Lisbon is one of the coolest cities I have been to. It is beautiful, friendly, warm, has a great night life and is cheap. I am very glad I am here, loving it. the hotel I am in is one of the best in the universe, absolutely rocks the Kasbah. The hostel does free breakfast, $5 excellent dinners, an awesome lounge room, a lift, great beds, a bar and it is clean and light and really homey. If you come to Lisbon stay at the Oasis and if you are here for 5 nights or more take home a free t shirt!

Today was spent eating cheese and chilling out at the hostel, losing money in poker games and trying to stay out of the pouring rain. Getting to bed at somewhere around 6am made it very easy to spend the day inside taking it easy.

There are 3 other Aussies who are travelling solo here and we have had many a great conversation over drinks in the courtyard out the back. I have not takled for that long about books for ever, very cool to meet fellow science fiction nerds.

The cheese gathering excursion today was not only extremely successful but entertaining (cheese was procured and later consumed). The supermarket obviously was not built with heavy downpours in mind and had a wonderful water feature that came out through one of the lights, interesting, I wondered if they understood how lights work and the compatability of that ability with moisture. I am not sure many places in Europe have heard of OH&S, the cobblestones are a prime example of this.

I will gush some more about Lisbon later, there is more cheese to be eaten.

Apricot Uluru out the bus window

Skies swell with threatening bruises

Olive trees watch silently

Bright stains of foreign bugs splat on windscreens

Neighbours sit too close

Crowding my passage

Once again climbing through the window

into another world

Ttravelling feels like defenestration

Plunging Alice like curious, confused

My music closes around me

Adrift in a dream world

Imagination not needed

 Cold floors

Uncomfortable chairs

Where is my shoe

Places not spend a Friday night definitely include Luton, and its Airport. I spent a funfilled 19 hours in the airport. It was 2 degrees outside and no more then 7 inside. If you decide, as I did, that the best way to save money is to get very cheap flights and spend the night in the airport, take a sleeping bag. And try not to have one of your shoes mysteriously vanish (I have 2 pairs fortunately and am determined to find the roaming one that somehow escaped me).

On the plus side I was not the only person sleeping in the airport and I met some cool people, we laughed a lot. You can bond with anyone when trying to sleep on an airport floor and or seat. I was also happy to discover that Luton is a 'silent airport' meaning it does not announce flights or any information apart from the compulsory messages about not leaving your bag and not smoking inside, which are only every half an hour or so, rather then every 2 minutes ala the States (incidentally as soon as these warnings were played back to back, half the airports population abandonded their bags to go and smoke outside in the freezing cold, another example of the power of suggestion misapplied, Interesting that the lesser of the 2 evils was bag abandonment not smoking indoors).

Airports aside, I am now in Portugal and so far, I love it. The hostel I am in, is the best yet. Clean, has bar, light fillled, comfortable beds and reasonable numbers of people in each room. It seems, like every hostel, to be inhabited mainly by Yanks, Aussies and some token Canadians and Kiwis, but they are thus far a cool crew, even in my sleep deprived state. What little I have seen of Lisbon leads me to believe it is a beautiful city with lots of oppurtunties for fun. And the sun sticks around until 6 and it is a balmy 21 degrees, England you could learn from this....

Flying essentially over Portugal to get to England and wait 19 hours for my flight to Lisbon was surreal, but Marrakech had primed me for oddities and surrealism. Hours spent trying to find a way out of the (Funky Pink) Medina makes any western plane experience pale in comparison. Marrakech Airport with its tent in the carpark, lack of information and lassiez fair attitude to announcements and departure times, also added to the surrealism of the whole Morroco affair and detracted from the strange universe of airports and their cleaning machines.

Africa, tick.

Pink Buildings rise

above crumbling alleys

Rioting senses

So I am in Africa. And it is certainly something else, by the far the most "foreign" place I have been yet. Biz and I are staying on the edge of the Medina, the ancient town, which is the most confusing maze I have ever entered. No invading hoards would have been able to conquer this town; they would be hard pressed to relocate their seige engines if they made it in, and would do the only sensible thing to do in this crazy town and roll a doobie and try and find coffee.

I have seen the white slavers, they roll past their captives in tow all looking stupefied, drugged and confused. I had mistakenly thought white slavers are snatching people against thier will and selling them. I now know that in fact you sell yourself into slavery, you pay your fee and wonder around behind some knob with a paddle while he shares ancient history and you congratulate yourself on being so adventurous. No, the true white slavers are the tour operators, trapping thier victims and dictating every second of their Morroccan Experience.

Meanwhile I may be lost but I am free. Free to be hassled by children who offer to show you to different places in the maze. They catch you when in a weak moment as you draw out your useless map and pretend to know where you are, let alone where you are going. "Big Square?" They offer and volunteer to lead anywhere, usually they take you to the tourist traps and market stalls and then demand exhorbitant amounts of money for the priveliege. "But this is not where I wanted to go..." Pleading and rationality does no good nd on the end the only thing left to do is swear t them and look angry. Or I suppose you could give them what the verage family gets in a week as they demand, but I won't.

We found the Museum of Marrakech which I hypothesised was where they showed you what happened to all the other tourists. Apprently it really is a museum... But the whole city seems to be a window into the past, so I wonder what is in there that is not on the streets? Wood fired cooking, donkeys and primitive attitudes to women are everywhere alongside scooters, bikes and the worst driving I have seen for a while. Since we continue to stumble on the Museum, it would be great to know where it actually is, especially in relation to the hotel, but no it is just everywhere.

The Big Square is exactly that; a big square. Like most of the Medina there are stalls with spices, shoes, clothes, produce, live turtles, animal skins and hats, but it also has the added bonus of snake charmers, people in national dress and with monkeys. Everyone wants to sell you things and constant harrassment the latest price of white middle class priveliege.

Marrakech is colourful place, I think I like it. But I am glad I am not here on my own. I am also getting a little tired of being looked at like a prostitue.

Barcelona was a lot of fun. It was interesting to hang out with people who live there, (although I only met one person who was actually Spanish), I was hanging out with people from Argentina, Sweden, Italy, England and all sorts of places. It is tough hanging out with a bunch of people who know each other and all speak a different language, I spent a lot of time having absolutely no idea what was going on.

I did get to go to lots of cool bars and parties that I never would have found on my own.

Tuesday was All Hallows Eve, or more commonly known as Halloween. It is not a big thing in Spain, but the 1st of November, the Day of the Dead is. However like most places, any excuse to party and get drunk and do it in a silly costume is seized upon. Despite not arriving to the party until about 2am (apparently getting dressed like everything else in Barcelona takes 67 times as long as it does in other places, see below), it was still pumping. It was a cool party lots of people and some fantastic costumes, but once again not knowing anyone or understanding what anyone was talking about was a challenge.

I went and saw Manu Chao play on Friday night. It was awesome but very weird. Watching such a famous Spainsh speaking band surrounded by

Spanish speakers who know every word, to every song and have their own ways of appreciating music can be very overwhelming for someone who understands no Spanish and is relatively clueless about the lyrics. This was followed to a visit to my idea of hell. Port Olympia, which is revolting tourist bars filled with shiny people, pissed English dickheads and other classless tourists. It is a giant meat market full of awful music and bad bars.

Apparently Barcelona is where all of the short people in Europe congregate, it was mind blowing looking over a sea of very short heads. I have never seen so many short people in one place. I felt like a viking, a giant like an entirely different species. Where do these people all buy clothes, I am assuming Barcelona has places for tiny people to buy tiny clothes and they are not all dressed from the childrens section, but you never know. Seriously small, miniature humans, it freaks me out a little bit.

Barcelona time is different to everywhere else, everything takes longer and no one seems to move very fast. This is really nice to be laid back and chilled out but it does get frustrating if you have ambitions of actually doing anything.

Overall Barcelona has some great food, is cheaper then France (just!), some gorgeous little lanes and slanty old buildings, all the Gaudi you could want in one place and a whole lot of character. It does smell like a urinal, which is unfortunate. But it is beautiful and fun. A city that keeps the hours I like, nothing is open before 10 and the party kicks off at midnight and rages until sunrise. The Gothic Area where I stayed is very cool, it has fantastic bars, excellent food and is not so much of a tourist trap.

Cheese baguette

Red wine sore head cant leave

Repeat for many days

So Sunday morning bright and early I haul my arse out of bed to go and catch the train from Lyon to Barcelona. Being too stingy and still annoyed at the loss of my Eurail Pass to spend a lot of money on train tickets I refuse to catch the very fast train that would take 5 hours and instead opt for a train leaving at 7:23am with 3 changes, 3.5 hours of waiting 

between trains and a total voyage time of 11.3 hours. All good knew, what I was in for. So when I rocked up to the tain station at 7am congratulating myself on being early I was most confused to see trains departing at 6am still displayed on the information board. I persisted in trying to catch my train, got breakfast and sat on the platform with a feeling that something was not quite right.

Around me all the clocks were saying 6:05, the trains departure times seemed to reflect a similar time.. I started wondering when daylight saving finishes in Europe.... Sure enough it finishes on the last Saturday night in October, crap. So I was an hour early and rather unhappy. I thought back to all of the people who had the chance to share this piece of rather relevant information with me. The guy who sold me the ticket the day before, the dude at the hostel who I asked about Metro times, the guy at the train station who told me about Sunday morning connections, the random French dude who attempted to hit on me on the way from purchasing my ticket. Mofos. I coud have slept for an extra hour. I did not have to once again watch the sun come up over a train station (seems to be a recurring theme of this trip). Crap crap cap.

So I am guessing that daylight saving has started in Australia as well. Which means the time difference is now 10 hours. Not that I manage to do any of the things I need to in Australian business hours anway, but this will make it even harder to and give me more excuses. Sorry Mum.

On the bright side I am in Barcelona, hanging out with the notorious Bizarro and staying in a very cool flat for nada, lovely. Barcelona is a welcome relief after Paris, so much cooler. People are dressed like humans not shop mannequins and are delightful to you rather then surly. It is a really pretty city and I got to see the sea for the first time in ages yesterday. Happy Max.

Halloween Party tonight, thank god I brought my cat ears with me, I knew they would be useful. Max´s travel advice says always take a least one costume/item of fancy dress with you.

I have spent a hour conversing with a 3 year old in French. We have similar standards when it comes to communction in French, very satisfying. I was able to disucuss her doll, her doll's life and her sister, she was pleased I was delirious. Her parents were borderline bemused/concerned.

I have decided that when I rule the world along with inroducing a pedestrian licencing system, there will be a special advance licence for anyone who wishes to travel. People will no longer be able to mill in tourist destinations like drunk cats, no more being stuck in a tour group with middle age Italians unable to escape. No more walking 7 abreast in streets. Tour groups will be made to hold a rope, much like pre-schoolers on excursions and the unlicenced will have their own lane where they will no longer ruin it for everyone else. The money from licencing will go to a desperately needed school for pedestrians. Repeat offenders will be limited to walking the streets only between 1200 and 1400, everyone will be happier (except the French who seem to like being miserable and offended, they can continue to turn their noses up at everything in the world that is not French and be miserable bastards).

Lyon is awesome, I'd like more time here but I have crazy adventures with Bizarro ahead of me and a schedule to keep. If you make it to France, spend 2 days in Paris then get your arse down here, cheaper, friendlier, beautiful and still French. Needs more then 36 hours that is for sure. Ce la vie Barcelona tomorrow, ready to exchange sexual harrassment and an attitude problem for just sexual harrassment.

Youth hostel seems to be code for 'school excursions & weirdos'. I think I will stick with the regular hostels from now on, since the 2 I have been to are both strange and crawling with children and/or cats but always freaks. Very much looking forward to spending a night not in a bunk, a floor would be heaven at the moment, anything that does not betray the slightest tremor of the person slumbering 75cm away from me. Most of you also know how phenomenonally tolerant I am of snoring also.... Almost homicidal.