Brontides

This has just appeared as a guest post over at All Lit Up. Any comments would be appreciated over there.

A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

I was walking down the street yesterday, about to meet some colleagues for an evening of card games and roast chicken. At the time I was on the phone to Jon, when without warning a massive guy came up behind me and but both his hands heavily on my shoulders. This was rather surprising, but then he called out to a car, that swooped out of the nearest turning and pulled up in front of us. Before I could really react, he had pushed down on me, hard, forcing me into the car, and had closed the door behind me.

Jon tells me that I sounded surprisingly calm while this was going on, but the guy driving the car started shouting almost immediately. “POLITZIA, POLITZIA,” he shouted, while I looked back in wide-eyed terror. They drove me to a nearby alley and continued shouting. “PASSPORT. PASSPORT!” Stupidly, I had left all of my documentation at home, but had no really effective way of communicating this other than shrugging and looking bewildered. They carried on shouting for a while and I carried on looking confused, but I quickly realised that we were at an impasse.

They were apparently unwilling to do anything to me other than shout, thankfully, so I called the manager of the school and asked him to translate for me, in order to help move things along. He had a word with the cops and explained to them that I didn’t have my passport with me, but almost as soon as he’d hung up they started shouting again – “POLITZIA! PASSPORT!” This didn’t seem like a promising sign.

After a while, the record changed. The larger of the two turned, looked me in the eye, grinned, and – pointing to himself – started repeating, “Mafia. Dollars! Mafia!” At this point I actually relaxed a little. Up until this point I hadn’t been sure what was going on, but a shakedown is much more of a known quantity – it was surreally hilarious, but in general, you know what to do when a massive crooked cop is asking you for money. He clearly wasn’t actually Mafia; I’d been walking around with a laptop, a camera, an iPod and my credit cards, and if this guy had really been mafia he wouldn’t have bothered with a shakedown for twenty bucks. So I continued to act dumb (I’m a natural) until he got bored, which happened surprisingly quickly. After about 5 minutes, he visibly deflated, said “Bye bye”, and stared morosely out of the window. “Spasiba!” I said before climbing out of the car and hauling ass.

My boss was livid about the incident. Apparently, despite being a bit of a Russian cliché, crooked police shakedowns are rare in Nizhnevartovsk, and he promised to give the local PD hell (I’m sure that he pays enough in protection money to be able to expect that his teachers are unmolested). Me, I was… one-fifth terrified, two fifths confused and two fifths entertained. As soon as I realised that I wasn’t in any real danger, the whole thing became a bit of a pantomime. There is an extent to which I brought it on myself – by walking around without a coat I stuck out as a foreigner like a sore thumb (I also attracted a fair bit of gopnik attention – ‘gopnik’ being the local variety of chav, redneck, bogun, whatever). But it makes for a good anecdote and we had a few laughs about it over the roasted chicken, so it could have gone down much worse.

Spring has arrived in Nizh. For the last week, temperatures have been above zero and my thermal underwear has stayed in its drawer. Outside, the sun is shining and a few birds are tweeting away in the distance.

Spring is a treacherous time in Siberia. The snow on the ground can take weeks to melt, and will, more often than not, re-freeze overnight, leaving the dreaded, perilous black ice to bewitch the ankles. More hazardous is the prospect of falling ice, which – its grip loosened by the heat which escapes from inefficiently-designed concrete roofs – plunges at near-terminal velocity, in chunks the size of a paving stone, from eight to ten storey buildings. This is easily enough to kill a person; so, for the first weeks of Spring, the residents of Nizhnevartovsk tend to stay away from buildings as much as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting my teeth into teaching. Do I enjoy it? I haven’t decided yet, but it’s certainly an experience. I teach six separate groups – four of children (mostly between 13 and 17, although one group is 8-11) and two groups of adults. Teaching the adults is okay, but teaching the kids requires a discipline I just don’t have, and behind it all is the nagging suspicion that I’m just not very good at it. Still, two weeks is a bit of a quick judgement, so we’ll have to see how I feel after three months.

Society is different here. I haven’t quite gotten my head around the way that it works, but it’s very different. Russian women outnumber Russian men by a significant margin, but yet are as unequal as in parts of the Middle East; but that inequality seems to be consensual. I met a girl from Zim who worked fairly high-up in one of the oil companies, and she said that – as a foreign woman in a position of authority – he got a fair amount of hassle, but no more than she would have gotten anywhere else outside of western Europe and the US. Russian women in positions of power are rare, but they don’t seem to attract the same social opprobrium that enfranchised women elsewhere do. I can discern no social pressure that prevents women from working and succeeding, should they wish to, which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist – in inarguably does. The social levers of oppression here are either extremely subtle, or the female population is being co-opted in some other way – either through residual conditioning or something even more obtuse. I’m not sure what yet. That this is a grossly unequal society is not in question; the manner of the inequality is of a certain academic interest, though, and will certainly bear further thought.

Meanwhile, getting used to the surrounds continues apace. One of the sad things about the school in Nizhnevartovsk is that it doesn’t seem to have the same tradition of adventurous group activities as the school in Tyumen exhibited. There is some talk of another banya trip, which could be jolly, but I’d like to get out of Nizhnevartovsk and see what there is to be seen in the remote Siberian taiga; hopefully I’ll get an opportunity before long.

After what seems like an age, I’m finally settled in to life in Nizhnevartovsk. I’ve got myself installed in a flat, I’ve bought groceries, I’ve even (mostly) unpacked my suitcase. I know that I’m only here for three months but I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy a sense of permanence while I have it.

At the end of the last episode, I was in Tyumen, freshly birched and awaiting transportation. All told, I had a pretty good time in Tyumen. The people there were good people, and I had a chance to teach a couple of individual students, which was at least a first step in getting a bit more confident at this teaching lark. One of the students was a 16 year old girl, and it was encouraging to note that Russian 16 year old girls are the same as 16 year old girls everywhere, i.e. capable of delivering an unholy mountain of scorn at very little provocation, and that this is an occupational hazard that I can cope with, albeit with an acceptable degree of flapping.

I finally left Tyumen behind me on Sunday 15th. I had been looking forward to it, but in the event, to call the journey a chore would be an understatement. Trouble started when trying to rustle up a taxi. For a start, actually finding a taxi was an uphill struggle. In Moscow and, to a lesser extent, Nizh, it is usual to find that 90% of the cars on the road are being driven by someone who is happy to be a “freelance” taxi driver – you negotiate a price and jump in. Not so much in Tyumen, where I stood with my arm up like a dork for over an hour waiting for a cab. It was so cold that I had to go back to my flat two or three times, each time tracking mud back onto the floor that I had laboriously cleaned, to restore circulation to my extremities. When I finally did manage to flag down a cab, I of course had no idea how to negotiate a price in Russian, so of course – to add insult to injury – I got reamed on the cost at the other end. At the time this was vexing, although I can now put it into perspective and realised that I was being charged about £6 for a 20 minute ride with luggage, which is hardly a reaming by London standards.

However, at least my adventures with taxis done, for now, I was met at the train station by one of the other teachers called Rob, who made sure I was well supplied and put me on the right carriage. At this point I was already headachy and slightly irritable, but I’m glad that someone came out to see me off; I know that Amanda would have done, but she was struck down with some virus that is currently sweeping the nation, so it was kind of Rob to make the effort.

On board the train, I quickly found my seat and stowed my luggage. The train itself was an interesting beast: a kind of rolling dormitory, spotlessly clean but somewhat cramped. Each carriage has 54 beds, spread over two bunks and arranged in clusters of six. The other passengers on board were very kind, choosing to treat my foreignness as an unfortunate disability that couldn’t be helped, and thus giving me every assistance, which I was grateful for despite essentially wanting to be left alone – the headache had by now developed into a mild migraine, which necessitated occasional bathroom trips to vomit – but once the train was on its way I was mercifully left to my own devices.

I didn’t sleep that night, as the combination of crowded dormitory, rocking train and retching headache is a bad one, but it gave me an opportunity to look out of the window and count my blessings. An opportunity to watch Siberia go by without having to experience the cold is certainly something to be thankful for, because Siberian landscape is an oddity. For a start, an awful lot of it resembles nothing more than sand dunes. The temperature doesn’t get high enough here for the snow to coagulate for another couple of months, so the snow on the ground is all sand-esque powder, and is shifted around by the wind in a similar manner. More than that, though, the flora – struggling with snow and permafrost in the same way that beach scrub has to cope with barren sand – is the same kind of skeletal gorse and shrub that you see on British beaches all year around. It was slightly surreal, as a part of me half expected to see surfers and kite-fliers at any moment.
The snow dunes alternate with patches of countryside – disused for the winter – which could have been lifted from rural anywhere: fields demarcated with hedgerows, copses of trees, mild hills – except, of course, still covered in snow. In many respects, that is the overwhelming aesthetic here.

Finally, there is the tundra that I imagined before I came here: forests of evergreen pine, larches with silver bark, and the brightest stars I have ever seen. This was the dramatic Siberia that I had partly hoped for, home to wolves and bears, an image which I was sure was anachronistic, although I was happy to be disproved.

I rolled into Nizh at 11am the following morning, feeling surprisingly fresh. I was met at the station by Jon, who trained with me for a while in Tyumen and who is one of the nicest people I have ever met, and Tom, who will be my new boss and who seems like a really kind and pleasant guy. They showed me to my new flat and left me there to gather my thoughts for a few hours.

Since then, I have started at the school, taught my first few classes and found my local supermarket. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write some about all of those things a little later on.

My first weekend in Russia was fun.

Because many of our students are working adults, a lot of our work is conducted outside of office hours – i.e. evenings and Saturdays, although the school is thankfully closed on Sundays. This weekend was a public holiday, however: International Women’s Day, which, despite the moniker, is largely only celebrated in the ex-Soviet Union. Originally instituted by the UN in New York, it was envisaged as a holiday celebrating women in the workforce; the Soviets picked it up as part of its adoption of organised labour, and it gradually fell out of fashion in America and the West for much the same reason. Its celebration in Russia has mostly lost this context, and now serves as an all-purpose celebration of women, although this is largely theoretical in Russia’s hyper-masculinised society.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that we shut up shop early on Saturday and resolve to head for the local banya. A banya is the Russian equivalent of a sauna – a log cabin in the woods, about a mile outside of the city, on the edge of a (very frozen) lake. You get about five hours in the hut – the ten of us arrived at around 8 and left just after midnight – a functioning barbeque, to which we bought our own meat and expertise, and a handy hole in the ice of the lake, to which we will be returning. Oh yes.

We started out by cooking the food we’d bought – chicken, beef and pork chunks were skewered with vegetables, and Rob, Dan, Amanda and myself took it in turns to watch the meat and occasionally prod at it to see if it was done. In the meanwhile, those who weren’t involved in the cooking watched the greatest hits of the Eurovision Song Contest in the hut and drank very expensive vodka. We cannot be accused of not having conformed to local culture.

Food dispensed with, we explored our facilities. The banya had three rooms. The first was a normal room, in which we played cards, ate food, and messed around with the provided satanic backgammon board (don’t ask). The second is a kind of hot lobby; although there was no fire in there, the heat and steam from the banya itself kept it at sauna temperature. It was a good place to cool down after the banya itself and a good place to acclimatise when going in the other direction. Finally, the banya itself was a small-ish room with tiered levels of slat seating. One wall was taken up by a furnace which belched heat and humidity. The temperature in the room was, at a guess, around 45C, but the humidity was intense. I don’t cope well with saunas so it was an effort of will for me to stay in there, but I enjoyed it once I’d found my feet.

In addition to the above, we also had the services of a banshick, a man who comes into the sauna, pours various liquids onto you (beer, cold water, honey, you name it) then slaps you with a laurel branch while you lie face down on the slats. This is actually an extremely pleasant experience and a quite unique way to have a massage, although you’ll still find bits of laurel between your toes weeks later.

After around twenty minutes of this, you have generally had enough. The tradition is to then run down to the lake, which has had a 2m x 1m hole cut into it with an axe (the ice, for context, was about a foot thick), and plunge yourself in. The hole itself was a good hundred yards from the banya, a mad dash over slippery ice down an unlit path through the trees, at the end of which: some ice, and a hole. The water was sub-zero; if you left it alone for more than ten minutes or so it would start to re-freeze. After plunging yourself into the frozen water, you then scramble madly back up the hill, back into the hot then bolt for the safe heat and humidity of the banya, all the while shivering uncontrollably and scraping ice out of your hair. I took one look and thought: Nah. Fuck that.

Of course, that resolve didn’t last long.

And the bizarre thing is: it was brilliant. The heat from the banya stayed with me for the entire plunge, and by the time I got back into the sauna I was still wondering when the pain was going to start. Not only was there no real pain; the rush of endorphins was immense. I ended up going twice; Jon went three times and ended up staggering around with a spinning head. Totally worth doing, though, and great fun as a group outing.

Sunday was quiet – I took the opportunity to see a bit more of Tyumen, which was somewhat underwhelming. Monday started with brunch at Amanda’s, along with Rob, from the school, and two friends of Amanda’s from around town – which rapidly turned into lunch, then afternoon tea, before I made my excuses and ducked out at around 5. All in all a good weekend. In the next few days, I’ll teach my first class and get ready to relocate to Nizh, so I guess you have some or all of that to look forward to in the next gripping installment.

Airports. One feature of the modern world that is genuinely hard to love; from the gross inefficiency of your Heathrows and CDGs, to those sterile, sprawling monstrosities in Schiphol and Frankfurt, to the nauseating glitz of Dubai’s shopping mall city, no-one has yet managed to successfully design a place where thousands of travellers can cool their heels in relative comfort and peace. It’s a tall order, admittedly, but you’d be hard pressed to find an airport than makes a bigger mess of it than Sheremetyevo, the ex-Communist monster that “serves” Greater Europe’s second largest city. I spent roughly four hours in Moscow enduring fever-inducing cold, belittlement, mild extortion in the form of excess baggage payments (a 3kg excess in Heathrow miraculously blossomed into 7kg once on Russian scales), cigarette smoke, and the worst music I have ever heard in my life. If Russia is as awash with money as they say, then it can surely afford something better than this.

Tyumen airport was an exercise in contrast. Which isn’t to say that it was good, because it wasn’t; more that it was… austere. It was really more of a train station than an airport. Upon touching down at 6am, we trudged across the snowy tarmac to be disgorged into a car park via a gate held closed by a rusty padlock. That was it; no arrivals building to speak of at all. A little while later, an ante-chamber was unlocked, in which I found my baggage. No further officialdom seemed to be forthcoming, so I went on my way – slightly bemused by the experience, nonetheless.

Happily, I was met from the airport by Amanda, a pleasant American lady who is also the director of studies of CET in Tyumen. Her assistance on that first morning was fairly vital, as my own capacity at the time was somewhat sub-par. I later found out that this was a case of the blind leading the blind: Amanda had herself arrived in Tyumen after a 15-hour trek from the States only a day or so previously, and spent much of the following day in deep, deep sleep. But that notwithstanding, she still managed to take me to my apartment, thrust a handful of cash and groceries into my hand, and force me to make my bed before collapsing into it. For this I am grateful.

I forced myself out of bed at around noon, having slept for about 4 hours – enough to take the edge off, but not enough to ensure that I would be body-clock-distortingly alert at 2am the following morning. This was the first point at which I properly stopped to check out my surroundings. My flat – fine, clean, tastefully decorated and spacious, with as much kitchen as I could possibly wish for. Located on the tenth floor of a Soviet concrete block, it provides some scenic views of a pair of radio masts, which are actually quite pretty when lit up for night.

Meeting Amanda and another new colleague, Rob, for a pizza lunch provided an opportunity to see Tyumen itself in daylight. On first impressions, it’s like a Saudi city but snowier – lots of wide, straight roads in a grid system, lots of concrete blocks, and lots of cars. A slightly fairer eye will realise that this is fatuous; for one thing, Tyumen has bars, and restaurants, and pavements, and people bustling about the place – not many, but enough to prevent a sense of desertedness. The concrete blocks are interspersed with some charmingly ramshackle old wooden buildings, most of which have electricity but none of which have plumbing. And if you’re persistent, you can find some items of real interest – a small central park with a fair, for example, complete with ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds, and a collection of very beautiful ice sculptures, or some of the oldest churches and cathedrals in Russia.

Pizza was a slightly lazy affair, if only because Amanda and I were persevering under the effects of travel tiredness. Once fed, however, I was taken to the school to meet the other staff and get a sense of the premises. The school in Tyumen isn’t big – 6 permanent teachers, plus myself and Jon, both pending for Nizhnevartovsk – but it is friendly, and the welcome I received there was very warm. At the end of the day, Jon – who is literally the friendliest, most cheerful man I have ever met – took me out to dinner at a diner in town. Along with Dan, another recent arrival, we cheerfully ordered Deluxe Moccasin with no idea what that entailed (in the event, a fish fillet fried in batter with a potato fritter) and a nice big slice of cake to follow. I got home in time for an early night, but sat up bolt upright at about 1.15am, realising that I had left my satchel at the restaurant. After ten minutes of internal wrestling, I sighed, booted up and headed back out into the cold. After half an hour of trudging, was extremely fortunate to discover that: a) stories of the probability of getting stabbed in Russian cities at 2am are overblown, at least in Tyumen; b) the restaurant is not in the UK, and thus stays open until a sensible hour – in this case, 2am; and c) apparently no-one else had been in the restaurant since I left, as mu bag was undisturbed where I left it. All of this is extremely fortunate, as losing that bag – and its contents – would have been catastrophic.

Yesterday was mostly spent at the school, although I did brave my first visit to a Russian supermarket (which was, uh, remarkably similar to supermarkets anywhere else in the world. Who would’ve thunk). Plans are being drawn up for a weekend trip to the hot springs, and hopefully I’ll have my ticket sorted out for my train ride to Nizhnevartovsk by early next week. I shall no doubt keep you all informed in the next thrilling installment.

I went back to Istanbul in 2008. It was still awesome.

Well, I hope you are all well, because I’m fantastic. Istanbul!

Lyrical is like a bald man’s head – it should prepare itself to be waxed.

This city is amazing. The youth hostel I am in is situated roughly twenty feet from the Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque, and on my first night I was fortunate enough to – by chance – be standing directly between them just as the Call to Prayer began. It occurs to me that, while Christianity shows its faith through the awe inspired by choirs, organs, heavy gilt and gothic architecture, Islam (or what I have seen of it here) relies on light furnishings, delicate buildings, and the power of one man, his voice and his soul and a big microphone, at the top of a minaret to convey their sense of the holy. Both are based ontradition, so it would be too much to try and apply these ideas to more general trends, but I do find it to be an interesting difference in approach.

Istanbul is staggering. Of all of the European cities, it is the one the wears the pomp of its glorious past most comfortably, neither ignoring it nor allowing it to overwhelm its optimistic present. The Grand Bazaar is a sensory overload, a covered market covering a square mile and packed to the brim with a mind-boggling array of colours, smells, and less intangeable concepts such as products and haggling – and, after today’s excesses, somewhat more significant overdraft withdrawl than I had hoped for – but utterly worth it. Haggling is an amusing experience for one reared in Britain’s somewhat more restrained social system. I saw a chess set which I fell in love with, but for which the asking price was 180 YTL (Turkish Lira) – about a hundred pounds. Half an hour of haggling brought him down to 100 YTL, which was more reasonable, but part of the joy was that it was a win-win situation; he enjoyed haggling, expected that to be part of the process, and inflated his initial price to adjust for that. I bought a few gifts there – not for everyone, I warn you all now, as money is spare right now, but if I’ve missed a birthday or I usually get you a christmas present then something from either Turkey or Sofia will be forthcoming.

Istanbul has its menaces, though. The most annoying is the street touts, who aren’t so much dangerous as annoyingly persistent. I am pretty much obviously a tourist in Istanbul but in general I am prepared to seek out things like taxis and restaurants for myself, and slightly resent having pushers force their paymasters upon me every hundred paces. More dangerous are the fraudsters, who will promise single men that they will take them to bars with beautiful women then stiff them for a $3,000 dollar bar tab – fortunately not the kind of thing I am succeptable to, but still annoying.

But yes. Still, I shall share stories when I get home. To tide you over until then, my flickr account has had a bit of an update, including some elusive hints of Megan from Budapest. Enjoy those.

This, of course, is my last update, as I’ll be back in the UK as of next Saturday. Hopefully I’ll see you all (or all of you for whom it is practical – i.e. not Viv, Tim, Lise etc) at some point soon and tell stories. Until then, hope you are all well. I look forward to seeing you.

A few memories that didn’t make it into this post: Arriving in at the youth hostel in Dubrovnik to find that I was their first customer in months, and that they had basically opened the place just for me. Having to beg for 5 euros from the station guard in Bar to get on the train to Budapest. The bus driver not letting me pee at any point on the journey from Dubrovnik to Bar, so me going in a plastic bottle in the (out-of-use) toilet.

Good times.

Probably the most amount of leg-work I’ve managed to squeeze into a seven-day period so far. So, let’s see, I sent the last email from Zagreb, and since then have ben to Split and Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast, Bar and Belgrade in Serbia, and now Bucarest in Romania, a city I’ve had a mild desire to visit for most of my life, seeing as I lived on a road that carried it’s name for seven or eight years.

So let’s start with New Years. I actually had a pretty good time, which is unusual, as New Years is usually something of a let-down. New Years in Zagreb takes the form of some 4,000 Croats in the main square, jumping up and down to some age’d-rocker band (think Bon Jovi fronted by George Galloway in a ponytail), and letting off fireworks with an absolute disregard for safety procedure. The fireworks were pretty incredible, though – the Croatians sure know how to put on good pyrotechnics, and the lack of police presence meant that they could be… creative about how they were letting them off and allowing them to go. So that was exciting. New Years Day was a proper vegetatian day; the Croats actually know how to do January 1st TV, meaning that I spent the day watching (in no particular order) The Great Escape, Beverly Hills Cop 1-3, Eraser and the last James Bond travesty. I had a good time in Zagreb. It’s an odd little city, somewhat lacking in charm, but it did know how to party.

The train down to Split was actually new, which was a novelty – I had kinda gotten used to trains being covered in cigarette ash and non-functional light fittings. Split itself is a fun little city. It is quite definately orientated towards the tourist, since it’s main raison d’etre (trade routesand sinking Venitian ships) dried up a couple of hundred years ago. It is dominated by a fort-cum-castle that is like the inspiration for every fantasy movie ever – masses of tiny winding passages flanked by tall, tightly-packed yellow-washed houses, interspersed with broken courtyards, gaping chasms and tall towers. It’s incredibly dramatic; wandering around it makes me feel a bit like a child, as I tend to let my imagination run away with me in such situations. I think that the main attraction of Split, however, is that it appears not to even have a McDonalds, which I think is probably a first. For a while it also seemed like it didn’t have a youth hostel, either; I was wondering aimlessly through a back alley looking for one which allegedly existed but could not be found through conventional means, when a man saw that I had a backpack on and came and asked me if I was looking for someplace to stay. Normally I would be wary, but I was tired and it was dark, so I just said yes. To cut a long story short, I ended up with a vacant apartment – double bed, kitchen, the works – for just under £10 per night, right in the middle of the citadel, and thus right on top of all the action. Outside the window this morning there was a vast market, selling fruits, dried meat and honey. Yeah, I fell like I did pretty well. I know it could have ended up much worse but for now I’m not complaining.

Split, however, is the end of the train line as far as Croatia goes. A bus journey to Dubrovnik wasn’t too traumatic, but it did act as a precursor for what was to come. Dubrovnik is an amazing city. Sheathed in white marble, perched on an outcrop over the Mediterranian, and ringed by mountains and forests, it is a city that demands awe. Like Split, it’s military function is ancient history now, which is why the shelling of the city (and its entirely civilian population) by Serbian battleships in 1991 caused such consternation. Happily, the damage has been pretty well repaired, although the odd gutted building still lurks around. Actually, that’s pretty much a feature of the Dalmatian coast. The train and bus rides down wielded some stunning views, but the countryside is still scarred by the odd derelict with its roof shelled off.

(Incidentally, the winter is the wrong time to visit Dalmatia. Wrong wrong wrong. Dubrovnik was gorgious but it would ahve been unreal in the sun.)

So, that was the fun part of the week. Unfortunately the rest brought varying degrees of discomfort and stress. The plan was to head from Dubrovnik to Belgrade; at first, I was set on backtracking to Zagreb and taking the train from there. However, the train lines in Serbia terminate in Bar, which is a small town on the south end of that country’s coastline, near to the border with Albania. Realising that it was but a hop, skip and a jump from Dubrovnik, I resolved to take the bus to Bar and catch the train to Belgrade from there. Bad idea. For a start, the bus journey was actually in the region of eight hours long, and then to add chaos to misery the train from Bar didn’t leave for Belgrade until about seven hours after I arrived there. Let me assure you that there is nothing to do in Bar. I used those seven hours to read Lolita, with annotations and seventy-odd pages of waffly analysis, and shivered in the unmitigated cold.

The train, when it finally left, was not a sleeper, despite the fact that it was leaving at 11pm for a city ten hours away. Also, the doors didn’t lock. Being as I was certifiably the only English speaker on the train, there was no-one to buddy up with. So I stayed awake all night, and judging by the incidence rate of people poking their heads through my door that was probably sensible. I did get to see soem of the Serbian landscape, though, which was nice, although as the train line plotted a course that contrived to approach both the Bosnian and the Kosovan border, the view mainly consisted of craters from landmines.

Belgrade is ugly. Don’t ever go there. I left after only six hours, and it’s the only city in which I didn’t take a single photo.

(It does have an amazing bookshop though. At some pioint I’m going to have to tote up the amount of books I’ve read over this trip. I’m pretty sure it’s around 25 now. Ouch, that’s a lot of money on books.)

And would you believe it? The train to Bucarest is also not a sleeper. The night train community in Romania is actually surprisingly zesty; no-one appeared to be sleeping, let’s put it that way, and if they weren’t then I sure as hell wasn’t. The train alternated between overzealously heated and ludicrously cold, the conductor kept on laughing at me which I found undescribably creepy, and to top it all off I made myself sick again – dehydration, over-exertion and exhaustion combined to produce an interestingly insistent fever and a scorcher of a headache. I’m coming to realise that I’m not a teenager any more and a diet of Coca-Cola and metabolism cannot be made to support power-walking up hills with large rucksacks. When I think about the three times I’ve been laid low on this trip, they’ve all been exhaustion-related. Perhaps I need to work on my diet.

Anyway, it wasn’t all bad. The train did wend its way through Transylvania, and I had an Awesome Travelling Moment – looking out of a window at an opportune moment, I happened to see a castle perched on a hill, surrounded by trees and illuminated by the full moon. Then the train took a corner with a screech of brakes and the whoel scene was obliterated by darkness. The fact that the train was roughly circa 1898 added to the whole Bram Stoker feel.

(Can you tell that I’m getting sick of travelling? No so much the seeing new and exciting things business, that never gets old. It’s the periodic 12-hour breaks in between, sat on dirty trains and cramped coaches, that are starting to chaffe.)

Anyway. I arrived in Bucarest (back above the snow line, le sigh) at roughly 5am this morning, found a youth hostel and have ben sleeping until now. Next is to take a poke around the city, although the main focus of the next few days is to get ready for my train jounrey to Sofia, which no doubt will be equally pleasant. My next email will reach you from Istanbul – and, my friends, will probably be my last, as my return flighty to Blighty is booked for Saturday the 21st of January. Keep an eye out for it, same Bat-time, etc etc.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing all the New Years stories, which I’m sure some of you must have. I hope you all had a good one, anyway. Let me know!

These are getting shorter as we get closer to the finish. Slovenia still stands out, though, as being one of the most beautiful countries that I saw.

Hello chaps and chapesses!

Christmas was slightly lame this year, although, as discussed previously, I don’t consider Christmas to have occured until I am sick of the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and seeing as I haven’t even heard it this year I feel like I can justifiably claim not to have had Christmas at all.

Which is lucky, as Christmas itself was sort of lame. The youth hostel was pretty much empty apart from a horde of Latvians, who descended on Christmas afternoon, made the place smelly, then disappeared on Boxing Day morning. There were a few sketchy things going on – there was a kind-of pseudo flea market going on by the river, and some folk-singing on a stage in the main square, but that was about it. The cinema was open, but it was only showing King Kong and some Eastern European thing. In the end I went slightly further out to another cinema, which was again pretty limited in range, and watched A History of Violence, which was poo. And that was Christmas.

But judged apart from that, Slovenia was great. I choose to regard those two days as a sort of haitus, a rest-stop if you will, because the rest of my time in Slovenia was packed with action. I took a day trip to Bled, a beautiful little town on the Italian border, which is surrounded by the Julian Alps and has a church on an island that can only be reached by Gondola. I also tramped through two sets of caves, one of which was UNESCO listed and very pretty indeed; and on top of all that, Ljubljana itself was worthy of a fair few days worth of exploring, and looked particularly scenic in the two feet of snow which feel on Boxing Day. Slovenia was left pretty much unscathed by the Yugoslavian armies when it declared independence, which is fortunate, as the Old Town of Ljubljana and its surrounding villages are particularly nice. Boxing Day also saw the arrival of a bunch of Canadians, so I even had some company for my last few days there. So, yes, I actually had a really good week in Slovenia, if we discount Christmas Day, and that only because every other place was closed.

I’m in Zagreb now, capital of Croatia, which is about two feet deep in snow and only just above freezing at midday. It took me three hours to find my hostel yesterday, partly because it was dark and snowing, and partly because the Croatians seem to have a problem with road signs – maybe they think it will confuse the Serbs? Anyway, by the time I got here I was very cold, very exhausted and somewhat emotional, but happily I’ve regained some of my humour, and went to do some sightseeing today. Zagreb seems pretty functional, not terribly pretty but with a good atmosphere. There’s a pretty big party of French guys here, who seem decent, and quite a few Italians as well; oddly, no Australians, which I don’t really know what to make of, nor any Americans since the last ones went this morning. So I’ll be surrounded by Latinate folks for New Years, which should be amusing.

Speaking of New Years, I’m not really sure how I’ll be spending it yet. Chances are a small group of French and Italian people will go in search of a party, and I will probably join them. But I am sure you will all be having a far more glamorous time, so let me know the festive-season goss!

I must go as my feet are cold. A Happy New Year to all, and all the best for 2006.

So, the Megan story.

I met Megan in Gdansk in Poland. Hit it off pretty much immediately, so she invites me to stay with her in Budapest, where she’s doing a foreign exchange year. I do so; we spend about 10 days in Budapest together, before she goes home to the US and I move on.

We tried to keep it going as a long-distance relationship for a while, but for one reason or another I couldn’t do it – my head just wasn’t there. She offered to move to London for me but I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to be in London either. I didn’t see how it could work out, and I told her so. Gradually we drifted apart.

Sometimes I feel guilty, like I used her for that period, but I know that I meant it at the time. In different circumstances, I think that she and I would have been great for each other. Either way, I hope she’s happy now.

Budapest – again, undersold here but an amazing place, lovely enough that I am going back under my own steam. Also unmentioned in this post: Rachel, a really nice Australian girl (with whom I had an entirely platonic relationship, for those who are sniggering at the back ¬_¬ ) and stayed in touch with for a few years after that. Haven’t had an email from her in a while, but hopefully she’s doing well too.

Haha, what an amusing couple of days.

So, Krakow was pretty cool, although I probably stayed way too long there. It’s the kind of place that sucks a person in – a guy missed three planes in two days trying to leave, and it was basically a once-a-day occurence that someone would end up coming back to the youth hostel after failing to make it out fo the city. As it happens, I managed to get out first time, but only after 8 days of procrastinating and general timewastery. Met a whole slew of awesome people, though, and managed to see such interesting sights as Wawel Castle (one of the seven Chakra points, no less), the Salt Mines (the world’s oldest active mine), and a big man-made lump of earth, which may sound dull but was actually mildly impressive. Of far greater interest was the fact that the youth hostel I stayed at had its own private cinema, which, as far as I was concerned, was utterly incredible.

Of course, I also took in Auschwitz, and got pretty heavily submerged into the Jewish history of the area. The experience was bleak and somewhat depressing. Obviously, worthwhile, though. I guess I’m still mulling the whole thing over. More on that as it comes to me.

Something else relevant happened in Krakow, but I can’t remember what it was. Ah, yes, Team England! Four English boys descended on Krakow over the weekend; one got arrested on his first night for smashing a window but that was just the beginning. On the second night an Australian went out with them – and this was a pretty serious Australian, you know, 6’2″ with a pleanty impressive beer capacity of his own – and woke up the following morning missing “300 Euros, his wallet and his cock-ring”. Apparently, all he remembers was that Team England left him puking outside a brothel at 5am, and that the cause of the subsequent losses are unknown to him (although I can probably hazard a guess). Another Australian, incited by them, jumped out of a second story window. I’ve never been so proud to be English. In their honour, an English girl I met called Cath and I entered the hostel’s pub quiz on Monday night as Team England, and won conclusively. Being as I’m a non-drinker, this left Cath with the task of dealing with twelve pints of beer by herself; I hear that she aquitted herself well.

As Cath and I were travelling in the same direction we took the night train together. The night trains in Poland are awesome! They have a sketchy reputation for theft and violence, but we splashed out (haha, splashed out – the entire exercise cost about fifteen pounds) and got a private two-bed, and just locked and dead-bolted the door. It was super-comfortable, so we were happy.

Daylight found us in Budapest, jewel of the Danube. In Budapest I met up with Megan, a I girI met in Gdansk who I have stayed with for the week that I’ve been here. I have had the best time – ice skating, turkish baths (which are amazing, incidentally), the lot. Budapest is a beautiful city, if somewhat lacking in charm. It reminds me a little bit of London, actually. It’s like a mini-London; the people are slightly friendlier, the pollution less noticable, but the atmosphere similar.

This morning I took Megan to the airport and put her on a plane back to America. I’ll probably only be here for another day or so myself. Ljubljana and Slovenia are waiting.

I will almost certainly not be sending out another email before Christmas, so I hope you all have a wonderful festive season. Those members of my family who are doubtless already on the French coast, for when you get this, I hope you had a good time and I (was/will be) thinking of you; for everyone else, enjoy and be happy.

Love to all.

The sly allusion in the second-last paragraph refers to Megan. More on Megan when we get to Budapest, but for now: I met her in Gdansk.

Right, I’m going to try and write slightly less in these, as heaven knows you’re all busy people – especially this time of year, what with all that buying presents and eating cake.

So, since I left Vilnius I’ve spent the last two weeks or so Poland. First port of call was Warsaw, which is a very odd city to visit. Warsaw has been talked down to me so many times that I was prepared for the worst – dull, dirty and depressing was the impression that I had, and I was quite happy to believe it. I n the event, I was happily surprised. Part of the pleasure, of course, was that the city was buried under a chunky couple of inches of snow, which could only delight the child in my soul. But besides that, the city itself is quite interesting. The overwhelming majority is large and modern – almost ultra-modern, in fact, as Warsaw was clearly and obviously far wealthier than many of the other European capitals I had visited so far. At the Warsaw Uprising, towards the end of WW2, Hitler basically numbered the buildings of Warsaw in order of their cultural importance to the Poles, before detonating them with teutonic efficiency; thus, most of Warsaw has no truck with any of this ‘classical architecture’ malarky, giving the casual visitor the slightly unsettling feeling that he or she has wondered accidentally into some transported American or Australian city centre. There is a reconstructed Old Town, which has actually been rebuilt with a degree of sympathy, which is quite refreshing.

Some other things about Warsaw: it’s slightly post-Soviet, it has the largest outdoor market in Europe, and does a zesty business in illegal gun smuggling.

From Warsaw to Gdasnk, which used to be called Danzig until the Australians got to it (“G’dansk, yer flamin’ gallah!” It’s a bad pun but I won’t apologise). Gdansk is a nice place. It’s very pretty, very peaceful and quite boring. That last is unfortunate – Gdansk is attatched to all sorts of important historical happenings (it was the seat of the Hanseatic League, housed the Knights Templar, and was more recently the birthplace of Solidarnosc, the trade union movement that was probably most directly responsible for the downfall of the Soviet Union), but none of them are really in evidence there. Most places tend to wear their histories on their sleeves, but not so Gdansk. I’m reading Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum right now, which was set in Danzig, and am finding it far more interesting than actually visiting the city itself was.

One other thing about Gdansk: you can fly there for 1p + tax with Ryannair. Many British people do this.

So now I’m in Krakov. I was going to stop for a while in Poznan on the way south but didn’t for numerous reasons, some of which are pragmatic (I’m running out of time and money, and Istanbul is still a long way away), some less so (but a gentleman does not talk of such things). I’ll be here for a week, in which I hope to see Auschwitz and the Salt Mines, plus many other things, while hopefully not getting totally rained on.

Hope you’re all well and funky!

Two things: I was unfair to Vilnius here, and I never found out what happened to Matt the Australian. Oh, and I’d forgotten about the Navy SEAL guy! That night was so awesome. Oh, one last thing – Girls Aloud are still awesome. FACT.

So, since my last email, I’ve nearly been mugged, helped an Australian with his love-life, joined in a celebration of the overthrow of the Soviet Union and, for the first time since leaving England, lost something. Read on!

The reason why this update has been so delayed is because I wanted to do an overview of the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As I leave this evening for Gdansk in Poland, this seems like as good a time as any to get that done.

The first stop on this leg of the tour was Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia. Tallinn is a city that is basically schitzophrenic. In the centre is the Old Town, a perfectly-preseved monument to Estonia circa the fifteenth century. Preserved is perhaps not the right word; Tallinn’s Old Town is not really preserved at all, in as much as the crumbling walls and condemned derelicts are still very much in evidence. In many respects it felt to me more like the Spanish and Portugese towns that my dad took me to for family holidays when I was younger. My overwhelming memory of those towns was they they, too, were old and decaying; not so much through caustic neglect or malice, but just because the focus of the world had moved on to other places, and neither the time, nor the money, nor the inclination existed to stop the rot. But Tallinn shouldn’t really be subject to that reasoning. Since it seceded from the Soviet Union, sometime between 1989 and 1991, Tallinn has been a boom town, as is evidenced when you cross into New Town. The change is marked enough that it could be delineated by a line. On the other side you find the shopping malls, sky scrapers, the teams that made both Kazaa and Skype, and the hoards of financiers, innovators and tourist board officials that have given Estonia the fastest-growing economy in Europe. Personally, I like their approach. By seemingly choosing not to artificially extend the life of the Old Town, but concurrently refusing to overrun it with modern developments, Tallinn’s city planners have managed to retain a kind of authenticity that is utterly absent from, say, Paris or Brugge. On the other hand, this status quo won’t last forever, which is one reason why I feel fairly privileged to have seen Tallinn now. Which I suppose was the point.

But, yes, while I was there, Tallinn did end up with one thing in common with Paris – it was a city in which I nearly got mugged. As I was just entering a museum, a pair of skinhead yoot’s accosted me and asked me for some money. When I refused, the more articulate of the two said “Well, what if we rob you?” “What?” I said – because that’s always a good thing to say when you’re stalling for time – “What if we rob you!” he howled, while his friend behind him pulled a chain taut in his hands and waved it menacingly. I gave them my best look of scorn and derission – the raised eyebow, sneery mouth, the works – then just opened the door and went into the museum. What were they going to do, follow me in there? Or maybe pull me back out, bodily? They were absolutely the shittest muggers ever. They were only about 15 as well. Poor dears, I can believe that they didn’t even want the money for drugs, but rather just to boost their Pokemon card collection. They were rubbish.

While there, I randomly bumped into Matt, and Australian guy I had previously met in Stockholm. So I basically hung out with him and this other Canadian guy called Peter. One night we went out to a restaurant – a traditional Estonian restaurant – run by this guy who had done just about everything. He had been in the US special forces (his family fled Estonia for New York in the 50s), had written a book, was a prolific painter (Jimmy Carter had had one of his painting on the wall in the residence of the West Wing), and led his own band, covering fifties and sixties rock ‘n’ roll, which played most nights in this restaurant, which he owned, along with a farm outside of the city, which he tended to himself by hand. He was married to a ballett dancer. So we spent the evening chatting to him and at the end he gave us a CD of his music, whoch basically consisted of Estonian translations of Janis Joplin and the like. I still have it, purely because it contains an Estonian language cover of Gampie’s classic smash hit “Alice? Who the f*** is Alice?”, potentially sung by a bunch of old dudes on accoustic guitars. That would be hilarious.

Well, after a few days, Matt and I decided it was time to leave Tallinn. As we were both headed towards Riga (Latvia, yo) we decided to join forces and form a super-awesome coach-travelling rock team. A couple of words about Matt: he’s tall, Australian and had been in Tallinn for nearly ten days (I got bored after three) because he met a girl and didn’t want to leave. The most he got for his trouble was a ‘frenchie’ (as we used to say, classily, in high school), but she was apparently on the rebound and – hey, I didn’t really care about the details, I can’t believe you do either. I mention this only because it was all he talked about between Tallinn and Riga. That’s a five hour bus trip, so after about an hour I decided that the delecate vocal harmonies of Girls Aloud was probably preferable to any more talk of Tiine and suchlike. I’ve decided that What Will The Neighbours Say was actually a really good album, and should probably get Chemistry when I get back home. Pop-tastic!

Riga is the opposite of Tallinn. It is a city that makes no distinction between old and new whatsoever. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Riga is my least-favorite Baltic city, simply because it appears to have no identity of its own. It has precious few musea and art galleries, a below-par selection of historic buildings (although those that did remain were lovely), and an altogether too high incidence of English stag parties. I was, however, lucky enough to arrive in Riga just in time for Latvia’s Independence Day, which is held every year on Nov 18th, the day on which Latvia formally became independent of Imperial Russia in 1918, and became a republic for the first time (although the more recent independence, in 1991, also comes under the remit of the festivities). There were fireworks and parades and such, and generally a good atmosphere, in spite of Latvia having a 30% Russian population. So I hung around for that, but not much longer.

After Riga, Matt and I parted companies. It took me three or four days but I finally pursuaded him to go back to Tallinn and see if his ‘thing’ went anywhere. I did this for two reasons – firstly, because the romantic in me sincerely wishes for him to succeed, settle down in Estonia and raise a hoard of unnaturally tall half-Australian kids, and secondly because the cynic in me finds the entire situation to be utterly comical, and realises that the story would not make for a good anecdote unless he hurried back to declare his undying love. Does this make me a bad person? Not that I really care, I’d just like to be clear on the subject.

Sooo, I left Riga, and realised that I had LOST MY SCARF. This irritated me to no end as I really liked that new scarf, and had, contrary to all expectations (my own included!), failed to loose anything at all on the trip thus far. So I bought a new one. Uh, sorry, I guess that’s not interesting. Move on!

Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and it’s a little bit like bacteria, in that it may seem unpleasant at first but then it grows on you. Unlike Tallinn and Riga it is resolutely un-modern; in fact, it seems to have progressed very little since the Soviet era, despite being the first of the three to overthrow the yoke. It is still very religious; on a Sunday, the streets are empty, apart from those housing one of the (many) Russian Orthodox churches, which are never large enough to house all those who want to get inside them. Strange to think that this was a country that once had an empire that stretched from the Baltics to the Black Sea. While I was here, I also went out to a town called Siailuai, near which is a monument called the Hill of Crosses. During the Soviet occupation, the Lithuanian peasants would leave crosses on this hill, commemorating the dead, deported and disappeared. Come the day, the Soviet forces would bulldoze the crosses, but at night the Lithuanians would come back, under the cover of darkness, and plant more. Since the end of the occupation, there has been no-one to bulldoze the crosses any more, but the Lithuanians still keep adding to the collection; now, the hill and surrounding countryside is covered in thousands upon thousands of crosses, dense-packed one atop the other. It’s unlike any other monument I’ve ever seen; there are no souvineer booths, no tickets, not even any toilets. To get there, you must travel three hours from Vilnius, then take an (irregular) local bus ten miles out of town, to this patch of rural farmland ungraced by either building or animal; THEN you have to walk for twenty minutes, and unless you’re driving, that walk in unavoidable. All this because it’s not an ‘attraction’, per se. It exists for the same reason as it always existed, for little old Lithuanian grandmothers to hobble along the path and leave a cross, remembering those who are gone – and, now, to be greatful that their sons and grandsons won’t be taken to someone else’s arbitrary war, that their husbands won’t be kidnapped for political dissent, and that they will probably have enough food to feed themselves in the morning. It is a humbling place, but it highlights the difference between Lithuania and the other two: it is still attatched to its past. While the other two have forgiven their history, and have modernised to meet the future, Lithuania is still busy mourning for its past.

I should point out that, while I have spent a lot of time in ‘Resistance’ musea over the last few days, I’m trying to avoid getting too indoctrinated in the anti-Soviet bias that historical documentary takes here – despite whatever the previous paragraph may suggest. It seems relatively certain that a great many atrocities took place, but alas, I’m not going to be able to make it into Russia – getting a visa is just too damn challenging – so I can’t really get any kind of balanced view on the subject. Lithuania has had a troubled past either way – it was historically very important, but has dwindled into utter obscurity, and t-shirts bearing the legend “I’ve been to Lithuania! … Where the f*** is Lithuania?” are sold with a touch of bitterness. Caught between Russia and Germany was never a comfortable place to be. It is a resolutely depressing place. I’m glad I came but will be equally glad to leave.

I suspect that I may have rambled long enough. As previously mentioned, Poland is the next port of call, and hopefully the next update will be delivered in a more timely fashion. Hope you’re all well, and look forward to hearing any news you may have.

Scandinavia was beginning to bore me?! Good lord, whatever next.

Well, it seems that the drizzle in one Baltic country is the same as the drizzle in any other Baltic country. The drenching I got in Oslo seems to think that it’s funny to follow me through Sweden, Finland and now even to Estonia, where the sky remains resolutely grey and morose.

But enough of that – I’m in Estonia! This is delightful for two reasons: firstly, Scandinavia was starting to bore me, I felt like I was getting bogged down, and wanted a change of scenery, ex-Soviet style; and secondly, I can get an all-you-can-eat lunch here for roughly one pound twenty. Hoorah, I can once more afford to eat!

So, what happened after my last email… I spent a couple of extra days in Stockholm, a city which I’ve decided to marry if ever it becomes legal to join oneself in holy matrimony to a metropolitan sprawl. I didn’t do much else, to be honest – took a couple of photos that had been previously denied to me when my last batch of films ran out, ate with people I met at the hostel, and generally relaxed and recuperated. On the evening of the second day I caught the ferry to Helsinki.

Now, I’m not a fan of boats at the best of times. Hell, truth be told, I have a peculiar aversion to most forms of long distance travel, but there’s something about boats, especially those massive ocean-going liners, that really strikes the dread into me. And this ship was BIG, let me tell you, rising as high as nine or ten stories out of the water, which itself was a reason for worry; I’m no marine architect, but I’m pretty sure that when something’s height exceeds its width by such a vast amount, its stability can basically go bye-bye, and even if that ISN’T the case, then surely it would need a bigger draw under the water to compensate? And how deep is the harbour, anyway? So it couldn’t have been THAT much… these, friends, were the thoughts that were going through my head as I boarded this monstrosity. They left as soon as I was on board, though. From the moment I got on board until the moment I left, I was thinking only about how I would escape in the event of a disaster, how much time I would have, and whether it was sensible to go to sleep or not. It was a 16 hour overnight journey, so the answer was definately “yes,” but in the event it was academic. My cabin (free, “thanks” to Interrail) was on Deck 2, the bottom deck – and, coincidentally, the deck on the exact level of the waterline against the prow of the ship. And, as my cabin was against the hull at the front, I heard every wave – and when a November wave in the Baltic Sea it’s the prow of a ship, it does not do so with a gentle little ‘swoosh,’ oh no. It goes: BANG, BANG, BANG, I WANT TO GET IN THERE AND MAKE YOU DROWNDED, BANG! So needless to say, sleep was not an issue for me that night, and very glad I was to see Helsinki the following morning as well.

Helsinki is a nice place. It reminds me a lot of Copenhagen – it’s slightly bigger, not quite as pretty, but probably more interesting at night. It does have a very interesting set of island fortresses protecting the harbour, built back in the day to protect against the oncoming Russians, but which are now marine training facilities and UNESCO listed Heritage sites. It also had some amazing buildings, displaying the range of its influences to the fullest extent. While there was an obvious degree of Soviet intervention in many of the buildings, there was also an interesting mix of modern Scandinavian and classical Slavic construction on display as well, and all arranged in a fashion that was quite unique. Interestingly, the city seemed to have grown around its docks, rather than its train station. Those with longer memories will remembered how upset I was that Brussels didn’t seem to have a river; cities, in my experience, tend to all observe certain rules, regardless of location and political affiliation, and one of them is that they are always built on water. Another, more modern one, is that the train station is always the oldest, and usually the poorest, part of town; it is here that you will find most of the people, but also the kebab shops, the sex shows, the slums. Not so Helsinki – this was a city defined by its docks, and the area around the train station was actually quite gentrified. While it was a nice place with a lot of charm and character, it didn’t have much by way of diversions, so I stayed there for a few nights then moved on.

As if to prove that I am a man who seeks to face down and conquer his fears, I took the boat from Helsinki to Tallinn, and while I did indeed fret for a lot of the way, the worst thing that happened to me was that I lost my lunch due to the choppy seas. Tallinn seems like a lot of fun, if slightly odd. In many respects, it feels like a mediterranian city – Spanish, maybe – and of all the cities I’ve seen, it most embraces its medieval, fortress past, while lurching brakeneck into the globalised, capitalist future. This is just a first impression, though. I shall see how it looks again in daylight.

Sister Sash tells me that the Ice Hotel is a no-goer, as it’s all booked up like whoa. This is a blow, for two reasons – firstly, for its own sake, as I was really looking forward to it; and secondly, because it means I miss out on Northern Scandinavia, which I had intended to do seperately when I came back. But such is life – I intent to return to Norway on a hiking excursion anyway, so I’ll get my opportunity, I’m sure. Now I just need to find something else to cash in my birthday credit for. Decisions decisions!

Right, gotta go eat. Keep well, and let me know your news!

This is another one of those “Josh was grouchy so he made a place sound worse than it was” posts. Ignore that guy; Bergen and Oslo are both wonderful places.

I have not had a good few days.

Let’s begin at the end – I’ve just spent the last 26 hours hanging around Oslo train station. The reasoning behind this is that the night train I was supposed to get on Saturday night was cancelled, and this saturday night also happened to be the night that some football cup final fell upon, so all the city’s hostels and cheap hotels were full of beered up Norwegians. So I got to Oslo at 6pm, took about seven hours to come to the conclusion that I was not going to be spending my night comfortably, and took stock. My Game Boy and iPod had both run out of batteries on the seven-hour train journey from Bergen, I didn’t want to withdraw cash as this was supposed to be my last hurrah in Norway, and my only book was The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski, which I’m really enjoying but can be kinda dense after midnight has been and long since gone. The internet cafes all closed at midnight; I made use of them as much as I could before they did, for warmth as much as entertainment.

For those who are interested, the blue team beat the yellow team by a conclusive margin. I know this because I had to sit in the drizzle watching them do what football fans do at 3am, as the train station itself was closed between 1am and 6am. Yeah, that was amusing. Feh – I’ve had to sleep rough before, but never in a city I didn’t know, much less a city in a foreign country miles away from anyone I knew, and never in anywhere quite so fucking cold.

Still, I suppose the situation had a certain gloomy inevitability about it. And at least I know what to do next time it happens (i.e. get a night train to anywhere then get another train back in the morning – that’s what the Interrail pass is for, dipstick). Tonight I get the sleeper back to Stockholm, and I’ll probably spend a day and a night in Stockholm recharging batteries – Game Boy, iPod, and me.

So, back slightly further, to Bergen, where I ostensiably celebrated my birthday. Bergen’s indescribably beautiful and utterly dull. It is a city that hasn’t quite gotten over being a fishing village, which is admittedly part of its charm, but it’s no good whatsoever for celebrating a birthday in. Still, we got some hiking in (despite almost constant rain – I managed to get through three pairs of trousers in one day, which I think is some kind of record) – on the day of my birthday we actually went up into the hills for a good seven or eight hours, which was a lot of fun, although my knees are really feeling the benefit just now.

It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. For the train journey from Oslo to Bergen, we were blessed with good weather, and were thus able to get a good look at what is undoubtedly the most beautiful chunk of landscape in God’s creation. The train track wends its way 1,222 meters above sea level, through the cloud cover and up into the mountain peaks; the entire route is dominated by perfectly still mountain lakes, fast river rapids, tiny villages and even, at one point, a glacier so close that you could wind down the window in the train and hit it with a rock. The one problem with the whole experience was that I could only experience it from behind a sheet of glass, in a train. I wanted nothing more than to get out and get my boots dirty; run my hand through the water, climb the ice-carved rock peaks, and see how deep the snow really was between the trees. Watching it all through the window of a train was maybe slightly better than looking at a photograph, but not by much. Perhaps someday I shall have to come back, during the summer maybe, with some decent hiking boots and a tent. That would be something.

The city of Bergen itself has everything and nothing. It has a leper museum, which I went to for the simple reason that I will almost certainly never find another leper museum anywhere, but it was quite dull. It had a lot of old churches and buildings that you couldn’t go inside. It had a fish market that sold fish, and I didn’t want any fish, so I saw it through and left. I’d love to live there – despite the 300 days of rain per year – but it’s not a great town for touristing.

Oh, and Norway is HELLA expensive. I can’t wait to get to Estonia, which is hopefully where I will be by next weekend, and where I can probably live comfortably for a day on the price of a Norwegian cup of coffee.

OK, that’s enough bellyaching for now. The next update will be less bellicose, I promise! I shall go to Helsinki with a soul full of optimisim and a song in my heart. The song will probably be something like Unwell by Matchbox Twenty but it is the thought that counts!

Hope you are all well and happy.

I met some great people in Stockholm, including a bunch of Americans teaching English in France. Still one of my favourite places in Europe.

Two months in, woo!

Strange to think that I’ve been living like this for, um, one sixth of a year. Actually, no, that’s not weird at all, but time has been doing some funny things since I left. Belgium seems more recent than Berlin, for some reason, and Copenhagen seems like a decade ago. One thing that is in perspective, however, is London, which receedes a little more with each passing day

So, I’m now in Oslo, a city whose defining characteristic is drizzle. It is a good museum city, actually – partly because it has taken London’s lead and instituted the very sensible policy of making things free, and partly because they offer protection from drizzle, which becomes a very important factor after any length of time here. Today alone I visited no less than three museæ (+10 point correct pluralisation bonus SCORE) – the Modern Art museum, the Edvard Munch museum and the Nobel Peace Centre. Of the three, the first was probably (and surprisingly) the weakest – a couple of interesting bits and bobs, mainly installation and photography, but apart from tat just the usual morass of breasts and freshly culled deer’s blood. Edvard Munch, on the other hand, has long been one of my favorite artists. Not so much for “The Scream” or “The Kiss”, both of which suffer, inevitably, for over-exposure, but for paintings like “The Sun” :

and etchings like “The Sick Child” :

So that was also good to see.

The Nobel museum was also great. It was supermodern, which itself bamboozled the senses, but there was a ton of information there, so I spent a happy hour re-educating myself about the Middle East conflict, the collapse of Apartheid, the work of the Red Cross, the goings-on in Myanmar and Guatamala, and all those happy kinds of thing.

The Nobel Award has, naturally, been something of a theme for the past week or so, as Stockholm inevitably had its fair share of Nobel floorspace. I spent a good week in Stockholm. As mentioned in the last email, my ex gf, Katie, joined me for much of that week. What I was too polite to say last time was that I anticipated disaster, and while it wasn’t quite as bad as that it certainly wasn’t quite fun. The problem with Katie is that she’s both a sociopath and someone who is used to the finer things in life, so what she expected to get out of a youth hostelling trip (where people are plentiful and conditions are squalid) is beyond me. Her stay culminated in her dragging me to Ikea (who the fuck goes all the way to Stockholm to go to Ikea? It’s flat pack furniture for heaven’s sake) then ditching me in the foyer for two hours. I say two hours – I don’t know how long she left me there for because she actually disappeared without telling me, and got onto her flight back to England without so much as a goodbye and thanks-for-having-me.

So, I tolerated her BS, mainly because she was only there for a few days and I could always stay later and do my own thing, but it kinda put a crimp on the week. Couldn’t ruin it, hough, because Stockholm is possibly the nicest city I’ve been to so far – only Copenhagen can compete, really. Firstly, it’s undeniably stunningly gorgeous. Built on an archipelago, it has a certain Venician quality to it – all rivers and waterways, wending through neo-classical architecture and busy cobbled streets. But it also has modernity and energy; parts of the city felt almost Blade-Runner-esque, with streets running over and under each other beneath neon signs and vast, glowing monuments to god knows what. The people were uniformly freindly, if disappointingly unattractive. A rather amusing group of American people I met claimed that this was because winter in Sweden was a six-month hibernation period for sexy time, so only the ugly Swedes still walked the streets. I don’t kinow whether this is true or not, but I have also been informed that all Swedish men have shaved scrotæ (+10 more points, go me!), so it seems that the Swedes are gathering their own sexy mythology. And more speed to them!

Of intrest in Stockholm was the Vasamuseum, a vast museum dediated the the warship Vasa, which sunk mysteriously in the 16th Century and was only excavated 300 years later; the Nobel Museum, which I expected to be ruthlessly narcisistic but, fortunately, gave far more floorspace to the winners than the selectors, the Swedish Parliament, which is intresting but amusing (most of Swedens politicians are part-time, and seem more obsessed with making sure that the deomographics of the parliament match the demographics of the country exactly than, y’know, selecting he right person for the job – but then the population of Sweden is smaller than the populaton of London alone, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter); and, ohhh, a whole host of other things besides. Seriously, just stop reading this and go to Stockholm yourselves, You won’t regret it because it’s ace. Just don’t go in winter because winter is sexy time.

There.

Also, I took a night train from Stockholm to Oslo. It was actually quite good fun!

Right. Tomorrow morning I’m going to Bergen, which appartently has rain for 275 days of the year, and I’ll be there for three days. Following that, I will EITHER head north to Trondheim, Bødø and Tromsø, OR I shall head straight for Stockholm and take the ferry to Helsinki. There are two factors to this: 1, I am spending money at an unsustainable rate, and long to get to Estonia and Poland where I can live on 30p a day; and 2, I’ll be back in Sweden in December, as several of my more awesome family members have clubbed together to get me a night in the Ice Hotel ( http://www.icehotel.com/).

So. By now you must have had enough of my blather, so I shall leave you for another short while. I hope all is well in your collective lives and hope to hear from you all soon.

Much love.

Ah, that’s a bit fairer to Copenhagen, I think!

Hello, you lucky people!

Well, it’s been a week and a half and no mistake. Copenhagen is one hell of a city. It is compact but dense – everything that’s worth seeing is within twenty minutes walk, easily. You can cover the entire city in a day, but then realise that the amount of stuff you miss is bewildering. I kept on having to extend my time there; there were roads I’m sure I went down six or seven times, but kept on finding new things on. It was amazingly beautiful, if a little on the chilly side, but had such a variety of things to do and see that, if I’d known the extent of it beforehand, I would probably have been intimidated. The tiny suburb of Christiania was worth a day in its own right – Christiania is an area of Copenhagen which is basically lawless and self-policing, does not pay taxes, is not covered by the police, and is ostenisably an experiment into a kind of hippy-utopian model society. It is as politically controversial as you’d expect from that description – while the city continues to consider it a ‘social experiment’, recent years have seen a number of police raids over drug offenses – but it is still an extremely interesting place to visit, if only because it has developed a distinct culture and atmosphere of its own.

The hostel was a bit utilitarian – no curtains, three-high stacked bunkbeds, no-power showers – but it did have a nice communal area, and, shock horror, free internet! I met a whole bunch of awesome people there, and could probably fill another one of this on that topic alone, but eventually I decided that the time was right to move on to Sweden. As it was, I timed my run a little early – I could probably have stayed an extra day or two – but you live and learn. Of all the places I’ve visited so far, Copenhagen is one of the few that I will definately come back to.

So I made my way to Malmo, which entailed train ride across a massive bridge over an ocean, which seems like a bad idea to me, but then I’m no engineer. Malmo itself is a horrible city; it’s utterly soulless, being dominated by two massive shopping streets and nothing even remotely resembling an atmosphere. I was quite happy to leave it behind me, and so headed to Gothemburg with unseemly haste.

The journey to Gothenburg was fun – a combination of delays, breakdowns and bus replacement services that would impress Railtrack – but I met a couple of American guys along the way so it wasn’t too bad. Gothenburg itself is a charming city; a little on the dull side, as, like Malmo, it lacks any kind of culture, but at the very least there was a little bit of excitement about the place. Sweden is a funny place; the people really seem to struggle to get out of work mode, and concequentially Gothenburg on a drizzling Saturday night was bordering on terminal. The stereotypes are pretty unfounded, in general; yes, it’s pricy, but still nothing on London or even Paris; and yes, the girls are pretty, but I really struggle to appreciate them. It’s hard to forget that, up until the late 1970s, Sweden had an active policy of eugenics – which is to say, everybody looks *exactly the same*. It’s a little scary and I fear for the Swedish gene pool.

So today I arrived in Stockholm, and the little of it I’ve seen so far looks stunning. I’m avoiding taking in too much of the city today, as I’m probably here for the best part of a week; tomorrow I shall be joined by the lovely Katie, who many of you will remember as an ex-girlfriend from a few years back. She’s come out, ostensiably for her birthday, but really to keep me company, for a week or so, following which I’ll be heading on to Oslo in Norway. Wending my way up the Norwegian coast is a prospect that fills me with particular glee, but first I must buy some gloves. Dear God I fear for my extremities! There is snow on the ground in southern Sweden already and it’s not going to get any warmer.

I hope all are well and that London, or indeed any of the other various places where this journal is read, is not too drizzly.

I ended up dating Maria for a short time when I got back to the UK.

Also, woah there on Copenhagen. I really had a good time there! It was a nice city, full of character and charm. Also, I met another girl who I really liked there, called Lise; we never really hooked up, due to going in opposite directions and suchlike. She ended up moving to London to be with another boy, who she is still with. We talk occasionally. Man, these were clearly my wild days (Such as they are…)

Sorry for the extended delay! I was trying to write one of these every five days or so – if only because they help to break up the time – but the last week has been kinda hectic. A lot of fun, but busy busy busy.

Booo, I think we left off in Berlin. From there I headed north to Stralsund, a tiny town on the North German coast, which was extremely pretty. The weather was still good, and the views across the Baltic at night were stunning. From there I went to Rostock for a night, which was a pretty but dull town, but had the distinction of having the most awesome youth hostel ever – instead of being a building, it was a boat, and my €15 bought me my own cabin for the night. It was probably the one and only time I have ever literally lept with glee.

So those two were nice, if a little bland. I was intending to spend another few days on the coast – Lübeck was my next port of call – but I guess I missed city life a little, co I decided to spend my last few days in Germany in Hamburg instead. I’m very glad I did, as well – it’s an awesome city. It’s probably the only German city that’s actually growing, and as such feels very modern and cosmopolitan, but it also has the distinction of having escaped both war and occupation relatively unscathed, and so has a lot of its history intact. I met some great people there, including an English girl called Maria, who was working there as a translator. It was one of the few places I’ve
regretted not having more time to stay in.

From Hamburg I took the train to Copenhagen. That was fun; for a part of the journey the train has board a ferry, so I even got to take in a mini cruise on the way. There was one panicy moment when I realised, as the train was leaving, that my Interrail ticket had actually expired three days previously. Had I been caught, it would have been hefty fine time, but happily I managed to distract the ticket lady with a carefully-timed, but appaling, boat-based pun (“You look pale. Are you OK?” “Yes, I just don’t like boats.” “Seasick, huh?” “No. Afraid of assault and bateau-ry!” Hey, don’t knock it, it worked). I’ve been in Copenhagen for a few days now. It’s a nice city, but somewhat lacking in the youth hostel department; a lot of them close for the winter, and the ones that stay open seem to be on the
utilitarian side. That was one advantage of Germany – it has great youth hostels.

So, I’m here for a few more days, then I’m headed into Sweden – first Mälmo for a day or two, then Stockholm, where I shall be joined for a few days by a friend from home. I’m not planning on spending long in Scandinavia – a few weeks at most – but there’s still a lot to see.

Incidentally, my mobile phone is dead. I shall probably be making do with phone cards from now on. The old number is thus defunct!

Anyhoo – hope you’re all well. Let me know any news!

Much love.

The brevity of this suggests that I was knackered. Also, boy did I ever undersell Eisenach here. One of the nicest places I went to – beautiful surroundings, and the Wartberg Castle was something else.

Hey folks.

Slightly less dramatic entry this time, although you do have the result of the Choose Your Own Joshventure to look forward to at the end – no skipping forward!

So the time since the last email has been spen in Eisenach and Berlin. Eisenach was a pretty town, with a big castle and a lot of history – Martin Luthor retreated there after the Emperor, Charles II, retracted his support, and spent nine months there translating the Old Testament into German. His cell in the castle (complete with a whalebone-vertibra footstool!) has been a draw for pilgrims for centuries. Reading the graffitti is always interesting, but in this place Franciscan monks had been carving their names into the walls since 1750, so there was a real sense of antiquity.

The town was on the edges of the Thungrian forest, so I got some hiking done as well. I did, however, suffer for not having a stick. Conventional logic would suggest that they’re everywhere, and that finding one of suitable walking length would be childishly simple, but it appears almost not to be the case. Perhaps they’ve all been stolen by unscrupulous walking-stick salesmen! A conspiracy looms.

Based on the looming termination of my interrail ticket, I cut short my meander through the rubbish little towns in Germany and headed straight for Berlin. Man, have I missed city living! I wouldn’t want to be stuck here for more than four or five days, but it’s been great just to be able to find someone to talk to every night. I’ve met a whole host of interesting people. The first couple of nights I spent with a pair of Americans called Joe and Elena, a brother-and-sister pair who were travelling for the laters birthday. After they left for Poland, I hooked up with a pair of English guys called Trevor and Owen, then last night I went out to a club with two Israeli girls (Keren and Rotem), two other English guys (Ian and Andy), and a girl who’s just from everywhere (half Brazilian, half Italian, living in France, fluent in Greek and Russian, called Maria). So my evenings have been occupied once again. Over-occupied, in fact; I got back to the hostel from last night about three hours ago. I’m mainly writing this as an excuse not to have to do anything meaningful.

The days have been pretty well spent as well. Berlin is pretty much a building site; it has developed uniquely of all Europe’s major cities, for all the obvious reasons. It does contain a stupid amount of history and culture, though, and there is a certain enrgy about it that was entirely missing from Paris. Standing in Berlin gives one hope for the future of Germany. Of all the cities I’ve been to, there are very few with as charged an atmosphere.

Anyway. Tomorrow I’m going to the North German coast for a few days, then, in accordance with the majority vote, heading towards Denmark and the North. As things stand, I’m redrawing the route to avoid anything west of Prague; I’m planing to see Estonia and Lithuania, then Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc, then Croatia, Greece and Turkey, before hopefully heading into Israel and the Middle East. I don’t yet know if I’ll head into Russia, simply because visa proceedings are going to be tricky to arrange, although I would love to go to St Petersberg and Moscow – Moscow has always been a dream to me. I may miss it this time, however, simply because I want to give Russia the attention it deserves at some point; get the Trans-Siberian railway and taking the whole sweep. We shall see.

Anyway – I think I may shamble back to bed. Hope you’re all well.

Option 2 ended up winning, although I never made it to Russia.

Also, I was way harsh on Munster here. Munster is a fine place! But, yes, slightly dull. (The exciting Martin Luther stuff is an Eisenach.)

Right, this time I’m going to do something slightly different. I’m not going to talk much about what I’ve done over thew last few days, because frankly they’ve been boring. Synopsis: two days forced in Dortmund (dull), two days in Münster (pretty but dull), two days in Eisenach (nice but ongoing). There you go – up to speed.

I bet you wish these posts were all like that, huh?

No, this time I’m going to introduce a note of democracy into the proceedings. Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books? It’s like those. (Those books were awesome for getting kids to learn how to read. I expect they’re single-handedly the reason why literacy rates are so high in the English-speaking world. Let’s face it, everybody who now reads regularly – e.g. everybody reading this – read them at some point. Actually, that’s probably really depressing if it’s true… although, having said that, no more so than Harry Potter for this generation. Digression ends!) Yes, I want input on what to do next.

The plan was always thus: Month 1 – Paris, Belgium, Luxembourg, half of Germany. So far so good. Month 2 – other half of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czek Republic if we’re speedy. However, a new plan has arisen, and I need to decide now.

So, option A is the original Month 2.

Option 2:, I’ve been pretty good with money over the first month, and have thus decided I want to go to some contries I previously thought too expensive – Norway, Sweden and Finland, then approach Poland via Estonia etc, maybe take a swing at Moscow or St Petersberg if I can afford the visa. This is all well and good, but it does mean missing out on a lot of Germany, potentially including Hamburg, and may also leave me short at the end of the trip – the Turkey, Croatia, Greece and of the holiday, which I’m quite looking forward to. Also, I may have someone temorarily joining me at the end of October, and I don’t want to be somewhere completely antisocial.

OK, so it’s not a terribly interesting dilemma, but a tricky one nonetheless. In the morning I leave for Berlin, where I must decide whether to head North or East; anyone with a strong feeling either way, let me know!

Peace out.

I dealt with Aachen pretty harshly here. It was a nice place.

Me again!

I’m still in Germany. So far I am somewhat disappointed, for a variety of reasons. Chiefly, though, it is that the cities largely lack character. I cannot complain too loudly about this; the cities lack character because they had to be rebuilt after 1945 because we bombed roughly 80% of them into itty bity fragments of dust, so moaning about it now would be like me burning your house down then complaining that you don’t have any sandwiches.. The 20% that remains is spectacular, however; Kölner Dom, the main cathedral of Cologne, is one of the most imposing structures I have ever seen, grand on a simply breathtaking scale, and there are several similar examples elsewhere.

So, three days spent in Frankfurt, of which at leats two were a waste. Germany shuts entirely on a Sunday and, bizarrely, a Monday (“economic problems? What economic problems?”), meaning that those two days were spent mostly meanding about trying to stay warm, as Autumn is most definately proceeding in Central Europe right now. Tuesday was fun though – I got to see the Museum de Moderne Kunst – kunst is German for ‘art’, a fact that gives my peurile mind no small amount of pleasure. The main thrust of the exhibit in aforementioned gallery is a continuous exhibit of objects brought through related keywords on eBay, and was interesting as a meme, if not especially worthwhile as an art desplay.

I also met a trio of Australian guys and two Danish girls, with whom I ended up spending the evening; the six of us wondered around looking for a restaurant, then wondered around looking for a bar, before finally wondering around looking for a nightclub. We did find an amazing bar on top of a tower in the city centre, but the prices were as high as the altitude, so we didn’t stay for long. Frankfurt is a very pretty city, but very sterile.

It’s the banking capital of Germany, which I’m sure is no co-incidence.

Yesterday I up’d sticks again for Cologne, which is a nicer city, if barely more interesting, although I did manage to fill a day for once. Thus far my days have been largely solnambulent; my routine is to wake around 8, eat, shower and ablute before heading out around 9.30ish, do something until 1, eat lunch and read in a park for an hour or two before heaidng back to the hostel around 4 or 5, then out again at 7 to eat. Yesterday kept me on my feet for the better part of 8 hours, though, which was far more impressive.

First port of call was the aforementioned Kölner Dom, which just looms over the city, less like a church to the glory of God and more like a giant punk cockroach. Climbing the spire took about half an vertiginous hour, but yielded some impressive sights, and I did get some good photos from across the river.

After that I headed into the Museum Ludwig, which is massive and deeply interesting. The bottom floor delt many with modern art – Andy Warhol and his ilk predominated, and while parts were interesting I generally find conceptual art to be quite frustrating. The upper floors were better value, however. The top floor contained a massive collection of Picasso originals, which occupied a happy hour or two, but the real treasure was a heterospective (he’s not dead yet) of George Brecht.

How to describe George Brecht? As a conceptual artist, he was heavily involved in the Fluxus group, a group which was known for playing the the established form of art, and specifically with causing the audience to ingest its art in new ways. Certainly, that sounds very much like a broad-brush definition of conceptual art, or even modern art, as a discipline, but it’s hard to peg down what made this so interesting. George Brecht’s approach was almost one of gamesmanship; he would arrange musical scores for car controls, which were ‘conducted’ by a randomly thrown deck of cards, and which would be ‘played’ using car lights, windscreen wipers and the like. The nature of events were also of interest to him. He would create decks of cards describing events (“Near to an insect”, “On a white chair with a scarf and a walking cane”); his art returned to the themes of adding arbitrary meaning to common events and objects, often with a touch of playfulness – indeed, the format of the game as a social activity, the formalism of created rulesets, and the release of the audience from the ‘rules’ of art (one piece was a medicine cabinet from which items could be removed, or added, by any member of the public at any time) were his chosen method of communicating his art. The ideas he pioneered can still be seen in modern theoretical sociology (such as the work of Peter Suber – much of Brecht’s work can be seen in the intellectual make-up of Nomic).

All of which may hold limited interest to many (most?) of you, but it interested me, so there’s a paragraph on it. Nyer.

Back to travelling, today I took a day trip to Aachen, which is a pretty nice old University town, but generally lacked enthusiasm. This area is failing to inspire me, unfortunately; I’m here tomorrow, but may move on to Münster sooner than expected.

Anyhoo. Hope you folks are all well and looking forward as usual to hearing your news.