Having a wonderful time in Bristol with my P2C friend Zoe, being shown around and looked after, makes a very pleasant change to winging it on my own. I have many stories and exciting things to write about but I am cold and cannot be bothered at the moment, so I will write a more entertaining and informative entry later.

Loving the English countryside, it is very beautiful. I feel like I am in a novel, one of those quaint ones with bread and drippings and lots of tea.

Briggsy, what is your email address???

Tim, Happy Birthday for Friday in case I cannot email.

So in my time in London I have had the good fortune to experience the following marvels; Black Monday on the tube system, the Indian Consulate and their visa granting processes, vaccinations against nasty things and some seriously dreary weather.

Black Monday was apparently one of the worst days ever on the tube system. I should know I spent 45 minutes between Russell Square and Holbourn. I having braved Cityrail plenty of times, I did not realise that it was still one of the worst days ever. Seemed like a pretty good day by Sydney train standards; delays on 75% of lines, ranging from severe to stopped dead. Having said that I was not on during peak hour and what was normally an hour round trip did take me three hours. Thank God I was in zen travel mode or I may have cried.

The Indian consulate issues 1500 'q' card from 8:30 until 12 every day or until they run out. You then take your card and wait for your number to be called to go and put your application in with a harrassed member of staff who then tells you to do some more things and come back tomorrow. Finally after 3 days of this joy and glory the Indian consulate have my passport and will supposedly return it with my visa next week, I said I would go and pick it up, I am scared. Anyone attempting to get a visa from the embassy in London be warned; you will need at least one day and 2 passport photos and some serious weather gear for the hours of standing around outside in the sleet waiting for 'q' cards or entry into the hall of angry travellers and tired workers.

Travel vaccinations hurt. I was vaccinated against Typhoid, Tetnus, Polio, Hepititas A & C and 2 others, I can't remember, but they were obviously important. My arms have been dead for 2 days and are now just recovering. For this priveliege I paid £120, or $300Au. The money definitely hurt more then the needles. I spent another £40 on my visa application, so in one day I spent $400au to stand in a queue all day, in the rain and get stabbed with painful things that caused me to be unable to clean under my arms for 2 days. Life feels like an Ernest Hemingway novel at the moment. All that is left is for me to lie in agony in a puddle of mud, alone, deserted with sleet dripping down my heavy wool collar or something.

London is a miserable cold place to be in Movember (it is Movember because; it is the month that all who are capable are supposed to grow a moustache, you can donate money to people who defile their faces and it goes to Prostate cancer and Men's depression www.movember.com.au). The sun goes down at 3:30 4:00 and it is cold and rainy. It is not even cold enought to snow, which would be exciting, just cold enough to make me want to stay inside and start storing some reserves for the next ice-age (and no I am not talking about buying canned goods, I prefer the store-it-on-my-person approach to ice-age avoidance also known as the if-I-feed-my-arse-now-later-I-can-feed-my-face-method). It has been nice to do nothing for a week (if you exclude the attacks with syringes and the time spent at the Indian Embassy, which you should because I am working on repressing them out of existence).

Next stop Bristol.... Will keep you updated.

I just wanted to say; Mary, Dan I lost your details. I have no idea of you are cheking this at all but if you ever do send me an email!

Dan happy birthday for Saturday I did want to come out and have drinks but I had lost all you details... I hope it was fun.

Oh and welcome aboard Frankie, it is about bloody time, but I still love ya kid.

http://gallery.tla.net.au/hannah/  go here to see photos of me taken by the second cool Australian I have met called Hannah.

So I am all nostalgic and sad about leaving Portugal and Europe. I am still here but my plane leaves in 3 hours and I am bummed to move on from here. Definitely on the 'must return to list', and the hostel have offered me a job, so there are some good reasons to stay.... Apparently not having a visa is no challenge to making beds and spruiking for the hostel, hmm ok need to stop thinking about this, could be dangerous.

Last night a bunch of the hostel crew played circle of death and headed out to catch some music and savour the Portugese night life (and of course their beer). We found a jazz bar where your cover charge buys beer vouchers, genius! The music was all covers but extremely well played and very easy to listen to. It was also nice to go out in Lisbon and not put up with sexual harrassment for once, excellent development in the Lisbon experience.

So now onto London to freeze my bits off and organise the next stage of this journey. I need a visa and some needles for India, not real excited about either, alhtough quite frankly I think I'd take the needles over the visa any day, I am sure it will be easier and heal faster.

Feeling very apprehensive about India, I have an exit plan... We will see. I am looking forward to Christmas New Years in Goa. As an ex/Portugese colony they should be able to party it up a notch! It is part of my ease myself slowly into the whole India thang. So all you India people send me some tips/advise/places to stay etc, I need all the help I can get. I will be there somewhere around 5th of December at this stage, argh.

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

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.

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.

I made it out of Paris! For a while there I did not know if I would, I got trapped in a cycle of alcohol, sight seeing and partying that was very difficult to break. In fact I attempted to leave Paris on Wednesday and failed, ended up spending the night in a budget hotel in the burbs with an awesome Australian chick from Redfern, Hannah who came for an adventure with me. I had an amazing time, that was more because of meeting some seriously awesome people then Paris itself.

Paris is very beautiful and elegant, but also; rude, sleazy and arrogant. I would like it more without the French in it, and less if I had not met Katie, Bree, Bliss, Hannah and Lochie amongst others. We had so much fun drinking at the Eiffel tower (repeatedly) smuggling contraband booze into our room to play circle of death, going to open mike night at the Beaver (yes the Beaver, it is a Canadian bar near Notre Dame) and generally having a wild time and consuming revolting amounts of alcohol. I had 2 very interesting nights in the luggage room at the hostel.

I did the tourist thing; went to the Louvre, Sacre Couer, Catacombs, Notre Dame, Musee D'Orsee, Montmattre, saw Gallo Roman ruins. All very cool and interesting, but maybe better if you hvae slept more then 3 hours a night.

I have been living on the most phenomenomally fantastic cheese in the world, drinking lovely cheap wine and watching my money vanish like water out of a cotton pocket.

My French has improved hugely (which is not hard considering how crap it was before), I can do pretty much all the basics about directions, purchasing things, small talk and more. Unbelievably I actually needed to know 'window' in French which was great because it is the only thing I remembered from school (oh and how to say 'I am a black and white dog' which is yet to prove at all useful).

Last night Hannah and I stayed in Troyes which was singularly the most bizzare experience of this trip by far. Troyes is south of Paris and full of stupidly well dressed people (who make me look and smell filthier then hobos sleeping at train stations, which I am still a rung above at least) it is lovely and pretty and the former capital of Champagne, but dont bother going.

The youth hostel in Troyes is inhabited by what appears to be a family of bogans who are renovating the place. Hannah and I were the only ones under 55, apart from Cody the cockhead from America. There was a tonne of cats and it was officially bucolic. Very weird, many stories to tell.

Hannah and I parted company in Beaune today, and now I am in Lyon, which is very pretty and seems infinitely cooler then Paris. And it appears that I can eat without selling my remaining, slightly used kidney, hooray! I am here for 2 nights, which hopefully will give me time to wash every item of clothing I own, since that should have been done 10 days ago, and organise my life, or at least getting to Barcelona.

So from Lyon for now au revoir, bon soir and bientot to all.