Liverpool Game

After flying from Lisbon to Barcelona, we spent an uneventful night in a pretty ordinary hostel in Barcelona - great location but not much opportunity to meet people, so we had an early night. The next day we caught the train to our hostel in Valencia, where we discovered that our tickets (which we had paid EUR 170 each for) had never arrived. Bugger. We're not sure if the site was a scam or what, but Dane is giving them a chance to make reparations before reversing the credit card transaction. Having made it this far, we caught the train to Vila-Real anyway, intending to scalp tickets. On the way there we met a nice lady from Vila-Real by the name of Amelia, who spoke English and helped us out a lot with various things, driving us to the stadium and calling a taxi for us in Spanish afterwards. On getting to the stadium we discovered that there were still plenty of tickets on sale, even though pre-match publicity had said that it was sold out. We scalped a couple of tickets from a Liverpool supporter anyway, for half price of 40 EUR, but then discovered that they were in different sections, so we shelled out another 80 EUR for another ticket in the same section, so we ended up paying 80 each anyway. This was a lot better than the 170 each we paid to the scalping site, but we had no way of knowing we didn't have to do that.

Vila-Real is a town of less than 50,000 people which somehow manages to support a football team which probably ranks in the top 5 in La Liga in Spain. The stadium was smallish - a 25,000 capacity - which was good since we were up close and personal with the players. The game itself was a bit lacklustre, which was to be expected - it was a friendly, and though I think Vilareal mostly ran their top team, Liverpool took the opportunity to give their young kids a run. They did play the new striker Keane for the whole of the first half though. By the way, at Barcelona-Sants train station, we saw three Liverpool fans who were already wearing the official number 7 Keane shirt, even though he only signed to the club a day or two earlier. Crazy.

The player everyone wanted to see was Fernando Torres, Liverpool's premier striker. He started warming up on the sidelines in front of us midway through the second half, accompanied by cheers and whispers from the Spanish crowd of his Spanish nickname "El Nino". He was instrumental in Spain's win in the Euro Cup this year and is therefore loved throughout Spain even though he now plays for an English club. To give a sense of how valuable he was in his debut season for Liverpool, a passable strike rate for a striker is 1 goal per 3 appearances and a good striker scores 1 goal per 2 appearances. Torres, in his first season in the Premier League, scored 33 goals in 46 appearances, and has replaced the captain Stephen Gerrard as the most popular player among fans. He only played around the last 15 minutes and despite one good opportunity was unable to break the scoring drought. The game ended nil all.

Dane and I will probably spend tonight in the hostel bar, then tomorrow I fly to Split, Croatia via Rome, and he flies back to London. I'm joining my 8-day sailing tour of Croatia tomorrow, so there will be an internet drought. More after that.

Portugal

I was originally going to write separate posts for every region of Portugal but I can't really be bothered doing that so I'll give a quick rundown of my whole week and a half or so in the country. The short version is that it's a really cool place. Being a little more off the tourist trail than say Barcelona means that you get a better quality of traveler there. It's cheap, really cheap. And the cities are really pretty. I'm pretty lazy with photos though and have like one shot from my whole time there, which I may or may not upload later.

I started my trip with a couple of nights in Lagos, in the south. I didn't know much about the place and was expecting a lazy beach town, but what I got was the most insanely full-bore party town I think I've ever been to. Some of the stories of degeneracy I heard there were pretty jaw dropping and don't really bear repeating on a public blog. I will however repeat them privately on request. Bit too crazy a place for me, but a spot to bear in mind if I ever feel like drinking myself to death.

Porto was quite a bit quieter, a very pretty city with a lot of nice architecture. We stayed at a great hotel and became pretty good friends with a couple of Slovenian girls who we met again in Lisbon (and I will probably meet one of them again in Croatia). Didn't accomplish anything too jaw dropping there though. On the last day Dane and I hired a car and drove out along the Douro, but had the misfortune to be given horrible advice by a girl in a tourist office who could barely speak English, which led to our wasting most of the day. On the way back into Porto we took a wrong turn and ended up in downtown Porto, which is one of those driving-nightmare European old towns, with a twisted jumble of streets, most of which are one way, with drivers who will cut you off given the slightest chance. Driving on the right in an unfamiliar manual car, I didn't enjoy this much, but we managed to get back to the car hire place just in time to return it and board a train to Lisbon.

Lisbon is a great city which I would recommend to anyone doing the Europe trail. There's a bit of something for everyone. A lot of great sightseeing to do, or so I'm told. I spent most of the days sleeping, having got home from bars at such hours of the day as 7am. The nightlife is excellent - the locals are friendly and, as I mentioned, the tourists are a cut above the type you get in places like Barcelona or Rome. While there's certainly Lagos-style degeneracy if you go looking for it, there are also classier clubs with an upmarket feel. I also managed to hook up with the first girl I uttered a word to in the first club we went to, and you have to love a city where that happens. Highlights also included hanging out with a couple of Australian guys who were complete womanizing, drug-taking, alcohol-swilling maniacs, but who also managed to be friendly, funny, intelligent guys, rather than jerks like most of that type are. Lowlights included Dane and I losing an absurd amount of money at poker in a 24 hour period. We were already up for the trip so neither of us are down too much but it wasn't much fun!

So that was Portugal... and today we flew back to Barcelona, where I am currently watching my laundry dry and stealing free wireless. We're staying only one night before getting the train down to Valencia. We have two nights in Valencia, but the first one will be spent at the Estadio di Madrigal in Villareal, watching Liverpool vs Villareal. That's if our tickets arrive safely at our Valencia hostel. Liverpool have just signed a new striker so we're hopeful we may get to see his debut game (edit: we just found out that he will indeed be playing his first game for Liverpool, so that's pretty cool).

Blog finally up to date!

Barcelona

Barcelona seems like ages ago now, even though I only left there eight days ago. I do remember that I arrived there with the intention of largely ignoring the culture (Barcelona not being a particularly Spanish city anyway) and doing some partying. That my time there is a bit fuzzy now suggests that I achieved my aims. I do remember walking back to the hostel down La Rambla and getting propositioned by no less than four hookers, so they must have thought I looked in the mood to have fun (that, or very drunk). The only touristy things I achieved while there were taking a look at the Sagrada Familiar, the insane unfinished creation of Anton Gaudi, and going on a hike along the Carretera de les Aigües, a gravel path up above Barcelona that gives great views of the enormous city. I have photos of all of the above (ok, wait, not the hookers) but I can't really be bothered putting them up right now. I just wanted to get this post written before I completely forget that I even went to Barcelona. I'm in Lisbon now, so posts about Lagos and Porto are also in the works. Dane is napping so I might write them now. Or not.

Nice

It's good to have the net again. I've been in Porto for about the last 5 nights, in two different hostels, and in both of them my laptop wouldn't talk to their router. Hence the lack of blogging.

After arriving in Nice and checking into my hotel I met up with Julia and her boyfriend and after grabbing some lunch, we gathered supplies and retired to the beach with an esky to drink two bottles of champagne that I had brought with me. After polishing those off we relaxed at the apartment of a friend of theirs, and after eating some Indian food we had a pretty early one. The next day we met at the train station for a daytrip to Monaco, which is only about 20 minutes away by train. After wandering up by the palace for a while, we spent a while in a public swimming pool and then changed into more respectable clothes to go up to Monte Carlo Casino. It cost 10 euro to get into the casino and while the building was beautiful, it was a bit of a disappointment. It was early on a Saturday evening but not much was going on. I was hoping to play some poker but none was running. Oh well. I have a panorama shot of Monte Carlo harbour, it’s pretty big so I could keep the detail in it, so I've put it on a separate link: click here to check it out.

After bailing out back to Nice, we had a night on the town, although Julia and her boyfriend went home earlyish, while I kicked on solo until 5:30 in the morning or something. On returning to my hotel I was sober enough to realise that I'd feel like crap the next morning. My flight to Barcelona left late night the next night, so I decided I should book my room another night and spend most of the day napping. I tried to put this plan into action but the guy at the desk at 6am or whatever it was didn't speak a lot of English, especially not slurred English, and I was unsure if I had made myself understood. I therefore set my alarm for noon the next day, which was checkout time. When it went off, I was hungover as expected, but grabbed the phone and called reception. It turned out that I had succeeded in booking another night.... in the room next door, which involved packing up all my stuff, going down to reception and getting a new key, which defied the point of being able to stay in bed. I grumpily requested they cancel it, gathered my stuff together, and went and got my head straight in the lobby instead. Then I hung out at Julia's apartment until it was time to go and get my flight.

I didn't really achieve much in Nice, but I did have a really fun night out and it was good catching up with Julia. Doecke had told me that Nice sucked and Monaco was great, while I had the opposite experience. He didn't like Nice because it was unfriendly (not my experience) and full of drunk tourists (surely that's the whole point), while I didn't much like Monaco because there was nothing to do once you're over staring at people's Fararis. I wouldn't actually say I disliked the place, but a daytrip was definitely enough.

Onwards to Barcelona!

Champagne-Ardenne

The day after Rock Werchter ended, we hired a car in Brussels and Doecke drove us southwest into France. Our destination: Reims (say: Rhayms), the capital of the region of Champagne-Ardenne. After setting up camp in our hostel, and learning to our displeasure that gambling sites were blocked on the internet there, we walked into the center of Reims and managed to score a table at Le Foch, a Michelin one-star restaurant there. The prices were very reasonable - I had a 4-course menu plus cheese for 45 euro - and the food was excellent. An older couple from Alsace had the table adjacent to us and the man helped us translate the menu, talked to us a little about the regional peculiarities of Alsace, and at the end of the meal gave us his address and contact details with an invitation to visit him in Strasbourg. I have no idea who started the rumour about the French being arrogant and unfriendly, but it would be right up there with "The food in Italy is great" on a top-ten of completely untrue statements about Europe.

The next day we caught the train to Epernay (something like Ay-pear-nay), the wine capital of Champagne. First we went to a bar I had read about, called C-Comme Champagne, where five different small producer wines are served by the glass, changing weekly. We got a glass of each and they ranged from average through to very good. Then it was time to tour the cellars of Moet et Chandon. After learning about the methode champenoise, Doecke asked if there were any champagnes made without sugar added after fermentation as is normally done. After finding out that these "zero-dosage" wines do exist, he decided he wanted to try one, so we headed back to C-Comme Champagne and asked if they had any. They only had one, so we bought a bottle to drink, and coincidentally the producer (owner or winemaker or maybe both, I'm not sure) of the champagne was in the bar at the time. He was a friendly guy who chatted to us for a while about the wine we had bought, his business and the region in general. It was a really good experience. We had dinner at a place that allowed you to bring your own wine to drink (a very uncommon idea in France - and no corkage charge!), but unfortunately I selected a particularly poor Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the local wine store. Pretty good food though and well priced.

That night I decided that my plan of heading to Bordeaux after Champagne was no good. I had just had two full days of wine-related acitivities and didn't fancy spending the weekend doing more of the same in a city without a backpacker scene, when I could be doing something more social. Instead I decided to catch a sleeper train to Nice the next night and catch up with Julia, a girl I had met on my Europe trip last year. This plan would also allow me the opportunity to daytrip to Monaco.

The next day we visited a forest near Reims which is famous for having a number of beech trees which are mutated in some way - either a genetic variation or a viral infection - that leaves them gnarled and deformed. It's supposed to be spooky or something, but we found it pretty underwhelming. It did provide us with an opportunity to drive around the countryside of Champagne though.




Then I said my goodbyes to Dane and Mike (although I'll be seeing Dane again in Portugal in not too much longer) and hopped on my sleeper train to Nice. I was kind of dreading the 12-hour trip but actually it wasn't bad at all. Trains are much better than planes in so many ways. It isn't just that you have a little bed and can walk around whenever you want - it's things like not listening to the low-frequency drone from jet engines for 12 hours.... and rather than having to breathe stuffy dehumidified air, you have the opportunity at any time to go to the window and get a blast of country air in your face... then you can hang out at the window and look at the blanket of ground fog over rural France, watch little villages with illuminated churches on hills as they fly past and wonder what the lives of the people who live there are like....

And now we're on to Nice... but that's another blog post.

Rock Werchter

After arriving at Rock Werchter, located next to a small town called Werchter just outside of the city of Leuven, we set up camp in the tent city in area A2, just one of about 15 camping areas.



We got there late, and Mike managed to miss Counting Crows for the third time. The first time, he bought tickets to their show in Adelaide and then got the day of the concert wrong, and the second time he bought tickets and they canceled.

Through a guy from Adelaide called Dan, we were introduced to a group of around 20 people, mostly Australians living in London, with a few Norwegians. One guy had brought an Australian flag, which was flown in the middle of our camp, Camp Australia:


On the last day, the flag blew off the pole and was (we think) stolen. Another guy had a Trinidad & Tobago flag he'd bought at the last soccer World Cup, so we briefly became Camp Trinidad & Tobago. There were several boxing kangaroos flying elsewhere. I also saw an England flag, a California flag, an Amsterdam flag and a Japanese flag.

On to the acts. I only saw about two bands a day. Some people like to see everything at a festival, but I find it just tires me and makes me less enthused about the bands I actually want to see. Dane and I took advantage of the free buses into Leuven on a couple of days to see a film and watch the Wimbledon final.

Anyway....

THE GREAT

Radiohead: Probably the band people were most interested in, their setlist was not what I would have chosen. They only played one track off my favourite album, The Bends, and that was Sulk which I don't like at all. However, their performance was so strong that even the tracks I didn't know or particularly like were great. In particular they put in a great performance of what I was later told was You And Whose Army. Other highlights for me included Paranoid Android, 15 Step and Nude. They played the whole of In Rainbows bar one or two tracks. Thom's voice sounded great and the unity of the band was amazing. A festival highlight for sure.

Underworld: These guys really benefited from the most enthusiastic crowd of the festival. The second-stage tent was crammed full and overflowing with vocal fans, while Beck over at the main stage had a larger but more lukewarm crowd. At one point the singer said "Thanks for turning this into the main stage" and that's definitely how it felt. Highlights included Born Slippy (obviously), Two Months Off and King Of Snake.

Ben Folds: Excellent performance as usual, Folds has a lot of charisma, there was plenty of crowd participation, and again the crowd was really into it. My highlight was probably a tweaked version of the joke cover Bitches Ain't Shit.

THE GOOD

Chemical Brothers: Almost made it to the Great section. The visual show they put on was incredible and the good tracks were great, but I've left them down here because frankly the new album sucks and half an hour of that in the middle of the set had me nearly falling asleep. Some of the blame for this should probably go to the fact that they stopped playing at 3am, but meh.

REM: I'm not the world's biggest REM fan, but they put on a solid show with a good mix of old and new.

Panic At The Disco: Good solid pop, if you like that sort of thing.

THE BAD

Only one entry in this section....

Moby: I know a lot of people enjoyed this, but I thought he was awful. Musically it was pretty terrible. Most of the songs were over a generic 4-4 beat with slightly off beat bassline designed to make people jump up and down. When he was first on stage he was playing guitar and got it completely out of time. He sang on some of the tracks, and when he does that on albums he has multiple takes and studio production magic to assist him, but the fact is that he can't sing at all. He has no charisma or stage presence whatsoever; just as I'd nearly start to enjoy myself, he'd prance around the stage and go "Yeah!" or "Come on!" into the mike and ruin everything.

I saw a few other bands, but I don't have enough of an opinion to write about them.

After another night in Brussels, we headed to the Champagne region in France. Will blog about that in a sec.

Slovenia

All my flights to Ljubljana took about 35 hours total. Nothing really to report except that the view of Hong Kong during landing was amazing and has made me excited about going there as part of a trip around Asia. After making it to Ljubljana Airport I split a taxi into town with an ethnic-Swedish Finnish girl who was fluent in English and competent in Hungarian and enjoyed talking at a million miles an hour in all of them. After making it to my hostel I relaxed for a few hours before heading out drinking with a 6'8" ex-professional volleyball player from Canada.

Slovenia is a country of around 2 million people. It's one of those places that has been kicked around between about 800 different regimes over the course of the last couple of millennia. Most recently it was part of Yugoslavia, but this ended after the Ten Days War in 1991, through which Slovenia became the first Balkan state to gain independence.

Ljubljana, the capital, only has about 300,000 inhabitants. It was quite a nice city, but without much to distinguish it from other European cities. I was fine with only having one night there. The drawcards of Slovenia are to be found out in Bled and the surrounding Triglav National Park. On my second day I caught the bus to Bled with the Canadian and a Swedish guy and spent the day wandering around the stunning lake and revisiting the castle. In the evening I met up with Mike and Dane and we played cards with some people off the Triglav daytrip they'd just done.

We had three more days in Bled. Highlights included:

- Swimming out to Bled Island with Dane. From the point on the shore that we started from, it was probably 400 metres each way. Dane is a pretty good swimmer, but I'm hopeless and ended up doing survival strokes most of the way. The island doesn't have much on it other than the church, which we didn't go into because it was Sunday and we were in nothing but shorts and dripping wet. There are 99 steps up to the church from the dock. A tradition is for newly married men to carry their wives up the steps. Lacking brides, we just wandered round the island and caught our breath (OK, I caught my breath) before swimming back.

- Kayaking on the Sava Bohinjka river. Mike and I went on a morning trip to do this. The section of the river has a few basic rapids - something like grade 1 - which was perfect as it provided a bit of interest while keeping our chance of dying acceptably low. Mike tipped over once but I managed to stay upright.

- ATV quad biking. It took me a few minutes to get the hang of driving them. At first, because I was sitting in a saddle and using handlebars, my subconscious was convinced I was riding a bike, and kept issuing me with imminent death warnings every time the thing tilted past a certain angle, or lost a little traction. Eventually my inner voice came to the conclusion that I must actually be driving a car and settled down, enabling me to relax and enjoy the scenery, which was incredible. Slovenia is a strong challenger to Norway for prettiest country in Europe. It's a jumble of amazing skyscraping rocky alps, fluorescent blue rivers and lakes, and lush, deep green forests. It looks more like something out of Middle Earth than a real place.

The only thing I missed out on was hiking the nearby Vintgar Gorge, which is supposed to be awesome, but I think there's a very good chance I'll be back to Bled for a third time in the future.

I tried to take photos on the last day, but discovered my camera was out of batteries and didn't have time to recharge it. I suggest checking out the photos here or looking at my Bled photos from last year here.

I'm now typing this in my underwear in a hotel in Brussels, Belgium, having woken up a bit too early on the first morning of Rock Werchter, the music festival we're headed to next. I have 50 minutes left to check out, so I'd better get moving.