Concluding my Viking saga

Another art I forgot about: the art of climbing a bunk bed whilst holding a hot cup of tea. I've become well pro at this!

Things that are pretty awesome: inadvertently arriving in a town during their city's festival week! I've come to Århus during Århusfestuge, which apparently literally translates to "Århus party week", and there are live acts (the main stage is right around the corner from my hostel), carnival rides and street vendors all over town. Once the Rolling Stones even played this festival. Too cool!
Making a good impression on me, I think Århus might even be my favourite of the Denmark cities I've visited!

This morning I've got a train to catch; heading to Hamburg!

All my Denmark photos are now up: here

Several pastries later

I am a wizard who works excellent tricks! Seeing that the forecast was for rain for the rest of the week in Copenhagen I went out and bought a raincoat on my first day there. It hasn't rained on me since!

Enjoying the fine weather, I've been to see a bunch of stuff around Copenhagen and Odense and tomorrow I'm heading to Århus to finish my Denmark trifecta. So far I've concluded that Scandinavia is great! Pricey, but great.

Here are some arts that I have mastered:
1) the art of seeing a large amount of things in one day
On my first day in Copenhagen I somehow managed to see what felt like a really large amount of things. To save you a long list, my favourite things were going under Christiansborg Palace to see the excavated ruins of the old castle, Kastellet, and the cellar of old wine (1614!) in the Royal treasury. This bodes well for all the cities I'm planning on heading to just for a few days!
I also went to the spot where the Little Mermaid "should be" - they've shipped the statue off to the Shanghai expo and instead have a big screen showing a live video feed of people walking past the statue in Shanghai. I found this pretty funny, but was glad I knew in advance before hiking out there!

2) the art of catching trains
Actually, I consider myself still an apprentice to this art. But I've activated my Eurail pass and used it to head to Roskilde for a day trip and then to Odense. Far out, it's so good! As long as you're not on a busy train that needs a reservation, you just hop on, no ticket required (something I needed to actually do to believe).

My day trip to Roskilde was awesome - I went to see the Viking Ship Museum and it was mighty cool to see one of my favourite things I studied archaeology for real. I thought I'd be well Vikinged out after this and wasn't planning on heading to the National Museum, but then I read some good reviews so went there the next day and woah, this had pretty much everything else I ever enjoyed in archaeology. Aurochs and lurs and coin hoards and tons of things I recognised from having their pictures in my lecture notes. It was also just a really well laid out museum. Probably the best one I've been to so far! Also, free. I'm well glad I went!

3) the art of sleeping through anything (without any aid from earplugs or eyemask)
This excludes the alarm clock that went off at 7am this morning, waking up everyone in the room I was staying in excluding the guy who'd actually set it, who was wearing earplugs.

4) the art of "eating in advance"
This one is technically more an art I mastered for one night but hope to never do again! Last night, my first night in Odense, I had just eaten a really hearty and filling lamb biryani for dinner and then went out to get a beer in "the Australian Bar". The place was packed and it turned out I'd unintentionally crashed a function for psychology students - but they had three trays of hamburgers and three huge bowls of chips that the staff told me were leftover and needed to be eaten otherwise they would get thrown out.
The prospect of free food in Scandinavia was too good to turn down! After steeling myself with beer I scoffed down "second dinner", concluding that I would just store all the energy in lieu of lunch the next day. Mostly I just felt really full. But apart from that, my plan did work, and I got free food!

My first night in Odense got even better after this, as when I was walking around trying to walk off double dinner I found an open air cinema in a plaza where people were sitting down with picnics and getting ready to watch a movie. I slyly infiltrated the crowd and sat down to see what movie was showing, and this is how I ended up watching Dirty Dancing (and had a really good time of it, largely due to the fact that I was stunned by my double-dose of free things and because the crowd were getting so into it! So many lines got mega cheers.)
Sasha and Abby: the watermelon scene was still my favourite (though somehow since you originally told me about this, I'd gotten the watermelons and "the lift" mixed up in my memory and had always imagined that the scene involved dancing in a lake whilst trying to hold watermelons over their heads).

Today I went to the Odense Zoo, which was a really good day out and even though my lunch consisted solely of reserved energy from last night's hamburger and a great bag of "snack carrots", I decided to get an icecream as well.
At the freezer I was confronted with: Batman icecream, Catwoman icecream and "Crazy Jungle" icecream.
Completely unable to choose just one out of these three amazing icecream options I ended up eating all three over the course of my day at the zoo. And that was how I ended up just eating carrots and icecream for lunch today.

Another story I have from Denmark is that I was helped out at the post office by a guy who was the splitting image of James Corden in "The Lodger", who told me I had a cool name because it's like Brian Moriarty, the 80s video game designer. This is one I've never heard before, except from myself. What a champion! This guy can be my Danish best friend!

I have some pictures to prove all of the above but it looks like uploading them is going to take longer than my patience before heading out to eat some proper food for dinner. But in the meantime, here's a picture that I intend to use as the cover of my first solo album, I guess entitled "Moriarty in Moscow" or maybe something else more inventive (thanks to Tony for the pic!).

Denmarkation

Today I succesfully made it to Copenhagen! The city looks great but unfortunately: pouring with rain.

My hostel is in an awesome boho neighbourhood (just off the city centre but within walking distance) with a lot of good kebab and Indian restaurants, so in a clear patch I went on a kebab hunt. Feeling enthusiastic about the clear patch I decided to turn this into a walk around the local surrounds. Bravery? Insanity? As soon as I was a reasonable distance from my hostel it started bucketing down again and I got soaked.
Am now back at my hostel in trackpants, drinking hot chocolate (powdered hot chocolate in a styrofoam cup with whipped cream from the fridge). Best 12 kroners I've ever spent!

Used the time to upload the rest of my Russia photos: here

Tomorrow I'm determined to see a whole heap of the city, rain or no! Also, will buy an umbrella.

Russia continues to be real horrorshow

Tonight is my last night in St Petersburg. I am sad to be leaving Russia! But excited to be going to Denmark.

To celebrate my last day in Russia I went to the State Museum of Political History, which was a surprisingly awesome find, all about 20th-century Russian history (mostly) and with lots of English translations. I think I learnt more from this museum than I ever did in history, and I was excited to find some records made out of x-rays in their display on the underground music movement (Abby, you should know all about this!).

I topped this off by going for a walk in a park, stumbling across some kind of crazy fair, and going for dinner at a restaurant that had free bread (!) and free vodka (!!). Where was this place all of Vodkatrain?! (note that my conviction that I had drunk all the vodka I intended to in Russia soon turned into, “free vodka?!” Also, it was properly chilled (a first?)).
Whilst happily downing my borscht I found myself unintentionally spying on the two tables I was facing. One contained an old couple playing cards, which led me to conclude that going out for a nice dinner but bringing a pack of cards is pretty awesome. The other was a family with the most insanely posh English accents I've ever heard. Seriously, they were like something out of an American movie making fun of English people. What's more, everything they were doing just made them more and more stereotypically "posh English" – it looked like two parents taking their 20-something prodigal son out for dinner (going to Russia to do this?), and whilst they were drinking wine I kept hearing snippets of conversation about "marital prospects", "Windsor castle", "business headquarters" and "Cambridge". The illusion was slightly marred when they started talking about Toy Story 3 ("apparent-leh it's a real tearjerker"), but returned when they started discussing the art they'd seen at the Hermitage. Feeling appropriately snoopy, I then went and bought myself some pancakes.

Other things I've done to keep myself busy over the past few days include:
- going to the Peter and Paul Fortress (properly this time – in Vodkatrain we just walked around it). They had another space museum there, which wasn't as cool as the Moscow one, but which was set up in the former jet laboratories which gave it a cool old-science feeling.
- going to the 'Zoological Museum', where I was drawn in by the promise of the world's only preserved woolly mammoth. It's true that they had one, as well as preserved copies of almost every animal, fish and bird you can imagine, but everything in the place looked like it was slightly decaying so that instead of feeling like a 'majestic nature gallery' it felt like being in the world's worst hunting lodge and it got more and more unsettling the further I got into the place. May have developed a mild fear of stuffed animals; only time will tell. Maybe it was just the whale skeleton.
- going to the Tikhvin cemetery, where a lot of famous Russians were buried (eg. Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky). I went here on an overcast day and it was brilliant.
- watching way too much Community during hostel down-time. The videos on my iPod have got to last me another 4 months but I have “just one more ep?” fever!

I had a craving for English food so I tracked down a British pub (“the Dickens Pub”) for some pie and chips. Dave, you'll be pleased to know they had Old Speckled Hen on tap there!

Also, in the past few days I've successfully passed the test and have been mistaken for a Russian several times. One woman (maybe even a tourist? I didn't realise til after!) asked me for directions (in Russian), and a girl gave me free juice. Free juice!
(I wasn't even wearing my Zenit shirt on any of these occasions. I have won at pretending to be Russian!)

I have some photos from the past few days (including way too many of the cemetery), but it looks like the hostel net connection's sticking to a pretty slow rate so I'll have to upload them later.

Goodbye Russia.
Hello everything!

From Russia With Good Spirits

Vodkatrain is now officially over and one by one everyone has left St Petersburg, leaving me as the last man standing and inheritor of the chocolate factory. Now I'm sitting on my bunk drinking tea and eating trail mix, and I am keen to tell you about Russia!

After catching the train into Irkutsk we didn't end up staying in the city, instead spending a few days in a log cabin hostel in a town on the edge of Lake Baikal. Our honcho there, Uliana, was a redhead who looks like Kirsten Dunst and likes the Big Bang Theory (??!!?). I'm pretty convinced there's a monster living in Lake Baikal but I didn't see it. The lake was well impressive to look at; we got one good day to spend walking around it and boating on it and eating tasty shashlik and then one stormy day to spend not doing much at all.
Jenny, here is a story that will be close to your heart: the alleys of Lake Baikal were filled with tons of pet dogs who you'd see wandering around every now and then. They were mostly harmless, but then the two girls from our group went for a walk down an alley and one of them got bitten on the ankle. She had to go to hospital for rabies shots! It's your nightmare become a reality!



In Lake Baikal this great show was playing on the TV in our hostel, some kind of "policewoman beauty pageant". They had all these girls doing beauty pageant things on a catwalk, but then would interperse this with shots of them going about their day-jobs as tough Russian police ladies. What a brilliant show. Ah, Russia!

We got a day to wander around Irkutsk and then got on the train for our epic train trip to Moscow: 4 nights, 3 days. I ate a lot of apricot jam, a lot of pot noodles (and one unexpected pot buckwheat), a lot of bread and cheese and drank vodka to be in the full spirit of vodkatrain. Passed the time with reading, cards, lots of celebrity heads and hopping off at stations – most of which turned out to have the same kind of shops, but I did find a couple of good scores (pirozhki and a mug). I made one "local friend", a guy from Kyrgyzstan who enjoyed sitting in our cabin and chatting with us by pointing at things in the phrasebook and use of comical gestures. I didn't spot any bears, but I did spot a fawn (I think). As we got closer to Moscow we passed through the bushfire region and the train got pretty sweltering hot – the last day was spent lounging around and struggling with crazy heat lethargy, but then we got a thunderstorm at night which succesfully cleared away all the smog for Moscow! The smog disappeared just before we got there, and then was due to come back just after we left. Woah!

I successfully got to see what felt like a huge amount of Moscow in the few days we had there, which was wicked. Red Square, the Kremlin, "classic Moscow" was cool but my #1 favourite place I went to was the Cosmonautics Museum, a space museum devoted to the Russian/Soviet space program and achievements. This place was awesome, it had a hall of satellites, tons of Gagarin memorabilia, space suits, space pods, a walk-in shuttle, awesome Soviet space propaganda posters. I couldn't understand a word of it because all the signs were in Russian with no English translations, but it was nonetheless the coolest place to walk around. After this we went to an old Soviet expo centre that is now a sort-of fun park that was also mega impressive.
On our last day in Moscow our honcho Marina invited us over to her house for lunch which we helped provide from the supermarket, and we ate squash pancakes with vegemite, awesome home-cooked pasta (thanks Alicia), watched half of The Castle and generally chilled out. A pretty excellent end to Moscow-time!



Got to St Petersburg by a well comfy overnight train and here I've been living the good life walking through all the 18th-century buildings. I got to spend a good chunk of my first day here seeing the Hermitage museum, where I had just enough time to see the vast majority of the things I was interested in. The throne room, the portrait hall and the wood-panelled library were the best! The next day we did a lot of walking around and got to go on a boat cruise through the river and the canals. For our final official night of vodkatrain we bought up big at the supermarket and had an awesome picnic in the park!

The next night there were a few of us still left around St Petersburg, so we went to the “Travelling Bag for the Pregnant Spy” restaurant (which was mysteriously more horror-themed than spy-themed) and then Tony and I went to see Zenit St Petersburg play Auxerre in the UEFA Champions League qualifiers. Awesome!!



In a case of bitter irony we were 5 minutes late for the match because we hadn't expected to be held up by mega security getting into the stadium – and the only goal scored (which was by St Petersburg) was 3 minutes in! Man, unfair! Still, it was an awesome night (weather and fun-wise), we had wicked views and I did my best to bluff my way through some Russian chants. Good times!

Here's the best link for all my Russian photos: here

I'm here in St Petersburg til Monday when I fly to Copenhagen, so I'll be trying to see a bit more of the city before I head off. But otherwise, I am catching up on the internet and hanging around and just generally enjoying being in Russia! For some reason I keep getting asked here if I'm German. Is this the European equivalent of people in Perth asking if I have an accent?
Also, I've discovered I can't vote in St Petersburg after all, only in Moscow – so I guess I'm counted out of this one!

I hope everyone's well who's reading this! Any stories from Perth-town?

До свидания (for now)!

Dill and Vodka

Здравствуйте! I've made it to Russia! It's morning in Moscow and I'm currently chilling in our hostel after spending the last four nights on the train seeing lots of woods and log cabins and old factories, crossing timezones, playing cards and fighting villains. I was warned about the fires around Moscow and it was pretty smoky as we got closer on the train, but we got an awesomely timed thunderstorm last night and it looks like blue skies for my first day of heading out into Moscow. Yesss!

I've also had my first Baltika on Russian soil, had Russian kebab, drunk straight vodka and danced to some crazy remix of “Coco Jamboo” in a Russian disco. Living the dream!

Beijing was pretty cool – though the combination of the heat and the pollution made the city well smoky, which was nice to look at on the taxi ride from the airport when everything was all green trees and grey skies, but it wasn't so much fun to be out in! Because I ended up with only one day there I missed the Great Wall and instead went for a walk from my hostel to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City was awesome, I ended up just staying there all day trying to see everything. One of my favourite bits was the Hall of Ceramics because a) it was well air-conditioned, b) it was mostly empty (because apparently few people outside of archaeologists are interested in pottery shards) and c) it had some of the oldest stuff in the museum. All the crowds of people who seemed to be avoiding the place definitely missed out! The Hall of Clocks was also wicked, with all the elaborate clocks that the emperors collected, and I fortuitously arrived there at the time they demonstrated what some of the clocks did on the hour. I took lots of photos of obscure (and non-obscure) things that interested me around these places, some of which I've put up on flickr for anyone else who might be interested, though chances are you're quite possibly not (someone else's museum photos, "a good time for all")!
That night me and most of the Vodkatrain group went out to do karaoke in this crazy multi-storey hotel-like building where every room was a karaoke room. There was lots of shouting along to Bon Jovi and good times.

The overnight train from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar was wicked, and I spent most of the time playing cards and trying to get photos through the train windows (hence, as a result, most of my pictures have reflections of my camera in them – ah well!).

Mongolia completely swamped Beijing in its coolness (sorry China, but I'm siding with Chinggis). We got a day in Ulaanbaatar where we ate all-you-can-eat Mongolian barbecue, went to the theatre to see traditional Mongolian singing/music/dancing (where I found out that Queen Amidala comes from Mongolia and all Mongolian string instruments have horses' heads on top of them) and then tried to go for a pub crawl on what turned out to be Mongolian “dry day” (first day of the month). We successfully found 2 pubs in the city to get drinks from.
The next day we went out to the countryside to stay in the Ger camp. Far out, Mongolian countryside is brilliant, it's all plains and mountains and herds of horses and Ger tents and open space. Our tents were well comfy and while we were there I went horseriding, climbed mountains, tried archery, tried fermented horse milk and saw a mini-nadaam (wrestling, professional archery, horse racing). I think 2/3rds of the population of Mongolia do that pretty much all the time. Mongolia is awesome!!
Also, our honcho through all of Mongolia, Billy, was a real champion. He took us to his house, recommended bands to me, and I got to explain the original trilogy to him as a follow on from him only seeing the prequels, something I've never done before but which was well fun!



Hello from Mongolia!

More China/Mongolia pictures: here

I'll save more Russia stories for next time, after I've seen more of Moscow than what I can currently spot out my hostel window!

I hope everyone is good back home in Perth! Many fond and party regards!

- Moriarty

Ave Genghis Khan!

Not much net time! But I just wanted to let anyone who's reading this know that I'm alive and well and safe in Ulaanbaatar. Vodkatrain trip has been awesome so far, the China-Mongolia train trip was wicked. Mongolia may be the greatest country on the planet, though this is a big claim spurned from a few pints of Chinggis that I will evaluate better over the next few months. Hopefully will be able to post some photos and adventurous stories soon

Here is one story for Tom (meaning you Reynolds): in the middle of the night we crossed the border from China to Mongolia and, half-asleep, I realised that the weird noise I could hear was our train attendants booming "Poker Face" over the train speakers. Apparently, they really love it in China, I heard it several times. Now I can't get "p-p-p-poker face p-p-poker face" out of my head.

Sasha (if you read this): Vodkatrain friend from Ohio has now mentioned/sang Don't Stop Believin' at least once but usually twice every day since I messaged you, including one time when I heard it faintly, and then louder, from the next carriage on the train and discovered he was playing it over his laptop speakers. Crazy!