Video upload #2!!

(If you're reading this on Facebook: Either go to www.patrickneasey.blogspot.com to watch the video, or look in my profile where I posted it in my status recently.)

This video is an update from my hitch-hiking trip with Maria over the past couple of weeks, taken in Koper, Slovenia. More details of the trip are coming in a blog post very soon.

All the best,

Patrick

Hitch-hiking with Maria and beyond

It's getting harder to update this thing! Weeks go by just like that *snaps fingers*.

So I've been on a bit of an adventure since my last post. Maria (from Dresden) and I have been on a hitch-hiking trip we'd been planning for a while. I won't bore you with all the details, instead I'll attempt to put in some of the things I particularly enjoyed as well as a rough run-through of the route.

We began in Graz, having both successfully hitch-hiked there from different places. Graz is a nice city in Austria and we had even nicer hosts.

We've been through Slovenia from top to bottom. First Maribor, then the capital Ljubljana, all the way to the coastal towns of Koper and Piran. We've had fun in a road-trip style van with two Slovenian friends and even more fun hanging out with Erasmus students in Koper - our host was a girl from Finland, her best friend was Lithuanian, and there were others from tons more places. Yep.

We walked over the border into Croatia.

In Croatia, though not as hot and tourist-infested as it would have been in summer, we stayed with some great hosts in Rijeka and Zagreb.

In Zagreb, we were even inspected while fare-dodging on the tram but the guy was far less strict and intelligent than the German inspectors and it was pretty easy to just walk around him to the exit door and avoid any possible fine.

From Zagreb, Maria successfully hitch-hiked north back to Dresden because her school holidays had come to an end. I successfully hitch-hiked to the eastern city of Osijek, and from there across the Serbian border to the capital city, Belgrade.

This was the city I chose a few days earlier to be the city of my 19th birthday, and what a birthday it was. I couldn't have picked a better place to CouchSurf. I was hosted by Natacha, a Belgian student living and studying in Belgrade, and her French room-mate Amelie. We also had another CouchSurfer at the same time, Simon from Germany. On my birthday, around 30 more people came for a party that just happened to take place in this apartment on this day, and they came from a wide range of countries. Around 3 were actually from Serbia I think. We had lots of drinks and conversations before going out clubbing, in a night that lasted one extra hour because of the end of daylight saving time.

I had a slight hiccup in my plans today - I got up earlier than usual and got myself out to a hitch-hiking spot with a bus. My destination was Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But I never made it. Not one Serbian person stopped for me in around 3-4 hours of attempted hitch-hiking from 3 different spots. By the late afternoon I was fed up with the whole concept of hitch-hiking and became a quitter. Unlike the time I had to sleep on the grass in Leipzig, this time I was able to get the buses back to the city centre and surprise Natacha and Amelie with the bad news. They were totally cool with me staying for an extra unexpected night.

This cuts Bosnia and Herzegovina out of my trip because tomorrow I was going to go back to Zagreb, now I'll be making this journey from Belgrade rather than Sarajevo, and I won't be risking another hitch-hike. I'll take a train like a normal person. ARE YOU HAPPY SERBIA? IS MY SPIRIT CRUSHED ENOUGH FOR YOUR LIKING?

Before I go, here's yet another video update, somewhere in the middle of Croatia just before I'm taken to Belgrade by a nice man, his son, and his son's friend, all of whom spoke great English.

from Belgrade (for the last night this time, I hope!)

Patrick

Crazy people

Crazy people are the best type of people. I don't mean people who have something wrong with their mind. I just mean people who are interesting, laid-back and who are up for almost everything.

I've mostly been hanging out with these people over the past week. I left my last blog hanging as I got on a train with the destination of Altenburg airport. I'm pleased to report that everything went smoothly and I was able to fly to London, something I spontaneously decided to do while I was in Belgium.

I was there to visit Alex, the girl who I spent a few days with after that long hitch-hike I wrote about. This time, it was a 5-day visit to her new apartment in London. She's just started studying photography, but doesn't let this get in the way of her being a crazy person for a living.

I spent these five days with Alex and her fellow crazy friends. There are her two room-mates, David and the Polish guy whose name we can't pronounce. There is her future room-mate Joe, a CouchSurfer from Singapore called Jas, and a few people I talked to at a CouchSurfing meeting. It's so easy to get on with this kind of people. The world should be full of them.

They introduced me to the wonderful world of independent cinema.

I accomplished something the other day.

I took a bus from London to Amsterdam and I managed to sleep for maybe 9 of the 12 hours that made up the journey. Stoked. I arrived in Amsterdam not tired at all, and was soon surrounded by more crazy people. I CouchSurfed with a girl called Kayley who's a Malaysian with an Australian accent, and her room-mate Natalie. Jack also came up from Belgium to apparently start living and working in Amsterdam. He stayed with us as well. There were also two more crazy CouchSurfers in the place. Over the two days I spent there, we had some great times. Funnily enough, most of our conversations ended up being about bicycles and weed.

Today I used a fresh new Eurail pass to spend around 11 hours on trains that took me from Amsterdam through Germany and all the way to Vienna, Austria. This marks the beginning of a two-ish-week hitch-hiking trip with Maria, my friend from Dresden. A slight hiccup in our trip is that Maria failed to hitch-hike to Vienna from Prague today, and is spending the night in Brno instead. Hopefully we will meet up in Graz tomorrow.

Crazy times ahead.

Oktoberfest!

The world's biggest beer festival takes place over two weeks each and every year in Munich, the capital of the German state of Bavaria. It used to be in October, but they brought the date forward many years ago because they kept getting bad weather during the festival. It now starts in September and finishes on the first weekend of October.

And I went there! (I even went in October as well!)

Having spent a great few days with Jack and Alice in Belgium, which included CouchSurfing with some really cool people, fare-dodging the Brussels transport system every single time we used it, and eating a heart-cloggingly tasty Belgian snack that involves sausages and chips in a baguette, I spent the entire 30th of September on six different trains that eventually took me from Brussels to Munich.

I met up with Steph Gough and Lauren Anderson, two school friends, and Bec, a girl from Victoria who did a placement with Steph before they went travelling together.

We spent three nights in our own apartment - I managed to find a nice CouchSurfing host for us, but after letting us into her place, she had to go to some other city for work for a few days, and allowed us to stay in her place by ourselves!

Thursday the 1st began with a walking tour of Munich, then we headed to the Theresienwiese, the site of the Oktoberfest festival. After finding space in a beer garden next to a giant beer tent, we spent the next several hours with some more loud Australians - Madi, another friend from Steph's placement, was there with her Dad and her older brother, and a few more friends of her older brother. They were already tanked.

The Oktoberfest beer is a special beer that's only brewed for the festival, and comes in one-litre glasses at around 8.60€ a litre (like $15?) which is massively expensive of course. After my first glass, I was hesitant to buy more, because I'm trying not to splash out money right now, but I was shouted more by the others who were in no such financial trouble and hated to see a guy sitting at Oktoberfest without a beer!

After just two and a half glasses (I think), I was surprisingly drunk and having a good time. All of us were. We had some loud conversations and took some funny photos and videos until 11pm came and it was time to close.

Before closing time, I'd gone for a walk, and I'd found a beer glass from the famous Hofbräuhaus beer tent, outside on the ground. This is rare - many of these one-litre glasses used to be stolen from the festival until they introduced security and bag checks in 2008 and recovered 220,000 attempted thieveries! This year there is a 50€ fine if you're caught sneaking off with a glass, and a security guy at every beer tent door. So finding one outside the security zone made me happy. I picked it up and hid it between some trees, hoping nobody would find it as I went back to join the others.

When closing time came, I told the three girls I'd meet them at the main entrance. I drunkenly walked back to my hiding spot and retrieved the beer glass, then hiding it under my jumper, walked around to the main entrance. I don't remember my thought process then, but something made me decide to take the glass out and just hold it behind my back. I accidentally dropped it in doing so, and it shattered on the ground, and I quickly rushed away before anybody tried to fine me for breaking a glass.

But, by that time, I had got it into my head that I'd be going home with a beer glass, and breaking one wasn't going to stop me if I could help it. I was drunk and had a mission. I walked quickly back to the Hofbräuhaus tent, went into the beer garden area, found a glass that the waiters hadn't picked up yet, put it under my jumper and walked quickly back out past the security guard. The security guard reached out and put his hand in front of me, trying to stop me so he could check me, but i just kept walking quickly, straight ahead, straight ahead, hoping I wasn't being followed, hardly able to believe I'd just done what I'd done, and even less able to believe I'd got away with it.

I then went back to the main entrance, found the girls, and we walked to the underground station. I was still scared that one of the security guys herding people through the station would stop me, but the glass wasn't very visible. Once we were back at the apartment, I was finally able to breathe a sigh of celebratory relief. Although the relief was somehow lessened by me being sick.

I was still feeling rubbish the next morning and it didn't look like we were going to the festival anytime soon. The girls went to a concentration camp while I got on the internet and organised my life for the next week or so. I'd already been to a concentration camp near Berlin and one is enough for a while.

We made it to Oktoberfest later, but weren't able to find the others again. We didn't get drunk this time, just walked around the entire place looking at some of the rides and stuff. I bought souvenirs for myself and for my mother and brother, who have birthdays coming up. When closing time came, this time it was Lauren who found a glass - on the ground in the festival site, with some beer still in it. Rather than look suspicious by hiding it, she decided to just carry it in front of her as normal. If security stopped her, she was just going to say she didn't know she wasn't allowed to take it with her and innocently hand it over to them. We made it out the front entrance and after a longer-than-was-necessary walk, found an underground station and made it home with Lauren's glass safe and sound. We did some cooking and washing up before heading to bed.

I got just over 3 hours of sleep before getting up again. I had to get everything sorted and pack my bag then catch an organised ride share at 6am after saying goodbye to the girls. For 20€, the driver took me from Munich to Dresden. In Dresden, I dropped my guitar off with my friend Ria and am hopefully about to get in a train that takes me to Altenburg, where an airport is...