Oliver is... Paphosterous

Oliver is a bit busy and lazy to bother writing his own travel blogs these days, so since I'm lacking inspiration in my own boring life and seeking any escape from boring work writing, I wanted to help him out. He provided the requested photos without even commenting on what a strange request it was. That was nice of him.

I don't know what he got up to in Paphos, what he thought about it or what these photos are of, since I haven't been there myself. But I've tried my best to get inside his mind and emulate his style so it wouldn't be too obvious. I'm not going to do anything boring like research though.

Oliver, feel free to copy and paste this into Wordpress as is.

Do first impressions count?

Day one in most countries I visit is usually pretty disappointing/frustrating as I'm forced to deal with over-zealous airport security, incompetent bus drivers and sleazy taxi drivers to get to my accommodation, hoping I don't have to share it with pests (bed bugs or English people).

Sometimes I get rained on as well (the fact that you're even reading this anthology blog means the weather here hasn't improved, or I'd have some tedious travel photos to show you instead).

These first days may be quasi-traumatic on occasion, but they're at least useful for setting the bar extremely low so that I'm easily impressed when/if things go right. And sometimes, they give an accurate indication of what I can expect during my time there.

The journey

'No man is an Iland,' wrote the metaphysical, can't-spell-for-toffee poet John Donne.

Taiwan is an island though, and sounds a bit like 'no man' if you're deaf and have a speech impediment and are mad, so this unfortunately required me to break my 'sacred' 'no flights' 'rule' to get in and out of the ROC. A self-imposed principle that I've previously upheld to the letter, only breaking it in the rarest and direst of circumstances as you'll see here and here. Oh, and here. And here.

I'm the Captain Kirk of the East; disregarding sensible precautions where'er I visit and corrupting their women. I also have ace sideburns.

But even when I took flights rather than other, better, greener, more interesting forms of transport, it was always as a last resort - either due to distance, border restrictions or simply a lack of alternatives. But now that I'm back on the mighty Eurasiafrican continent, and country boundaries are mostly political rather than geological, I have the opportunity to travel more authentically, experience the changing landscape and pay ridiculously cheap local prices. Flying is rubbish.

Here are some of the most notable journeys I've made so far.

The Great Museum-Off

Some experienced travellers claim you can't gain a true understanding of the world's myriad peoples by visiting museums, and that only by walking the streets and interacting with the locals will you really be able to appreciate foreign cultures.

But a lot of the time, the locals don't know anything and the streets are too strewn with innuendo to be of any cultural value. That's why sometimes, to truly appreciate a civilisation, you do need to visit a sterile museum and look at endless identical vases behind glass, viewed through the gaps in a Japanese crowd.

Farewell forever, Europe

...well, probably not, but I probably/hopefully won't be back in the continent for a very long time. To turn back time (zones) now would seem foolish, now that I've finally broken my Asian hymen.

Not literally, mother, if you're reading.

I'm writing this in Athens International Airport, waiting for a flight to Tel Aviv. That's right, regular readers (Oliver?), my self-imposed no-planes rule has now been broken twice, but it's not like I didn't exhaust and stress over all the other non-options for days.

From the Athens of the North to the Athens of Greece

Pointless mission accomplished - by land and sea, I travelled from the self-styled 'Athens of the North' (Edinburgh) to the bona fide 'Athens of Greece' (Athens), with just one cheating plane ride across the Alps.

Arriving by bus in a remote and smelly part of the city, my first impressions of Athens were pretty unfavourable. But I remembered I had a similar reaction to Florence at first, before getting to the nice, pedestrian-friendly tourism parts.

Like in Italian, the word pedestrian in Greek roughly translates as 'public footpath that nevertheless permits motorcycles, as if they aren't basically cars, and stupid bloody choo-choo trains.' With its speedy and sparkling clean metro system too, this shithole has had a major colonic irrigation, but the skidmarks are still clear to see if you venture too far...

Don't judge a man by the quality of his footwear

I've been on the tourist trail for almost a month, and today I was delighted to be approached by my first con artist, outside the Acropolis.

I say 'artist,' but he still had some way to go in perfecting his shtick, whatever it was. The fact that his opening gambit was to compliment the high quality of my shoes was a dead giveaway that something was awry:

My post-Acropalistic footwear

Still learning Greek

I'm embracing today's 10-hour bus ride to Athens as a chance to become master of the language, and jack off none (well, that would be inappropriate behaviour on a bus).

After the embarrassment of getting around in Italy with just a weather-beaten print-out to remind me of key phrases - and to be honest, cruising by on little more than ci, buongiorno and grazie - I was determined to put more effort into learning the language during my visit to Greece, with help from Pimsleur's Modern Greek Short Course which I sort of stole...

Learning Greek

What the hell does that mean? It's all Greek to me. A-ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Actually, Greek doesn't present much of a problem here in Ipsos, a second home for vermilion sunbathers escaping from North West England. Practically all the neo-locals who frequent the bar I use for internet access hail from Greater Manchester, meaning I've heard more accents from my home counties in these last two weeks than I did in the previous three years, and I'm in the bloody Mediterranean.

What do these Mancs think they're doing, abandoning their birth nation to make a new life overseas? They make me sick.

Because I'm obviously nothing like them, I'm committed to at least trying to learn the local language while I'm in Greece. Here's how to learn foreign numbers easily and keep them in your head for all time, along with all the other junk.