from oz to belfast an overdur update on my ramblings

well well, after a couple of failed tries ive finally setup a blog in order to note my travelling experiences. in my mind the main purpose of this blog is to ease my slight guilt at my pathetic attempts to keep in email contact with anyone.ok so first to very briefly update anyone who i haven,t contacted since i left australia.

me and flick left in april 06 and had a few days in bangkok then five weeks in india and one in jordan. summing up all that is pretty impossible so i,ll just say it was great. particularly memorable were the food in thailand, sharing the roof of a bus with 42 indians as it raced along some tiny mountain roads in the kullu valley and the overall magnificance and improbability of the archaloegical theme park that is petra.then we headed to germany for the world cup where we drank a truckload of fine beer watched heaps of soccer and enjoyed the very cool city of berlin. got to hang out with fulton and megsy, and catch up with clemens and jan again which was fun. we also spent a week in each of poland and the czech republic.

by that stage we were well and truly broke so we had to leg it too london and crash on my sisters couch, ta celia, and get ourselves work. flick ended up working like a slave as an in home carer in portsmouth for three months. as for me after a trying period of unsuccessfull job hunting jem managed to line me up a job at boots, ta jem. the job mainly consisted of giving advice to rich snobby middle age bitches on what type of facial cream/harispray/makeup would best suit them so obviously i was a complete natural. well actually thats a little bit of a lie i desperately tried to avoid any advice giving and instead concentrated on a concerted but predominantly futile campaign to avoid giving the aforementioned bitches a plastic bag to wrap up the box of panadaol they,d just bought and were about to put in their handbag.actually boots was kinda fun i didnt give a shit and neither did the rest of the fantastically cool little crew of co-workers i worked with. there were lots if comic moments but i guess there of a you had to be there type and this is dull enough already.

living in london itself didnt really do it for me as much as it does for most people. there were definite ups like getting to hang with my sister again after not seeing each other for three years, and hanging out with conor and jem who amazingly lived right round the corner. i was also lucky enough to move into a cool, if messy even by my standards, flat with jane, finn, lucky the dog and three cats! they were great and it was a fun place to live. overall i found london just too expensive, difficult to get around, busy and generally big. so after her three months in hell were over flick returned to london and at about the same time sturt and charlotte arrived. we all decided to ditch london for somewhere cheaper and smaller and so ended up in belfast.

belfast was great, we managed to get a very comfortable and cheap house and living with flick, stu and char was lots of fun. the location was certainly interesting, we were deep in the protestant heartland of east belfast, a wierd area of fish n chip shops, chavvy little brats wandering the streets at night, threatening murals, scary skinheads walking their (alost exclusively) pitbull terriors and more fish and chip shops. those bloody dogs shat on the footpath so much that the pungent aroma permanently lingered in the air.

belfast is an interesting place. in the slightly less than three months i spent there i felt like i was only just beginning to get a glimpse of the reality that lurks just below the dreary but friendly exterior. certainly the place must be a lot better than it was back when the 'troubles' were really cranking. it seems like a lot of people of my generation and younger think its all a bit of a load of bollocks and would rather get on with being happy little consumers than get into any sectarian nonsense. nonetheless its still a city truly divided and, unless your an outsider like we were, your always marked by which side you belong too. the communities are still almost entirely divided, theres still full on murals, protestant areas are sperated from catholic ones by huge barriers and the police vechiles look more like tanks than cars. its obviously improving but it,ll be a long time before the dynamics are anything like a 'normal' city.while in belfast i mostly worked crazy fifty plus hour weeks doing insanely tedious, mind numbing and ethically dubious data entry work for a consumer credtit company. still it was easy, there was a few good crew there and i saved a shitload of cash so it was all good really.ok so that about sums up that, around the 10th of feb me and flick headed off travelling but that can be for another post.