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7NNT25 – teaser
coming soon…
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SG24 – Day last
“Cold and final, the imagination shuts down its fabled summer house” are as true as any other words by Sylvia Plath and, metaphor or not, they are as good as any to kick off the last leg of this short sharp sweaty taste of Singapore. Caught up with N last night near Farrer Park, where we caught up on how the world is treating us and had some excellent vegetarian Indian food at a place where tourists don’t go on the corner of Racecourse Rd. Wonderfully thick palak paneer, flavourful palak tikka, creamy yellow dhal, rich and well spiced aloo gobhi, and cheesy naan that was so good to be…
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SG24 – Day 3
One day I’ll be too old to be standing on a couch in a drag bar next to a transgender cheering on drag queens at 1.30am. For better or worse, that time is yet to come. For all of the multitude of wrong that is the Hard Rock Cafe, the Singapore establishment has been hosting a regular Saturday night drag performance Riot! for some time. For 2-3 hours they close the main area and let Becca D’Bus and other queens take over the stage (while there are still diners upstairs, who are probably wondering what they’ve walked into).I’d booked a seat in the “nice” area, far enough back from the…
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SG24 – Day 2
The Swan Song bar is the wonderfully eclectic result of three very passionate whisky people. Since discovering this place in 2020, in their old location neat the Auld Alliance, I’ve had the pleasure of going to their current place last trip with L, and being back in town, went their again last night. I say eclectic as the whisky on offer is definitely not the standard bottlings, I’m not sure they even have any whiskies on offer that you could just pick up a bottle at a local outlet, instead there are rows of independent bottlings, limited releases, and single cask offerings. They might not have a single Ben Nevis…
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SG24 – Day 1
Flight was fine, boring and smooth just how I like them. Caught a couple of movies, Oversteer, a Singaporean movie set in Malaysia (I thing it was Singaporean, it was in the Singaporean Showcase tab) about families and street car racing, and The Roundup Punishment, a Korean cop movie starring Ma Dong-seok where he goes around and punches people (it’s possibly a sequel to others I’ve seen, as a lot of faces looked familiar). Took a Grab to the hotel, apparently it’s school holidays this week so things will be a bit quieter with families going away. Hotel is okay, good location, room is a little small and lacking in…
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SG24 – Day 0 Transit
July to September is the worst. Southern hemisphere winter, the cold, wet, dark, and no public holidays as far as the eye can see. Get up in darkness, go to work, go home and by the time the dog is walked it’s dark again. Five hours away sits Singapore, that Disneyland with the death penalty, lit up brighter than every xmas tree, where there’s almost always 12 hours of daylight, and while it might be wet, at least it’s warm. It’s a land where some happiness is guaranteed: just join any queue for food that has 10 locals; or take in an evening dram or three at the Auld Alliance…
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@home, 2024 | baltics24, estonia, europe, finland, helsinki, istanbul, latvia, lithuania, riga, tallinn, turkiye, vilnius
Baltics24: Days 19-20 – Istanbul – Home
Home. Not Istanbul, nor Constantinople, nor Byzantium. Not Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Helsinki, Stockholm. Just a couch with a dog that has mostly forgiven, and the heater on, because we’d certainly acclimatised to 30 degree weather and are feeling the chill of an otherwise mild Perth winter. The journey home was uneventful, Singapore Airlines generally took care of us well (except for their website stuffing up L’s gf selection, and their online help being next to useless to correct it — Jeshua I’m keeping my eye on you). We bounced through Changi with enough time to grab some duty-free, and it’s good to see Changi airport has a lot more stores…
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Baltics24: Day 18 – Istanbul
And yet, despite everything, it’s still not Constantinople. I’m beginning to think that I can’t go back to Constantinople. Our last full day in Istanbul, and kind of the last day of the trip. Tomorrow morning we grab breakfast, then a car takes us to the airport, then the next stop is a couple of hours in Singapore before the final stretch home, where a dog should be very happy to see us. Today was all about commerce: Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul has been a centre for trade for a while, like most of its history. Marco Polo was here (though I don’t think he graffitied the Hagia Sofia). Out of all this…
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Baltics24: Day 17 – Istanbul
Still not Constantinople. Today was about ticking off the big ticket items, the Hagia Sofia (reminder, pronounced “aya sofiya”) and Topkapi Palace (rough translation “palace with too many stupid tourists”). The Hagia Sofia (translation “Holy Wisdom”) was built in the 6th Century to be a cathedral, after several other churches in the same spot had existed (the one immediately before was burnt down when some chariot racing politics got out of hand). Then when the Ottoman empire showed up, they stripped out all of the cathedral trappings and turned it into a mosque. Then came the Young Turks who turned it into a museum, before in 2020 the current folks…
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Baltics24: Day 16 – Istanbul
I’ll write the second half of day 15 after this, but figure I should get today down while it’s fresh, a few extra hours won’t hurt my memory. I’m also distracted keeping one eye on the absolute shitfest that is England vs Slovakia, it’s currently half time in extra time and JFC it seems that England have finally managed to turn up and remember what that funny white framed net thing at the other end of the pitch is for. It’s been painful to follow. Istanbul (not Constantinople — I promised that would get rehashed often once I got here), or Byzantium if you’re really really damn old. Probably one…
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Baltics24: Day 15a – Vilnius – Istanbul
This might end up as a two part entry as it’s a little after 2am and we’ve just checked in to our Istanbul Hotel. So if I fall asleep typing this I’ll throw some more words at the screen in the morning. The main tasks for today in Vilnius were shopping, shopping, and shopping. All the last minute souvenirs and presents and that kind of thing, including getting the snow dome. Important stuff. Checkout of our “interesting” apartment (it did the job but had a few quirks, like the sensor for the shower light and exhaust fan with a 5 second loop) was at noon, but our flight wasn’t scheduled…
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Baltics24: Day 14 – Vilnius
Our last full day in Vilnius, and indeed the Baltic states. Eastern Europe has apparently just one castle built on an island in a lake, and that’s in Lithuania at Trakai, about 20km out of Vilnius. Having travelled through Scotland several times, including just last year, I’ve seen my fair share of castles in lakes, it’s basically mandatory there to have a castle, or the ruins of one, wherever an island exists in a lake/loch. Mandatory, Bonnie Prince Charlie said so. Eastern Europe, not mandatory, maybe the folks at Trakai did it and then paid everyone else not to, so they’d be unique, or maybe in the Grand Duchy of…
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Baltics24: Day 13 – Vilnius
Vilnius (though the locals barely pronounce the second i) the capital of Lithuania (which is spelt locally as Lietuva) is an interesting place. It’s the second largest city in the Baltics, with just a few less people than Riga, Lithuania is the most populous of the three countries, and as Laura told us yesterday, has a more spread out population (of the 6 cities with more than 100k pop, 4 are in Lithuania). This morning was the obligatory wander to see where things were, it was also about 30 degrees so a part of the wander was just to find patches of shade. There was an occasional breeze which helped.…
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Baltics24: Day 12 – Riga – Vilnius
A long day on the road. We booked a transfer tour from Riga to Vilnius with Traveller.ee, so we were up and ready before 9am, having a breakfast of the last of the smoked pork and other random bits. We met Laura (pronounced more like lauw-ra rather than lora) and soon a group of eight of us were on the road (several USians, a Chinese/US/Swiss, a Kiwi, and an Argentinian/Kiwi). Lithuanian Laura was very entertaining from the outset, full of the dry, ironic, slightly self deprecating humour that is prevalent in the Baltic region. Her potted history of the Baltics was a hoot, especially with the deadpan delivery, around how…
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Baltics24: Day 11 – Riga
The Riga Aviation Museum is a museum in a very different sense of the word to how we would generally understand it. It’s out by the Riga airport, so it takes about 20-30 minutes to get to, including a bit of forest where you start to wonder if you’ll ever be seen again. Through this, we pulled up at a gate, or just past a gate as the driver didn’t realise we’d arrived, where we could see some old planes and helicopters sitting just the other side. There was a a strip of razor-wire atop the fence, an opened padlock on the gate, and a number to call, and after…
