Photos

I've finally managed to upload some photos so if you haven't seen any pictures on facebook and you're looking to waste some time then look no further than here http://davelearoyd.shutterfly.com/.

Leeds

Home. Home cooking. Homemade. Homeward Bound. Homework. Homing signal. Home, home on the range. Home furnishings. Homosexual. Homosapian. Homophobic. Homeopathic. Homer Simpson. Home. I’m actually home.

Last week i was in Amsterdam which is the kind of place that you go to with expectations. Canals, cannabis, red lit women and dance floors spin through your mind before you get there and in front of your eyes once you arrive. It’s a city that felt almost anonymous or independent from anywhere else. As if it floats above the rest of the world promising to come back down soon but knowing it never will. Some call it a melting pot. I think it’s more like a blender. But all the human zoo of the red light district and surrounding bars is neatly confined to a few square kilometres near the central train station and the rest of the city is a maze of canals and old, big terraced buildings glinting in winter sunshine or European drizzle depending on your luck.

I met Matijs and Joost, two Dutch guys that i first met when i travelled in Mongolia a few years ago. We met up again and the three of us swapped stories, drank beers in different little bars bulging with people escaping the winter chill.

I left Amsterdam too quickly but i had a seat booked on a bus to Brussels which was driven by a big French man who had crap 1980s music blaring from the radio all the way to the Belgian capital. We glided across the Dutch landscape which is so flat you can almost make out the curvature of Earth as you look out of the window.
Brussels was a really pretty city full of grand old buildings covered in Christmas neon with the smell of chocolate wafting through the streets and the beer flowing not far behind in the cold evening air. The following morning i was zipping towards London on the Eurostar train wondering how and when it became normal to take a train that travels through a tunnel under the ocean linking two different countries.

I spent that night in Oxford where I met two old friends, Stu and Max. I hadn’t been in England for 18 months. Now, i wouldn’t want to add to the reputation that the English are all drunk idiots but you can probably guess what happened next. We played some drinking games in a pub and then I got so drunk that i vomited all over the streets of Oxford, fell asleep in the back of a car and woke up trying to piece together the previous twelve hours of my life without much success. Then we had a fried breakfast at lunchtime. Welcome back. The next evening i was in my home city of Leeds.

Europe has been immense fun but for the past few months i’ve felt like a stone skimming across the surface, seeing place after place, city after city only for the journey to end and being forced to plunge back into something familiar. England. It’s a country where almost 60% of its GDP is national debt. Where a light covering of snow brings the whole nation to a halt. A place where getting drunk or spending money are seen to solve all your problems. Where the politics is centred so firmly on the middle ground, you wonder how politicians are able to sit down properly with all the fence posts stuck up their arses. Where the majority is silent and everybody else seems utterly fixated with Celebrity X-Factor Big Dancing Brother On Ice with Harry Potter in Afghanistan. I wonder how long i’ll last.

As always, i’m already planning the next trip. In the mean time i’m unsure of what to do with the blog. What do i write about now i’m not sleeping in hostels and eating kebabs? As i won’t be travelling for a while would it be true to the title to keep it going? Should i change the title to something more honest such as ShutUpJustTryAndGetAJob or ShutUpJustDrinkUntilYouVomitInTheStreets? Let me know what you think. I’ll leave you with some questions that have, for whatever reason, entered my head over past few months.

1. Why are e-tickets printed on paper?
2. Why are power cuts never during the day?
3. Why are you always oblivious to announcements at train or bus stations until it’s one about your journey, even if the announcement is in a language you don’t understand?
4. Why is it whenever you book a ticket the train is empty but if you don’t book one the train is packed?
5. Why is it when you’re desperate for a shit and you use a public toilet there’s never any toilet paper? Or worse still there are only two sheets left so you try and wipe your arse with toilet paper the size of a bus ticket and get shit on your fingers.
6. Why is it wherever you go in the world you always see a pair of old manky trainers tied together and thrown over a telephone line? Who started this and why did people decide to copy it?
7. Why is it wherever you go in the world you always see a child wearing an English Premier League Football shirt? How the fuck did the Manchester Utd away shirt from the 1996-97 season find its way to rural Uzbekistan?
8. Why do you always see one glove on a fencepost every winter regardless of the country you’re in?
9. Why do people who drive their car with the windows down and the music playing loud always play really shit music? It’s never The Killers or The Kings of Leon is it? It’s always Warren G or DJ Otzi.
10. Why is that six months of your life travelling through different continents and countries taking in mountains, beaches, deserts, cities, villages, friendships and dozens of journeys in cars, boats, buses, trains and planes whilst eating all foods and knocking back strange drinks seem to race by so quickly that at the end of it all you can barely remember what you just did and yet waiting thirty minutes in the cold rain for a bus can seem like a lifetime?

Thanks for reading. Have fun. See you soon.

Amsterdam

I'm almost finished. This trip, and maybe this blog, has less than a week left. Here's another weeks worth of travelling.

I was in Bollnas this time last week and the only reason to be there was to meet up with my mate Alex. It was fair to say that there was nothing for me and Alex to do in the small town of Bollnas apart from what Alex seems to have been doing for the past three years - go ten pin bowling, eat, hit on small-town Swedish girls and drink beer. It got a bit boring quite quickly. We went out to a bar, of which there are two to chose from for the whole town, and it was one of the strangest places i have ever had a drink. It contained three bars, three blackjack tables, two dartboards, a dance floor, shit music, a big screen TV and a load of people who for some reason thought that Bollnas night life rivalled that of London or Hong Kong. Somehow me (an idiot Englishman) and Alex (who's from Ethiopia) got talking to a plumber from Uruguay and a drunk Somalian mental case. In Sweden. In winter. I'm starting to miss normality.

Bollnas was the furthest north i've ever been and the frost one morning was so thick that it tricked you into thinking it had snowed during the night. The sun lazily woke up at about nine thirty, struggled in an upward direction for a few hours and then just gave up, wandered back down to the horizon and disappeared at about three in the afternoon. Me and Alex got a bus back to Stockholm and it wound through an edible scenery of trees and fields that looked as if it were covered in icing sugar.

Stockholm is a very chic place. Coffee shops look like furniture show rooms and restaurants resemble modern art galleries with a few tables thrown in the middle. We were walking around the cobbled streets and old buildings when we saw a small demonstration by Italians about Silvio Berlusconi. One of the demonstrators gave us a leaflet and Alex asked what was going on and why.
"How long has he been in power?" he asked.
"Fifteen years", the demonstrator replied.
Alex shrugged.
"Shoot him," he said blankly and walked off.
I almost died laughing. It seems you can take a man out of Africa but you can't take Africa out of the man.

And Stockholm's expensive. It was over five Euros for a beer but that didn't seem to stop me and Alex drinking Guinness, playing darts and reminiscing about life in Hong Kong. But after a few days in Bollnas you'd probably start reminiscing about time in prison. The next morning i was on a bus again and Alex was back in small town Sweden.

Twenty two hours, two buses, two ferries and a loaf of bread separated Stockholm from Dortmund. Dortmund isn't a great city. It got the arse bombed off it by the British in the Second World War meaning the whole place is filled with functional 1950s architecture and all the heavy industry that was there has recently left for other shores. I'd planned to meet Marco who was working in Seoul when i was and was now back working in Germany again. Marco lives near Dortmund in Hagen and him and his family let me sleep on a sofa in the basement for two nights and feed me at every opportunity.

I had a day Düsseldorf which sits next to the Rhine River and was once the financial capital of Germany until all the banks moved to Frankfurt for reasons that nobody seems to know. Düsseldorf is also home to one of the largest Japanese populations outside of Japan. Again, nobody seems to know why but it adds to the city which is a decent place to waste a day and drink a beer. I also went to a small city called Munster which was like Oxford but German. And then i got on another bus.

Koln is spelt Cologne in English (again, nobody really knows why) and i stayed with Stefan who i met in Uzbekistan. He and a load of German students were doing research in Tajikistan and were seeing Uzbekistan while they were there. In Koln, we swapped more central Asian stories and by coincidence i was there the night that they were doing a big presentation at the university about Tajikistan which joined the dots between Samarkand and Koln quiet neatly. I had a few drinks last night in Koln where i ordered a wheat beer which for some reason came mixed with banana juice. Apparently the good people of Koln enjoy fucking up the already wonderful German brews for reasons that, guess what, nobody seems to know. I'm starting to think that Germans aren't as we all thought they were. All the precision engineering and efficiency and beer brewing is just a ruse and they are all, in fact, clueless about everything and secretly hate beer so much that they choose to mix it with fruit juice.

I've been racing too fast through Europe which isn't ideal but better than flying over it and so today i was on another bus to Amsterdam where i arrived a few hours ago. After here it's Brussels, Oxford and then the finish line in Leeds.

Thanks for reading. Have fun.

Bollnas

It's a little bit freezing cold outside. I'm in the middle of Sweden in December. Who's idea was this anyway?

Berlin somehow got better the more i was there. I spent most of the time in the eastern side of the city and in Kreuzberg which is an area adorned in graffiti (even the fire station had some) second hand shops, small record stores, street art and lots of bakeries and Turkish restaurants. There was an area called Mitte where i saw a photo exhibition and art galleries, Christmas markets, the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and bus loads of other tourists clicking cameras in the winter sun and the cold rain.

And then there was the beer. I found a delicious little microbrewery serving some of the best beer i have ever tasted which came with a side salad of relaxed bar staff, football on a big TV, tiled walls, furniture that looked as if it had been nicked from somebody's house and a big dog that sat in everybody's way as it licked its bollocks. And everything rattled slightly as trams rumbled pass outside and the rain hammered down. Somehow, it felt like home.

I met up with Anja who i met in Georgia a month or two ago. She took me on a cycle tour for the day showing me the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, more fantastic exhibitions, Currywurst (Bratwurst in curry sauce), gluhein and whizzed around on a bicycle as i followed straining to hear her barking directions and information over her shoulder at me as we dodged traffic or waited at lights in the never ending cycle lanes.

I said goodbye to Berlin and Anja and got on a bus to Copenhagen. I figured the bus would travel over land and bridges but a few hours into the journey we came to a ferry port at Rostok. Now, i have a very black and white relationship with the sea. Sometimes my stomach is like a brick for the whole journey on a boat and other times i vomit so much i almost break a rib. There's no in between and there's no telling which it will be until about five minutes into the sea journey. Fortunately my stomach stayed inside my body this time and two hours later we were in Denmark and not long after i was on a train leaving Copenhagen for a small city called Horsens in the dark and damp of a Danish winter.

I met up with Jamie, an old mate that i went to high school with but hadn't seen for ten years. It's strange how sometimes when you meet friends or family that you haven't seen for years you're somehow able to just carry on the conversation from where it left off years previously and so it was with Jamie. I stayed with him and his girlfriend, Jeanette, and we mainly spent our time drinking, eating, watching TV, playing on an X-Box and avoiding the rain. We also went to a Christmas tree farm and played tenpin bowling where we saw dozens of Danish people on Christmas parties who got shitfaced drunk, ate a load of food and were entertained by the worse band in history called The Bacons.

Horsens was a quiet place that seemed comfy and an easy place to live but also very quiet and set in a flat green agricultural landscape. Jamie described as "retired persons dream" which pretty much says it all. The train back to Copenhagen revealed more flat green farmland and more retired towns and not much else.

Copenhagen seemed like a very cool place to spend some time but i only stayed there one night and hopped on another bus to Stockholm taking in another ferry journey on the way and then an endless landscape of green trees interrupted only by the occasional farm and three kids at the back of the bus who seemed to cry and scream for no reason. In Stockholm i met Alex who i lived with when i was teaching in Hong Kong a few years ago. He's from Ethiopia and has been working in Sweden for three years and we chatted and caught up with each others lives on a bus for three hours until we arrived in Bollnas which is like Horsens only smaller and less interesting. And fucking freezing. I've just read that description back to myself and it sounds like the start of a bad joke, "There was an English man and an Ethiopian man on the back of a bus in Sweden in winter and..."

So that's my life at the moment - taking mammoth day long bus journeys into the cold arse end of Europe and freeloading my way onto long lost friends sofas and into spare rooms. I'll be doing the same for the next two weeks all the way back to Leeds. Feel free to leave some abuse below.