I´ve been reading a bit of Dorothy Parker lately, and I found this little corker that I thought I would share with you.

Resume
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren´t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Where has this woman been all my life?

Rather fond of their porn, these Austrians. Rather fond indeed.

Dinner
I fell in with a cool crowd of Americans while I was in Vienna. I´ve made plans to catch up with each set of them (they came in pre-packaged pairs) in the next couple of weeks -- here´s hoping that all our vaguely made plans come together. We were staying in a cool little hostel that was a converted apartment with one (open) dorm room and a living room. There were never more than about six people staying on any one night, so socialising was a piece of cake. And an easy introductory topic of conversation was "so just how crazy do you think the hostel owner is?"

Anyway, we hung out doing the tourist thing in Vienna for a couple of days, including the Opera and a Dali museum. But the last night that Ned & Megan were in town, we had a dinner party in our hostel. There was no-one else staying the in hostel that night, so it felt like we had our own apartment in Vienna. Overcome by the excitement of this thought, I began calling it Our Dinner Party In Vienna (probably something like WienWurstNacht in the native German). I was in charge of dessert procurement, and the fine Austrian bakeries enabled me to execute my responsibilities with the greatest gusto. Like all good dinner parties, the conversation flowed uncontrollably, aided by the cheap and ... um ... "robust" wine and the cheap and delicious beer. Topics included what was wrong with America (a topic that somehow reduced me to a supporting role, despite my Trampan tenure), travel plans and destinations, and later on in the night, the inevitable rise of global communism as the only viable form of society. Like I said, there was wine. (Annie, did we agree a date for the people´s revolution? I´ve lost my copy of the minutes.)

As you can imagine, we really felt a sense of camaraderie with each other by the end of all of this. I feel really lucky, like I´ve had one of the highlights of my trip less than one week after landing in Europe.

Lunch
I was struck on my very first day in Vienna that I don´t have the vocabulary to do justice to what I was seeing around me. For instance, I had lunch that day in the Fine Arts Museum, and I was so overpowered that I stayed and wrote this description of what I saw. Remember, this is where I had lunch -- you can imagine what the rest of the museum was like.

It´s an octagonal hall, with a dome that reaches at least fifty metres above the ground. The effect is stupendous. The colours of the hall are from the black, grey and earth marble, the gold that is everywhere, part of everything that I describe, and the pale white marble of the statues. Each wall has a fifteen-metre high arch, support by two black marble pillars. To each side of the arches and above the pillars are life-size statues of people in court life -- carrying wine, acting, posing with a sword, unfurling a fan. Reach from above them and into the apex of the arch is a gold string of roses and sunflowers.

Above this are eight greater arches, encompassing all that we see on each wall, throwing more marble down to the floor, supporting balconies on what must be a second floor. Dazed museum-goers peer out of the balconies, unsure whether to look up, down or across. Framing them are more golden flowers and two statues of female griffins. Above each of these arches are two angels, alternatively trumpeting the call to battle and holding a crown of leaves for the victors. Higher still, and in the centre of the wall, are man-sized medallion portaits of Habsburg kings, flanked by subjects on either side.

Now, finally in the dome, we see a window, then each king´s royal crest and crown presented by tiny angels. The apex of the dome is an octagonal blue and golden window; a simple conclusion to a rich, ornamental room.

Opera
I can already feel the smile spreading on everyone that has been to Vienna, and already knows what an amazing experience the Viennese State Opera is. I saw one of Mozart´s most famous operas, The Magic Flute a few nights ago. I got a standing-room ticket for only €3.50, and even after the conversion to the pacific peso, that is pretty damn cheap. The standing room section is a little like a mosh pit, but the opera was much better than anything else I´ve seen in a mosh pit. (Yes Cam, even better than Marva Wright.) The performances were all incredible, but the set and the detail in co-ordinating the set with the action and chorus really blew my away. So, yes, I liked it. Worth the price of the plane ticket by itself. Well, nearly.

Dodgy Internet Cafe Nominees
The first nominee is Enjoy the WEB! in the tiny Austrian town of Melk. Dark lighting and a powerful stench of cigarette smoke gave a promising start to this establishment, but its nomination was truly earnt when I saw that the only two other patrons were both on internet chat sites, typing things like "schmergen schmergen sex schmergen". As you can imagine, I feel right at home.

The flight
It is a simple fact of life that all long-haul flights suck. There is just no such thing as an okay flight that is longer than two hours, with the possible exception of an overnight orgy of drugs and sex that just happens to touch down in Vienna. All that remains to talk about flights is how each one fulfilled its destiny of being torture on wings.

In my case, it took the form of a creature with all the cosmetic appearence of a cute Shirley-Temple-like four-vear-old girl but who had unfortunately been possessed by Satan for the duration of the flight. I'm sure I can leave you to fill in the blanks.

Don't you think?
In KL, my walk from the hotel to the train station took me right past the apparently infamous Putu jail. While the jail isn't used anymore, they've left it pretty much as it was when it was being used. One of the more charming features was a big-arse sign on one of the walls: "DEATH!! That's the mandatory sentence for drug trafficking in Malaysia." Fair enough. There are quite a few signs like that through Malaysia, even if they weren't quite so dramatic. But the beauty about this one is that there was a rave held at the jail just a few weeks before hand. Now, for the sake of argument, let's assume that some of the westerners at the rave popped some E. Would that be ironic? Popping pills in a jail with a big drug warning out the front?

Using the definition of irony to your right, examine this proposition in one hundred words or less. Extra marks for incorporating Alannis lyrics.

Well, judging from the reaction that I got, "harder.com" is suitably catchy, and has the added advantage of looking distinctly dodgy in any collection of bookmarks. It will do nicely for now.

I want a new name for this website -- "travelarama" doesn't do it for me. Any better suggestions?

Jamiroquai is playing in a Roman Arena in Croatia on June 14. Is anyone else going to be in the neighbourhood?

Malaysian Politics
Mahatir Mohammed spitting the dummy has been in the news every day since I've been here. So far, he's had words about those damn city dwellers (all 4 million of them?) who expect too much but won't give anything back (the goods and/or services they expect weren't mentioned) , and those lazy Muslims who aren't studying IT in the numbers he thinks they should. If I had an ego the size of Keating's (watch it...) then labelling him recalcitrant would be the least I could do. Anwar Ibrahim, on the other hand, is still in jail 4 years after he was arrested. He was in the news because he cancelled a hunger strike 24 hours into it because he had... the flu. Now, is it just me, or does his state reason seem to ignore the whole point of the hunger strike? Pulling out on medical advice? "My doctor has advised me against losing any more weight, so from now on I am only going to eat desert if it is my favourite, chocolate cake."

Malaysia
There are some beautiful and poetic names for places out there. Japan's name in Japanese really does mean "Land of the Rising Sun", "Australia" comes from the latin for "Great Southern Land", "New Zealand." in an obscure Maori dialect really means "We Of The Big Drinkers". (One of those is not true.) And then we have Kuala Lumpur, which means in Malay, and I shit you not, "muddy estuary". Really, guys, can we lift the bar just a little? The choice of name makes a little more sense when you realise that this was originally a British colony. Can't you just see Francis and Merriweather Smythe sailing up the river and thinking to themselves "This all looks a bit shite, doesn't it. River's pretty damn muddy, what?" and from there the legend is born. (But really, who would trust the British to start a colony anyway? Can you name one Brit that you would trust to run a 7/11, let alone a country? I thought not.)

Anyway, it's hot. Damn hot. The first few day I was walking short distances, in and out of airconditioned hide-outs. (God bless fast food stores.) But by today I've just given up. Sweat dripping off my shirt under the equatorial sun still feels pretty damn uncomfortable, but I have achieved a zen-like determination to ignore it.

Weird natives approaching me has been limited to Bob, who plays in a cover band that seems to specialise in Madonna. We had a good old chat, but he was a little upset when I told him I was neither going to come and see his band, nor stay with his Aunt that night. Everyone speaks pretty good English here, which was quite a pleasant surprise (with the possible exception of Bob). But when you do as little travel planning as moi, you get quite a few surprises, pleasant and otherwise.

I went on an extremely cool tree-top walk north of KL yesterday. About a 2 km hike up a mountain through dense forest (no wild orangutangs, unfortunately) and onto what is basically an aluminium ladder with some fishnet either side, suspended twenty metres above the canopy. Completely terrifying but absolutely amazing.