Woah! What an incredible city! This city is buzzing! I love it! It is a hive of desperate activity, flashing lights and furiously beeping horns and it is 100% real! Here, I have managed to a large extent to escape the effects of globalisation. This is the most different place I have ever been. It is much more vibrant than Kuala Lumpur and much more gritty and in your face than Singapore. It's a crazy city full of overloaded mopeds, tuk-tuks and garishly painted taxis all racing around without any kind of order. I have nearly been killed crossing the road so many times now that it's not even scary anymore. There's no such thing as a pedestrian crossing. You just walk right into the traffic and somehow magically stay alive! My host happens to be a tour guide so she got me into the Grand Palace (see photos at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/) for free. The only catch was I had to go as part of a Russian tour group. It wasn't too hard - I just nodded and said "Da" and pretended I knew exactly what was going on. I won't waste superfluities on a description of the Grand Palace when I've put up loads of photos of it. Suffice to say it's breathtaking. Afterwards I drank a coconut full of coconut milk.

There really is no way to describe just what a jumping city this is with either words or photos. You really have to come here and experience it. The heat, the dirt, the smoke, the smells...oh the glorious smells - smells I've never smelled before - smells that change with every footstep. I accidentally found myself lost inside a canalside market and it took me 15 minutes to get out. On the way I think I smelled a hundred new smells and saw things that I had never considered edible before in a culinary context. There were bathtubs full of clicking crabs, basins of squirming eels and stray cats and dogs everywhere picking up the scraps. That is the real Bangkok and it's everywhere. Tourists often miss out on it though by getting taxis everywhere and only going to the tourist sites like all the temples...which are certainly spectacular but real life is even more spectacular here. I caught a river ferry and was nearly knocked out by the smell from the river. It was the brownest river I ever saw and was full of boats going in every direction and spewing black smoke into the air. I don't think they're that concerned about the environment in Bangkok. Somehow, huge ugly catfish manage to survive in this polluted water and people sell bread to throw at them. When you throw them food they thrash about and fight each other to get at it. It's a surprisingly repulsive sight. I think my worst nightmare would be being thrown into that heaving mass of slimy fish and them squirming all over my body! Little wizened brown men squat on dirty cracked pavements and play one-stringed Chinese violins for change. Every sad drag of the boy across the string draws out the creaky misery of their existence. People are always trying to sell you something but I was ready for this after Kuala Lumpur and it didn't seem as bad. I had so many things planned to see because there is a lot to do in Bangkok but it's the kind of city that doesn't work well with plans. The best thing to do in Bangkok is to just stroll down a lane and see what happens and who you'll meet. I am soaking up every moment in this city. I want breathe the sights in through my nose and out through my mouth and eventhough every breath I take is laden with pollution, I savour the strange taste of it. I'm only here for a few days so I'm sure there won't be any long term effects. There is a strange fanaticism about the King of Thailand. They all really really love him and you can be killed for saying anything bad about him. Today is Monday. Apparently, the King was born on a Monday so they celebrate this every Monday by wearing yellow, the royal colour. About 70% of the people on the streets are wearing yellow shirts. It's weird! I didn't have a yellow shirt so I wore my Cork jersey instead. The Skytrain is a monorail that zips about high above all the traffic and gives you great views of the giant anthill below that is Bangkok. I took a stroll down Little Arabia today and met a man who saw my Cork jersey and said he'd just placed a bet on Waterford United to beat Longford in soccer and lost. He even showed me the betting slip which was in Thai. How weird is that! Why would they care about the Eircom league in Thailand? Tonight, Thailand play Australia in soccer here in Bangkok so I'm going to go see if I can get a ticket at the stadium now. I want to run around this city like a headless  chicken because there's just so much to do. Bye!

I arrived in Bangkok last night. The air hostesses bowed at me with joined palms as I got on the plane and said "Sa wat tii ka", which my travel guide assures me means hello. The lower the plane descended into the madness that is Bangkok, the more amazed I became at the glittering colours beneath me. Thai billboards are huge! They can probably be seen from space and they're fringed by flashing lights. And naturally I don't understand a word of what's written on them. It's quite a humbling experience to suddenly become completely illiterate. I have tried to learn what the numbers look like so I will understand price tags. I've been studying the Thai Baht notes. The one looks like a snail and the five looks like a bald merman begging for food...trust me...it does. The money is useless. There are about 40 baht to a euro so everyone here is a millionaire. I'm walking around with thousands in my pocket! This city is hot and wet and dirty and so far I like it. It's a city that smells of promise, adventure and a little raw sewage in the canals. One thing's for sure. There will be a lot more updates from now on. I'm staying in a hospitalityclub apartment with a Russian girl called Anastasia. I have to get out there now and start exploring. Time is of the essence! By the way here's the address for my Thailand photos from now on: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Thailand/

So far there's only one photo up there but there will be plenty more soon. Later!

It has been another week of me doing nothing apart from being cold and dreaming of Thailand's tropical heat. I have been eating remarkable amounts of Krispy Kremes. I was overjoyed when I discovered they had them here and have been buying them by the dozen ever since. The only problem is they're twice as expensive as they are in America for some reason. The worst thing about Australia is the inexplicable and unforgivable absence of Ben & Jerry's. It simply does not exist here – I can't possibly imagine why a country would happily go about its daily business without the benefit of the creamy goodness of Ben & Jerry's!!!

            They just got school holidays here last week so I've been avoiding public areas because they're full of those pesky teenagers up to no good. Going to a shopping centre is a big no no. It's full of spotty adolescents hanging around trying to look cool. The infuriating thing is they're all so trendy! Well actually the really infuriating thing is that the trendiness here is exactly the same as the trendiness at home. There is no difference in styles or tastes…although I expect taste often has little to do with what teenage girls choose to wear. They all have those horrible furry boots or else some kind of other ridiculous-looking boots. Why would people on the other side of the world suddenly develop these monstrosities as part of their fashion while people in Ireland also decided that these boots would be something really cool to wear? They didn't! Once again globalization rears its ugly, crass, tasteless head and strikes a blow for the aesthetically displeasing. I think I'm getting old.

            Meanwhile in real news, I suppose you've all heard about the alleged terrorist doctor who was hanging out in Australia and the massive investigation that's underway here now. Now is not a good time to be a non-Australian doctor with brown skin in Australia because that makes you a terrorism suspect. The witch hunt is well under way with foreign doctors in every corner of this country being interrogated. The guy who they believe actually had something to do with the recent car bombs in the UK was living in Southport. You remember I was there – I remember nearly going into the police station where he is now presumably being held (maybe he's been moved to Brisbane by now) to ask for directions. It's kind of cool to have recently been to a place that is now unexpectedly the centre of a global media focus.

            And the other big deal recently was the Live Earth concerts. The lineup in Sydney was fairly anonymous unless you're Australian. Predictably, New York and London had the best collection of bands. They even had Smashing Pumpkins back in New York!!! I think the whole thing was just an excuse for a big money-making party. Personally, I'm sick of being told to change my light bulbs and stuff by a bunch of musicians who couldn't care less as long as they get to play to a stadium full of fans they didn't have to earn. Someone is getting very rich by jumping on the now hyper-trendy "save the planet man" bandwagon and cashing in on people's trepidation of an imminent apocalypse. Not that I don't believe in global warming or anything but I don't see how having lots of concerts and giving lots of money to the concert promoters is going to "help combat climate change", a phrase which is by now a tired cliché. Throwing money at the problem will not help and the need to "raise awareness" is frankly non-existent as you would have to be living under a rock not to have been aware of global warming. I think the whole thing is a shallow imitation of Live 8 which was a unique and pioneering event that made a real difference to third world poverty. That was an event where money was actually needed for the cause. Poor African people needed cash in order to eat – the ozone layer has no use for it. I fully support having great concerts for the hell of it but why dress it up in eco-friendly agendas and make the musicians preach to the world about something they are unqualified to preach about – musicians should play music and leave environmental lectures to the experts. Perhaps I'm being very harsh but I just feel that a lot of naïve people were conned out of their money – they thought their ticket money would somehow reduce greenhouse emissions and I fail to see how it could possibly do this. Money is not what is needed – just for governments to fulfill their obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. I think that's enough ranting on my part for one day. There are some new photos from the past week up here: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Australia/

Sorry it's been so long since I updated but honestly - nothing has really happened worth writing about. I've spent the past week fruitlessly jobhunting. I've offered to pull pints, work in offices, make ice cream, serve noodles, make little cheese cookie thingys, serve pancakes, sell books, sell CDs and sell cinema tickets. There is plenty of work available if you're willing to go through the whole rigamarole of handing in CVs waiting to be called, going to interviews, waiting to be called again and then actually starting on the job training. I have two more weeks left here which makes this a little difficult. Naturally I'm not telling my potential employers that I've only got two weeks but I think by the time I actually get a job, I'll have to leave the following day! I've budgeted well though and I'm living frugally so I should be ok. South East Asia is notoriously inexpensive anyway. In the meantime I sit here in the cold imagining exotic Asian destinations with ridiculously high temperatures. My feet are itching for the road again and I've recuperated more than enough. I am well ready to set out on the next non-stop two month leg of my odyssey. Two months is a long time to be living out of a backpack - I haven't even reached the half way mark of my summer yet and the past two weeks has been leisurely stress-free living which I think is probably quite unhealthy. I need more action and stimulation to keep me young. I've been reading Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" and it's been stoking the embers of adventure in me again. It's a dizzy travelogue through 1940s America that makes me resent the fact that hitch-hiking is now illegal in America AND Australia! That is so infuriating!

Anyway, today I did something slightly interesting anyway. We went to Gaelic Park where the final of the local Gaelic Football league was on. It was the Wolfe Tones v Sinn Fein. Gaelic Park is way out by Keysborough on the outskirts of the city and if feels like it's in the middle of nowhere. It was like being back home in Kilnamartyra again. What a blast from the past! There was nothing there but the football field and the pub. It was the most genuine Irish pub I've been in so far. The people were actually Irish, the bar was a no-frills kind of a joint and everyone there was an honest-to-God rural Irish person...or close enough anyway. You could take your glasses outside so a lot of people took their pints out to the side of the field and huddled together in the cold, protecting their pints from the wind and yelling encouragement/obscenities at their friends who were playing. None of the players' shorts matched - only the jerseys - and one lad there was wearing UCC shorts. I could have been forgiving for forgetting I was in Australia at all. The pub and changing rooms were built by Irish builders for free because it was so important for the Irish ex-pat community to have a focal point for their culture where they could forget they were on the other side of the world. A lot of Irish people sponsored a brick in the changing rooms and all the bricks have people's names engraved on them. My aunt and uncle have a brick and a few bricks down from them is former President of Ireland, Mary Robbinson, and there's a former Irish Ambassador under her. I got a photo of it to show you. Speaking of which... It doesn't look like the photo application on this blog is ever going to fix itself so I've started uploading some of the backlog to an external server. From now on, I'll upload all my photos there and provide a link in every new blog entry every time there are new photos to see. It's annoying and not ideal but it'll do the job. Here's the link: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Australia/

All the photos from Sydney are up there now and hopefully I'll get the photos from Canberra and Melbourne up over the next few days. Slan!

On Friday night I went to see my first Aussie Rules game in the MCG which is a huge circular stadium with about 100,000 capacity. I had got a crash course in the rules from Jimmy and Kathleen. It was the Melbourne Demons vs. the Richmond Tigers. I supported the Demons. They got creamed. You don't even want to know the score. Suffice to say the the Tigers got into triple figures which is a lot even in Aussie Rules. Every goal is worth six points and every time the miss a goal they get one point! To get a goal you don't even have to kick it into a goal - you just have to kick it between two posts and any altitude you like. You'd think it would be easy. That quare shaped ball they have makes things a bit difficult though. They have to hop it on the ground as they run like in Gaelic Football but it's a lot harder with an oval ball. There are many similarities with Gaelic but it's a much more physical game. You're allowed to run up your opponents' backs and launch yourself off them to catch a high ball which looks very painfull. There's a lot of falling over and throwing people around. Once you get the hang of the rules (which aren't actually that complicated) it's a very entertaining game. Or at least it would have been if Melbourne's performance wasn't so dismal, promting me to leave in disgust at half time. The game tends to run for almost two hours though which I think is a bit long. I've taken to watching it on TV now though. Last night was the Collingwood Magpies vs. the Sydney Swans. The standard was much higher even though the Swans got trashed. There was a young 19 year old Irish lad playing his first game ever for Collingwood last night. They brought him over from Ireland specially! This seems to be the latest craze! They have Setanta O Hailpin from Cork on the Carlton team and Tadhg Kennelly from Listowel on the Sydney team. I'd give it a go myself if the ball wasn't that quare shape and I wasn't about three sizes too small!

To make up for my failed Museum Crawl, I spent the ENTIRE day yesterday in the Melbourne Museum. It's a fairly big museum and I was determined to see everything. There was a massive exhibit on Aboriginal history and another exhibit of preserved human organs. My favourite though was an actual first generation computer - the fourth ever built. It was so funny! It was huge - it took up a whole room. You couldn't fit it in most student's bedrooms. It had flashing orange lights and little printouts on paper reels and it made little retro computer music which apparently took six months to program. The funniest part is that my little mobile phone is far more powerful than it! That monstrosity can't play MP3s or display photos or videos. There were also samples of later computers like IBMs and Apples from the eighties and advertisements saying how advanced they were. There was a first generation laptop which was bigger than my accordion! There was also an exhibit on the first mouse which was made of wood and metal. What a blast from the past! I was still wandering around a cool exhibit on the Great Wall of China when I was kicked out by security at closing time. A day well spent if I say so myself!

Last night, I found an ITF Tae Kwon-Do club and went along for training. I plan to train here twice a week while I'm in Melbourne. It was a small club run by identical Chinese twins (3rd Dans) who also have a younger brother who looks confusingly like them and is a student there (2nd Dan). The only way I can tell the three Chins (that's their surname) apart is by checking the names on their belts. It was great to go over all my patterns again with someone to correct me although I didn't get to do any sparring. As my first training session in about two months, I was very happy that my recent neck and ankle injuries didn't seriously affect me but I'll have to try some sparring before I'm totally satisfied that I've made a reasonably full recovery.

Today I went to the Queen Victoria Market. Despite the imperialistic title, it was actually quite an enjoyable experience. It's basically a humongous (yes it's a word!) shed with cheap clothes in one part and fruit & veg, and meat and fish on the other. It's a lot like Cork's English Market only bigger and louder. As people mill about inside, vendor's shout out their rock bottom prices like auctioneers, lowering them by the minute. The mixture of smells in there was so exhilarating that I almost felt guilty breathing out instead of constantly inhaling the healthy aromas that cordially introduced themselves to my flattered nostrils. In the space of about ten steps, I could smell meats, fish, cheeses, Chinese food and baking bread. I had to physically restrain myself from buying everything in the place. If they could bottle the olfactory experience of that market, I would have bought several crates of those bottles.

You will recall that yesterday I was going to go on a museum crawl today. I did visit a Chinese/Australian museum in Chinatown where the Australian proprietor was so bubbly and excited about me visiting her wonderful museum, that I was sure she was either under the effects of some hallucinogen or a failed children's television presenter. That was the extent of my museum crawl unfortunately. Instead I went on a pub crawl to try and find some work. By now I have visited The Corkman, Pugg Mahones, PJ O Briens, Bridie O Reilly's, The Celtic Club and The Quiet Man. I was rather hoping I could just say hello in an Irish accent and walk into a job but they all want CVs or application forms and then they might grace me with a phone call some time next week.

The evening was spent listening to Jimmy's stories about immigration in the fifties and old skool Australia and Ireland. It was such a different world back then. He just went to the Australian Embassy, where he was welcomed in and encouraged to go to Australia. There were no planes so he had to go on a cruise ship. The Australian government paid most of it and it would have only cost him 10 pounds but the dates didn't suit so he had to go on a more expensive ship for 110 pounds! It took several weeks to get here and then when he was thinking about going job hunting he walked out on the street, LOOKED at a building site, and the foreman ran out to offer him a job with an immediate start! Wouldn't it be nice to be offered a job without even asking! Maybe tomorrow!

I am in Melbourne. Before I embarked upon the eight hour bus journey to Melbourne I had the opportunity to visit the National Australian Parliament and the High Court of Australia. The latter was a lovely empty building because the court had decided to go on tour to Brisbane that week. The former, however, was quite fascinating. I saw the Australian Prime Minister and I got a photo of him which I can't show you because the photo upload mechanism is still broken!!! I am beginning to wonder if I will be able to show you any more totally excellent photos of my totally excellent adventure at all! I sat in a packed public gallery for question time which consisted mainly of a lively debate about the provision of broadband and the brandishing of an incriminating leaked email! I left Canberra yesterday in a haze of unreality and arrived in Melbourne last night.

I'm staying here at my uncle Jimmy's house which makes a welcome change from the hostel lifestyle. I've been catching up on family histories from well before my time. Jimmy and his wife Kathleen have been here since the fifties and it's so strange to hear them talk about Australia then. When he arrived, there were no buildings in Melbourne higher than five stories (there's plenty of skycrapers now) and the city of Canberra was just a swamp. I walked around Melbourne today and it seems like a better planned city than Sydney and a bit less hectic. I visited the State Library where I spent a long time examining their exhibits on literature through the ages with really old rare books. It started with early Iraqi inscriptions on stones from 5000BC right up to the present day and was a rundown of the major literary milestones in between. Obviously everyone will always disagree as to what should be in there but I think they covered all the major bases they should have Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, early Bibles and prayerbooks, and so many many more from every era that I couldn't possibly name. They had Joyce and Beckett in there but no sign of Oscar Wilde. There were also sections on graphic novels and manga including some great extracts from Frank Miller's Sin City.

I also visited the State Supreme Court and sat in on some criminal trials. They were unsurprisingly lengthy and tedious. I quickly grew tired of listening to a doctor explain over and over about the difference between a wound from a sharp object and a blunt object.

After you've been travelling for a while, every city starts to look like different versions of the same template. You have to work hard to capture the wonder and awe of being on the other side of the world because sometimes it can feel far too much like home. Naturally this is more true of Australia than most of the rest of the world but in order to grasp the reality of being in a different country,
I find it helps a lot to try to learn about the history of the country because there was a time before globalisation and cheap air travel (not that long ago) when every country was vastly different. Everyone over the age of forty is a living relic of that wonderful time. Their minds are like a lump of amber with an extinct insect preserved perfectly inside. They are products of an unimaginably diverse world that is now very difficult to experience first hand. There are few places left in the world that are truly untouched by the outside world. North Korea is one of these places which is why I would like to visit it someday if I can. I saw a relevant quote from Salman Rushdie in the State Library: "It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, That its loss is part of our common humanity." I always believed that when one travels, one should not waste time in dusty museums when you could be out there experiencing real life. However, real life continually disappoints me with its predictability and uniformity. This is why I now see the value in spending time in the museums of various countries to try and imagine a lost foreigness that is now extremely elusive. Australia was once an outpost of the Empire struggling to beat back the wilderness and the Aborigines. This wasn't actually as long ago as one might think and it's wonderful to imagine that time. Furthermore, it isn't all imagination. Most countries have millions of citizens over the age of forty who have been shaped by a very different world to mine and in turn, shape this one. It is vital that I understand the kind of country that influenced them if I am to understand the country that I travel through in the 21st century and to savour what is left of the diversity of the world. With this in mind, I hope to go on a bit of a museum crawl tomorrow.

So I'm in Canberra. This is a very strange city. It doesn't feel like a city at all. It feels like a national park that just happens to have houses and monuments scattered around everywhere. Actually it's a lot like Vermont. It's very well planned as it was constructed only about 80 years ago as a purpose-built capital. Instead of being laid out in a grid plan like most well-planned cities, it's based around circles with roads that go around the circles like everexpanding ripples on a lake. There are several of these circles and each is like it's only little town circle, all the ripples eventually intersect forming one big sprawling network of roads through a tree-filled city that feels like the countryside. It's like lots of little Essex Junctions [FEN: in Vermont] stuck together. Technically, it's late autumn here so the trees are sporting some very fetching yellow coats at the moment. Today is Sunday and there are families out everywhere enjoying the brisk cold air and sunshine. Everyone cycles around here because it's so flat and pretty. There are families gathered around the huge lake around which the centre of the city is built and there are people sailing little remote control sailing boats on it. There is a huge carillon on one bank. For those of you who don't know, a carrilon is a giant musical instrument featuring at least 23 bronze bells played from a baton keyboard using fists and feet. It is housed in a big bell tower. You can almost see the tumbleweed blowing around Canberra though. Apparently it has a population of over 300,000 but it seems empty and small. It's so easy to forget you're in a capital city and sometimes I am briefly confused when I walk past an embassy, wonder what it is doing in the middle of nowhere and then remember that this is the capital. There seem to be more monuments and official buildings than people in this city and I imagine that everyone who does live here is a civil servant because there doesn't seem to be any industry or businesses to speak of here. It is very strange but I like it. It's a very relaxed place and everyone seems remarkably happy and friendly. I think they are unaffected by the stresses of city living here. It wouldn't suit everyone. Not a great place to go partying I'd say, although there are loads of fake Irish pubs. I'm hoping I can find a real one to watch the Munster hurling semi-final in tonight at 1AM. Yesterday I visited a lot of war memorials and spent hours and hours in a huge museum just about Australia's military history. I find it particularly interesting to see that in the dozen or so wars that Australia has been in, their enemies have become allies and vice versa many times over the past 150 years. It highlights for me the fickleness of war. Many of the monuments here claim to symbolise the futility of war and these monuments are commissioned by the Australian government. Yet, the Australian government continues to take part in new wars. I fail to understand how they can reconcile this obvious dichotomy of principle. I feel it must necessitate resorting to a dispicable Orwellian doublethink. There are Australian troops in Iraq right now. I read a list of all the wars Australia has been in and the last one was referred to as "The War on Terrorism". I found this very strange. Is this the name that will go down in history books? It seems like such a glib, vague Americanism coined to justify an unjustifiable attack. The Sydney War Memorial referred to it more accurately as "The Iraq War". This memorial also listed all the wars Australia had been in and gave a brief explanation of why the wars were started. For the Iraq war, it sheepishly admitted that the motivations that affected Australia's decision to enter the war (namely WMDs and an alleged link to Al Queda), had "since been discredited". Why then, are there still Australian troops in Iraq? While I have been in Australia, I have listened over and over to the Pogues song [FEN: Irish punk/folk fusion band] "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda". It is a song sung from the perspective of an Australian who is drafted for the first World War and sent to Turkey where he gets his legs blown off. He returns a veteran and very cynical and bitter about war in general. This song inspired me to learn more about a side of the 1st World War I knew nothing about - Australias conflict with Turkey. Apparently, this is the most infamous battle that Australian troops ever took part in - Gallipoli. The Australians landed in a strategically inferior position in Turkey and the Turkish troops picked them all off with machine guns. The Australians didn't give up and they advanced up the mountain towards them. They were mowed down by the Turks. I believe it was Australia's greatest military defeat ever. Shane McGowan [FEN: Pogues singer] spits bitterly: "We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter. Johnny Turkey was ready, he'd primed himself well. He showered us with bullets and he rained us with shells and in ten minutes flat, he'd blown us all to hell, nearly blew us right back to Australia." This really brings home to me the horror of war. The objective is after all, to kill as many people as possible. The strength of a victory is judged by the body count on the opponent's side. But enough of such unappealing talk...

Today I will visit the national parliament. My roomate incidentally, is another Korean by the name of Pyeong Chin (probably incorrectly spelled). He is also a Tae Kwon-Do black belt but he is WTF and I'm ITF. He says that all he knew about Ireland was what he saw on the sports news about the strength of ITF in Ireland. That is so cool! I wish they had Tae Kwon-Do on sports news in Ireland. We practised a bit outside the hostel and he gave me some tips on increasing power. I also discussed the North Korean situation with him and tried to guage the Korean attitude towards the US and China who are like two stubborn children tearing on either arm of a helpless puppet (Korea), both desperate to impose their method of governance over the whole peninsula. The Korean sentiment seems to be resentful of the US and Chinese imposition into a Korean issue. Anyway, I still have a lot to see in Canberra so I better be off. I have rented a bike (when in Canberra!) and have already cycled around some of the lake which was very relaxing. Now it's off to the Parliament House!

So I've spent several days in Sydney now and I've seen a lot of things. Sydney is beautiful if you catch it on a good day. I think it probably has a lot more good days in summer. I went on a tour of a convict barracks which had a monument to Irish famine victims - didn't expect to see one of those so far from home. I went into the New South Wales parliment house to check it out - it's probably slightly grander than the Queensland one. I also spent a lot of time exploring the city with Mati, the Korean guy in my hostel room room. We visited a meticulously landscaped Chinese garden and then we got a tour of an actual Australian naval battleship called the HMAS Vampire, followed by a tour of a naval submarine called the HMAS Onslow. That was seriously cool - I never thought I'd get to go on a submarine. I sat in the captain's chair and everything! I'm having technical difficulties uploading photos at the moment so I can't show you all the wonderful things I saw but as soon as these difficulties are resolved I will get them up there. We walked through Chinatown. There are so many Asians in Sydney it's just staggering. You could walk through Chinatown and never realise you were in Australia. I'm sure there are old Chinese people living there who never leave Chinatown and live their lives as if they were still in the old country. Then we got a ferry from Darling Harbour over to Circular Quay and enjoyed some amazing views of the Syndey Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House. We walked half way across the bridge and back again as the sun set and got some beautiful photos of the Opera House that you'll just have to wait to see. It's a massive bridge. It's a lot like the Brooklyn Bridge only more touristy. If you're loaded you can pay loads of money to actually climb up the bridge right to the top where the flags of Australia and New South Wales fly.

Night had fallen by the time we got off the bridge so we went to Sydney Observatory where we got the once in a lifetime experience of gazing at the constellations through a huge, computer-controlled telescope. You just click on the constellation you want to look at on a computer screen and the dome above rotates to point the slit at the correct part of the sky and then the big telescope rotates around on its stand and points itself out the slit. It was very surreal to be looking at Sydney Harbour Bridge through that slot and then examining the planets up above it. We saw lots of constellations that you can't see in the northern hemisphere. We saw Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, Saturn and Jupiter. You could actually see the little rings around Saturn and if you squinted really hard you could see the tiny little specks of Jupiter's moons. After this breathtaking experience, we thought we couldn't be any more astounded but we walked over to the Sydney Opera House anyway and walked around it. It really is an amazing piece of architecture. Standing in front of it, we got such a beautiful view of the lights of Sydney's skyscrapers.

Today was a far more soggy affair. It was cold and wet. Mati had a plane to catch so I caught a train out to the Blue Mountains for a day's bushwalking. I was quite blue myself when I got there and the mountains were more of a subdued grey than blue. It was way colder than Sydney - they had had snow that morning and the rest of the day was drizzly and misty. Therefore, many of the breathtaking views were obscured by cloud. Nevertheless, I strode on undeterred. I attacked the mountains with a steely determination. I was about to descend some steep steps from the top of a cliff into the valley when I met a German girl called Ursula who accompanied me for the remainder of the hike. She had spent the past nine months travelling through New Zealand and Australia on her own and today was her last day in Australia before flying home. We spent several hours walking and admiring some massive waterfalls until we had to scale what was called "The Giant Staircase", which was essentially...a giant staircase. It went on and on and on straight up the face of the cliff and we thought we would die on those steps until we finally reached...a sign saying "Half Way"!!! Someone had scratched the name of the Lord in vain onto that sign and I shared their despair. About half an hour later, we were sitting in front of a fire in a chocolate shop drinking tea and now I am back in Sydney waiting for the rain to stop. Tomorrow, I pick up my Vietnamese visa from the Consulate General here and then it's off to Canberra this weekend. Hopefully the weather will improve a bit in the Australian Capital Territory...probably not though because it's further south. I should be at my final Australian destination (Melbourne) by Tuesday or Wednesday, where I will remain until July 15th. Let's hope it doesn't snow there!!! 

So I'm in Sydney now but before I tell you about that let me go back to where I left off in Byron Bay. My first night in Byron Bay was spent wandering around the outskirts of the town. It's not a very big town so it didn't take me long to walk out to where the pavement turns to sand (anyone get that reference?) and where streetlights were few and far between. From there, I got a good long look at the southern hemishpere's sky which was startlingly spectacular. The southern cross was very prevalent and unmistakable. The following morning, I was picked up from the hostel by a rainbow coloured bus that looked like it drove straight out of an episode of Scooby Doo. I was going on a day trip to Nimbin, which was the real hippy haven. On the way we passed through Lismore, which was eloquently described by the bus driver as being a bit of a sh*thole. I thought it had a certain rustic charm. All the wooden houses were on stilts because apparently the town tends to get flooded now and again and all the shops get waterlogged. Isn't that just ridiculous! Why would you build a town on such marshy ground? We'd never let this happen in Cork would we?

Anyway, when we pulled into Nimbin I had to rub my eyes and confirm that the bus we were on was indeed merely a Mystery Machine rather than a time machine. It's like we'd landed straight back in the 60s. Crusty old scraggly looking hippies sat around smoking and composing songs about peace and not washing. Every square inch of building was covered in multicoloured paint. I tumbled out of the bus with a Hindu from Birmingham and a confused Dubliner with whom I had struck up a rapport. We wandered down Nimbin's one street in a daze not really believing what we were seeing. Every second minute, we were approached by young people, old people and middle aged people all trying to sell us dope quite openly.  We wandered into the Hemp Embassy, where there was plenty of hemp related paraphenalia for sale and displays and newspaper clippings on why hemp was so brilliant. Then we went to the Nimbin museum which was more like a hallucinogenic trip through random relics of a hippy subculture than an actual museum. We stumbled back out into the light and gingerly made our way through some bead curtains into a pub. It was a long pub with everyone sitting at the bar smoking hash. The interior decor was like the inside of a hippy's stomach. There were little TVs all over the place playing subversive anti-establishment videos. We slipped back out through the bead curtain onto the street. Everywhere we looked were shops selling organic this and natural that. There were healing centres and apothocaries. I almost expected Janis Joplin to suddenly appear and start saying something very profound and drawn out about love. There was even a police station way down at the end of the village on its own. I can't imagine what the cop who works there does all day because he sure as hell never leaves the  building. One can't help but address the prohibition issue internally after being to this village. Some of the pro-drugs propaganda we saw in this village would have you believe that the wacky tobacky gives you a heightened consciousness and opens your mind. After what I saw there that day, it is clear that all it does is lower your consciousness  to a level of quasi-unconsciousness where the user drifts apathetically through his day without ever really registering what's going on. Their eyes are incapable of focusing on anything and so are their inspired soliloquays. The user is uninterested in life in general and responds more slowly and inaccuratly to ordinary conversation. They seem amused by the evidently unamusing. The psychological benefits of marijuana are in fact disbenefits. However, hemp also has many other uses such as a fabric, paper and biofuel. Whatever one's opinion of the drug, it is undeniably unjustifiable to ban it while tobacco, an otherwise useless cash crop and proven deadly substance, is legally available. In a democracy where the freedom of the individual is paramount (with the caveat that one does not infringe on the freedom of other citizens), it seems obvious that people should have complete control over what substances they do and do not consume. While I am convinced that the consumption of marijuana would only make a country's population duller and more stupid, people under the influence of the drug are essentially passive and unagressive whereas those under the influence of alcohol frequently become violent and abusive. In fact, I think it would be in the best interests of a bad government to legalise the drug as it would make their electorate too stupid to notice all their flaws and too apathetic to even vote anyway. No offence potheads!

Anyway, after all that...we left Nimbin but we didn't really travel forward in time because we went to the Channon Market, which is an arts & crafts/organic foods market held every Sunday. This place had a really relaxed and laid back atmosphere. Families came and walked around or just sat on the grass enjoying the spectacle. There were a little kids orchestra playing what appeared to be bamboo glockenspiels in harmony and an old hippy playing a harp.

After that we went to a "secret swimming hole" which had a little waterfall where you could climb up to the top and jump in. It was FREEEEEEZING!!!!! It made Coolea pool feel like a sauna. [FEN: this is a small unheated outdoor pool in the middle of nowhere.] The landscape of New South Wales replaces Queensland's cane fields with huge orchards, that stretch over hills and valleys.

Just to give you an idea of what a cool place Byron Bay is, last night I passed two establishments within five minutes and each had live jazz playing inside. We picked one and weren't disappointed. Now when I say jazz I mean this was hardcore jazz. It was finger snappingly zap zupa zebedee hardore! There was this little black beret-clad American guy who was built like an Orangutan with short little legs, a long torso and even longer arms that draped themselves nonchalantly over his electric double bass which he played so fast that you couldn't even see his fingers. He used phrases like "hip to the tune" so he was definately a real live jazz musician. Every piece was about fifteen minutes long and seperated by long and seemingly pointless monologues. Now that's real jazz! After the music ended, we went back to the hostel where I caught about 37 winks of sleep before stealing away in the dead of night to catch a 1:20AM bus to Sydney.

I was the only passenger for much of the journey given the unsociable hour. I sat in the back seat and pretended I was being driven in an incredibly long stretch limo. I slept a restless sleep for much of the 12 hour journey. I had developed a very painful ache in the back of my neck which made turning my head even a little bit quite inconvenient. This is an ache that continues to plague me even now. We pulled into Sydney about 1PM. We drove right over  the Sydney Harbour Bridge with its twin Australian flags fluttering proudly in the breeze. I saw the harbour and the opera house and much of the CBD from the bus. When I got a subway straight to my hostel. The subways here are massive - they're double deckers - I don't know how they fit them underground. My hostel was in King's Cross. It was after I had booked my hostel online that I bothered to check my Lonely Planet to see what kind of a place was it at all. I was mildly alarmed to note that King's Cross was what Lonely Planet cheerfully referred to as "a bizarre cocktail of strip joints, prostitution, crime and drugs shaken and stirred. The Cross has always been lovably roguish..." Lovably roguish would not be how I would describe it. My hostel is on the "trashy main drag". This place is quite a pit of depravity actually but one has only to walk one street away in any direction to escape the worst of it and there are some beautiful views of the city from a nearby street. The bouncers actually try to persuade you to come into the strip joints as you're walking by which is a completely alien concept to me. Bouncers are supposed to be there to keep you out. As I walked down the street in the middle of the day, I encountered a crime scene that was taped off by the police and there were two cops standing around taking photos of a big pool of blood on the pavement with a towel next to it. I helped them out and took a photo of my own for your benefit. I'm sure I'll be fine though - I'd feel much more confident if I could turn my head painlessly though. I got a fairly cheap Chinese massage which has alleviated some of the pain but not all. I also got to eat steak and spuds today for only $10 while listening to some truly inspired music played on two acoustic guitars in a little place called Joe's Cafe. Joe and his daughter run the cafe and they seem to enjoy it as much as I did.

In terms of my roomates, there are two girls who work in the strip joint across the street, there's a guy who does nothing but sleep and there's a Korean guy who also just moved in today called Mati. Mati and I have been walking around getting a feel for the place and discussing the major issues one would expect like Tae Kwon-Do, my tatoo, the current political relations between North Korea and South Korea and a comparative analysis thereof using the Irish peace process as a model. Since he's only been learning English for a few months this was all done very slowly, and interspersed with me showing off my useless ability to count to 20 in Korean. So far Sydney would seem to be the New York of Australia in terms of its hugeness - it dwarfs Brisbane. Its much too early to reach any conclusions about the place yet though having only seen a tiny seedy corner of it. I will be here until at least Saturday. Tomorrow I will try to find the Vietnamese Consulate so I can apply for my Vietnamese visa. Who knows what Sydney holds in store for me tomorrow...