Greetings from London! It's a Friday night, Madonna is freshly divorced and teenage boys are running scared across town, Gordon Ramsay is cooking duck on the tele with Germaine Greer, who is saying things like "watch out for skinny men, they're all dick", and I'm sitting here typing about the last few months. Sit back with a West Coast Cooler, enjoy and thank me for my tireless service later.

We've been here for nearly five months now; time flies when you are stacking on potato and beer kilos, and learning to say "hiya" instead of "hi", "hello" or "g'day ya pommy bastard". We're shacked up in Stockwell, south London, the childhood suburb of Roger Moore, according to Wikipedia. But we haven't really done a lot of London exploration, having been in the last few months on trips to Sicily, Madrid, Dublin, Prague, Budapest and last week, by Eurostar (don't get me Eurostarted on how good train travel under the ocean is) Antwerp. And then we're off over Christmas to New York, to skate on ice while drinking 10L Cokes, eating deep-fried bicycle tyres and seeing what their dishevelled, unemployed bankers look like.

Sicily
Don Broweno has Family in Palermo, a second cousin by my estimation, although I'm not too good with family trees. Francesco is Bron's Mum's cousin, and we - Bron's parents Marg and Ian, Bron and I - stayed with Francesco, his wife Maria, their daughter Elissa, and Francesco's sister Anna (a Londoner now) for a week in August. Their hospitality was incredible, particularly the involtini-related parts of their hospitality. We ate like kings for a week, managed to squeeze into the Fiat Punto despite said indulgence, and generally ambled from town to town, just about completing a lap of the island. We scaled Etna (or at least, a crater of Etna). Here's a photo:

It was a trial to leave. I was starting to get back into the swing of travelling. And I could have spent another week swimming in a sea of involtini. But we left Francesco and family with an Australia guidebook and urged them to allow us to return the hospitality when they get the chance. God knows how a bbq, VB and a potato salad is going to stack up though.

Madrid
A few weeks later, we reconvened with Marg and Ian in Madrid, where they were making a pit stop on the grand tour and sharing an apartment in the centre of town with their Melbourne mates, Vicky and Michael, who were also grand touring. Food figured prominently again. The first night, I ate a plate full of testicles at 5 to midnight. The following evening, half a cow in chocolate-ish sauce. Much wandering the streets was done, lunching, chewing the fat in our convict drawl, and laughing while Juan Carlos (aka Ian) got mistaken for a proper Spaniard. Then there were the piano accordion players busking for Euros, who Ian and Michael put a fatwa on and proceeded to threaten bloody death to at every opportunity, with cheer-leading support from the rest of us. Nothing makes you think favourably of stabbing yourself in the ear more than a piano accordion. Good, good times. Again, too short.


Dublin
The chief reason for visiting potato and beef stew-land was to see my old mate Fezza, whose Mum and mine spent the week preceding talking on Facebook about how much they wanted to be there with us. Given the quantity of Guinness consumed on the Friday night, that might not have been the best idea.

I was struck by how friendly Irish drunks are, compared to English drunks. English drunks will glass you in the forehead before kicking you in the nuts and stealing your wallet, whereas Irish drunks will ask if you know their cousin Sean in Maribyrnong and invite you to spend time in Gllwey (which I later discovered meant Galway in ale-speak). Although, I didn't exactly repay Irish friendliness in the following exchange:

Irish man at bar: "Aye, I thought you were a New Zealander, like".
Me: "Shit mate, I thought you were English".
Irish man at bar: "No, but we won't mention them, will we. We won't mention them" (promptly walks away and, I suspect, finds a Protestant to punch).

L-R: Bron, myself, Fezza, and Lise.


Prague
Meat, castles, meat, beer cheaper than water, meat, castles, bracing walks, left my new glasses in the seat pocket on the plane from London. Cranberry sauce, meat.

More meat.

Medieval dinner shows or dinner and band. Meat, sauce, beer.

I'm sure we did more than this, but it's all I can remember.

Budapest
This was the week after Prague, and to help digest all that over-indulgence, we...over-indulged again. How can you knock back three courses of meat and three veg when it's all so good and all so cheap? I have not regained normal gut function though - paprika is a curious ingredient indeed.

We did what everyone else does when they go to Budapest: hit the baths. The list of possible bath selections and combinations of selections that confronts you at reception is a bit like the aisle with the tuna at the supermarket: a baffling array of options, none of which seems satisfactory. We eventually brushed aside all the with-lemongrass-and-peppercorn choices, and settled for the standard whatever. And spent the next couple of hours watching amorous Magyars dry-humping (or not so, I suppose) in shallow water.

More glorious scenery:


I'd say on the list of most spectacular waterways I've ever seen, the Danube is just about on level with the Mekong (although, for patriotic reasons, the Pumicestone Passage is still a clear winner).

Antwerp
Why, you might ask? Well, Bron heard it was a hip place, and I heard there was a Eurostar package on the cards. I had a cold this weekend and couldn't quite enjoy things as much as I might have liked, but I will say this: do yourself a favour and visit the Antwerp train station. They have tunnelled deep below the original platforms and inserted three others stacked on top of each other beneath. That sounds like Melbourne Central, but the centre of the station is hollowed out, so you can see trains arriving at each of the platforms on top of each other. An engineering marvel. Christ, I'm starting to sound like Tim Fischer. Here's what I mean:


In a strange coincidence, outside our hotel room was a picture of Melbourne. Someone got a bit attached:


Well, that's all for now. All my photos are here:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/andy.kohl

Will write more soon, and more often, but until then, thank Christ for Barack and hope all are well.