I haven’t written anything on this blog for about a month and there are a variety of reasons for that which include, in no particular order, rats, job centres, snow, snooker, beer and Where’s Wally.
Being back in the UK and Leeds is slightly strange. Everything is familiar and yet at the same time different. In my home city there are now more strip clubs than bookshops (apparently). Local buses are brand new and yet still have a faint whiff of sick. Leeds United beat Manchester United but we’re in different leagues. And it’s a multicultural city full of nightlife and interest and yet, to me, it feels painfully ordinary. If it were a colour it would be beige.
Quite predictably i spent the first few weeks back in Leeds getting repeatedly drunk. I went to a bar called Sub-urban (it was, literally) where i went to the toilet, stood at the urinal having a piss and was greeted by a man who said hello, blatantly stared at my cock and then asked everybody in the toilets if they had any cocaine. That’s one thing about Leeds that perhaps isn’t ordinary; the people.
Another thing i’ve noticed about people since i’ve been back is their size. Now, i’m not a large person. If you’re being polite you’d probably call me “svelte”. If you weren’t being polite you’d probably call me “a skinny little tosser”. But there have been times here where i’ve looked positively anorexic. In one pub last month i felt like a chopstick in a room full of space-hoppers. Brits are big.
The weather also occupies people’s minds way too much as well. For some unknown reason we British people expect this country to have a climate similar to that of Miami. We are genuinely surprised when it throws it down with rain and cannot comprehend a weather phenomenon called “snow”. Snow in Britain is like Kryptonite to Superman. It just makes us go weak and little bit mental. If we wake up in the morning, open the curtains and see a carpet of white we think world is going to end. And this behaviour isn’t limited to winter. Just wait six months. Everybody will be equally amazed and goggle eyed when the sun comes out for a few weeks and, surprise surprise, it gets a bit hot. It’s like this every year. You would have thought we’d have got used to it by now but for some reason it’s headline news. Snow In Winter! Heat Wave In Summer! We are actually factually stupid.
Like a lot of people here i avoided the winter weather by staying in pubs. I drank so much and so frequently over Christmas that i decided to give my body a rest by keeping clear of beer for a while. Since then my Dad keeps reliably informing me that proving you can stay off the drink for a few weeks is a classic sign of the first stage of alcoholism. First stage? I’ve been drinking solidly for ten years. How many stages are there? One memorable night was my brother’s 30th birthday where, through circumstances that are still quite hazy, i got so drunk that i found myself in the centre of Leeds in a gay bar searching for my lost coat whereupon a transsexual DJ insulted me by telling me i look like the 1980’s cartoon character Where’s Wally. I told you we’re not ordinary.
I’ve been hunting for a job which is probably the easiest way of lowering your self esteem that i know of. Write your life down on one piece of paper, send it to potential employers for jobs that trained chimps could do and then watch them ignore you. Or walk forty five minutes to the job centre in the snow to save money on bus fares. It’s great to be back.
I’ve done a few other slightly interesting things such as find and dispose of a dead rat that had been partially eaten by a fox in my Mum and Dad’s front garden, i’ve read two and a half books and i’ve laughed at snooker. You might think that watching snooker is boring and you’re probably correct but the saving grace is the commentary. It’s as if the TV channels just grabbed two old men, sat them in front of a microphone and told them to chat vaguely about the sport they’re watching whilst inadvertently inserting more double-entendres into a few frames of snooker than you thought was possible. They say things such as, “Well, he’s on 69 and he’d just love to get the pink into the corner pocket,” or, “Well, he wasn’t expecting a double kiss on the brown,” (sorry) and one genuine quote last night from British Eurosport’s coverage of the UK Masters Championship was, “Ohhh this boy is quick. Down. In. Hit. Score.” Accidental genius.
So, that’s my life as it stands right now. I’m trudging through snow and slush to a job centre, clearing vermin from gardens and giggling at snooker commentary. Rock and roll. Was i really stood on rusting ships on the Aral Sea? Did i really hike around Shikoku? What happened to that guy? And when the hell is thinking of making a return?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
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/.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Berlin
I'm in Germany. I'm back in western Europe. It's cold and damp and grey and multicultural and drunk and sarcastic and cynical. I love it.
I left Istanbul after only scratching the surface and promised myself to return one day and dig deeper. I was on an overnight bus to Sofia in Bulgaria and we spent an hour on the border as our bus got x-rayed and all our bags were searched by Turkish customs official. I don't know why they were searching everything when we were leaving the country. I think they were just bored on the night shift and wanted to use some new gadgets. The bus was almost empty and i copied what some other people were doing and slept by stretching my body across four seats. My head at one side of the bus, my feet at the other with my legs suspended, crossing the aisle.
I arrived in Sofia at 5.30 in the morning and got on a tram to take me to a hostel. There was nowhere to buy a ticket and nobody checked if i had one. Free transport. I only stayed in Sofia for one night but had a decent time seeing the old neglected buildings next to the new European money and the cobbled, compact, dinky sized city centre still seemed to be partly trapped in a communist time warp, dragging itself towards the rest of the West.
The bus from Sofia to Budapest took all day. The drive out of the city centre revealed damp dank apartment blocks and gypsy squatter camps covered in mud and dirt. Rural Bulgaria didn't look much better as grey dark fields and dead grass greeted the road to the border with Serbia. I now have a Serbia stamp in my passport but i only got out of the bus and actually walked on the country twice and that was to have a piss and buy a Bounty. Serbia looked happy and Mediterranean compared to hardened Bulgaria with white and cream farmhouses and green fields and mountains. We crossed the Serbia-Hungary border at nightfall and arrived in the capital late at night.
I did my usual "walk, get lost, get drunk" routine which i seem to have done with alarming regularity on this trip and Budapest is a great place for those things as the city is packed full of streets that go nowhere, streets that go somewhere, old gothic buildings and plenty of bars. Like Sofia, it also has a great old communist era clanking grumbling tram system where nobody ever checks that you have a ticket and half the ticket machines are broken anyway. I love old knackered trams. I think every city would benefit from a clunking Russian built tram grinding around town full of fare dodgers and drunks. And drunk people love Budapest. I thought it may have been compulsory for people to have drink in their hand as every other person seemed to be drinking, buying or carrying some kind of alcohol. Other signs that i was firmly back in Europe were the large amount of homeless people, buskers playing violins and graffiti.
I saw lots of Budapest including some great markets and the modern art gallery but the cold damp weather meant that i spent my last day there in a bar with and couple from New Zealand watching football and rugby. Then i got the 14 hour overnight bus that passed through Slovakia and pulled into Prague in the early morning. We ploughed through thick fog and crossed the Czech-German border at sunrise which revealed a landscape of green rolling hills, farms and massive wind turbines. After brief stops in Dresden and Leipzig the journey eventually ended in the capital yesterday lunchtime.
I've only been here for one day but i already love Berlin. I have never experienced a city that has so much personality and immediacy. Graffiti is on every building. That's not an exaggeration. Every building has a signature of some kind. Half the population seem to ride bicycles. It oozes attitude. This is where the country's leader is a woman and the Mayor is a gay man. This a place that has the highest per capita cocaine and ecstasy users in Europe. This is where the past collides with the future. This is where you would not be surprised if a revolution was around the corner. This is where anything can start and nothing seems to stop. This is more a social experiment than a city. This is Berlin.
But nothing lasts forever so i'll be leaving on Friday for Denmark but i don't know what i'll be doing between now and then. But this is Berlin. You're not really supposed to know what you're doing between now and then.
I left Istanbul after only scratching the surface and promised myself to return one day and dig deeper. I was on an overnight bus to Sofia in Bulgaria and we spent an hour on the border as our bus got x-rayed and all our bags were searched by Turkish customs official. I don't know why they were searching everything when we were leaving the country. I think they were just bored on the night shift and wanted to use some new gadgets. The bus was almost empty and i copied what some other people were doing and slept by stretching my body across four seats. My head at one side of the bus, my feet at the other with my legs suspended, crossing the aisle.
I arrived in Sofia at 5.30 in the morning and got on a tram to take me to a hostel. There was nowhere to buy a ticket and nobody checked if i had one. Free transport. I only stayed in Sofia for one night but had a decent time seeing the old neglected buildings next to the new European money and the cobbled, compact, dinky sized city centre still seemed to be partly trapped in a communist time warp, dragging itself towards the rest of the West.
The bus from Sofia to Budapest took all day. The drive out of the city centre revealed damp dank apartment blocks and gypsy squatter camps covered in mud and dirt. Rural Bulgaria didn't look much better as grey dark fields and dead grass greeted the road to the border with Serbia. I now have a Serbia stamp in my passport but i only got out of the bus and actually walked on the country twice and that was to have a piss and buy a Bounty. Serbia looked happy and Mediterranean compared to hardened Bulgaria with white and cream farmhouses and green fields and mountains. We crossed the Serbia-Hungary border at nightfall and arrived in the capital late at night.
I did my usual "walk, get lost, get drunk" routine which i seem to have done with alarming regularity on this trip and Budapest is a great place for those things as the city is packed full of streets that go nowhere, streets that go somewhere, old gothic buildings and plenty of bars. Like Sofia, it also has a great old communist era clanking grumbling tram system where nobody ever checks that you have a ticket and half the ticket machines are broken anyway. I love old knackered trams. I think every city would benefit from a clunking Russian built tram grinding around town full of fare dodgers and drunks. And drunk people love Budapest. I thought it may have been compulsory for people to have drink in their hand as every other person seemed to be drinking, buying or carrying some kind of alcohol. Other signs that i was firmly back in Europe were the large amount of homeless people, buskers playing violins and graffiti.
I saw lots of Budapest including some great markets and the modern art gallery but the cold damp weather meant that i spent my last day there in a bar with and couple from New Zealand watching football and rugby. Then i got the 14 hour overnight bus that passed through Slovakia and pulled into Prague in the early morning. We ploughed through thick fog and crossed the Czech-German border at sunrise which revealed a landscape of green rolling hills, farms and massive wind turbines. After brief stops in Dresden and Leipzig the journey eventually ended in the capital yesterday lunchtime.
I've only been here for one day but i already love Berlin. I have never experienced a city that has so much personality and immediacy. Graffiti is on every building. That's not an exaggeration. Every building has a signature of some kind. Half the population seem to ride bicycles. It oozes attitude. This is where the country's leader is a woman and the Mayor is a gay man. This a place that has the highest per capita cocaine and ecstasy users in Europe. This is where the past collides with the future. This is where you would not be surprised if a revolution was around the corner. This is where anything can start and nothing seems to stop. This is more a social experiment than a city. This is Berlin.
But nothing lasts forever so i'll be leaving on Friday for Denmark but i don't know what i'll be doing between now and then. But this is Berlin. You're not really supposed to know what you're doing between now and then.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Istanbul
It's official. I'm in Europe. Somehow and for some reason i've made it across Turkey in a week and ready to move further west and north.
I was in Diyarbakir which was a Kurdish city in Turkey where people would happily try and teach you some Kurdish words and has been home to many demonstrations and problems in the past between Kurdish movements and Turkish law enforcement. There were armed police in the streets and at the bus station making their presence felt but everybody seemed happy enough. The back streets of Diyarbakir old town were a knot of alleyways with kids playing on cold stone cobbles amongst the litter and women barking down to the children below from balconies as the sun crept between buildings and the call to prayer rang out from the mosques. Nobody paid me any attention at all as i sauntered around taking pictures.
I stayed in what i thought was a cheap hotel and i guess it was but it was also a kind of brothel. Three fat ugly women would loll around on a sofa in the cramped corridor waiting, smoking cigarettes and sipping tea all day until an old man would come in and they'd disappear to a room for while. Thankfully they never bothered me but the whole place had no windows and was painted bright green and pink in a way that gave you a headache if you stayed inside too long.
There were always two sides to Diyarbakir. The main streets were modern and clean full of shops and restaurants, the back streets were cramped messy and noisy. The old city was encased in walls and buildings that were centuries old as the new city sprawled outwards in dull apartment blocks. But then i've realised that most of Turkey seems this way - always pulling in different directions. Black Sea versus Mediterranean. Street side kebabs versus upmarket restaurants. Mosques cry out with the call to prayer five times a day versus bars and nightclubs pumping out beer and beats all weekend. Western cities versus Middle Eastern villages. Five star hotels versus green and pink brothels. Europe versus Asia. Summer beaches versus winter skiing. Sand deserts versus green farms. Ancient history versus an uncertain future. Every country has it's contrasts but Turkey seems to take it to another level. And then there's Istanbul.
Guess what? There are two sides to Istanbul. On one side sits Asian Istanbul and the other side of the river sits European Istanbul. The bus from Diyarbakir (a 22 hour over-night bum numbing journey) crossed from the blue skies of Asia over a large suspension bridge. A few hundred metres into European Istanbul and the skies darkened, the clouds thickened and it started hammering down with rain. "Europe in November," i thought, "It's been a while. I remember this."
Istanbul is one of those cities that draws you in with its physical size, depth of history and breadth of potential and quickly breaks down every preconception you had about the place and then rebuilds that image just as fast and spits you out the other side knowing that you won't look at things in quite the same way again. It is head spinning. Istanbul, along with the rest of Turkey, is way more European than i thought it would be, both the people, the buildings and the culture. The history of the place shouts at you through the massive mosques and the Grand Bazzar but the future burns bright as well with women matching Adidas with head scarves and the trams, boats and metro buzzing people through the chaotic traffic. I could stay here for a long time and it would still feel fresh and new. If you get bored in Istanbul you're probably dead.
I really wanted to experience two main things from Turkey; a football game (ticked that one in Trabzon) and a bath. I went to a Turkish bath with Zaka, a German guy who, by coincidence, lives not far from where i grew up in my home city in Leeds, and Ali, the owner of the guesthouse i'm staying in. The Turkish bath was a round marble room with a large slab in the middle, sinks and taps on the walls and steam drifting everywhere. The full Turkish bath experience, so Ali told me, consisted of sitting in a sauna and sweating for as long as you can and then a large hairy man about the sıze of a telephone box scrubs you with a rough cloth. I was embarrassed by the amount of dead skin that came off me. I can only guess at how much crap came of my back after carrying my life on it for a few months. Then i laid down on the huge marbel slab in the middle of the place and was "massaged" by the same guy. He kneaded my aching muscles in a way that made me yelp in a similar way to that of a small girl finding a spider. At one point i was laying on my back and the telephone box man was squeezing my arm as if he were trying to strangle a snake. "Me...Muhammed," he said and then he gestured at me.
"Erm...Dave."
"Italia?" He took both my arms crossed them over my chest and put all his weight on my elbows, slowly pushing my arms in opposite directions.
"No, Englaahhhhhnd!"
"Football?"
"Leeds United. You?" He took my left arm, tried to pull the hand off my wrist and then proceeded to try and pull each finger from my hand. His eyes grew wider for a second and he drew his head a little closer to mine and with a big grin said,
"GA-LA-TA-SA-RY."
"Hmmm."
Once the massage/kneading was finished Muhammed was kind enough to wash my body and head, rinse me and send me back to the sauna after which he wrapped me in three towels and then served me tea on some sofas. My body felt elastic and the cleanest and squeakiest it has ever been.
Unfortunately i won't be going back because i'm leaving on a bus tomorrow night to Bulgaria and then onto Hungary. I'm city-hopping and friend-meeting almost all my way back to England. It's almost finished. Only one more month.
I was in Diyarbakir which was a Kurdish city in Turkey where people would happily try and teach you some Kurdish words and has been home to many demonstrations and problems in the past between Kurdish movements and Turkish law enforcement. There were armed police in the streets and at the bus station making their presence felt but everybody seemed happy enough. The back streets of Diyarbakir old town were a knot of alleyways with kids playing on cold stone cobbles amongst the litter and women barking down to the children below from balconies as the sun crept between buildings and the call to prayer rang out from the mosques. Nobody paid me any attention at all as i sauntered around taking pictures.
I stayed in what i thought was a cheap hotel and i guess it was but it was also a kind of brothel. Three fat ugly women would loll around on a sofa in the cramped corridor waiting, smoking cigarettes and sipping tea all day until an old man would come in and they'd disappear to a room for while. Thankfully they never bothered me but the whole place had no windows and was painted bright green and pink in a way that gave you a headache if you stayed inside too long.
There were always two sides to Diyarbakir. The main streets were modern and clean full of shops and restaurants, the back streets were cramped messy and noisy. The old city was encased in walls and buildings that were centuries old as the new city sprawled outwards in dull apartment blocks. But then i've realised that most of Turkey seems this way - always pulling in different directions. Black Sea versus Mediterranean. Street side kebabs versus upmarket restaurants. Mosques cry out with the call to prayer five times a day versus bars and nightclubs pumping out beer and beats all weekend. Western cities versus Middle Eastern villages. Five star hotels versus green and pink brothels. Europe versus Asia. Summer beaches versus winter skiing. Sand deserts versus green farms. Ancient history versus an uncertain future. Every country has it's contrasts but Turkey seems to take it to another level. And then there's Istanbul.
Guess what? There are two sides to Istanbul. On one side sits Asian Istanbul and the other side of the river sits European Istanbul. The bus from Diyarbakir (a 22 hour over-night bum numbing journey) crossed from the blue skies of Asia over a large suspension bridge. A few hundred metres into European Istanbul and the skies darkened, the clouds thickened and it started hammering down with rain. "Europe in November," i thought, "It's been a while. I remember this."
Istanbul is one of those cities that draws you in with its physical size, depth of history and breadth of potential and quickly breaks down every preconception you had about the place and then rebuilds that image just as fast and spits you out the other side knowing that you won't look at things in quite the same way again. It is head spinning. Istanbul, along with the rest of Turkey, is way more European than i thought it would be, both the people, the buildings and the culture. The history of the place shouts at you through the massive mosques and the Grand Bazzar but the future burns bright as well with women matching Adidas with head scarves and the trams, boats and metro buzzing people through the chaotic traffic. I could stay here for a long time and it would still feel fresh and new. If you get bored in Istanbul you're probably dead.
I really wanted to experience two main things from Turkey; a football game (ticked that one in Trabzon) and a bath. I went to a Turkish bath with Zaka, a German guy who, by coincidence, lives not far from where i grew up in my home city in Leeds, and Ali, the owner of the guesthouse i'm staying in. The Turkish bath was a round marble room with a large slab in the middle, sinks and taps on the walls and steam drifting everywhere. The full Turkish bath experience, so Ali told me, consisted of sitting in a sauna and sweating for as long as you can and then a large hairy man about the sıze of a telephone box scrubs you with a rough cloth. I was embarrassed by the amount of dead skin that came off me. I can only guess at how much crap came of my back after carrying my life on it for a few months. Then i laid down on the huge marbel slab in the middle of the place and was "massaged" by the same guy. He kneaded my aching muscles in a way that made me yelp in a similar way to that of a small girl finding a spider. At one point i was laying on my back and the telephone box man was squeezing my arm as if he were trying to strangle a snake. "Me...Muhammed," he said and then he gestured at me.
"Erm...Dave."
"Italia?" He took both my arms crossed them over my chest and put all his weight on my elbows, slowly pushing my arms in opposite directions.
"No, Englaahhhhhnd!"
"Football?"
"Leeds United. You?" He took my left arm, tried to pull the hand off my wrist and then proceeded to try and pull each finger from my hand. His eyes grew wider for a second and he drew his head a little closer to mine and with a big grin said,
"GA-LA-TA-SA-RY."
"Hmmm."
Once the massage/kneading was finished Muhammed was kind enough to wash my body and head, rinse me and send me back to the sauna after which he wrapped me in three towels and then served me tea on some sofas. My body felt elastic and the cleanest and squeakiest it has ever been.
Unfortunately i won't be going back because i'm leaving on a bus tomorrow night to Bulgaria and then onto Hungary. I'm city-hopping and friend-meeting almost all my way back to England. It's almost finished. Only one more month.
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