Share Housing

Hi friends,

I know posting has been disappointingly slim, and i will endevour to return this blog to the glory from whence it appeared. Been loving londonland, aside from some issues with a broken bed, a scary landlord and some sexual innuendo. Have so far spent my time here being as gay as is humanly possible, shopping, seeing musicals and drinking… beer.

As of tomorrow i’m moving into a share house for the remainder of my stay, a hilariously studenty house a million miles from the centre of london hired to me by a lithuanian man who speaks really quickly.

I’ll keep you up to date, lovely friends.
Wheee!

Hello and Goodbye

Hey all.

Been a crazy couple of weeks. Got sick. Then got better. Made it to Germany, Holland and Paris, and Laura has gone home. She flew out today so i’ve jumped to london for the next couple of weeks to hang out with Cam and Em. So really the blog should be called Cam and Em and Dave, or Dave Has No One To Travel With So He’s Mooching Off His Friends.

The internet cafe is super-cheap, so i’ll do my best to post with more regularity.

Hugs!

Oh Deutschland!

Oh friends, oh family!

I am moving to Germany. This may sound somewhat like a shotgun wedding for Pamela Anderson, or as i like to call it ‘every day for Pamela Anderson’, but I assure you I have had two full days to consider and reason, and I have come up with a list of for and against.

Germany is fabulous, and the hospitality has been amazing. On our newly created ‘photos’ link, you can see for yourselves. We spent the first morning driving from Hamburg to Preetz, the small super-German village we are staying in. The first thing I noticed, aside from not having to watch for bag theives and malaria, was the green. It’s clearly not fourth stage water restrictions. No, no, no friends! It’s as green as my face after one too many ‘horny martinis’ in South Yarra. Everything seems to be overgrowing, rustic and cobblestone drives lined by the tallest trees.

We met Max and Hildegarde as we waited for our bags at the airport. I say met very loosly. Instead, we saw Hildegarde waving an enormous sign saying ‘LAURA AND DAVE’ complete with kangaroos and the union jack (see post one!) We were battling some serious jetlag, and as soon as we had a chance to run over, hug them and sit down for a kaffee (coffee) I realised neither Laura nor I actually speak any German. This presented a problem, because I didn’t want to come across as too ‘wordy’ and confuse them, but at the same time I wasn’t quite prepared to jump up and down on the spot in what would, from a distance, closely resemble a drunk person trying to perform ‘Swan Lake’ on ice. So I did what I always do in awkward situations. I ran to the currency converter to change my baht to euro (1300 to 19, thank you very much!) But the ice was broken somewhat when Laura and I began screaming blue murder when as we drove along in the right hand lane.

Upon arriving in Preetz we met some of the family and took a walk through the village. People, this is TEXTBOOK Germany. Hell, it’s textbook Europe. The entire place is cobblestones and sharp rooves and beer with big handles and giant butchers and and and everything that makes me happy. We went to the local supermarket and I spent twelve minutes trying to decipher which bottle of water wasn’t actually sparkling. TWELVE WHOLE MINUTES. We had a small communication breakdown when Hildegaude offered us some ‘Ice’ and Laura politely told her no thanks and we are not into that and how dare you offer illicit drugs in such a quaint village! After some awkward humming and ahing, we realised that ‘Eis’ means ice-cream, and even if we wanted drugs a 74 year old woman is probably not our best point from which to access hardcore amphetamines.

I wont lie, but the time we had reached the nearby lake Laura and I were kind of getting a little bit mushy on Germany. I quickly learned how to say i love (Ich liebe) Germany (Deautschland) und (and) bier (beer) and began saying it to anyone, and i mean anyone, unlucky enough to glance at the 6″3′ red-head Irish tourist jumping up and down next to a giant lake. We stopped off at the local cafe just off the water, and amused by my constant drivel, Hildegarde and Max ordered me a gross (big) bier. Check out the photos people, the Germans know how to drink. Laura and I spent the afternoon trying to learn some German words. This went on and on and on and on, until Laura pointed at a dog and said ‘What’s that?!’ and Hildegarde said ‘That iz a dog’. Awesome, just awesome.

From there we head back (albeit, me somewhat stumbly) to the village and spent the evening with the family. After sleeping 12 hours we headed out today to Kiel, the closest city to buy train tickets for our trip to Amsterdam later in the week. This, too, ended up being somewhat of an ordeal. We found a station master who seemed facinated when told we were ‘AUS-TRAL-IA-N tourists’ and began explaining the best way to get to our destination. Upon hearing the words ‘12:30′ Laura pulled some old German classes out and receited back to him in German the numbers he’d just said. He took this as a sign that this endearing Australian girl was fluent in the tounge of the motherland, and bombarded her with enough ‘eicth’, ‘frugel’ and ‘hammerstienlenlarkenzbergs’ that she sort of stared at him in a daze. After what can only be refered to as a VERY pregnant pause, she said to him ‘IT’S VERY COLD IN AUSTRALIA’. Their makeshift relationship did not survive.

My other favourite little nuance of Germany are the churches. Good lord people, if God can’t see the faith of a group of people that will build a church in a tinsy tiny village that CAN BE SEEN FROM THE MOON, he’s probably not worth believing in. The stunning architecture and sheer size of these creatures ended with hilarity when Laura, armed with an umbrella for the fabulous weather, attempted to look up to the roof and nearly fell over from pushing her neck back too far. It was a classy moment, and had I not been asleep in the mud from jetlag, i’d have totally teased her for it.

Today was somewhat more subdued. A trip to a submarine from WW2, which we walked through, was a sombering reminder of the history of the rest of the world (I described Australian history to Hildegarde, in broken english, as ‘a bunch of criminals got off a boat!’) A happy snap turned sour when Laura pointed out that I was ‘thumbs-upping’ a cemetary. And finally, when I was trying to hit on a waiter while pronoucing a word that involved spitting into a cup and doing a backflip (lingustically speaking.)

Anywho, to the list!

FOR
- Everything sounds cooler in another language
- I am strangely super-attractive when I say ‘G’DAY MATE!
- The beers are served in glasses around 1 litre
- My broken english creates sentences that Shakespear would be proud of
- Every bartender looks like Brad Pitt, and is still friendly after I massacre the language
- The place looks like the front page of ‘House and Garden’

AGAINST
- Um… my family doesn’t live here yet?
- Mark is small, but not small enough to be mailed

Ah friends, I will miss you, but I am assured you will understand!

Liebe und bier!!
Dave.

RUN!

Hi friends.

Have finally managed to score some time on a computer that uses a European keyboard and a german operating system. For some reason, this means it randomly inserts the letter z into everything. It is pretty awesome. So, to begin, Bangkok.

We got off the aeroplane, a seven and a half hour flight during which I sat behind nine of the worst behaved children I have ever encountered in my entire life, to sweltering heat. Bangkok hits you like a wave a ash and sweat. Within seconds I had managed to take my jumper off, while Laura (being somewhat more prepared) had managed to get down to a tank top and tinsy tiny shorts. We wandered outside to try and find a cab, and within moments were ambushed by what felt like were 1,500 Thai men all vying for our attention. It didn’t help that I reduced to a quivering mess on the floor of the terminal, leaving Laura to save the day.

Within seconds she had decided (from a reputable source) that we should pay no more than 400 baht for the trip to our hotel. I was so overwhelmed by the rush of tiny men with intimidating stares that I was willing to pay the 1,200 they originally asked for. Obviously none of you informed me of the magic of bartering. This came to a stunning conclusion when I turned to Laura and said ‘Laura! You’re being really mean to these people!!’ She did not respond positively. Next thing I know we’re downstairs in a 400 baht cab on the way our hotel, me with nothing but my words to eat.

My intense fears that we would end up in some tiny shanty house like the millions we saw on the drive through Bangkok was qwelled somewhat when we pulled up at a lavish hotel complete with private entrace driveway and a whole lot of fake gold finishes. We wandered up to our room, threw our bags down, peeled off our filthy flight / swear clothes and made our way to the main street. I had heard of Took-tooks from Cam, tiny four wheel motorbikes that unwitting tourists step into to get around town for little to no money. There was, however, a catch.

The drivers do not know the road rules.

What had started as an innocent fun ride, our hair back, our faces shining as we giggled through the traffic turned into something more sinister as we realised the endearing little Thai man didn’t seem to be taking us anywhere. As the giggles turned to nervous half-smiles and then to no smiles and then to ‘oh my god is he going to eat us???’, we pulled into what looked like a drive through butcher. A man jumped on the side of the car and Laura looked as though she was about to faint. It was pretty awesome. Turned out it was a Thai resturaunt, and, after two 700ml Asahi’s, I was more than willing to break my earlier rule about not eating anything. And the food was delicious. It became less delicious when I woke up a few hours later realising that the dream I was having about my stomach hurting was actually just my stomach hurting. I prayed to whatever God hangs out in Thailand that if he made me not sick I would marry a girl and get a reputable career as a businessman. And it worked! For some reason the pain subsided, and I was a ok.

The next day we woke up about 9am, got a cab (no more Took-tooks) to the local shopping centre, and somehow got taken to a massive jewelery store. Turns out the drivers get a commission if they take you to their ’sponsors’ store, and so Laura and I somehow endured 35 minutes of a small roundish Thai woman asking me repeated why I wasn’t buying my pretty girlfriend an engagement ring. I resisted the urge to the tell the small roundish Thai woman that she had more chance of me joining a circus of performing monkeys, and Laura saved the day by pulling out the front door and running for cover.

From there Bangkok got all a bit too much for me, with the exception of the oh so fabulous lady boy who sold Laura her new sneakers. So instead of seeing a movie to pass time until our flight, Laura rebooked our hotel room so we could lounge around with our getting harrassed for a couple of hours. We had some sleep, I played some gameboy and we high-tailed it our of Thailand on a much classier airline.

So, after drinking far too many minature bottles of red wine and giggling at ‘Blades of Glory’ at 2am on my tiny video screen, we arrived in Zurich, changed flights to Hamburg, and then got to meet Laura’s great aunt and uncle, Max and Hildegarde. And good LORD people, Germany is so amazingly pretty and amazing.

So, much love (for you, certainly not for Bangkok) and I will speak to soon!

Caio kittens, Dave.

PS: Have yet to work out spell check and proper photo uploading, but will come back to you with something good soon! Also, Laura had a fairly less dramatic response to Thailand, so I speak only for myself when I say I totally didn’t cope with it.