Right now I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Rome trying to convert AUD to EURO which is surprisingly difficult. Well, when your maths level reels at anything more complicated than plus or multiply. It’s all good though as I’m transferring money to Tali so a few ‘convenient’ mistakes may occur.

The last two weeks have flown by and updating the blog has been really hard as there aren’t as many internet cafes in Europe, and Tali and I have been busy sight seeing and eating, excessively. In London we were lucky enough to have free accomodation from our friend and as a result London wasn’t too taxing on the funds. But landing in Rome was an absolute punch in the guts. The first night we stayed at a hotel we had pre booked on Hostel World and it was a dump. We paid 50 euros for a shoe box of a room without a toilet. The springs were poking up through the mattress and the pillow was as flat as a pancake. It was worse than most of the places I stayed at in Nepal/India where it cost me as little as $1.60 per night.

At 3am, aching all over and furious at my inability to sleep in this overpriced crap hole, I declared we were leaving first thing in the morning. I managed to drag Tali out of bed kicking and screaming (literally) at about 10.30 and we spent the next 3 hours trolling the streets conjuring up all kinds of foul words at each other as we searched for a new hotel. Both of us lack any sense of direction and blame the other when we get hopelessly lost. We finally found a awesome little hotel with a nice old Italian man and it has been all good since.

So I don’t know why I have spent two paragraphs explaining how expensive Rome is when I could be telling you all about the Colossseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon and heaps of other really old stuff. I’m sure you know all about them though - yes it’s all beautiful and we had an incredible time. I reckon art is pretty boring so much of it is wasted on me and 5 minutes in an art gallery looking at 16th century religious paintings makes me impossibly tired. 

In London we spent 30 minutes at the British museum and then we left. We got there one hour before it closed and worried we wouldn’t have enough time, but after seeing a few clay pots and figurines it all looks the same. We had been told to see the Magna Carta which is supposed to be a momentous piece of history so as we were browsing the isles we were both saying “we’ve got to see the Magna Carta” and both pretending we were interested. After a while I turned to Tali and said “do you even know what the Magna Carta is?” She burst out laughing and said no and I admitted I didn’t know either so we got the hell out of there (sorry Emma!). Neither of us are history buffs or art critics but we’ve had a lot of fun nonetheless.

 I have to admit though St. Peters gobsmacked me. Wow. It is the most impressive thing my eyes have ever seen and the amount of statues (statue bro) artworks, pillars, gold, other big things, surely must make it man’s greatest architectural achievement.

The highlight of Rome has been the food and wine and much of our time here has been spent devouring exorbitant amounts of it.  

London was awesome too and we did some sightseeing, caught up with a few friends and had a big night out at Fabric (a big London club). I don’t really know what else to say about it. I’m horrible at relaying past events.

I don’t think I’ll update the rest of India as I want to tell the stories from there first hand to all of you when I get back (sorry Mark!!!) plus I’m just lazy. My burst of enthusiam has burst. Like many things I do, I get excited at the start and then suddenly lose momentum. I’ll try and keep the blog updated every now and again but it’s getting harder and harder because I’m getting into the travelling groove.

Anyway, hope everyone is well at home and send me emails to my hotmail and I’ll write back!

One day, long long ago, I was walking along Manly Beach with my friend Stephen when we ran into a guy giving away everything he owned. Naturally we walked over to see if there was anything good we could score for free. I asked the guy why he was giving everything away and he told me it was in the name of Jesus. He told us that when you give things away, you get things in return and it starts a cycle of reciprocity.

At the time I thought he was a lunatic (I’m sure he was, but not in the way I thought), however thinking about this 10 years later, he was a remarkable man. Stephen and I got a tape from the guy which had one song on it called “hungry hippo”. The lyrics were “we’re the hungry hungry hippos da da da da da we’re the hungry hungry hippos”. It was a random, bizarre, low budget recording which repeated the same thing over and over. The song had us in stitches for hours and we sung it together for months. In fact if Stephen reads this post, I know he will piss himself laughing again.

It’s funny how something so simple and seemingly innocuous can provide so much enjoyment. That man has made me think about this cycle of reciprocity and has influenced me so strongly that I will remember that day forever. And now I pass this story on to you - giving something away (however small) can have a profound effect on the receiver (in ways you would never expect), and if we all made an effort to pass something on the world would be a better place.

What stirred up this memory was Tom Kelshaw’s post on the viral waistcoat which is an experiment to see if a physical object can go viral. I hope this is successful, though if that waistcoat came into my hands, it would go no further. That thing is cool as shit!

Well I am well and truly over this horrible weather - the rain, clouds, grey sky. I’m also fighting a cold which means I’m stuck inside reading and watching movies. I just finished watching The Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Meh… It seems every movie Jet Li says it will be his last yet he continues to go on.

My dreams have been extra vivid lately which is strange because I never usually remember them. In the dreams I remember, I’m always running away from something more powerful than I am - a vampire, a monster, or a serial killer. But I can never get away no matter how hard I run or how desperate my escape is. I’m sure there’s some Freudian meaning there, but I balance it nicely with other dreams where I am the superhero and save the day.

A number of years ago I bought a few packets of mugwort which is a plant said to induce lucid and vivid dreams. I placed it under my pillow every night and it had an incredible effect on my dreams. Someone else I know who used it as part of their thesis on dreaming felt little effects, so perhaps it was just a placebo. Either way I recommend trying it - you can buy it from Happy High Herbs.

A few years ago there was a lot of hype going around about nootropics, more commonly known as ’smart drugs’. One which received a lot of attention was Piracetam. After a lot of reading, I ordered two bottles off the internet as it was over the counter in America but had not been approved in Australia.

I have always had a problem with memory and to be honest, I remember very little about my entire life. Memories dissolve into a blurry haze after just a few years and I can barely distinguish my years at school. So I began taking Piracetam and after only a short while noticed some interesting effects. The memories I formed had a much greater salience as though they were important milestones in my life. Yet the events that occured during the time I was taking Piracetam were on the whole entirely mundane or unimportant. It is difficult to explain this, and I can only liken it to something sticking out in your mind.

An example of this was a gig I went to - Cocorosie which made a huge long-lasting impression on me. It was an awesome gig - don’t get me wrong (I saw them again a few month ago), but my memory of it is uncharacteristically cemented in my mind.

There were other interesting effects of taking Piracetam, the most extreme was superimposing myself into my cat’s mind as he walked past me and I saw the world in a fuzzy black and white - as though I was seeing the world through his eyes. This was only momentary and it was not startling, but it was enough to get me to stop taking anymore Piracetam.

It was an interesting time and I never really speak about it, so I guess now is as good an opportunity as ever. Just thought I would share this.

On the weekend I went down south to a place called Lake Conjola with 5 other guys on a camping trip. There’s an island off the beach called Green Island which has some of the best surf in Australia. Unfortunately it was flat though I suspect with these storms it has picked up.

We didn’t do much down there except drink beer around a fire which we built. It was heaps of fun to get out of Sydney and hang with some kangaroos - there were heaps!

In the afterthoughts of the trip, the thing that is resonating with me the most is the absurd price we paid for the wood for our fire. For a 20kg bag of chopped wood it was $20. This lasted us one night so we got 2 bags for 2 nights.

The guy chopping that wood is making way too much money in my opinion. Now I don’t know where this dude gets his wood from, but I see plenty of fallen trees lying around. Well, actually I don’t - but when I imagine a forest, I envisage that quite a few fall down. And you have to trust your intuition, right?

I propose buying a truck, chopping wood, packing it into bags, and driving around camping sites selling it. Or better yet, I’ll start the company, put some money into it and HIRE some people to chop the wood for me.

I thought about this for a while, and then I went back to crocheting…

It’s better to be up and down than to just spin around