June 2011
2 posts
Concerning Sweden
I am reclining in a 70’s style loungechair, itself and its twin arranged around a little table precariously placed on a groin-level shelf normally reserved for potplants underneath the street facing window of a cafe in Sodermalm, which is normally spelled with an umlaut, in Stockholm. A wrist width gap between the striped awnings directly outside produces a bar of blinding white light right...
Benny Christopher Barcelona (Or: London, Liverpool...
Right now I am at the kitchen table of the three bedroom apartment I am presently renting, which I have all to myself, on the outskirts of an inner city Stockholm suburb spelled with letters I do not have on my keyboard. I have been in Stockholm, Sweden, for almost a week. It gets dark at midnight, the kind of “dark” you expect at about 8pm during Summer in Australia, before the sun...
May 2011
1 post
Paris addendum, Brussels(Belgium),...
I am writing this on my last day in Amsterdam, seated comfortably atop several cushions in a coffeeshop lining a predominately residential canal. I have five hours before I need to be on an aeroplane bound for Liverpool, England. I have a bottle of pineapple juice and a blunt the size of a flashlight in front of me on either side of my tiny laptop. I figured I’d be smoking as soon as I got...
April 2011
2 posts
Leaving Budapest, Munich (for three hours) and...
I have been in Paris for 6 days now. I left Budapest destined for France last Tuesday with a short layover in Munich before boarding my overnight train to sleep through the last leg of my journey here.
Leaving Budapest was hard. The city has its own social gravitational field, forcing young people who like to eat richly and drink plenty to circle it like a satellite or tiny moon for weeks...
Budapest, still (again)
I have been in Budapest(again) now for two weeks. I have been staying for free because I have been painting murals in a hostel, carving myself a routine around the typical trashy backpacker lifestyle and usual hostel business of taking groups of tourists to a variety of themed nights seven days a week all planned on interesting ways to make you sick up by 3am. My lungs are those of a sixty year...
March 2011
5 posts
Budapest (again) addendum, Prague.
It is my last day in Prague, I have been here for six days. I am in the hostel common room. The other people here are watching a John Candy movie. I think the movie is “Uncle Buck”.
On the last day we had in Budapest, the dream team of Chris, Phemie, Han and I broken up like the Beatles due to silly reasons like responsibilities, three of us went to an enormous run down market...
Cluj and Brasov, Romania, and home again home...
Chris and I woke up in a stupor six days ago, schlepped our filthy backpacks down to Keleti station and boarded a train bound for Cluj, Romania, which is a university city in the vaguely north-western quarter of the country.
Trains in this part of Europe aren’t precisely luxury affairs. The usable toilets, which are the toilets not clogged and brimming to the rim with excrement slopping and...
Budapest
People say to me “Ben, what is your favourite city in Europe?”, to which now I reply “Budapest” before they even finish the question, which might seem rude of me but I’m really just trying to express enthusiasm. Enthusiasm for how much I love Budapest.
I arrived four days ago on my overnight train from Warsaw. I had a six person sleeper all to myself for my twelve...
Warsaw, which is in Poland.
I am in a tacky cafe in Warsaw on a street called “Nowy swiat”, in the middle of Warsaw, which is in Poland. I have been here four days now.
I have not done much! I have been taking it very easy, which is what people who just previously spent a week in Berlin drinking and insufflating until five in the morning every day enjoy doing very much. I have been sleeping in until almost...
Berlin and about 2 hours of Warsaw.
I am in the common area of the worlds cutest hostel in Warsaw. I am drinking tea and the only background noise is the ridiculous yap of Polish television. As best as I can make out people are kissing the inside glass of an empty television set and then a band, led by a Polish woman who looks like an overweight Amy Winehouse wearing a red vinyl evening gown, plays a burst of the apparent...
February 2011
8 posts
Munich addendum, Darmstadt, Berlin.
My washing is going around in the machine at the moment so I thought I’d put up another post while I have the time and before too much gets away from me.
Hello! I am in Berlin now. It is a very active city. I spent two more days in Munich after my last post being a drunken trashbag with my two American super pals and another group of lovely people who took the same tour of the city...
Paris addendum, Munich.
Reading over my last post, I feel I was maybe a touch uncharitable to French people in my description of Paris. I’m not entitled to friendliness and warm welcomes everywhere I go. I’m a tourist and Australians roll their eyes with the best of ‘em at the happysnappers back home. Paris was beautiful and it was a genuine experience in itself to not feel like you know a place a whit...
Paris.
Kellie and Laura have left. Kellie to Leipzig, Laura back to warm, friendly Melbourne. I stayed my last night in a hostel in the north east of Paris. Today(after missing check out and breakfast) I have some downtime to write down my France experience online and my France and London experience in my diary before meeting a friend, Margot, before taking off to Munich tonight at 10pm on a coach. Seems...
Dog Eggs: A guest post
By Laura and Kellie
Look, all I can say is, if you bring a knife to the Vitis you better be ready to face the heat. In this case the ‘heat’ was a passive aggressive ‘pretend to be stabbed and bleeding and send Kells and Ben into a frantic search for band-aids’, but it is the heat none the less.
The apartment has been wunderba. Well…I have tried to be a good...
London addendum, Oxford and Paris.
London was lovely. I really had a very good time.
While I didn’t really find many travel comrades in my hostel (due to everyone travelling in loud, antisocial groups and not really wanting to associate with anyone who puts vegemite on a croissant), I feel I didn’t need to. I was taken such good care of by my tour guide Gillian the whole time I was there. My only hostel...
sunney olde londone towne
Our last half week in Thailand was the best. The marine park was a succession of natural wonder after natural wonder. It’s important, I’ve found, to check myself regularly. It’s easy to just have a pleasant paddle out and around as part of a tour, but my more awestruck moments have been when I stopped to look about and simply appreciate that I was kayaking in an archipelago of...
Kho Phangan 2
Hello! Matt and I are still in Kho Phangan and there is nothing wrong with that. We’re now fully licensed international advanced divers and completely pro at riding mopeds around at unsafe speeds in a variety of climates in a broad spectrum of road quality.
We’ve been on dive after dive and every boat dive has been gorgeous. Our instructor Scott has been a total dude to us and can reliably found...
January 2011
4 posts
Ko Phangan
I thought it would be easier to get computer time in between activities, but unfortunately for my poor mother who is convinced I’ve been sold into white sex slavery every time a period of 48 hours passes without communication, I need to take special trips away from the bar just to make the obligatory facebook status update and email reciprocation. Writing this thing takes even longer! (I...
Bangkok!
I got out of the taxi from the impossibly long-named Bangkok airport at 11:50pm 2 nights ago. The taxi driver didn’t seem to care that I don’t speak a work of Thai, talked at me for twenty minutes straight and pretended I gave him 100 baht less than I did.
The backpacker nexus looks exactly as you would imagine it to. It was crowded and loud and it smells like victoria street. 20 open...
COMPUTER BLOG DOT COM!!
I just changed the theme of the blog! I am a regular com-puter-programmer!
This is a test post and you should ignore it
oh gosh I just don’t know anything about blogging so I figured I’d do a test post (and this is the test post, this post right here)
