Im not sure whats going on at the moment - its 4am and Im meant to be at the airport tomorrow morning before 10 (its a one hour train trip). I went out tonight with Lance, two Irishmen and a Japanese chick, and another Australian (but he went home early). There was some kind of festival (Matsuli) that took over the whole suburb for a time.

Drinks, photos and ridiculous music. Crazy crazy shit. Had dinner with Lances neighbours (awesome) and moved on to some play-your-own-music bar for after dinner drinks. Turns out nobody knows how to play the instrument they chose.

Went to the Irishmens house (they live together) and discussed absolute crap till about 30 minutes ago.

Leaving the country hasnt really factored into this process in any way yet. This I will regret.

Oh, and earlier today I went to fish markets, Reppungi (Lost In Translation hotel area), Tokyo tower, Harajuku (teenage ultra-fashion center of Japan), and Asakusan.

Im in a little hotel in Kyoto at the moment - sweating, hot, no air-conditioning, hung over from a night on sho-chu. Cicadas sound like infants would if infants could make mechanical noises when they scream. And they never stop.

When you come to Japan in the summer, bring short sleeved shirts and sandals. Everything is sacred, I spend a lot of time feeling clumsy and loud. There are beautiful temples everywhere. When you come here you need Lance and Aki.

The food is delicious, MasterCard fucking sucks (fuck you MasterCard) technology is advanced but also sometimes old and clunky. Narrow streets and many girls in kimonos everywhere. How the fuck can you wear a kimono in this weather???

Cant upload any photos from here - dont have the software probably, and Im too damn hot sitting here. Ill update when I get back to Lances house in Tokyo.

This place is awesome.

This month, Israel goes absolutely bat-shit murderous crazy raising international concerns about oil prices, Syd Barrett dies, North Korea fires a bunch of missiles as the world holds its breath (consequently Japan decides they are probably friendly enough to have a standing army again) - fortunately oil prices are not affected - and Paul Cechner announces that he will soon migrate for time unknown, to destination known.

I realise that I have made no official announcement anywhere, sent no spam email and notified no newspapers - August the 11th marks my last day in Australia for the foreseeable future[1].

I have outlined my itinerary in great detail thusly. Perth->Sydney on August the 8th, Sydney->Tokyo on the 11th, then Tokyo->London on the 25th.

One pictures a massive benefit concert, an undulating crowd of friends riding the wave of a going away-rave, culminating in a crescendo where our enigmatic host disappears after some stunning yet brief announcement, never to be seen again. Guests would still have a good time after he left, but probably not as good a time. Of course this scenario is precluded by a lack of willing participants and a well-known lack of organisational ability.

So I find myself with three remaining precious weeks, busily divesting myself of my worldly possessions. Some know of my convenient automobile disaster - an unexpectedly serendipitous moment that solved a bunch of problems at once, providing both a $4,700 windfall and a sudden dependency on my car-wielding friends. A poorly organised tax portfolio ensures a hefty return on unnecessarily paid HECS contributions (for more information please refer to this dissertation on my modus operandi.)

Other than the car, I have a bed, computer and computer desk. These aren't going to be a problem.

I am freaky excited about every part of my coming trip. If leaving the country is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Footnotes
[1] From the Paul dictionary:
The Foreseeable Future(n) - not necessarily a long time, given Paul's inability to foresee more than a matter of minutes into the future.

This is an accounting of the events of Thursday the 1st Dec. I'd just come into Rome from Cologne. I am now back in Australia and jet-lagged as hell.

Dove si trova l'Internet point was the first Italian phrase I learned in Rome. Where can I find the local Internet place? I'd arrived at midday and it was now 11:30 PM, and my goal had been reduced to finding a hotel in which to put my bags.

I walked in the front door of a 2 star hotel called Hotel Charter, a tiny front entrance dwarfed by the booked-out 4 star hotel next door. The guy in the lobby was watching black-and-white porn when I came in, and helpful and polite as he was, he didn't really stop watching it.

Parla Ingles? "Yes, don't worry sir. You are looking for a room?" I said I was, and he started booking me in. Passport, 70 Euro. Dove si trova l'Internet point? Apparently down the road, to the left, then to the right.

After a prolonged explanation on how to get the vertical-coffin-like elevator working properly (you have to hold the button down to keep it moving,) I proceeded to my room, dumped my bags and headed towards the promised Internet point.

This part of Rome - the only part I'd seen so far, having wandered in a completely random direction - was more seemy than I had expected. A few ladies of negotiable virtue and sometimes debatable gender gave me askance in Italian, presumably not scared off by my stumbling gawking tourist manner. Head low, I kept walking as these folk called unintelligibly after me.

The Internet point itself was cast in the fluro blue light they use in bathrooms to stop junkies from being able to see their veins. The dude behind the counter pointed me towards a station and I jumped on the Internet like a ravenous beast. I accessed the Internet's brains out.

Bob and Teja were on, giving me some hope for the night. Where the fuck is your brother? He was supposed to send me an email telling me where we should have met up, and I've been wandering between airports, bars and Internet points for 11 hours trying to track him down!

Their attitudes were refreshing but probably not as helpful as they might have imagined: you're in Rome baby! Look around! Drink in the beauty! Have an adventure!

I doubtfully looked around. I think some of the trannies outside were packing up and searching for me. There was a toothless old codger out trying to chat up one of the less obviously female Romans. The dude behind the desk was up to his elbows in a prolonged nasal excavation. I imagined the black-and-white beauty the concierge in my hotel was resorting to. This wasn't really helping.

Nevertheless, I really relished my moment's communication with friends after what seemed like weeks of self-exile. As enriching an experience walking around a non native English speaking country is, it tends to stain your insides with a curious detachment from the world around you. I am, at heart, a very social creature.

I shot off an email to Mos and Mel telling them the name of my hotel and put on a very angry face before leaving the fluro-blue haven. This is my 'don't fuck with me' face. My 'I certainly aren't interested in sex' face. It seemed to work, until I was almost at the hotel. 'Oi,' some dude muttered - a short guy with a big shiny white smile. He jabbered some proposition at me. Sorry, Ingles. 'Oh, no pais Italiano eh? Hahahahaha. Ha.' I walked in the door and held the button for the elevator. The dude was still grinning at me through the front door as I went up.

I spent the next hour or so showering, shaving (using a dodgy blade stolen from Mostyn and no shaving cream) and reading the useful phrases section of my new tourist Rome guide. Then I pulled the pear and apple schnapps that was a parting gift from my German uncle. If ever there was a time to get a little belligerent, it was now. 'Prost,' I toasted myself in the mirror. Then I went to sleep.

45 minutes later, the phone rings. Hey. 'We're downstairs' says Mel. Sweet, things are looking fucking sweet all of a sudden. The next three days were awesome, though less interesting to write about right now.

Yes, I've returned to the waking world. Last night I came home to find Carla, Shaun, Rob and Teja still waiting for me at the airport! I was so happy to see those guys, though I think my enthusiasm may not have been obvious over the 20-something hours of sleepless flight I'd just gone through[1].

I could never repay Mostyn, Mel, Al, Lucy and Kev for their hospitality over the last five weeks.

I know things change when you're away, but I really hope the new friends I made in Europe are still waiting for me when I get back.

[1] A quick note; so far it seems my plan to minimise jetlag is working. I kept myself awake on the plane with a strict diet of alcohol and screaming children then crashed like a drunken ethnic driver when I got home. I woke at 6 this morning, and plan on staying awake till late tonight, fingers crossed.

I am writing this in a Cologne internet cafe on the 29th Nov. No photos for a while, I guess. This is an account of what happened last Wednesday night (23rd Nov).

Friday, 25th November
I woke Thursday morning and the soft matter in my skull had crystallised into painful little shards of heat. Something was burning against the nerves on the back of my eyes. No, it was Mel knocking on the front door. My phone had rung out, she tells me as I let her in. I grunt and go back to bed, checking the phone on the pillow beside my head; yep - two missed calls.

As I lay there I began retracing my last day's path for signs of burned bridges.

The day begun as one of the best - taking three girls onto the London Eye (an enormous Ferris Wheel in the center of London that has a 45 minute round trip time.) Then, on the way to the Tattersails Pub - a permanently moored ferry on the Thames - we were accosted by a news reporter-looking guy to do some vox pops for the channel More 4. Having given answers to many questions about how terrified we all should be about the ever-present danger of asteroids, we continued on to the pub. This is where my recollection began to fragment.

The Tattersails was awesome. We got food and drunk. Then Mel and Honi left me, ostensibly to 'work'. I buried my disappointment in alcohol.

Myself and an American tourist I had promised a tour to continued from there up through Trafalgar Square, where I saw snow for the first time ever. It was basically a huge pile of ice being sprayed with water by a big bored dude.

We were at the Science Museum when my Scouser mate Kev rang and asked when I was going to be at the pub for our pre-arranged football viewing (Liverpool vs Someone). Oops, sorry Sonya, I gotta go to the pub instead of the National Gallery. OK, she said - and she came along, but thats the last clear memory I have of her presence. As my mind scanned the road ahead I began to understand why.

I rocked up at the pub. "What the fook is that?" Kev said. It's my new hat, and it makes me look distinguished.

"OK, well whats in those bags?"

What bags? Oh, I must have gone to the Borough Markets, I guess. (The bags contained a bunch of really expensive cheese and sausages from the food markets.)

The game, after 6 pints each, degenerated into Kev and I singong some Scouser song to the tune of "if you're happy and you know it clap you're hands" and ending with Kev picking some patron of the bar, staring him in the eye balefully and screaming "DO YOU FUCK!?"

I got a massage from a professional masseuse in the bar. The price was "whatever you feel it was worth," though when I started pulling out a 5 pound note the chick jumped in with "but most people pay 10 pounds." So I did, of course.

The train ride home was the painful part. Another song Kev was teaching me was sung to the tune of the Beatles' Ticket to Ride, though I only picked up a few lyrics at a time, and generally hummed the rest. For this reason, the subject matter didn't really hit me till much later.

A quick segue into a little story; theres a doctor called "Doctor Death" who operated in Manchester. He is known for killing (by accident or design I do not know) a bunch of old ladies in Manchester. The Liverpool people (who call themselves Scousers) do not like people from Manchester (who they call Manks.)

The song we were singing loudly on the train was actually a glorification of the work he did, praising him for what went down. With this realisation came not only a deep shame for what I'd been singing, but astonishment that we didn't get the crap beaten out of us at some stage.

On an up note, however, I did get home in time to see us on the news. Of the five or so minutes we were interviewed for, only one of us (me) got a single word in:
Reporter: What would you say if I told you that the Earth could be hit by an asteroid very soon?
Paul: Soon!?

Yesterday Mostyn and I visited the British Museum. This place is an imposing structure that we could not have possibly hoped to fully explore in a single day - my tourist book says I should pick any two rooms (of the hundreds) in which to spend all my time, else I'll be rushing around not taking anything in.

Anyway, we decided to coast through the Egyptian section taking in what we could. At closing time, in fact, we were probably about halfway through the Egyptian section, drifting through a room of Predynastic (about 3500 BC) artifacts.

Looking at a few wicker baskets and sharpened flint stones I heard a soft bump and 'ow' beside me. I turned to find Mostyn rubbing his forehead - a small forehead smudge on the glass.

I imagined my backpack sitting in a display cabinet 5000 years in the future, with a small sign above it proclaiming that 'in the Cechnerian period the ability to carry many things was a sign of virility.' Some hairless, large eyed and grey skinned evolved species of man meanders on by, kinda interested. He stops and unconciously leans forward to take in some detail, somehow surprised when his head impacts with the glass display cabinet.

My England '05 photos can be found in the gallery

This morning is washing morning. This means I am forced to stay home so that I don't have to walk around London naked, or wearing Mostyn's clothes (which, without sufficient duct tape, would probably amount to the same thing.)

So I get to sit down, contact some family, and write on my website. Quick summary in mathematical form: Liverpool > Manchester > Bangkok > The French.

I carry a notebook around with me, so I get to write diary entries if I am feeling up to it. Just to get everyone (i.e., my mum) up to speed on things, I'll transcribe some of them below:

2005-11-02: Hurtling at 550mph 40,000ft above the earth, somewhere between Perth and Bangkok

An immediate and horrid torture. It took the cunning ingenuity of the Thai to devise such a fate, expressed on my person for hours on end.

First, of course, the regular isolation of the corpus that is common to all airlines. Pressed into a small seat, hopelessly denied what refuge sleep might offer, I sit in stunned hopelessness watching the most horrific collection of god-awful movies. The 5-foot viewing screen is directly in front of me, and I can see the images through my closed eyelids.

The Butler: Brooke Sheilds and Tom Green. Yes, the headphones are 'optional', but you soon discover that no sound and all image is even worse. Two cheeky kids looking for a dad, too-busy working single mum (Shields) estranged from her cheeky children. Unorthodox butler (Green) with a heart of gold. Annoying French boyfriend the kids don't like but mum likes for some reason. Final scene, Sheilds running down a pier after Green, having realised she loves him after all, just before he leaves forever. This movie may have given me cancer.

Trying to sleep, I discovered that the most comfortable position was, curiously enough, the most difficult to describe in words.

2005-11-02: Stop-over in Bangkok

A quick guide to all you need to know about Bangkok for people not intending to leave the airport, but who must stay for 6 hours:

• Arrival on the 2nd floor, but you MUST go to the third floor, even though nobody will ever tell you this, and there are no signs to indicate this fact.
• Plane departure details are made up on the fly. This means that nobody will be able to tell you ahead of time where you need to go to depart. You have to keep checking the screens. Again, nobody will tell you this, they will just try to push you on to someone else.
• 30Baht=1AUD. For some reason though, I was charged £3 ($8)for a coffee. Lesson learned: I am a gullible twat.
• The Bangkok Cafe & Bar is actually a nice place to sit and wait for your plane. French people can ruin this however.

The wait was formidable, but kind of interesting. Lots of brown smog, very humid. Although not helpful, the people working in the airport are nice. For about $20 AUD you can get a 45 minute massage, but half the people massaging are guys, and I wasn't really up for that.

My French people experience: While waiting in the aforementioned bar, having snagged a nice set of couches to myself, three attractive French ladies came over and asked if they could join me (with many a 'tee hee hee'). Being a Nice Guy I said yes, calmly accepting the fact that my hours of lonely beer drinking and reading were to end. However, upon sitting down a couple of previously unnoticed French GUYS came over to the seat and joined them. I am certain that they hung back only because their group would be less likely to get the seats were they all present. I spent the next two hours being ignored by all the people sitting around me as they spoke in French. I asked if I could use their laptop to put some MP3s on my new iPod, and was met with a few seconds' blank silence then an incredulous 'no!'

2005-11-02: In the air again
For the long leg of the trip, I started feeling more like precious human cargo, tended carefully like so much well-paying cattle in our battery cages. Our troughs filled like clockwork, warm towels handed around to lessen the cattle stink and ostensibly satisfy our need for a modicum of hygiene.

Then the movie about a disillusioned alcoholic ex-baseball star who takes over as little league coach. Only catch is - these kids are really bad! I got the feeling his unorthodox teaching methods could be just the kick they need, and maybe he'll learn something about himself along the way.

"Motocross" is a movie about two brothers who are great at motocross racing. One brother gets badly injured, the other has to ride to avenge him against some bad guy motocross rider who wears all black and rides a black bike. Spoiler: the brother wins by a knuckle hair[1], in slow motion.

2005-11-02: 7:30PM arrival in Heathrow

Glad to be in, the immigration guy gave me shit about not knowing the exact address of the place I was staying, and said he could easily not let me into London. I suppose he was offering to put me up for a month. I told him as nicely as possible I had friends waiting for me in the reception area, but he kept saying "what if they're not there??? Eh? What happens then???" Well, I said, I'll call them. "What if you can't get hold of them???" Look, they're gonna be out there, stop stressing.

Anyway, they weren't there. I wandered around for about 40 minutes, and got onto a phone to call them. Neither of them were responding. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. I'm gonna kill them sumbitches... as soon as I see them, I'm gonna start ripping holes in their skins, making me carry this fucking heavy bag around...

Then they turned up, and I was so glad to see them I forgot all about it, and we all went home happy. Mel bought me an Oyster pass, so I can travel anywhere I'll likely be going for free for a week. Al gave me a £5 phone away card so I could call Australia, and his girlfriend Lisa gave me a pre-pay mobile phone card, which I charged up the next day. These three things and a map of London are seriously all you need (plus money) to survive.

Events since then have been all good, but I'll summarise them some other time. My washing is finished, and I'm gonna head into the National Museum today, then into Covent Gardens markets for some good food and beer.

Next entry I'll talk about London: why Manchester sucks (an ode to Liverpool); wandering lost and in desperate need of a toilet in Trafalgar Square at 4am; and Leicester Square - my favourite tube stop.

Footnotes:
[1] the kind of knuckle hair you get on the second segment of your finger - really fine.