It’s been a long time since my last email so rather than send a mammothly huge email I’m just sending a gargantuan one. I’m going to have to summarise these cities, partly for brevity, partly because they’re not so fresh in my mind and partly because this French keyboard is going ooh la la on me a bit too much for easy typing. I’m aiming to make brevity my war cry but knowing me I’ll ramble on as much as always. So here we go – all the way back to Italy.
FLORENCE
I was diverted here by a quest for leather gloves for my sister but the fact that most of the worl”s Renaissance art resides in Florence is as much of a reason to go as any. My tourist detector was redlining after Rome and Venice so it was not a pleasant surprise to find that half of America had decided to cram into Florenc”s narrow streets. The word on everyone’s lips was David. Have you seen David? Where’s David? They weren’t talking about your humble author but the famous statue. I didn’t go to see it as I can just strip naked and look in the mirror for some living art. I saw the statue on some postcards and I’m a dead ringer for David, apart from the body hair, which I suspect was too hard for even Michelangelo to sculpt.
Florence might have been an enchanting and amazingly creative little town once but it has whored itself for the tourist dollar. Hordes of shops gather around a shrivelled and slimy river. Every hill is crowded with private villas that take up any possible view. This leaves people to sunbake on concrete by the side of a river that smells like shit. There is some amazing art at the Uffizi Gallery but how many paintings of Madonna and child do you need to see in one lifetime. I left with a bad taste in my mouth.
TURIN
This was my bid to get as close as possible to Spain without staying in France. Turin is in the north west corner of Italy surrounded by mountains and apart from the fact that a shroud came from here I didn’t know a lot about the place. I still don’t know that much about the place other than it was great to be somewhere where people gave me strange looks for carrying a big bag through town. The natives were a strange ethnic mix with a lot of Phillipinos and Eastern Europeans. I spent a great Sunday afternoon wandering in the park by the river with the families and enjoying not doing anything. I stayed for one night.
LYON
I entered France with trepidation. The French can sense when you don’t like them and return it with icy cold disdain. So it was in my first brush with a frog. The conductor on the train looked like a plump Napoleon with thinner hair and beady, piggy eyes. I desperately, irrationally, wanted to get to Spain by that day. In a typical froggy bid to be different the train system at Lyon confused me. I stayed for two hours.
MONTPELLIER
I arrived at Montpellier after sneaking on a high speed train and avoiding detection. I had been travelling for eight hours. The noticeboard at the station said the train to Barcelona left in 15 minutes. I stayed in Montpellier for 15 minutes.
BARCELONA
The subject of this email should really read THE TRAINS IN SPAIN ARE FOOKIN’ SHIT. They take double the time they should to get anywhere, mainly because they go at half the speed and stop in the middle of nowhere for extended periods. I arrived in Barcelona after travelling for 13 hours but got out of the station somewhere familiar, as I had been to the city before. I stayed for one night.
ZARAGOZA
This is on the way from Barcelona to Bilbao. I didn’t intend to go there. I didn’t know it existed. When I got on the train the conductor flinched when I showed him my rail pass and started talking to me in Spanish. I just nodded and looked tired, as I knew what he was saying. I can let you on but if someone else has reserved that seat then you have to get off. That’s how I ended up in this northern Spanish city. The highlight was a beer vending machine with a sticker warning people under 18 not to use it. I don’t think that’s going to stop a 16 year old with a pocket full of change and looking for a buzz. I certainly felt better afterwards. I stayed for one night.
VALENCIA
I had to go somewhere after Zaragoza and the only train I could catch for free was going here. I had heard good rumours about the place and they had oranges so off I went. Valencia smelt like shit and was crowded. The only remarkable feature was a river, not made up of water, but parkland and dirt football pitches. I didn’t get it. I stayed in a cave for one night.
MADRID
Madrid was my saviour. The streets smell nice, are leafy and cool, and even though the hostel was full I found a nice pension. I played charades with the woman that owned it for a while but she won so I gave her some money. Madrid was also home to the Prado Gallery which features some Goya just as he starts to switch from doing portraits to featuring leering madmen and ugly children. It was a welcome change and I enjoyed staying for two days.
Spain was a massive disappointment to me, mainly because I couldn’t get anywhere that I wanted to go. The terrain in between the large cities conjures up images of a wave of banditos rising up out of the distance and storming the train. Unfortunately nothing that exciting happens in modern-day train travel and I was left to ruminate on the dryness and inhospitability of the terrain. I was beginning to wonder how the Spanish ever managed to get an empire together as I was greeted by countless abandoned stations in the wasteland.
It’s only as you get on the trains around Valencia and Madrid that you begin to see the Spanish crop – a lot of wheat. I’m talking about hundreds of kilometres of fields. It’s also a stark reminder of why Spanish wine isn’t the best. They have their vineyards competing with rocks in the desert for sun. Most of my time in Spain was spent sitting on a train looking at this kind of thing until I went back to Barcelona.
This time I didn’t bother with the sights. I splashed out and hired a villa in the hills just outside the city where I staged a three-day long orgy with some porn starlets I had arranged to meet there. My favourite part was when Rebecca stimulated my anus with a lark’s tongue. After the orgy I was quite tired and got lost several times looking for a laundry, once walking in a complete circle.
My bid to get out of Barcelona did not go well. The trains were booked out with a six-and-a-half hour wait to buy tickets. I decided to do the yuppie backpacker special and take to the skies, sneering at the train travellers below.
I honestly thought my flight left at 2:55 pm. I mean – absolutely positive. I arrived at the ticket counter at told the lady this. She looked worried as she told me there were no flights then, soon telling me I was on the 1:40 flight. I assured her she was wrong but as she sorted it out for me a thought drifted in that perhaps she was right. I had done it again – missed another flight. Luckily for me the ladies at Air Europa are a lot more understanding than those Lufthansa swine and she put me on a later flight with a bunch of French teenagers as punishment. I was heading to their hometown of Paris. Spain looks amazing from the air. Gone are the endless patches of nothing, replaced with a patchwork of light brown fields broken up with mountains. It’s the only way to get around the place and I’ll be abandoning the train on future visits. Now that that’s out of the way I’ll let you recover before I regale with tales of gay Paree.
Dave out.
