Italy: Accurately represented by violent cinema.

The mafia.

I can't say for certain that I was witness to mafia activity. I have no actual 'evidence' as they say. But you know; men, guns, Italy. You join the dots.

So we ended up in Venice. It had never been our intention to go to Italy. I had said the words: "I have no desire to go to Italy at all. It's strange. It does not interest me in any way". And so, while in Finland, we burned the Italy section of the Lonely Planet. And Portugal and Spain. Andorra, Germany, Belgium, Iceland, Austria. Gone. All part of Idiot Boy's grand plan to 'consolidate' our luggage down to a lunchbox. He says the Lonely Planet is significantly lighter now. I got to burn Switzerland myself though. I really hate that country.

We went to Italy because there was a cheap flight from Madrid to Milan and Milan is east of Madrid. And we stopped in Venice because Venice is east of Milan. And we stayed in Venice for 6 nights more than planned because we were living in a caravan park out past the airport and we discovered that you can quite easily live on pesto, gelato and women's multi vitamins.

We had been walking for hours one day and found a quiet part of the city. We found two health food shops and declared the area bohemian. It's quite a rare thing, in Venice, to find a part of the city away from the chaos of the pounding of tourist upon tourist, and we thought ourselves superior and fortunate.

We stopped to take a photo of this little piece of stencil art. Because we thought it was funny. Gun death, we laughed. Ha ha. Sometimes there's tempting fate, and then there is tempting fate.

"Our own little part of Venice", said Laurie looking out over the canal at the gently bobbing fishermen's boats. I nodded. Venice is nice.

We started towards this little narrow alley that had clothes strung between opposite windows. And I got to thinking about how it is that after hundreds and hundreds of years of stringing clothes between windows, nobody has thought there may be a more effective method of drying clothes. And how it is that noone seems to mind that the whole city can see your underwear. I've seen undies that could power yachts. And I saw one apartment which washed a load of pinks and whites twice within a week. What kind of freaks have that much pink that they need to do two loads a week? Who would do something like that?

It was because of this kind of profound thought that I didn't catch it when Laurie first said "That's a gun".

I continued walking down the little narrow alley.

"That's a gun", said Laurie again. But he says a lot of things. Sometimes I listen, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I hear other things. This particular time I heard 'that's a group', by which I assumed he meant a tour group and so I picked up the pace planning to get close to the group and listen in to the guide's talk and get information for free (score!).

"That's a gun", said Laurie.

And then I saw it. The man pointing some object at another man's head, that man opening his trench coat in an apparent gesture of innocence. And the man in a black beanie and sunglasses who was looking straight at us.

"Oh", said I. "A gun".

We tried to walk away at a pace that told the organised criminals, "Hey guys, we don't condone your activity, but we lack the linguistic skills and local 'know how'" to report it. We're nobody. We like your gelato". And then Laurie took of his jacket so that we could not be tracked down by the mob.

On the plus side, Italy had Lindt balls as big as my head!

You win some, you lose some. But with gigantic Lindt balls, everyone's a winner.

The route so far

OK. So the following posts are just going to be all over the place. That's how it is. Don't cry.

But so as to give you some illusion of continuity, this is how we have got ourselves to Daugavpils by a long and convoluted route. Here is a visual aid for your benefit:

Purple is for planes. Yellow is for boats. Green is for trains and buses. The giant red arrow indicates where we are now. Daugavpils. Because I know you really, really care.

So it was from Paris to Stockholm, Stockholm to Turku back to Stockholm, to Oslo, to Bergen, to Tornio (via Olso, Trondheim, Fauske, Narvik and Lulea), to Lapland, to Jyväskylä, to Vaasa (also known as Vasa), to Porto (via London) to Lisbon, to Sobreira Formosa, to Lisbon, to Lagos, to Sevilla, to Madrid, to Milan, to Venice, to Dubrovnik, to Sarajevo, to Vilnius (via Budapest and Warsaw) and then to Daugavpils.

Daugavpils is nice because it doesn't move. And the Russian hair.

Particularly harrowing, perhaps because it is still a raw scar on my soul, was the three consecutive nights spent on Soviet trains and buses getting from Sarajevo to Vilnius. Naturally checked and searched by border guards and other demanding Eastern Europeans at random points during the night (usually when we were just about to fall into what was a permanently elusive sleep). Technically it was only 2 and a half nights, because we were kindly dumped in the middle of an abandoned Vilnius bus depot at 3:15 in the morning. With our 45kgs of luggage, nowhere to stay, no idea of where we were and a total ignorance of what currency they use in Lithuania, let alone ownership of any said currency.

But clearly I survived in tact enough to spend 20 minutes drawing arrows and lines on the 1996 version of Microsoft Paint. That is my contribution to humanity.

Comical things in Europe

The following are things which bewildered and appalled us on our travels.

1. M and M's in Norway


It's M and M's people. You can get either/or.

2. Pods for rent in Italy

There was no natural light, no heating, no bathroom and they've probably been out of use since 1972, but I could not help but, ever so slightly, want to stay in one of the pods. Because it is a pod.

3. Giant grapes in Finland

They're just really big grapes.

4. Footwear all over Scandinavia

Once again, the Scandinavians adopt a controversial but comfortable Third Way. While the rest of the world remains bogged down in the eternal struggle between sock and sandal, Scandinavia boldly says no. Sock and sandal are not mutually exclusive pieces of footwear.

5. No MOSE protestors in Venice

MOSE is a program in Venice designed to prevent the flooding and destruction of Venice as changing weather patterns threatens the future existence of the great city. Apparently some Venetians have taken great offence at this and are protesting against the preservation of their city.

6. The redundancy of walking in Vilnius

There is something really wrong about developing walking aids for the able-bodied. This particular cool dude is perusing sweatshop oil paintings of bridges, flowers and kittens. He never gets off his Segway, but silently rolls back and forth very, very slowly. It was like that cold sore ad where the woman is so ashamed of her facial herpes that she wears just such a helmet everywhere only to soon be freed by the miracle of Zovirax. It's also strange that this is taken in Vilnius (that's the capital of Lithuania sweetheart) which is barely 15 years out of Soviet rule and appears to be leading the world in the uptake of totally useless and disturbingly expensive consumer goods.

C.??

I know not who this C. is, but she sounds like a fun a classy lady.

I like her.

A short account of Hapless C's shame (part 1). By Laurie

Question- what should one not do hours prior to an international flight (in this instance, from Paris to Stockholm)?

Answer- dose oneself up to the eyeballs with laxatives. This is what the Hapless C. did and by lord, did she pay for it. We arrived at Paris Beauvais airport after a lovely week in Paris. Shortly after, the bathroom stops began. At first I thought it was odd that C. went to the ladies three times before the security check. But she drinks a lot of water. After we made our way into the departure lounge, again I thought it was quite odd that C. rushed off. I queried whether C. was ok and it was then that C. revealed her penchant for self medicating- apparently when one laxative doesn't work, you pop another one. When the second fails to work, pop two more.

Once the queue to the plane got a moving Hapless C. needed to run off to the toilet once more, leaving bags full of shoes purchased from Paris second hand shops, with me. I must admit that I was getting a little flustered because I know the Darwinian struggle for Ryanair airline seats. I had visions of securing the best two seats on the plane but now those dreams were making their way down the drain. As the minutes ticked away, C. finally emerged and it was left to me to race past old men and women and perhaps I may have even backhanded a child or two, to claim two seats at the very back of the plane. They were near the bathroom, a point which I'm sure did not go unnoticed by Hapless C. After shoving the luggage overhead with some venom, we were off, holding hands and reflecting on the week that was in Paris, the city of love.

Thank you for your time.

PS. don't tell Celina.

The Olga-isation of Celina.

I have decided to attempt to start referring to myself in the third person. It adds an air of mystery I think.

Anyway, more or less, I attribute my recent lack of blogging to my Olgaisation. That is, the process by which a thoroughly modern, cafe hovering, documentary watching, inner city dwelling wanker is transplanted into a rural environment where, apparently, velvet shoes cease to become wet weather wear.

Here I am shown on a tractor. It is my belief that tractors are used for 'ploughing.' I am not entirely sure of what ploughing is having been carried off this particular tractor soon after this photo was taken when I realised I could not get down. This is in northern Finland. I am to understand that at this particular moment, this tractor is out of service on account of the fact that all of Finland is now under around 746m of snow. I'm back there next week.


Before we left Finland (about 3 months ago now) it had already begun to get a bit cold. Enough so that soon after this photo was taken my socks burned on my feet. This despite the sage advice of this particularly homicidal looking young man:


Indoor toilets? Flushing mechanisms? None of this fancy pants, fat cat life for me. There is a door, that is all you need.


After leaving Finland, which thrust me on the Olgaisation trajectory, we headed to Portugal. My entire immediate family descended upon the small Iberian land and the endlessly smaller 2 bedroom apartment in the Lisbon ghetto. It was here that my Olgaisation took on a more sinister and ethnically appropriate turn: Maria-isation.


Here you can see me and my similarly rustic sister stomping on grapes in my dad's farm in central Portugal. I had very much wanted to stomp grapes, but was shocked to discover that after about 5 minutes it starts to get boring. It ends up being pretty much just stomping. And there is something a little disconcerting about drinking something which is the product of you stepping on it. Especially seeing as I knew the amount of spiderwebs and other small insects which had miraculously got through my uncle's stringent quality control regimen.

And this is not me, but I feel the day is nigh.

Daugavpils, Daugavpils.

"It is a drab, post-WWII Soviet creation and so depressing to visit it's almost a national joke. A skyline of smokestacks and the lumbering great hulk of Daugavpils prison greet those who approach".

But what the Lonely Planet doesn't tell you about Daugavpils is that they have very, very cheap chilli nuts. And no Euro. Pros and cons, my friends, pros and cons.

So we find ourselves in Daugavpils, Latvia's second biggest city which, according to the Lonely Planet, had it's glory days in the manufacture of tractor and bicycle chains for the rest of the Soviet Union. Those days are over now and Daugavpils has made to negotiate it's place in a bicycle and tractor chain free future.

We've been staying in a very nice and fantastically free apartment belonging to Laurie's cousin's wife (Milana) and gorging ourselves on the world wide web. Stayed up half the night to find out whether the Labor leadership challenge was successful. If only Kevin Rudd knew that two twenty somethings were spending a freezing Baltic night hovering around a computer with only a 1.5L bottle of gin and tonic to see us through. I suspect he would do a cartwheel. He's that kind of leader. He may be elevated to son status, but I reserve judgement.

Anyway, I can't really comment on the drabness or otherwise of Daugavpils as I do not leave this apartment except for trips directly to and from the supermarket. And after over 6 months of non stop travelling, Daugavpils is, to me, a perfect kind of mundane.

Plus Laurie gets to speak Russian, just like he has done ever since we got east of Italy. Except in Hungary where he spoke German. We have found people really love it when you speak to them in the language of their former overlords. The good thing is that now, people actually do understand the Russian words for 'good', 'thank you' and 'what'. A little babushka came to the door this morning and Laurie explained to her that we were not intruders, but inoffensive houseguests by repeating the phrase 'Milana comrade. Milana comrade' and then closing the door in the aforementioned bewildered babushka's face as she continued to cry 'sto? sto?' (what? what?). Cultural interchange my friends, that's why we travel.

There are no photographs here of Daugavpils. We have not taken any.