The Wall.

The Berlin Wall. One large slice of history, composed of brick and concrete. Although once it separated east from west, now it serves only to separate the train line from the river. Along its pathway can be found many strange distractions, such as Yamm, a café which is also a skate ramp and basketball court. There is also a rather uppety restaurant, along with, of course, a souvenir shop. In fact, the souvenir shop offers, of all things, fake DDR passport stamps, which they will add to your travel documents for the princely sum of €1.

The Wall itself has been reconstructed, and some time ago young painters were asked to adorn its eastern side with their designs. These remain, and some are quite impressive, however over the years passers-by have decided en masse to offer their own additions. These range from impassioned pleas to Legalise It!, to diatribes about tourist culture, to serious reflections on the proposed wall between Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

I walked the entire length of the wall, reading these thousands of plebian contributions. And really, I just couldn't help myself.

Europe. In Miniature.

The moment I walked in to Bruxelles' Mini-Europe, I was offerred the hand of a man in a strange animal costume. Sure, this animal is well known continent-wide as the friendly, reassuring mascot of the burgeoning, expanding European Union. But can anybody, somebody, please tell me what on Earth it is actually supposed to be?



The man - or the animal, depending on how far you want to take it - shook my hand, but instead of politely letting go and allowing me to walk on, he dragged my hand to the local foliage to force me into a photographic pose. Another strange young man stood with a camera at the ready, and abruptly captured an image of me and the man/beast before I had a chance to run. I was told that I could pick up the photo at the end of my visit. I was not told that collecting the photo would attract a €6 charge, on top of the (discounted) €11.20 charge to get into Mini-Europe in the first place. And all this just to see well-moulded miniature models of European cities in the middle of Bruparck, a Belgian theme park also including a massive cinema and Oceade, the distinctly unimpressive waterslide.

I was told to visit Mini-Europe by Pat, the middle-aged Irish hotelier who sat beside me on the train from München to Bruxelles. He owns a three-star hotel in Köln, and is married to a woman who comes from the family responsible for Eau de Cologne. He also told me to try rucola while in Germany, which will be my dinner for tomorrow.

Which brings me to tonight - I am writing this post from the Easy Internet Cafe in Berlin, which will house me for the next 30 hours or so. Would you believe that the only Internet Café on the Kurfürsterdamm is, in fact, above a Dunkin' Donuts?

In case you're wondering, I didn't pay my extra €6 for the photo. I took my camera and took a photo of the photo, before a man whisked the original photo away from my grasp.

Holiday In Bavaria: part zwei.

People are getting that joke, right?

For my last night in München, I dined at the Hofbräuhaus. For the uninitiated, this is the Bavarian hall, the perpetual bastion of Bavarianness in a city otherwise occupied by Turkish immigrants, sex shops and the Olympic stadium. And the Allianz Arena, the football stadium which actually looks like a large, multi-coloured tyre. In any case, for people wishing to see a parody of Bavaria in Bavaria itself, the Hofbräuhaus is the place to be. Although you could easily just go to Hahndorf, it's really not the same thing, is it?

Hofbräu is the grand old Bavarian beer, and the Hofbräuhaus is its dining hall celebration. Every table is incomplete without a stein of Hofbräu, which will set you back as much geld as your meal. It will be served by waiters in lederhosen, and waitresses in fetching Bavarian overalls. You will eat while accompanied by a horn-and-wind band, also lederhosen-clad, which marches from one table to another to play famous German waltzes to a captive, clapping audience. In true German style, the one meal advertised as Vegetarisch was unavailable, but thankfully I was able to get bread dumplings in a mushroom and cheese soup. Yep, that was dinner.

Although the hall is enormous, the popularity of it is such that I had to share my table with a middle-aged couple from Hannover. They spoke neither English nor French, which meant that my conversation with them tested my German to its limits. I still don't know what wissenschaft means. I should look that up at some point.

Incidentally, the large hall of the Hofbräuhaus was the site of the first mass meeting of the Nazi Party, after Hitler took over and renamed it from the German Workers Party. When he arrived in München from Vienna, he made a living selling hand-painted postcards to tourists. That's Bavarian history for you, the kind not advertised as you enter.

So that was my last night in Bavaria. In a matter of hours I'll be on a train to Bruxelles.

And for those of you enquiring as to the state of my health, I'm actually quite alright. I even have a doctor's word on that, who sent me home with nothing more than a topical cream and a letter telling Singapore Airlines that I was fit to fly. However, I am still covered from head to toe in red marks, and will confine myself to single rooms for the time being. Although I intend to see quite a bit more of Europe before the 14th, I'm still absolutely delighted - nay, ecstatic - to be coming home.

Fourteen Days.

Congratulations, everyone. We have gotten through the month of July, and as our reward we are all being presented with the month of August. This means, among many things, that I have now been out of Australia for an entire month. It actually feels like about four years.

Thanks to the wonderful people at Singapore Airlines, the earliest flight for which I can be confirmed departs on the 14th of August. This is, so my totally amazing mathematics has deduced, fourteen days from now. Exactly what my spotty body will be doing for fourteen days is somewhat beyond me, but it will be staying here for a while, and then happening upon Sweden where it will see Low. It might then end up in Berlin for a while, before catching a plane from Frankfurt.

I have also, apparently, been 'waitlisted' for a flight on Friday.

Incidentally, the area just south of the München Hauptbahnhof (train station) is completely comprised of only the following things: hotels (mine included), sex shops (many), Internet and Discount Call Centers, and döner kebap shops. Exactly how a döner kebap differs from any other kind of kebap I have yet to establish, however it does show that I am located in the heart of the Turkish quarter of München. Germany is quite well known for its large Turkish immigrant population, and last night I decided I would dine on its ethnocultural specialties. This didn't work out as best it could.

For starters, what I really wanted was something resembling Koshari from the Jerusalem Shishkebab House back home. This is basically lentils and rice, with a garnish of cucumber and yoghurt. Instead, every single kebap shop offers little more than a bunch of vegetables and some rice. (When it doesn't involve meat grilled four ways, and then fried, and then grilled again. In Turkish gravy.) Also, all of the restaurants have the same menu, and many even have the same pictures. It's like I stepped into an ethnocultural twilight zone featuring streets lined with Turkish McDonalds'.

I eventually settled at a restaurant where the waitress and I couldn't communicate in each other's languages, but settled on the universal language of romance. I should call this French, because it was one of the most completely unromantic conversations I've ever had. It did involve me being told where to put my tray, and being served, so I could then pay. My rice was littered with lentils, but my 'vegetables' were really grilled eggplant in some kind of gravy, slopped on the side of the plate by a surly Turkish guy with a six o'clock shadow.

I then asked for Türkisherkaffee, hoping to experience Turkish Coffee made by real Turkish people! I was actually hoping for a recreation of the singular glory of Jerusalem Coffee from the Shishkebab House. Erica tells me this singular glory is called 'cardamom', but I like to think of it as singular glory nonetheless. Instead, my Turkish Coffee was a ridiculously thick caffeinated substance with seemingly no added spice at all.

And then I walked home. Fourteen days to go.

I Expect You All To Complain.

I'm feeling a little better today. No longer do I feel the need to sleep all afternoon. I actually felt hungry, before I actually ate lunch. I don't want to actually walk around and discover Munich - partially because I don't want to fall ill again, and partially because I still look like a freak. I'm spending all this money on a proper hotel room precisely so I can confine myself to it. So today I'm simply bored. But within days the sores will fade, the scars will heal and I'll be a normal person again.

So here's the thing. Five nights ago I nearly fainted during an Air concert, before lying awake with back spasms. I nearly fainted again the next day, in line for tickets at the train station. I had to travel from Vienna to Munich (where I actually had accommodation booked) by not one, but four separate trains, while barely being awake enough to show the Polizei my passport. I then had to walk to my hotel with all of my things; check-in, looking freakish; then ask for a taxi to the hospital. My first taxi driver refused to take me to emergency, worried that I might be contagious (he told me to call an ambulance... for chickenpox!) He ejected me outside a random hotel, and I had to haul myself inside, shivering, to ask for another taxi driver. This one finally obliged, where I finally got treatment. By this time, I was sheathed in sweat, I had a temperature of nearly 40 degrees, and I could have passed out at any moment.

In a few days, I will be completely healthy again. However, the doctor did take pains to point out that no less than 20 per cent of adults who get chickenpox are offered free pneumonia upon each recovery. (Seriously, this is real.) And after this week - and hell, after everything over the last month - I don't want to tempt those frightening odds. The only thing I want to do is catch a plane back home.

And despite any of my original plans, that is what I intend to do.

Complaints?

Holiday In Bavaria.

Where I'll do what I'm told. (Doctor's orders, after all!)

I just thought I'd let everyone know that I'm feeling a little better. I slept pretty much the entire day yesterday, save for watching CNN specials on the many ways in which products made in China are shit and will kill you. My sores are no longer particularly itchy, and are healing (slowly), so the calamine lotion is unnecessary anyway!

And yes, Henry's mother, I do have travel insurance. Otherwise the €200 hospital cost would have worried me greatly, as would all the other associated costs which are bound to arise. Actually, my travel insurance documents were the only thing I had with me which had my full address for identification at the hospital.

Who am I kidding? This is still not cool. Oh, well. Back to more old, poorly dubbed episodes of My Family on the German Comedy Channel (where everything is poorly dubbed). Or maybe MTV, whose early morning filmclip show is called 'Let's Play Some Fucking Hits', with those words scrolling constantly across the screen. And, if you like, here's one such Fucking Hit:

A Health Update.

At first I thought it was some kind of intense skin irritation. Then it seemed like it might be dreaded bed-bugs, a thought which put me into a fit of exterminate them! around my room. But no, it was when I realised that I had quite a bad fever that it occurred to me that I had...

Chickenpox.

Yep, I never got them as a kid. Everyone in my year three class got it eventually one winter, while I stayed as healthy as... a healthy person. But at the age of 23, in Vienna, I got chickenpox. On the scale of things that are not cool, this is up there with the best of them.

Especially since yesterday I had booked a train and a hotel in Munich.

So I spent all day on a series of trains which were either delayed, connected to buses (not cool with chickenpox), going back to where they came from to connect to another train, or just delayed again, until finally I got to Munich. I then asked to get a taxi to the nearest hospital to see a doctor, which happened to be the University Hospital, where I was treated immediately and four two and a half hours by three doctors! I was given a saline drip, blood tests, thermometer (39.9 degrees celsius) and blood pressure. I was also given (through the drip) medication for my fever, which cooled me down immensely and took more than half an hour of lying there falling asleep to do so. Each of the doctors treated me as some kind of excellent case study, before telling me that there wasn't much they could do, and I needed to rest for seven days.

So now I'm resting in another single room, in Munich, for seven days.

And I look like a swollen leper.