Ahrgh.
So everyone is probably wondering where the hell I am, and for a change, I know the answer. Right now I'm at the end of a total of 20 hours online in Malta, finally uploading a months worth of photos and 2 months worth of videos, and contemplating the madness that has been the last 4 weeks.
So in case you haven't guessed it already, get yourself a cuppa and some sandwiches, take the phone off the hook and brace yourself, because this is going to be a long one.
First up, miss you all as always and thanks for all the replies. Stories from home are great to hear, even if they're nothing special for you, they are for me!
And a big shout out to my brother Matt who managed to win $20,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire a few weeks ago! Congrats mate! Even managed to have a go at his ex-girlfriend at the same time; quality effort. He's putting on a show at the Melbourne Fringe Festival so I strongly recommend the locals go and check it out!
Links for photos and videos are at the end of the email and I strongly recommend you watch the ones from Sweden, especially the Aftermath video. Even I though it was funny and it's me making a dick of myself on there...
Last I wrote I was bound for Gibralta and a little bit nervous about where I was going to stay. Oh sweet innocence. Since that last email I have covered half of Spain, flown up to party with the Swedes and then descended through western europe in a headlong rush to make it to Malta before my rail pass ran out.
Welcome to Spain - you're coming out
The first thing you notice when you get off the train from France and arrive at San Sebastian is that everything is different. Within the space of a border they houses are more close and ramshackled, the people darker and shorter, and there's life in the air. I don't know how to explain the exactly, but it seems like the less rich a country is, the more life there is in it - between the buildings crumbling around you, the tiny alleyways
and the hundreds of cheap shops, there's a vibe in the air that just has to come out.
It nearly seems like the people are responding to the lack of super-refined infrastructure, quality housing and public services and making up for it with sheer enthusiasm and community spirit. And I loved it.
The tone pretty much got set from the minute I got to the youth hostel. 20 seconds after walking in the door someone yells "Gordo!"
Needless to say, having just carried my suitcase 2km from the train station on my head (the wheel fell of yet again) in the Spanish heat, I wasn't in great condition and this completely threw me. Who the hell knows me in San Sebastian?
Sure enough, down the corridor comes David and Tatjana, two of the motley crew that toured the bars of Brugge, Belgium a solid month earlier. So no soon have I dropped the case I've been scooped up and told we're on our way out for Pinchos. I had no idea what pinchos were, nor any idea where I was for that matter, but that was irrelevant. I am in Spain. I must party.
Turns out Pinchos are tapas - tiny portions of food you get with every drink. This is the best invention since the beer on tap in the kebab store in Switzerland, and we managed to polish off plenty of those suckers.
One of these was a bit of a surprise. It looked like a small battered parcel, which should have been warning enough, but a solid bight into it revealed it to be a mussel. Still in the shell. Why you batter an inedible object was never explained but we are assured that this is normal. All I can say is that Spanish people must lose a lot of teeth.
So after a couple of hours of this I'm about ready to collapse. I say my farewells and set off for the hostel. Unfortunately, the combination of exhaustion, new suroundings and having carried my suitcase on my head for 30 minutes meant I completely confused north from south and went on a lovely night tour of San Sebastian. Even after coonsulting a map I am still not sure where the hell I went that night, or how I managed to get back, but managed to make it up the steps before passing out.
This hostel was the first one I have used that is not a Hi Hostel and there's no going back as far as I'm concerned. Compared to the clean but damn boring Hi Hostels, this place was a mardi gra on marajuana (not literally Mum). And it had a kitchen. Which meant...
Cooking!
With some very rare exceptions I had not cooked a meal for myself up to this point for the entire trip - Hi Hostels don't have kitchens you can use. So I'd been eating the free breakfasts and stealing enough of said breakfast for lunch, then dining on a kebab for dinner. Interestingly, you can gain an idea of the strength of a country's economy by the cost of a kebab.
But now I had a fridge, a stove and pans and free reign. Awesome.
It's amazing how much cheaper it is to cook your own food, and after a diet of processed cheese, white bread and cornflakes at the Hi Hostels, the nachos with salad and a great red wine that we whipped up was heaven.
The ocean
I haven't seen the ocean since Denmark and Sweden and I'd forgotten how much I love it. If it wasn't so far away from friends, family and work, I'd have moved to the coast loooong ago.
So standing next to the big statue of Jesus on top of the hill and seeing the ocean all out in front of me was a bit of a homecoming for me. Regarding said Jesus, the combination of the statue, hill and township on the coast reminded me a lot of photos of Rio de Janeiro. I wonder which came first?
It was also at said Jesus that I ran into David and Tatjana again, along with a couple of Italians studying in Barcelona, Allesandro and Sarah. We ended up going out, touring the grungy bars and then...the storm. We'd been feeling the air get thicker all night but weren't ready for this - it bucketed down in near monsoon proportions, lighting and thunder a-plenty.
Naturally it only added to the festivities and we had a good run home through it all.
The Guggenheim
Take the tip; if you're in San Sebastian, take the time and do a day trip to the Guggenheim museum - the building itself is worth it. a massive platinum building with no, I repeat, no flat surfaces on it is a sight to behold, though it does make finding the entrace a bit tricky. The there's the 10m tall cat made of flowers out the front. I mean, what more could you want?
Charitable donations to Spanish public transport
I try to do my bit. I give to worthy causes etc, but I generally prefer to have a choice in the matter. And while Spain has many virtues, fluent, or even basic English isn't one of them. I am not complaining - I figure if I'm in a country I should learn thier langugage not the other way around - but it did lead to a couple of problems, most notably, buying the wrong ticket for the wrong train, for the entirely wrong train system.
I did this 3 times before I found the right one.
That said the interstate trains are much easier to navigate and come with plenty to keep you amused, including movies on long trips. And I can now state that watching Kungfu Panda in Spanish is 10 times as fun as in english.
Madrid
More than anything else, Madrid gives the feeling of well organised chaos. That life I mentioned before is extremely present in Madrid and you get the feeling as you walk around, that if everyone was to leave the city for the weekend, the whole place would colapse inside the first hour.
Spain is a big country, on a European scale that is, and it has a lot of different sub-cultures inside it. The difference between San Sebastian in the north coast and Madrid in the dead centre is palpable - if I though the buildings at San Sebastian were a bit crumbly, Madrid was a whole new level both of grunge and also friendliness.
Kebab relations
So of an evening a went looking for my kebab. And at the local shop I met a genius. Not only could this girl from Morocco speak Arabic and Spanish, but also German, French and a little English.
Already shaken by my complete inability to do anything without waving my hands wildly, I clung to this vestige of english like a life raft, and next thing I find myself invited to eat at her sister's restaurant the next night.
So I wander over there wondering what I'm getting myself in for, find the place and 2 hours later find myself dancing away in a Moroccan club.
The thing you need to know about the Moroccan population in Spain is that it's pretty tight knit. And the guys apparently don't dance. Which means that I had a pretty sudden 'oh-shit' moment when I realised, not only am the only guy dancing but I'm being watched by
every...
single...
guy...
in the place. The fact I was being smiled at by a few of the girls there did not improve this situation. I decided a tactical withdrawal was in order and sat down, very deliberately.
Oh and I finally decided to take some affirmative action about my suitcase and managed to do the one thing that could make me look more rediculous. I bought a trolly.
This is Sparta! I mean Toledo!
Toledo is famed for it's steel and especially it's swords. I have a bit of a fascination with these items so I headed of for a day trip.
The first thing you notice about Toledo is that it resembles an island in the middle of the plains, carved out of the rock. Why the founders chose to build such a compact city with so much space available was dificult to understand, right up until you got outside the train. There you encounter the second most noticable thing about Toledo - the heat.
In order to minimise the amound of direct sunlight that reaches the street, the buildings in Spain tend to be high (between 3-8 stories) and very close together. In Toledo this is an art form and it's exceptionally easy to get lost for several hours - there is not one single straight road in the entire city.
Often you would find yourself outside the city walls all of a sudden, providing you an opportunity to find your bearings, locate yourself on the map, and promptly get lost again.
Before I arrived I expected to find 2 or 3 well respected swordsmiths, making quality items that a person should chose with care and cherish for a lifetime. How romantic of me. Instead virtually every second window has a pointy instrument of some description, from the ornamental to the downright lethal.
But by far the most intriguing items weren't swords at all, but the full set of precisely detailed Spartan armour from the film '300', complete with codpiece.
Now don't get me wrong, this was incredibly cool. But think about it a second: who actually buys this stuff? And more importantly, what do they do with it?
A sword you can hang on the wall or even practice with, should you be so inclined. But armour for a fictional movie that doesn't include pants? Bit of an odd conversation piece. And then there's the whole horrifying prospect that people might actually dress up in this gear...and do things. And you just know anyone inclined to do that is not going to be at the pinacle of physical fitness...argh.
But you will all be releived to know that I decided that the customs at Heathrow airport were hard enough carrying a tube of toothpaste, let alone having to explaining 60cm of cutting edge in my carry-on luggage.
Granada in any other tongue
When you arrive at a new town, there's nothing like being greeted at the station by a friend. So meeting Hannah, a friend from working at Kandersteg, Switzerland, made my day.
Actually she made my several days because within 15 minues of getting off the train I was eating a freshly made Indian meal with her friends by candle light. Talk about hospitality!
Hannah and a few of her friends study interpretation, which in a Spain means they are among the few fluent english speakers around and made good company. It also meant that thier exms are slightly more interesting than usual and I managed to tag along to a simulated multi-lingual conference which they had to translate.
And here's the kicker - because each student generally only interprets one language, if the speaker was using French, the German and Spanish translators would have to wait for the English translation before doing thier own. No pressure hey?
Unfortunately, these exams meant that time was limited, so when Hannah had to travel home for the weekend, I took the opportunity to take a trip down the coast to Gibraltar for a couple of days.
Gibraltar
For those who don't know, Gibraltar is famous as a massive rock forming the gate of the mediterranean to the Atlantic ocean. Since this is quite a strategic position it's been fough over quite a lot and is currently British turf, hanging off the bottom of Spain.
Sounds nice hey? I thought so too.
Here my tip: should you be so unfortunate as to find yourself in Gibraltar, leave immediately and, if you think you can get away with it, set it on fire on the way out.
I hate Gibraltar.
Take Spain, suck all the life out of it and fill it full of wobbly english tourists and that's Gibraltar for you.
You know it's not a good sign when you spend the entire second day at a place composing text to try and sum up exactly how much you hate it. The best I can describe the place is as follows:
- Take a natural wonder of the world; a massive rock, once the border of the known world, rich in history, filled with natural caves, covered in flora and fauna including the only apes in Europe.
- Then allow the military to shit all over it for over 200 years with lovely concrete buildings, industrial waste and high explosives
- Next attach a large port to the side of it to thoroughly pollute the water and air
- Then build a large number of poorly planned, constructed, managed and maintained hotels, including reclaiming a large area of seabed.
- Import tourists, who seeing the state the place is in, see no problem in dropping vast amounts of litter.
What really underlines my diatribe here is the extreme contrast on display. I've seen plenty of places in worse condition than here, but the presence of the rock doesn't let you block it out in the usual way.
Gibraltar could be an amazing place if it was properly managed and cared for. But instead it exemplifies everything I have committed myself to prevent.
On the up side, the nature reserve on the upper rock is wonderful, and as I noted, features the only apes in Europe living up there on the heights. Said apes get a bit of a feed out the tourists and the tourist bureau has put up informative signs like 'The apes recognise plasic bags as holding food' and that since humans give them food, we must be lower on the food chain.
Unfortunately they only put these signs at the top of the damn hill, so sure enough, here comes Gordon carrying his lunch in a nice, obvious and extremely vulnerable plastic bag.
First thing I knew about it I was falling over.
Laying of the ground I eventually noticed there was no mugger in the vacinity. And then I looked a little harder. The little sod had snuck up behind me, grabed the bag, and pulled me off balance. And now the little bugger was sitting right next to me eating my lunch.
A monkey stole my lunch. Perhaps they're not far off when the consider us further down the food chain...
2 days later I was out of there, with a new appreciation of Spain, and looking forward to some more...
Granada free love
The plan was to stay with Hannah for a few more days, but there was a day gap before she arrived backin town, so I stayed in the Oasis youth hostel. And it was here that I really began to notice the vast number of hippies around the place.
The hostel was in the Sacremonte area and you can't turn a corner in there without being sold a bongo drum, handmade necklaces, seeing some awesome graffiti, or running into a person with dreadlocks.
After meeting a few people at the hostel we wound up on a rooftop, having a few drinks and chatting. I'm looking around for a chair and our hosts says "watchout over there, you might knock over the weed".
Pardon me?
Sure enough, closer inspection shows that the potted plants aound the roof are in fact, potted pot. Needless to say the whole night was a pretty unique experience.
Granada also combines bohemia with some excellent views and a huge amount of history, thanks to the Alhambra - a large castle overlooking the town - a remainent of the strong Moorish influence on the area. In fact virtually every church in Granada is a converted mosque. Once Hannah arrived back in town she was able to give me a bit of a tour of these places.
All in all, Granada now rates as my favourite place in Spain and one of my favourite in Europe.
Dangerous liaisons in Valencia
This was never a deliberate stop. I had planned for a while to take a plane from Barcelona to Sweden for certain festivities I'll get to in a moment, but I messed up the dates and found myself with an extra 3 days to kill. So instead of taking a night train all the way to Barcelona, I stopped off at Valencia on the way.
And it's a lucky thing I did because I was rather enthusiastically propositioned on that train by a north african lady. She didn't speak english and I don't speak anything else, so it was left to a poor Spanish guy to translate my desperate excuses to escape. Awkward.
But this turned out to be a bit of a theme in Valencia. I for one would have appreciated the hostel staff telling me that the red light district was immediately behind the hostel and then maybe I would have walked through it alone at 11pm.
Sangría and giant dogs
There is another free tour in Valencia which is excellent. We were shown the sights and the history of the place but thre were two definite highlights. We'd been hearing a lot of commotion for a while and eventually we asked the guide what was going on? He told us it was a political protest, and given the amount of noise, quite a big one. We rounded the corner expecting to see about 300 people there was that much noise. Instead we found 14 old people with drums, whistles and pretty much eery noise-making instrument known to man. I was highly impressed.
The second high point was at the end of the tour where you stop at a bar and can hve a few drinks. Our guide recommended the sangria as very good value - I should have realised that this took on extra significant in Spain, and sure enough I ended up with a fishbowl on my table. And that stuff was strong. But it was hot so I downed it pretty quickly,which would have been ok if it wasn't 2pm and there wasn't so many massive dogs around.
An Irish Wolfhound is basically a small pony disguised as a dog. Standing on hind legs these things can be 2m tall easily. And it is not something you want to encounter bounding along your path after a fishbowl of sangria. I was rather shaken on encountering not one, but two of these things on the way home.
Barthelona
That's not a mis-type, that's how it's said. For some reason the spainish language has a lisp on the 'c'. This caused much spluttering.
Barcelona is a hell of a place. I didn't spend enough time here, but I did manage to get a massage, be propositioned by the local prosititutes without being robbed, do a bike tour on a chopper (you have to see the photo to understand this bike - it was incredible), check out the statue of Christopher Collumbus which is pointing the wrong way (meant to be to America - turns out it's to Morocco), and visit my favourite church of all time; the Sangria Familiar.
The Sangria Familiar was designed by Gaudi and is still incomplete after 100 years of work - that's how detailed this thing is. I've seen a lot of churches on this trip, but this one not only made it onto the very short list of ones I like, but goes down as the only church that represented any God I could understand. No gloomy gothic style or hypocritical displays of wealth here - instead the design is based around nature and the insides remind me strongly of a growing tree.
I also managed to catch up with Alessandro and Sarah who I met in San Sebastian. They took me out and introduced me to a tiny tiny place, with very very cheap food and drink, that was nonetheless very very full. So full that grtting your drink to your mouth was a challenge.
Suitcases, Ski pants and Sweden.
So while I was visiting my Swedish friends back in March, they invited me to come and watch them graduate from highschool in June. Because I obviously didn't feel enough like a dirty old man as it was. But a week of solid partying won me over and here I am getting ready to depart Spain for Sweden.
But first I have to get my bag down to 25kg for the flight. This is causing me some problems, thanks to the trolly I picked up in Madrid.
So in an act of desperation I walk up to the check-in counter wearing my hike boots, ski clothes and with every available pocket stuffed with books and luggage. And despite all this the case still checks in at 35kg! Dear lord I was carrying that thing on my head!
But I shouldn't have worried: it was a Spanish airline. I could have handed them a surfboard and they wouldn't have batted an eyelid.
4 hours and several brushes with heat-stroke later, I step off the plane and catch a train to Sweden. And suddenly the ski lothes aren't such a stupid idea because after 8 weeks in France and Spain, it's cold up here!
To be continued...
Because it's 5am and I'm well aware how long this email is turning out.
Stay tuned for the next installment in a week or so, including the Swedish graduation parties (yes, multiple), featuring our nearly being deported to Denmark, and the mad decent south, Venice and finally 3 weeks in Malta.
Photos and videos
Check them out on Facebook and Youtube as always. Also, I have now uploaded
all the Episodes to Facebook as well for your viewing pleasure. Re-live the
memories!
What cheer!
Gordon
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