My First Three Experiences of France Perhaps it is fitting that my first three experiences of Paris all begin with the same letter, or perhaps it just sounds more romantic if I say it that way. After all, Paris is the city of romance. There have been all too many books, movies, anecdotes and sappy poems telling of the lure, the charm or even the lust that this city creates in people (particularly those young and restless types), or perhaps more scarily, that this city actually has in it’s own right. I can assure you, without any hesitation whatsoever, that this [View Full Entry]

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The World’s Most Dependable Alarm Clock Isn’t it great to sleep in on the weekend? To relax and loll around sleepily while you make up for all the early starts between Monday and Friday is something that we all like to do every now and then, and when you are indulging yourself in a few extra winks the absolute last thing that you want to happen is for that pesky alarm clock to go off. For me the weekend alarm used to be the neighbour’s kids running, screaming into the swimming pool immediately outside my window. I was constantly in awe [View Full Entry]

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Busses and Weather Patterns: The Weather God Phenomenon Exposed I may not be particularly striking, I may not be inordinately tall, I may not have superpowers or omnipresence, but I am a weather god. I say this in all seriousness and I can prove it. Unfortunately I don't actually have the ability to control the weather, it just sort of happens automatically, and it's somehow linked with buses in Scotland. Let me begin to explain, if I can. After leaving England and heading north, and after a couple of fun days exploring the charming city of Glasgow, I embarked on a [View Full Entry]

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There is More to This Country. . . Where I come from it takes a good hour and a half driving in excess of the speed limit before you even come to the next piddling little village down the road, and to get to the next “big” place takes another hour or so. Australia is the kind of place where you can drive for several hours on end and only find two places that are signposted enough to be considered worth stopping at. This is the world that I grew up in; this is what I’m used to. Imagine my surprise [View Full Entry]

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Welcome Home My Dear Convict Son It felt as though I’d just spent nine hours in time machine when I emerged from the plane. I was pretty sure that I arrived in London significantly before leaving New York, and as I was still operating on Tacoma time my internal clock was telling me that the sun really ought not to be up at midnight. I hadn’t slept on the plane of course; who can fall asleep when your body is telling you that it’s 10am? I was obviously quite grumpy, but I was holding myself together just long enough to get [View Full Entry]

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Welcome to New York They say that you can’t visit the USA without seeing New York and despite the fact that you very well could do such a thing, it not being physically impossible or anything like that, and also forgetting that a lot of US citizens never leave their home town anyway let alone visit New York (I guess they never exactly “visit” the country though so they can be excused), I figured that I ought to at least prove this rule one way or another. So, bravely going where only a handful of million others had gone that week, [View Full Entry]

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In the Words of Prince Humperdink: Skip to the End I apologise in advance for this journal is nothing of the sort. Consider it more along the lines of me trying to get some thoughts out of my head and onto paper (albeit the electronic kind). For those of you who are actually interested in what I did while in the USA I have included a short description towards the end along with some decent photos. Feel free to skip to the end and please do not feel required to read any of my ramblings. Also, I’ve had to write it [View Full Entry]

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Once Upon A Time In the year 1607 a fourteen year old girl named Arjumand Banu Begum became betrothed to Prince Khurrum, third son of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. This alone would be a truly unremarkable story but thankfully there is a little more to tell. This is the story of how one man ruined it for the rest of us by setting the bar far too high. The princess became the third and most beloved wife of Khurrum (polygamy being in fashion and all) and the couple were reportedly so head over heels in love with each other that they [View Full Entry]

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Where’s The Bloody Zoo? While I was on the train heading across the Indian continent, Piscine Molitor Patel was telling me a thousand wonderful facts about the Pondicherry Zoo. Stories of exotic animals living happily in their synthetic enclosures while the young Indian boy ran amok around the area trying to collect as many religions as he possibly could were rolling around my mind as Paul and I arrived in the old French colony of Pondicherry. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that there never had been a zoo in Pondicherry! After many angry outbursts, curses towar [View Full Entry]

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The Long Drive to Israel Right after the four-thousandth bikini clad goddess obliviously walked past us that day Paul and I decided that the time had come to leave the sunny shores of Goa. Somehow an entire week had disappeared on Palolem beach (I dare not guess the reason) in which we had seen very little, done very few things, been almost no places, and had learnt absolutely nothing. Sure, we’d both been having a great time and Punjabi had most assuredly been entertaining us each night with his antics but the time had come for us to move onwards and [View Full Entry]

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