Olivers Odyssey

People love to say it, I love to say it. In fact, it's the German word for Oops! so Germans probably love it too. A friend of mine told me recently that they even like typing it. The fact is, Uppsala has the rare and elusive double header of being a charming place with a lovely sounding name to go with it. Very lovely place indeed, especially in winter, but more on the city itself later. Today we're focusing on snow which is an important part of Swedish winter as it's everywhere. And I love the snow. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Eskimos have 14 words to describe snow, and true or not, I always found that to be incredible. For an Australian who lives at least 3000 kilometres from the nearest snow, I ... read more

I spent my birthday building a fence around some compost in Belarus, which, as strange as it sounds, is stranger still as the compost heap didn't look like it was about to escape. We were in the middle of a visit to the capital city, Minsk, when it was decided that a sojourn out of the big smoke and into the countryside was in order. Karina's Grandmother had a cottage out there somewhere and the prospect of digging up vegetables and eating them too was delightfully foreign and appealing to me. (Back home, I rely on an excellent fruit and veg supermarket just down the road...) What's more, the house had no heating, no running water, no phone, and no internet. I've experienced this once before after not paying the bills in a London share house, ... read more

Getting In Russia, at first, seems to be a huge, impenetrable fortress. A land where you need to fill out pages of forms, (proving your existence, your intentions, with a few passport sized photos), just for a one week visit. The former Soviet empire, looming over Europe like a forbidden forest. And finally, with a reason to visit and a girlfriend who can speak the language, here was my ticket into the deep dark woods... As if sorting out all the papers wasn't hard enough (you have to buy an invite from a hotel for visa eligibility) our entrance across the Finnish/Russian border was impeded because someone on the bus had been accused of having a fake passport. A fake passport! And luckily for me, I passed through just before they did, so I had a ... read more

The most memorable thing about travelling is getting a local touch. Unfortunately for the romance seekers out there (you know who you are), I'm not referring to meeting local girls. I mean nothing beats meeting people who live in the place you're visiting, and who take the time to welcome you into their houses, their lives, their worlds. This was especially the case with Serbia. Through a distant contact, we were given the address of a woman in the capital, Belgrade, and she was expecting us. Her name was Violeta and that was all we knew. Getting to her apartment from the station was a major problem, the streets on our map were written in familiar Latin letters, while the actual street signs were written in Cyrillic. Plus it was dark. That photo on the right ... read more

Archipelago, meaning a cluster of islands, is a great word. If it wasn't for "Ollie Gee and the Gentle Jivers", "The Archipelagos" would probably have a shot at being the name of my fictional band. But in terms of real archipelagos, I first came upon Stockholm's as my Ryanair flight from London descended into a pink-tinged sunset, and I positively marvelled at all those thousands of islands stretching off into the horizon. 24 thousand according to some counts. 24, 000 - try and picture it. Some so big they have holiday houses on them. They were truly sprawled out all over the place, almost as if by some big uncontrollable force. While you're probably thinking this sounds like the result of tectonic shifts, erosion and subduction zones, I thought it looked more like the result of ... read more