Mr Grimaldi, you give me the ships!

Trains are fun. Way more fun than planes. Trains make you comfy and relaxed. And comfy, relaxed people are more interesting to talk to than stressed out, cramped and rushed people. Planes take you away from reality for a few hours, make you uncomfortable, stressed, and stop you from sleeping, and then they spit you out, disoriented and tired at the other end.

Flying is like a really slow, uncomfortable teleporting process. Or maybe more like the digestive process (you enter the mouth looking and feeling great, spend the entire trip in horrible cramped conditions in the gut, and then, well you know how it ends).

Trains on the other hand take you on a real journey, an adventure! They don't try to trick you by defying gravity or making you breathe fake air, they don't even need attractive hostesses or an in-flight movie to distract you from your discomfort because the view out the window is always interesting. Also it seems real humans catch trains, while boring suits catch planes. Sucked in.

But when I left Finland bound for Germany I discovered that ships could be even more fun than trains! Even more comfy, even more relaxing, and everyone has all the time in the world and wants a chat.

I had such a good trip across the Baltic Sea with Tallink ferries that I was determined to get on at least one more overnight ferry during this trip, and when I saw the chance to sail from Spain to Italy with Grimaldi Lines, my eyes lit up.

But unfortunately it turns out that not all ships are fun. Some ships are a bit dodgy, charge like a wounded bull for barely edible food, have broken internet, make strange irregular banging noises all through the night that make sleep impossible, carry disease that instantly makes you sick, and then arrive in port close to midnight instead of 7pm, making me miss all connecting trains to my booked hotel in Florence that night 100km away. Some ships need a punch in their shippy faces!

So what does one do when sick and stranded in an Italian port in the middle of nowhere at 11pm? Well it turns out that one takes a very expensive taxi ride to Pisa and then hangs out in the freezing cold with a bunch of homeless people outside the railway station for a few hours until the 2am night-bus arrives to eventually get me to Florence around 4am. Well that's what I did anyway. The only highlight was a surprisingly good kebab from the kebab shop near the railway station.

And then of course when I awoke the next day I had a full-blown flu, which kept me in bed for the next 4 days before I could even think of going out for a walk, wasting a heap of my time in Florence.
So thanks Mr Grimaldi. You suck. I'm going to stick to trains.


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Location:Mediterranean Sea

Australia needs a Royal Family

DISCLAIMER:  The following post deviates from my normal blog and is just a bit of a sarcastic personal rant.  This is all a bit tongue-in-cheek, I'm not trying to offend anyone here.  Regularly scheduled programing will resume in a moment.

Visiting Saint Petersburg has given me a theory. I think Australia needs it's own real proper royal family. Not the adopted, watered-down, nerfed royals like we have at the moment.. I'm talking about proper old-school heads of state. The ones that snap their fingers and make heads roll and make ridiculous demands that would shame Mariah Carey and Spinal Tap.
Look at the countries that had Kings, Queens, Emperors and Tsars like that... Now THEY knew how to get stuff done!

A jazzed up fortune teller told the Chinese Emperor he would be killed by a Mongolian, so the Emperor turns around and tells his dudes to go build a Great Wall that turns into one of the wonders or the world. That's some pretty hard-core ruling.

Some Tsar decides he's too good for Moscow and wants to build Russia a new capital. Bang! Saint Petersburg is born out of a swamp. No questions, no matter the cost, just get it done.

And don't even get me started on the Pyramids...

Is there anyone here who looks back at these great marvels and thinks they should never have been built? If the Great Wall or the Pyramids were never built then the lives of many thousands of people would have been saved... But it's too late to worry about that, they'd be dead by now anyway, right?
The point is, nearly all the cool stuff in the history of the world was built by the order of some royal nut-job or evil dictator. Not some do-good elected committee.

Democracy breeds mediocrity. What's the best a freely-elected government can give us these days? The Perth Bell tower? Kings Park? Barbagello Raceway?
That's ridiculous when you consider in today's modern age, a half-drunk bogan in a bobcat can achieve about as much in a day as 100 slaves could back in the time of Cleopatra. We've got no excuse.  We should be churning out a new wonder of the world every week!

I think T-shirt hell sums it up best on one of their shirts featuring an image of the pyramids and the caption "slavery gets shit done".  It's meant to be an offensive joke, but there's no denying the truth of it.

Seriously, so many of the most amazing things in the world came at a terrible human cost which is easy to ignore.
Here I am cruising around the world having the time of my life enjoying the fruits of centuries of slave labour. I need to remind myself of this from time to time to get some perspective I think.

Saint Petersburg is a city 300 years old.  That might seem pretty old compared to Australian cities, but for a European city it's just a teenager.  Looking around this city, it's incredible to see what's been achieved, even more incredible to think it was all built by hand before any modern machinery was available, and most incredible of all to think it was done in one of the coldest climates on the planet.  I mean here I am in -26degC temperatures, the rivers are frozen up and winter hasn't even started yet.

What have we managed to achieve in the last 200-odd years since European settlement in Australia?  Well, we did our best to destroy 50,000 years of the world's oldest living culture... hmm..  We invented the lamington, and we've put a lot of effort into producing some impressive athletes (while the rest of the population sets new records for obesity).
Ok, so that's a bit harsh. I actually love Australia and I know we have plenty to be proud of.  There are things I miss about it every day while I'm away.  But there are so many things we could learn from other cultures and ways to improve life for everyone.  We really do live in the "Lucky Country", but sometimes it feels like we've got some of our priorities wrong as a society.

We need a King of Australia to grab the country by the scruff of the neck and kick the unskilled bogans out of their bobcats and send off to learn quality craftsmanship and design instead of just how to bulldoze more, faster. And while they're gone we should hand all the fatties a shovel and drill and tell them to get off their bums to start doing the hard labour required for a new Australian capital city.  We need to learn to embrace high-density living, develop good public transport, reverse our tendency to prefer quantity over quality, and dismiss the "more = better" attitude we have about almost everything.
And anybody with a "Love it or Leave!", "F*ck off we're full" or even a Southern Cross sticker on the back of their vehicle should be made to live overseas for a year to gain an appreciation of a number of other cultures and just how little they have to complain about.  It's time for a nation-wide reality check.

Of course as the instigator of the Australian New Royals, I would graciously accept a post as one of the "haves" rather than the "have nots". I don't think this kind of regime is quite as popular with the unwashed masses as it is with the lucky few at the top, so I'd rather just avoid being one of the plebs.
No matter that I might be both a fattie and a bogan, that I might live in a house with a backyard in the urban sprawl, drive several vehicles, and consume more than an entire African village.

When I say "we" need to change our attitudes, really I mean "everyone except me".
And therein lies the problem.  Talk is cheap.

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Location:Saint Petersburg, Russia

Fashion TV - The Root of all Evil?

I don't understand the Fashion TV channel. Can someone please explain it to me?

When I first discovered it as a channel on pay TV back in Australia I thought WTF? Do we really need 24 hour a day reporting on the world of high fashion? And the next WTF moment was when I noticed how terrible the production is. I mean this stuff looks like some high school kids made it with a mobile phone to post on YouTube. Seriously, how is it even possible to film so many "beautiful people" and make every single one of them so bad? Even the poor starving kids in the World Vision adverts look healthier than these specimens. The lighting is so bad the poor models look like zombie deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. In fact the whole thing looks a bit like Left For Dead, just without the fatties and the blood.

What ever happened to real photos of real people? Here are some photos of real Mongolian fashion as a reality check for the producers.

Anyway, it seems this poor excuse for a channel that proports to providing news, entertainment, education, umm I actually don't know what it provides (apart from self-esteem issues).. Anyway, this channel is following me around the world!
I noticed in Saigon that when I walked into a number of bars, the Fashion channel was playing on a TV in the corner. Initially I just put it down to an unfortunate channel-selection accident, but it soon became evident that people were watching this by choice.

Thankfully the Chinese government had enough sense to prevent this dangerous tool of capitalism from infecting any of the TVs I saw in China, but here I am sitting in a restaurant in Mongolia with that stupid diamond-F station logo on a TV on the wall. The strange thing is, I look out the window and watch regular Mongolian women walking along the street sporting far better fashion than the women on Fashion TV, and most of the women in Australia too for that matter. And what's more, women in real life are allowed to smile.

Update: I'm currently sitting in a restaurant in Irutsk (Eastern Siberia) and Fashion TV is on not one but two big screens on the wall. I swear it's trying to take over the world, Zoolander style.

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Location:Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia