There really are lots of places I haven't been



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Although I have a quite a lot of travel planned for the rest of the year, I do not have a single trip planned to a country I have not visited before. I might be able to fit in another weekend somewhere at some point, but that is about it, and most possible destinations are places I have been beofre. So I don't think this map is going to change this year, unless I go to Norway or Switzerland.

Redirection

I have a piece on eating Dim Sum in a local restaurant in Kowloon City over at Gastroblog.

Early Saturday morning song lyrics

Line one is the time
That you, you first stayed over at mine
And we drank our first bottle of wine
And we cried

Line two we’re away
And we both, we both had nowhere to stay
Well the bus-shelter’s always ok
When you’re young

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
That you die

Let’s take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
Not through the age or the failure, children
Not through the hate or despise
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Line three I forget
But I think, I think it was our first ever bet
And the horse we backed was short of a leg
Never mind

Line four in a park
And the things, the things that people do in the dark
I could hear the faintest beat of your heart
Then we did

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
You should die

Lets take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
You can’t have too many good times, children
You can’t have too many lines
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Well my eyes look like a map of the town
And my teeth are either yellow or they’re brown
But you’ll never hear the crack of a frown
When you are here
You’ll never hear the crack
Of a frown

- Prettiest Eyes, by the Beautiful South, a song that I know from their best of Albulm Carry On Up the Charts. Generally, the songs on that album are more cynical, but I choose this one as an act of optimism as a revolutionary act (as Lloyd Dobbler a la Cameron Crowe might say).

In truth I rather like this

At a dinner party this evening, the question "Is there anywhere you haven't been to?" was asked of me. Of course, the answer is "lots of places", but I am doing my best.

It was a very nice pub

Yes, I know

I am in Strasbourg. Last weekend I was in London. The weekend before that I was in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney and in Sydney itself. The weekend before that I was on the Gold Coast in Queensland. The weekend before that I was in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The weekend before that I was in London. The weekend before that I was in Millau in the south of France.

I'm tired.

It's a drizzling European Sunday morning

Seriously, where is spring this year?

I am in a cybercafe in the basement of a "Cyber Hotel" in the middle of Strasbourg, that apparently has a PC in every room. I don't actually need that - I brought my own PC - but the wireless would have been nice. Instead I stayed in a more mundane hotel. But c'est la vie (as they say here). As it is, I come here to use the basement cybercafe. I am sure I would have the software build on this PC the way I like it within three or four days if I was staying longer. (Well, other than that it running Windows 98SE on a really slow processor. It's kind of a shame, as the computer has a nice TFT display - it's just the computer itself needs replacing).

Anyway, although Germany is just across the river one wouldn't know it. This is a French city. I have heard more English spoken than German, and the hotel TV only had French channels plus CNN in English. But, there was one exception. At my guidebook's suggestion, I went to a brew pub named Les Trois Brasseurs which was full of people both in the bar upstairs and the cellar downstairs where there was live music. The beer was much better than is typical in France, and this I think may have been influenced by the proximity to Germany. I started talking to a group of Americans, who turned out to be interior decorators from Malibu who were doing work for some extremely rich person over here. They were with some three or four locals with who they were working, and who had brought them to this pub. I had a very pleasant hour or two in conversation, and then something amazing happened. As we were about to pay up and leave, the barman brought us a last round on the house. Whether this was because the French people in the party knew him or were regulars or what I do not know, but I have to say this was awfully nice. It was a good evening.

I am in Strasbourg in Alsace

Strasbourg is a beautiful city, and that it remains so strikes me as doubly impressive given the extent to which this part of Europe has been an issue of territorial dispute over the decades. But of course, although World War One did succeed in getting Alsace and Lorraine back for the French, the fighting did not actually reach here.

And speaking of reaching here, in a very Ryanair way I flew to Baden Baden airport over the border (which is the Rhine, looking rather less impressive than it does in Rotterdam) in Germany and got the bus here from that airport. I have been to Germany several times before, but on those occasions I have travelled around by rail. The amazing thing was that the bus ride was the first time I had been on a German autobahn. And it was a disappointment. The speed limit was 120km/h. Now I was already aware that many autobahns do in fact have speed limits so this was not a surprise. But given the reputation of the autobahn network, it was still disappointing. The speed limit actually increased when we entered France for goodness sake.

I always prefer my cuisine conceptualised



What's the concept exactly? That they speak Indo-European languages in the north and Dravidian languages in the south?

Redirection

I have a piece on lunch at the Sydney fish market last week over at Gastroblog. I shall post some more photos of the event here later, but alas I have to put in a day's work first.

Back in London

I somehow managed to get eleven bottles of wine through customs and into the United Kingdom this morning. This is a record and I am proud of myself. I also managed to go straight to work after the flight and manage to be at least reasonably productive, too. Right now though I am exhausted and must sleep. I have a great deal still to say about my travels, and hopefully I will indeed write most of this over the next few days and/or weeks.

The joys of Australian wine tourism





At Australian wineries it is possible to buy port in ten litre containers.

Alas, I found the prospect of getting this onto the plane and through British customs a little daunting, so I did not buy one. Which is a shame, as I would have been delighted to have been able to serve port out of a plastic container that looked more suitable for engine oil at my next dinner party.

I continue to move around

I am now at my brother's place in Cessnock, which is a coal mining / wine town in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney, and my last stop on this trip to Australia. The Hunter is most notable for its lovely lemony white wines based on the Semillon grape, and also makes a lot of in my mind slightly less notable shiraz based reds. And there are a few in my mind quite fine Pinot Noir, which is totally bizarre given the extremely un-Burgundy like climate.

Anyway, I shall investigate these things further in the morning.

Now in Sydney

I will blog something substantial soon. Sydney is cosmopolitan in a very predominantly Chinese Pacific Rim way (in a sense even more so than Hong Kong) whereas my sister's place in the Blue Mountains where I was yesterday is very, well, English. And the Gold Coast is sort of modern developed world internationalist. More on this soon.

The modern world

I am presently staying with my parents on Australia's Gold Coast, which is a sort of lesser south Florida. (It's a very pleasant place, but it has certain qualities about it). My parents yesterday evening held a party, attended by a wide assortment of relatives on both sides of the family. Prior to the party, I was asked to take care of some background music for the evening. When he asked me to do this, I suspect my father expected me to go through his CD collection and find a few to play for the evening. Instead, I of course responded by plugging my laptop into his stereo, and announcing that everything was taken care of. I think he may have been slightly bemused by this.

Of course, prior to this I had to rush off to the local shopping centre and buy a cable with a 1/4 inch headphone plug at one end and two RCA plugs at the other. I have serveral such cables already, but alas they are in England. My mother now wants me to leave the cable with her and show her how to use iTunes prior to flying out from the Gold Coast on Tuesday.

And of course I have to flash the firmware on her DVD-ROM/R/RW drives to make them region free, too.

I do love nationalistic rubbish bins

It's really okay

Jackie still seems slightly defensive about using her laptop in bed to access the internet. She shouldn't. This is what laptops and wireless were invented for. I have to confess that I had been using laptops in bed for years before I got wireless though: I just had to use a cable for the internet connection. What Jackie may or may not realise is that there is a moment in most wireless laptop users lives when they find themselves going to the bathroom, taking the laptop with them, and being still connected to global information networks while performing certain bodily functions. Most people conclude that this is going too far, but doing it in bed certainly isn't. In fact doing it in bed (just like doing it from a Starbucks in Shenzhen) is cool.

Of course, blogging from my laptop in bed is what I am doing now. I am at my parents place, and my parents have a WiFi network. My mother recently bought her first laptop. I made a suggestion with respect to the model, which she followed. (Like Glenn himself she got a Dell Inspiron 700m, which is a lovely little piece of kit. With this one Dell have really managed nice design, whereas most of their previous machines - like the Inspiron 8600 I am using now - have had good feature sets and have been excellent value for money, but a bit big and clunky. It's a shame Dell are not presently selling the 700m in the UK). I also recommended that she get a home WiFi network in order that she could use the laptop anywhere in the house, and she did. She and my father like to use the laptop on the kitched table at breakfast, and Mum likes to use it to read the newspapers in bed in the morning. (In fact, I just saw my mother take the laptop to bed with her). And my sister and I can use the wireless when we visit.

In fact, my sister will be here tomorrow evening, and she will certainly be bringing her laptop. It is possible that this house will have three people using its wireless network from their beds simultaneously as of tomorrow.

More geographical relocation

I am now at my parents place on the Gold Coast in Queensland, not far from Brisbane. I am going to be here for about a week, which is good because I don't think I can take any more plane trips for a little while.

If it's Tuesday, it must be Sydney

I am now in an internet cafe in George Street in Sydney. Since I was here last, Australia has changed from being a "Short, Tall, Grande" country in Starbucks terms to being a "Tall, Grande, Venti" country. China and Hong Kong remain "Short, Tall, Grande" countries, however.

While on that, I forgot to redirect this little Samizdata piece on finding nerd heaven. This piece was actually posted over WiFi from a Starbucks in Shenzhen in China. (I was having a Grande triple shot latte at the time. I was fighting jetlag and really needed it).

We haven't quite figured out the wireless business model.

I am now in an entirely different Starbucks clone in Hollywood Road. (The whole mid-levels / Hollywood Road / SoHo area in Hong Kong really is yuppie expat heaven). This one has free internet terminals for customers. This is a nice touch, and compliments to them. It also has wireless internet access. However, this is for pay wireless internet access. So it seems they will offer me a terminal plus internet access for nothing above the cost of a cup of coffee, but if I provide my own computer the internet access itself will cost money. That's a new one.

And yes, I do actually spend the majority of my time outside coffee shops, even when travelling. Really.