Cublog

Back home

2005-02-11T10:44:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm back in Australia now, in the beautiful warm weather. It's really weird being back though, especially with the knowledge that I'll be back in Europe by the middle of the year. I'm almost reluctant to settle back in, knowing that I will have to pack my crap up again.

That hasn't stopped me though - I'm enjoying not having to live out of a suitcase now, catching public transport on autopilot, driving around, and talking to people who all speak a language I am proficient in (no, I still had problems with accent in London). I'm also glad to be back amongst my two months of continuous music that I've been collecting, I'm just catching up on all the music I love that I haven't had a chance to listen to.

I've taken some time to sort my life out before heading back to work, which is a whole bunch of paperwork that I basically need to do. Insurance claims, frequent flyer points, bills to pay etc. It's amazing how low maintenance my life is - I expected to be bogged down in a whole bunch of administrivia when I came back, but there is surprisingly little to do.

On the slightly nerdy side of things, I'll be working on making a summary page for this trip - with highlight pictures from the entire trip, as well as a little DVD/slideshow (I'm making full use of iLife). This blog will be archived off in a few weeks time, so leave any comments you want to while you can :).

Thanks to all the commenters and people back home who have been following my little adventure, it's been a good experience, and I now have a swag of stories to regail people with over a couple of cold beverages (as long as you're buying). To those people who I stayed and met up with during this trip, a big thanks to you to - it was a great comfort to meet with familiar faces as I crossed the globe on a solo trip.

If you're still interested in the continuing adventures of Hiren, you can find his main site at Penguins dot mooh dot org, check there for updates. Bye all!

Springtime for Hitler

2005-02-02T18:01:00.000+01:00

It's springtime for Hitler!

Zürich and Berlin

2005-02-01T14:26:00.000+01:00

Well, I'm back from Europe now, it was a little disappointing going from the nice crunchy snow of Berlin, to the, um, splodge of London. Berlin was a lot of fun, as was Zürich. I really can't be arsed doing a full update now. I'll use bullet points.

X-tra, funky club in Zürich
The Coop, funky supermarket in Zürich (only kidding)
More sleeper trains from Zürich to Berlin
Berlin - snowing and fun
Mel and Martin are there
We made a snowman
It looked stupid
We went to Salsa
I looked stupid
I flew to London on Easyjet
It really is cattle class
I went to see the Monty Python stage show
In French

Eurotrash

2005-01-23T19:37:00.000+01:00

Europe so far

The pics from my travels around Paris, Germany and Zürich are now up.

Zürich - Home of the official foodstuff of the world

2005-01-22T16:29:00.000+01:00

I've been in Zürich now for the past 2 and a bit days, staying in a suburb called Höngg. It's a pretty cool place, both literally and er peopley. The weather had been quite rainy for the past few days, but this morning I've woken up to about half blue skies.

Walking around the city, it has a nice ambience to it, and it feels quite young in places. Last night we (Ben, two of his PhD counterparts - Simone and Martin, and myself) went out to a gig in a place called Bazillus. It was to see this group calling themselves the Fusion Elektro something or the other, and was meant to be a jazz/electro group. While the group had it's moments, the band didn't quite live up to expectations. The DJ they had amongst them was limited to doing really basic scratching (following a rhythm and that's it), and not really doing much else - he was a bit of a glorified drum machine.

On the upside, we stopped in for these pretty good kebabs at a place just near the gig. I think the kebab should really become the official foodstuff of the world, since it's pretty much available anywhere.

There's broadband (for each apartment!) here, so I should be able to upload some pictures from the past week when I get some time.

Heidelberg

2005-01-18T19:00:00.000+01:00

I'm in Heidelberg at the moment. It's a very pretty town, but I can't help but be reminded of the various FPS games set in WWII Germany. Walking around Heidelberg castle, I keep expecting brutal looking germans wearing long grey coats to be talking about inconsequential things, only to shout "Mein Leiben" when a pesky American sprays them with his latest and greatest alien/supernatural armour peircing chain-gun.

Speaking of Americans, there are a lot of Americans here. Sitting in this internet cafe, which incidentally is a great deal cheaper than the last one that I visited, I have just witnessed the mass exodus of a bunch of Americans who were stopping here in the midst of a shopping trip. I think the large number of Americans has a lot to do with the American base which is, er, based in Heidelberg. Apart from that, I've seen a whole bunch of Japanese tourists (at least I'm pretty sure they're Japanese), and a few random Australians about the place. It feels sort of like being back in Australia..

My talk at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) went really well I think, and it looks quite hopeful that I will be able to start work on a PhD here sometime during this year. This means that I probably didn't need to do the stacks of sightseeing that I've done around Heidelberg, but I can feel happy to say now that I've climbed the 315 steps of Castle Wolfenstein - er Heidelberg, and seen the Bridge of the Monkey with Hemorroids. Willi had taken me around Heidelberg after I recovered from my train trip from Paris on Sunday (arriving at 5:30 am), and based on my memory of that excursion, I figured out how to see the sights without spending too much cash :). It's not too cold here today, but the clouds are quite grey, and it keeps threatening to rain.

I'd made an expedition earlier today to pick up a cable so that I could recharge my camera batteries. The one I picked up in New York officially sucks, as it loses it's charge within a few hours. I'll need to try and recover that battery somehow. Anyone reading this know how to fix a battery like that? It was a good experience walking around Heidelberg - the new part - looking for a place to find the cable.

I'm back on the travelling bandwagon again tomorrow, so I'll be stopping in to Tübingen (which is a completely distinct town to Bingen, be careful when asking for a train ticket "to Tübingen") to see Frau Jo, and that evening, I will be arriving in Zurich to see Herr Schulz.

Ahh.... Paris

2005-01-16T01:28:00.000+01:00

Well, here I am again, in a strange country, using strange keyboards to type out these blog entries. Unfortunately, I don't even have the luxury of knowing tiny pieces of the language to get me by. A fear of asking for train/bus tickets has led me to just walk everywhere in Paris, which is very doable.

You should be able to do a whirlwind tour of Paris in one day, which is all in fact I could afford to do. The Louvre was pretty affordable though, and the beer is cheap enough at the hostel I'm staying at. I went down to see a Salvadore Dali exhibition today, it was pretty crap, and totally not worth the money, but it's solidifying my interest in Alice in Wonderland now.

In my grand tradition of spotting celebrities, I wasn't too far from the Dali exhibition, when the mqn who wanted to be the most powerful mqn in the universe walked past me. And I'm not talking about Skeletor! John Kerry, the original waffle walked right past me. I was pretty stunned, and I exchanged glances and shrugs with another random tourist, and wordlessly confirmed (I wasn't going to even try) it was the man himself.

Off to Heidelberg tonight. I'm a bit worried about getting in to town at 5:30 am, but I'll try swindling the hotel into letting me into my room early, as it is abso-fucking-lutely cold here.

I went to see the Queen!

2005-01-12T21:56:00.000+01:00

Old Lizzy's place

I guess it's time for another update from my travels. I've been floating around in London for the past week and a bit, attempting to remember various bits and pieces of my former life in London.

London is an amazingly cramped looking city - the roads are choked with cars, and although generally speaking, the streets are about as wide as Australian streets, the cars parked on both sides of the street, as well as corners, and any available free space really make you feel claustrophobic here. Of course, there are some really really tiny streets running off other streets in Central london, barely large enough for one car. I'm feeling really comfortable making my way around London now on the public transport. I think after a few days in any of these really large cities, I kind of settle down a bit, and feel very comfortable travelling around and getting things done.

One of the things that I've spent a lot of time doing is meeting up with people. I've met up with all of my numerous (second) cousins who live in London (and outside London too), and it was a real hoot talking to them about the good old days. Another person I met up with - completely at random, was PaulM, ex PSL. I was walking down Oxford street, in search of a pair of cheap jeans, and walking down in the opposite direction was Paul, on a lunch break. After accosting him in the street, I met up with him for lunch the next day. Paul works in SOHO square, which is really nice and central to all the fun things in London. I hope to meet up with him later on this month, so I can go for Laksa (in Putney).

I've also met up with Oliver - a friend of mine from high school here who found me on the internet somehow. It was a trip to the local pub - an institution of sorts in this country, for a couple of quiet ales. Funnily enough, I ended up drinking Fosters here, which was surprisingly drinkable, or at the very least, not foul.

I'm off to Paris for a few days next, followed by a journey through Germany and Switzerland. I'll try updating as I go through there :)

Where have I been?

2005-01-02T23:21:00.000+01:00

Cuba pics!

Okay, so you guys are probably wondering where the hell I've been for the past week and a bit. No updates to the blog, and the last you saw of me, I was writing in pain from horse riding misadventures.

Well, the horse-riding thing was really a bad idea. My ankles, nearly two weeks later are looking quite ugly, and are not exactly fun to walk around with. Regardless, I soldiered on with my plan to carry on in Cuba, hoping that I could sort of work around the discomfort.

To try and aid the healing process, I made the extremely tough decision to go to the beach and just hang around there for a full day. The beach is about a 20 min coco-taxi ride from Trinidad, and I was there in a flash. Actually, the trip could have taken much longer, and I wouldn't have known, as I was doped up on antibiotics and really feeling quite out of it.

I spent the evening at Casa (something something) Musica - the hub of the local music scene. As I sat around downing Mojitos and drinking Cuba Libre, forgetting all about the sickening antibiotics I was on, I relaxed and enjoyed my time there.

The next day, I set out to Santa Clara, home of Che, to get ready for the Parandas festival that was on in a little town north of there. Getting the bill for my accomodation, I was a little shocked at how expensive my trip had been so far. My attempts to beat the Cuban tourism system had failed miserably. No matter though, it had been fun :)

The Casa that I stayed at in Santa Clara was run by a guy called Carlos, and his wife Rebecca. They were both really nice people - and I could see where the reputation of Cuban's being really nice comes from. I spent the first day in Santa Clara not doing very much really - just keeping off my feet as much as possible in the hope that my feet would automagically fix themselves up.

The night of the Parrandas festival - I was all set to head out and party. I had scored myself a cheap bus that would take me from Santa Clara and back again at about 4am. Total amount of worrying required - none! On the way to the bus though, things started going very very wrong. My stomach, possibly inspired by the proximity to the Che Guevara memorial, staged it's own personal revolution, and decided that it would have no part in any partying for the evening. I was literally about to walk onto the bus at this point of time. Talk about some terrible timing. I had to cancel my bus fare, and jumped on the nearest bici-taxi back to the Casa. I wasn't a happy chappy.

The stomach pain seemed to have all the symptoms of Giardia, and so I had to make a decision about what I was going to do for the rest of my time in Cuba. My feet were not making very much progress - still quite painful to walk around with, and now my stomach had decided to have a go at me too. My next destination had been the idyllic region of Pinar Del Rio, and in particular the town of Vinales. The only problem with that area though, was that it was really good for going hiking, which I figured that I wasn't in any position to do. So, given the cost of the journey so far - and doing a couple of back of coaster calculations - I would be really spending a bucketload of cash to stay in Cuba, whilst not getting very much out of it. I figured the best thing to do would be to grab a flight out, and see what I could do about recovering in Canada.

I'm disappointed that I had to cut the trip short - as anyone would be - but I will return to Cuba, where I shall stay away from horses, and possibly grab a car and drive around the country, a much better way to travel I think.

So, at the moment, I'm making use of the lavish facilities in the Maple Leaf lounge in Toronto Pearson international airport, after spending a week bumming around in Fenelon Falls (north of Toronto). My flight to London departs in about an hours time, and I didn't want to start on the Da Vinci Code yet. More updates when I get to London.

Amazing, Searing PAIN

2004-12-21T20:30:00.000+01:00

I went horse riding today. It was extremely painful. I have massive blisters on my feet and ankles. Luckily, I took a first aid course before I left the country (thanks Briony!) and I could patch myself up pretty well with a plethora of bandages

I´ve got pictures of the bandages too, so you can all eagerly await to see my feet in some very ghetto looking bandages. The horse ride was great when we were going slowly - but as speed picked up to a canter (i think that´s what it is), I kept on hitting my legs on crap. Once the horse started galloping, things became more comfy. I was scared out of my wits for most of the horse ride though. I´ve never ridden a horse before, and my co-ordination is poor to say the least. I stuck with it though, and was rewarded with a look at a secluded waterfall. It was quite a nice place, and I got to have a chat with some other travellers too.

An update from Cuba

2004-12-20T19:52:00.000+01:00

Greetings from Sunny Trinidad. As I guessed, the internet access here was both expensive and hard to get into. I´ve pretty much ruled out sending photos to the blog, since all the computers seem to be locked down pretty tightly. I don´t think there are any particularly amusing pictures anyway. I spent two days in Havana, and am now in Trinidad. In summary - Havana sucks, Trinidad does not. Read on for more

Havana was an old city that reminded me a lot of bits of India, namely the crappy roads and old cars driving around. Half the time I tried to speak in Spanish, I´d end up talking a little in Gujarati - a problem which I know Briony faced when she went to India.

I basically didn´t like Havana much because it was too much of a tourist city - too many people trying to rip you off for some cash. I should have been more prepared for that, but hey, what can you do?

Trinidad on the other hand is much nicer, it´s a colonial town, and I´ve had a ball walking around for my first day here. I went and climbed a rather large hill, and had a security guard acting as a tourist guide babble at me for half an hour. I didn´t know what he was saying, but I nodded a lot and walked off happy. To my doubters - I arrived yesterday with nowhere to stay, and it only took 5 mins of me looking pathetic next to the bus before someone offered me a place to stay! It was a good bargain too - the food that is cooked is pretty good. I haven´t had to stretch too much with the eating thing, but I´ve been very lucky. I haven´t been very sick much either.

Tomorrow I should be heading out on a horesback ride to some waterfall somehere, and then I might jump on a bike for a ride down to the beach. The weather is absolutely fantastic here, and I enjoy being able to walk around in shorts and sandals again. It´s a great deal better than walking around in New York or Canada with far too many layers of clothing on.

My next two days will be spent in Trinidad, and then I shoot off to Santa Clara for a few days, while I get ready to go to the Parrandas festival that is on there. After Santa Clara, I have no idea what I´m going to do, but it probably involves going to the Vinales valley in Pinar Del Rio, and then checking into a resort on Cayo Levisa for a few days.

I´m in Cuba

2004-12-16T23:45:00.000+01:00

I´m in Cuba, the internet is really really slow. It´s quite intimidating here, especially being such a Gringo. I´m going to go out exploring for a bit now - in an attempt to find some food. One other thing, the keyboards here are very wacky, so it takes some getting used to actually doing the typing mojo on them.

Last days in Yonkers

2004-12-13T05:34:00.000+01:00

I spent my last day out and about in New York today, as I'm going to be spending tomorrow shopping around for stuff for the Cuban leg of my journey. Walking around the city, I realised just how much New York is the iPod nation. I think I regret not keeping count of the number of people wearing white earbuds. The iPod has reached saturation here, I can get on a subway train and see four people sitting next to each other, each carrying their own portable reality distortion field generator.

I've spent the past week running around various bits of New York and Boston. I spent a large part of Monday floating around the Museum of Modern Art, affectionately known as MOMA to the locals. This building has just finished up a four year renovation process, under the guiding hand of a Japanese architect - and you can see his influence in the design. It's tastefully minimalistic, with lots of nice nooks and crannies which just look plain cool. During the renovation process, a camera was set up across the road from the site, and a picture was taken over a 4 year period. This picture was very cool, and it was insanely complex. I'll have to get a copy of that picture at some point of time. I was very impressed by the museum all up, and it quite easily fills up a day. The line outside for getting into MOMA was also helpful for filling up my day, as many people obviously had the same idea to get out of the rain.

Tuesday was spent indoors as much as possible, although I did head out to have a sushi dinner with Amie. The name of the place was Sushi Park, and I was a little disappointed at it's inability to live up to nominative determinism. There were no amusement rides there, and there certainly was not a troupe of 4 foul-mouthed pre-schoolers finding new and inventive ways to "take one for the team". Instead, there was quite a nice sushi restaurant, located in my favourite part of the city - midtown Manhattan. Whilst watching TV here (as one must do), I stumbled across "Search for America's Next Top Model", a variation on the standard rags to glam rags reality television fare. I was quite amused with one particular part of the show where a model-to-be was complaining about New York being all dirty and unclean as she walked through midtown, and not being like the New York she thought it would be. It was diametrically opposite to my experiences in New York, where I wasn't too impressed by 5^th Avenue and Times Square.

My next four days in the US were spent in the Boston area. I was flown up to Boston by PSL to attend some meetings with two companies and MIT. The PSL offices are in Woburn, just outside of Boston, and much like the Sydney offices, are slap bang in the middle of nowhere. It's about a $50US cab ride to the airport from Woburn to the airport, and about the same to the city I'd think. So apart from being a little bored up in Woburn, the meetings were pretty productive. It was interesting to walk around the MIT campus, and finding the offices of the person I was meant to have a meeting with was an interesting challenge. Especially since I only remembered his name, and not his office number, or the building that it was in. The actual facilities in MIT aren't all that flash however. For the one building that I actually spent any time in, it was actually a lot like the Electrical engineering building from UNSW (from when I went there). I did walk past the Bill Gates building, however, which looked very wonky.

So back to today - after coming down with a case of the sniffles earlier today, I figured I should take it a bit easy, so I headed out to NOHO (in Midtown Manhattan - where else?!) to check out Satellite Records, at the suggestion of Dr B (aka DJ Simo). I managed to leave the little scrap of paper with the address written on it at home, so I got down to Bowery St (which is where this record store is located), and started walking down an extremely long road in an attempt to find it. I kept walking for a while, before I realised that the store probably wasn't going to magically appear if I kept walking in that direction. Like so many times when I am trying to find stuff, instead of trying another approach, I gave up, since I thought I had no chance to actually find the damn place. As usual however, whilst making my way back to the subway station, I ran across the store. Expecting a funky bustling shop, full of DJs doing their stuff, I burst through the door - and was confronted with an almost deserted shop. I floated around the store for a little while, pretending that I had some kind of qualification for actually being there (such as actually needing some new vinyl, or wanting to possibly engage in commerce), and I eventually talked to one of the shop-monkeys working there. I enquire about how business is like in the store, and it turns out that business has been going down in New York since late 2001. This has also coincided with a downturn in the general dance music scene in New York. The predominant sounds there are Tribal and Deep house - both of which aren't really my cup of tea (at the current point of time at least). This was kind of exemplified by the few Paul van Dyk posters plastered up around New York, the only ones that I saw for any kind of dance music event. Is that really the best they can do? As random record store guy said - the best way to describe the New York scene is "disappointing".

Fixes

2004-12-07T07:07:00.000+01:00

You know, you guys are a bunch of whingers. I've put up links at the top for you to arrange the posts in chronological order, and there's a slightly prettier text only version to look at. You'd think I wouldn't have to do this while I'm on holiday!

Speeding Subway car

2004-12-05T05:37:00.000+01:00

Subway Car

This is a bit of a high speed picture of a Subway car I tried taking - in hindsight, I should have used a faster shutter speed, but I don't think I can take another picture, since apparently it's illegal to take pictures of Subway cars. Look for the ghost-like image of the photographer in the right of the picture.

St Patricks Cathedral 5th Avenue

2004-12-05T04:59:00.000+01:00

St Patricks Cathedral on 5th Ave

So I finally figured out how to take pictures in the dark, or relative dark. Problem is though, that you need to keep the shutter open for a large amount of time (I'm actually using a night scenery setting here in combination with a slower shutter speed). This in turn introduces issues with having to keep the camera stable. For this picture, I couldn't find a place to rest the camera - so I had to hold it in my hands, and you can see the shake of the camera. I've got a few better ones though.

Like - oh my god!

2004-12-05T04:35:00.000+01:00

OH MY GOD. It's Him!

So anyway, I'm chillaxing around 5^th Avenue, you know, sampling the bling bling at all the shops that, like, you know, I can buy stuff from. Yeah, so, like, you know, I'm walking around, and I'm like snap snap snap, like with my camera. You know. There are heaps of people all around me, and I'm all like, "Get out of my way people I don't know". And they're all like, "No you get out of my way!". And I'm like "No!". And they're like "Whatever punk!".

It's like, you know, Christmas over here or something, and there are trees and stuff with lights on them, and you know, all these people, are like literally, shopping for stuff, like, that they can't ever afford. You know. So I'm snapping, like literally, but not figuratively, and like literally with a camera snapping, not literally having bits of me snapped off by passers by who go like "How do you like them apples sucka?!". And yeah, you know, I see this guy in a Red suit, and a white beard, and I'm like "No way!". And this person next to me, was all like "Whatever Girlfriend!". And then I'm like "I'm not a girl", and he's like "Oh sorry". And so, you know, I go up to talk to this guy, and he's really Santa. Can you believe it, I'm in the middle of New York, and like, I'm talking to the real Santa fucking Clause. And, like, you know what the best thing was about Santa in real life? He's a brother! Who would have thought Santa was Black? So I'm all like, yeah, let's break some rhymes brother, and he's all like "Get off me or I'm calling the cops", and then I'm all like "Rodney King!". And then he's all like ignoring me or something. And then I realise that now Santa's hit the big time in New York on 5^th, he doesn't care for his brothers any more. And I'm all like sell-out, and I like, go and you know, buy stuff, like in the nearest store on 5^th.

New York

2004-12-04T05:03:00.000+01:00

Starry Nights

I spent my first night out in New York this evening, after managing to sleep in for far too long today. Amie and I headed out to Starry Nights, a Jazz night on at the Rose center, off the American Museum of Natural History. It's a pretty impressive looking building, with funky lighting all over the place. The funky lighting, of course, makes it hell to take pictures with my dinky digital camera. I've yet to figure out the logistics of taking pictures in dark areas with my camera. I guess you will all know when I figure it out, when I have good pictures up here.

New York New York

2004-12-03T07:40:00.000+01:00

I've arrived in New York. It's really late, and I'm going to get some sleep.

It's a small world after all

2004-12-02T18:13:00.000+01:00

It's a small world after all

You'll never believe who I bumped into at the gate for my flight to Vancouver (via Honolulu). Bun was off on a round the world trip, and was sitting a few rows behind me on the flight. I'm posting this from the airport lounge in Vancouver after I became a bit desperate and shelled out the $8 CN for TELUS internet access. The flight was largely uneventful, and the customs and immigration (so far) have been quite courteous and professional in the demeanour.

Guess who's at the airport?

2004-12-02T16:24:00.000+01:00

Guess who's at the airport?

Liz is at the airport on the same day to head off to Vancouver for a skiing trip. She leaves an hour later than me, but arrives about 1 day later, thanks to el dodgy airline China Air. We went on a spending spree together and splashed out on some travellers purse thingies. Very useful to have. This photo was taken just before I walked through the point of no return (Immigration).

Bhautik and Briony see me off

2004-12-02T15:25:00.000+01:00

These two kids see me off

Bhautik and Briony came to drop me off at the airport. I was pretty tense about getting on the plane, worried quite a lot about the safety of my luggage. The presence of copious amounts of duct tape soon appeased my worries.

The luggage

2004-12-02T05:01:00.000+01:00

The Luggage

These are the two bits of luggage I will be lugging around. It's the night before I leave, and after a day of stressing, I finally think everything is under control. Except for having to pick up my passport from the courier on the way to the airport. I'm setting out from home at about 7am tomorrow morning - so hopefully nothing goes wrong between now and then.

Photo galleries

2004-11-25T12:56:00.000+01:00

Big thanks to Yun for setting me up with a photo gallery account at photos.mooh.org. Rather than using Flickr now to host pictures (and paying $50 for the privelege of one-click blog posting), I'll be posting most of my pics up at mooh. It really is becoming the new Yahoo.

Testing

2004-11-15T15:04:00.000+01:00

Welcome to my trip log. This design has been shamelessly stolen from Malevole, but I'm using it since I want to play around with spiffy looking html.