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.