Utrecht, friends and bad pasta

Holland, Holland, Holland. I asked one of Maud's friends about the difference between 'Holland' and 'the Netherlands'. They means the same thing, essentially, now, but once upon a time 'Holland' was the rich part, and 'the Netherlands' was the rest of it.

So Maud's place is basically amazing. It's in the centre of town, a second-floor apartment overlooking the canal. It's big and bright and has beautiful huge windows that you can throw open and fall out of. It's all cluttery and creative and arty and, basically, Jes and I have stopped at a few real estate agents to look at property... we're moving here. It's so green, and there's a canal that runs through the middle of the city. There's lots of young people, cool bands play here often, there's a supermarket and a video store ... there's no need to look anywhere else, really. There's good noodles, too, and some lovely little bars. Y'all can come visit, I don't mind.

I don't even know how you're meant to use that urinal. Well, I mean, I know how you use it, it's pretty simple, you basically just gotta stand and pee, but don't you think they could've at least put, I dunno, a shower curtain around it? Something? Those things stand ON THE FOOTPATH. Not in Utrecht, thankfully - Utrecht is not so tacky. That shit's in Amsterdam. And I guess peeing on the street is nothing new to a lot of people, myself included (only when the need arises, really really arises), but it's so confusing, like a weird mashup of trash and civility, so you feel nice and normal just peeing in a bathroom, but then realise the little man has gone green and a hundred people are barging past you. How confusement.

Less confusing is hamburgers in vending machines. I don't know why this shit isn't everywhere. I would definitely buy one of those, definitely definitely. Once, at least. Then, obviously, when you realise what a hamburger from a vending machine tastes like, you'll never purchase one again. Having said that, they seemed fairly popular amongst the kiddies in Amsterdam. They sold out quite quickly, one could say!

The canal that runs through Utrecht is constantly alive with music and noise, boats, people drinking on the banks, ducks with their babies, people riding waterbikes. And you have to cross little bridges to get from one part of town to the other. It's tight.

Speaking of tight:

That's where we're staying. Not there, not in that tree, but that's the view from our window. It's amazing waking up to the light streaming in through there - less amazing that it comes in at like 5am, after only going down at about 11pm or something.

Europe Interplay starts tonight, and Maud is basically organising the whole thing, so she's going to be mental for the next week, never at home. (Interplay is an international playwrighting festival held every year - I went to World Interplay last year in Townsville, which is where I met Maud and a lot of these other geezers). Tonight's the opening night party, and I think Jes and I are going to crash it. There's lots of old Interplay folk from Townsville here - I've already caught up with Anna, who's from Melbourne, and Florian from Delft (here in Holland). A few others, tutors and delegates alike, will be around, which will be nice.

That's me and Maud. She's the sweetest girl you'll meet.

The other night, Anna and Florian came into Utrecht for the afternoon, and we all grabbed lunch and some coffee and had a bit of a catch up. Jes and I decided to make dinner for them and for Maud, and then Maud invited her friends Erik and Yorit, so we went to the supermarket and got too much pasta and not enough sauce and put together a meal for 7. Aside from the shit food and the warm wine, it was really lovely. We all sat around and laughed and listened to songs and everyone spoke English, most of them better than me, and then the boys went off to see Xavier Rudd who was playing just up the road - so there were at least 3 Australians in Utrecht that night.

We decided to go out, too, that night, so while I lay on the couch, Jes did her little girly routine with the makeup and the clothes and the hairspray... well, she thought it was hairspray. The can was on the shelf with all the hair mousse and whatnot, so she grabbed it and used a bit of it. She kinda turned to me and said "That doesn't smell like hairspray. What is this?" We had a look at the label, which was written in Dutch, and worked out it was actually waterproofing spray for your shoes. It seemed to do the job though, because she looked great. And when it rained that night, the water just slid right off her.

Everyone is smiling, but it's all fake. We're actually all bloated and dying from the bad pasta...

We had another label-issue the following morning when Jes came in from the kitchen and took a mouthful of muesli and screwed up her face. We'd bought sour buttermilk instead of normal milk to put on our cereal. It said 'melk' on the front, so it seemed to be ok. It wasn't. I ate it though, and I'm still alive, so I guess it can't have been that bad. We might make some pancakes from it, because apparently you can use it for that.

Yesterday we got the train to Amsterdam. Jes got some new shoes (above). I think Amsterdam is basically a bit of a hole. A big whorey, touristy hole. I've been there before, two years ago, albeit very briefly, and I don't know what I saw last time, but wow. Initial touristy reactions are of grossness and dirtyness. Anna and Florian have said there are some very beautiful parts once you get away from the shit, but the shit is kinda what hits you first, what's pushed. Sad looking girls and women in their underwear, waving at you from shopfronts, trying to get your business. Sex shops galore, tacky nasty spruikers out the front trying to lure you in... I don't want to sound like a prude (heaven forbid!) but it's kinda yuk. We did see lots of stray cats though, which were cute and fun to play with. And we got some Ben and Jerry's ice cream, which made us both very happy. We met Anna, her friend Eliza, and Florian for a drink, too. And we bumped into some of the Spanish kids we waited with back at the Paris metro at 5am. Stupid small world.

It's really weird being able to smell weed wherever you go. You're walking to the supermarket or to church and all of a sudden someone rides past you smoking a joint. And it could be anyone, y'know, it's not just the young kids or the tourists, it's the cops and shit. Not the cops, I'm sure, but probably the priests. There's a coffee shop a short walk from our place and we've observed that it must close at midnight, as at about 10 minutes to 12, there's a line out the door of insomniac-looking people who clearly need something to send them off into the land of nod. The windows of the shops display what's on offer, like a little menu, with quantities and prices. There's even a chart to decode magic mushrooms - it has a table with the type of mushroom to buy depending on what kind of physical/psychic/bodily reaction you want to have, how many you should take, what to avoid when taking them (ie alcohol etc). And, hilariously, they've just introduced smoking laws here, which restrict the smoking of tobacco in bars and coffee shops etc, so if one were to smoke some weed, you can't roll it with tobacco, it has to be straight green, and THAT can be smoked indoors. What? What? What.

We didn't end up getting back from Amsterdam til quite late, and all of the shops had closed, so we got a pizza and ate it while watching The Devil Wears Prada and Maud did some work. Poor thing is going to have a crazy week! 60-odd people arriving today from all over the world, and she had to meet and greet all of them and answer all their questions and allocate all their rooms and tell them all where they can buy stamps and a drink and then tuck them allll in to bed at night. Busy work.

We've got a few things planned for the next couple of days. We want to climb the big tower in the centre of town, go for a trip down the canal in a waterbike, ride real bikes to the forest for a picnic, go to Delft and see some art, go back into Amsterdam, and go to a little cheese village not far from here. I don't know if we'll squeeze it all in, but we'll try. Berlin is next week, and everyone I have spoken to has said it's amazing! So excited.

I've put up all my photos, now, I think. Check them out here. I managed to delete a few altogether, which was a little irritating, but I think they're boring ones anyway, so it's not like there's a big gap missing from the holiday.

Jes has been at the beach all day, so she's napping on the bed. I'm doing this and watching a bit of Ally McBeal. I think we'll head to the party at some point later on tonight.

Miss you all, a lot now actually. I'll be funner next time, promise.

xd

Paris to Amsterdam...

We are in Utrecht, just outside Amsterdam. We got in this morning, on the train. Standing outside the Metro in Paris at 5am, waiting for the gates to open, we were with a bunch of other Spanish people ... we all looked like homeless people, all tired and dirty and carrying bags. There was even a real live homeless man there, but it took us a minute to realise he was homeless and not backpacking.

We are very happy here, in a building we were brought to by Maud (my friend from Interplay). I think it's her University. We have real proper internet, on real proper computers - it's sad how desperate Jes and I are to connect with a keyboard. We were thinking of wandering around town this afternoon, but Jes just turned to me and said "Do you mind if we just sit here for four hours?" and I basically cried with excitement because I was hoping to do exactly that. We've developed this thing, we have, where we ask a question - Do you want the top of the bottom bunk? - and on the count of three, we both have to say the answer we want. So it goes a little like this:

Jes: Do you want the top bunk?

Dan: 1.. 2... 3

(simultaneously) Jes: Top / Dan: Bottom.

That way, everyone is happy, because we find out the REAL answer, not the polite answer. Unless we both answer the same way (ie if we both said 'top', we'd be in trouble). But that hasn't happened yet so we shant think about it.

ANYWAY. Paris to Amsterdam.

Let me do a bit more on Paris, because the last post wasn't really sufficient, in my mind.

Paris is amazing, basically, beautiful and old, but you need exactly four times as much money as we had in order to do stuff. And by 'stuff', I mean 'eat'. And 'have fun'. If you were there for a week, and had $10,000, you'd be rockin it. But we have about $6,000 for 10 weeks, so it's not quite the same. Finding food was hard - that's a lie, finding food was easy, we just went to supermarkets, but finding CHEAP food was hard. There was a lot of bread-and-cheese, baguettes, croissants, fresh fruit, noodles, pasta. On the first night - have I told this already? - we had chocolate biscuits and 'bolognaise' flavoured chips for dinner, because we were too tired and shit and poor to even think about making food.

We spent a lot of time thinking about, talking about and looking at food, though, stopping religiously at almost all shops to look at what they had that we could eat. If we ate everything that we stopped to look at and/or wanted to eat, we would be in a gutter right now. We obviously spent a lot of time looking at cheese. On the left is Jes and a giant BabyBel. Right after that photo was taken she shoved the thing in her bra and walked out of the shop all lopsided. She smelled for daaaays.

We had breakfast by the Eiffel Tower a few mornings - only about a 20 minute walk from our hostel, which wasn't too bad really. It really picked us up on our down mornings, walking past it and going - Wow. There it is. It's kinda gross up close, too many people trying to sell you things and steal your moneys, but from a distance you definitely feel a bit romantic. A lot of the time we spent walking, wandering, a getting lost. Jes was the guide with the map, and she didn't a great job - really, no kidding - but sometimes we did have 'special' moments on the side of the road where Jes would point at the map and say "Where are we?" and I would just do a blank face and shrug my shoulders and not speak English for a bit. She didn't like that a whole lot.

The other thing, and I guess you find this with any sort of travel, is that we were so tired, completely and utterly knackered from all the walking and all the thinking in French/translating, and all the map-reading, and all the constant heat and sunburn, and the uphill and the downhill and the sore feet and the bad pillow and mattresses on the bad squeaky bunk beds ... we were tired to the point of severe grumpiness most of the time. We found small things to amuse us, though, like the way the French would laugh at us when we tried to speak their language, or the way that we were interrupted in some way during every transaction we ever partook in ever - in a supermarket, at the hostel, buying a loaf of bread or a croissant or trying to get the room key, ANYTHING, someone always always always pushed in front of us or shouted over us or demanded service before us. That only became hilarious after about the 300th time. Is any of this making sense? Ok.

The hostel was stayed at in Paris was called the 3 Ducks Hostel, but it should have been called the 3 Showers Hostel, but even that would be a lie, because there are only 2. It was a nice place, very cute little courtyard, but no lockers, and lots of funny/smelly people staying there, very gross showers, very gross beds (both Jes and I have bites on us, and we think there were bed bugs). The showers are all push-button, which means you push the button and the cold water hits you like a fire hose for about 15 seconds and then dies, and then you press it again and the boiling water hits you like a water hose for about 15 seconds and then dies. It's good, because it works like a freezing/defrosting system, very clever. I was getting changed in the cubicle the other day, because I'm not really a naked in public kind of person, so was kinda trying to squeeze into my jeans in the shower while it's all hot and steamy, and then I bumped my ass against the push-button, and was soaked in freezing cold water. It was obviously hilarious but I wasn't happy.

When we walked into the hostel on the first night, Jes get hit on by some skeezy guy who asked her if she was there alone, which we think is French for 'Can I kidnap and rape you?'. I asserted myself as the boyfriend and all was well. In fact, it was all SO well, that a few days later, on the street, some French men came up and asked if they could take a photo of my girlfriend for a stupid work-team-bonding exercise that meant the whole office had to run around Paris getting photos of stupid things and doing crazy little challenges. Jes was dressed in blue and the task was to get a photo with someone dressed in blue. But instead of asking HER, they asked me - Is it ok if we take a photo with your girlfriend? What? Jes actually said, 'Er, you can ask me.' Obviously I undid her chain and let her do it. But just this once. The hostel had a lot of weird people actually. That same first night, the night of skeezy French man, another man came up to me and said "Ah, Hollywood! You have face like Hollywood!" which I thought was quite nice, really, considering I didn't know him. A bit later, though, he said "You need some sport, Hollywood. You're a bit fat, you need sport". Fucker.

We climbed Notre Dame one day, which took about a week because of all the steps. There really are a lot of steps. And the line was very long, a lot of waiting. But the view from the top was amazing, you can see out over all of Paris, and the Tower's up in the background. You're up so high, just chilling out with the gargoyles and chatting. It was a beautiful warm day, too, so that always makes things nice.

Sunday we met up with Nicole, who is my buddy and workmate from De La - she choreographs the Rock Eisteddfods. She was staying in the Latin Quarter with her mate Tam, and on Sunday we met Nicki (who I call Shaz - we're Shaz and Daz) to go market shopping and Montmartre-ing. The photo just there is of us outside Sacre Coeur, wearing matching t-shirts that Mary (our mutual buddy and Rock Ed co-shenaniganiser) had made up for a gig she worked on a little while back, a CD launch for a friend of hers. Had a great wander with Shaz. Sacre Couer was pumping, buskers and guitar players and kids everywhere, it was so tight, all bohemian-esque in a very tourist trappish sort of way.

Let's tell a funny story. We'll call the story, 'Crazy Puerto Rican bitch who looked like Nicole Richie, being a dog in the middle of the night'. It basically involved this crazy Puerto Rican bitch who looked a LOT like Nicole Richie being a dog in the middle of the night.

From the top:

I accidentally fell asleep in the sun outside the Louvre and got very hot and pink and now have a weird tan line on my arm (parents, I don't need a lecture about SunSmart, the lesson has been learnt) and then Jes made me go on a scary ride at the carnival that was called 'Boomerang' - we HAD to go on it, really - that spun us round in circles high up in the air, so by the time we got the hostel that night I wasn't feeling so good. Sunstroke and queasy tummy are a bad combo. So I was in bed by about 9, asleep by 10 - all is well. I'll tell the story from Jes' perspective now, because I'm asleep. There are 6 parts to this story. Read on!

Crazy Puerto Rican bitch - let's call her Nicole, as in Richie, not as in my friend - comes into the room at about 11 or so, I'm asleep, but Jes is reading, and some other people are asleep too. She barges in, opens the doors and yells "Is anyone getting reception on their cell??", Jes says 'Yes' in a way that indicated Nicole should really keep her voice down because it's late and people are sleeping. Then Nicole exits. An hour or so later, she barges in again - everyone is asleep, including an American couple just in from Venice and very tired. She bangs on the light, opens her suitcase, rummages through her case, finds a bottle of vodka, pours herself a PINT of vodka and Coke, and then exits again. An hour later, comes back and sees the American girl on one of the bottom bunks and starts complaining that that was HER bed, and Jes - woken from her sleep by the light and the yelling (Dan is still asleep) - tells her that the top bunk is free, she should just use that and sort it out in the morning. Oh no, no no no, Nicole decides to get the manager. So the light goes off for 10 minutes, everyone's happy again, but then the manager comes in all yelling and lights-on, "Who's in that bed? Who's in this bed? Who is that sleeping man?" Jes said "That's Dan". The manager tells the girl to sleep on the top bunk, they both leave, the light goes off, everyone is happy. About 4am, Nicole comes back, at which point Dan wakes up. She bangs in, turns the light on, waking everybody, smashes around the room for a while, then swings the doors open so violently that they bang against the walls - in fact, she may not even have used a door handle, she may have just pushed them so hard they flew open - and yelled "This room stinks, I'm opening the doors." Of course, 4am is the time that everyone in Paris decides to commit a crime or light a fire or have a heart attack, so there's sirens galore, and people are putting out rubbish so there are bins bashing around and bottles breaking. But it all settles down again. Everyone's happy. Let's get some sleep.

7am. Nicole's alarm goes off. Some hideous noise pollution is spewing from her phone, some hip hop shit with no beat but a wicked rhyme, at about 1000 decibels, waking everyone in the room except for Nicole. Dan gets up and staggers to her bed. She is half-lying on the phone, her right breast squashing the phone against the mattress. Dan (that's me, I'm going to keep using 'Dan' til the end of the story, thought) figures if she wakes up he'll just punch her in the face and she won't remember being groped anyway, so he grabs the phone and pushes some buttons and slams it shut again. Sleep. 7.30am, alarm goes off again. Quasi-naked American man stumbles from his bed to repeat the action Dan performed not a half-hour earlier. 8am it goes off again, and this time the dumb bitch half wakes up, mutters 'Sorry' and falls back asleep. The great thing was, everyone was awake after that and we all shared a moment of hatred, united against a common enemy. Jes was plotting her revenge, planning to line everyone's phones up beside Nicole's head and set them off at the same time. In fact, a lot of Jes' anger was unwarranted, because in between Nicole's night-time terrorist acts, Jes had fitful nightmares about the other bad things Nicole had done, which was nothing, obviously, because they were just dreams. So Jes had anger from Nicole going through her bags (dream) and yelling at her (dream) and a whole bunch of other stuff (dreams) ASIDE from the nighttime shenanigans.

Nicole woke up like an hour or so later spooning her purple Adidas sneakers and an empty bottle of vodka, put some hairspray in her hair and left. Fuck you very much.

Lots of photos to share, too. I'll post a batch from London below.

The dog squad: me, Jes, Beth and George

Jes' first London experience!

Australians on the Tube? What?

Me and George in Shepherd's Bush, before seeing Tegan and Sara

Just down by the water.

After the TATE.

Me at Buckingham Palace.

By the lions in Trafalgar Square.

A nice girl offered to take the photo, and as she was lining us up,

encouraging us to move further back toward the statue,

Jes whispered 'Are you ready to grab her?' and I said 'Yep'.

Playing with toys at Hamleys!

PS. Read Jes' blog too, over here!
PPS. I have also edited the options so now anyone and everyone should be able to comment. That's for you, Jacinta...

xd