You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

I woke up this morning, had some breakfast, had a shower and sighed to myself as I was watching the start of the weather on TV that "ahhhh, it's still only Thursday. I wish it was the weekend so I could enjoy the sun and heat." As I was putting my shows on, still watching the weather (it was now near the end and they were showing the forecast for the next 2 days, labelled as TOMORROW and SUNDAY. "Hmmm, that's strange, they missed a day out..." and continued tying my shoes, still not fully woken up. I finished tying my shoes, got up and it suddenly dawned on that maybe it was Friday, not Thursday. I checked my phone's calendar. Friday. "No way". I wasn't convinced. I checked the date on my watch. Friday 4th February. Instead of just feeling happy, I felt concerned that I had lost a day somewhere. Still not 100% convinced, I walked out of the house, counting the days back in my head. I got to 3rd of Feburary and an irrational thought exploded...

Chinglish isn't just restricted to China. A programme on TV that looked interesting and maybe Snoop Dogg or Xzibit would write a rap song about. It turned out to be a film about a Chinese guy called Ho, who was pretty nasty to people.

I've not been updating for a while due to Christmas and holidays but this is the second of three. New Years Eve is (for me) traditionally about not really organising anything until the last minute. But this year, being in Australia and one of the first countries to celebrate the dawn of a New Year and being in Sydney, I wanted to see the world famous fireworks and celebrations in Sydney Habour. Most other people I spoke to were doing other things, like going to parties, go out for dinner or to watch the fireworks but from some place seculuded, with 100 times less people than I had chosen to mingle with. I'll explain. I went to a place called Kirribilli, pretty much in front of the bridge, on the right side of bridge's bay. A prime spot , and being free, made it even more alluring. Tickets to sit in the gardens near to Sydney Opera House were selling for $200, and other places near to the bridge were also charging for tickets. Mine was ticketless, basically the first there...

My first opportunity to celebrate a festival in Australia turned out to be an entirely American festival. And I was lucky enough to experience two of them! I'm talking about Thanksgiving. One official Thanksgiving celebration, with lots of traditional Thanksgiving food like turkey and yams. The other was a Mexican Thanksgiving party, which was in fact a celebartion of my housemate's anniversary of moving in to his house, and it just happened to fall around Thanksgiving. And Mexico is viewed as an antonym of the USA I guess. And it probably created a good cover story for drinking beer and tequila for 15 hours and playing loud Mexican music. Mexican Thanksgiving solely involved Mexican foods and drinks and games. This meant 3 different types of tequila ( one with the traditional scorpion preserved in the bottom ), Corona, nachos, burritos, a piñata, sombreros, wearing shirts with just the top button fastened, saying "essay" a lot, putting Riche Valen's La Bamba o...

Celebrating Christmas in other countries isn't a first for me, for example I once celebrated Christmas in China a few years ago. Celebrating Christmas in China felt strange, but not incredibly alien. Hardly anyone where I was living celebrated it, but at least it was cold, I had to have lots of extra blankets on my bed, I had to wear more clothes and Chinese New Year was relatively close to Christmas, so there were festivites and ample decorations. It's an even strange experience here in Australia though. Not a horrible, uncomfortable strange. Mainly because it's quite warm and sunny. Christmases have become synonymous with bitterly cold weather, grey semi frozen slush (commonly referred to as snow in parts of the UK...although this year from what I've been told it will be quite a white Christmas), warm houses, boilers breaking, breath condensation at all times of the day, almost permanent darkness, being mystified why the Tube is so hot in summer and yet so cold...

This was on the news this morning and thought I'd share it, a website about a huge teenage warbling American talent (t.w.a.t for short).....;) http://lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com/ Brilliant.

I met up with Sean on Sunday evening. We've known each other for a few years. Sean's been in Australia for a few months; travelling about, learning to scuba dive, shagging girls. General British tourist behaviour in Australia. So, we met up in Sydney city centre, mooched about, ate a few burgers, watched a thoroughly uninspiring, unenthuasiastic guy from the West Country perform a "circus trick" where he sat on a bmx on a maypole 10 ft above the ground and juggled a knife, a flaming percussion mallet and an apple (one of my friends, Adam, standing next to me also watching said "hahaha wow, look at that, he's just eating the fucking apple. What a load of shit!". In between my laughter all I could say was "yeah, he's probably hungry"). Bizarrely the performer also suggested to me, out loud, to jump in front of the little passenger train car that was going past, and he then had a go at a little boy for playing with a rope and posited t...