In Conclusion....

Well, as Chris pointed out, we're back home now. The final value on the pedometer is 3,294 miles - 6 less than I calulated (I will have to recheck my calculations to find out where my calculations went awry). I'm sat at my English computer, with my standard English keyboard, with the letters stuck on in the right order. I've driven on the right side of the road (i.e. the left). Had some bacon butties. Done my washing and used my own shower, where the water flows round the plug hole the correct way. Almost ready to go back to work tomorrow... almost.

I thought I'd wrap it up by sharing with you a few things that we've learned about Johnny Foreigner while we've been away.


Foreign Drivers

French: Are just rude. Don't really like indicating. Won't move out of your way if you're in the fast lane and you're going faster then them. Typical.

Italians: Lovely people. Haven't quite mastered driving in cars yet instead of scooters. They don't really understand that you are meant to stay within the dotted white lines.

Germans: Are by far the best drivers. Courteous, considerate and forward thinking. They probably don't want to upset anyone else after, you know, the war (which we didn't mention).

Tram Drivers in Eastern European Cities: Are not scared of anything. They drive their trams in the street over there you know. Stay well clear. They will crush your car like a bug, you capitalist scum!

BMW Drivers: Are the same in every country. Tw*ts.


Foreign Driving Tips

Motorways: They expect you to pay to drive on their motorways. Dirty foreigners. It's expensive as well - I reckon I spent £100-£150 on motorway stickers and tolls. In Austria we had to buy a motorway sticker and still pay tolls! But they did have some cracking tunnels. Oh, and if you get a ticket, don't lose it, or you will get shouted at by johnny foreigner.

Road Signs: They're all in Foreign! A lot of them didn't make any sense at all. We sorta looked out for things that looked sorta like the pictures on triangle ones, ignored most of the speed ones and anything we couldn't understand. Which didn't really cause us too many problems ;-) Or we don't think it did, I'm just waiting for some international speeding fines!

Traffic Lights: There are lots of variations in lots of countries, including horizontal traffic lights, flashing greens, helpful ones with timers on and flashing yellow ones. Basically the rules that we used were green means go, red means stop and flashing yellow means go if it doesn't look like you're going to hit anything.

Border Controls: There seemed to be clearly defined borders between the countries, but no one cared about little old us! Most countries were happy if you waved some passports at them, some didn't even want that! The man in Hungary actually looked at the passwords in a half arsed way. The worst were the English coming back from France who proper looked at our faces and everything. No one even checked the car, although I suppose it was quite clear, especially on the way back, that it was full of smelly camping stuff. But I reckon we could well have stored a couple of Ethiopan immigrants under our luggage all the way around Europe and earned ourselves a couple of Ethiopian Durkas (approx 0.0000003p - enough for a beer in Hungary)

Petrol Stations: They call unleaded petrol lots of different things in europe. After a while, I decided that putting some of the one that was the colour closest to green in my car would work best (Simon, take someone that can see proper with you). The car still seems to be working, but we will see what its like when it goes for its next service ;-)

Inter Driver Communication: It is customary, when in Eastern European countries, to make constructive critisism about fellow motorists' driving techniques, to keep up morale. The prefered method is to beep the horn repeatedly, whilst shouting "DURKA DURKA DURKA", out the window. If an especially well performed manouvre is observed, they may follow up by waving their arms repeatedly or, the ultimate driving complement, extending the arm with a fist made, knuckles pointing downwards, and then extending the middle finger. I discovered that Chris was already conversant with these European motivational driving techniques, which were used liberally in order to ingratiate ourselves with our new found foreign friends and in return, several drivers commented back on his exceptional driving skills. I don't like to be big-headed, but I did notice that several drivers chose to comment on some of my more skillful manouvres.


Foreign Food

Breakfast: Johnny foreigner doesn't understand that a growing English gentlemen needs some salt cured pig flesh and chicken ovulations for breakfast. They tried to fob us off with rolls and cheese and funny looking ham. Luckily for us, McDonalds sell Sausage McMuffins in all countries, although they're not called that. However, trying to communicate that to the whole staff of a Hungarian McDonalds was, well, interesting. The international language of pointing and making hand gestures works well here.

Eating out dictionary: In the capital cities, most restaurants will have a menu in English, even if that staff can't speak it, but out of the city I'm afraid you're on your own. In general though, your best bet is to choose restaurants that have big pictures on the wall, so you can point at stuff and grunt like the dirty English animal you are. For the less adventurous (Laura), the word for Pizza in every language is Pizza. If you don't like pizza, it's probably best if you don't leave England, although we have developed a useful list of translations that you may try shouting at Johnny Foreigner until you get something that looks familiar (if you want a drink and pizza and chips):

• Diet Coke: Coke Light
• Lemonade: Sprite (lemonade will just confuse people)
• Water: Aqua/Water sans gas. They drink a lot of fizzy water over there. The bastardised French/English Water sans gas seems to work best.
  
• Chips: Pommes Frites. This doesn't always work. Steak potatoes is quite a good word to use, it can get you either chips, potato wedges, roasted potatoes, sauteed potatoes or boiled ones. Shouting steak potatoes in a moment of desperation will ensure you at least some sort of potato based accompaniment for your meal. Whatever you do, don't actually ask for chips. You will get crisps on your meal. Duh.
  
• Quarter Pounder: Those of you that haven't watched pulp fiction (Chris) will not know that this is in fact a McRoyal. I think John Travolta explained it best when he said: "...man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is."

Flemish Meat Stew: Avoid. Nuff said.

Service Charges: Those dirty foreigners sneak a compulsory tip on to your meal! Watch out for it and make sure you don't double tip. Don't forget, 10 english pounds is enough to buy you three wives in Hungary. And that, I'm sure we can all agree, will only you bring misery and despair.


Anyways, that's about all I have left in me. I'm going to have a nice sleep in my big bed, all alone. So for now I will bid you adieu, and that is that. The end.


Fin

Sneaky f*cking russian...

Seeing as though AK managed to nip on the 'net in France (God knows how!) to write about all the juicy bits in Innsbruck (the extremely tall waitress who made me look like a pigme walrus, the AWESOME authentic Austrian Yodeling / Clog Dancing / Horn blowing) and about my Escargot, and about the completely fucking STUPID Italian drivers (99% Italian Drivers are idiots. FACT.), I'll update you all on today.

Today we arrived home. That is all you need to know, and all I care about right now. I had an ace time, but coming home to some bacon butties at AK's mum's house, and entering my house for the first time in 3 weeks is possibly the best feeling I've had in my life (sorry ladies ;P). My housemate, bless his cotton socks, is making us a very nice smelling pasta bake and we're probably gonna chill out all night and catch up like a pair of girls :P

I have 170 odd emails to check, most of which will be spam from recruitment companies, and I need to get stuff ready to start my job tomorrow... so this is Spikeh, signing off. Au revoir!

Yodel-ay-he-hoo

Well, it's been a few days since we spoke last, let me keep you updated.

After Slovenia, we drove through Italy to Innsbruck in Austria. I'd calculated that it would be a 4 hour drive, but it ended up being 8 hours. And it was HOT. Bloody hot, again. We spent two hours in a traffic jam in Italy, that we thought must have been a really serious accident or something. Turns out it was a queue to get to the toll booth! We also discovered that of all the countries that we'd been in, the Italians knew how to drive the least. They really didn't seem to understand the concept of 'lanes' or pulling over to overtake someone. Added to the top of that, they have toll motorways in Italy. It was our first proper experience of them, and they are bloody expensive. I reckon I've spent at least £150 squids on motorway tolls and vignettes (like motorway taxes in some countries). Anyways, I went on an overzealous tidying spree in the car at one of the Italian service stations and lost the ticket that they give you to tell you where you get on. So we got to the Italian border, and they were going to charge us a 60 Euro fine for losing our ticket, but we sweet talked the lady at the booth (who was very impressed that I was called Tony ;-) and they just charged us the amount that was owed, but gave us some forms that they said we had to fill in 'if someone writes us from Italy' and we also created a massive queue of angry italians behind us ;-) Serves them right for being shit drivers!!!

So, we finally reach Innsbruck, all sweated up, and nowhere near the town centre (my mum had recommended we go see the house with the golden roof!), but had no time to do anything so just went down to the hotel down the road which had a restaurant attatched to it. We weren't expecting much from it, but we did get served by the tallest woman on the planet! After we had ordered our food, in the auditorium next to us (which was part of the hotel) a proper genuine Alpine shindig got together. No seriously. There was yodeling aplenty (hence the title of the blog post), some alpen hof, wood chopping, a bit of opera, pig tails and the piece de resistance, genuine men in leather pants slapping their thighs. It was the most cliched thing we have ever seen, which made it all the more amazing. However, i suspect the incredibly tall waitress had heard it once or twice before, as she looked like she was going to kill us.

Today was the really long drive again, from Innsbruck, Austria, through Switzerland and then into France. However, the weather has been nice and cool and overcast, and we have been thankful for it. We didn't encounter any traffic jams and it only took us 12 hours, which was slightly less than I was expecting it too. Once again, France has annoying toll roads and we got well stung for them, but i suppose the alternative was taking the car to a post office and posting it.

So we got back to original hostel that we stayed at our first night in France. We wandered off into town for a meal and chose 'Restaurant Le Welsh Pub'. Which we were telling Mum about on the phone with amusement, when this couple sat near us started pissing themselves. Only turns out that they were actually Welsh. They must have been employed to sit there to make the pub genuine under EU rules or something. We had a really nice meal, well mostly nice. Chris tried L'Escargot for the first time, which he really enjoyed, and I opted for the Flemish Meat Stew. I think it may have lost a little in the translation - it was a load of off cuts of cold ham and turkey in a big solid block of jelly like you get in pork pies. Slightly dissapointing (Craig will testify that I always choose the best things in restaurants). All in all it was a very nice meal and we got to try out some of our French (of which there wasn't much between us!) - but the meal cost 40 quid each - it was 7 Euros for a pint - and a European 500ml pint, not a proper English one! Theiving French bastards!!!

Anyways, we're just about to go to bed here now to get the Ferry back tomorrow morning. We should be back in Blackpool for 3 or 4 ish if there isn't any traffic and I'm sooooo loooking forward to coming into work on Wednesday and seeing what a mess they've made of everything without me there :-) Mum is getting Bacon and Egg butties ready for us for the grand homecoming.

Au Revoir, Auf Weidersehn, Ciao and Goodbye for now!

Ant

Gaz is a girl

Well... a few things to report from Slovenia (not Slovakia, like I originally wrote). We've had two relatively late nights out on the town, though there's not really much "town" to see... lots and lots of restaurants and quiet bars, but no partaaaaying going on anywhere.

Gay* managed to pull the fit barmaid last night and went out for a drink with her, but was snubbed for a goodnight kiss (haha). I'm sure he'll have much more to report on here than he did to us ;) I'll leave AK to tell the extension to this story about the English guys we overheard last night... ;)

I ate a horse steak, or more specifically a foal steak for lunch yesterday, which tasted like a well done beef steak, just a bit more tender. We also passed a place that sold "Horse Burgers". I'm not entirely sure if this is all ethical, but when in Rome... eat like the Slovenians =]

AK and I managed to get accosted by "Dave", a random Scottish dude who hadn't slept for 32 hours and hadn't seen his dad for 10 years. So they decided to come here to go for a 6 day bike ride over the alps. Stupid prats. I mean... if you hadn't seen your dad for that long, you'd go for a piss up with him, or catch up at home or something wouldn't you? Not kill yourself by riding uphill for 12 hours.

The rooms here are OK, albeit a bit small - especially when AK and I are in them together. I've nearly broken my back each morning / night getting in and out of the bunk beds, that I'm convinced are made for actual midgets. Being massive, it seems, has downsides too...

Today we leave for Innsbruck, Austria. I may just have got a country / place name / spelling correct for the first time since we set off... I just did a bit of wee.




* Sorry, I meant Gaz, the big girl.

slovenia chris s l o v e n i a

hey gays

arrived in s l o v e n i a and its well hot and we have just eaten our tea. Anthony had the gayest fruit coctail i have ever ever seen ( suppose you could call it a fruity fruit coctail). the weather is really nice and the woman behind the bar is really nice. The only thing ruining it is chris´s stinky poo poo attitude ( only joking it has been a pleasure to listen to his moaning). Still enjoying being on holiday but a little part of me now just wants a bacon butty. The hotel we are staying in is pretty nice ( a bit like the woman behind the bar) and the language here is beautiful ( NOT) i can only emphasise what chris said before when they sound like they want to kill you. I asked the really nice lady behind the bar ( oh she really is nice by the way) what the word for thank you was and i felt like taking cover.

cant wait to see my little niece when i get back i bet she will probably be out clubbing it though it has been that long since i saw her last. think i saw a really nice woman serving behind the bar before dont know if i mentioned it so i am going to try and communicatesky with her.

Hello to everyone who can be bothered reading by the way hope the weather is nice in England (ha ha i know its not cos ma mum sed sooooo).

Peace out
shizzle ma nizzle
Catch all yall crazy cats later

Bye x x x x x x x xx x x x x x x x x x x x x x x xx x x x x x x x xx x xx x xx x
( x s are for the ladies only)

Waaaay too much heat

Just a quick post, I've managed to get on the net for free, so I'd better make it quick.

We've just arrived in Slovakia, AK's ordering me a beer and we're just about to eat.

Managed to get here in record time.

That was sarcasm, but there's no way of making that obvious on the 'net. It took us about 5 hours from Blaton because 90% of the motorways aren't built yet. Why couldn't we be here in 2 years time? :P Still... this place scares me - I'm not even going to atempt to learn "Thank you", "Yes" and "No" like I have in all the other countries. They all sound like they're going to murder me with every syllable. And believe me, there are a lot of syllables.

It's been VERY hot for the last few days. My forearms are well and truely tanned, but the rest of my body is as white as a sheet... too hot to sunbathe really, and we've not had time anyway.

New development on the job - I'm now starting on the 22nd August, which was my original start date. After all that stress I've got nothing to worry about... beaurocracy at its best :

Right. Food. And lots of it, damn you.

I like your face.

Lake Balaton

Hi guys,

Me again. I'm downstairs in the Hotel Rev at Lake Balaton. It's absolutely boiling here, around 36C, and we are all sweating our tits off!

Our excellently executed exit plan from the island on Wednesday worked a treat. We all took our big bags to the car on Tuesday so all we would need to carry on Wednesday morning was our tents and overnight bags. Laura woke us up at 7am, because she was soo looking forward to getting home and having some proper food (Laura doesn't eat foreign meat, foreign water onion or cheese)

We were in the car and ready to set off at about 9am, and then we had a hankering for sausage and egg McMuffins. Once we'd found a McDonalds drive thru and communicated our order to the staff (although I got chips with mine, chips for breakfast! The heathens!) we dropped Laura off at the airport and set off for Lake Balaton, which took us about an our and a half.

Even though it said that this was a hostel on the booking sheet, it turns out it's actually a hotel. I think Gary descibed it best when he said - 'it's a shit hotel, but the best hostel we've stayed in so far!'. Although it's clean, and I have a room to myself with a double bed in (which is nice after having to sleep with every tom, dick and harry in my tent for the last week!). The only problem is that they don't have laundry here. Which was a serious problem for us because, well, everythinng we own is stinky and damp. So they very kindly opened up their laundry room for us. When we asked where the dryer was the guy said 'I don't know how to say it, but we have drying machine'. Turns out, after a lot of searching, the drying machine was a clothes horse.

Anyways, we're ready to set off now to Loobleeana, so I'm going to say goodbye. Hopefully the next hostel will have a keyboard that hasn't had a few cans of coke poured in it.

Ciao. Jegshemesh.