Curious Phil

Soon to return

2006-08-17T15:34:00.000+12:00

Yes folks (if indeed there are any folks out there), curious Phil will return soon. Now that I am back in NZ with some access to the net the blogs will roll on in. I have some more travel stories from Italy, Switzerland, France, England and Africa so by next week things will start to appear....watch this space.

High on a hill was a lonely Gertrude

2005-10-28T00:59:00.000+13:00

The grand Rathaus (townhall) in Wien (Vienna)

High alpine passes, coffee with cream, Grand Hapsburg Palaces, boozed Polish teens..... these are a few of my favourite things. There is a roadside service area in the hills above Vienna where married men come to meet their mistresses and drunken Polish teens prepare crapped out Austrian cars for transport to their homeland. This is where we spend our first night in Austria.

Our second night in the country finds us in the Imperial city of Vienna. The waltz (Strauss), Cappuccino (something to do with monks) and Croissant (Marie Antoinette took the idea to Paris) all began here but the architecture is the true star. The Hapsburg family gained control of the city in 1278 and in 1521 made it their capital. Under the Hapsburgs Vienna became the cultural heart of Europe with Mozart, Beethoven Brahms and others all living here. The Family built ornate palaces and austere opera houses leaving behind an impressive legacy of art and architecture. It really is impressive, the Hofburg Palace makes Buckingham look like a garden shed and there are more chandelier-lit cafes than you shake a bent pastry at.

Having drunk more coffee and eaten more cake in three days than most people would in a year we move on to Salzburg. Mountains, Mozart and Maria Von Trapp are the order of the day in this attractive city. Mozart is ubiquitous in Salzburg, his museums and his chocolate balls are the staple diet of tourists here. We frolic and sing in the hills, we gasp in wonder at the bizarre "trick" fountains and we stuff chocolate covered marzipan in our gobs, ahh the life of a tourist.

We certainly didn't climb any mountains nor did we ford any streams but we did eat a lot of chocolate and cake. So we bid Austria so-long, farewell, aufwedersein, goodbye and pop into neighboring Germany which you can hear about in my next post....."How do you solve a problem like Bavaria?"(sorry).

Signs

2005-10-28T00:49:00.000+13:00

Cesky Krumlow; thankfully free of signs

I'd never seen so many roadside signs in all my life. We leave the border with Poland and are confronted with signs for every town, road and hardware-store in the Czech Republic. Given the overwhelming presence of signage it is quite impressive that two minutes after leaving the border we manage to turn into a construction site off the motorway.

We eventually manage to extricate ourselves from the construction site and head for Prague, Europe’s most popular tourist destination. Budapest, Krakow, Saryevo have all been described as the "New Prague" which may lead you to ask why is there a need for a new one, what's wrong with the old Prague? The answer is us. Prague is a beautiful little city underneath the tourists. Cheap flights from the UK and elsewhere have brought a deluge of tourists looking for a taste of old world charm washed down with gallons of cheap beer. It's all a bit of a shock after Poland so we leave Prague to the Hen and stag parties and make our way South.

We pass signs for Tesco, McDonalds, garden centres and nightclubs and eventually find Beer! We drink it in a brewery in Pilsen (think pilsner) and a sewing machine filled pub in Cesky Budyovice (Budweiser anybody), it's cheap and oh so good. I could probably tell you about the illustrious history of brewing in this area but all you really need to know is that here beer is cheaper than water and possibly better for you too!

Behind us we leave cheap beer and more signs than a school for the deaf, ahead are the mountains of Austria. We are heading for Vienna; we've heard it's the new Prague.

Pole Position

2005-09-28T04:06:00.000+12:00

Jasna Gora: Poland's spiritual heart

"where you from?" asks the smiling truck driver,
"er, New Zealand" I reply rather distractedly.
I glance up at the traffic light, it's green but the traffic in the middle of the intersection shows no signs of moving anywhere just yet.
"Wow, You come long way!".
Don't I know it, after seven hours of bouncing along rutted roads and now on our second circuit of central Warsaw I'm about ready to throw a fully fledged hissy fit.
"You like Poland or just so-so?" he asks as the light goes red again.
"It's very lovely, but the roads......." I make a wobbly motion with my hand "they are not so good."
"Ahhh, but they stop you sleeping" and he proceeds to bounce around the cab of his truck in a very fine impression of driving in the Polish countryside.
The light has gone green, the traffic miraculously cleared and my mood has been lifted; the truckie gives a cheery wave goodbye as we trundle off along the road.

Polands position in the heart of Europe has on many occasions placed it in the centre of conflict, and many of the scars can still be seen. It wasn't always this way however. When Warsaw usurped Krakow as the capital in 1572 Poland was an enlightened empire, a haven for Jews, and a centre for science architecture and culture. It wasn't to last, in the 18th and 19th centuries Poland was carved up by Russia, Prussia and Austria who set about suppressing the culture of the proud Poles. Things didn't improve much in the 20th century as Warsaw and Poland suffered first from the brutal Nazi occupation and then a restrictive communist regime, but this isn't the real story of Poland.

The real story of Poland is the strength of her People. As soon as Poland disappeared off the map in the 18th century Poles began to find ways of preserving their culture and heritage. Nationalist movements appeared; revolutionaries plotted and died martyrs deaths. When the Nazis took control in 1939 the polish resistance flourished and planned several disastrous uprisings, the most famous took place in the Warsaw ghetto. By the end of the war 20% of the pre-war population was dead, most of the Jewish population had been murdered in the death camps scattered around the country, and Warsaw had been almost completely destroyed. Stalin famously said that imposing communism on Poland would be like fitting a saddle on a cow and so it proved. Again the Polish people formed resistance movements and lead by the solidarity trade-union took part in numerous strikes and protests culminating in the fall of communism in 1989.

Modern Warsaw is an intriguing mix of the new and the newer. Its "old town" district was almost entirely rebuilt after the war, an exact copy of the beautiful town rising from the ashes. Modern high-rise offices of multinationals stand alongside soviet era tower blocks and amongst it all are numerous monuments. Monuments to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto, monuments to those deported by the Nazis to death camps or the soviets to the Gulags, monuments to military generals and unknown soldiers, monuments to famous heroes and to ordinary Poles.

We travel from Warsaw to stay with a friend on a farm in the east. Three days spent splitting logs, moving cows and eating sausage, life as it has been here for decades. Life out here is comfortable but far from easy for the Sadowski family. Money sent from family in America has helped them build a lovely home but there would be little chance of building anything on the wages available in Poland. Again we encounter the optimistic Polish spirit, as the family go about their business thankful for what they have, unwilling to complain and anxious to feed us more sausage.

After leaving the astounding hospitality of the Sadowskis we travel, via the catholic pilgrimage centre of Jasna Gora, to the unassuming town of Oswiecim. It could be said that we had traveled from Polands spiritual heart to her heart of darkness. Oswiecim is now forever to be associated with the name given to it by the Nazis, Auschwitz, and with the massive camp they built here. Established in 1940 to hold Polish political prisoners Auswitz soon developed into a huge centre for the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables. The area actually contained a network of camps, some based at factories were to provide slave labour, others were simply factories of death.

The camp is very tidy, with tree-lined roads linking the well laid out barracks; the peace and calm of today in stark contrast to the scenes here during the war. The scale of what happened here is very hard to comprehend. It is easy to reel off the numbers: 1.5 million killed from about 27 nationalities, mostly Jewish , but when you are faced with huge piles of spectacles, human hair and suitcases meticulously labeled by their owners you finally realize the true human cost of this tragedy. Most telling is a display of shoes taken from their owners prior to their murders; the huge pile of footwear includes work-boots, dress shoes and delicate children’s slippers. This attempt to eliminate a race of people, irrespective of class, age or sex went a long way to achieving its goals and at Auschwitz we are left with an important reminder of what humankind is capable of.

Heading west to the Czech Republic we have a lot to think about. Bouncing along the E462 towards the border I reflect on the amazing pragmatism of the Poles we have met. People who wont complain but instead simply go about making things better. They've got a lot of work ahead of them but at least they won't fall asleep on the roads.

Lovers Tiff

2005-09-04T02:33:00.000+12:00

A lovely piece of architecture, not in Wesel

It had to happen sooner or later, I mean we've been spending so much time together. She had been playing a lot of Robbie Williams and Toto which is enough to push any sane man to the brink of madness and when she refused to go anywhere that day....... well I shouldn't have said the things that I did but I was upset and just lost my head. It was only later as we sat in our room at the Kaiser-Hof hotel in Wesel that I regretted calling Gertrude a "piece of crap" as we left her at the Renault dealership.
This is the unglamorous side of travel that they wont show in the guide-books. The provincial towns that exist purely to house car dealerships and cheap chain-stores with names like "Trendy!"; the Te Kuitis, Milton Keynes and Adelaides of this world. As resourceful and positive tourists we treated our enforced night in Wesel as an adventure, surely on closer inspection Wesel would reveal more than a characterless main street and an uncharming cathedral; a huge inflatable cow perhaps, maybe the worlds largest jar of honey or a large shrine to Saint Wesel the easily corruptible. Nothing. The best we could find was a small statue of a donkey and really wasn't something to write home about.
Don't get me wrong, I love Germany. The people, food and culture are all thoroughly beguiling. It's hard to beat a gluwein at a Christmas market, the dry self deprecating humour of the people or the grandeur of its many cathedrals and castles but Wesel just doesn't cut the mustard. We spend our night here watching "pimp my bicycle" on MTV Germany and eating Kebabs.
We were filled with understandable joy when reunited with Gertrude the next day and with relief when she started smoothly. We drove off into the German countryside and I started to think that maybe the last couple of days hadn't been that bad. We did have some very nice cake in a cafe in town, I now Know the German for "starter-motor" and Gertrude seems to be running smoothly. It'll take a lot more than a broken van and a boring town to burst my bubble, just then the radio announcer said the words "classic hit" and "woodpeckers from space" in the same sentence..... It's gonna be a long drive to Poland.

Dutch courage

2005-09-04T02:21:00.000+12:00

"Are we clear?"
"er, not really"
"I'm going!"
"TRUCK!"
"shit, shit, shit...."
"CLEAR, GO GO GO!!!"...... and thus Phil and Andrea enter another motorway, just another day at the office.
Amsterdam. We eventually exit the motorway, pale and shaking, set up camp and head into The Netherlands most (in)famous city. It's absolute madness. In the red-light district half naked women in windows display their wares while on the canals below a traffic jam is turning into a carnival complete with brass bands and dancing girls. In the midst of all this stoned backpackers and drunk stag and hens parties take photos and spew on the footpath...it's exhilarating stuff.
The thing about this city though is that it lives up to every tacky tourist cliche that you could dare to dream up. It's a city of contrasts, a city of art & culture, a party city, a city of peace and tranquility, a game of two halves. Our three days here are spent sitting by canals drinking beer or coffee, admiring Van Goghs, Vermeers and Rembrandts, and soaking up the manic atmosphere.
Phew! It's going to be a hard act to follow, pale and shaking, we get back on the motorway.... I think I need a holiday.

War and Waffles

2005-08-29T23:30:00.000+12:00

Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium

We left Blackbird Leys to the sound of sirens and and headed on our way. We followed the numbers, M40, M25, M33.... Dover. A12, E16.... Belgium. This is what we do now, follow letters and numbers (often the right ones) and we find ourselves in varied locations. Brugge for the medievil town square and the sugared waffels, Brussels for Eurcrats, Antwerp for Diamonds and Ypres for trenches.

Ninety years on and this small town in the Belgian countryside still bears the scars of this dreadfull conflict. During the four years of the war the town was bombarded and razed to the ground, The townsfolk had to flee and thousands of innocent men lost their lives. Today, the town is rebuilt, children sell their toys in the town square and tourists come to look at the trenches. If it wasn't for the imposing gate at the top of the main street you might miss what had transpired here. It bears the names of 55 000 men who have no known graves, just the men without graves! A short drive through the countryside reveals acres of grave stones sprouting amongst the crops.

We move on, following the numbers to the netherlands. Leaving behind the numbers that tell the story of a brutal war.

2005-04-28T21:52:00.000+12:00

Vote LOOny

Istanbul was Constantinople

2005-04-28T01:22:00.000+12:00

Lazy post.

This is a story that I have just submitted to nznews uk, a free publication in this part of the world. Hope it's published but if not at least it's on the internet.

I’m Face down on a marble slab in a cavernous, steam-filled room. It’s certainly not a common experience for me, but then this is not a common city.

Istanbul is a city that will challenge your preconceptions and mine are being sorely tested as a burly man named Sener bends my arms behind my back. A Turkish bath is a ‘must do’ here in Istanbul and I’ve chosen the Cemberlitas Hamami which has been in operation since 1584. “WHAT’S MY NAME?!” bellows my Masseuse as he folds my legs up like a deck chair, events appear to be taking an unusual twist. “Remember, my name is Sener! You give tip to only me, O.K?” I’m not going to argue.

For many Kiwis Istanbul is a short stop on the way to Gallipoli but it is so much more than that. It is truly a city where east meets west, straddling the Bosphorus river which separates Europe from Asia. Elaborate mosques stand beside Christian churches and Jewish synagogues with no sign of anything but acceptance and tolerance.

At the grand bazaar you can witness the meeting of cultures in all its hectic glory. The bazaar is like the original template for a modern shopping centre, it has 65 streets and about 4400 shops. At first I found the bazaar incredibly intimidating, crazed vendors chase you down the narrow alleyways extorting the virtues of their wares, but once I learned to cope with this it all became a whole lot of fun. In the main thoroughfares of the bazaar stall-owners jostle for the tourist dollar, Lira, Euro or anything else of value. In the back alleys you’ll find Istanbulis haggling over wares whilst sipping on apple tea or groups of traders sitting in shops puffing on hookahs.

Variously known through the centuries as Byzantium, New Rome and Constantinople, many remnants of Istanbul’s rich history can still be found. Roman aqueducts and Greek statues vie for attention with modern high rises and palatial riverside homes. There is, in fact, a staggering array of architectural wonders in Istanbul. The Blue Mosque with it’s thousands of intricately decorated blue tiles is a peaceful refuge from the madness of the streets, but for sheer opulence you can’t go past the Topkapi Palace. Not only did I find the best views of the Bosphorous from the palace but also I discovered some absolute gems amongst the many rooms of the labyrinthine complex. My favourite was the sumptuously decorated ‘Circumcision room’. The room is described as a ‘party centre’ where the royal children were circumcised, I’m not sure if the royal children ever appreciated the party atmosphere.

Istanbul is definitely worth more than a couple of days. So why not spend some time to get to know this intriguing if somewhat exhausting city, just remember to tip your masseuse if you want to keep all your limbs.

Vote Loony

2005-04-23T01:08:00.000+12:00

Yes I missed a week, and yes the numptie update is on the way. There just seems to be so much going on at the moment.

You may not be aware that the UK is in the middle of an election campaign. If you have ever watched a horse race or rugby match in which you have no particular favourite then you have an idea of my interest in this event. As an outsider I find myself able to enjoy the electoral process much more. I have no need to worry about enrolling to vote, no nail biting and hand wringing over who to vote for, no poring over manifestos and listening intently to debates in order to make an informed decision. Instead I find myself glued to the television willing John Prescott (deputy PM) to snap and take a swing at someone again, or for Tony Blair to actually give a straight answer. It appears as if this election is neatly filling my need for 'reality TV' between installments of big brother and celebrity wrestling.

Like any contest in which you don't support a particular team I have thrown my backing behind the underdog. Many commentators might consider the Tories to be the underdog (they are trying so hard!) or maybe the Liberal Democrats (if elected we promise to give you all a big hug) but the true and undisputed underdog of the campaign is the new LOOny candidate, Mr. Honest T Blair. As far as I can tell the party has only one candidate and he happens to be standing in east Oxford. The new Loonies are putting themselves forward as the real alternative to the main parties and if elected they will strive to:

Instigate a war on Terriers
Bring peas to the world
Retrain unemployed hunting hounds
re-colonize America, starting with a Boston T-Shirt party.

They may not be a serious threat to the big guns, but their policies are almost as plausible and as a party they are certainly more entertaining, unless John Prescott does actually punch somebody.

For more information on the New LOOny party click on the link on the left of my page.

Vote LOOny

Numptie awareness week 9th - 15th April

2005-04-09T02:42:00.000+12:00

Numptie;

1. A reckless, absent minded or unwise person
2. Moron
3. My housemate

Sometimes it seems that every worthy cause and terrible affliction has an awareness month, week or day. October is adopt a shelter dog month, in May we observe compost awareness week and in September we celebrate international talk like a pirate day. It appears however, that the humble Numptie has been forgotten in all of this. Whether you know them as numpties, eejits or morons they play an important and often misunderstood role in society. Without Numpties who would we have to tell jokes about, who would make us look intelligent by comparison and who would be U.S president.

To do my part in raising Numptie awareness I am conducting a week long case study. Over the course of the week I will post daily updates on on of the greats of the genre who just happens to be my housemate. I have complete confidence that aforementioned numptie will provide me with ample fodder for the study.

But first some background to set the scene:

Numptie works in I.T. (enough said)
She once claimed her pet snails were 'hibernating' six months after they had died due to starvation.
To save on time mowing the lawn (which she has never done) Numptie once suggested we get a goat.
When at home, Numptie and her adult brother have an aupair.

So when you see a Numptie this week, feel a little sympathy for them, they can't help being a moron. Maybe you think I'm being a little bit harsh, then why not come over and experience it for your self..... just be carefull of the goat on your way in.

Dear Tony

2005-04-01T23:20:00.000+12:00

To launch my new blog I have managed to secure an exclusive! The following letter which was lost by royal mail has been found by the roadside in Sedgefield. The text has been reprinted in full.

Rotten Row rd.
Harare
Zimbabwe

Tony
10 Downing st
London
U.K

Dear Colonial oppressor,

Thankyou for your recent letter enquiring about our free and fair elections. Even though you are nothing compared to my friend the man-woman called Thatcher I will agree to share some of our innovations with you. They may be some use in your election.

I have called these elections the 'anti Blair' elections, this was the idea of your friend Gordon Brown. Maybe you could try 'anti immigrant' or 'anti Jaime Oliver'.
Why not try to outlaw any gatherings of three or more people, although this will make no difference to supporters of the conservatives.
Our initiative to encourage culture was very successful. People were rewarded for singing the party song by being fed. I like to call it 'sing for your supper'. You could try something similar, perhaps 'sing for your school dinner'.
I am very grateful to my esteemed and patriotic friends the war veterans, they are very good at encouraging people to vote. Your war veterans might not be very pleased with you so you should redistribute some land to them then they will also get a handy subsidy from the EU.
My greatest success has been the 'obesity tourism strategy'. We hope to attract many of your portly countrymen to work on our farms for free. You should encourage immigrants to do something similar for the good of your people. I believe you have made a start on a similar strategy called 'minimum wage'.

I hope I have been some inspiration to you. All the best for your upcoming elections, I hope to see you soon, perhaps you would like a holiday on one of our farms? Please remember to leave the BBC behind.

Regards,

His Excellency the President comrade R.G. Mugabe

Here comes Curious Phil

2005-04-01T00:14:00.000+12:00

Those of you who know me know I have a lot to say, most of which is bollocks. Therefore I can think of no more appropriate way of communicating aforementioned bollocks than by way of a rambling Blog. Curious Phil will be a weekly rant published each Friday and although I can't promise it will be amusing or particularly articulate it will all be true...... actually I can't back that up. Future topics include such world changing topics as Sneezing, Seasonal affective disorder, Turkish baths, A begginners guide to Africa and my very abridged version of Ulysses by James Joyce. Hey you might even Learn something.

Watch this space.