“Sorry For Any Inconvenicence Caused”

I’m cursed. That is just all there is to it…well actually there is a bit more to it then that. Let me explain.

I wasn’t the one who spotted this, it was a good friend of mine. An apology is due to this friend, the curse at times affects their life – I’m sorry.

So, you’re probably still wondering what is this curse.

Basically everywhere I go, a museum, some historic sight or monument, there is always something closed. Some days the curse is particularly nasty, this happens occasionally and the exhibition that I most want to see will be closed. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often.

I have been quite fortunate in life to have been able to travel across a number of continents and countries and unfortunately, everywhere I’ve been the curse has followed me.

Below is a selection of pictures that illustrate how this curse has manifested in my life.

Amritsar, India

Damascus Citadel, Syria

British Museum of Natural History

British Museum of Natural History

East Coast, USA

East Coast, USA

Palacio de Real, Madrid, Spain

British Museum of Natural History

Alexandria National Museum, Egypt – I was told off for taking this photo…whoops.

Petra – Climbing the Monastery

The Monastery

There are two main parts of Petra that are quite well known, either through movies, pictures or whatever else.

Well, alright three, but two of them always feature together so we can count them as one. There is The Siq and The Treasury – which I posted some pictures here.

Then there is The Monastery, a pretty amazing sight! This was one of the most amazing monuments that I’ve set me eyes on!

The pathway leading up to it was exhausting! The Nabataean’s that apparently built this amazing city must have been amazingly strong and fit!

Of course...we ignored the sign

The pathway leading from the main area to The Monastery was a grueling 800 steps (I didn’t count but this is what I’m told). There were Bedouin’s along the way selling jewelry and other “Petra” related stuff. As well as cold drink and chai. I came prepared and didn’t have to pay the hugely inflated prices

While we were sitting admiring the amazing sight we spotted something, at first I thought my eyes were deceiving me…but no, they weren’t. There were people up the top. After a little convincing from the guy who had tagged along with me and my Canadian friend, we decided to climb it while the Canadian selflessly stayed at the bottom to photograph us.

Full shot of the Monastery. Look closely and you can see me up the top.	Looking down
Just kicking back, the view from the top was kinda scary

A set of stairs was cut into the rock

The climb was pretty easy.

There was a sign that said “No Climbing”, once you ignored that you had to scale a small brick wall that had been built to make it tricky, but not impossible.

Once up the wall there was a set of stairs already cut into the stone, which took you most of the way to the back part of the top. There was a bit more scaling up a sloped rock face then you came out the top of the round bit you see in the above photos.

It was REALLY REALLY high up! I won’t lie, I was a little bit nervous but it was totally worth it for the amazing view.

We didn’t spend too much time up the top, as we didn’t want to be in toooo many people’s photos

Petra – The Rose Red City

The Siq - the famous entrance to the Treasury

Petra, Jordan – one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites is stunning, breathtaking and absolutely amazing!

Well known from a variety of movies ranging from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade to Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

For me Petra was so much more amazing then anything I saw in Egypt and rivalled the majesty of the Taj Mahal in India.

The main entrance to Petra is through a long narrow winding sandstone canyon, known as The Siq. As you get closer and closer the Treasury slowly begins to reveal itself.

Then all of a sudden you emerge from the Siq and are there greeted by an amazing sight!

The Treasury. It looks amazing and you just stand wondering how was this built? How long did it take to do? Why?!

The Treasury

Well…it certainly does look amazing on the outside – but I have some bad news for you. The inside is dark, damp and boring.

It’s just a big empty room on the inside, the ceiling is dirty from the numerous fires that have been lit over the ages.

The locals, a people known as Bedouin’s inhabit the area. Most are there for the money that the tourists bring – the entrance fee goes to the government – so they make their money by selling food/drink and offering camel, horse and donkey rides.

They are all very friendly people, probably because they want you to buy stuff from them, they all speak a variety of language – from English (duh) to German to Spanish.

They know all the slang words and probably do a better “Aussie” accent then most people that make fun of me here in London!

Camels everywhere!	Bedouin donkey guy
Another shot	The Treasury

I spent two days exploring Petra and the workout my legs received from doing so much walking was totally worth it!

India – Mumbai #1

Mumbai

I think that when you mention Mumbai most people will conjure up the image of the Taj Hotel burning with police wearing bullet proof vests running around outside.

To those who have read Shantaram then they will have their own mental image of the likes of Leopolds Cafe, Chowpatti beach, the slums and Colaba (the main district frequented by tourists).

Leopolds Cafe

Despite the attacks that took place, there was no way I was going to go to India and not go to Mumbai!

I was in Mumbai on two seperate occasions. The first was just before Christmas, to get to Mumbai we went from Mangalore to Goa on a night bus then went straight from where the bus dropped us off in Goa to the train station, where we arrived just in time to buy a ticket and jump on the train to Mumbai – we coverd about 1,000km from Mangalore to Mumbai!

We arrived in the early evening and were completely stuffed. We had a few problems trying to explain to our taxi driver where our hostel – The Salvation Army Hostel – was located. After we’d found a taxi that understood us we were on our way. Once we’d arrived we realised all we needed to say was take us to the back of the Taj Hotel.

Here are some photos from the following day.

Aemon laughing with the army guys guarding the Taj Hotel	Taj Hotel with lots of people taking photos
Interesting note written to Pakisan	This must have been taken at a quite time of the day as the streets are usually a lot busier!

133,255 Kilometers in Trees

According to OpenFlights.org I’ve flown 133,255km or 82,801 miles.

This is over 28 segments, and adds up to about 7 days, 11 hours and 19 minutes of flight time. But that doesn’t count the wasted hours that I’ve spent waiting for connecting flights, sleeping on cold hard floors, or sitting at airport bars.

Oh, and these totals also don’t count the times that I’ve flown domestically in Australia (Sydney to Melbourne and back numerous times and also going to Adelaide for the weekend to see a friend get married).

I’ve met a variety of people on the different flights that I’ve taken, you can read about a few of them here.

So the question remains, how many trees do I need to plant?

Games Night, Homeless People and Not Getting Punched

Games night, at a pub?

Sounds boring…think again!

Last night turned out to be quite an eventful evening! It started off as usual getting the 159 from Streatham to Trafalgar Square and then walking down The Strand to get to the pub where the games night was being held.

Along the way I saw a middle aged homeless guy, I was right near Tesco (one of the numerous supermarket chains in London) and went in and bought him a bunch of food and some water. I went up to the guy and handed him the food, he refused it!

In all the countries where I’ve bought food for homeless people (Australia, USA, Canada the list goes on…seriously, the list goes on!) this was the first time that I had a homeless person openly insist that he could go buy food for himself and refused my gesture! I found it strange how insistent he was that he could just buy food if he wanted to, this caused me to wonder…why was he holding out an empty cup?

Anyway, I left the food for him and walked away!

Apparently you can tell my personality from these cards...

The games night was fun – I played “Apples to Apples“, apparently the adjective cards you receive for points explain your own personality (read the rules if you don’t understand what I just said…).

If this is the case then my personality is some combination of: Inspirational, Rich, Fuzzy, Graceful and Spiritual.

We played a variety of games including, “Mafia” and ”Jungle Speed“.

Fun was had by all.

After I left the pub I headed back towards Trafalgar Square to get my bus home, I was practically there right near the beginning of The Strand and I saw a guy looking around like something was wrong.

I said to him, “You alright mate?”

He stormed over and said “WHY WOULDN’T I BE?”

You have to understand, this guy was maybe a foot taller than me, had a big gut and was built solid – he could have snapped me in half if he wanted to!

“You looked like something was wrong” I replied as best I could.

“WHY WOULD SOMETHING BE WRONG?”.

He didn’t smell drunk but maybe he had been drinking. He was definitely annoyed/upset about something and was quite aggressive. His massive gut was up against my stomach.

“I don’t know, maybe you lost someone or are looking for something?” I motioned to him how he looked when I first started talking to him – that is looking down the street in a searching kind of manor.

We had a few more exchanges, I can’t quite remember what I said and what he said. All I can remember is thinking, “if I back away then this guy will knock me to the ground”. So I stood my ground and managed to talk my way out of the situation.

“OK, You can go now” and he gave me a bit of a push and kept walking.

I’m not going to lie to you, I was a little bit shaken by this experience.

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So, you are probably asking yourself will I learn the lesson. Will I harden my heart and stop offering help to those who are in need and asking if people need help?

I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, that the answer to this question is: NO!

I will not let that happen to me, because I know that despite the large number of people that are begging on the streets some of them are in genuine need and I have to just keep filling their cups with food.

Will I stop asking people if they need help if they look like something is wrong? No, because I know the one time I don’t offer help to someone then they will probably be the person that actually needs someone to help them.

So what does this mean then? I can see two potentially negative outcomes:

1. Maybe I’ll occasionally buy food for people that actually have money to buy it for themselves – fine what harm is done?

2. Perhaps I’ll get smashed in the face every now and then – that is definitely not the best outcome, but if it means that I’ll find someone, one day that is in need of help and I can help them, then great!

The positive is that one day I’ll help someone in genuine need and probably I won’t even know it

Who Needs Brick Lane when you have…

South Indian - Upper Tooting Road

…Upper Tooting Road!

When people come to London one of the touristic “sights” they hit up is Brick Lane – an area in East London with a large population of people from the Indian Subcontinent which is well known for the numerous restuarants that line the streets.

Personally, I’ve never been there.

The area to the west of where I’m currently staying, there is a place called “Tooting“. I was there a few weeks ago to register for my National Insurance number and noticed how many different Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi/Sri Lankan restaurants were there and thought to myself that I’d have to go for dinner sometime.

At “The Couch” the venue of the regular London CouchSurfing meeting I met a traveler passing through on a tour of Europe who was keen for some Indian food, so we arranged a time to meet up and headed out for Tooting.

As we were walking around looking for a good place to eat I noticed a poster that said “Who needs Brick Lane when you have Upper Tooting Road”, with a list of all the prize winning restaurants in the area. Some of which won a nation wide prize – you wouldn’t think so walking through the area.

Yummmmy!

We ended up eating at an Indian restaurant. The food was amazing – it was like being back in India the waiter even did the head wobble that they do and kept asking “is everything ok boss?”

I had a samosa and some chicken for the starter and a lamb kebab karahi for the main, eaten with naan bread getting my fingers all nice and dirty, of course – just like in India.

And once we felt there was a little bit of room in our stomachs  we had gulab jamun for desert.

A very good night indeed.

London: Week in Review 31/5 – 6/6

I’m a bit late in posting last weeks “week in review”, but here it is so enjoy…

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I’m not going to lie to you guys, this past week was pretty boring. But here goes:

Sunday: As you read last week was spent at Speakers Corner, read about it here.

Monday: My phone was ringing, not quite all day but I had a few calls about jobs that I’d applied for, as well as a couple that I hadn’t applied.

Tuesday: I visited one of the banks that has a bit of a reputation of being a little ‘dodgy’ and managed to kind of open a bank account – they had to run some credit check things but they said at the very least they’d open a basic bank account for me

Later that night was the weekly CouchSurfing meet up in Central London – I’m getting to be a bit of a regular.

Wednesday: Uneventful.

Thursday: Were the European Union elections. Unfortunately I’d left it too late to enrole so I wasn’t able to vote, but I will be enroled for the next election.

Friday: More job chasing, again today my phone rang quite a number of times.

I went to Central London to meet up with the sister of a friend of mine, while I was hanging around waiting for her someone came upto me asking if I knew where some kind of college or institute was, there just so happened to be one across the street so I said perhaps it was that one, he said something like “i’ll have a try” and I said to him “Insha’ Allah” (God willing) at that he repeated it back to me and had a bit of chuckle, I don’t think he was expecting me to say that.

Saturday: Slept in. Did some “study” to start preparing for job interviews. Reviewing all the stuff I learnt at university – Object Oriented Concepts, Design Patterns, various programming languages etc…

Later that night I went round to a friends place with two of my housemates and watched some commedy.

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I’ve been struggling to get more trip photos up. The biggest problem that I have is that I have so many photos and so many stories to go with them. On Saturday I started going through my photos of the Middle East and just got lost going through them all! Say tuned, more is coming

London: Week in Review 24/5 – 30/5

My first full week in London is now over and overall it has been a relatively productive first week.

Throughout this week just past I drank way too much coffee, so starting yesterday (Sunday) I’m having a coffee free week.

Monday was a bank holiday, which for me didn’t really mean much, but for the majority of the population it meant a day off work.

I spent it watching Tintin and applying for jobs. In the afternoon, John, one of the guys whose house I’m stay at comes to me and says “do you want to go on an adventure?”. I was a little cautious but said “….yes…”. It turned out that a couple of his friends (whom I’d already met) were heading to the “common” (basically a park) to pick elder flowers to make elder flower cordial and “champagne”.

We were recruited to help pick the flowers. We left the house and headed to the park, we were each required to pick about 30 elder flower heads, after we’d done this we headed back to Al and Penny’s house to make the cordial.

I don’t remember the exact proportions to actually make the cordial, but what I do remember is dissolving copious amounts of sugar into water which was then poured over the flowers to extract their flavours.

After all this was done we had fish and chips for dinner – of course the ethical alternative when it came to the fish – and watched a British television show called Hustle.

Tuesday I had an interview lined up with a consulting company to find out what services they could offer me to help me find a job. This meant turning back into “corporate Ken” and making myself look employable.

That night was another CouchSurfing meeting, held at the aptly named pub – “The Couch”. This is the regular meeting where people just gather to hangout, chat, drink beer and for some people finding a place to sleep that night. It was a good chance for me to catchup with people that I’d previously meet and to meet more “Londoners”.

Wednesday I arranged an “interview” with National Insurance (NI) to get an NI number – used for tax stuff. I range them up around 1230pm and they said they could book me in for 2pm. I said I’ll take it. It was going to take about 30minutes to walk to the office so I left around 1.20pm thinking that would be enough time.

Unfortunately I took a wrong turn and ended up walking the long way round, I’d realised this when it was too late and ended up having to run/jog the rest of the way to the office. I ended getting there just after 2pm but that wasn’t a problem.

On the way to the interview my phone range – it was a recruiter calling about one of the jobs that I’d applied for. It was a bit of an inconvenient time for them to be calling but as I was currently walking down a quiet back street I proceeded with the interview. It all went well, up until the point when he asked me what I expected my pay rate to be…this is always an awkward question.

Thursday/Friday were both pretty uneventful days. Although I did visit the bank on Friday to attempt to open a bank account. This didn’t really work out as I didn’t have a “proper” proof of address.

Saturday I slept in That night I went around to Phil’s place (a guy whom I had met at the church I’d visited) who was good friends with the people I was staying with. He was having a BBQ.

On route to his place we stopped by the shops to pickup some supplies and to my horror there were only PORK sausages. What is up with that?!?!?!?! It’s not because I’m Jewish (well I’m not really, only 1/4) that I don’t like pork, I just don’t like the taste. Unfortunately it was all there was so we bought them, and I did end up eating them but was thinking about how much I missed Australia whilst doing so

Sunday I visited “Speakers’ Corner” which is an area of Hyde Park where basically people just stand up and are allowed to openly express themselves through public speaking (you can read more about the history at Wikipedia). I didn’t get to listen to many people as the first guy I saw and started listening to was saying some “interesting” stuff about Sharia law and Islam in the west so I stood by him and then asked him one question…which led to a million more. Anyway, two and half hours later I was still talking to him.

It was more of discussion than a debate (definitely not an attack). He had some interesting thoughts on Christianity which I attempted to put right.

Overall he was quite a friendly bloke, he was of Pakistani origins and I had a chat to him and told him about my experiences of Pakistan. He was a bit shocked that I would just go to Pakistan for “travel”. He shared with me his experience with CSIS (Canadian Intelligence) and I told him about my experience with Australian Immigration.

We (myself and John) left around 6pm to head to church, which we were late for, then of course…headed to the pub afterwards.

NB: I usually abide by the fact that Sunday is the beginning of the week. Future “week in review” posts will take this approach.

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That was the end of my first full week.

This week will involve:

• CouchSurfing meetings (games night at a pub tonight and the regular meeting tomorrow night)
• Attempting to get a casual job – I was given a bit of advice at the BBQ on Saturday night about teaching English
• Applying for more jobs
• There is also the possibily of an interview for a job which I was contacted about this morning.
• Posting more about my travels

Pakistan – Lahore #3

Printing labels for Diesel

You never know what you mind find down an alleyway.

Usually it was just people living out their lives, people would watch you from a door that was open just a crack. You’d see people get a bit of a look of you from their open door, curious about what you, a foreigner was doing in their alleyway.

You almost always get some curious and excited children.

Well, one day while exploring the Old City of Lahore we came across a man with a printing press making labels for Disel. He was quite friendly and there was another guy who ushered us inside to take photos. Of course there was an offer for chai which we all accepted quite happily. It had been a long day of walking around and chai is always welcomed!

Music man

While we were standing around being flooded by copious amounts of children the “Music man of Lahore” started talking to us and said that we had to go and visit his music acadamy.

We followed him back up the alleyway and into a small room. It had a couple of trophies and a microphone and amplifier which echoed. The ceiling was also lined with Kellogg’s Special K boxes…strange!

He was a friendly guy and there was more chai, followed by a couple of songs. The lovely young Estonian woman we were with was proposed to by one of the guys, despite being “married” to our Scotish friend. His proposal was strongly rebuked by the surrounding locals.

The music man then asked if we would sing some songs. Aemon ended up singing Waltzing Matilda and our Scotish friend sung some Scotish song.

On another occasion we came across a games arcade with old style video games and foosball!

Putting my foosball skills to the test...I lost

Me with some new friends outside the arcade

You always find something new if you look hard enough for it. Whilst I’d already tried this wonderful desert before coming to Pakistan it was an eye opener for our Estonian and Scotish friends.

Gulab Jamun - a sickly sweet desert that is impossible to resist!

The cullinary delight doesn’t stop with freshly cooked naan bread, Nutella or Chicken Tikka.

Paksitan (and India too) has this amazing desert called Gulab Jamun. It is basically a dough like ball which is soaked and cooked in a rose water syrup and tastes absolutely AMAZING!

It’s very adictive and you can never stop with just one.