This too must pass- the longest awaited wrap up travel blog

So it's been several months of empty promises and finally I'm delivering. A wrap up of the ultimate highs and lows of my recent trip. I think I was just thinking that the longer I waited the less I had to admit the trip was over. In part this is to stop people asking about them so first the low lights and then the high and just to end off some crazy wacky food notes.

The worst of times

As is apparent of those who have been reading along as I travelled, Lisbon was the low light in terms of locales, but what of other happening:

• Worst country- I was only there for a couple of hours but Slovenia wins. It was more than a bit too Soviet for my liking
• Worst food- no surprises here, the China Airlines vegan "food" with its mystery textures, mystery smells and non-food-like taste.
• Worst hostel- Lisbon, hands down. Just not clean and in non safe part of town and not a fun place to be trapped when it was storming outside but at least the people were OK
• Worst dorm mate- Though there were close runners up in the Brazilian girls who stayed out all night and made tonnes of noise at 6am in Barcelona, woman in London in her fifties who was in the bottom bunk of my triple bunk wins. She complained LOUDLY every time someone spoke in the dorm even when it was after 7am and therefore kosher for the talking- they were speaking quietly and as they rightly pointed out to her one morning she was waking up more people than they were. The day I left her phone when off at 3am and she had a very loud conversation but then when I had to jump out of bed from my top bunk of the triple bunk (with the lack of ladder and all) to leave at 6am she screamed at me, "I can't believe you are waking us all up again, you already woke us up in the middle of the night!"- Considering I was in bed at 10pm and asleep before she came into the dorm (and in fact was asleep before she was every night I was there), I have no idea what she was talking about.
• Worst time- The first French train trip when no-one spoke English and all the trains were delayed and/or cancelled and I ended up in tears...not a fun
• Worst tourist attraction- it wasn't bad but the Eiffel Tower is a little too crawling with peddlers of random junk for my liking
• Dullest church- St Stefan's Dom in Vienna. It was very dark and there isn't much to look at in it.
• Worst airport- Lisbon! Just for the baggage loss and the amount of time I had to spend there.
• Most unpleasant person- the bloke in a Post Office in Berlin who screamed at me when I was sick. The conversation went something like this:
• Him (in German with much snappiness in his voice)- Can I use this pen?
• Me (confused look of sick person)
• Him (in German with even more snap) - Can I use this pen?
• Me- I'm sorry? (switching to German) I only speak a little German
• Him (switching to English)- Pah! If you are going to live in this country, you need to learn to speak the language.
• Me (in quiet sick voice)- I don't live here. I'm on holiday
• Him- Still, if I came to your country, you would expect me to speak your language
• Me (in sick almost whisper)- No I wouldn't

          After this I came up with a massive speech in German about how I was just visiting Germany and that I was sick and that I did speak German and how it was lucky other Germans weren't like him or they'd have no tourist industry. Thankfully he was long gone by then as he was aggressive and had I screamed back at him thing may have ended badly to say the least.

• Biggest rip-off- It is a tie- Czech cabs and Malaysian tours! Just a note if the money is profoundly different to what you are used to, do the maths!
• Biggest language issues- For all the French train confusion, I think my biggest issue with language came in Spain when I arrived at my hostel and found their night desk guy only spoke Catalan which I don't speak at all. It was much fun.
• Ugliest locale- Jesenice in Slovenia. I was only there for a few hours but it was very Soviet and very bleak looking
• Worst weather- Though Ireland's icy and dirty streets do rate a mention for their danger factor, this is yet another award in the category of worsts for......LISBON!

The best of times

• The best country- It will come as a surprise to many what with my complaining about their train systems but the hands down winner was France. It had some of the best food, the best hostels and staying at the hostels some of the nicest people.
• The best city- I'll exclude London as I'd been there before and as mentioned in my blog on Amsterdam is my favourite city in the world. When I was in Amsterdam, I mentioned that Amsterdam was now clocking in number 3 on Clare's list of favourite cities after London and Sydney. Sadly for Amsterdam, it is now number 4 and Sydney is now number 3. My favourite city on the trip, aside from London, was ultimately Paris especially the Monte Martre
• Best food- Just so France doesn't cloud out all the bests (though the food in Nice was amazing), this isn't another tick for France. Italy also should rate a mention as the pizza in Venice was awesome as was the Indonesia meal I ate in Amsterdam and both the food and coffee at Queen of Tarts in Dublin. Ultimately though the best food was in Malaysia as by the time I got there I was craving spice like nothing on this earth. To add to this, dahl for breakfast is about the most genius idea ever.
• Best hostel/hotel- And back to France....Both hostels in France were great but hands down the best hostel of this trip and in fact any trip I've taken was in Nice. Quality food, quality people, free wi-fi, clean, cheap alcohol and pretty location.
• Best dorm mate- There were many good dorm mates (and in Scotland I stayed with friends) so I can't really pick for this one. The funniest was crazy Russian guy in Prague.
• Best time- Wasting time chilling and wandering in Park Guell in Barcelona in the perfect Spanish winter weather with the sound of quality buskers in the distance.
• Best tourist attraction- Again too many good ones to pick just one. The forerunners were the British Library, the van Gogh Museum, Anne Frank's House, Topography of Terror, Venice (the whole city is a tourist attraction really), anything Gaudi related in Barcelona and the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris.
• Most exciting church- St Paul's in London, Roslin chapel, and Norte Dame all rate a mention but no surprises here. The most exciting church was by far and away the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona....everyone must visit it!
• Best airport- Singapore....what with its butterfly park, cactus farm, free movies, chairs for sleeping and free foot massage machines- what more could you want? A food court, it has several. Lots of shops, them too. A pool, yep. A games room, more than one. You can tell its a transit hub.
• Biggest bargain- Most of these were food related like pizza in Venice and the meals at the hostels in Berlin and Nice. Also worth of mention are the free walking tours in Prague, the Paris Museum card and the I <3 Amsterdam card, and the free wi-fi at many of the hostels and airports around Europe.
• Fewest language issues- Well being as I speak English and so do people in the UK and Ireland, and also most people in the Netherlands and Malaysia, I'll leave them aside. I think my biggest language break through was walking through a museum in Nice and managing to understand a lot of the French on the signs even though I don't speak it.
• Prettiest locale- Sintra in Portugal and Blarney in Ireland tie for this one. Both so pretty and so worth the visit.
• Best weather- Barcelona where it was sunny with a light breeze and about 12-13 degrees for the entirety of my stay.
• Best Christmas Market- none were bad but for sheer tackiness this goes to Hyde Park in London

So there you have it and you can stop asking about the bests and worsts. To end some random notes on food in its bizarrity and entertainingness, which I was making as I travelled albeit intermittently:

Spotted/Eaten in the UK

•          Fair trade kit kats- isn’t fair trade and nestle in the same sentence oxymoronic
•          Cooperative food- the co-op supermarkets have their own brand so you can pay co-operative eggs or co-operative sausages. It makes me laugh though others could really understand why

•     Bovril posters- now I don't drink Bovril for obvious reasons but it comes from Roslin so we went to a cafe named after it (Bovril Johnstons....very good cafe with great hot chocolate and giant brownies BTW). On the walls of this cafe are Bovril adverts from the past which in an odd slightly sadistic all include cows who are encouraging you to drink Bovril.

Ireland  

•          Crisps- aside from the Bloody Mary crisps without alcohol in them and the Buffalo crisp which are suitable for vegetarians, both of which are odd in their own right, what is the deal with the Irish (and the British for that matter) and crisps?!?! Instead of potato chips on the side of meals, they often come with crisps which I find bizarre especially when I was given favoured not plain crisps with a sandwich in Cork.

Zurich

 

•   Maccas vouchers- what to get the person who has everything! Adverted as a great Christmas present for grandma in the railway station in Zurich

Amsterdam

•          Olives in Caesar salad- enough said really. That was plain weird and unexpected

Berlin

•                     Would you like potatoes with those potatoes? Germans love their spuds it seems. They were on offer at every dinner often in various forms i.e. mashed, chips, wedges and boiled all at one meal.

Prague 

•                 Ketchup on everything. It showed up with pizza one day and pasta (which had a pesto sauce already) the next

Train between Prague and Vienna

•                  Broccoli soup with sweetened whipped cream in it. Much like the olives in caesar salad, enough said there. But unlike the olives in caesar salad, this combo was not that tasty.

        Everywhere

•                Chocolate muesli or cereal with cocoa on the side. Can I say gross? Muesli is the healthy option and adding chocolate kills it- be warned if you're in Europe and you pick up muesli you may find chocolate chunks. And the cocoa in cereal thing, just buy coco pops if that's what you want, people! I fail to understand why so many European were into the cocoa on cereal thing
•                 Finally just because it can't be said enough, can someone PLEASE teach the people of Europe (especially the UK) to make decent coffee?!?!? The most horrifying thing I saw on the trip was that while the good Australian coffee makers stay in Sydney and Melbourne, Gloria Jeans has now spread its hideousness to Ireland and the Czech Republic. Baristas of Australia, Europe is calling.

        

       OK so done now, I'll be back soon with some thoughts following my recent trip to Katoomba though travel related they won't be.

Unreadable, odd or academic....or maybe all three

Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the internet....

Bringing you a new and strange post on the poor forsaken unread novel and that the university curriculum isn't the best way to save it, as inspired by two recent experiences. 

Firstly reading the truly brilliant One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde and now already you've confused because you could never label Fforde's books as unread- you can tell people read them because when they are first released they come out in jumbo size with an expensive price tag and if you haven't read them and you are a fan of things book like, I recommend you join the rest of us and read them. The thing about this novel that got me thinking is the way it talks about unread or unreadable books. Now it is the fifth in a series so I won't plot spoil at you, just to say go and visit a few second hand book stores or garage sales and you'll notice that there are literally millions of books out there that no-one is reading and that no-one has read for quite a while, and just think what if the world inside books was real and interactive what would happen to them.

Secondly was me once again doing a self deprecating and deferring explanation of my PhD thesis. That's right people of the blog world (those who don't actually know me in reality which I think is probably very few, if any, of you), I'm an Arts PhD student...you know those slightly awkward creatures who cling to walls at social gatherings occasionally latching onto an innocent bystander in order to talk a plethora of isms at them and explain why people should be interested in talking about social paradigms in order to justify the government letting them study for free. Worse than that, I'm an English lit PhD student which in most people minds translates as a person without the gumption or talent to be a writer. The reason that gets me thinking of unread books is that I'm writing my thesis on one. 

During my honours year, I wrote my thesis on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda which not many people have read and I tried endless to explain to many people why they should read it. I mean if you are judging a book by its opening line - the first chapter epilogue opens with "Men can do nothing without the make-believe of beginning" which is just brilliant (OK it's no "A single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife" but I think it is better than "Miss Dalloway bought herself flowers"). Even with very good BBC miniseries of it made a few years before I started honours, people usually stared at me blankly and told me that either Middlemarch was brilliant but it was enough Eliot for them or that someone had thought forced them to read Silas Marner and they were never touching Eliot again or, sadly more often than either of the above, they said that 19th century lit wasn't their thing and they had no idea who this Eliot guy was anyway. So many hours wasted explaining to people the brilliance of book and also that George Eliot was a WOMAN, that when I started my PhD and found myself researching a book even fewer people have read I gave up and stopped trying to convince people to read. When people ask what my thesis is on, I say "Oh it's on Mary Shelley but not Frankenstein" and half the time they don't even follow with by asking which of her other novels it is on (needless to say most of them don't think she wrote anything but Frankenstein so it's all confusing from the outset). Those who do ask the follow-up question are told that The Last Man is one of those books not many people would be interested in and that it isn't shocking that no-one has read it. I'm starting to think I've been a bit mean to The Last Man (which don't get me wrong, I personally do love). It too has a good opening- "I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless oceans, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population"- and it, like Frankenstein, is an interesting study of the human condition. You sold on it yet? Maybe not, maybe it will die an unread death or maybe it will be put on a uni curriculum and English lit undergrads of the future will be whinging about it. Then again it isn't bad enough of some uni curricula.

And that is the problem with a book that is largely unread by the general public, the decent ones often die a quiet death but the bad ones might be controversial and that might get them put on a uni curriculum . High school curriculum novels somehow maintain their dignity- lots of people love To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby  and Catcher in the Rye despite having studied them in high school. Uni novels don't fare as well especially as they are often on a course to illustrate a point and not for their quality. This means I have suffered through many a terrible novel, many of which I hated so much after a chapter that I put them down and left them there. This was the case with Silas Marner- one of the most boring books out there and I'm yet to find someone who liked it- and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent- I had Sons & Lovers forced upon me in high school and while I know some (especially male) academics think Lawrence was profoundly talented, but to my mind his misogynistic, deary prose makes me wish he was alive so I could beat him about the head with a large shovel. That said I couldn't drop them all. Luckily people in most parts of the world can avoid the works of Richard Harland who was one of my lecturers, but I'm sure that some others were forced to read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness which is put on curricula for being an early depiction of lesbianism and a banned book. It is truly dreadful and being banned is not a reason for now being read (listen up also those who would read Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover for this reason). There is this brilliant story about it wherein Virginia Woolf visited Radclyffe Hall and said she and her Bloomsbury chums would protest the banning of the novel because censorship was wrong and Hall responded that if they were going to protest the banning, it should be on its literary merits not as part of large protesting of censorship, and Woolf replied in that case we cannot protest. I often thought that my lecturers were doing the same thing a friend of mine did with The da Vinci Code. He hated the book but instead of telling everyone how bad it was, he ranted on and on about its brilliance. After I read it, I was like what the deal, that book sucked beyond the telling of it. He laughed and said yes isn't it painful, I just felt others should share my pain. I think a few too many lecturers out there were forced to read a bit too much D.H. Lawrence and personally I'm also plotting my pay it forward revenge. Or maybe I should be more positive and start new traditions with better books that no-one reads and resurrect the brilliance that is rotting in garage sales.

Hmm no I like the first idea better....