travels with an ageing punkrocker/publisher
“Cold and final, the imagination shuts down its fabled summer house” are as true as any other words by Sylvia Plath and, metaphor or not, they are as good as any to kick off the last leg of this short sharp sweaty taste of Singapore. Caught up with N last night near Farrer Park, where we caught up on how […]
Read moreOne day I’ll be too old to be standing on a couch in a drag bar next to a transsexual cheering on drag queens at 1.30am. For better or worse, that time is yet to come. For all of the multitude of wrong that is the Hard Rock Cafe, the Singapore establishment has been hosting a regular Saturday night drag […]
Read moreThe Swan Song bar is the wonderfully eclectic result of three very passionate whisky people. Since discovering this place in 2020, in their old location neat the Auld Alliance, I’ve had the pleasure of going to their current place last trip with L, and being back in town, went their again last night. I say eclectic as the whisky on […]
Read moreFlight was fine, boring and smooth just how I like them. Caught a couple of movies, Oversteer, a Singaporean movie set in Malaysia (I thing it was Singaporean, it was in the Singaporean Showcase tab) about families and street car racing, and The Roundup Punishment, a Korean cop movie starring Ma Dong-seok where he goes around and punches people (it’s […]
Read moreAnd yet, despite everything, it’s still not Constantinople. I’m beginning to think that I can’t go back to Constantinople. Our last full day in Istanbul, and kind of the last day of the trip. Tomorrow morning we grab breakfast, then a car takes us to the airport, then the next stop is a couple of hours in Singapore before the […]
Read moreStill not Constantinople. Today was about ticking off the big ticket items, the Hagia Sofia (reminder, pronounced “aya sofiya”) and Topkapi Palace (rough translation “palace with too many stupid tourists”). The Hagia Sofia (translation “Holy Wisdom”) was built in the 6th Century to be a cathedral, after several other churches in the same spot had existed (the one immediately before […]
Read moreI’ll write the second half of day 15 after this, but figure I should get today down while it’s fresh, a few extra hours won’t hurt my memory. I’m also distracted keeping one eye on the absolute shitfest that is England vs Slovakia, it’s currently half time in extra time and JFC it seems that England have finally managed to […]
Read moreThis might end up as a two part entry as it’s a little after 2am and we’ve just checked in to our Istanbul Hotel. So if I fall asleep typing this I’ll throw some more words at the screen in the morning. The main tasks for today in Vilnius were shopping, shopping, and shopping. All the last minute souvenirs and […]
Read moreVilnius (though the locals barely pronounce the second i) the capital of Lithuania (which is spelt locally as Lietuva) is an interesting place. It’s the second largest city in the Baltics, with just a few less people than Riga, Lithuania is the most populous of the three countries, and as Laura told us yesterday, has a more spread out population […]
Read moreA long day on the road. We booked a transfer tour from Riga to Vilnius with Traveller.ee, so we were up and ready before 9am, having a breakfast of the last of the smoked pork and other random bits. We met Laura (pronounced more like lauw-ra rather than lora) and soon a group of eight of us were on the […]
Read moreThe Riga Aviation Museum is a museum in a very different sense of the word to how we would generally understand it. It’s out by the Riga airport, so it takes about 20-30 minutes to get to, including a bit of forest where you start to wonder if you’ll ever be seen again. Through this, we pulled up at a […]
Read moreHello Latvia! Having set an alarm to make sure that we’d be up in time for breakfast, check out, and a taxi to the bus station, we were awake well before. First there were the crowd of folks who decided to have a bit of a street party outside our window at 4am, I guess in fairness it was already […]
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