Just a short one, Top Gear started for the new season last night. It was the first time I’d seen an episode live to TV on BBC2. Awesome, good to have one of my favourite shows back on.
Damn the fellas are looking old though, Richard especially, 60′s punk rock boy hair cut not doing anyone any favours.
Last night was the night I’d be waiting for, for a while since missing him in Perth in December. After booking the tickets in July, I’d been hotly anticipating seeing Damien Rice, my favourite Irish Folk Artist, and he certainly didn’t dissapoint. I haven’t been so impressed by a concert since seeing the Three Bens (Ben Folds, Ben Kweller & Ben Lee) live at the Burswood with the H-Dog about five years ago. That could have something to do with the fact that apart from a plethora of drum’n'bass, trance, tech and other electronic gigs I hadn’t really been to anything else since the Bens concert, that good at least. But Damien was fantastic, I might even say it was the best 25 quid I’d spent since moving here.
Of course, this was the one night I forgot to bring the camera, which is weird as I usually take if everywhere, and totally annoying as we were sitting at the front of the stalls (at the back of the arena, mind you), but would have been an awesome oppurtunity to take some nice shots. Hopefully I can find some decent shots online at some stage, but for now stolen pics from around the inter-web will surely suffice.
He played a big mix of old songs, and new songs, and a few I hadn’t heard before, as well as the weird mid set interval with shouts of support and another song in support of the current crisis in Burma (Weird, but kind of touching at the same time). I really don’t get to see enough of my favourite artists live, but its always great to be able to see the songs performed differently, adds a lot extra to the experience.
i get really funny with live music, and when watching it i’m quite often in a weird buzzy haze with with a wonderful warm fuzzy feeling and body rus…. Wait, what?? This wasn’t the first time I saw Armin or some other equally classy trance act. But yes, its true, its weird that just listening to music can make me do that, but fantastic anyway!
Why does Wembley Arena only sell Fosters though? Why?
It’s now 2:30 in the AM and I’m still awake, tieing up some loose ends from work today, some stuff I was doing at home and playing some CS:S. I’m still occasionally up for a challenge. And two tools decided they’d be cocky shits in a game and challenged me to a match. Bots aside (ignoring the two guys who just joined before the game ended), I completely and utterly shat all over them. And laughed at the same time.. Poor form… Losers..
Wait, who’s the grown man sitting up in the wee hours of the morning playing computer games again..
Sick.
Brugge (Bruges) is to Brussels (Bruxelles), what hot is to cold, what rock is to pop and what heaven is to hell. Travelling from Brussels to Brugge is like a lovely holiday oasis in the middle of a desert, only a stone’s throw from Brussels (1hr by train), everything about it is like what you’d expect of a lovely holiday destination out of the big city.
The second we dropped our bags, we raced straight down the local pub (next door to the Coin-Op we were washing our clothes at) and dug into some tasty Belgian beer. Belgium is to beer, what Australia is to wine (blasphemy I know, but I’m biased… France is great too) and I mean that. For 2.5 Euros, this place could buy you a pint of Quak (8% Belgian Beer that comes in a test tube), 9% Westmalle Triple or a Duval (arguably Belgium’s most popular export beer).
Quak – Killer Beer in a Test tube
Orval, another -10% (just)
A couple of these put me into a very happy place, you can imagine what I was like by the time our clothes were clean. After we finished with the laundry, we went straight back out to the local beer house recommended to us by Monique, the owner of the Bread and Breakfast we were staying in. It was called Cambrinas, and its specialty was over 400 different types of bottled Belgian beer. Yes, that’s right, 400 different ones, a beer lover’s heaven.
Brugge has a lot of history, nice cobblestoned roads and a couple of fantastic looking main squares which literally laugh at that of Grand Place in Brussels. Some points of interest are the church containing the blood of Christ (apparently), Notre Dame, its Windmills and any of the other sites you can see from a cruise taken down one of Brugge’s many Canals.
I would definitely recommend Brugge, out of everything I saw in Belgium. For a city of just over a 100,000 people, there’s more to see, more going on and its at least tenfold nicer than its capital city of Brussels. A must see!
Finally, about four days left now. It’s a ridiculous situation, but I know now haven’t been paid in almost 4 and a half weeks and we’re just starting to get really desparate. It’s good training though.. I’ve gone from my normal expenditure of £6-10 a day on food/lunch plus £4-5 a day on coffee to, spending £3.37 a day on a huuuge discount salad (half price after 2:30pm) and quick afternoon snack.
How does this actually happen though?? I’m 24, in a long-term relationship where both people are working full time with decent salaries and I’m flat broke, basically living on staples. It’s like being at university again. I would blame the fact some bum stole our card details while we were using an ATM in the Netherlands, but we still should have had a back up plan..
Almost there anyway..
Casino…. Anyone?
One thing I’ve noticed time and time again about moving continents is despite the fact everyone I knows speaks good English, different slang from each country really throws people. It seems to happen all the time too, in normal conversation, or when swearing. I get stupid looks all the time about the most obvious words and sayings. Some obvious examples, which throw shop keepers are asking for an ATM (universal I would have though), or EFTPOS (less obvious, but still used). I’ve had it whilst using the word sunnies too, meaning my Sunglasses, another I would have thought would have been obvious.
The corker came on Sunday though, whilst going over the intricacies of the thongs and the obvious difference in meaning between the Aussie Footwear and the rest of the worlds sweaty butt-cheek separater. We were with our friends from the US, and I thought I’d explain some of the different types of thongs we have in Australia, specifically the Double Plugger. Straight away, the car erupted in laughter as the non-aussies tried to work out how on Earth a double plugger related to footwear, when the obvious choice was some funny looking DVDA-style Butt Plug or other bizarre sex toy. Hopefully not one the size of a bowling ball, someone remind me what movie that was from?
The cheapest of all thongs
Do you know how difficult it is to actually explain what a Double plug is, especially when everyone thinks its the funniest they’ve ever heard? Ya!
continued on from Paris (The Holiday – II)……
I had meant to finish my mindless ramblings about Paris all in one go, but I was looking back on what I wrote the other night (whilst slightly innebriated, mind you) and realised that I’d hardly written anything at all. Worst of all, I’m not living up to expectation (mine mostly, as the ultimate companion to any Lonely Planet, Shannon’s Guide to the world… Or at least to the places he’s actually been). Whats the first rule of the SG series? They’re supposed to offer something different than others. But, it probably won’t, and guess what?
I’m going to write it anyway…..
What did I know about Moulin Rouge before going? Not much! I’ve seen the building before, that neon Red Windmill (which I’ll assume was where the idea for the “Gentleman’s” ahem.. strip club came from in Perth) and I remember the boring movie, it did nothing for me, and was probably the main reason I wasn’t terribly fussed whether we went or not. I get it, they family-ified it, but meh anyway. I’ve also heard a few stories about it, like the one of the H-Dog praying to the porcelain god (without the porcelain) out the front of it on a contiki tour, if I have this wrong then I’ll most certainly correct it, but I’m pretty sure those were the details.
Very rarely, nowadays, do I find a site that can continuously hold my attention for any time period and make me piss myself laughing the whole time, and I found that a couple of months ago.. The site I’m talking about is I Can Haz Cheezburger!
It’s officially moved to the top of the 5 minutes of humour a day list, and I’m loving it. It even beat:
And I hate to say it, its probably better than the GIJoe cartoons of a few years ago too, “Who wants a body massage???”, “I’m a computer…”… (Must see!!!) and “All Your Base Are Belong To Us”:
The idea for the I Can Haz Cheezburger is a whole bunch (read: thousands) of reader submitted images of cats in cute/funny/ridiculous positions and outfits with an appropriate caption written on the bottom. But don’t take my word for it, look at this:
See?? They’re funny and they’re not that hard to understand, you just have to interpret what each peice of l33t speak means, which is usually as simple as changing all the z’s to s’s…. So it’s basically identical to understanding American!
Enjoy!
There’s no doubt about it, Paris is a great city, and definitely one that grew on me a lot, especially after visiting it for the second time. I’ll admit, we werent’ quite in the same area as we stayed last time, but the first thing I wondered was where all the grafitti, vandalism, rubbish and slashed tyres were. It wasn’t as if were were on the other side of the city, we were probably about 4 or 5 miles away, staying near Franklin Roosevelt Station (Champs-Élysées), compared to last time near Anvers/Gare du Nord stations. The suburb/area/district (not sure what the French call them) we stayed in this time was the nicer part of Subiaco, or Claremont compared to Northbridge or Perth City at Night. And we were lucky enough to get a reasonably priced hotel, which was really quite nice as well. For 100 euro’s a night, with a delicious coffee/baguettes/crossaint and tasty cheeses, was a darn good deal:
It seems everyone has a story about a European city, how sleazy Rome is, or how dangerous London is, watch for pickpockets in Paris and Brussels or even stay alert and don’t get in a position thats likely to get you mugged in Madrid, but I’d say a lot of it comes down to common sense, and a big chunk of luck. Of course, I feel sorry for this guy, and have heard many stories similar in the past, but I didn’t see anything that made me at all uncomfortable, at least not in Paris.
Not knowing a terrible amount about French history (nor much history at all for that matter), I wasn’t really sure what to expect of Versailles, but we’d heard that many people talk about it, that we just had to go and see it. The whole setup is a lot like the English Palaces, probably more like Hampton Court Palace than the others, but far, far more grand, and beautiful. Of course, Paris, being the most popular tourist destination in the world, meant Versailles had a most obvious downside, and that’s people, and queues. Walking up to the front gate there was a sea of people, with queues lining both sides of the massive entrance with no barriers/sign posts to direct you as to which of the two of three lines was which. After smirking at the idea of standing in a queue for two hours we went off and looked for a quicker way in and found an alternative ticket desk selling entry tickets for slightly more (€19 instead of €14) and allowing you to skip the first, longer queue. Why anyone queue for two hours just to get tickets, only to join another queue is beyond me.
Sea of People
The palace is definitely worth the ticket fee though, and some of the rooms in the palace, halls, and king and queens quarters are nothing short of spectacular:
Rating Guide
Travel: About 45-60 minutes from Paris by RER Train 2
Price: €19/ea
Time: Approx 2-3 Hours
Value: Good Value
More to come..
I found this little gem the other day. It’s a movable, zoomable, auto focus web cam that’s positioned under the Myer/Carillion City Overpass in Murray St Mall, in Perth. The quality is nothing short of fantastic, and even all the way over here in the UK, I can get an almost perfect live feed from the camera every time I’ve tried it. It’d be good enough for identifying people I’m sure, but you’d need the proper circumstances, like someone stopped in the mall for a while.
Call me a voyeur or something, but I’ve seen some weird stuff already in my few minutes of spying, including a bum who sat down, lay all his possessions out neatly on the ground around him and then walked around them two or three times and proceeded to put them back in a bag, and this was all at midnight Perth time on a Saturday night.
Seeing the CBD made me feel just a little homesick too, which can only be a good thing! *sniff*
So yea, its at http://perthcam.mogbog.com/
Powered by ScribeFire.
3,991 | Unique Visitors |
