GoonanismA Sporadic mix of the personal, political and programming

In last year’s Eurovision Song Contest Milan Stankovic won my heart with his tune ‘Ovo Je Balkan’ – This is the Balkans…

We’ve come to the end of the first leg of our Balkans trip. I’ve been dying to get to this part of the world ever since my last European adventure. It has lived up to my expectations and then some.

From Turkey we went to Bulgaria, then up to Romania, over to Serbia then down to Bosnia and Herzegovina. All are stunningly beautiful, all are steeped in history and all have walking boulevards lined with cafes and bars.

Our first stop was Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s charming ‘second city’. We were immediately struck by the contrast in pace and temperament to Turkey. The city is full of quaint antique shops that no body was dragging us into and the attitude of the shopkeeps was more honest and relaxed. When looking through one shop a commented on how beautiful some glasswear was and how it was a pity that she couldn’t buy it because it would break in her backpack. ‘Yes, you are right’ the shopkeep replied forlornly. In Turkey we’d have received endless assurances and been presented with huge rolls of bubble wrap from behind the counter.

The shops and market stalls were filled with unbelievable Soviet and Nazi era trinkets from medals to bayonets and gas masks. Being obsessed with the Soviet era aesthetic I regret having not bought a medal or something.

Sofia’s city garden was a pure Eastern European delight, complete with old men playing chess and a small brass band (again of old men) busking whilst the children danced to their polka rhythms.

Then there was Veliko Tarnovo which sits on an s-bend in a river which is cut deep into the mountains creating the ridge that the town sits on complete with an impressive fort perched on the outcrop.

Bucharest is bigger, faster, dirtier and ruder than anything in Bulgaria but not without its charm. I suspect you’d need to spend a bit of time there to get below the surface and see what it is really like though (more so than other places). It’s referred to as the ‘Paris of the East’ and you can see why. Just about every street we walked down had at least one or two Renaissance mansions but they were invariably smeared with diesel fumes and looking the worse for wear.

In keeping with this aesthetic, the former communist rulers constructed a 12 story, 330,000 sq meter Parliamentary Palace which one can’t help but feel is a little out of touch with their proletarian roots.

But as soon as we left Bucharest I fell in love with Romania. The countryside is beautiful and the trains move at a snails pace, still powered by soviet era trains (although the carriages have largely been replaced or refurbished) and the old people all stand at the windows with the wind in their face watching it slowly go by – something I got into the habit of doing myself.

The farmlands seemed to have a particularly vibrant colour but once we got up into Transylvania I was beside myself. The thing about Transylvania is that it actually looks the way you imagined it would which came as a surprise to me. The mountains are steep and densely covered in a pine forest and sheer rock faces jut out of it so high that their tops are obscured by the low lying clouds. There was also the occasional sign warning you not to feed the Bears.

Horse drawn carts are still widely in use and many of the big old farm houses share architectural ideas with their surrounding castles, interspersed with a Soviet era factory or public housing block scattered throughout the countryside.

It is landscape that is just so foreign to an Australian but seems so familiar to me thanks to the fantasy novels I struggled my way through as a young teenager.

We spent a couple of nights in medieval Braşov, a very gothic looking town that is full of students – and therefore life – thanks to the local University. From Braşov we visited Peleş Castle and Bran Castle which lays claim to being Vlad Dracula’s castle – a fact that is milked to death (so to speak) by the local tourism industry. But hey, it got us there didn’t it.

It was actually Peleş Castle which was by far the most impressive of the two, it’s ornate detail and gothic architecture trumping Bran’s much blander interior and exterior although Bran is on a rocky outcrop which you have to give it points for.

From Romania we moved into the former Yugoslavia where we have been ever since and will remain for another month. Belgrade was our first stop, a city that has done well to repair itself since the several months long bombing of the city by NATO forces in the 90s.

There isn’t a huge amount to do in terms of sights and so forth in Belgrade but it is full of great bars, restaurants and pedestrian strips which we spent many an hour traipsing up and down, eating ice creams and drinking coffee. It was 30 degrees every day we were there so for us, it was the start of summer.

From Serbia we moved to one of the epicentres of 20th century wars, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Coming into town on the bus the signs of the 90s conflict are still quite present with pockmarked buildings and recently rebuilt mosques. But the city has largely been rebuilt and there are countless new apartment blocks with plenty more under construction.

Lots of people are finally moving back to Sarajevo which gives the impression that it is a booming city. However with unemployment rates of over 45% and an almost total lack of industry it is clearly still feeling the wounds of war and has a long way to go before it is back on it’s feet.

We covered an unusually high number of museums whilst we were in Sarajevo. One museum, the Sarajevo Museum, was built on the spot that heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serbian Nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The other important one was the excellent, albeit harrowing, National Museum which largely concerned itself with the 3 year siege of Sarajevo.

Aside from all this war business, BiH seems to have held on to Islam and Ottoman culture a lot tighter than the rest of the Balkans. Walking through the old city in Sarajevo you could be forgiven for thinking that you were walking through Sultanahmet, Istanbul. There are Mosques, Turkish Baths and Bazaars. But no Balkan city would be complete without large pedestrian areas lined with bars and cafes which Sarajevo does not sell itself short on.

Our last stop on this leg of our trip (from where I write this) is Mostar. Mostar was to the Balkans conflict what Dresden was to the Second World War – an incredible historical marvel that was needlessly destroyed towards the end of the conflict. In this case it was when former allies, the Bosniaks (Islamic Bosnians) and Croats, once allied, turned on each other.

The main strip through the city was the front line and bombed out buildings are still abundant – albeit slowly being rebuilt. We did a bit of a self-guided tour of the front line which had a very unsettling feeling and wasn’t helped by the small cemeteries that litter the city.

Mostar’s old town centres around a 16th Century Ottoman stone bridge which was deliberately destroyed during the 90s conflict but has been painstakingly restored using traditional techniques since.

The bridge is 18 meters high and a group of local men pass the hat around every time a tour bus comes to town. Once they have collected enough money they jump off the bridge. Tourists delight, locals roll their eyes.

The weather is really starting to heat up now so we are heading down to Croatia to try and get some beach time before the surge of tourists arrive from the rest of Europe.

I’m looking forward to a swim.

From Athens it was a short flight to Nicosia, Republic of Cyprus (the Southern, Greek, end) where we rendezvoused with a’s entire family – mother (l), father (big a) and brother (n).

I immediately decided to read up on the Greek/Turkish conflict over Cyprus and initially came to the conclusion that the Turks are a bit sooky.

The Government of Cyprus has provisions to positively discriminate in favour of the Turks. It has seats of parliament set aside for them and there is a minimum quoter of public service jobs that must be filled by Turkish Cypriots.

However, since the invasion in the 1970s those seats of parliament have remained vacant and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is only recognised internationally by Turkey.

But perhaps the ‘sooky’ label is unfair. The Turks invaded because the then far-right wing Greek government, assisted by your friend and mine, the CIA, tried to annex Cyprus in a military coup – something the Turkish invasion prevented.

Moreover, a recent referendum regarding the reunification of Cyprus, Turkish Cypriots overwhelming voted in favour of it but the Greek Cypriots voted it down so maybe Greek Nationalism is to blame.

Whatever the case, I should probably stop making these sweeping generalisations on a topic I know virtually nothing about.

The upshot of all this is me basically shitting myself. It was our first night in Nicosia – a city split down the middle by a UN enforced demilitarised zone – and I decided to walk home from dinner through the poorly lit back streets with a’s brother, n. As we walked along we noticed a small box covered in razor wire. I jumped when my my eyes finally adjusted and I noticed the military man with a helmet and machine gun sitting in the box. I guess I was unprepared for the seriousness of the divide.

From Nicosia we hired a car and drove to Latchi which is just outside Polis on the North Western coast of Cyprus where we hired a beach-front cabin for a week. The time was spent swimming in beautiful, albeit frigid, water, seeing various ruins and drinking Monk wine and spirits bought from mountain top monasteries.

After a week of relaxation we flew to Antalya, Turkey. It was never really on our itinerary and really only ended up there because it has an airport with cheap flights from Nicosia but we were particularly pleased that we happened upon it.

It’s based around a stunning Roman harbour with crystal clear water surrounded by a snow capped mountain range which comes right down to the sea.

However our time in Antalya was upset early on our first morning by the news that a’s grandma, her father’s mother had passed away. She had been suffering from server Altzimer’s for a long time but it was still quite healthy and was unexpected.

On a quite serious note and without wanting to trivialise anything: for fuck’s sake, would people please stop dying! It’s deeply upsetting and continues to interrupt our trip.

Within a few hours a’s parents had booked flights home and we were making arrangements to get them to the airport the following day but not before l did a bit of shopping in which is where the title of this post comes from. She a’s mum, l bought a beautiful carpet which the salesman assured her was ‘no bullshit, just the shit’.

The next day we bid them a teary goodbye and a, n and I continued on with a holiday organised by the people that had just left us including a range of activities and hotels we would not have been able to afford otherwise.

This point was immediately emphasised by our trip’s next stop, Fethiye, where we met up with a’s mum’s cousin’s, daughter’s, husband. A really sweet Turkish man named Aladdin. Armed with a back of the envelope rundown of the family tree we met up with him and had a really great evening eating and drinking with the locals.

Our next adventure was a 4 day yacht trip off the coast of Bodrum – another clear example of us being on a’s parent’s holiday. The weather still wasn’t particularly warm but it was nice enough for us to swim in the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean most days. I slept on deck every night, helped out with the sailing – even tying a knot – and managed to catch two fish on the one line; something I hadn’t managed to do since I was about 10 years old.

Four days later we were dropped at the dock and got on a bus to Pamukkale, a tiny village were ancient tractors outnumber the cars on the road. It’s also home to a mineral spring which is high in calcium and has turned the entire mountain into a white wall with pools of aqua blue water at regular intervals all the way down the mountain. It’s is an impressive site as you walk up the hill from the town and see this wall of white appear on the horizon.

I also seems to be a magnet for Russian tourists who arrive by the busload. The women all immediately stripped down to bikinis whilst everyone photographs them. The men took their tops off to reveal their beer guts, a good portion of them getting horrifically sunburnt due to their white surrounds much the way you would at the snow.

After that we went up to Selçuk from which we visited Ephesus, the ruins of a Roman city which are still in tact leaving you with a good sense of what it would have been to walk around in a Roman city two thousand years ago.

On the day we went out to Ephesus I happened to be wearing my ‘Communist Party‘ T-Shirt and like Pamukkale, Ephesus also has its share of Russian tourists. A young Russian lad came up to me and said ‘can I take photo’ which I took to mean, ‘can you please take a photo of me and my friend here in front of these ruins?’ ‘Sure,’ I said and I went to take the camera off him. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I take photo with you.’ I asked him why and he told me ‘I love you.’ It turns out, despite, or perhaps because, he was too young to have even been alive during Russia’s communist period he was ardent communist and loved my T Shirt. As proof of his devotion to the cause he had the hammer and sickle as the wall paper on his phone and considered Karl Marx to be his father.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the T-shirt was a joke.

Next stop was sleepy Assos, a beautiful old fishing village that Aristotle spent three years in until the Persians invaded. There’s not a lot to Assos, it’s only about three houses deep and about 500 metres long but you could sit on the little harbour for days, drinking Raki and watching the tiny fishing boats come in.

From Assos we caught the bus to Çanakkale which is across the Dardanelles from the Gallipoli Peninsular.

I had mixed feelings about going. I’m always interested in history and am a life long anti-war activist. The place holds a particular significance for a lot of Australians, which I’m a bit weird about, but I’m also Australian I guess. I don’t ascribe to this historical revisionist idea that Gallipoli has always been a significant part of our national psyche and a nation defining moment, but I also don’t buy the notion that ‘we shouldn’t have even been there’ either.

My first reflection was that I really don’t like most Australian tourists. Naturally our tour group was largely made up of Aussies who were particularly precious, and their continuous undertones of passive racism (‘is that ten minutes, or ten Turkish minutes’) really got on my nerves. But maybe it’s just Australians obsessed with out military history that make for bad tourists, it’s hard to say.

One guy on the group was a particular know-it-all, I even had him pegged as someone that had obviously read a book about Gallipoli before he came on the trip. Turns out he had just watched the film. And while we’re on the topic of annoying Australian tourists, can the phrase ‘holy moly’ pleased erased from our vernacular.

All that said, I did really enjoy the tour. It was fascinating to learn all about it and our guide was fantastic. Having attended high school in the pre-Howard era I knew virtually nothing about Australia’s involvement and what I thought I knew was basically wrong. It was a battle for a bit of land that had incredible strategic importance and the Australian’s were stationed there for quite some time with many initial military successes. I always thought that it was a hopeless mission and thousands of Aussies and Kiwis were just slaughtered before they even got to shore; not so.

But the most important thing that I learnt was that it was a nation defining moment for Turkey far more than it was for Australia. At the time Turkey wasn’t even a country, it was just the relics of a decaying Ottoman Empire. Mohammed Kamel Attaturk who lead the Ottoman soldiers in the ensuing battles, went on to become the first President of the newly formed Republic of Turkey. His military success formed a major part of his campaign for the position. Moreover the loss of Turkish life was far greater and the troupes were far younger. We hear all about the brave Australian’s that lied about their age to join up, but nothing about the Ottoman entry requirement which was simply that you could hold a rifle up at arms length. On particular battalion, the 57th, was totally whipped out, not one person survived. A Battalion is a big military unit and the 57th was retired after the battle.

So in summary, I’m really glad I went. I feel like I’ve got a much better appreciation for it all.

From Çanakkale we made our way to Istanbul where we were reunited with a’s mum, l. Before everything when arye we were going to be spending 4 nights in Istanbul with a’s family, before heading over to Cappodocia and then coming back to Istanbul for a few more nights.

To get l the Turkey holiday she had been dreaming about for so long she joined a and I on the leg of our Turkey trip that we were to be doing once we had left her family.

Our first 4 days in Istanbul we had n with us so we jammed as much of the city as we could into those days to ensure n wasn’t missing anything he wanted to see. Admittedly this did mean one day of pure shopping but that meant we got a good look a the bazaar.

Our hotel was pretty much at the base of the Blue Mosque which made it the ideal launching pad for all the sites but also meant sitting bolt upright at about 4:30 every morning to the call to prayer.

We then bid goodbye to n and slowed things down a bit but still took in some amazing sites, not least of which was the Dolmabache Palace which would probably look more at home in the French countryside than on the banks of the Bospherous.

After a few more days in Istanbul we flew to Göreme in a region called Cappodocia which is known for it’s ‘fairy chimneys’. They are a strange, chimney-like geological formations that people were living in from around the fourth century. Most people have moved out of them now but there are still a handful of them inhabited.

You can go into many of them and some even contain remarkable 4th Century chapels.

The highlight of our time here was another ‘parent enabled activity’: hot air ballooning. The entire Cappodocia region is a spectacular moonscape so what better way to see it than by hot air balloon?

I’d never been in one before so my only expectation was that I would absolutely shit myself as soon as we got about 2 metres off the ground but to my surprise I found it really quite calming.

I think that balloon ride will stay with me forever. It really was one of the most awe-inspiring things I’ve done and didn’t want it to end. However, when it did end, it did so in a very impressive manner. Our highly skilled captain actually landed the balloon in the back of a trailer.

From Göreme it was a flight back to Istanbul where we chilled out for a couple more days with l before she got on a plane back to Australia and we caught the bus to Bulgaria where we are now.

By the end we had spent a full month in Turkey. We could have easily spent a lot longer. It is a pretty special country with a spectacular and diverse environment, beautiful people and a rich culture.

Dear readers, my apologies for the tardiness of this post, it has been a while and a lot has happened since we last spoke.

If you recall, last we spoke, I was in France and heading down to Spain for about 3 weeks. Our first stop was the irrepressible Barcelona. An old friend that never fails to disappoint. Although this time around I was considerably more sober and existing beyond the subsistence level of 3 euro Dönar Kebabs for every meal – a welcome change from my last visit about 5 years ago.

Our four days there consisted of long walks on the beach and through parks, a day of Gaudi, lots of great food and a trip to the Picasso Museum which would have to be one of the best curated museums around. I adore his interpretation of Diego Velázquez’s Les Meninas.

From Barcelona, we flew south to Granada – the first stop on our tour of Andalucía. Andalucía is Spain’s southern most region and without wanting to offend my German brothers, Andalucía is to Spain, what Bavaria is to Germany – when you conjure up an image of Spain Andalucía is what comes to mind.

Of course we stuffed our selves silly on free tapas in Granada and started tasting a few different Sherries from the region. However the highlight came from one of the two Flamenco shows we attended in Granada. We had a hunt around online for some less tourist orientated shows and found a venue that exhibited modern Flamenco, described as ‘Flamenco with a touch of David Lynch’.

We were not disappointed. The music was haunting, half the singing was essentially spoken work by a woman with a deep husky voice, but most importantly the dancing was spectacular.

Listening to the chromatic scales of the male singer I was also reminded of the influence Islam and Arabic/Northern African culture has had on the region and, indeed, the rest of the Mediterranean – a theme I continue to be fascinated by (surely communism is the only other idea that has spread so quickly and had such a world changing impact.)

Our next stop was Rhonda, somewhere I hadn’t been before. It turns out that the Rain in Spain falls mainly in Rhonda. The place damn near flooded whilst we were there. However there is a spectacular bridge (we have pictures of it being rained on) and the bars have barrels of Sherry behind the counter which they poor from liberally. It’s a stunning town that was once the capital of the region and is the home of modern bull fighting – if bull fighting can be modern that is.

Our next stop was the current capital of Andalucía – Seville. It was the first sunny weather we had enjoyed in a few weeks and we hired an apartment which meant cooking at home. I quickly rushed to the super market to buy a bottle of Fino Sherry which turned out to be cooking Sherry – no wonder it was only 1.50 euros. I drank it regardless.

From Seville, it was just a quick hop to Cordoba which was probably my favourite town in Spain. Again, the skyline is dominated by a Mosque come Church (always curious structures) and small winding streets riddled with little bars which I could drink Sherry in. Blissful.

Our last stop in Spain was Madrid. It was a’s birthday so we went to a fancy hotel and booked a fancy restaurant. On the day of her birthday we took a picnic full of local produce to the park then I rowed her around the lake in an act of unbridled chivalry. The next day we dined at a place called Asiana: Next Door which we both agreed was one of the best meals of our lives. The chef had been trained by someone famous and he produced a 12 course Asian fusion degustation to die for.

During our time in Madrid we also spent quite a few hours wandering around the very impressive Museo del Prado which contained Velázquez’s original Les Meninas. It is a painting I could stare at for hours. I also finally got to see Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights whose image I have been wearing on a T-Shirt for a couple of years now.

From Madrid we flew to Tiranë, the capital of Albania, via Milan where we had a 6 hour stop over.

Whilst sitting in the transit lounge in Milan a voice came over the loud speaker, in Italian, to remind people that smoking was not permitted in the terminal, followed by a voice with the same message speaking English with a thick South London accent. Someone at that airport has a sense of humour.

Albania. A lot of people have asked my ‘why Albania’ at which point I launch into a brief history of Albania in the 20th century. It’s the only European country that split from the USSR to formally align itself with China. Then, after the death of Mao they simply went it alone. In all of my readings of the history of Eastern Europe during the 20th Century Albania is always the exception. Of course the real reason for heading to Albania was that it was on the Mediterranean coast so a bit warmer than the rest of Europe and was cheap to fly to from Madrid. Moreover, it was an attempt to get back to something vaguely resembling the holiday we were meant to be on.

It’s also an incredibly beautiful country with a mountain range running down it’s spine.

We spent 3 nights in the capital which included many conversations that resembled something out of Everything is Illuminated and a trip on a cable car to the top of the mountain that Tiranë sits in the valley of. At the top was a rotating restaurant which was empty and didn’t serve food although they did get it rotating for us which made us both a little motion sick.

Albania can be a confusing place. In Albanian ‘yes’ is ‘po’ and they shake their head for yes and nod their head for no. So when I asked the shop keep for a beer they had a tendency to shake their head, say ‘Po’ then pour you a beer.

From there we headed north west to Skhodra near the border with Montenegro. It was on our first day here that we got the news that a very close friend had died in a sudden and tragic canoeing accident. All of a sudden Skhodra seemed like the arse end of the world and the furthest we could possibly be from where we wanted to be.

Thankfully we had a good wifi connection at the hotel we were staying at and could stay in regular contact with home and other friends abroad feeling the similarly isolated but in a more suitable timezone for our calls.

We immediately started exploring the possibilities for getting home, booked flights to Athens and then a return flight from Athens to Melbourne so we could be where we most needed to be. Within 48 hours we were home and with our loving friends and family.

…and 12 days later we were back in Athens.

I take back anything negative I may have said about Athens in our time in Melbourne. As second time round it struck us as a very ‘liveable’ city (despite the traffic congestion) which is honestly about the highest complement I can pay a city.

We spent 3 days wondering around, seeing ruins, eating Gyros and having a wonderful time – albeit with moments of profound sadness interspersed.

I started operating on the ‘Gyros’, rather than the Euro (it’s about 2 Gyros to the Euro) just so that I knew exactly how many Gyros I could buy at any one time.

The Acropolis is amazing, and the Acropolis Museum was also impressive as well as being an amazing piece of architecture and a superbly curated.

Now we find ourselves in Cyprus with a’s Family with whom I get along with famously… but we’ll save that story for another post.

Sorry about the lack of photos – but the alternative is further delays to this post.

After London, we flew to Toulouse for just under two weeks in France. It was more time in the company of extraordinarily generous friends combined with healthy dose of indulgence in good food and wine.

We spent about 5 nights at our friend’s apartment in the heart of Toulouse’s old town. Toulouse is known as the Ville Rose (The Pink City) for its red brick buildings that give the city a pink hue. Its two main industries are the local University and the Airbus A380 which employs 30,000 of the city’s 1.1 million residents. It was school holidays while we were there so things were pretty quiet and we spent most of our time wandering around eating and drinking which isn’t such a bad thing when you’re in France.

We spent a lot of time in markets pointing to yummy cheeses that we wanted to buy and fumbling our way through the French language. I became quite proficient with the phrase Je ne parle pas Français – so much so that I thought I might be starting to sound like a local that was just being rude (a rude Frenchman, imagine!). Perhaps the best example of my language deficiencies was illustrated by the time I tried to order the fish of the day and received a dozen oysters.

A few days later we caught the train to Auch, where we were met by the same friends who took us to Condom (nothing funny about that name if you ask the French) where they had just bough a beautiful old farm house about 5 mins drive from town. Once there, we finally got a bit of the sunshine we had so desperately been seeking since landing in a snow covered Frankfurt a bit over a month ago.

Our time in Condom was fairly lazy. A few excursions out into the French country side, but nothing too strenuous. A couple of years ago my brother worked a vintage at Château de Malle, just outside Bordeaux. He was good enough to tee up a tour of the winery and the Château itself with their head wine maker who is a good friend of his. We had a fabulous day being shown around both, trying a wide range of vintages, primarily Sauternes which would have to be one of my favourite wine appellations.

And speaking of wine appellations, Sommelier.net.au got a real work out while I was there. Here’s a quick rundown of the various appellations I got to drink while in France:

• Jurançon
• Sauternes
• Corbières
• Saint-Emilion
• Graves
• Armagnacs (the king of Brandies and France’s first distilled drink)
• Bourgogne Aligote
• Gaillac
• Floc de Gascogne
• Alsace

In addition, I think I ate duck about 7 different ways and even tried Steak Tartare which was surprisingly good.

I left a couple of bottles of wine in the cellar at the farmhouse in Condom which guarantees a return in the not too distant future; although the allure of Condom is as much for the company as it is for the wine.

It must be said that our last three weeks have been characterised by the extraordinary generosity of our friends.

We arrived in Frankfurt, having been evacuated from Egypt by the Australian Government. We made a b-line for the train station and got on an overnight train to Berlin. Dressed for the warm Egyptian climate, we found snow on the train tracks. We were certainly not supposed to be here.

In Berlin and were greeted by our good friend who had spent the previous night clashing with the police over a forced eviction of a Squat – something we found quite comforting having come from the unrest in Egypt.

However, we were made to feel particularly safe, secure and welcome by our squat-eviction-fighting-friend who put us up without a fuss.

We spent the next week in Berlin pottering around, taking it very easy and basically eating a lot. We never walked anywhere without a traveller (0.80 €!) and our destination was, for the most part, a restaurant.

To understand Berlin is to understand the 20th Century. It has been the focal point of Fascism and Communism, was the key aggressor in both the First and Second World Wars, as well as a key battle ground during the Cold War. Germany is now the focal point of European capitalism but Berlin still suffers from very high unemployment levels.

We spent a day doing the free Brewers Walking Tour which was fabulous, but probably the highlight for me was our last day where we visited the Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Soviet War Memorial) at Treptower Park.

It’s an incredible monument to the Soviet soldiers that lost their lives in one of the Second World Wars decisive battles, the ‘Battle of Berlin’, where the Red Army lost an estimated 20,000 soldiers but effectively ended the European war. The centre piece is a massive statue of a Soviet Soldier carrying a sword in one hand, a rescued/liberated child in the other, as he stomps on a swastika. The whole area is lined with empty sarcophagi, each with a quote from Stalin on the side in both Russian and German.

Devoid of subtly, full of grandeur and glorification, yet somber and awe-inspiring.

The next stop was Old London Town where the generosity continued. We stayed with another friend who lives with 3 others – all of whom A and I instantly adored. We were made to feel right at home and there was absolutely no fuss about us occupying their living room for just shy of two weeks.

On our second night in town we caught up with another good friend for dinner who offered to lend us his motorbike for a couple of days. We gratefully accepted his offer and hooned off down the A23 to Stonehenge. That night, Valentine’s Day, was spent in a rather cold and wind swept Brighton where we had a lovely meal and spent the next day wondering around before taking a really beautiful back road home to London.

The next week and a bit was spent wondering around London, visiting markets, seeing a few sites and catching-up with the various people we know in London.

One particularly enjoyable afternoon we met up with my uncle, who also happens to be a priest currently on sabbatical for a year in London. Fittingly, he took us to see Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery along with the graves of the more recently departed, Malcolm McLaren (whose grave reads ‘Malcolm Was Here’) and Douglas Adams (taken from us far too early) – two figures dear to my heart.

We’ll be back in London, to live for a year or so, in just a few months. This visit served as a great little taste for what is to come. I’d been there before but A had not but I think we both have a feeling that we’re going to like living there.

But for now, we’ve retreated to Toulouse in Southern France.

Before the ‘wild’ excitement of Egypt, we were in Kenya with my family.

Given what has happened in the mean time, it seems like an eternity ago, but I can’t help feeling it deserves at least a small mention on this blog.

After a lovely time in Tanzania, we got on a bus and headed up to Mombassa.

Tanzania is one of the African success stories. It has a reasonably stable government, strong economic growth and doesn’t seem to have suffered from the same levels of corruption that other African nations have. Kenya is not one of these success stories (although it is considerably better than many).

The wealth disparity between the two countries is immediately obvious when you cross the boarder. You go from a reasonably well maintained bitchumen road to a terribly corrugated and pot-holed dirt road… which the bus driver didn’t seem to feel the need to slow down for at all.

When we finally arrived in Mombassa, it felt like we had finally got to a city that was really alive, particularly when you compare it to Dar Es Salaam. Lots of noise, traffic and energy.

So we spent a couple of days exploring Mombassa, wandering around the beautiful old town and even spending an afternoon at a Bowling Alley where I cracked 100 for the first time, racking up a nice personal best of 120 (lame, I know, but I’ve never been much good at bowling).

Then it was up to Lamu, the town and island off the northern coast of Kenya.

As you step off the boat (which in our case bore a striking resemblance to a shower) you are greeted with people saying ‘welcome to paradise’. I couldn’t help feeling that it would be more apt to say ‘welcome to Donkey Land’.

The streets in Lamu are all very narrow corridors so cars are right out of the question. Instead, everyone has a Donkey or two who do the grunt work around the place.

We stayed in a beautiful 300 year old mansion which we had all to ourselves as well as our own private cook who was happy to cook anything for you but we largely left to his own devices. The result was a huge plate of fresh swahili style seafood every night. And every night after dinner, I’d waddle off to bed nursing a very full stomach and suffering from seafood reflux. Note to self: never overeat lobster.

But the lasting memory of Lamu is the Donkeys, whose honk and wheeze could be heard all through the night. Every time the call to prayer went out it would trigger the Donkeys who would all compete with it for volume and attention.

In fact, right outside our bedroom window was a particularly vocal Donkey who spent most of his day in a fairly small enclosure and was going stark raving mad. I took the liberty of recording him for you so you can get an idea of what it was like:
Donkey

… all night long.

After our Lamu adventure it was time to head back to Mombassa for our last few nights with my family. The next two nights we stayed at one of Mombassa’s finest hotels where we spent most of the day by the pool. It was a suitably relaxing and luxurious end to our time with my family who we eventually said a teary goodbye to. They were off to get on a bus back down to Dar Es Salaam in order to fly home and we moved to more modest accommodation in the old town where we spent a couple more nights.

To be honest we probably didn’t need those extra few days but and most of the time was spent in our hotel room trying to escape the heat and watching an entire series of True Blood. But we did get out for a few nice walks. On one occasion we came across a chai wallah on the water front so we sat down with the locals to enjoy a cup of tea with them. When one asked why I wasn’t having any I patted my stomach and said that I wasn’t feeling well.

‘The Mombassa Express?’ Couldn’t have put it better myself.