Stress

I guess I have to apologize a bit to everyone who reads this and knows me in real life, I've been one big stress recently and it's snowballed from nothing into literally everything winding me up:

As well as upping and moving on from a new life that I created here in Aix-en-Provence, with great friends that I'll hopefully keep for years afterwards and great memories above all else, I've got to start to think about what I'm going to be doing with my time in Spain, while trying not to blow all of my money on having too much of a good time.

I have around 3 months to kill essentially, and I want to find a job and get fit at the gym most of all, but I want to learn Spanish too while I'm there.

Not only all of that but little things here have been annoying me, like neighbours being arseholes, not leaving my room for a few days and the university here being ridiculously underorganised as ever, ending in me missing two of my exams, as well as worrying me to death over whether I might have to pay back my Erasmus grant for this semester, since it now seems on paper that I've done absolutely fuck all.

But I'm back on track and feeling good after spending time with some good friends of mine getting fucking drunk and being idiots and catching up. It's very nice to have everyone back in Aix, and it's gonna be so so very hard to leave.

Amsterdam and the Case of the stoners and the missing bicycle.

I don't have much to write about Amsterdam since I don't remember anything, but why have I got tickets to a medieval torture instrument museum and a sex museum ticket for midnight in my pocket? Also where is all my money? Some mad shit went down then? Yes pretty much.

I woke up almost each morning in Amsterdam thinking: oh my god, how did I get back, and which completely defenseless Red light district prostitute did I try to free last night, like freeing slaves or fleeing farmyard animals.
I also lost my bike in Amsterdam after getting too stoned and parking it somewhere without completely remembering where I had parked it. It took a few more joints and a canal tour offered free by Heineken to work out exactly where in Amsterdam I was that one night. Lauren had died in the hostel after eating too much cake, so i'd went for a cheeky joint in the hostel (Flying Pig....which was amazing by the way) and then for a ride into town to have a look at some prostitutes. because it's Amsterdam, and you can do that shit there. Also it was funny to see these girls think that they're luring me into their sex-boxes when I'd more than likely prefer their (male) pimp to them.
I'd went to a bar and sat down next to some American guy on his own, travelling because his friends didn't want to come to Amsterdam too, so he was stoned as fuck and pretty lonely. I took him for a smoke and a beer and from thereafter I can't remember. What I can remember though is almost riding into a canal and having to book myself a taxi home later on!

But I still had sex museum tickets, and I can't remember going there but I do have vague memories of seeing some women do interesting stuff with their nether regions, but nevertheless, I thought I was just in some sort of hell/purgatory for my sins as a gay man. Also that being said, there were definitely not enough half naked gays parading around Amsterdam......

So my first weekend in Amsterdam was bizarre, hopefully going back soon, but I think after my first few days there I need a break and a return to civilisation. Lucky for me then, i've got a massive drop back into the realisations of the modern world: I now have fuck all money until the start of January, Christmas will be fun then.

This is a painting of the wall of the 'Grasshopper' coffee shop. Yes, it's a grasshopper violating a woman.

Europe is worth it though.

Newcastle, reverse culture shock, Greggs pasties and drugs and jazz.

Returning from Provence was a trek. Instead of taking the train from Marseille - Montpellier as was planned (due to train strikes on that exact date), I had to explore a few of my options:

1. Stay in Provence. Okay, so it's a lot warmer, the food is better and it's maybe even more of a place i'd like to live in than Newcastle, but I still really miss home, my friends and my family. This was not an option
2. Covoiturage from Aix -> Montpellier. A car share website just like CouchSurfing, where you apply to people's pre-given routes/destinations and organise a possible carshare together, for a small fee given to the driver to cover petrol.
3. Staying in a hostel in Montpellier the day before my flight. This was my preferred option, but unfortunately due to the time restrictions of actually having responsibilities for once, I couldn't miss my B2 French class. It's a shame, because it's a city I would have loved to explore.

Those were genuinely my only options around this time of year, so me and a friend from class who coincidentally booked the same flights/dates & times/UK destination chose to try out Covoiturage. It was awesome. We got picked up at 7am just outside of Aix, had a bizarre conversation with one of the passengers who was about 70 and travelling on her own until I ended up falling asleep and woke up to being poked awake when arrive at the airport.

I would recommend it to anyone who wants to save some money, or save their journey because of some higher uncontrollable problem such as striking for sure!

Coming back to Newcastle (via Leeds and York) was surprisingly different than I expected. As I approached Durham on the east coast line, I began to see snow and as soon I arrived in Newcastle all hell had seemingly broken loose.
Newcastle Central Station was packed with travellers like me, waiting for delayed services to Scotland and even more central parts of the Arctic Circle.... Buses were running skeleton services and, despite the snow and rain being pretty gruesome, there were still middle aged women prancing around in t-shirts and belts (can't bring myself to describe what they were wearing as even mini-skirts).

Such things are quite ordinary up here, but after living here for around 20 years, being away for just 4 months and then coming back, these things become more glaringly obvious and slightly bizarre.

I'm not about to bad-mouth my hometown, and home for most of my life so far, but there really are things I bloody hate about this place. I'm not giving up on it so easily though, and i'm not sure i've been totally bowled over yet by the promise of moving to Provence after my graduation.

Anyways moving on, someone commented on this blog congratulating me for not posting 'self centered' tit-bits of my travels 'like most year abroad blogs', but I have quite a few cool things to tell, so here's a self-centred recall of one of the best. I don't want to blow up my ego after all.


We went to see Mr Scruff in a nightclub in Newcastle, he's a electro/jazz/reggae/funkywhatever DJ who is absolutely amazing and I would love to see again. The nightclub wasn't too packed which was awesome, there was brownies and a tea stand as well as normal alcohol at the bar and we all dropped a whole shitload of drugs just to top it all off. The best jazz is jazz with a side serving of mandy, after all.

We danced on the bar, talked to random people about absolute rubbish and pulled out some absolutely wicked dance moves (As usual, of course) and a great night was had even though the moustaches we were gonna wear fell off for most of us!

Apart from that i've just been hanging out with friend and seeing my family again. Tomorrow it's Halloween and I have my costume sorta planned so i'll let the interwebs know how that went and if I managed not to fall into a gutter in Newcastle or not. 

Across the Adriatic.

Tomorrow a lot of us cool folk from Aix-en-Provence are taking a holiday (within a holiday) to Croatia for a very long weekend in Eastern Europe.
I've always wanted to go to Croatia and in fact had plans to go a few years ago with my best friends back in Newcastle. We were going to fly to Paris, Interrail from Paris through France, Germany, Austria and Slovakia then arrive in Croatia and go to a dance/electro festival called Hideout Festival.
Here you can see the quiet little affair down below.

But our plans were cut short because my best friend spent all of her student loan on champagne, casino and fried chicken and Ilhan's Special pizzas (which are the best in Newcastle to be fair brrahhh). It would have been awesome, but I plan on going sometime in  the next few years anyways. Hopefully after I graduate I won't be stuck in such a career rut that I can't just casually jet off to something like that (and/or continue with all my travel plans), like so many people I know...

So I was extremely excited to have the opportunity to do it right now!

We're flying with Ryanair from Marseille to Zadar tomorrow early morning (5th Oct - 6am) with pretty cheap flights. Obviously Ryanair is a massive shit sometimes, but i'm hoping that the plane won't just stop mid-air or something. I'd quite like to live a bit longer thanks Mr Ryan.

Zadar is apparently a lovely city, lots of old architecture and awesome stuff, but i'm just gonna in with a totally open-mind and report back with what I thought. I've never been to Eastern Europe before so the language barrier will be difficult but hopefully I can pick up a few words for 'beer', 'tequila' and 'hangover'!

Either way, I now have my passport back after finally paying my rent and a suitcase nicked from my Frenchman so i'm all ready to go! Hopefully I will wake up early enough tomorrow morning so that I don't miss our bus and then miss the flight and then miss the entire holiday....

By the way, final note: If anyone wants to know which hostel we'll be staying at, it's The Drunken Monkey Hostel in Zadar. Amazing name and it's looks great from what we've seen online. It's 92% rated on Hostelworld so I have high expectations that it's gonna be a chilled out place to crash.
There's a few photos down below which i've stolen from the website!

I'm so fucking excited.

This is a blog allllllll about Julie Koothrappali.

So there's this girl here who is Corsican, lives in Aix, speaks English (with such an Indian accent she might as well hold a dual-nationality passport despite her not being Indian whatsoever) and is moving to Liverpool in the UK for the hell of it for a year to find a job and all that.

When she's not harassing me to buy a chateau with her, she's calling me a gayboy but then demanding that George Michael personally call me up to party on down with her. He's obviously way too cool for that though, he always apologises on the phone but makes it very clear that he'll be in Liverpool soon but only if she is a little bit cooler.

So, Liverpool. Godspeed. If she doesn't drink your taps dry, she'll blow you the fuck up man. After all, she is Corsican.

No in all seriousness, tons of good luck to her. I met her the first night I was here with the 'casual alcoholics' and she's definitely one of the biggest characters here who i'm sure will be sorely missed! Liverpool's a nice place apparently, and she'll hopefully have enormous luck finding a job and settling in well with the rain and the miserable comedy and the Scouse accent! 'Caaaaaaym caaaym down lad'

Here's her mugshot haha:

On the left

Julie + Lén = SWAG

I love this photo of us. she might 'fuck you up' but she's still such a cutie 

OHHHH JULIE, IF YOU LEAVE ME. I'LL NEVER MAKE IT ALLLLOOOOOOONE.

Forget romance, Paris is darker than you think

 From my arrival in Paris I have seen as many sex shops as cute boutique cafés and restaurants and as many drunk French guys falling out of back alley bars and closet alcoholics drinking all the night through at the Sacre Coeur as i've seen couples romancing each other over a bottle of champagne or decent wine in upmarket street bars and restaurants.

Love in Paris isn't a lie, but it's not an epidemic like Hollywood makes it out to be.

I'm staying the best hostel so far in my travels; this place is the meeting place of the world. We have a large courtyard as communal area decked out with graffiti of Dali and other artsy stuff.

So i've been hanging out with a lot of awesome travellers, coming from every corner of the world looking for a slice of Paris. An awesome set of friends from New York, Sam and Liam as well as  whole heap of Dutch guys/girls and some English girls too. I've met an artsy Russian girl who smokes a lot of everything, Polish guys who hate art and a Turkish guy who was drunkenly talking about people in his area having sex with donkeys. Madness.....

I'm not really gonna post too much of the tourist tat photos that I have.....simply because everyone has seen the bloody Eiffel Tower, but I might add a small collection of photos that I like for you all to see. I've been pretty much everywhere and today is my last day. I've been so far drunk and flying high under the Eiffel Tower, right around the Sacre Coeur and Montmartre...down the Champs Elyseé to the Tuilieries and down the Seine, the artsy fartsy Pompidou Centre and today i'm going to go to the Père Lachaise cemetery to make love to Oscar Wilde's grave.

Here's me with a fucking awesome car in the Mercedes-Benz store

drunk on the Sacre-Coeur at 3am with a whole bunch of the travellers and some random dude who fell asleep. The view from this hill is the most spectacular view of Paris at night, by far.

So from Paris, i'm moving to Marseille for two nights and then on to Cannes, unless I find an extremely cheap hostel like this one in Marseille......i'm also getting really fucking nervous about moving to Aix. I guess that's just normal before starting at a new school or, in this case, a new university.

I'm having an awesome time though. I miss home, but not for bad reasons.

This is what i'm doing.

The life of a tourist revolves, seemingly, around trying to find the most beautiful building, or piece of art, or vista in any one given place and Instagramming that shit into the ground, sucking the life out if it and turning it into cliché, forever being listed as "Top 10 Places to Wear Bermudas, Flip Flops and Take your Screaming, Spoilt Children to 'Show Them the World'".

Even in the cold North, where you wouldn't even expect tourists to bother visiting, dodging them and the photographic cross-fire they create should be considered Olympic. I dare you, just dare you to accidentally include me into your family album when i'm hungover, looking like shit and on the way to the pub (again). Go on. Do it.

But all of this pent-up, repressed hatred for tourism in my mind has taken one massive(ly) hilarious U-turn. While in Newcastle hungover, looking like shit and on the way to the pub to meet a man (wink wink nudge nudge), and to meet my favourite barman who knows what I want before I do, I was asked by a lovely little Korean family to take a photo of them on their walks through Newcastle. This would normally annoy me and I would cringe a little inside, but this time I was very happily amused. I was walking through this alleyway (shown in the image below). Not very picturesque, right? Exactly. The Tyneside Cinema is a local landmark though, a great place to hangout and something of a legend so I wouldn't have been surprised if they wanted that in the background. Nope.

They wanted a photo of them just standing in this alleyway together next to the only other things there: a few overflowing bins and the side of an H&M.

I love this shit. 

They got their photo of course. Even with a smile! It made me think, over my pint-and-hot man-date, what tourism really is.

Although I will be sharing some of my snaps, I won't be posing in front of monuments too much, thankfully. You don't wanna see me in shorts anyways...

I really like finding the dark underbelly of cities and the world. Sex shops in Paris and 'kinky' clubs in the 'most romantic city in the world' and German electro clubs with naked men (however ugly) just wandering around all casual; not so far off the beaten track that there's nothing to see, but somewhere dark enough to get lost for just a little while....


Anyways, this blog post was supposed to be me detailing my (additional) travel plans, but I somehow got off course with my passion for bad things. After arriving in Marseille on the 23rd August I will be:

• staying in a hostel in Marseille for a night, and most likely exploring the nightlife with any other backpackers who are game.
• Travelling to Toulon for the morning of the 24th, and then head off to Cannes for the late evening.
• Stay the night in Cannes and head to the beach for the day (25th). Maybe go be a touristy twat if I can be arsed. Cannes again.
• Nice the next morning after checking out. Heading to have the best swordfish I've ever had, again. Might stay the night, depends on prices.
• Next day - Monaco (27th) and up to Grasse. Smallish places, so it shouldn't be too hard to explore them all. Night in Grasse maybe, or Nice again. Haven't decided yet. (I'm not good at plans)
• Down to Sainte-Maxime and getting a chartered boat over to ST TROPEZ BITCHEZZZ. Back to Marseille for the evening.
• Finally heading to Aix-en-Provence!

La France, j'arrive tout de suite!



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