What we got up to part 2

right, feel free to add/edit this team, but heres my round up of the second half of our adventure:

Amsterdam is alright, we thought it was a bit touristy and silly: a bit like a weird off shoot of england cos everyone speaks english. We got a very nice room in the middle of town and did some good wandering, Bird spent a while considering purchasing a 'posing pouch' made of those sweetie bracelet things you only get down the newsagents here in innocent bracelet form. Later, we got far too stoned [i almost had a very ugly meeting with a lot of parked bicycles, managed to regain some coordination in time though] and went to bed early after a nice kebab session. Toby, Alex and Sophie returned to us and we did similar things again, but not as 'hardcore' as we decided we wanted to go all the way down to Italy the next morning for this techno festival....

Italian techno near Pescara: officially the low point of the trip, too expensive to get in, everyone already there coming down of evil drugs [we arrived 2 days late] and our failure to 'enjoy' ourselves in a similar fashion. Oh and Toby had his bag stolen. Cunts. Appropriately the large quantity of drugs i had taken only started kicking in as we left for the train station after a good 5 hour sleep and about 7 hours after id taken them, so that was a nice happy walk if incredibly surreal... Everyone else seemed to be in high spirits [sober fun!] too as we left so the positive effect of the whak festival was to realise how much wed been enjoyin ourselves elsewhere.

I must now mention Bob: we met him on the way up from Spain into France where hed told us about the festival, which hed made sound like good fun. We coincidently met him again in Pescara train station, so we let him tag along as hed lost his suspiciously ever-absent travelling friend. Bob was a grade-A prick really: he severely took advantage of our generosity, rinsing sophies credit on her phone and our supply of vino as well as our patience. Always talking about his predicaments etc.: he claimed people 'looked down on him' because of his mangy dreadlocks, and then said 'but i went to a fucking excellent boarding school, so im probably better than them anway' ... you get the idea. Oh and he stank, which is not what you need from someone sharing a train carriage with you for 5 hours.

We managed to get rid of him eventually when we stopped of in Venice for a couple of hours for some food, despite his constant blundering dropping of massive hints he wanted to stay with us and continue to chief our stuff.

Thank the lawd for lilys nangness in getting us nice places to stay: post-Italy we went to an amazing house in Croatia. To try and describe it wouldnt do it justice, but to give you an idea of how nice it was, it had been in 5 magazines and had made it incredibly generous and lovely owner [Marijana] a minor celebrity. She gave us one such magazine, so there should be scans of it soon, along with our photos but it was truly amazing and we struggled to express our gratitude towards Marijana for letting us stay and generally being a lovely host. Spent five days lounging by the pool, watching films on the projection screen and trying to catch the various beasties that lived around the house [ok that was just me really] before leaving for Zagreb.

The big Z was very eastern bloc and bleak, especially on a drizzly Sunday when nothing is open, nice parks in the middle though. Being cornered and threatened by a man with one eye considerably smaller than the other with the mafia ["i make call, men come and hurt you, you call police and nothing happen!"] made it more exciting. Marijana once again came to our rescue and invited us to her flat [she'd come back to Zagreb for work the next day] so we all felt even more embarassed by her ridiculous niceness.

It was time to go home, so we made our way to Graz, which was quite cool: theres an artificial island in the river which looks like a space ship and has a buff cafe in it too which was a nice spot for a drink, and there were other cool little architectural tings as well like the giant bladder building... yeh. We went out drinkin as it was the last night, got nicely pissed, had some nice little snacky things... nice night to round of the trip.

Got the flight next day after a mad dash ["Springe! Springe!"] through town to get the airport bus that was thankfully delayed by the 2 minutes we needed to get to our supa cheap ryanair home.

sorted

...and now it feels very strange not being with the same 5 people all day who all stayed supa cool for a month. Cheers for everything everyone, i had a great time and i think we all learnt something. Which is nice.

on a personal note

instead of letting us borrow a tent for a week, sabina forced us to buy it at a rather large cost to our group, meaing we had less money during our final day. Well, i think thats just charming.

updatage

oioi there

Greetings from the hardcore crew (Lily Poj Bird) in Amsterdam, the City of SIN. So far we've been to a Sex shoppe, a strip club (many a Buush-esque shenanigans), a couple of prostitutes provided thoughtfully by the hostel but thats about it. Everything is rather expensive io;herghiorjnm blah alcohol.

Still awaiting the joys of a "'coffee'" shop (hoHO!) but should be going once we've done ths boring waste of time that no one ever reads..hint hint....

...werd...

Now for a semi-structured rewind of our adventures/escapades...

Morocco - rather hot, lots of annoying buggrs selling you stuff, and now ive got to stop being so negative (thanks lily) it was actually pretty fantastic, Marrakesh square (jmena al fna) right next to our hostel with our rooftop beds overlooking it, was amazing. Shopped too much but cos of the cheapness (after a LOT of haggling) very reasonable worth it, mainly bangles and camel skin bags which are V. old skool. Hotel Ali where we stayed (duh) was broken but buff in that charming third world way - beautiful tiling, very very cheap (five quid a night including amazing buffet dinner and breakfast) and hordes of overly clad women cleaning constantly - and when i say overclad, i mean full socks, tights, gloves and occasionally headscarves in 40 degree temperatures. Woken up, or sent to bed by call to prayer at pre-dawn (Allaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahh Ackbar) which was very cultural in that middle class way of ours. Furthermore the claims from Lonely Planet that Moroccans were a) generous and b) broke spontanously into song every ten minutes are, quites frankly, bullshit.

Cáscades d'uzoud - big waterfalls - were pretty phat, had a strange guide who tried it on with Shophie but who was otherwise pretty nice (fucking expensive though) , especailly after the heat of Marrakesh. Alex almost died of some strange, possibly heat related disease but struggled through it with the help of a Flemish SAS Field Medic.

Asilah - a more upmarket touristy town on the Atlantic coast was very relaxing and picturesque with very clean and well kept town although Lonely Planet - LIES - Paradise beach is nweither 3km away nor paradise in any sense of the word unless you're a fan of black plastic bags gently floating past on the sea breeze.

Spain!

Granada - we didnt go to the big Alhambra which everyone else in Granada went to, cos of our late night out on the town: went to an amzing spanish reggae haunt with 'buffness' all around and silly music (in a good way). Sophie met a nice Italian man whoes name we can only approximate to ''Pascale'' and we also met a nice dog we christened stevie (wonder). In the day time we walked around and looked at nice things. They were pretty.
The 3 Gals decided to weigh themselves down further by putting bits of metal inside themselves. Lily now has a cosmic zit on her nose while alex and sophie have varietes of ear piercings. Not painful apparently.

post-Granada we headed north to Lilys house in Luc near Narbonne but first we had to battle the shiteness of Spains transport infrastructure which left us stranded in Madrid (officially the shite-est capital city i've been to unles you're a fan of Fascist architecture) for a day which had been preceded by no sleep at all so we played at zombies in the local park and got chatted up by some yankinese mormon missionaries who were actually very nice, if absolute nutters.

Lilys house was a great pitstop, we washed our clothes and slept on beds and ate things we'd cooked instead of messy things scraped from bins onto bread in dodgy trains. Alex and Toby ran away to get their results and we got up to amsterdam today via Paris where we left Sophie to hop on a Eurostar.

thats all crew, Alex, Toby and Sophie return tommorow evening whence we will commence our journey southward to Italy.

This newspost has been brought to you by the letter P and the number 14.

tara

The axel turns

Lily says:

"Just throught I'd say, what about alex trench? He said on Tuesday that he definitely wanted to come round Morocco with us"

She also says:

"we should organise that shit."

Finally:

"you wanker Bird"

Charming.

Europe on a shoestring

My very important job was to buy a book, Europe on a Shoestring. So I did, and its rather interesting. I think we should have a meeting at some point shortly after the end of exams to discuss things.

Exciting eh? As it says in our header there may be some random stuff, and I noticed that we don't have any yet, so watch this space.

That is all.

| Thank you 'Anonymous' |

That is all. Really.

Arrangements so far

Alright, time for some clarity i think. Heres what we've decided on so far:

On Monday 1st of August, everyone except Lily arrives in Seville on Ryanair flight 8363 which is scheduled to arrive at 20:30 [bear in mind Ryanair flights have a tendancy for lateness]. As this is a late arrival, i suggest we find somewhere to stay that night in Seville. The airport is not far from the city [12 kilometers] and theres a bus you can get so that shouldnt be a problem.

After this, we are pretty much set on going down to Morocco after meeting Lily, although we have no concrete plans on when/how these things will happen. I reckon getting to Morocco on the 3rd/4th is realistic unless we want a military precision day of travelling and meeting up the day after landing.

I think everyone is pretty keen on Morocco [apart from the prospect of sunburn from hell] so i assume we will spend a fair amount of time there [particularly if we want to leave Tangier and go to Casablanca/Marakesh/other big Moroccan town]... say 7 days at least?

The next main port of call is to arrive in Lille on the 16th /17th so that people who want to go home for their results [released on the 17th] can get the Eurostar back to London town which was under 50 quid return last time I checked if you're interested. At this point the rest of the team left in Europe will head to nearby Amsterdam and await the return of those who got the eurostar, probably on the 18th/19th i reckon.

The first main obvious hole in our plan is what we're up to in between Morocco and Lille: whether or not we stop in Spain or southern France etc. I think some Spanish cities like Madrid/Barcalona/Valencia were suggested as options, along with Lily's house in Carcassonne. We've also gotta remember that it will take a couple of days at best to travel through Spain and France, probably longer... so we need to leave enough time to get to Lille basically.

After we have regrouped in Amsterdam, the rest of Europe to the East is our oyster. At the last meeting we put a fair few hand crafted flags down on places that we liked the sound of, but there were loads: Berlin/Munich/Vienna/Prague/Warsaw are some that i remember, but there were more and we didnt settle on anything. We were in a general agreement that it would be nice to finally end up in Croatia by the sea to relax after 3 weeks of hard travelling.

Our return to London will be on Tuesday the 30th of August on Ryanair flight 5733, which departs at 14:55 from Graz airport in Austria. I reckon that means we'll have to be in Austria on the 29th.

As our plans are still pretty embryonic, id say we need another meeting to decide on definate things, particularly: meeting Lily and getting to Morocco, getting from Morocco to Lille and what to do inbetween and where to hit on our way to Croatia.

The other main issue is where we'll sleep for the trip. I think that tents are generally in favour at the moment, but for certain places like Morocco [where the hostels are cheap and the campsites are far out of town and unsheltered from the sun] and Amsterdam [unlikely to provide good camping facilities?] we should probably look at trying to sort some bookings in advance for hostels, particularly amsterdam, which will be busy and probably the most expensive place.

Anyway, add comments of things ive missed/got wrong/ideas etc.

Breaking news....

On a completely unrelated note, Iggy is gay.

On a more related note...

the art of travel

Rail map of Europe - hope it's useful. 

First

Testing...Testing...

Yar, this be the first post.
Numbero uno.
Alpha.

Let's see how it goes, eh?