Better Late Than Never

Tuesday the 19th -> Monday the 25th of August, 2008 – Barcelona is a party town with little regret.

2008-09-08T15:32:00.003+01:00

Our time spent in Barcelona was surely the most relaxing of our entire trip.

Picture unabashed sleep-ins, a lot cheap sangria and supermarket-bought tortilla, going out ‘on the town’, taking advantage of the free internets at our lovely hostel, meeting people, getting drunk at the zoo, and days literally spent wandering aimlessly and unguided around the streets of the city.

Because of this, I’m going to do a wrap-up of our time in Barcelona in just one blog post.

A skeptic could say that I found the city to be worth so little that I could wrap up the place in its entirety in just the one post (and I dedicated a whole post just to traveling there! Sucks to be you, Barcelona, you douche!).

This, however, would not be true. I loved that city.

The real truth is that (a) I am writing this almost three weeks into the future,
(b) I have very little motivation to account for every day, but mostly because
(c) there were a lot of really great, incidental happenings that aren’t worth writing lengthy prose about.

You know the saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words”? Well, I have one hundred and one great photos from our stay in Barcelona already uploaded to my beloved Flickr photostream. Many of them with highly amusing titles, fabulous captions and witty retorts.

If you honestly expected me to write up my Barcelona trip in full, it would work out as something like this:
111 photos x 1000 words = 111, 000 words.

Fuck you for expecting me to write you 111, 000 words on Barcelona.
Who do you think I am - George Orwell?

Actually, now I don’t even want to write any more on the subject.
For you see, here in the future, I am sitting on my bed back in London, nursing a spot of the flu that I seemed to have picked up somewhere, self-medicating with coffee and biscuits I brought back from the Haage, and I honestly just can’t be bothered.

That being said, please check out my completely awesome photos from our great time spent in Barcelona. You’ll love it.

Monday the 18th of August, 2008 - Everyone is a douchebag but me.

2008-08-24T11:35:00.002+01:00

Instead of describing the next 24 hours of our trip in lucrative detail, I will simply ctrl+c//ctrl+v what I wrote in a Facebook message to my friend back home:

"Travels are going awesome. The best times are when stuff happens that throws you off course (Emm and Josh don´t agree with me on this though). For example, we just arrived in Barcelona 26 hours after we´d originally planned to get here,due to the train we´d wanted to take being fully booked. We´d just trained from a music festival in rural Belgium to Paris, then taken an overnight train to a little French town on the border of Spain,where they speak Spanish (Emma is awesome at Spanish, by the way).

So anyway, the train we want is booked up, so we have to wait 7 hours (it´ś 6am by this point) ´til the next one. We haven´t showered in 5 days, so we try find a cheap hotel room to hang out in and do our washing.

Eventually we get on the train to Madrid, which we arrive at at half-past midnight. The station is closed so we hail a taxi and drag along our backpacks and camping crap to this famous all-night chocolate bar, where they make the most amazing thick, thick, thick hot chocolate and churros (long, deep-fried Spanish pastry-doughnuts). We hang out there until 3am when we can take no more.

Then we slept outside the train station for a few hours, then inside the station when it opened at 5am,then on the train to Barcelona when it finally boarded.

ADVENTURES!"

Please visit my siblings´ excellent blogs here and here if you want any semblance of explanation on the subject.

Sunday the 17th of August, 2008 - We say goodbye to Belgium.

2008-08-24T11:15:00.002+01:00

By the time we leave the Pukkelpop campsite, it resembles a cross between a toxic waste dump and a warzone. The latter even more so because some kids eerily close to our tents decided to light a leftover camping chair on fire.

Eventually we got all bags packed up and tents dismantled. As many of you know, I hit festivals with my trademark cow-print tent. The Cow (as it was originally known) housed Sam and I during Pukkelpop ´06. Then it was washed away during Novak´s Roskilde experience of ´07. So then I got another - The Cow Mach 2 - which took me to Latitude ´07 and now, Pukkelpop ´08. Everyone loves The Cow. It´s known far and wide.

Unfortunately, Someone fell onto my tent on the first night of this festival and broke one of the tent poles. It was fixable with Emma´s crazily strong medical tape (that she "borrowed" from the hospital) but I decided to leave it because it didn´t make sense to lug it all around Spain and Holland with me for a month, and it was going to be a lot more expensive to mail it back to London than to just buy a new one.

So...onwards to The Cow Mach 3!

We said our goodbyes as the tears freely flowed.

It was amazing that was once a lush, green expanse of field when we arrived, was now little more than a rubbish tip; balding from too much foot traffic, more mud than grass. It was hilariously sad.

We stopped for some food to escape the hoards of partyed out festival goers and eventually got on a train back to Brussels.

I made a new friend on the train.

We had to wait until near-midnight to catch our overnight train, so we occupied our time at the train station by eating ten times our body weight in Belgian chocolate.

We eventually caught the overnight train to tiny French town on the border of Spain.

It was nice to sleep on a surface that wasn´t barely covering lumps of grass, rock and dirt.

z z z

Saturday the 16th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #3, where we finally brave the Main Stage

2008-08-23T16:20:00.005+01:00

One of the reasons why Pukkelpop is great - and I had completely forgotten this after my first time there - is that for the most part, everyone is very attractive. It´s those Flemmish. They are a beautiful people. I don´t just mean ´beautiful´ in the internal goodness way (which, incidentally, they also are) but in the superficial, outwards way. It´s all deep blue eyes, straight hair and angular faces.
This could all be wrapped up in my [not so] current obsession with beautiful Scandinavians.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the younger people of this place have chosen to stick two fingers to this win in the genetic lottery by perforating various areas of their faces with pieces of metal, shaving off random bits of their hair and then dyeing what´s left in a variety of mis-matched colours.

This isn´t a prelude to some story about my meeting a charming Norwegian boy in the crowd at Sigur Ros, falling in love and running away together to run a beet farm.
I didn´t meet anyone like that.
I just thought you should just how attractive everyone was.

So anyway.

Band #15 - Pivot - Caught exactly one of theirs before we headed off to get a good spot for the Black Kids. I really liked it. Bam bam thrash thrash. I lamented that I couldn´t have stayed for longer. Isn´t it funny how sometimes you only make an effort to see a band from your home country when you are in an entirely different country?

Band #16 - Black Kids - I´m going to complain again about the Marquee stage. If the Marquee stage was an amorous puppy, I would tap it on the snout with my rolled up newspaper, using my stern voice to say "no" repeatedly until it got the point. This stage never got the point. The sound was still pretty lame-o. The Black Kids were pretty good. Not dazzling, but good. They played their songs well and wooed the enthusiastic crowd in all the right ways. Emm and I did some awesome synchronized hand-dancing towards the end.

We were supposed to see Late Of The Pier but couldn't be bothered walking across the festival grounds to the stage they were playing. Neither could we be bothered staying exactly where we were to watch The National. Instead we walked a short distance and ate a lot of Ben & Jerrys.

Then we did one of the coolest things we did during our time at the festival: we stopped in at the 1 Euro Museum to check out the painted boards that artists and festival goers had been doing and displaying over the past couple of days. It turned out anyone could paint a board, so Josh, Emm and I grabbed a space as quick as we could and spray/painted away.

Our ´theme´ was to depict ourselves all together again, holding hands.
Aww.
I think it turned out ok. It made me think how much I should get off my behind and start experimenting with painting when I get back home to London. Surely it couldn´t hurt the portfolio I´m supposed to be putting together.

Band #17 - Yeasayer - I think we were all expecting a little more from their live performance. Again, don´t get me wrong - they were quite good - but we really love their recorded stuff and were anticipating an experience like what we got with The Dodos ("again with the frikking Dodos, geez why don´t you guys like get a room or something"). I did like the intensity of the lead singer though: lots of facial scrunching and hand-wringing.

Band #18 - MGMT - We couldn´t even get into that damn Marquee tent because people were spilling out it it from all corners in an attempt to hear the one song they knew from the ´band of the moment´. Puh! I knew at least three songs. I heard two of them, then left. Yes folks, I really am a douchebag musical tourist just like everyone else.

Band #19 - Bloc Party - We had managed to avoid the Main stage up until now but knew that we would have to concede to it´s harrowing crowds and poorly placed stage set-up if we wanted to see Bloc Party and Sigur Ros. I´m not kidding about the poor stage setup - it was the worst I´d ever seen...ever. Ever ever. Ever ever ever. Get this: on both sides of the stage (you know, where they usually place the camera men and main front speakers), there were huge blocks of stage sticking out, making visibility impossible unless you were directly in front of the band. In other words, from our typical position on the barrier towards the side of the stage, we could see nothing. Nada. Occasionally the head of a band member. It was pretty lame-o. So we watched the band on the screen above us instead, with our heads actually turned away from the band. Pretty ridiculous. If I hadn´t really wanted to ´see´ Sigur Ros perform, I probably would have left.

Grumble grumble grumble.

Oh, and Bloc Party did play a good set, by the way. But you already knew that.

Band #20 - Sigur Ros - Of course they were good. Obviously they were beautiful and amazing and soul-crushing and heart-uplifting and everything you´d always wanted them to be; and in the moment of the last song where they filled the air with white paper confetti, it was like getting a day pass into Puppy Heaven to be reunited with the childhood dog that was your first real best friend and died one day when someone left the front door open, and he ran out into the street and he got hit by a minivan.

Band #21 - M83 - We ran across the festival to catch the very last bit of his set. I love this band so much and have wanted to see them for years and years but have always missed them when they played London. So we hurried towards the Chateau stage and as we did, the bars of ´Don´t Save Us From The Flames´ - one of my favourite songs of all time - was wafting through the air, and we bolted it into the tent. Danced. Amazing. AMAZING. Jesus, this band is so very, very good.

Band #22 - Crystal Castles - They were equally as phenominal. My siblings had left for bed, so I stayed to see them with Anthony and Clinton, Perth boys that we met at the festival. It was too dark and crowded to see anything but again I indulged in one of those Dyonisian trances that you can only really do right when you have some fantastic thrashy electro to guide you. It was the perfect band to finish my festival with.

Considered staying up to do the last-night party thing for about five minutes before realising just how used up my body was. I made my way back to our tent, explored the outer reaches of the whole campsite for a while with Emm, then retreated to my own sleeping bag for my last night of sleeping on a flimsy blue mat.

Friday the 15th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #2 and we spend all day at the Chateau stage.

2008-08-22T11:50:00.002+01:00

We awake feeling a whole lot better than the previous morning.

The greatest part was that Emm and Josh experienced their first case of festival temperature hell: going to sleep bundled up in all the clothes and blankets you own to stave off the shivering cold...only to wake up in a sauna of a tent, ripping off items of clothing in a fury as you grapple for the tent zipper so that you can suck in air and relieve yourself from the sweaty hades you´ve gotten yourself into.

It´s always very amusing watching from the outside as tent flaps hurridly open and heads pop out, mouths agape like fish sucking for air.

Band #9 - The Dodos - I cannot express just how great this band was. It was like seeing a baby giraffe walk for the first time: you´re pretty sure you´re never going to see such an endearingly grand performance from such a young creature. The Dodos are young and amazing. Rocking out with multiple percussion, disjointed lyrics, sweetly-sung vocals and acoustic guitars. Marry me.

Oh, and just to improve upon my point about how great their set was - the audience gave them multiple standing ovations. They just would not stop clapping. The band was taking apart their gear and for 10 minutes, the crowd was still there, clappign and cheering. They didn´t know what to do with themselves but smile shyly as the applause went on and on. In my 9 years of seeing bands, I have never, ever seen that happen. Especially not to the first band on stage.

Then we got some more kriek beer. Because by this point, we are all pretty obsessed with kriek beer. We kept taking turns to cart trayfuls back from the special beers tent while we were waiting for bands.

Band #10 - Caribou - I love Caribou. The first time I saw them, they were so-so (owing to a pretty crappy sound job at the venue). The next time, they were staggeringly good. This time even more so. I was in a Dyonisian trance; rapping my hands against the barrier, head nodding to-and-fro.
Oh, and I can never get over how one of the guitarists looks identical to a boy I used to have a thing with.

Band #11 - Los Campesinos! - Michael was pretty excited about this new favourite band of his. He´d seen them a few times before, so had I. My opinion was that it was pretty much the same as the other times. I mean yeah, they´re obviously fun and all but...y´know. They are no Dodos.

We were pretty much waiting at the Chateau stage the whole time because that´s where pretty much all of the bands we wanted to see that day were playing.

I made a mask out of a cardboard beer carrier and we took some photos with our new Dutch friends.

I am a creative genius.

Band #12 - Tunng - Emm was pretty excited about seeing Tunng again. We´s seen them just a few days before at Field Day. They were beautiful, of course, and this time we didn´t get rained on. I loved hearing Jenny Again, again. It´s definitely a new favourite.

We did some productive chilling out before braving the Chateau tent again.

Band #13 - Alphabeat - Nothing could have prepared us for this. The plan was to turn up half an hour before they played and watch their set to secure a good spot for Tokyo Police Club (who, incidentally, were my most-needed-to-see band of the festival). How could a plan go so terribly wrong? The tent was packed already when we got there. I´ve never seen so many fifteeen year-olds in my life. We were very quicky packed like sardines. It was like being magically transported back in time to an all-ages festival. They scared me. Teenagers scare me. I´m not ashamed to admit this. I find their youthful vigure and enthusiasm for life (and the magical natural energy they seem to posses without the aid of a good ol´ fashioned cup of coffee) unnerving. Alphabeat encapsulated all of this in their cloyingly energy-riffic power pop. Jesus.

Band #14 - Tokyo Police Club - Obviously these guys were going to be good for me. They thudered out song after song. A lot from the new album (which dissapointingly, I hadn´t heard much of before) but also a lot from the previous one. Oh, and they were so nice too! Doing that whole ´aw thanks you guys, we don´t deserve all this´ that we seem to lap up even though it´s been done on us a million times before. The highlight for me was their encore - ´Cheer It On´ - my rock-out song of the year. I bumped into Mark and his friend Tim before the set and it was unfortunate that the latter stood behind me because I pretty much head-banged the crap out of that song, and I was totally hitting him in the neck or lower face with my ponytail. Oh, the spendor of being young and alive.

The Sydney guys stopped by our tent before they had to catch the last shuttle bus, but the three of us were being totally un-fun and already in our pyjamas, and Michael had been passed out in his tent for quite some time already. So we decided to keep being un-fun and just go to sleep.

Thursday the 14th of August, 2008 - Pukkelpop Day #1 and everyone is hungover.

2008-08-21T18:03:00.003+01:00

We all wake up on the first morning of Pukkelpop with a WHY-GOD-WHY mentality; mouths dry as sandpaper and heads booming like powerful bells. Hurray for us.

We say hello to our neighbours, swig some multi-vit juice from its bottle and brave the huge, crushing line to get into the festival. It´s hot and we are all feeling rather trashy. We grab some food tickets (bonnen) and drink tickets (drankenbon) and spend them on large Boston-style slices of mushroom pizza and about a gazillion cups of coke.

I forgot that they don´t serve redbull at this festival.
All they have is Coke. Oh, and Coke Lite. And Coke Zero.
The bastards.

Oh, by the way - in order to make this as painless as possible, I will just be summarizing my reviews of band sets. Ok, here we go.

Band #1 - Kaizers Orchestra - A strange Flemmish band. Watched them from outside the Marquee tent. Orchestra meets hard rock, maybe.

Then we had Flugel.

Band #2 - The Pigeon Detectives - from outside the Marquee stage, the White Lies sounded pretty awful and generic Brit-rock.

Band #3 - The Cribs - I liked ´Hey Scenesters´ and the last song of the set (which was pretty much post-rock played over a video/sound recording of a spoken word artist) but otherwise, it was pretty unimpressive. Also, the sound of the Marquee stage was fucking awful. Seriously, the bass was SO LOUD the whole time any band was in there. You couldn´t stand to be in front of any of the side speakers.

Much more exciting was the poffertjes we ate.

We also napped in the sun. We were still feeling a little seedy...

So we drank more beer. Because kriek makes all pain go away.

Band #4 - British Sea Power - Weeee! So good. Charismatic and musically on-form. They were, for many people, the highlight of the festival.

Band #5 - Henry Rollins (spoken word) - Ok, so I´ve been wanting to see Henry´s spoken word show for years. He is just...amazing. He didn´t stop for two hours. He just talked and talked. He is one of the most intelligent, well-read, widely-travelled, well-informed (in an autodidact kind of way), witty, angry and kind individuals I´ve ever have the pleasure of being in the presence of. Let´s face it, people; the man should be an elected official.

Band #6 - Mercury Rev - Middle-aged hippies making wonderful music while set in front of a screen with token 60s-esque psychedelic visuals (think babies crawling on globes, tie-dye and dolphins diving through solar systems). The lead singer is a little funny looking, which just makes them even better. I never did hear "Nite and Fog" though.

Band #7 - Flaming Lips - Well obviously they were going to be good. Wayne was out on stage the full hour before the set that it took to set up, obviously micromanaging the theatric displays to come. He did the ball thing...

...and they opened with ´Race For The Prize´(arguably the best song to open with - they pulled the same trick the first time I saw them, at Big Day Out ´05). And the rest of the set was great. Streamers filling the air, the works.

We were sated. We could have left the festival right them. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma´am. But we went to check out...

Band #8 - Holy Fuck - Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaah. Yeah. Yeah. What else is there to say? How can you go wrong with a set of good, trashy electro?

Then sleep.
z z z

Wednesday the 13th of August, 2008 – Arriving at Pukkelpop.

2008-08-21T17:54:00.002+01:00

Anticipating five days without a shower,we spent the morning before we left Brussels scouring our bodies, and washing and styling our hair.
Effort was also put into taking off our bed sheets and bundling them against the wall to hide they all had smudgy black stains that wouldn´t come off with scrubbing (on account of having drawn all over each other´s arms in sharpie before we went to bed the night before.

We had a hearty breakfast of whatever we had left at the hostel – including our deliciously inappropriate ´chocolate brownie´ breakfast cereal – and checked out of the hostel. We´d been checking the weather forecasts for Kieweit-Hassalt (where the festival is located) all week and it looked pretty dire. Rain, rain, rain, it predicted. We had no choice but to believe: as we walked to catch our regional train from the nearby station, the rain drizzled down on us and the wind through us about like marionettes.

The train itself was crammed with festival goers like it was an analogy for a can of tuna. Except it was tuna with luggage. And beer. And boom boxes. Some tuna were shirtless. Most tuna was between the ages of 15 and 22. There was nowhere to sit and some of the tuna was rather smelly, so we perched on the arms of chairs, in the aisles.

I anticipated it taking us an hour between swapping our e-tickets for festival wristbands and getting into the camp site (after all, I done it before – as I loved repeating whenever I could with a rather pretentious air, not forgetting to add how many Australians there were and how ¨when I was here TWO YEARS AGO, there was hardly anyone from English-speaking countries, no siree...¨).

It took just over two hours and it only rained slightly once. We managed to find a camp spot for the three tents (Emm and Josh in one, me in another, and a space for Michael-Masterplan, who was joining us later) just before it started raining a fucking gale. I dashed into my tent as girlish screams were heard all around us, and panicked slightly as the tent was blown about and strained against its newly-planted pegs. Then the sun came out, the rain vanquished and loud cheers echoed rose through the camp site. It rained once more that day – thundered down, actually – then didn´t rain again until we had packed up to go at the very end of the festival. It missed all three days of music.

It was a Christmas Miracle.

Another delightful thing to transpire was that another event that was supposed to happen that could have made the festival uncomfortable – namely my, er, ´womanly season´- held out until after we were out of Belgium. DOUBLE POINT SCORE!

Then:
- we made friends with our teenage neighbours from Gent,
- we went walking to find a store with supplies,
- we had dinner at one of the many temporary roadside ´cafes´ that the local residents had set up outside their houses,
- I took a lovely photograph of a rainbow,
- we bought some kriek, redbull and bottle of Jager,
- Michael arrived and set up his tent with us,
- we drank the kriek, then jager-redbulls,
- then met up with the Sydney boys from the hostel
- and drank some beers with them at the roadside cafe,
- then went back to our tent,
- where by that point, it was pretty much just swigging straight jager,
- which was evidently too much for me, so
- Michael and a random Belgian helped me back to our camp site, tripping on gy-ropes and dropping me a few times on random tents along the way.

Ba-bow.

Then sleep.

Tuesday the 12th of August, 2008 – Brugges is picturesque but overcrowded with tourists.

2008-08-21T17:42:00.004+01:00

We left our hostel not that bright and early to take the train to Brugges. It didn´t take very long. I kind of wished that I seen the film In Bruges before I went, though that didn´t seem to matter much when I got there: apparently locals hate tourists coming into their town and talking about the movie.

I would have feared for my life had I stepped onto one of their bike baths – which incidentally are much wider than their pedestrian pavements – only to have gotten hit after hit by a deadly tirade of provincial bicycles.

Ding! Ding! Ding! would ring their bloodthirsty war cry.

Bruges is very pretty but the amount of tourists makes it practically unbearable, and it is for this reason that we didn´t stay long.

What we did do, however, was this:

- looked into the shop fronts of over-priced tourist trap chocolate and candy stores.

- bought and ate a bag of coffee bean-speckled white chocolate buttons for – wait for it – 1 euro. WIN.

- bought and drank a bottle of chocolate beer, bought from the same Chocolate café (getting the bottle open was another story...).

- visited the Friets Museum (this was pretty exciting as an idea but in practise, it was mainly just a lot of rooms of information about potatoes and only one room about chips....so in the guestbook by the door, I left a message that said ¨If I wanted to learn that much about potatoes, I would have gone to the Potato Museum¨).

- How´s them apples?

(PS- upon finding out that most chips are made in animal fat at any particular stage, I decided to quite chips. Like, for the forseeable future. No biggie. Plus, it´s probably a good move, health-wise. I grow unnervingly rounder and/or flabbier by the day.)

We had dinner at the hostel and talked a little with the three boys from Sydney who we´d kept bumping into during our stay (and who were also going to Pukkelpop but staying in a hostel instead of camping at the festival.

Oh, the highlight of our evening was when we bought every brand of kriek beer from the store in order to conduct a highly scientific taste ratings test. This is how they fared:

#1 Lindemans – Very smooth with a vivid cherry taste. At just 2.5% alcohol, it is the perfect drink for a lazy summers´ afternoon , providing you don´t want to fall asleep in the sun after a few glasses. Extra points for only being served in small bottles. Classy.

#2 Mort Subite Extreme – The ´extreme´ stands for extra fruity flavour. Apparently. Similar to Lindemans in taste but it has a cheaper feel to it, a bit more soda-like. Alcohol content is 4.5% and you can buy it in a can or a small bottle. This is the beer that I fell in love with after sampling it at Pukkelpop 2006.

#3 St Louis - Couldn´t quite put our finger on the taste of this. Sort of like Red Bull or some other energy drink. It pretty much just tastes like a can of soda, It only comes served in Red Bull-shaped cans too...hence, soda. Nothing special.

#4 Timmś Light - This tastes exactly like Dr Pepper. The others rated it higher than the diet kriek in their taste test but I can´t stand Dr Pepper, so here it sits at fourth place for me.

#5 Bellvue – This is the stuff they pass off for authentic kreik at the Belgium Beer Café in Perth. Boo! This just tastes like beer. Beer...possibly with some glazed cherries thrown in. Not worth the inflated import price.

#6 Mort Subite Kriek – Again, this just tastes like lager to me. This is probably what the original, authentic kriek is meant to taste like but fuck it – I´m a girl and they don´t call it a girl´s drink for nothing.

I would like to become a world authority on kriek pls. Employ me as a buyer for your tavern or international beer retailer. Pay me a salary and urge me to sample it all day long.

PS - I read Kafka´s Metamorphisis on the train there and wished to have a dialogue about it but nobody was interested. Uncultured swine. Though in all fairness, our attention was being wooed by chocolate and fries, so I forgive them.

Monday the 11th of August, 2008 – Brussels is still good but everything is closed on a Monday.

2008-08-21T17:36:00.003+01:00

The hostel that we´d been staying in since the night before went by the name of 2GO4 Quality Hostel.
Despite this, it was actually a pretty cool place. It seemed to be run by three Flemish brothers (the youngest, attractive and charmingly helpful; the middle one even more attractive but snooty; the oldest, a little creepy) and had a big common room with a kitchen, tables, couches and free internets.

We spent the day seeing all the things we had circled in a great ´insiders´ guide to Brussels for young travellers´. When we started the highlights-to-see process, we assumed that we would need two, if not three, days to explore the city. Unfortunately, most of the cool design-y shops and spaces seemed to have closed for August. Nuts to that.

At least it meant that we had finished,tourist-wise, with Brussels and so could make it to Bruges the next day.

We had dinner at a recommended restaurant in the gay district that supposedly ´the boys go to with their mothers before heading out for the night´. We shared an excellent warm goats cheese salad and I had a rather bland, dry mixed vegetable pasta
BUT it did have brussel sprouts in it,
So I can now say that I have sampled brussel sprouts grown and prepared in Brussels.
And that is awesome.

Sunday the 10th of August, 2008 – Brussels is our friend.

2008-08-20T12:37:00.003+01:00

Dear patron, prepare for a new direction for this here ´travel blog´!

I have declared the previous format of ¨and then we did this and then we did this¨ to be wildly uninteresting for both reader and writer, and so from now on it will be a little more ephemeral and snippet-based.

If you´d like to read about exactly what the three of us did each day, you can consult the blogs of my siblings, who write in such comprehensive detail that I can´t help but admire their commitment and consistency.

So, to Brussels.

Brussels is neat.
If I was a city, any city, I would be Brussels.

It is small, laid back and confusing. A constant contradiction unto itself (two official languages, mixed in with at least five others; beautiful architecture against horribly plain buildings). It´s inhabitants pride a strong sense of irony and favour the casual over the hipsters (their term for ´trendy´ is used a criticism). Everything is closed on Sundays, Mondays and during a segment of the afternoon, and noone seems to care. Everything is art-and-design-y, and there is a legacy of a comics culture that is literally painted onto its walls.

More than that, the locals always seem quite guarded and stand-off-ish at first but once you get into two minutes of approaching them, they turn out to be the loveliest, helpful people with a great sense of humor.

When we got here, in the evening, our eyes widened, glossed over with joy as we decided that we loved it so much that we may as well move here. I started scheming in my head about living costs and liabilities.

Also, there is wonderful beer, chocolate, waffles and fries. My thighs grow round already. Not cool. Actually,maybe I probably should not move to Brussels then. At least in London, the normality of everyone's´ eating disorders keeps you on your toes.

But oh! the Belgian chocolate is so good.
And I am completely infatuated by the trappist beer – particularly the kriek variety, which is brewed with cherries and traditionally drunk by girls. So, so tasty. My first experience with kriek was at my first Pukkelpop in 2006, when Sam, Shannan, Cam and I happened upon Mort Subite Kriek Extra in the ´special beers´ tent.

Since then, I couldn´t keep it out of my mind and was anticipating our reunion.
It did not disappoint.

Friday the 1st of August – Paris is done and I never did get my croissant.

2008-08-11T18:46:00.002+01:00

Josh, Emm and I:

- checked out of the hostel without any breakfast or coffee,with the intention of getting a croissant and coffee at a café at the train station,
-took bloody well ages waiting in a cue for train seats at the station,
- so then had to rush to check-in for my Eurostar back to London
- and said goodbye, sadly,
- and I never did get my croissant in Paris.

Who goes to Paris and doesn´t have a croissant?

I will be on my death bed as the reaper stands over me and cry Oh, remorse! For I have not truly lived!

But I digress.

I took the train back to London, on which I ate a rather disgusting melted cheese sandwich, dropped my backpack off in my room, had a shower and went to pick up my pal Stacey from her hostel by Russell Square.

This has been my blogging of Paris.

Wednesday the 30th of July, 2008 – Paris contains museums.

2008-08-11T18:42:00.002+01:00

We got up to leave early to beat the lines at the Musée d'Orsay (the other day had frightened us off). Emm and I had to change from our eight-bedder room to another, so we checked out at the desk and left our bags on Josh’s bed until we could check back in later that afternoon.
We got to the d’Orsay, sans lines. There was room upon room of art from all over, everything from the Impressionists to Post-Impressionists, the Classics to the Neo-Classics. We spent quite a while there.

Oh, there were also tourists taking photos of the paintings.
WHO TAKES PHOTOS OF PAINTINGS AT A MUSEUM?

I mean, because - y’know - why settle for a glossy reproduction in any number of art books when you can have your very own poor-quality, shadowed and improperly angled on your digital camera. Morons.

Anyway, I was taken back to my days of year 11 and 12 art history at school. Like Emma, I was trying to remember all the significance of each symbol and brushstroke, and why they shocked and astounded and seduced each particular society.

Lunch was at a cafe not far from the museum, with quiche for Emm and I (hurray for quiche!) and pasta for Josh. We all had salad.

Next was the Centre Pompidou, which I was obviously very excited about. I’ll say this now: I prefer the Tate Modern. How’s that for home-town spirit?

The building itself was fantastically whimsical – all exposed escalators and block-coloured pipes - and contained a great little product design orientated gift shop on the first floor, which we could have spent all day at. We went to check out the main exhibition ‘d'jour’; a large and winding existential/ teological exhibit focusing on the exploratory relationship of artists to the concept of God. It was called Traces de Sacre.

Ok, so it was good and all. But really...do you really need to rely on Damien Hirst that heavily? Oh and also, I didn’t think too highly of the curation – they seemed to want their patrons to follow a particular path through the works but it just didn’t work out. People were scattered all willy-nilly, confused and scared. It really took me back to my course unit on the Philosophy of Religion that I did back in uni. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, as I thought some of the commentary was quite theoretically advanced and therefore, inevitably confusing. And monotonous. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the exhibit over all, but I had my doubts.

Then the most amazing thing happened: we went for a picnic on the canal. Fabulous.

On the menu of items that we bought from the marche:

- a ring of soft goats’ cheese (Josh was getting annoyed at the length of time it took for Emm and - I to select a delicious cheese at the marche),
- a tin of sun-dried tomatoes,
- a tub of tabbouleh (yum yum),
- a bottle of Lychee liqueur, and
- a bottle of Sprite.

It was so lovely.

We ended up so exhausted by food, sun and good times that, after spending some time attempting to socialise with some stereotypically uncouth and uninteresting Australian tourists at the bar, we watched the entirity of Fight Club in the chill out room.

Then sleep.

Tuesday the 29th of July – Paris is hot.

2008-08-11T18:36:00.001+01:00

Woke up and went down to the complimentary breakfast. Pleasantly surprised by the continental ´buffet´ available and took advantage of all of it, ie. bowl of cornflakes, baguette with butter and two cups of coffee. We planned out the rest of our day, starting with taking the metro to Basilique de Sacre Cur. Which we then did, took photos, etc. etc. Discovered how fantastic ´jumping´ tourist shots really are. Decided that we would use them heavily from then on.

We were lining up to get tickets to climb up the tower and there was this group that consisted of 2 small children chaperoned by 3 old French ladies AND FOR THE LIFE OF THEM THEY COULD NOT WORK OUT THE TICKET MACHINE and we were all waiting there for a good 10 minutes and the line was building up. Eventually one of them jumped over the ticket gate – I kid you not. Old French granny yoofs they were. We made our ticket machine transaction in a flat-out 30 seconds, after which Josh beamed at the line behind us and led an impromptu applause.

As I climbed up the tower, I filmed the whole 9 and a half minute ordeal with the time-lapse function on my camera (which Josh just showed me existed -note that I will be obsessed with this for the near future).

We climbed down, etc etc.

We went to Montmartre, bypassing the Moulin Rouge and promptly declaring it to be too expensive. Then we sat in a café named after ‘Le Chat Noir' where the waiter wouldn’t serve us - so we promptly got up and left – heading straight into its neighbour: the Musée de l'Erotisme!

I would say that I´ve never seen so many penises, hoochies or boobies in the one place in my entire life but that would be a lie – not to forget that I inadvertently caught the London naked bike ride going down Oxford St last year. It was alright, except the main travelling exhibition was about contemporary Japanese art. It consisted of 80% art that contained some pretty graphic themes about violence against women – something I felt extremely torn about. My inner feminist was reeling. We finished touring the museum and left.

It was definitely worth it, if for nothing else than for our Gran ringing Emma’s mobile while we were watching a porno from the silent film era, and her explaining that we were in “er, a museum right now, can’t really talk, oh yes it’s very interesting...”

For lunch we picked up three different vege quiches (or tarts) from a patisserie and ate them on the steps of a church.

We walked to the Centre Pompidou but – alas! - it is closed on Tuesdays. The bastards.

Instead, we got some amazing gelato and walked to the Dorsay. Amazing gelato is as good as, if not better than, modern art. Actually, they were pieces of modern art in themselves: one flavour enclosing another to form a delicious, icy rose.

Then when we got to the Musée d'Orsay, there was an epic line. THE BASTARDS.
It was so humid too.
We then walked a million and one kilometres along the Champs-Élysées up to the some arch (for the record, the Arc de Triomphe). We were dehydrated and dire. Tensions were rising. We didn´t even talk to each other along the way. We were melting. The rubber melted off my sandals as I dodged tourists up that long road, leaving black tar in footprints on the Parisian sidewalk. Then the ground opened up and the metro sucked us in, and we retreated back to the hotel.

Cue shower and refreshment. Cue cider and internet on Ozzy (real name Ozymandias), Emm and Josh’s brilliantly tiny computer. I still find it weird to type on this thing.

Back in our room at the hostel, we realised that the funky smell coming from the bunk below Emma was some smelly cheese left out by some guy who was sleeping there. Some pretty smelly, blue cheese. Oh, it was awful. Our roommate Michelle put it by the window to get some air.

All a little tipsy from just one pint of cider – thanks for those genes, Mum and Dad – we walked at least one hour until we settled on some food at a misc. Asian restaurant. (please note that we stopped in, sat down at, and read the menu of three other restaurants before settling on that one). Travelling with a vegetarian must suck balls. Sorry you guys.

Having already had rose’ aperitifs at one of the attempted eateries, then more complimentary of the same at the Asian, we walked back along the canal feeling quite tipsy. The colourful lights hit back at us from the water. We checked out the hostel’s bar to see if there was anything happening, then settled on a midi of lager each and watching the last ten minutes of Fight Club in the ‘chill out room’ downstairs,

Then sleep.

Monday the 28th of July, 2008 - Gay Paris

2008-08-05T16:24:00.002+01:00

So I get to the Eurail station at St Pancras International, right? And I assume that I got there with plenty of time to check-in for my 11:05 train to Paris and I’m trying to walk through the automated ticket gate but it won’t let me, and I'm thinking “why is there always a problem with anything I do!”. So I go to the desk with the man and he informs me that this is July. I'm like “uhhh I know it's July...”.

Then he shows me my ticket.
My ticket for the 28^th at 11:05.
My ticket for the 28^th at 11:05 in August.

Ba-bow.

Cue shock! Cue horror! Cue cursing myself under my breath and dashing to the Eurail ticket office, where a lady very kindly booked me on the next train (12:30) for no extra charge (it could have been 300 pounds).

Honestly, I am such a douchebag sometimes.

The worst part is...this isn’t the first time this has happened for a Eurostar train (may I remind you of the London-to-Brussels-for-Pukkelpop fiasco of ´06? The one that Sam and I swore we never tell anyone about but then proceeded to tell everyone about).

But I catch my train and all is good. While travelling, I dog-ear pages and circle items in my Time Out ´best Paris listings´ guide (I always trust those folks at TO; hereby referred to as TO for the duration of this post).

I get into Paris Nord and Emm, Josh and I have our little excitable triplet reunion. It’s hot in Paris in the summertime – much, much hotter than London, even on its good days. I’m wearing jeans and I’m schvitzing as we walk the four kilometres to the Hostel, catching up along the way. We get there and it’s this delightfully huge modern monstrosity, one big hulking cube of trendy exposed wood panelling – our hostel St Christopher’s Inn (one of a chain) and the adjoining Holiday Inn Express. I was pretty impressed with it though: all very clean, all very new. No unavoidable and scary odours. No urchins loitering in the hallway. Just a lot of Australians and Americans.

Emm and I were booked into a 6 bed down the hall from Josh's 10 bed room. We threw our backpacks into the lockers under the bed, changed and head out. We walked along the canal that our hostel is banked on and it all was so lovely and Parisian. We tried to find a bar that TO recommended but after 40 minutes, found it and decided that it was too early. We walked for quite a way before settling on a random café nearby for three ice cafes and a slice of apple pie to share.

From there, we wandered past a bar called Cafe L´Absinthe and thought ¨awesome¨ obviously, and ordered three absinthe aperitifs. It was so charming and cool, so we stayed awhile to chat and get tipsy off just a shot of absinthe and sugar painstakingly diluted into the cool water.

After that we walked to Bastille, did the tourist thing, and decided that it was probably going to rain. Which it then did. A lot.

Oh, summer! Humid rain! How lovely you are!
We would have just walked through it but we wanted to go out later and would have had anything to dry us off, so we hid in doorways and under shopfront curtains along the length of entire length of street. It was great, actually. We laughed the whole way.

It eventually stopped raining and we found our destination: a hole-in-the-wall crepe restaurant that TO had recommended. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

So good. The sweet, middle-aged lady who served us was so delightful. We drank a litre of their specialty of dry cider from special cider bowls´ before and during our crepe feast. I had the gruyere, egg and mushrooms, Josh had goats’ cheese, and Emm had Camenbare and walnuts. Then, even though we were fully sated, we just had to share a crepe suzette doused in Ramble.

We decided that we go out to a bar another night – we were pretty beat – and took the Parisian Metro back to our Hostel. There were snorers in the room and various other noisemakers, but we slept fine.

And that was day one of Paris. Thank you.

We’re superconnected.

2008-07-28T09:02:00.001+01:00

Orrright, so in half an hour I’m going to leave for the train station.
So that I can meet my brother and sister.
In Paris.
France.

All I have left to do is post this, make my bed, ring some stupid courier company about a redelivery, dry and straighten my hair, and smear some makeup on my face.

I have this kick-ass motherfucker of a backpack (50L, yo) sitting on my floor, all ready to go.

Things I will miss over the next four days:
- my ukulele (I’ve been playing it for a while every day and even wrote some neat little songs on it),
- my little cousin Aiden (because he keeps getting better every day), and
- ~~our messy kitchen~~.

So long for now, Bethnal Green.

Learning how to make the most of your life after twenty-two years of being out of practice.

2008-07-27T19:49:00.002+01:00

I’m finally going to “go traveling”.

Honestly, I’ve been in London with my EU passport for over two years and I’ve only left the country three times – and only one of those was to go to Europe – and that was only for a few days for a music festival. (For the record, the other two trips were back and forth to Perth.)
Everyone else goes traveling all the time. All I’ve done since arriving here has been working, mostly full-time, and studying. And faffing around and being discontent about faffing around, doing nothing particularly life-affirming.

So it’s time, dammit.

So here is what of have of my schedule for the next couple of months:

July
23^rd – 26^th = Michael and Kate as house guests
28^th = Train to Paris
28^th – 31^st = Having good tourist times with Emm and Josh

August
1^st = Train back to London
1^st – 7^th = Being awesome with Stace as my guest roommate
8^th = Emm and Josh come back to London
9^th = Field Day (festival) with E+J, among others
10^th = Train with E+J to Brussels
10^th – 12^th = Being tourists with E+J in Brussels
13^th = Train to Pukkelpop (festival)
13^th – 16^th = Pukkelpop with Emm, Josh, Michael, Kate (I think?) and whoever
17^th = Leave Pukkelpop, cry, train to Barcelona
17^th - ?? = Barcelona, then various Spanish places

September
1^st – 5^th = Amsterdam with Stace and Basia
11^th – 15^th = Possibly End Of The Road (festival) - I hope.

Then back to London, where the next semester of my CSM graphic design course starts on the 30^th of September.

Awesome-o.