Previously: Drink, Play, Loathe: Day 1, Paris
Well, I woke up this morning ugly and dishevelled and so hot I actually panicked and thought something had gone gravely wrong internally. Ran into the bathroom for an emergency guzzle of tap water and dry heaved at the sight of my wild haired, eye bagged, bloodshot reflection. I’ve got to learn to take better care of my body. Christ. Continue reading
It’s just after 7pm, and it’s been a strange sort of day. I feel like I’ve done a huge amount, and yet due to my exhaustion none of it feels real. I’ve been dreaming.
After waking in Berlin at 4am, I landed in France at 8.30 this morning and got the train into Paris. I got very confused and lost in the station, and finally arrived at my hostel around 10.45, and tried to check in. The girl looked at me like I was a half wit. Check in isn’t until 2, of course. I took my backpack and slunk off into the city. I decided the Louvre would be first. Continue reading
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
So, I’ve been on a trip of Europe, and kept a diary all the while. If travelling is anything at all, it is unpredictable, and the trip I expected to have was, as is usually the case, radically different to the reality. Modern life is a series of spinning plates, and the more you age, the better you become at keeping them spinning. I am young, and youth is wonderful, but the trade off of so much freedom is that fairly regularly, largely due to my own gross incompetence at being alive, my plates come crashing down around me all at once, and I am left lying bruised and stupid beneath a heap of porcelain. Continue reading
Yo yo, no pissing away time with introductory paragraphs on this blog. Nah, here we go, a straight up list written in an impassioned frenzy while listening to Thin Lizzy.
‘Look, it’s cold in here, okay?’
And last but not least, the most noble of my aspirations for the coming twelve months: get laid in a Berlin nightclub. But, again, that’s not likely to happen, as we will probably have all been machine gunned to death by swooping drones because someone on Twitter called Donald Trump a bull-frog-throated cock ring with a voice like Porky Pig that looks like someone skinned the Honey Monster, then reanimated it’s swollen corpse using a brain taken from one of those small yapping dogs everyone hates.
Good grief, what a visual metaphor.
After three weeks at home in Leeds for the Christmas holidays, I flew back to Berlin on the 31st of December at 4.45pm. My lovely grandad gave me a lift to the airport, and thanks to 17 years in the military his punctuality is such that it goes way past being sensible and gets rather ridiculous. Four hours early, then, I checked in and sat drinking Guinness and reading until my flight – the last flight out of the airport that day, as everyone who wasn’t a moron had already got their flights out of the way, not saved them for last thing on New Year’s Eve.
Hello you.
I know, I know, it’s a sad time here at World Hangover. ‘Tis true, The Berlin Diaries are, for now, over. Dry your tears, sweet reader, and keep your chin up, for there remain many bright days ahead. In the mean time, I have decided I will be writing regular articles on world famous adventurers whom I admire, which should hopefully be of interest to all three people who read this blog (Hi Mum!), but to be honest I just mostly want to write anything because I love writing. Continue reading
I’m in a wonderful mood this morning. I fly home to England tomorrow for the Christmas holidays. I’m finally returning home, and I never expected I’d be doing it on my own terms. I didn’t fail, I didn’t crash and burn like so many others I’ve met along the way here; the French guys I met back at the hostel who spunked all their money in one month; the homesick kids who come in their droves and fly back after a couple of weeks when they miss sleep and sense; the poor buggers who are overwhelmed and turfed out by the ever unspooling red tape. Moving to Berlin is an upstream salmon odyssey, battling against the current with hungry bears pawing the shallows. It’s a mad dash for safety under sniper fire, friends being picked off seemingly at random. You’re only ever one U Bahn fine or job interview rejection away from complete failure and a disgraced Ryanair home. But despite everything, somehow, I made it, and it feels so good. Continue reading
A few months ago I wrote an article called something like ‘“I can’t afford to travel” Shut up. Yes you can’. It was, as the name suggests, a tongue in cheek little post about how if you really want it, you can always scrape the money together to get yourself out into the world. Well, that was months ago, and since then I’ve discovered whole new depths of scrimping and saving to travel. I got dressed for work today, and was busy rummaging through my wardrobe for something that wasn’t either decrepit beyond salvaging, grossly miss-sized, or simply in spectacularly bad taste. As I rifled, I realised just how bad my clothes have got, in the wake of all my scrounging. Can’t afford nice clothes. Must travel. Continue reading
“The friendliest country in the world!”, the flimsy in-flight magazine exclaimed, as pretty hula girls beamed at me from its well thumbed pages. I was skeptical as my plane banked towards the impossibly green islands of Fiji. Continue reading
Actually no, that title’s shit. Need something edgier.
Cuba: A Look Back In Anger
No that’s wank.
Reflections
Jesus.
Erm.
Dan After Cuba
Oh forget it.
So. Assuming you have now read all 15 days of my diary (God bless your patience), you will now have an idea of why I find it so hard to sum the country up in a nice little manageable sentence. Two weeks after the first manic taxi ride took me plunging into the jaws of the mysterious communist island, Cuba belched me back out again, shivering and bewildered and wondering what the hell I’d just been through. Continue reading