Rose Street is somewhat like the famous York Shambles but with more pubs and less Romans. Princes Street is an adjacent hellhole – chav clobber galore and rickety buses – but Rose Street almost takes the stench away. A lovely street.
Category Archives: Travel
Ryanair aren’t even the Lada of the skies.
Ryanair are fucking dreadful. A flight with them is always an ordeal. The gate is called and you rock up to find a big fuck-off queue with no plane in sight; the staff are pumped-up scavengers, stalking the heaving gate for any carry-on item with dimensions bigger than a tub of Bold 2-in-1 Washing Capsules; their luggage policy metamorphoses weekly from nuts to bonkers to insane then back to nuts; the interior of the plane makes one sick in its tackiness; you can’t get a wink of sleep for lottery or scratch card announcements and trolley-dollies peddling hyperinflated savoury snacks. What else? Oh yeah, there’s quite the high probability that your flight will be cancelled. This is when the ground staff disappear into a bush which features in a Homer Simpson meme.
Ryanair staff in a crisis.
Worst airline ever. Yet we still fly with them in droves because we’re either poor or miserly.
Bigfoot on London Road, Edinburgh.
I must confess I found this most amusing – three seats symmetrically arranged for the grand spectacle that is a foot sculpture in a park. Is the purpose to sit there and stare at it? Amidst the dog shit and the litter, the football casuals and the junkies, this monument to the human foot is the regal gateway to Leith.
Wee drizzle on London Road.
I’ll never understand why the alleged ‘hard-as-nails’ denizens of Edinburgh shit their nappies when the rain arrives; you’d think it’s a hurricane descending upon The Burgh, Bill Paxton en route with his gear.
Here is a standard ‘thunderstorm’ … and a pale local (based on physiognomy most likely a junkie) with an umbrella eyeballing me as he sucks on a lollipop. Wanker.
Berwick-upon-Tweed.
A secluded beach in Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is I have been told the northernmost town in England. It’s alright; the Morrisons is large and there is also a McDonald’s. And this wee beach is sort of cinematic. The locals speak funny – a bit like Gazza but slightly more coherent.
Lost got … lost.
Remember a TV show called Lost? It was semi-gnarly for the first eight or something episodes. And then it was like … total shite, and of course meaningless. I never saw a narrative so pointlessly meandering, and I’ve sat through Fellini’s 8½ (1963).
By the second season I wish the plane that crash-landed in the pilot episode would have blown into smithereens. Utter pish. I still to this day don’t know how it ended.
The thing jumped the shark and all that.
The Buzludzha monument.
No, that’s not a UFO or something out of Prometheus (2012); it’s the awfully baffling Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria, an admittedly futuristic remnant in the brutalist architectural style from the country’s wretched dalliance with communism. Like all pillars of the Eastern Bloc age, it reveals the hubris and folly of the state. No wonder that vast Soviet experiment went tits-up when instead of making the economics work, governments were concentrating on this nonsense. The thing, whatever it is, cost a fucking fortune.
The monument’s interior – mosaics of commie stalwarts – is closed to the public. The official line is that it’s now too dangerous to enter, but one suspects it’s frankly too embarrassing a spectacle.
It does reveal a truth, though – the lengths totalitarian states will go to awe the worker bees into submission.
Further reading:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/buzludzha-monument
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-communist-monoliths-of-bulgaria
Four days in Porto.
Back to Portugal again, but this time the heady delights of Porto instead of last year’s Algarve. Arriving in the middle of a heatwave, I sweat my tits off for the remainder of the trip; as milk was a bad choice for Ron Burgundy, so here was my predilection for trousers and sweatshirts. No matter, the situation was somewhat rectified (t-shirt donned) after a decidedly traumatising wait in a sauna of a taxi rank. It’s a lovely city replete with multi-layered sandwiches and aesthetically pleasing denizens eating the sandwiches. For the record, I didn’t eat any sandwiches. I did, however, source cheap mushroom pâté from a convenience store. Winning.
The Patrick Bateman Palace.
Phil Collins accompanied this cheeky vape in the apartment. “No smoking,” said the agent. I’d like to think I’m half-rebellious, but not full-anarchist. The place was plush, an impressively air-conditioned getaway from the sadistic Teletubbies sun.
Super Bock.
This is the de facto Portuguese national beer. In the local supermarket 24 bottles will set you back six euros. For some perspective on the matter, a warm, dirty pint in an Edinburgh boozer/hovel will cost you £4. Super, indeed.
Jumpers.
I thought this bloke was gonna chuck himself off the bridge, i.e., kill himself. I took a snap for longevity. Fortunately, he was a member of the local money-making youth, many of whom dive into the river for tourists’ shrapnel. I didn’t give him anything (because I’m stingy).
Arty-Farty pretentions.
There was a moment of sadness on this jaunt. I could have taken a simple point-and-shoot snap of an inviting building, but instead chose to shove my ersatz Liam Gallagher sunglasses in the frame in an attempt to arty-farty it up, to just be that shamelessly banal.
Ryanair.
And fuck Ryanair. Shockingly awful once again. No further comment.
Sat on my arse in Frankfurt.
Guzzling ethanol and listening to deadmau5 in my chav trainers. And that’s Frankfurt.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 
