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.

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.

I'm pretty sure the Erasmus programme was made just so that natives can laugh at foreign people getting lost or making twats out of themselves.

Since i've been here i've made quite a few gaffes. Most of them are down to the good old combination of alcohol/social ignorance/my bad humour........ and although it's alright with friends from home who probably already know that when you've had a few too many you end up talking utter shit (and that's fine), it's so much different in a foreign country with a foreign language holding you back too.

I very frequently make a twat out of myself in social situations and so far I think i've insulted almost every nationality that i've come across so far in some manner or way:

• I was describing the Marianne [national emblem of France] and her flowing hair that I saw on a coin here, but I apparently I made her sound like a total diva and that annoyed some people. 
• Compared some American girls to guidettes from Jersey Shore because of duckfaces. That didn't go down so well
• Made a joke (which to be fair was taken hilariously) about the Troubles as well as the wars between England and Ireland as being 'back in the good old days'. Obviously sarcastically. In context it was funny....
• Talked about Swedish people looking like mannequins with perfect skin and perfect hair.
• OBVIOUSLY there were jokes about the Germans a bit. I'm British after all.
• And finally jokes about French guys being so sleazy...to relatively skeezy French guys.

I think the problem is that i'm overly confident just going up to people and talking to them normally (especially in English) and -obviously- friend humour is different to random stranger humour.

I realised that after sitting in the park with a few friends from uni and others a few times, making lewd jokes or having a bit of a laugh with each other to the point of calling each other names and making comments about things you really wouldn't normally: The faces of the people who weren't in our 'uni friends group' were just priceless. So shocked! Is that because we're generally vulgar though?

Personally i'd like to find out more about 'typically French humour'. We have really deadpan/black humour in England and we know it, but i've not really encountered much obvious humor here to be honest. Stand-up on TV really isn't any good an the bare bones of humor in conversations that I can actually understand between French people here just often doesn't make too much sense to me.

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On the other hand, laughing at tourists is the universal language of comedy I think. Why are tourists so obviously touristy allll the time? And why do they always wear hiking boots everywhere....even in 50 degree Provence? I would like to think of myself as never being 'touristy' to the point of this. I still get lost, look lost and go to museums, and I went to the Eiffel Tower to take photos. But I did all that without wearing ridiculous caps and hiking boots.

For anyone coming to Aix, you will eventually realise that there are a lot of tourists. And for the right reasons too, it's a glorious city, very Provençal with a modern touch. This unfortunately drives up prices in some places around the city centre, but after a while it's easy to learn which places aren't catered for people with hiking boots. I promise.

If anyone doesn't know the Marianne, she's the one holding the flag (and leading the fight): Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix.

I couldn't think of a good title

I really don't have much to write for this post, a little bit like the last one I made, but i thought i'd upload some pretty pictures of things for your viewing pleasure. I've not been very good at taking photos of Aix recently (unlike Marseille/Sanary/Le Lavandou etc etc) since i've mostly been getting my bearings right and making sure i actually 'see' most of the town as opposed to doing the whole touristy thing too much. But there's a few anyways

Anyways, it was the Erasmus 'Flag on your Face' party a few nights ago and the first real outing with the Erasmus students as opposed to the group of French friends i've made. It was okay, it was really weird to see just how many people there are here in Aix just in this one bar from all four corners of the globe, and the bar was packed but I had a fun night with the girls from uni at home and some other English/Australian girls too. 

 We may have absolutely taken over the streets next to the Wohoo bar

Obviously I don't have to try to be sexy after two bottles of wine.

Being tourists on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix. That's Carey btw, she has a blog too.

We saw this procession of traditionally dressed people walking through Aix, but we still have no idea why. Anyone can explain? It was September 2nd 2012.

Me and my first baguette. It was love at first sight. And she was cheap.

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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