The Year of Living Dormantly

Somehow, a year has gone by since I last wrote anything. A couple of days ago I asked myself how this could have happened. No answers came to mind - just a niggling feeling that I'd better do something before total atrophy set in. So, here you go, folks - I'm back, with a raft, or box, or kitty-litter tray, of new stories, observations, and stupidities, for your pleasure and edification.

Not that 'dormantly' is the most precise word, either - in the past twelve months I've been to Indonesia and Europe, had a few excursions into the Australian hinterland, worked a fair bit on my musical projects, assiduously driven the Titanium Princess to utter distraction, corrected not a few psycho-jeezoids on the interwebs, read Tia twenty thousand books, cleaned the pool, and vacuumed the carpet. So, before I receive nasty complaints involving the use of words such as 'sluggard', let me tell you that I've been busier than a one-armed taxi driver with crabs.

Now, where was I?

We (the T.P. and I) hit the tarmac of Dublin airport courtesy of Ryan Air, a company that believes it is sound policy to pay a penny to piss in its aircraft. Ha, I thought - what are vomit-bags really there for, anyway?

A few bus-stops later, we were ensconced in a shabby little hostel just down the road from St Stephen's Green. Central Dublin was just turning on its lights for the night, so we strolled up to Sheehan's Hotel, through the doors, up the stairs, and into the arms of twenty-odd people with whom I'd become great friends, but whom I had never seen in the flesh until this day.

It's a strange feeling. I'd 'known' all of these people for a couple of years - we were veterans of daily conversations about all sorts of matters: science, religion, atheism, culture, music, chickens - and I'd become accustomed to their 'voices' - the ones that formed in my head each time I read an erudite post from Sharon, or Steve, or Alexandra, or Dr Z, or Tyler, or Decius, or Philip, or Ashley, or Titania, or Jonathan, or Clod, or any of them. They'd become, for me, a digital family. But here they all were - sitting around at tables, big draughts of Guinness tumbling into the mouths of those who weren't currently declaiming strenuously (and into some who were doing both).

At our entrance, they all fell silent and turned to us. "G'day, you godless bastards", I cried, and twenty pairs of arms were hugging me. It was, I must say, one of the most astounding moments of my life. And we were all together in Dublin - let us not forget that. We were here for a conference; we were here to discuss important matters of the intellect; we were here to sort out, to rationalise, the New Atheist Agenda. We had conveniently forgotten that we were in the presence of a far greater intelligence: the mind of Guinness.

I awoke (to use the term loosely) the next morning with the blurry realisation that I was due to deliver a presentation on 'Language and Religious Metaphor' at the conference centre in about ten minutes. This was not good - I was in the upstairs portion of a double bunk, into which I had apparently climbed a couple of hours before, and from which I could see no immediate method of climbing down. I considered just jumping for it, but was unsure of the protocols of the Irish public health service. Then I noticed the T.P's gentle snoring coming from directly below.

'Chris...' I mumbled, trying to wake her so that she could take over the bunk-extraction procedure. It was to no avail - she'd consumed about thirty pints herself, and was somewhere between sweet dreams and a full-blown coma, by the look on her face.

Eventually, we made it to the conference centre, terribly late. Dr Z kindly offered to speak first, so that I could assemble what was left of my wits, and his erudite lecture on the 'landscape' of Evolution spurred me to pull my finger out, get it together, and say something vaguely intelligent. Somehow I waded through my presentation, and received rather enthusiastic applause and comments at its conclusion. These people, I thought, are either remarkably kind and generous, or they're hanging out to get to the pub for lunch. It was lunch.

After some tasty victuals and a couple more pints of ambrosia, we returned the the conference centre, where our resident cosmologist, Oystein, gave a fascinating account of the evolution of fourteen billion years of Universe in just under an hour. Jeebus, it made us all thirsty, though. We repaired to Sheehan's, again.

And that, dear reader, is the extent of our conferencing, unless you call wandering the streets of Dublin at all hours of the night, singing songs, laughing our heads off, telling each other our life stories, and becoming the real friends we always knew we'd become, a 'conference'. I think it became a far better conference than we'd ever planned. We took a trip to Newgrange, marvelling at the ancient mounds, intricate rock carvings, and the extraordinary solar observatory; we wined and dined at restaurants selected for us by our Dublin host Tyler (and they were all Italian, and all fantastic); we walked the grounds of Trinity College, where so many of the great Irish poets and dramatists and novelists had laboured; and we became friends for life.

It's not a bad way to spend a week, don't you agree?

We departed for Wales. We had an appointment with another man I'd never met. His name was Bendi. Sweet non-Jesus, how will I ever do literary justice to that encounter? But I'll try. Next time.

"Shenanigans" is Irish for "What the fuck hit me?"

Dublin had always been to me a place of myth. I'd spent so many hours, no, years, poring over the great Irish novelists, poets and dramatists that the very idea of being there filled me with some foreboding - as if the reality would never match the imagining. Happily, I was wrong, but not for the reasons you may guess.

The Titanium Princess had been all agog in Brussels, which we'd not visited since we were kids in 1974, and I'd had hazy memories of the place (ok, I'd forgotten about it altogether). But Brussels was pretty cool; we stayed in a penzione just down an alley called the Rue Chair et Pain, a stone's throw from the famous square that housed the superbly elegant Grand Palace, the Museum van de Stad Bruxelle, and the Stadhuis van Bruxelle - all superb works of architectural and artistic genius.

But no - what took the T.P.'s fancy was the Musee du Cacao et du Chocolat, and I'm sure I don't have to translate that one even for American readers. Her Metal Majesty was high on hog heaven - she waltzed through the doors as if she were the number one shareholder in Belgian sweet-goods, and proceeded to expand by the minute as she tasted every single available offering. I must admit - Belgian chocolate is a pretty fine substance, and one which, I think, had it been dispensed freely to the Nazis and the Poms, might have prevented quite a few unfortunate fracas a few years back.

After taking photographs of Japanese tourists taking photographs of each other taking photographs of the Mannekin Pis and giggling and laughing, we jumped on a bus and headed out to the airport, where Ryan Air unceremoniously dumped us into the sky, went horizontally at a great rate of knots, and just as unceremoniously dumped us on the tarmac of Dublin Airport. (And that's just what Ryan Air does - talk about "no frills"; you even have to pay to vomit into their sick-bags!)

Well, I thought, as we trundled across the tarmac into Customs, after several weeks of hastily learning a number of languages including Turkish, Greek, Italian, German, Belgian and Alcoholic (ok, I was already fluent in the latter), here we are back in a land where everyone speaks English.

But what an English it is. I fancy that the Irish are the world's best users of our great and noble tongue - they have a way of making the most common conversational constructions appear as Shakespearian dramaturgy; if you ask for directions they will be offered with so many conditional subjunctives that you will forget where you were going in the first place. I was intrigued and bowled over by the friendly lunacy of Irish English. (As an example, when I breasted the bar in the Bleeding Horse Hotel one afternoon, the publican asked of my origins. I told him "Kurrajong, near Sydney". He whistled into his beard for a moment, scratching his nose, and replied "Well, now - that'd be a place, then, wouldn't it?")

There was a higher purpose to our arrival in Dublin. We were to meet up with about twenty friends of mine, none of whom I'd ever actually met face-to-face, but who had become good friends nevertheless via the magic interweb. We were all regular contributors to a well-known forum of atheists, rationalists, scientists, philosophers and other goodismists, and had been badgering away at each other for the past two or three years. A couple of the bright sparks, Titania and Decius (I'll use screen-names for these characters, considering the revelations that are about to unfold, haha), ended up planning a meet-up in Dublin about a year previously, and it turned out to coincide with the Laurie/T.P. Grand Tour. The stage was set.

The T.P. had organised our digs in another one of those youth hostels, which turned out to be not so bad, because it was within easy walking, stumbling or crawling distance from about thirty different pubs. (Have you ever crawled on cobblestones? It's a life-changing experience, let me assure you.) We tossed our bags on our bunks. (I got the top one, and dimly surveyed the kind of drunken calisthenics I'd be using to get up on it in about twelve hours' time. The prospect wasn't pretty.) A quick shower and change later, and we were walking towards Sheehan's Hotel, and a date with doom, or Oromasdes, as he's better-known...

...to be continued

Don't mention the war.

We pulled into Prague on the day Michael Jackson went to live with Elvis. I haven't got much to say about this fascinating city, except that a) its drivers are horrendous, incompetent fools who obey road rules to the letter; b) don't go there in June or July, because you'll be drowned in tourists and high prices; c) the museum is great, and even has a mammoth, and d) it has the best thunderstorms.

So, after a couple of days, we boarded another train for Berlin. The Titanium one had gone troppo in Prague, and was kitted out with a most magnificent range of fabrics and those fiddly things women like to acquire to adorn their ears, necks, wrists and the like - all silver and crystalline chunks of ultra-compressed carbon. I bought another hat.

The train journey, which wound its way along the Vlatava River (which, when it reaches Germany, mysteriously becomes the Elbe), was a delight. It took all day, but it was one of those trips that never becomes a burden. The scenery changed around almost every bend in the river, taking us past farms, through forests, and, at one point, between Teplice and Decin, along a grand gorge with towering, incandescent sandstone cliffs that were eerily similar to the Hawkesbury sandstone of the Colo valley where I live. It was magnificent, and reminded me that the best part of travelling is the travel itself. Just as when I was a twelve year-old train enthusiast, hopping on and off trains all over New South Wales, this trip was enchanting; every turn of the track revealed something new and wonderful, and often enigmatic.

Like this: we were coming into Germany, and, in a field by the railway line, was a post and wire fence that was about two feet tall. It went for kilometres. I was intrigued - what the fuck was its purpose? Was it keeping hordes of feuding dwarves at bay? To this day, I have no idea. It seemed completely useless, but for some German farmer, it was an integral part of the infrastructure, as it was obviously well-maintained (like everything else in Germany, of course). I don't know - I suppose one of the German readers of this blog will enlighten me eventually (although there are probably several dozen fewer of them now than there were a few weeks ago. Don't worry guys - wait 'til I start telling you about England - you'll realise I'm an equal-opportunity curmudgeon, for sure!)

We stopped briefly in Dresden, scene of the British and American Air Forces' own Holocaust in WWII. Of course, Dresden has been rebuilt, but there were several monuments to the carnage left as they were, as a reminder to all and sundry that war is just about the stupidest project on earth. Interestingly, Churchill's rationale for the fire-bombing of the city was that they were trying to wipe out the railway marshalling yard. And they certainly succeeded in that. There was just the small matter of the 100,000 to 200,000 civilians whose barbecued remains ended up as collateral damage. Nice one, Winston.

With this grim reminder of humanity's utter collective insanity under our belts, we moved on, through spindly forests of ash, or elm, or some other types of trees at which, as an Antipodean, I was at a loss to identify, until we arrived at the most exquisitely-designed railway station I've ever seen - the Hauptbahnhof of central Berlin.

Opened in 2006, the Hauptbahnhof is a magisterial comportment of steel and glass. Its architectural beauty lies in its transparency - from almost anywhere inside the structure, one can look at all of the platforms, and all of the tracks, on multi-levels connected by vast escalators; it is almost as if the station floats in its own sea of glass. It said, more plainly than anything else, welcome to Berlin, welcome to modernity.

A bus whisked us efficiently and promptly to the Berlin Youth Hostel, only a mile or so from the city centre. Distinct from the YHA residences of Turkey and Greece, the Berlin outfit was all simplicity and (here comes that word again) efficiency. We were in our room in three minutes flat, had a shower (no enormous cockroaches evident), and were back out onto the street to hunt for victuals in no time at all. A blazing curry later, we sauntered back to the hostel and sat on the lawn, me demolishing a six-pack, and the T.P. fending off invitations from Adonisian young men to cast a critical eye over the robust collection of etchings they were hoarding in their rooms. (Just kidding - only one such Adonis made that sort of approach, and when I cast a quizzical eye at him he pretty quickly realised, from the gaunt visage of your correspondent's face, that an assignation with the T.P. might be biting off a fair bit more than he could chew, so to speak. Mind you, as an aficionado of all things comical, I would have paid good money to witness such an encounter.)

The next morning we took a walking tour of the city. There is still a neat divide between East and West Berlin, and it reflects the post-war priorities (and ideologies, if you want to get all politically historical) of the British-American and Soviet blocs. On the East, the Soviets preserved and maintained as many of the pre-existing structures as they could. And so, you walk along the great boulevard and see row upon row, block upon block, of 18th and 19th century apartments, shops, and, down further, palaces, museums and state buildings. It is simply wonderful. On the western side, however, vast spaces devoid of anything, with interspersed 'modern' buildings, testify to the Allies' penchant for knocking down anything that was vaguely damaged in the bombing. Vast edifices, legacies of the 1960s, ugly as only that period of architecture can be, confronted and appalled us at every turn. We headed back east, to the museum district.

The Pergamon Museum, built to house the collection of ancient relics pilfered from the famous Greek city in Turkey (to which we'd paid a visit just a couple of weeks before) stood, like a Parthenon, amidst the crumbling walls and buildings of East Berlin. The street on which the Pergamon stands was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting as the Soviets forced their way into Berlin at the end of WWII, and the legacy of that fire-fight is stark, brutal and disturbing. Shell and bullet-holes cover the walls of buildings; even the Pergamon itself didn't go unscathed, with great, gouging holes blown in the fluted marble columns. I earnestly hoped, as I wandered along the street, that these would never be lost, never be cosmeticised, because they too, like Dachau, like Dresden, were a reminder of the ferocity of war. If stone, brick and concrete could be so scarred, and so massively, what was happening to the bodies of boys and young men?

Back at the hostel, young men and women gambolled on the spacious lawns. A bunch of boys, fifteen or sixteen years old, dressed in bomber jackets and jauntily-angled baseball caps, effected a swaggering sort of pimp-roll past us, speaking in German. These kids were attempting to fast-track cultural evolution. I half expected them to turn black and begin saying "Yo" before my eyes. Of course, I've seen the same thing in Sydney - it was just a trifle more amusing to see Coca-Colonisation proceeding in German. Ce'st la vie, as they say in !Xhosa.

The next day, on the Potsdamer Platz, I approached a German military officer who had a little table set up next to a big, heavily-graffitied chunk of the Berlin Wall. He was offering, for one Euro, to stamp passports with a variety of Cold War-era permission stamps. I happily found Checkpoint Charlie and a couple of other such paraphernalia embossed inside my passport. He told me that there was a movement going on to reclaim as much of the Wall as could be done, and his little effort was helping to raise money for the project. "So, where is most of the Wall now?" I asked.

"In people's lounge-rooms," he replied straight-faced.

We continued perambulating down Unter den Linden, to the Berlin Cathedral - another fine example of the temporal largesse that can come from convincing people of the efficacy of howling at an empty sky - and, on that sunny June day, lay on the grass beside the fountain on Museum Island, admiring, once again, the class of Europeans generally when it comes to the realisation of space in their cities.

But now it was time to go to Hamburg, where we had a date with destiny in the form of two outrageous Americans and a week of debauchery. Liver, don't fail me now...

Mecca

Sadly, we took our leave of Narelle, and Munich, boarding a train bound for Prague. The plan was to take a detour into the Czech Republic, then emerge back into the old East Germany and head for Berlin. During the week in Munich we'd travelled to Salzburg, Wurzburg, and many a burg in between, relishing the efficiency of a couple of countries built on standards that would have been frankly impossible in a shambolic and oh-so laid-back country like Australia.

Every country has its good and bad points, of course - and often, these are evidenced on both sides of the same coin. Germany and Austria are paragons of public organisation and efficiency, for example - Mussolini didn't have much luck in Italy, by all accounts, but here, the trains really did run on time. These countries parade this neat-as-a-pin efficiency as a matter of course, most noticeably in their public transport systems, for sure, but in many more, and subtler, ways as well. I was forever taken with the no-nonsense attitude of the locals, especially when dealing with shopkeepers, policepersons, or any other official. Almost always, one's question was answered with a prefacing raise of the eyebrows and a slight moue, as if the answer simply didn't require the articulated "Of course, you oaf - vot do you think we are, here, barbarians?" There was a genuine pride in Germanic entrepreneurial efficiency, as if 'efficiency' was paradigmatic to any concept of both the ethical and aesthetic heights of culture. It was entrancing. Getting around the place was never a problem; the people were always happy to point one in the right direction, or offer good advice on food (...er, on second thoughts...), places to see, ways to do things.

Of course, there is another side. On a sunny Sunday morning, with no-one about (the Bavarians don't go out on Sunday unless it's to a relative's place for lunch), I went for a bit of a stroll. The roads were eerily vacant, and, j-walking across an intersection, I came across an old woman walking one of those sorts of dogs - tiny, yappy, fluffy and pompadoured - that really deserve to be picked up by the hind legs and dashed against the nearest brick wall. She stopped as I came to her side of the kerb, lifted a finger, and shook it vigorously at me. "Nicht in ordnung, nicht in ordnung!" she vituperated, busily clutching her tiny demon-hound to her ample bosom with the other hand. Nonplussed, I asked her what was the matter. She gesticulated wildly, tracing my path across the intersection with a finger, whilst jabbering away at me in German (naturally). I suddenly realised that I'd committed a grave offence, the worst one a bloke can commit in all of Deutschland - be different.

It dawned on me that the reason that Germany was a place resplendent in its efficiency was that everyone does the same things the same way. All those manicured wood-piles swept back into view, all of those pretty villages, docile farm-wives, cooking their pastries, all those people lining up so civilly to board the U-Bahn - to be well-ordered in Germany is the pinnacle of ideology. Forget the old Ubermensch bullshit - the only reason Hitler got to where he did was that the Germans are enthralled by the social purity of the concept of following orders. Heterodoxy is a sin; to be laid-back is as bad a crime as not washing for a month. I began to wonder what all of those post-war German immigrants to Australia must have thought when they got off the ship and saw thousands of Aussies deliberately not giving a fuck.

We trundled through several impeccably tidy towns - Dingolfing, Plattling, Deggendorf - and suddenly we were in the Czech Republic. Not that any sign announced it as such, but the first place we pulled into, Zelesna Ruda, was definitely un - German! The train heaved to a stop, and became, instantaneously, a Czech train. Instantly, the floor was littered with empty soda cans and beer bottles, scraps of paper and cigarette butts. And that was only my contribution! Outside, the rusting hulks of old boilers and other machinery littered the countryside; weeds grew with gay abandon, and everything looked tired and run-down. Ah, I thought - back to reality!

The train jalopied through a mixture of tumbledown villages, open country and pretty forests, then suddenly and noisily, came to a creaking halt in a city called Pilzn. Could it be, I thought? I jumped out of the carriage, onto the platform, and, Pope-like, got on my hands and knees, extended my posterior heavenwards, and kissed the earth. I felt like one of those diaspora Jews returning to Jerusalem for the first time, except that in my case the object of the pilgrimage was decidedly more gustatorial: beer! Fate, as she had done to me a few times recently, had delivered me to the shrine, the Mecca, of drinkers - the origin of the greatest of all styles of amber refreshment. Oh happy day! This was really beginning to be a journey of which one could be proud.

I resumed my seat on the train next to the Titanium Princess, who simply shrugged and gave me one of those acute, withering looks that said (and may I remind you that I can read the leader of the opposition like the doyen of Pitman's Shorthand): You simpering, gormless, feeble-minded halfwit. A divorce court is too good a place for you.

I was, however, in such a state of euphoria that I simply cracked open a can of Pilsener Urquelle and said "There you go, my darling - I knew this trip would take a turn for the better!"

We rolled on, towards Prague.

Civilisation

The train came thundering through the Brenner pass as a weak sun rose under low cloud, and there was Austria all around us. Italy and its discontents were already a fading memory as we descended the mountain, through little towns, two of which were named, strangely, 'Mutters' and 'Natters'. Already the concept of civilisation had taken a curious turn, with each village obviously vying for 'Tidy Town of the World' status. It became rapidly obvious that in these rural villages, anal retention was not so much a psychiatric obsession as it was a religion. 

Each little neat-as-a-pin farmhouse had a woodpile. And oh, what a majestic piece of architecture it was. Each stick of wood had been lopped to within a tolerance of half a millimetre for length, and split at a perfect one hundred and twenty degrees, then stacked with a precision that defied imagination, and common-sense, for that matter. For fuck's sake, they were just going to burn the stuff, after all. Everything was clean, there was literally not a skerrick of rubbish - not a bottle-top, not a plastic bag, not even a cigarette butt to be seen. Coming from Italy, this was some contrast, and it induced in me a worrying mixture of deep aesthetic gratitude and a rising panic that I'd suddenly been transported to some Midwich-like otherworld. I fully expected to see Nicole Kidman look-alikes with Mary Tyler Moore hairstyles and cotton pinafores carrying trays of pastries to each others' houses. It was all magnificently surreal.

Even the natural landscape looked like it had been manicuring itself for centuries. Perfect stands of conifers gave way to fields of mown meadow; snow around the conical summits of mountains glimmered with a praeternatural light; bubbling and hissing streams of pure water cut lyrical swathes through a countryside that was familiar with every shade of meaning of the word 'green'. Verily, this was an elysian dream.

Gradually, I regained the use of plain English as we descended into Innsbruck, then headed on through pretty valleys until we passed, unnoticeably, into Germany, where we finally arrived at the busy terminus in Munich.

We were having a week off, just hanging out at Narelle's apartment and taking in the sights and sounds of Munich and its environs. I was dead keen to do some serious, Australian investigation into the entire range of Bavarian liquid refreshments, and I must say that I did a pretty good job of exhausting the possibilities - so much so that by the end of the week I had become, I think, the premier ameliorator of the global financial crisis, Munich chapter. The Titanium Princess, of course, continued to be unamused by our rapidly deteriorating bag of shekels, and informed me so as I lurched blearily back into the apartment each night after another days' sociological endeavours.

'I hope your liver explodes, you idiot,' she would lovingly coo, as I ripped the top off a nightcap of a particularly dark and handsome variety of the local wheat beer. One doesn't have to actually eat anything whilst sojourning in Bavaria, I found out, as the entire gamut of food groups seems to be contained within each bottle or stein of Weizen, Bock, Doppelbock (and boy, can a bloke get misty-eyed on that little product!) or even Helles.

And it's a good thing, too, because what the Bavarians actually eat can inspire nightmares just by looking at it, so what kind of nocturnal torment a bloke would endure if he accidently swallowed some of it, Christ only knows. Dear reader, have you ever even looked at a plate of udder tripe? I rest my case.

On the fourth day in Munich, I decided to ease up on the old body, which had started to disintegrate under the onslaught, and spend the day being cultured. The girls had bravely decided to visit Dachau and its horrors, whereas I was intent on walking my way through the Alte Pinakothek, Munich's illustrious museum of art.

The Alte is one of three museums of art (the other two being the Neue, and the Moderne), and contains one of the best collections of Mediaeval and Renaissance art in the world. I walked towards it via the Konigsplatz, the seat of Nazi power during the '30s, wondering how the girls were faring, and thinking about the dissonance between the grand opulence of the Reich's houses of power and the charnel houses they were walking through only a few miles to the north.

The Alte is a magnificent building, constructed in 1836, and an exemplar for modern galleries all over the world. It was rebuilt in the 1950s, along with eighty percent of the rest of Munich, all bombed to rubble. For the princely sum of one Euro I gained entry through vast timber doors, and began a day of saying "Ooh" and "Ahh", and "Fuck me dead!" about every ten seconds.

The museum is home to the old masters - German, Flemish, Italian, French and Spanish masterpieces assail the viewer at every turn. I was captivated, more than anything, by the iconography of the early Germans and Flemish. The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Hans Holbein caught my eye. Here is poor old Sebastian, strung up to a tree, with various archers taking cross-bow pot shots at him from point-blank range. He's beginning to resemble a porcupine, and is decidedly green around the gills, as you would expect. One of the archers is on one knee, casually slipping another bolt in his bow. The whole affair is being conducted in a no-nonsense style as if whacking arrows into a martyr's body is just another day's work for the executioners. It's a tantalising painting - and gruesome in its mundanity.

Lucas Cranarch, with whom I was unfamiliar before this visit, was a wonderful painter of the sixteenth century. His Adam und Eva is a colossal piss-take on the whole Garden of Eden thing, if you ask me - complete with a serpent with a smile like a used-car salesman. Lions and deer gambol peacefully around the tree, and Adam and his missus, rather than eat a fairly delicious-looking apple, look like they're about to drop acid for the first time.

I was still chuckling when I walked through a doorway into the hall of Reubens, and had to gently lower myself to the ground before I passed out in delirium. Here was a cornucopia of delight, bliss, fear, and horror; a compendium of every extremity of human emotion. Lined against each other on the walls were paintings of sheer intensity, colour, vibrancy, and masterly technique. I was winded, I was fucked.

To give just one example, let me quote verbatim from the notes I wrote on that day as I stood before Der Bethlehemitische Kindermord, a painting describing the Herodic infanticide:

The Roman soldiers murdering babies. On the right, a woman is biting the arm of a soldier whose bloody dagger is poised over her back. Their faces ooze brutality. Another woman scratches at the face of a soldier, who is holding a baby being stabbed through the heart. The angels watch from above and throw flowers!! A woman, right, clutches a dagger above her infant, as if she is resigned to ending its life as humanely as possible. Blood is dripping from her hand.  Throughout, human flesh is being sliced to the bone. I wonder what Reubens was thinking? Is it a moral lesson, or is it journalism?

As I walked back to the apartment, I wondered whether the T.P.'s excursion had not, perhaps, been so dissimilar to mine. All that horror, centuries piled upon centuries of it.

I opened the door. Chris and Narelle were sitting on the lounge, and both of them were crying.

"Remember Montaperti!" (Part 2)

A couple of days later the three of us got on a bus and trundled through the Tuscan countryside to San Gimignano, a smaller version of Siena - another mediaevel fortress city perched on a hill. San Gim is famous for half a dozen or so square towers that poke out of various of its buildings without any rational explanation. It's like the builders just said 'Hey, Tony, we've got nothing on today, let's build a fuckin' tower on top of, er, that joint over there.' Whatever the case, they're pretty impressive, as is the entire city.

We walked through its ancient gates, and a wide, straight boulevarde climbed up and up the hill, lined with shops and markets, all adorned with flags and inexplicable figurines and knick-knacks. It was glorious and vibrant, and hundreds of people were walking along, everyone (including me) with the most delicious gelato in the world stuffed in their mouths.

I jumped into an internet cafe and hooked up with a few friends around the world, just in the interests of gloating, of course, while the girls haunted frock shops and the like. We re-assembled in the main square an hour or so later, where it seemed the annual festival of the pig was going on. Whole hoggies were roasting on several spits, and for the princely sum of two Euros I was handed an enormous, crusty bread-roll filled with the most succulent meat I've ever tasted. It was heaven on a stick, and without any guilt at all I went back for seconds. 

San Gim is a really pretty spot, and as we walked along the twisting, steep slopes of the Via Santo Stefano, I had the uncanny feeling of walking in the footsteps of romance personified. It was romantic; it was a place in which to love, and fall in love. It spoke of the history, and the ghosts, of lovers, this place, and I was calmly content. I like it when a new place brings old, close, and comfortable feelings to the surface. It's happened a few times before, but this felt special, and I was content. Ok, you can stop laughing now, but I was in love with the whole thing.

Fortunately, the T.P. brought me back to earth, complaining that I had once again got us horribly lost, and we had to get back on the bus by 3.45, so could I please get my head out of the clouds and concentrate on finding civilization again? We made it back to the bus depot in time, and I dozed away the return to Siena thinking happy thoughts. 

Finally, it was time to leave Siena. We had a day in Florence booked, and I was keen to get there, because all of my life I have wanted to see Michelangelo's David in the flesh, and Florence is where he lives.

Florence is a city without parallel - it is unfathomably eclectic, with a prepossessing mixture of all of the elements that make a city alluring. Picture this: Florence's vast, opulent and somewhat spooky Duomo sits comfortably amid a bustling, modern raft of tack. Shitty tourist restaurants and gift shops crowd it on all sides, forcing the traveller to think of this, the second-greatest Catholic cathedral in the world, as nothing but an attractor of filthy lucre. Which, when you think about the ultimate raison d'etre of Catholicism, strikes not one note of discord.

The Duomo itself simply reeks of exploitation and repression. I don't know why, but all of the great cathedrals of Europe I visited had exactly the same effect on me. Of course, I am awed by their majesty, their opulence, their mystery and their intricacy. There is no doubt that they display craftsmanship that is the pinnacle of architectural art. But, within their walls, is an ugliness which is inescapable. In Siena, for instance, exquisite sculptures by the world's greatest, Bernini, are overlooked by a parade of busts of one hundred and thirty popes, sternly overseeing the gullibility of worshipping peasants. The entire atmosphere in these houses of blood is the atmosphere of a psychological repression that left me in no doubt as to the origins of Fascism. We got out quickly - David was waiting.

We sauntered down from the Duomo to the Galleria dell'Academia, where David had been enthralling people for centuries. And, for fuck's sake-  it was closed! 'Pissed off' is not the term to describe my mood at that moment. I'd travelled half-way around the world, only to find that the Florentine Pogens had decided, for some inexplicable (but probably Catholic) reason, to close the gallery on Mondays. As I howled in rage and disbelief, banging my fists on the doors, the T.P. tried to comfort me, saying 'Stop whingeing, you idiot. You're attracting odd looks from the passers-by.' She's so understanding, my wife.

We made our way, me shrieking at the stupidity of all things Italian, to the Piazza della Signoria, where David's replica stood, amongst other gems of Renaissance sculpture. Somewhat calmed, my spirits began to rise. Here were sculptures by Ammannati, Donatello, Bandinelli, and the exquisite Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna. The whole place, overlooked by the fabulous Palazzo Vecchio, Florence's famous city hall, was wondrous. This was Italy, this was culture, for real.

It was time to go to Germany. 

"Remember Montaperti!" (Part 1)

We got out of Venice after a few days, and by then my pessimism about the place had evaporated somewhat, after being treated to a night at the opera and some wonderful, simply magnificent museums of art. (I'm still not keen on its cops, though.)

The T.P. was excited to be on our way to Siena to meet her sister Narelle, whom she hadn't seen for a couple of years. Narelle is a dramatic soprano who lives in Germany and can sing a bit (not really - there is still some dispute in the family over whether it was she who shattered every bit of glassware in her parents' house at the age of thirteen.... or whether it was her mother hahaha - sorry, mother-in-law in-joke).

From Florence, we boarded a rattle-trap old train that reminded me of the state of the art of the Australian rail system (in Germany a couple of weeks later I had cause to wonder at the stupidity, carelessness and sheer blundering incompetence of our political masters down under, as I rode in a sumptuous express at 250 kilometres per hour, whisper quiet and vibration-free), and pulled into Siena a couple of hours later. We walked through the gates of the old city, high on the hill, and my jaw hit the ground.

Anything one can say about Siena is an understatement. It is grand, on a scale of grandness that 

invites comparisons to other cities in the same way you might compare the intellects of Richard Dawkins and Kent Hovind. It is architecture on acid - three- and four-story stone buildings of exquisite design crowd narrow, zig-zagging cobbled streets. Gigantic, elaborate timber doors open onto dim courtyards, where water can be heard trickling into sculpted ponds. These are the residences built from about the eleventh century onwards - the houses of the nobles, and it seems that almost every citizen of Siena in those times must have been a noble, because there is virtually not one house that is not ravishing in its grandiosity and architectural brilliance.

Our room at the penzione was on the fourth floor. As usual, I dragged two heavily-laden packs - realising, at last, that the T.P.'s shopping exploits in Venice had been designed with one sole purpose: to induce a giant myocardial infarction in me - up a ridiculously narrow staircase, alighting on the top landing to see Narelle and my assassin in a cheery embrace. I hugged Narelle - it had been about fifteen years since I'd seen her - and collapsed on a lounge demanding beer, pronto. There was none.

Like every other place in Siena, our quarters were - literally - a work of art. Frescoes of saints and angels adorned the bedroom ceilings, and the shutters opened onto a panorama of utter gorgeousness. I dived into a shower recess built by a sadistic midget, and with many contortions managed to wash off the accumulated sweat from our ten-mile hike up the mountain weighed down with the contents of the Venetian Treasury.

Narelle, who was familiar with Siena, and who also speaks a fairly good brand of Italian, was the perfect guide. We wandered down the street, around a few corners, and my jaw, which was still flapping noisily against my chest, shot arrow-like to the street. We had reached the Piazza del Campo.

If there is a better-realised city square in the world I want to see it now. The Campo is as splendid an urban space as you could wish for, and to think it was pretty-much complete by the thirteenth century. Paved in red brick, its seashell shape is dominated by the Torre del Mangia, a tower that reaches majestically to the sky. Great mansions circumnavigate this vast, open and airy space. Hundreds of people were just sitting around it, at tables outside the myriad of restaurants at street level, or just plonked on the brick paving itself, eating gelati or pizza and drinking wine and beer. It was coming on evening, and the deepening sky contrasted with the reds and creams of the buildings in a sight I won't forget in a hurry. It was spectacular (and that's just another understatement.)

We ate pizza and drank beer, and I suddenly realised that the square, although populated by plenty of tourists, was also the haunt of the locals themselves. And why wouldn't you come here of an evening if you lived in town? It was cool and inviting - everything you needed was within thirty seconds' walk, and the sights and sounds of musicians playing, dancers twirling, and people just generally having a pleasant time made you want to stay well into the night. I'm not a city person, but I could live here, I thought.

...to be continued

I'll sue!

Some jumped-up Welshman's been having a go at me on his rotten little blog. I leave it for fair-minded Australians to come to my defence:

http://richardemmanueljones.blogspot.com/2009/11/bonzer-day-in-llanfihangel-y-creuddun.html?showComment=1257768412979#c6828378600377961611

A man, a plan, a canal - Panama. No, sorry, Venice!

I know everyone is supposed to fall in love with Venice on sight, but guess what? Venice is just a massive European K-Mart with cobbles.

Not that the Titanium Princess would agree. The T.P. literally waltzed across the Rialto bridge as we made our way to Al Gazzettino, the hotel in which she'd stayed a couple of years earlier. She was all smiles, and seemed to have lost about thirty years, as we walked down the little alleyways that featured so prominently in Don't Look Now. It was a delight to watch her (as I struggled with two recalcitrant suitcases and a massive hangover), tripping lightly along, staring into shop windows and mentally arithmeticking the vast amounts of money she would shortly be spending on Venetian knick-knacks. 

The hotel was on a little canal called the Dell Aquae San Marco, about halfway between the Rialto Bridge and the famous square of San Marco. An ideal spot, and one in which the T.P. had fallen in love with Italy, and all things Italian, a couple of years before. A very charming and urbane gentleman in a suit greeted us at the reception desk, and showed us to our room. He kept referring to the T.P. in the third person, as in "Madam will find that...", and "If Madam would like to..." He quite deliberately left me out of the picture, no doubt assuming I was some stupid Venetian lackey who was merely carrying the bags, and would trundle off once my job was done. (He did get quite a surprise the next morning when, in search of coffee, I bundled noisily down the stairs and gave him a forthright "G'day mate" as I galloped out of the hotel.)

Al Gazzettino is, in fact, a terrific little hotel. It was once the headquarters of an eponymous local newspaper, and its restaurant's walls are lined with old clippings and photographs of Venice from the late 19th century onwards. After the excruciating horrors of the Ikarus Palace, it was a godsend, if one likes to imagine that a non-existent deity would ever have the forethought to put a nice hotel in the middle of a waterlogged city. I liked it just fine, as there was a little stall down the alley-way where good coffee at less than a billion Euros a shot could be had, served by a genial young woman with a face like a Botticelli painting.

After my run-in with the law at the bottom of the gang-plank the previous morning, I was going to take every precaution I could against further interest from the Carabiniari, having been appraised of their prediliction to offer warnings against poor behaviour in the form of horses' heads at the foot of one's bed. I decided a 7.30 a.m. stroll around the precinct would be just the ticket. I hadn't gone far when I came across a gentleman in a black and white striped shirt and a funny little straw bota on his head, fiddling around in the front of a gondola on the canal. We had a short conversation in that curious argot where English morphs into Italian and back again, and you do this for several minutes, smile, laugh, and shake hands with many "See yous" and "Arrividercis", and continue on your way for a little while, whistling happily, until you realise that neither he nor you understood a single word of the conversation. Communication is one of those things I love about travel.

Before long, and after several little ponts over the canals, winding my way through narrow, mouldery alleyways, I came smack bang into the square of San Marco. Even I, a recent veteran of the architectural slendours of Ephesus and Athens, was gob-smacked. San Marco is such a beautifully-conceived space as to beggar description. But I'll try.

The painting at the top of the page is by the Italian artist Canaletto, and this view of the Piazza San Marco was finished in 1746. I've always admired this beautiful work, largely because it captures the superbly realised space of the square, which takes the unwitting traveller by surprise as he steps out below the portico of St Mark's Clocktower, a stupendous bit of archtiectural humour that immediately had me chuckling, to the consternation of a tightly-knit group of early-morning Japanese tourists, who evidently thought it was just about the most impressive bit of brickwork in Christendom. It's actually very nice, though, compared with the sheer lunacy of the Basilica itself. I stood, stunned, in the almost empty piazza, with only the sound of twittering from pigeons and Japanese to disturb me, as my eyes began following the cornucopia of excess in front of me. I'd never realised God had the taste of a drag-queen before, but this place was chintz from arsehole to breakfast.

This bizarre Byzantine confirmation that religion can really fuck with your mind (in this case, the minds of its conceivers) is supposed to house the remains of Saint Mark himself, whose body was allegedly stolen, by the Venetians, from Alexandria. I don't know what it is about this obsession Catholics have about the 'relics of the Saints' stuff, and frankly, I couldn't care less. If it's your thing to go digging up the powdery remains of some two-thousand year old dead bloke just because he wrote a pack of lies about another bloke who probably didn't exist anyway, go right ahead. But don't expect me to respect the fact that they used all this nonsense just to invent a religion which would give them access to little boys' bottoms, okay?

After reflecting on the gilded cage before me, and its place in the enslavement of millions of minds over the centuries, I decided to go and wake up the Titanium Princess, still languishing languidly in our four-poster back at the pub. She came to with a couple of grunts and a hearty "Fuck off," which I always regard as a particularly loving greeting, coming from her.

We breakfasted in the little dining-room on the ground floor, where the most marvellous selection of farinaceous delights went down with a good helping of strong coffee, all served by our urbane concierge, who turned out to be pretty much the entire staff of Al Gazzettino. Indeed, it transpired that his grandfather had been the editor of the newspaper when it eventually re-invented itself as a funky little hotel. I liked that.

A water taxi came around to the back of the hotel and picked us up for a little journey across to the island of Murano, famous for its glassware, of course, but less well-known for the fact that the bones of a dragon, slain by Saint Donatus (again with the fucking saints, but hey - we're in Italy, folks!), reside in the church bearing the dragon-slayer's name. I really wanted to see these relics! Alas, the church was closed when we got there, but the bloke who'd guided us told me that he'd seen the bones of the dragon. "I've also seen the bones of a cow," he confided, "and guess what?" he smiled broadly. 

I tell you, Mythbusters has a lot to answer for. Everyone's a sceptic these days.

The glass industry at Murano is fascinating. The Venetian authorities sensibly moved the glass business out of the city and onto Murano in 1291, fearing that the entire town might be burnt down one day. The glassmakers' factories are principally furnaces, and the one we went to was occupied by four masters all working to produce a single chandelier. They were currently working on some gilded leaves, and as each piece of glass came out of the furnace, it was deftly beaten into shape by one of the artisans, then further moulded and modelled. Several operations, all involving reheating, dousing and beating took place, until the leaf was cut from its rod and hung to cool. Each of these pieces ended up being precisely identical, without the glassmakers' use of measuring devices of any kind. They had the eyes that would be ears on a Mozart. It was all most impressive and beyond my comprehension. And I was getting thirsty in the heat. We got back on the water taxi, and headed off down the Grand Canal, looking for lunch and a jar or two.

The afternoon was spent walking, and I was, as usual, doing all I could to avoid the shopping precincts, which is particularly hard in Venice, a city that resembles a mediaeval Walmart. Some may say I'm being impossibly churlish, but to me a frock shop is a frock shop.

We lighted upon a little bookshop that proclaimed itself as "The World's Greatest Bookshop", on a sign outside. And guess what? It was! As we walked inside, a gondola from the fifteenth century greeted us, piled high in books and other parephenalia. In fact, the entire shop was a junk-yard of paper, cardboard and glass. I roamed around in heaven, sifting through 17th century manuscripts on the quality of the water-supply to Venice in 1658. We bought several large prints of Venice from the eighteenth century, which now adorn the already overburdened walls of our home. This funky little bookstore, whose doors opened up onto a canal, was a place in which one could happpily reside for a few weeks. Alas, we had to go. It was opera time.

The Ikarus Palace

These big, ocean-going ferries are usually about thirteen storeys tall, and after manhandling our luggage up to the top deck, on a series of escalators (all non-functioning), we arrived at our destination. In a flash of inspiration, I had booked our passage several weeks beforehand, and our travel agent in Australia had assured us that our accommodation for the two-night, one day cruise to Venice would be in "airline-style" seating. Fair enough, we thought - we can handle that for a couple of nights. As it was my only contribution to our travel plans (the T.P. had insisted on doing the rest, me being 'pathetically incompetent'), I was enormously chuffed at my vision of a romantic cruise for two up the Adriatic to Venice, the city of love - and, I must say, as a testament to my pre-eminent organisational skills.

I handed our boarding passes to the bloke at the door to our deck and asked him to show us to our seats. He scrutinised the tickets, for a bit, then looked around the outside deck where we were standing. It was a steel deck, painted green, and had some circular tables bolted to the floor. Other than that, it was completely bare, and open to the seasons. Stacks of white plastic garden chairs were roped to the bulkhead (that's 'wall', for you land-lubbers). 

"Anywhere here," he replied, indicating the acre or so of green steel.

Somewhat taken aback, I remonstrated mildly, "You've got to be fucking kidding, mate!" I pointed to the cabin I could see through the doorway, where rows of very comfortable-looking easy chairs adorned a tastefully-decorated indoor cabin. "That's where we are booked," I corrected him.

He looked at the tickets again. "No sir, it says right here, 'Deck D', and this, I assure you, is Deck D. Your ticket booking does not assign you a seat. You must do that separately, through the shipping company itself. See? It says so right here." He pointed at a paragraph of fine-print on the ticket, then gave me one of those European shrugs, and moved off to deal with some other passengers, who I noticed had begun the 'Look at this, another moron from the Antipodes'-type of eye-rolling. 

I looked again, across the vast, green space of deck, where a rather strong and quite cool breeze had begun to blow, then turned to see the Titanium Princess eyeing me off rather sharply.

"You. Great. Fucking. Idiot."

Now, dear reader, I know those full stops. I've had thirty-five years of those full stops. When the T.P. starts to punctuate, it's time to either start inventing stories or run. Alas, I had nowhere to run, and the cat had, indubitably, been let out of the bag by that jumped-up little ordinary seaman I was going to find, later on, and issue with a stern rebuke in the form of a knee to the gonads.

"Well, I don't know about you, Laurie," she declared, "but I am going inside to find some sensible man I can offer myself to in exchange for a decent bed." She turned on her heel and whisked herself through the doorway, quite regally, and disappeared. I pondered these unsettling events for a moment or two, wondering what the best course of action might be. Of course, the answer had to be found in a bottle of Heineken or two, so I clambered up a flight of stairs and found a congenial bar located on the upper deck. Just to be on the safe side, I ordered two Heinekens. The barman quizzically, but uncomplainingly, opened both for me and placed them on the bar.

"Seven Euros, please," he asked. It was only then that I realised I had left my little tote-bag with passport, tickets, and money in it in the hands of the T.P. "Oh, sorry, mate - my wife seems to have taken all the cash. Just put it on a tab and I'll fix you up when she comes back."

The barman gave me one of those heard-this-one-before looks, and said "May I see your ticket or boarding-pass, then?" I had to admit to him that these, too, were in the hands of my beloved, who, I refrained from adding, was currently undertaking a search for Aristotle Onassis. He looked at me dubiously, and turned to pick up a telephone, into which he mumbled several words of Greek.

Presently, two very officious-looking sailor-types with guns on their belts appeared at the top of the stairs and sauntered over in my direction. "Sir, are you a passenger on this ship?" asked one. I explained the situation as best I could. "And where is your wife now?" he persisted. "Er, I'm not quite sure, but she's certainly somewhere on the ship."

He spoke into a two-way radio, and presently a loud, booming voice announced over the ship's PA system "Would Mrs Christine  _______  please come to the aft lounge immediately!" We all settled down to wait, me eyeing off the two unconsumed beers with a strong feeling that they, and four or five whiskies, would be better consumed right now, and they looking over me with undisguised contempt.

About ten minutes later, the Titanium Princess arrived. She sized up the situation pretty-well straight away, then casually walked to the bar and put a ten-Euro note on it. "My apologies, gentlemen," she purred. "My husband is a little, er, unwell." She faced the senior marine guard, put her index finger to her temple, and slowly rotated it, her eyebrows raised in a 'you-get-the-picture?' kind of way. "I'll look after him now - thank you for your concern." The gendarmerie, duly mollified, traipsed away, and the T.P. sank into a chair with a beer in her hand and said, quite casually, "Why did I ever marry you?"

As it turned out, her solo efforts had not been in vain. Not that I'm suggesting she met Aristotle, of course, but she had charmed a purser she'd found, who had assured her that it would be quite OK to park ourselves in the lounge for a couple of nights, as the ship was nowhere near capacity-loaded. And so, as the Ikarus pulled out of Patras, we found ourselves ensconced in a warm cabin, drinking wine and listening to Greek pop-music being piped over the air.

So passed the first night, with the Princess happily snoring beside me, while I snatched a few minutes here and there. As a consequence, when dawn came, and the ship's passengers began to rouse, I was still sitting up, hard-wired on coffee and cheap wine. I must have looked rather bleary, as the T.P. woke up, looked at me and said "Fuck." I decided a shower was in order. Gathering up my kit, I stumbled along the corridor to the men's bathroom. The sight that greeted me almost had me losing what was left of the wine and coffee. The floor was awash in a grey, viscous and evil-smelling solution that I guessed was sewage. I backed out and returned, unkempt, to my seat.

"That was quick," mumbled the T.P., as she opened one eye, and then the other. "Jesus, Laurie, you smell worse than you did before you went to the bathroom. What happened?"

I explained the problems I'd encountered, and suggested we both go to the ladies', where she could play cockatoo for me while I got cleaned up. Unfortunately, the women's facilities seemed to be in almost constant use, so the only wash I got that day was courtesy of some bottled water I threw over myself. Things were not looking good.

We made our way forward, to a set of sumptuous dining-rooms, looking for breakfast. As it turned out, the ship laid on a magnificent repast, and I was duly lining up with a tray in hand when I saw a notice on the wall: "All breakfasts 15 Euros." Now, the thought of spending that sum on a plate of scrambled eggs took me aback somewhat, but not so far as it did the Titanium Princess. "I think we can forget about breakfast," she opined severely, "and did you bother to check before you booked me on this colossus whether meals were included in the fucking life savings you handed over to this company just for our fare?" When my beloved starts to speak in italics I start to quiver, and if she'd started to punctuate those, I swear I would have just made a run for the side and hurled myself into the briny.

I placated her with two Mars bars I procured from a machine down the corridor, at about five bucks a pop, and decided to go up to the top deck and get a little sun. The Leader of the Opposition, meanwhile, enjoyed a relaxing, and no doubt cleansing, shower in the ladies' bathroom, from which, you'll remember, I was excluded.

There was a swimming-pool on the top deck, so I thought I would have a quick plunge and rub a bit of the miasma that had accumulated in the past twenty-four hours off the old body. There were about twenty passengers in the pool, all German by the sounds of them, frolicking and chatting and generally having a whale of a time. And boy, were they brown. I learnt later that many of them simply cruise up and down the Adriatic for about four weeks, never getting off the ship, just so they can work on their tans, then go back to Hamburg or somewhere and show off for a while before they go down to the melanoma clinic for some radical surgery.

As an Australian, of course, I have permanently brown head and arms, but the rest of me is lily-white. In Australia, the sun is your enemy - we grow up with that fact ingrained. (By the way, a few years ago I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my chest. Not a big deal, but enough to seek attention. When I got to the clinic, a dermatologist came into the surgery, ordered me to strip, then looked over every single square inch of my body with his little spy-glass. He then told me to wait, and called in a female colleague, who did exactly the same thing. When she got to the nether regions, she casually lifted all of the wedding-tackle and began to scrutinise something I didn't even know the name of, but found out later was called the 'perinium'. "Bloody hell, Doc," I protested, "the Sun has never even shone down there!" She looked up at me. "Oh, you'd be surprised where these little bastards appear," she confided.)

Anyway, I stripped down to my Speedos and was just about to plunge in when yet another uniformed person laid his hand on my arm and said "Excuse me, sir, but passengers must shower before they enter the pool." He indicated a sign which said exactly that in about four zillion languages, so I guessed it was important to them. I dressed, and made my way to the bar, where several Heinekens never saw the light of day again. It was nine o'clock in the morning.

At some stage of the morning, the Titanium Princess finally found me. She looked radiant, having showered and changed, and availing herself of breakfast somewhere else on the ship. I, on the other hand, must admit that 'radiance' was not a word that one would willingly throw in my direction. Apprising the situation, she simply snorted in disgust and took off in the other direction, no doubt attracting the attention of several Greek shipping magnates along the way. Of course, this was all fine with me. Everything was fine, at that stage - why, I had even fallen in love with the bar-stool next to me. I decided to rest my head on it.

I awoke, sometime later, in a cool room with white walls and a green floor. I was lying on a bed, and could see a small, barred window over my head. There was a door to the room, and it appeared to be rather solid and locked. I got up, and tested it. Sure enough, it was going nowhere. Suddenly I heard voices outside and began to yell, "Hey! Hey! Who's there?"

A key rattled, and the door opened. There was the Titanium Princess, looking rather stern, surrounded on two sides by a couple of very heavy-duty looking dudes. "Laurie," she said, "these gentlemen are happy to let you come with me as long as you behave yourself, and don't drink anything more."

Well, it was news to me that it was nine o'clock at night, and I'd been asleep for nearly twelve hours. But I felt in tip-top condition, and happily bounded out of my bunk and into the T.P.'s arms, whereupon she effected one of those nauseated expressions and pushed me away quite firmly. "Just behave, for a change," she admonished, leading me through a labyrinthine set of corridors to our suite. I collapsed into a chair, and the rest of the night passed without incident (I think.)

I woke up as we came into Venice, cruising along the Grand Canal to the port. There it all was - this majesty of a city: San marco on one side, the island of Murano on the other. I was impressed, as I leant across the starboard railing. Finally, we were in Italy. I'd not had a wash, shower or shave for three days, and was desperate to find Il Gazzatino, our hotel, and luxuriate.

We traipsed our bags down the still-silent escalators, and came out into the sun of Venice. The T.P. was ahead of me a little way, and as I struggled to catch up to her, a man dressed in a suit approached me from the dockside. 

"Your passport, please," he demanded, holding out his hand. Now, by this stage of the cruise, I was in no mood to fuck around with anyone. I was tired, worn out, in fact, and looked like shit. 

"Fuck off," I remonstrated, "who are you? You're getting shit from me." He continued to badger me to give him my passport. "Listen, you arsehole, I have no idea who you are. Get out of my way. I'll give my passport to that cop over there," I pointed to a uniformed officer standing nearby, "but you can get fucked."

The uniformed officer made his way over to us. "He's the Inspector," he informed me, gesturing in the direction of Mister Suit.

They kept me there for three-quarters of an hour, with Mr Suit on his two-way almost constantly. "Where is your travel itinerary?" he asked me at one stage. "Fucked if I know," I replied. They had obviously formed the opinion that I was a terrorist engaged in the bombing of the Rialto Bridge, or something. Meanwhile, I could see the Titanium Princess, perched on her bag about fifty metres away, giggling like there was no tomorrow. Thanks, T.P., I kept thinking.

Eventually, after many questions and calls to headquarters, it was established that I was not a threat to the modern world, but just a down-and-out drunk from Australia.

Mr Suit made a big deal of handing my passport back to me. "Welcome to Italy," he said.

The tale of the erotic cockroach

So many people have seen and written about the Athenian Acropolis that it hardly seems worth saying anything at all about it. So I won't. But I can tell you that getting to it on a hot day involves so many refreshment stops that it can become quite difficult, after a while, to remember where one is, let alone the purpose of one's exertions.

I was in a state of enhanced euphoria by the time the T.P. and I had returned from wherever it was we'd been (I don't know - a big hill with columns on top is all I seem to recall), and I collapsed into our hotel room, which had seemed to have mysteriously shrunken in dimensions since we'd left it that morning. My next recollection is of being awoken by the sound of screaming. I shot bolt-upright in bed. It was the Titanium one herself, screaming blue murder for me to come and rescue her, and on the double. The noise was emanating from our little bathroom, and by the time I'd reached the room, expecting to see Alfred Hitchcock leaving, and a stream of bloody water gurgling down the drain-pipe, I realised (with relief mixed with a guilty tinge of expectation) that the malefactor was nothing more than a gigantic cockroach which had decided that the T.P.'s skull was as good a place as any to start chewing for the day.

"Get this fucking thing off me!" she wailed, as I tried to manhandle her soapy, naked body into a position where I could take a good whack at the offending creature. 

"Ow! Why are you hitting me, you idiot?" remonstrated an increasingly edgy spouse, who, with her eyes closed tight, was by this time unsure as to which was the lesser of two evils - the bug, or her obviously insane husband. We frolicked around in the shower recess for some time, both of us getting soapier and soapier, until I managed to flick the offending species of God's beneficient creation out the window. By this stage we were both sitting on the tiled floor, and I must say it was a most romantic position to be in. My thoughts were turning to other, fonder feelings than belting members of the order Blattaria. I thought I'd attempt a tone of conspiratorial friskiness.

"Do you know, my love, that cockroaches breathe through their posteriors?" I asked tenderly.

"You really are a fucking lunatic, Laurie," the Titanium P. exhaled, as she got up and jumped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around herself.  Fuck me, I thought - at least the cockroach got to chew on her for a bit. I was still sitting on the floor of the shower cubicle a couple of minutes later, humming the tune to a song called "What About Me?", when the T.P. returned and enquired sunnily "Now, what's on our agenda today?" It was back to business as usual, which is to say, traipsing the boulevardes of Athens in search of further mountains of knick-knacks and scarves. Boy, does that woman like scarves.

A couple of hours later, we clattered into the Athens Museum of Archeology. And what a place it is. Here, in a building the size of a city block, is the most stunning collection of what humans can really do well when they have a mind to it. An eight-thousand year history of life in the Mediterranean parades past the astounded visitor to this cornucopia of sculpture, craft, building, decoration and all of the other plastic arts. We spent the day in an orgy of high culture that surpassed even the post-cockroach imaginary orgy of the early morning. I do believe that marble and gold are my favourite substances, apart from Heineken, of course.

Well, once you've seen four or five things in Athens, it's time to get out, because Athens, like most other big cities in the world, is overwhelmingly crowded, dull, and commercial. I needed country. We boarded a little rattle-trap train and headed away towards Corinth and Patra, where we were due to embark on a highly anticipated cruise up the Adriatic to Venice.

But our first stop was a little town on the coast of the Corinthian Sea called Psathopyrgos. Now, here's a serious traveller's tip. When you're really hoofing hard through a big joint like Europe, every couple of weeks book yourself into a fairly swank hotel, preferably near the water, and chill out for a couple of days. The Oasis Hotel at this quaint little fishing village was just the ticket. We alighted from the train (in this case, not so much alighted, with all the connotations of grace and ease that word implies, but hastily chucked all of our bags onto the nearby track then jumped down before the driver hit full throttle and thundered away into the distance) and began trudging into town. Psathopyrgos is, I am bound to say, utterly charming. It nests on a little bay at the narrows between the Patra Sea and the Corinthian Sea, and affords a spectacular view of the steep-sided mountains on the northern side. It really is pretty, with gaily-coloured fishing boats resting at their moorings, children playing happily in the shallows, and at least two pairs of dogs enjoying sexual congress at any given moment.

The owner of the Oasis, an Englishwoman from Cornwall, greeted us effusively in an accent so broad I was tempted to ask the Greek receptionist to translate into English, but I refrained. She was a charming woman, really, and escorted us to our room, all clean and nice and with a real, spacious bathroom (pure heaven), and left us with an admonition not to "Doi arnythang Oi wardn't doi." I had no idea what she was talking about.

The Oasis was just that - a large and well-appointed swimming-pool (it had a bar in the middle) fronted the sea, and a garden restaurant just behind served delicious local fish and more salads than even I could force down. The Leader of the Opposition and I decided to plunge into the sea from a little jetty, and have a bit of a race. My wife is a particularly good swimmer, and we were neck and neck for about four hundred yards out into the briny. I finally admitted defeat, and we floated around for a while admiring the view to shore. At this point I noticed that a small crowd had congregated on the jetty, and there seemed to be much scratching of heads and pointing in our direction going on. "Wonder what that's all about?" I said, looking around for any signs of a big Noah coming our way. We decided to head back in.

As we clambered up the ladder to the jetty several voices in a number of languages seemed to be scolding us over something. We ignored them, and dived into the pool. I breezed over to the bar and ordered a couple of drinks. The barman started shaking his head and giggling. "They're all a little concerned that you swam out so far," he said. "Most Europeans don't really swim very much, and they thought you might be in trouble." I assured him that there was no problem, and that a half-mile swim in flat conditions on very salty, buoyant water was not all that taxing. It's a sad fact that surf drownings in Australia are disproportionately high amongst European and British tourists. Or a happy fact, depending on your point of view.

So we spent a relaxing and rejuvenating two days in Psathopyrgos, a beautiful part of the world I would recommend even to my mother-in-law, were she still around to enjoy it.

The second evening saw us sadly saying goodbye to mine hostess (all right - the T.P. dragged me kicking and screaming all the way to the bus stop), and we headed off for the port city of Patra. At 10.30 p.m. we walked to the rear gang-plank of the Ikarus Palace, an enormous ship that I was told was capable of housing eight hundred vehicles and a thousand passengers. There was a sign with some sort of motto emblazoned on it on an archway leading into the vessel. It was in Greek, of course, and it was only later that I discovered that it was a quote from a little book called Dante's Inferno, saying "Abandon hope, all ye who enter..."

We were about to embark on the cruise liner from Hell.

The Athenium

We landed in Athens at five in the afternoon. The weather was turning typically Greek - that is to say, bloody hot. In a city like Athens, such heat, which is tolerable in Australia, becomes so oppressive that the Athenians begin to stalk the streets purposively, with glints in their eyes that suggest madness is just around the corner.

As usual, the Titanium Princess, in her never-ending quest to do Europe on five dollars a day (she still had all those dog-eared paperbacks from the seventies stashed away in our bags) had booked us into a hostel in the Omonoia district, which turned out to be the sleaziest part of town by a long chalk. Rubbish was piled ten feet high along the footpaths; drunks and ice-addicts hurled abuse at each other across rat-infested alleyways, and everywhere was the overpowering aroma of a sewerage system that had not been updated since the Romans left town.

"Jesus, TP," I complained, "if I'd known I was going back-packing with Tom Waites in a skirt I would have stayed home!"

"Ah, suck it up, Nancy Boy," was her considered response - a reply which, on reflection, was about as close as I was going to get to marital compassion.

We found our room, six gruelling stories above the reception area of the "Athens Lucky Hostel" (I suppose one must give the proprietors of such establishments a few brownie points for eponymic optimism), and collapsed in puddles of sweat on the bed. At least we had our own shower at this place, unlike some of the communal cess-pits I'd been forced to bathe in previously, and I spent ten vigorous minutes under a cold shower until life had returned. It was way past beer o'clock, so I sauntered out into the city while the TP took a short beauty sleep, on a mission for Heineken.

Omonoia, as it turned out, happened to be just my kind of place. In the Dark Ages, I used to work six nights a week in Kings Cross, Sydney - and this part of Athens took me back to those heady days of dodging puddles of urine and beating off the kinds of women who assure you they want you more than any man in history until you explain that you're rather short of cash, in which event they drop you faster than Phil Tufnell under a screamer (and if you don't know cricket, that one's going straight through to the keeper). 

I pulled up at a little roadside kiosk - the sort of joint that sells everything the modern bloke could wish for, from condoms to hair-gel, with beer in between. The shopkeeper, a young guy with a crooked nose and some serious tattoos, produced two half-litre bottles of Heineken from a little fridge, and asked me where I was from. When I told him, he became all enthusiastic, and told me he'd just seen AC/DC when they'd performed in Athens a week or so ago. Apparently AC/DC was the greatest Australian export of all time, at least according to their number one fan in Greece, who gushed on for a while before turning around and showing me the back of his head, which had "AC/DC" artfully tattoed across a shaven skull. I thought about baring my chest and showing him my "Joan Sutherland" tatt for a moment, but he side-tracked me with an offer of a "genuine shrunken head", which he pointed out to me, hanging from the top of his kiosk. It was a most unusual piece, and from the couple of flies buzzing around it, could well have been for real (and relatively fresh). It was time to move on.

I took off from the kiosk at a rather fast clip, and, rounding a corner, belted straight into a bloke coming the other way. We both bounced back and hit the ground on our backsides, rocking backwards and forwards like a couple of those blow-up clowns with sand in the bottom you used to get from the local variety store. He bounded straight back up, and let forth what I assumed was a torrent of abuse (I don't know, it was all Greek to me). I, meanwhile, was assuring myself that the Heineken was still intact (it was, fortunately), and when I finally looked at him I realised with a start that I'd bumped into the wrong bloke. He was emaciated, with a filthy shirt that was probably white, once, and a pair of grubby jeans from which protruded two bare and dirty feet. His sleeves were rolled up, and as he continued his invective he scratched one arm, and then the other, both of which were covered in evil-looking, bloody scabs. And when I looked at his face I understood that it was probably only the scabs that were preventing his entire body from dissolving and leaking down the gutters into the already overloaded Athenian sewerage network. He was an ice addict. I offered him a beer.

He looked at me strangely, then smiled, and grabbed the Heineken and poured half of it down his throat in one go. He smiled again, then his eyes glazed over, and he continued staggering away from me, up the road, occasionally stopping for another swig. I watched him until he was out of sight, and wondered how long it would be until he was cured or dead.

After wandering the streets (carefully) for another hour, sipping away at my remaining beer, I returned to the hostel to find the TP rested, refreshed and ravenous. We decided on the cafeteria at the hostel, and made our way downstairs, where a big, happy, noisy group of youngsters from all over the world, different accents plying for dominance, was devouring pizza and drinking ouzo and retsina and beer. A young woman came over to us and deposited two complementary glasses of ouzo on our table, and asked if we were ready to order. Her accent was unmistakenly Australian, and so was her body. She was aboriginal, from Byron Bay, in fact, and she sat down and we chatted away for twenty minutes until she decided to do a bit of work. A reasonably edible pizza arrived a few minutes later, washed down with a couple of bottles of Pilsner Urquell (or four - I can't remember now). I was starting to feel rather fond of the world, in inverse proportion to how the TP was feeling about me, no doubt. After all, at three Euros a go, I was blowing the next two weeks' travel budget. She's a tough cookie, my wife.

The following day dawned hot and dry, and we wasted no time in getting out and into it. It was a short hike to one of the places I'd been busting to see for over thirty years - the Academy. It was not Plato's original of course (that had gone long ago, and there is still some dispute as to whether the modern structure even sits on the site of the ancient one), but a neo-classical building designed by the Dane, Theophil Hansen, in the 1850s, as part of a beautiful trilogy of structures next door to each other (the others are the National Library and the University). As I stood in front of it, a tear or two sprang to my eyes. Here, after all, was a monument to the founding of modern thought, and its power. The moment was poignant, imbued with warmth and beauty. Even the Titanium Princess was captured by it. "Can we go now?" she asked solicitously. "And use a hanky, you sentimental fool." I like it when she's kind to me.

...to be continued.

Aesthetics 101

We'd been relaxing on the island of Samos for some days, after our whirlwind tour of the Turkish Aegean coast. Samos is inexpressibly beautiful - mountainous and, for a Greek island, botanically luxuriant. We'd hired a little Fiat, and I learned to drive on the wrong side of the road (although the TP malevolently reminded me that I've done that on more than one occasion in Australia.) Driving a left-hand drive vehicle is a doddle, really - the only thing of importance to remember is that the gear-stick is operated by one's right hand. Several times I'd fumbled for it with my left, succeeding only in opening the driver's door and almost casting myself out of the car. One benefit of this is that I managed to elicit screams of horror from the usually unflappable Titanium Princess, and one should always be thankful for small mercies.

Our hosts at the Emily Hotel in Vathy, the island's major town, were Emily herself and her ex-husband Kari (don't ask.) They were most gracious in their welcome, although Kari resembled a more genial Basil Fawlty, and seemed unconcerned that there weren't too many guests in his establishment. He would prepare wonderful breakfasts, then sit us down in a garden patio, where bougainvillia competed with orange trees and other flowering shrubs planted by our hosts many years before, and regale us with stories of ancient Samos and its obvious importance to the evolution of civilisation as we know it. It was, after all, the birthplace of Pythagoras and Aristarchus the astronomer - for Kari, the two most important figures in history. He and Emily were two old troopers - funny, charming and knowledgeable, and would bring us glasses of wine or beer without suggestion after we'd arrived back from a hard day's slogging around the island. 

We'd used the tiny Fiat to thoroughly explore the island, and what a treat Samos was. The little port town, eponymously named Pythagoreia, combined tradition and ancient history; the ruins of the Ionian acropolis at Herion, and the temple of Hera, with its fifty-five marble columns, all in ruins now, out-doing the Athens Parthenon in size, scope and astonishing gravitas; the tiny mountain villages, with cultures and traditions all their own - yes, Samos was a place the traveller would immediately choose as a return destination.

We were booked on a fast ferry to Paros, but as it was the day when the European Parliamentary elections were on, the entire island, including the shipping companies, decided to close down for the day with the Greek equivalent of "Fuck it - let's party." Any excuse, and I could readily understand why so many citizens of the oldest democracy in the world had decided to relocate to one of the newest, and good for them. Talk about cross-cultural equivalencies - I can just imagine Theo jumping off the ship in Sydney in the middle of January, looking around at people deliberately doing nothing but enjoying themselves, and shouting "Effie! This is the place for us!"

And so, the following day, we trooped into the shipping-company's office at the port, where a very friendly and very out-there gay guy organised a re-booking for us. He was a lovely man, who, looking at my reasonably drab green t-shirt said "I love your blouse. You must come back later and sell it to me." Hey - it was the first pick-up line I'd had directed at me in about thirty years - don't knock it.

The ferry-master must have decided that a "fast" ferry meant exactly that, and we were no more than five centimetres out of the harbour when he put his foot to the floor. Our first stop was another port on Samos, Ag. Dimitrios, and we came barrelling into the harbour at top speed. Fuck, I thought, standing up on the top deck, this is a several-thousand tonne vehicle. I hope he knows what he's doing. It seemed that the ferry was on a course designed to stop us, eventually, about two hundred yards up the main street of the town, but at the last moment our captain executed a perfect handbrake turn and reversed up to the dock with just the gentlest thud of metal against concrete. I knew I was in good hands, and returned to the bar to consume about thirty retsinas in a row, just to be on the safe side.

About four hours later we arrived in Paros. Somehow I managed to man-handle our bags off the ship, and stagger about four hundred metres along the quay-side, the Titanium Princess keeping up a constant monologue on the dangers of drinking at sea, or drinking, period, until we arrived at the Hotel Paros.

We got to the desk, and I stood there, swaying slightly (well, I was still to re-acquire my land-legs; after all, I'd been at sea for four and a half hours), while the manager of the hotel eyed us up and down, then rushed around from behind the desk, grabbed the Titanium Princess in a bear hug, and shouted enthusiastically in a distinctly American accent "Christine, Christine! Where have you been, darling? I was expecting you yesterday! What's happened, my poor love!"

Well, it was news to me that the TP had visited Paros on her last solo European excursion, and further news that she'd been conducting an affair with a hotel manager, and an American one, to boot. I was just about to offer some advice like "Hey Chuck, or Brad, whoever you are, I don't mind you groping my wife, but could you carry these bags up to my room and get me a beer, first?", but then realised that Dimitrisgouros (or something like that - he was of Greek parentage, and his name was utterly unpronounceable) was simply one of those hoteliers who had been to a hospitality school where the idea of "service" included acting as though he and any guest of the opposite sex had been sharing intimacies for twenty years.

Meanwhile, a slightly discombobulated, and thoroughly flattered, Titanium Princess was breathlessly explaining the reasons for our delay. With Dimitri's help we got to our room, and I explored a well-stocked refrigerator while the TP, for some inexplicable reason, adorned herself for the first time since I'd met her with face-paint and bright red lipstick. (Just kidding - she flopped on the bed and resumed reading Pride and Prejudice.)

The Parians are the world's greatest, and most enthusiastic, stone wall builders. It is only a small island, but Paros simply teems with the things. Big ones, little ones, walls of houses, churches, taberna; walls to delineate paddocks, to retain banks of earth, to terrace olive groves, and walls for no discernible purpose at all, that wind for hundreds of metres over hills, along ridge-lines, and parade right down to the sea. Dry-stone walls, mortared ones, capped walls, walls decorated with icons, inlaid with equilateral triangles; walls made of quartz, shale, sandstone, volcanic rocks of every variety - the Greeks of Paros simply adore the very word "wall". 

I'm convinced the natives of Paros build walls for fun. In fact, I'll bet they knock down perfectly good ones just so they can get a kick out of replacing them with something even more beautiful to look at. Every field, paddock, house-lot and road is perimetered by one, and each one is not just a utilitiarian division, but a work of art in itself. And, where you find an open area which, unbelievably, has seemingly been forgotten by these muralistic obsessives, you will almost certainly find several huge piles of stone, just waiting to be skilfully manipulated into place. "Hey, Nick - there's a fuckin' paddock here without a wall!" "Shit, Con, ring the cops. Then get a few truckloads of rock in - this is a disgrace!"

I jest, but the Parian walls provided an intimation of something else that was going on in this part of the world. It crystallised for me as we sat at the taberna at the front of our hotel one night (traveller's tip: the Hotel Paros is fronted by one of the best restaurants in all of Greece - to say the food is merely delicious is tantamount to defamation), and, as we were waiting for our meal, and looking across the bay at an idyllic Paroikia sunset, I noticed the manager's son, a bloke in his late twenties, fussing about to my left. I looked over to find him hanging a glass bowl of rose water by some delicate chains to one of the lintels; when that was done, he gently placed half a dozen floating candles within and lit them. The whole time his friend, who seemed to spend most of the day drinking coffee at the restaurant, but who had no apparent employment status there apart from resident philosopher, was encouraging him with words of advice about the orientation of the bowl, etc. Eventually, they both walked out onto the road, turned around, and had a lengthy conversation about their masterpiece. Satisfied that it was just right, they came back in, sat down, and gazed appreciatively at this newest addition to the restaurant's already extensive range of decorative ornamentation.

I realised, suddenly, that the Parians are just aesthetes - for them, life is not about competition, accumulation, or consumption; it is about beauty. They love living within a beautiful environment, and they abide no distinction between craftwork and high art. It is all the same to them - their wonderful natural surroundings are simply enhanced and highlighted by their stone walls, their blue and whitewashed buildings, and their humble frescoes and decorations. These are enough for life to be complete.

Armed with this epiphany, I turned to the man to congratulate him. Waxing lyrical, I explained how refreshing it was to come to a place where capitalism was yet to pervert the souls of men; where art was the province of the people, and finished by pointing to the rose-bowl and saying "And I see now why you get so much enjoyment out of the construction of such a simple, yet beautiful, little thing."

He listened impassively to this somewhat tipsy monologue, and when I'd finished, leant over and said conspiratorially, "And it sucks in stupid fucking tourists like buggery."

Three jewels of the Bosphorus

The Topkapi Palace was, for centuries, the seat of the Ottoman Empire. When Constantinople was taken by Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453, the Ottoman Turks used the site of the old Byzantine Acropolis, on the peninsula leading from the old city to the Bosphorus, as the place where a palace of dreams would be built.

Topkapi is huge - the complex is twice the size of the Vatican, and, to give you an idea of how vast it is, at the height of its grandiosity it boasted a kitchen complex that employed two thousand cooks. That's a serious gastronomic facility, folks.

There are four enormous courtyards on the palace site, each one hosting palaces and pavilions, dormitories, stables, liveries, armaments rooms, and, of course, housing for the ladies of the harem. One particular Sultan of the sixteenth century had some 1500 such women in his harem. During the course of his Sultanate the Ottoman Empire went into a temporary, but nevertheless serious decline. Apparently, the old boy was so hard at work servicing these fair maidens that the affairs of state were left a distant second on his list of priorities - a state of affairs which boggles the mind, as well as the gonads, one might think. When the TP read of his horizontal exploits, she gave me one of those looks that says Men are such fuckwits. You know that look, gentlemen?

To say that the Topkapi beggars belief is an understatement. Here is a place where you will find ceilings adorned in beaten gold leaf; where there are palaces literally studded with gemstones, where even the ceremonial knife used in the "Circumcision Room" is made of gold and diamonds. I'll bet that attention to detail comforted the fourteen year-old princes as they were about to get the chop. "Ooh, what a lovely looking knife. What did you say you were going to do with it, Father?"

Reeling from the heady delights of the Topkapi, we headed off to the Karpali Carsi, the Grand Bazaar at the top end of Sultanamet. This promising little shopping-centre was established in 1461, and has grown considerably in the ensuing five and a half centuries. I gave up counting the number of individual retail outlets when I got to about four thousand, the TP seemingly having made a purchase in every one of them. Pashmena scarves, silver and gold jewellery - she even bought a belly-dancer's outfit, and I'll be writing about that in a later instalment. I bought a cap. It cost two dollars.

The Karpali Carsi is as psychedelic place as you would ever see. An interior decorater's nightmare, each shop tries to outdo the next in gaudiness and cosmetic hubris. And at every little palace of bargains, a tout will accost the shopper with a well-practised sales-pitch. My two favourite lines were "Sir, madam - how can I relieve you of your money today?" and "These goods are almost free."

Thus substantially burdened with exotica, and considerably lighter in the pocket, we returned to the "Cordial House Hotel", our lodgings, where I had to consume about six bottles of cordial to assuage the morbid prospect of re-financing Casa Laurie, yet again.

I must say I really like the Turks. They have a nice, laid-back attitude about them, and a great sense of humour. Friendly and helpful, they made us feel welcome everywhere - and that's not something you can say all the time about cities and countries chock-a-block full of tourists, and German and American ones, to boot. (Sorry, I know, I know, I'll stop now.)

To give you an example of Turkish generosity (jumping a few days ahead), the TP and I were walking along a road in Kusadasi, late at night, searching for a hotel where we were intending to meet some of our touring friends for drinks. We were totally, utterly, hopelessly lost. I had spurned the Princess's advice to get firm directions and take a street map, relying on my inherently good sense of direction instead. As I said, we were completely lost. It was pitch black, dogs were barking at us from doorways, and I was just a little unsure about even finding our way back to our hotel. We'd been walking for an hour, and had found ourselves on the outskirts of the town, instead of the intended destination, its centre.

Presently, a bloke scootered past us and disappeared over the hill. The TP was exhausted, sat on a low stone wall by the side of the road, and declared "You and your fucking sense of direction. I'm not moving until you get a taxi."

Just then, a car came towards us from the top of the hill. It was the same guy who, a few minutes before, had driven past us on his little motorbike. He leant out of the window and said, in passable English, "Are you good people a little lost? Where are you going?" 

I mentioned the name of the hotel, and he shook his head. "I don't know that name, but I will find out. Please, get in."

Now normally, when travelling, it might be inadvisable to accept lifts from perfect strangers in the middle of the night. I think there are warnings about such things on travel advice websites, under the general heading "How to avoid being mugged, raped and shot in foreign countries", but the Titanium Princess was ensconced in the back seat of his car before you could say "grievous bodily harm." With just a slight feeling of misgiving in the bowel region, I clambered in behind her.

But the bloke turned out to be a delight. He stopped at another hotel nearby, left us in the car with the motor running, and disappeared inside, only to emerge in a couple of minutes with a big grin on his face, and promptly drove us another couple of kilometres and stopped at the door of our destination. "There you are, good people, the hotel you were looking for."

We were flabbergasted. "Can we buy you a drink, sir?" I offered.

"No, thank you very much, I must get home to my children. It was very nice meeting you, and I hope you have a pleasant stay in my country."

With effusive handshaking all round, we thanked him for his generosity, and he sailed happily off into the night. He had done this simply because he was a good bloke who had seen a couple of travellers out of their depth. And that's the sort of treatment we got from the Turks wherever we went. What a great country.