Well for a start merry Christmas to all!! I’ve been meaning to update on here since it only seems to happen now after a dev meet or I’m extremely bored But thanks to work I haven’t really had as much time as I want to write on here.

:EDIT: Well first to my very short trip to frog country (France) too see one of my mates from uni. Ended up taking a day off work to leave on the Thursday afternoon, since this saved me a nice 100 odd quid rather than leaving on the Friday. This seemed like a good idea at the time, until my mate said that there weren’t any trains that would get me to where she lived that night so I’d have to spend a night in paris :s not exactly the first thing I wanted to do but fine, I’ll go along with it. A nice 1 hour flight later and I was in Paris working out how to use the metro system.. which is something I have to give them praise for, if there’s one thing the frogs know how to do its trains and metro systems. Although 10 seconds after getting into my hostel a Colombian and a Romanian came into the room after already having had a ‘few’ drinks and asked me to come along with them again, fair enough, I have to be up at 5am the next morning but I can never say no to a few drinks. So we went to an Irish pub (where they have proper beers and drinks) and started drinking, athough by the end I had 7 or so drinks.. none of them were the same apart from the first and last which was beer.. god damn Romanian and buying me drinks to catch up :/
Still wasn’t too bad getting up at 5 in the morning to get to my train, although when I got there and sorted out all my tickets and shiz, I got on the right platform, there was a train there, got on that.. and it didn’t move for about 15 mins. So thinking something was wrong I went out to check and somehow it was the wrong bloody train, I have no idea how I managed to do that but even though I was at the right place and time for that train it just went wrong and it was the wrong one.. somehow.. Anyway I got a new ticket and went on a later train finally getting me to where I wanted to be. Seeing my mate again was good, haven’ seen her in a while so was nice to catch up a bit, although now she doesn’t understand who I am owing to the fact I’m being nice, and not *as* sarcastic as I used to be, don’t think I’ve changed that much…. But apparently I have :s
Well continuing with the uni life we basically sat and drank for the next two days which is always appreciated films were watched… by which I mean house of course, food was eaten and more drinking was done in bars.. Which is REALLY frakking expensive, thank god I wasn’t spending much longer there, I’d be soo broke otherwise.


Then on to ’s dev meet on the 19th: started out meeting at Stevenage train station – which incidentally was looking better than I had ever seen it before.. but that could well be because pretty much all of it was hidden by snow, so there was less of it to see. But rather than waiting around for the rest of the people to arrive me and went for a nice healthy McDonalds, burgers are always needed this early in the morning before a days worth of drinking . Well after everyone turned up it was off to the Hollywood bowl for a round of doubles pool (which we won.. of course!) then onto the lanes for some quick bowling… that one wasn’t so successful, usually ending in many gutterballs from me, all that mattered though was I beat =Maivale From the Hollywood bowl we followed up with a true dev meet tradition and headed off to Wetherspoons for drinking until it closed, what was quite amusing is that apart from ~Stannerz having a couple of alcoholic ginger beers (Crabby’s) I managed to drink all of their bottles of it in a matter of hours, pretty proud of it. There are many pictures of the day in `greenie’s page in his usual format ^^ I’ll be uploading some of my pictures a little later when I can get them off of the camera.
After that I only had 3 more days of work before I could go back to the parents to steal some free food. Come Wednesday I skived off work at half 11 along with my mate so we could get back home. Even though there was so much talk of the roads being busy and clogged from all the snow, this was a blatant lie since they were all clear and no sign of snow once we got further north. Although dropping her off in Sheffield and having an amazing Chinese meal was well worth the drive, fried prawns in crunchy batter and rice, mmmm sooo nice ^^

Currently however I’m dying of a slight food overload. Yesterday was the Polish time to celebrate Christmas, so of course we had our meal with the parents and had a few neighbours round, 12 courses and 3 bottles of wine later I was feeling ever so slightly full. Not that I’m complaining of course, I’m loving the salmon, prawns and fish in general, not forgetting of course the pierogi (Polish dumplings) which are soo nice and I can eat entire bags of them, and barszcz (beetroot soup) which oddly enough tastes just like tomato soup Anyway the advantage of this is that I get to open my presents, along with the much needed socks I also got several books (thanks to amazon wishlists ^^) and the lie to me DVD boxset… Oh and money of course, that is always apprecieated ^^
Now today we went to another neighbours house for an English Christmas lunch, looots of turkey, stuffing, potatoes everything, not to mention the Christmas pudding with ice cream, was soo nice and now I’m working my way through a crate of beer which wasn’t drunk last night, so it’s all MINE!!! Although speaking of which there’s two crates sitting in my garden back at Stevenage that was buried in the snow… hope it hasn’t all melted and the beer been stolen

The plan for the next few days is to go shopping for stuff I need for the ski trip I’m taking in March, going airsofting with a mate of mine I haven’t seen in a few months, and lazing around of course Then back to Stevenage on the 30th with the gf :iconboss-kaz-09: coming up the same day, where she’ll stay till the 2nd of Jan, as far as I know the plan is to go to London somewhere and watch fireworks… South bank I think… with and her bf, and a few other people, should be kinda fun me thinks.. depending

Well that’s all I can think of to write atm, I’ll upload the pictures as soon as I can if I can find a cable to connect it all together otherwise I’ll have to wait till I get back to Stevenage

Right I really should find the tie to update these more often ‘cause then things happen which only means I have to write more and more but usually end up forgetting most of it

Anyway first things first, the MCM expo happened a couple of weeks ago which was a good excuse to seem my friends (dressed as a cute catgirl) and (who went as herself… ‘nuff said ) I originally went with and a few of her mates, but as soon as we saw the line and realised we weren’t actually as sensible as we sometimes try to make out and not getting tickets in advance meant *Boss-Kaz-009 and I quickly said fuck that to waiting in the queue. Good thing too since :devchandraken;’s mate got in line just before we arrived, just as were leaving he only just got in meaning that’s a 5 hour wait… Yeah I wasn’t that desperate to get in tbh.

So instead of going in we hung around outside and managed to find among all the FF cosplayers. Find her on a good day is hard enough thanks to her amazing shortness Although it was arguably more fun outside, first there was al the bleach cosplayers having their massive photoshoot – I can’t believe how many characters they’ve added to that series since I stopped watching it after episode 150 or so… it’s ridiculous. Then there was always the FF guys, who insisted on fighting each other all the time... well that was more down to ~azimowolf picking fights with people twice her height.. y’know, as you do Although my favourite one of the lot were they guys who dressed up in the TF2 gear – and someone even put together a rotating turret the engineer makes ^^

On to dev meets.. well.. meet anyway. This one was organized by for the 30th of October, after meeting ^Pyrochan-dolls and @Narfmaster at Canary Warf station we had to wait around for old flavio even though he was on at us to get there on time… damn hypocrites Although he did fulfil his promise of providing the drink… 20kg of it to be precise, all packaged up in a nice freezer bag ^^. I of course had to steal the tankard for the beer though hehe. Some more waiting happened so that more people could turn up (~Only--A--Shadow, ~SonicSaturn, *mori-the-bat, =Maivale, *wojteq2, ~alidaron .... and a few others but I can’t find your dA names right now ) Then onto Jubilee park for foods and talking.

One good thing about dev meets is a nice amount of cake is brought along banana cake in particular hehe. But yeah quite a few people turned up in the end to join us in the park, and the usual amount of stuff happened you’d only expect to see happening when people from the internet congregate in the real world, including seeing who could get a credit card in their mouth ^^.. like I said.. internet people..

As much as we would have loved to have stayed :devboss-kat-009: and I left at around 4 ish to go watch inglorious bastards… again since we didn’t actually get round to finish watching the ending the first time we saw it, but either way second time round was still fun Then I once again abandoned my principles and went to *shudder* starbucks *spit on floor* after a wander round looking at people in their Halloween costumes – wish I’d actually bothered to take my camera out of the bag for that since there were many people that would have made some great shots.

As far as I can remember that’s about it for whats been happening since last time, I should be going to the devmeet on the 5th of Dec too unless something else comes up.

Riiight I really should stop writing this now and get back to work… maybe

Huge photo upload:

Right this is going to be a mega update covering Budapest, Bratislava and now Vienna too (which I’ll come to in a bit).

First – Budapest. After meeting up with my mate at the airport and getting driven over to the hostel we were ever so slightly worried that it was in the ass end of no where without a decent way of getting into town.. until we realised that the tram stop there actually worked and took us right to one of the main metro stations in Budapest So really the first few hours were spent seeing what was around the station since we really were not in the mood to be going all the way into town at this point (since she’d been on a bus since 1am that morning to get her flight and had little sleep thanks to some stupid crying baby) – She wasn’t exactly pleased to hear that I have been upgraded to first class for my flight for free
Aaanyway after a good pizza and some half decent nights kip we were all ready to get over to the castle the next day, so after ¾ of an hour’s walking we got to the castle wall .. only to find out that the tram we got off before we started walking actually took us nearly all the way to the bloody castle and it would have saved us such a bloody walk. But oh well such is life in 35 degree heat As for the castle itself it could have been much worse with bugger all to do, but there was plenty to see – although we didn’t exactly go to the museums and what not – there are many more important things to spend money on.. mostly on food.. cause we all need to eat. After a decent lunch involving some pasta and plenty of beer we headed off down the hill to the Pest side of town and to the Jewish quarter. There we went to the largest Synagogue in Europe and had a tour round that, although I’m ever so slightly confused as to why anyone would build something so big if it is never filled up, it seems ever so slightly pointless and just wasting time and money.. but that’s just me I guess.
The second day was spent wandering round the rest of Pest that we didn’t get to see the first time we went there, again it was a very beautiful place to walk around.. and even get lost in. Although we eventually found our way and walked down to the statue of heros which is exactly what it’s name suggests; a statue – well, series of statues – to commemorate some of the leaders and kings of the time (originally it was the Hapsburgs but I think they were removed and replaced with other people when it was partly destroyed in WWII). Further down the park though there was a small castle built in the middle of a lake (a bit like lazenki in Poland) the only real difference was the architecture .. and the steak restaurant of course
That night though was pretty good, we ended up talking to a couple from America and drinking more and more from about 5 or so, then the guy who was on night duty came over and gave us free shots of apple schnapps and more beer was had. Of course at this point the guitar came out, I guess when you’re pulling night shift quite a lot with not a lot to do you start to get pretty good at singing and playing at the same time because this guy really was amazing, even after a few shots and beers he was still good enough to keep us entertained for a while. But once the performance stopped he returned with yet more schnapps, this time of the peach variety .. at least I think that’s what it was, either way no where near as good as the apple stuff ^^. By the time we actually got round to thinking about going to bed it was 4 in the morning and we had to get up and get out of there to Bratislava for a 9am train – Needless to say it wasn’t exactly fun getting out of bed that morning.

This happened to be the morning that we needed to leave for Bratislava.. and get a train… at 9 in the morning :/ Wasn’t fun but we were lucky that it wasn’t the train to Prague since that one is at 8 , not like it mattered that much sine I managed to sleep most of the way there – for about 2 hours. If it wasn’t for my mate being there I would have just missed the stop for Bratislava and ended up in Berlin That really wouldn’t have been so cool.
Although there would have been more in do in Berlin since Bratislava is essentially a small town (the centre is anyway.) Although it is a nice place to go to there really is nothing to do there, we ended up having done pretty much everything within the first day of being there. Essentially our two highlights of the day were not being in 35 degree heat and finding that all the beer is pretty much 12%. It really was nice to have a language that I could sort of understand again, I just couldn’t get my head around Hungarian at all – just didn’t seem to make any sense after Polish and Russian – Slovakian is nice though it being essentially a mixture of Polish and Russian words and variations on them with a few random ones thrown in there for good measure
This is when we decided to take a day trip to Vienna since we would end up being so insanely bored if we stayed there any longer than we had to. So another train was taken the whole hour to get to Vienna, although it was better than spending a whole day doing nothing in Bratislava there wasn’t exactly a huge amount we could do there since seems to be a place where you come to in your helicopter, wander around with your bodyguard and buy crap you’ll only wear once even though it costs a couple of grand. Us being poor students it wasn’t exactly like we could do that.. But it was still fun non-the-less.
We spent most of the time doing the same as we had in Budapest – going round all the purdy buildings and Opera houses but it was still interesting to see how different it all was after spending nearly 2 weeks on the “Eastern” side even though it was only an hour away as I’m sure you’ll see from the pictures. We really did miss the 12% beer already after only being in Slovakia for a day

The trip back was also pretty uneventful as more sleeping was happening again ^^ (I’ve started doing that a lot now when I can) but as soon as we got back packing had to happen ready for the next day which was a nice early 6 am start to get to the train station on time for the Prague train. It would have helped though if the fucking Spanish bastards would shut up and let us get to sleep, what I wouldn’t have given for a shotgun right about then not only were they shouting and being twats at 3 in the morning they decided it would be a great idea to start playing music for the next few hours
Anyway next and last update on my travels will be about Prague after that I shall be HOME!!!!!!

Yeah I know I said that I would try to update regularly when I got good internet but that plan kinda fell through Well I’m currently waiting for the internet to be reconnected since there’s a bit of a storm gong on outside so the line has probably been hit. Now I really apologise for how stupidly long this is going to be but I have gone about a week without doing an update so there’s a lot to say.. sort of anyway.

Anyway I got into Kiev at around half 10, the next task was to try to get to the hostel; something that is much easier said than done. Well it’s more of trying to find the damn metro station, admittedly it was more of my own stupid fault. Have you any idea how frustrating it is wandering around outside of the train station looking for bit words saying “Metro” and then after half an hour realising the big words saying “Voksalna” is referring to the name of the metro stop and not how to get to the train station. *faceplam* After that it was just a case of walking up to the place, although walking with a 30kg pack uphill in 30 degree heat doesn’t lend itself to ending up dry when you finish, those of you who know me know that I really don’t take kindly to heat let alone doing anything strenuous in said heat. All I’m saying is thank god for the free beer I got when I arrived

The day after was spent going to Chernobyl, I’m assuming that most of you have seen the pictures that I’ve uploaded from there, well there’s also a few more down below. First we spent 2 hours getting up there mostly spent sleeping and eating M&M’s and then had a drive around the reactors 1 and 2 which were still intact as well as the unfinished reactors 5 and 6. The last we went to see was reactors 3 and 4 (for being the one that decided that it didn’t like being intact any more) But yeah a lot was explained to us about what went wrong and what they are having to do now to try to ensure that is doesn’t happen again. Currently they’re trying to build a huge ark around reactor 4 since the original sarcophagus is starting to rust and fall apart since the inside of the reactor is still burning, the more the concrete falls apart and spills dust into the still burning reactor could possibly cause a complete explosion of the reactor essentially meaning that the top half of Ukraine will become a wasteland and spreading more fallout throughout all of Europe (hence why pretty much every country is giving money to help build this ark – for personal interest rather than actually wanting to help :s)
After being told all about this it was then time for a trip to the abandoned city of Pripyat, something I’ve been waiting for for literally 4 years ^^. Where contrary to popular belief there is very little radiation around at ground level any more, we found more often than not the radiation was actually less than background levels (200 uR/hr (micro-rotogens per hour)) The only times it was higher was on the roof of the hotel (around 1.5-2 R/hr) which wasn’t too bad, but on the roof of a neighbouring building it was closer to 5 R/hr… We weren’t allowed to go there Next stop was the iconic ferris wheel and fair ground that almost everyone has seen, still didn’t stop me taking some photos of it as most of you have no doubt seen It’s still pretty creepy going through the city that used to have 50,000 people in it and now is deserted but is left almost exactly like it was. It wasn’t until this point that we discovered that we left 3 people behind at the hotel, so quite a bit of time was spent looking for them luckily though they were found by one of the many army officers wandering around out there to stop people trespassing through the city. So only about 30 minutes was wasted on finding lost people, although this meant that we really had to rush through the school and skip out another location all together something we weren’t exactly happy about obviously, I can’t stand it when I ‘m being rushed and trying to do photos at the same time. Either way I got a few good shots from there as 2 of my recent deviations show, by this point it was about 15:00 so was time for a late lunch … most of us had forgotten about eating and were too busy looking around the city. But by 19:00 we were back at the hostel and wanting a much wanted nights sleep.

Nothing much happened the day after sleep was taking up most of my time since I was still recovering from Poland and the stupidly large amount walking that was done. The day after that it was time for some more exploring through Kiev, most of the time was spent on the east side of the city going to the main cathedrals there. First was St. Sophia’s where I could only take pictures in the courtyard, if you try to take pictures inside you get shouted at lots but that was defiantly more beautiful inside than Mikahiliskva’s (sp); even though it was big and impressive on the outside it wasn’t that much to look at inside. After that I wandered down the river … it’s ever so slightly weird walking down a beach on a river.. you really don’t expect to see the other side.. and for there to be trees… and a bridge but it’s all good. This took me to the arc to commemorate the reunification of Russia and Ukraine which was spoiled slightly by the fair ground rides that had moved in the pervious day but was still interesting to see.

The last day of sightseeing was spent going to the caves monastery and the defence of the motherland statue a few km towards the south of town. The monastery was huge and had the better part of 10 different churches inside, the main attraction though was in a series of caves where there are many monks that have been mummified and put set into glass coffins for people to see and pray to. Well, by see I mean their outlines at least since they were clothed in various gold, sliver and purple clothes. This is somewhere I don’t recommend going if you’re even remotely claustrophobic since being packed underground in a tunnel which isn’t wide enough for your shoulders and is about 4 inches too small height wise with hundreds of other people all carrying burning candles doesn’t exactly lend itself to being relaxing if you don’t like that sort of thing. But tbh it doesn’t really help being 6’3” and slightly well built so the tunnels aren’t that user friendly to us larger people. Soon after though we walked over to the Defence of the Motherland statue, this is a statue made out of titanium looking over Kiev with her sword and shield, but this thing is HUGE, even several km away in the monastery we could see it very clearly and it was big enough then but it’s this 80m statue built on a podium that is at least another 80m tall just to make sure everyone can see it. But well worth going to for the awe-inspiring sight.

Right I think that is pretty much everything that has happened this week for the most part. Just need to wait around now for my flight over to Budapest tomorrow (14/7) and I should be flying around at quarter past 4 getting in at 5, even though I have really enjoyed Kiev it’s going to be great having a change in scenery and when I come back I’ll defiantly be visiting the southern part of Ukraine

Well here I am in sunny Warsaw on the first part of my trip round Eastern Europe, sitting 'enjoying' the sun and heat eating foods and stealing internet from the people next door.

Basically I started on Thursday getting an rather unwelcome wake up from mum telling me that she wanted to get out of the house and down to Cheshire by 11 am.. ignoring this I promptly went back to sleep. A second kick came a little bit later, so unhappily dragging my ass out of bed got ready to go.. ish. It wasn't until I remembered that I needed to shove a few more things in my bag.. things that there was no way in hell were going to fit, so after 3 repackings and a lots of indecision I was ready to go.. at around half 12 ish. Got down to my aunts where I was spending the night so I could get a flight the next morning without too much trouble.

Next morning another kicking came .. this time at half 6, bearing in mind that my plane to Heathrow wasn't until 11 wasn't cool. Needless to say we got to the airport with 2 hours to spare :/ it could have been worse to be honest, but still. When I got into Heathrow went straight to find food which came in the form of descending on Gordon Ramsay's place which sprang up since I was last there, as always good food ad wasn't actually as small a portion as I thought they would be ^^. At 2 though I had to leave to get on the plane to get over to Poland

When I got there I actually managed to find my bag again.. Something I wasn't expecting to see until 3 months later due to the people losing it.. but no there it was not lost, but going on past experience I really wasn't planning on seeing it again. Got over to the hotel finding I was on the 31st floor, the view from there isn't any where near as good as the view from the gym on the 41st! It is slightly disconcerting however to get on a running machine which is right up against a window and start running, every now and again I'd get this feeling that I was about to go straight through the glass and keep going.. always a great experience.

Anyway this morning I thought I'd treat myself to some breakfast at the hotel since I had no clue of any places around Warsaw that would be open at that time to feed me, it's always nice I be waited on given food and have someone play the harp for you at 9 in the morning Now I've just been wandering around trying to find places to go to tonight and tomorrow morning, which is actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Although when I first started I managed to get myself lost and ended up about 1km away from where I thought I was :s score for my awesome map reading skills! Haven't been up to Old Town yet but will probably go over tomorrow, along with a few other places I was thinking of. I managed to find the tomb of the unknown solider again and saw the park behind that, I always love going there, almost forgot that they have a show(ish) when changing the guard, will have to come back tomorrow and take photos though since I didn't manage to get my camera out in time to get anything worthwhile.

A few photos have been taken already but haven't really gotten round to doing anything about them just yet, might have a look at them later tonight if I get time. Any updates I do while in Poland will be just put on here, not sure how many I do depends how often I feel like coming back here to steal the internets since I refuse to pay for the hotel one.

EDIT [14:02 5/7/09]: I know that isn't the time I'm actually uploading this but its the time I wrote it and really the only thing that has changed is that I'm now warm and outside drinking a bit of beer before heading out to find dinner somewhere, so here goes...

Well at least today started off well enough, sunshine no clouds and what not. But lucky for me I managed to get caught out in a huge downpour while getting back to the hotel, so now I'm soaked and trying desperately to keep warm which would be happening if it wasn't for the stubborn AC not wanting to turn of

But yeah really the day consisted of going up to the Old Town to have a look around and see if much has changed since I was last there. But on the way I saw another changing of the guard which was much more ceremonial than it was yesterday I'm not entirely sure if this was a Sunday thing or if there was a special occasion - I would have found out but the speaker was speaking waaay too fast for me to be able to understand but either way I got a few good pictures some of which I'm putting up today but the rest will have to wait until I get a reliable internet connection.

After a while wandering round the streets of old town it seems as though not too much has changed in comparison to the new town, hell even the old pizza shop where I used to get meals from every time I was in Warsaw since I was 4 is still here ^^ ahh good times.

I think the plan tomorrow is to get down to the lazenki gardens since I don't even remember going there when I was younger so will be interesting to see if I can remember any of it at all, should also make for some good photos.. providing the weather is on my side *hopes* Here are a few pictures of my wanderings round warsaw so far and will try to get some more up.. although I think they may just be saved for facebook instead.

I never really anticipated just how much walking around a city for two days would take it out of me, but right now I can barely keep my eyes open from tiredness and I really should go have a hot shower before my fingers decide to turn black and abandon me for the floor Ahh well another day and a bit to go before I can take a 24 hour nap on a train to Kiev ^^ although it is slightly worrying that I'm having a little trouble after only two day when I have another 2.5 weeks of this.. ahh well I'll live

EDIT [20:12 5/7/09] Just as a quick after thought if anyone reading this fancies meeting up just let me know and I'm sure we can arrange something, the dates of when I'll be in places can be found here

EDIT [10:30 7/7/09]: This is just going to be a small final update from Poland before I start another page for Kiev.

My train out of here leaves at 16:45. Although I very nearly stayed another night here. Last night I was feeling unbelievably ill, I slept from 2 till 6 waking up only to drink more water and finally force some food down me (in the form of ice cream) then slept again from 9 until 9 this morning. I was very light headed had a fair amount of trouble walking anywhere, alternating between boiling hot and freezing cold and whenever I closed my eyes my hands felt as though they were 3’ wide I’m putting it down to exhaustion and dehydration from all the walking in high heat. But I’m feeling much better now and have decided to carry on with the planned trip and use Kiev as a rest since I’m spending the most time there.

The beginning of yesterday however was spent walking over to the Botanical Gardens and lazenki park both of which were stunning to see and walk round. I kinda ended up spending a lot of time sitting on a bench and watching everyone walk past, it’s a surprisingly feeling sitting with a litre of sprite on a park bench watching the world go by… and not being a chav sitting with a 2 litre bottle of knock off white lightning (yes it does exist) throwing abuse at people.

As I’ve already said I got back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day asleep with the bloody news on repeat since that was all that was bloody on Ever so slightly apprehensive about Kiev since now I won’t know the language and very few people actually speak English, £10 says I get lost on the way to the hostel