I loved that game! Even if I was 9 and making alot of wild guesses.. hehehe

Wow, another comment! Thanks mavis. Yeah I was much the same. I played in on an old, which at the time was new, original apple macintosh. Originally our school had Apple IIe's on which I played Load runner. But when the GUI'd macintosh came out such wonders as risk and Dark Castle came out. Contributed much to a mispent youth. But Carmen was good fun, a great way to inadvertently learn.

So, you want to know where I am, huh?

Well, actually, right now I'm sitting in the DOOM internet cafe in downtown Varna on the Black Sea coast. Why not visit the DOOM website? (URL associated with this comment) It's very dark in here, principally for the sake of verisimilitude I expect; it doesn't take long sitting in here in the CRT-illuminated gloom in a cheap plastic lawn chair typing away for one to start sweating a little in that clammy faintly unhealthy IT sort of way.

Neither Varna nor the Black Sea coast are quite as quaint as I imagine they must sound; Varna is a city of modest dimensions; the Black Sea is mild, warm and fertile but has a reputation for fearful treachery, hence the name. But it's pleasant enough here. What can I say? It's a foreign country full of foreign people; whenever I try to characterise the differences, I end up with the rather unhelpful conclusion that it's just like Australia, except foreign.

Might as well restrict myself to the mundanities then. Actually, I'll tell you about the Happy restaurant chain. Happy sell traditional Bulgarian food of various sorts, plus a few dubious dishes of allegedly foreign extraction (Chinese Cucumbers, for example, are bulgarian picked cucumbers with soy sauce sprinkled on top). According to the signage, it was 'established on the Christmas Day 1994', and the chain is notable for three things: It is owned by a former Communist of some sort and was established with a great quantity of embezzled money (flashy cars here denote former communists and extortionists the way black SUVs in Mexico denote narcotrafficantes); a 35% surcharge is levied on all non-bulgarians; and the waitresses are all obliged to wear these ridiculous one-piece uniforms that feature micro-mini skirts that one would describe as exploitative if doing so wasn't (in light of what the uniforms look like) utterly, entirely redundant.

What the hell, I'll leave it there. Ask me stuff. Make it easy for me.

(btw, I couldn't get the maintenance URLs I got for this section to work [I got 404s] which is why I'm doing this with comments and not properly. Hope I didn't do anything wrong somehow.)

Excellent, to hear you're alive and well!

I think comments are probably the best way to add updates. I'm not sure why the maintenance URLs didn't work though...

So questions, questions, lets see. We'll start with the main ones:
1. What date did you leave and when do you return?
2. What has been and is your itinerary?
3. Did you play any Doom (tm) in the Doom cafe? Were others playing Doom or was it an expression of the mood within the venue?
4. With the large range of climates within Australia, would you expect there to be many places that are totally different to Australia? Is it just the climate that seems similar or cultural aspects as well?
5. Why Bulgaria?

Oh, I did want to congratulate you on your use of the longest word on this blog so far i.e. verisimilitude. I guess there is narcotrafficantes as well.

Missed you at the Bund dinner ofcourse Alex.
Write soon.

I left on May 16th, or something like that, gee I don't know. I'll be back on July 20th. I'll be in Singapore from the 15th to the 19th; I'll be visiting Paris and hopefully Venice between June 24 or thereabouts and July 8th, including a fair amount of more or less painful bus transit time (so actual in-Europe sightseeing will be somewhat less than that).

They play Half-Life and that sort of thing here, I imagine. The idea of coming all this way to a foreign country and then spending my time in a gloomy little room playing an American FPS game is so absurd it's nauseating; so I haven't played any Doom or Quake or anything. Although I do miss badminton - without access to my principle source of exercise I'm slowly getting fat. Anyway. I gather that the place is called Doom because copyright enforcement here is so lax that it was easier to purloin a corporate identity than to pay someone to come up with a new one for them. And it works well enough, I guess.

Large though the Australian climatic range is, I'm glad to say that there's an overwhelming wealth of different climates to be experienced on the rest of the globe. Even the weather here, while not particularly distinguished, is distinct enough from anything in Australia to be notable. Just now it's quite warm, generally; in the mornings its overcast but for the rest of the day it tends to be clear. A cloudless night sky is not accompanied by a substantial drop in temperature as it would be in Melbourne. The sun is hot and the glare considerable, but the heat of the sun is somehow more acute than it is in Australia (the Australian sun somehow has a more even but indescribably heavier quality). Brief rainstorms occur; the rain that falls is not cold and the water dries up quickly, at least on streets that are still well-drained. And of course in the winter it snows. The temperature of the sea can reach 25 degrees celsius, not that you'd catch me swimming in it (the waters as I might have mentioned have a millenia-old reputation for treachery and people routinely drown 20 metres from shore). So it's quite different.

Culturally it's different too, of course, although peculiarly one tends to notice not so much the differences as the areas of overlap - Who Wants to be a Millionaire here is called Stani Bogat [get rich - for a while whenever the show came on I'd be reminded of that song 'Nobody Likes a Bogan'], and The Weakest Link is on here in Bulgarian in the evenings, and mobile phones are called GSMs, etc etc etc. The staple diet differs a bit; pork here is much better and lamb rather worse than in Australia, for example; they have a national cuisine (unlike Australia) but on the other hand have some truly grievous Chinese restaurants. Knives are freely available in various shops, including a number of specimens designed specifically for murdering people. Alcohol is sold together with everything else in the supermarkets. There are, in essence, a whole range of little differences, but nothing so marked or bizarre that you can point to it and say there, that's a cultural difference. You know, like people riding camels backwards down the main streets, or that sort of thing.

One thing though is that here nodding your head up and down means no and shaking it from side to side means yes. It's a real pain in the ass. Try nodding your head up and down and saying 'No, no' at the same time. You'll see what I mean.

I'm in Bulgaria because this is where my last surviving grandparent lives with the maternal side of the family. I haven't been here since 1983 or thereabouts, so there was a good deal of catching up to do. And there was a certain sense that I needed to come to some sort of terms with this particular side of my background, somehow.

I guess that's it for the moment. I'll try and write more some time soon...

I'm writing now from Singapore. I like Singapore, by and large. It's relaxing here.

Two weeks ago I was in Paris. Paris was expensive. It's as though someone stabs you in the wallet at immigration and then after that for the whole time you're there, everywhere you go you bleed money. When even McDonalds costs AUD$13-$14, you start to go a little funny as the calibration on your internal sense of what a good price for something is. So, AUD $16 for a 36-exposure roll of 400 ASA film is 'not too bad' compared to, say, dinner at McDonalds. And this may seem an obvious observation to make, but everything's in French and it gets rather tiring after a while. So much so that day 3 or 4 or something was Disneyland Paris, just to get away from all the France. But Paris itself is nice, I suppose. The Musee Guimet (Asian art) was very good, the Louvre goes on forever, the Musee de l'Armee was also very good if limited in scope, the Eiffel Tower isn't as big as I thought it would be and is scary to climb at night, and just now I can't remember anything much else. Anyway.

So after that it's kind of nice to come here to Singapore and just not really do very much of anything. I brought a Singapore guidebook along to Bulgaria and my father and I read it piece by piece while we were away. So he's going to ask me what I saw while I was here, and the understanding will be that my list will be something like, 'Sentosa Island, the orchid cultivation farm thing, the Botanic Gardens, the War Memorial at Changi, the Night Safari, etcetera etcetera', whereas my actual list is going to be more like 'Seiyu, Kinokuniya, Parco, HMV [they have J-Pop /so/ much cheaper than Australia], Mosburger'. And I'm finally buying a camera.

So that's what I'm doing now.

I'm writing this from Melbourne, so now this whole topic goes right down the toilet right about now, I guess. It's nice to be back on the whole. I'm spending a really obscene amount on film processing. It gets dark here really early compared with Europe right now. And that's pretty much that.

It's good to have you back home Alex.

Alex is in Barcelona. studying graphic design.

Found your site through blogspot and wanted to say hi