Hobo. The Journey Continues

So after the brief sojourn with the Lyonnaise Police department behind me, i headed to Grenoble.. A little city up in the mountains, away from Paris which was fun..  It also, as i found out later happened to be in the Chartreuse region of the world..

So after a few days hanging out with my mate Olivier, i jumped on a train to Geneva, where i was going to meet up with a guy off couchsurfing, who lived in this crazy punk house.. got to his house, called him up and he was at this party on the other side of town.. i dumped my bags and headed off on a bus, cross town. 5am and a dozen supermarket beers later it was party time back at the punk house..

stayed in geneva a very expensive 3 days, and an even more expensive train trip back to france, to go to Mulhouse to visit my buddy Anthony, where it was Vin Chaud all the way to the top..

(sorry. im the mucous man at the moment.. i cant think of anything clever to write..)

But in other News, the fun news.. From Mulhouse, the plan was always to hitch-hike to Berlin.. or at least somewhere in Germany.

So i woke up at like 6am, hopped on a bus out of town and walked to the freeway onramps, and wrote a sign on my sketchbook to ‘Allemagne’ (the french dont have similar names for countries like everyone else.. they just have to be different.) After 30 minutes of waiting, some Europcar guys took me to the border and dropped me at the bridge to Germany. I walked across, which was nice, i suppose.. From there, Frank drove me to Freiborg, and talked to me about some exchange students from melbourne who are staying with him.. Affie drove me in his truck from Freiborg to Offenberg with his Border Collie.. i waited in the rain talking to Gorge from Bulgaria who was the toilet attendent at a truckstop there, for about 2 hours, before Miroslav from Slovakia drove me to a truckstop just north of Frankfurt, when for the first time ever, i actually awarded myself a vague point..

Thinking to myself.. “Why the fuck have they concreted all the embankments next to the Autobahn?? and why does it extend beyond the embankments?? Whats the point??”  This being in the centre of Germany, where it has on occasion been known to snow. A lot.. It took me about 20 minutes to figure that one out.. So Bessie – look out, I’m catching up.

Tony the Portuguese/German drove me from Frankfurt to Hannover, where i stupidly thought it would be cheap/easy to catch a train from there to Berlin. Trains to the capital? go all the time dont they? and cheap? no on both counts. I was too exhausted and couldnt be arsed anymore so i bought a ticket, some beers and caught a train to a small city kinda in between the two and got drunk and fell asleep at the station.. (By this stage it was midnight..) I got to Berlin 27 hours after id left Mulhouse, which by all accounts is pretty quick for hitching.. Fun times though.. it turns out every single truck driver smokes like a champion, so it was great fun riding high above everyone else, swearing in different languages and smoking millions of cigarettes..

So Berlin huh? Fun city. Easy to be poor (like me.. im getting into calling the folks territory fast.)

So thats it for now. Its beer beer beer, poland on the weekend, gluhwein at night, and vegan cooking. Good times.

Back in london on the 17th of December. In time to be even more poor..

some totally weird shit

found it today.

hangin out in montpellier with my new buddy charlotte.. just had a nap, ate some freshly baked artisan baguettes just with butter and a bit of salt (totally fucken awesome btw.. none of that crap shit you get in england or spain..)

about to head back out and walk around a town i don’t know totally aimlessly like a zombie during a brain drought.

was in barca for a week, valencia for a few days before that, and am heading towards lyon and paris over the next week or so. fun times.

the Hobo traveller. Part One – Portugal & Southern Spain.

So. the trip begins..

I flew to Faro, southern Portugal on the 20th, and headed towards the hostel that i had booked, with the plan to just get there, chill and figure out where i could go. But as i was getting progressively more lost in Faro itself en route to the hostel, it turns out there was a week long, once a year festival type thingo in the town square.. Good timing. It was a good sign. So i found where i was going, dropped off my shit and headed back to the festival, drank some beers and stuffed my face with all sorts of portuguese chorizo, ham and then a whole lotta churras and fasturas. Good times..

It was still sunny the next day so i figured i’d head to Olhao, and jump on a ferry to one of the islands nearby and pitch a tent.. which turned out exactly how i figured. I pitched a tent on Armona, an island near to Olhao, ate chorizo and cheese and went for a swim in the afternoon. simple.. same thing the next morning and then back to olhao, where i jumped on a train to Vila Real de Santa Antonio, on the border to Spain. It was shit and it was raining, so i jumped onto the first bus leaving the bus station, headed to a place called Marim Longo..

This was a funny funny place.. the bus took like 2 and a half hours, and by the time it got there, it was already dark, so i figured that i’d just go and get drunk, at least the football was on and i could smoke inside, so as bars go, the boxes were ticked.. Then it turns out, after 60 cent bottles of beer, and sporting Lisbon scored, this crazy old guy named Javier came and joined me and he sterted telling me about how the guy sitting on the table next to us is the second best piano-accordian player in all of Marim Lungo but it was hard for him, even though he could play the guitar, the pan flute and piano.. Then once the bar closed i slept in the bus stop. Hobo points.

From there, I crossed the border into Spain and hung out in Ayamonte for a bit, and checked in an internet place where might be cool to pitch a tent.. Bought a book, caught a bus to Huelva and from there a bus to Punta Umbria, where i walked (in the sun.. oh yeah) outside of town, past a supermarket, and onto the beach.. pitched the tent, went for a swim and smoked like 8 million cigarettes, read the book and did absolutely nothing. At all. In the sun. The same one i didn’t see most of summer in England.. 2 days fuck yeah.

Bus back to Huelva, Bus to Seville. Found a hostel, booked in for the weekend, had a shower and made full use of the siesta, which turns out to be less about closing everything, but more about going for a really long drunken lunch.. So i walked around town, back and forth through the little streets, looking for that elusive awesomely spanish bar.. the one i’d always imagined. Then i found it.  No ashtrays. No barstools, it only had 20 person capacity, there were two massive barrels of wine behind the bar, bottles with 50 years of dust on them, and to top it off, the barman was an old guy named Pepe. fucken rad.. i drunk with some of the regulars and then there was a bit of a lock-in. great afternoon really.. then i had a nap. Met some aussies, some kiwis, some canadians, some americans and we all ended going out and smash baggin it over jugs of sangria in a flamenco bar.. good times

Train to Malaga, train to Fuengirola.. met my Danish buddy Jakob in fuengirola and went to his place, drank some beers and figured out where we could go, him being unemployed as well.. so we hired a car, went to the first round of the Volvo Masters golf tourney at the Valderamma golf course, Gibraltar – which is pretty much a big rock where you can see africa and covered in monkeys, Tarifa and Ronda.. stopping at a few other places along the way.. Fucken hilarious road trip – culminating in a drunken evening at a really awesome Tapas bar in Ronda (incidently it also had an old guy named Pepe behind the bar) where, on account you can smoke inside still, we had no need to get up, apart from going to the toilet, so for the first time in years, i ended doing that one when you dont realise how drunk you really are until you stumble out.. Shit hangover. back to Fuengirola.. Prawn day. oh yeah..

and thats up to date. ish.. photos to come when im not lazy

and then it went north

..so there was a hectic couple of days where it was THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in the world to buy a ticket to norway to go hang out with funky mark lawler, so on the positive vibe there’ll be an international bender going on, the flights were booked. turns out funky mark and his marky bunch were going to be on their road trip 15 hours away on the other side of norway. ah well. its no-ones fault really.. who wouldve thought me of all people couldve been so proactive at buying plane tickets?

yeah my point exactly. still.. cant wait to get there

ps new menu at work means all work and no play makes brendan a dull boy. 16 hour day no breaks suck.

photos of some new work and the latest in the english summer of drink to come.. word

some old some new..

some flix of some old artwork, and some of the new pages in my sketchbook..

more to come.. enjoy it!

1. Phoenix / Griffin tattoo sketch for my stooge mate danny connock

2. Illustration for Is Not Magazine

3. Sketch for a wine bottle exhibition at ACCA in melbourne..

4. Danni from Coventry

5. Porchia

6. Wall painted for a friend Phoebe at the Wheatsheaf

7. Wall in the basement at the Southwark Tavern..

Hola Senor Tres!

So i started a blog a couple of weeks ago, but soon reaised i had nothing to write about.  But since then, i’ve been travelling, got a new job, and snuck a card up my sleeve..

So as for the travelling part, i went from Vienna to Berlin, via Ceske Krumlov, Prague, Kraj Liberic and Dresden. I flew into Vienna for a week and hung out with my housie Judith and another friend Niki (ps thanks again for putting me up!) and went on a tour of Viennese late night sausage stands.. Then it started getting funny. I caught a train across the border into Ceske and had a fairly drunken may day, when it dawned on me to never listen to my mate Danny ever again. That idiot i was going to meet up with in Prague said when we were organising the trip that there was no need to book accommodation, and we’d sort it out on the day.  Yeah good one Susan..

So come Prague, there’s absoluteley no accommodation at all, being the may day holiday and all.. Shit.  Lucky we could drink in Prague for sweet fuck all. Brahnik’s 9 koruna anyone? (ps 1 pound gets you 32 koruna. fuck yeah) So we end up drinking all night and then going to a titty bar til the early hours and then slept in a park. Great start to Czech..  

Then we decided to travel north to Kraj Liberic, a province of Czech.. Yeah, turns out to be a shithole.. But on a night out in Liberic, we wondered round trying to find bars (who would’ve thought in the magical beer land?) but after getting pretty loaded I found a burger place on the side of the road (bad idea) and Danny saw there was a bar next to it..  So we walk in, and it turns out to be a Gypsy bar. It was tense, until Danny ended up chatting with the owner and it just ended up being a laugh.

Next day, 3 trains to various small Czech towns, we decided to just go to Dresden, which turns out to be the best idea we could’ve made. It turns out that in Germany, people are much more helpful when you just rock up without booking accomodation, so after checking a tinternet cafe for local hostels, we started walking to one of them, which was full. After hearing that a million times in Czech, we started to walk out, but the girl at reception told us to wait, and did a ring around, and told us to go to another one, which may have had a no show. (it was still may day weekend, and it seemed every hostel was booked) We went there and were told to come back at 11 when it was the earliest they could give away the booked room..  So 2 beers later we went back to some bad news.. I was gearing up to sleep in a park again, but the second reception girl called around, and we were in luck..  not just any luck, hostel on a boat luck.. Fuck yeah.  It also turns out that there are an infinite amount of bars that are open compared to the north of Cesky.. But it also turns out that dodgy burgers make you really sick.  And by 12 i was feeling it. Shit.

Next day, i’ve recovered, ate a massive breakfast, and then went to the Bahnhof to go to Berlin. Now i’ve heard good things about Berin, but i didn’t realise how fun it would be.  Me and Danny wanted to get tattoos, and get really drunk. Standard really.. By this stage, we learnt quick smart and had booked accomodation beforehand.. Sunday night, Berlin. The stage was set.

I picked up one of those boggo tourist maps at the hostel, and it seemed alright, because at least it had a few tattoo shops on there. It also made mention of a bar called Wild at Heart, so i decided that at least it would be a decent start..  turns out we didnt really need to leave. After a pint there, we went on a tour of offies around the area, which all seemed to have tables and chairs out the front, and then came back for a descent into chaos.. Now if you know me, you’d preobably know that i dont really like punk..  But Danny and his flouro pink mohawk does, which made it pretty funny, because en route to Prague, he’d bought Stone Cold’s biography, which both of us had read by the time we got to Berin.  Which also made us think we were top flight wrestling superstars. It was also funny when Danny was skanking away to this band on stage, I came seemingly out of nowhere, and BAM! DDT. It was on..  turns out also that i make a great heel.. everyone watching the band hated me. It was awesome. That was pretty much the tone of the 3 days in Berlin.  En route back to the hostel, we discovered Schawarma..  MY GOD.

Back in London, weeks earlier, i got supremely drunk drinking double scotch on a friday night, and berated a regular, who’s one of the head chefs around the corner from the pub i worked at.. I kept asking him for a job, something i have complete memory loss of. Turns out he could remember and got me a job.. Farken hilarious.  So now im working as a chef in this really nice kitchen. Result.

As for a card up my sleeve, check it out. Its for my kids back home. taking one for the team. I was ging to keep it secret, but i couldnt help myself.