Monthly Archive: July 2009

Travel Tales 2: Lisbon 1: Tram-tastic

I can thoroughly recommend traveling via tram if you visit Lisbon. It is totally tram-tastic fun 🙂
First off make sure you choose an older tram, the new trams are nice and have air conditioning but the older trams have more fun routes. For instance the number 18 to Belem has to travel up a series of steep inclines (we caught it upto the palace). as it traverses the narrow streets and sharp turns pedastrians scatter and motorists risk life and fender to avoid the great metal monsters.
On one incline we passed a car that had parked a litle too close to the tramlines. The tram driver didn't pause, didn't sound a horn, didn't do anything but slow slightly so as not to derail before easing past to the accompanying squeal of metal as side of car met large iron bumper. There was more than one smiling face as locals and tourists alike looked out if the window to admire the artistry.
Grab a travel card from a local kiosk for unlimited travel on the many trams, buses and metros.

Posted by ShoZu

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la biere d’amour


Ya gotta love the message on this beer carton in Portigal, "feed her a crate of this and she's yours" – or is it – "with our beer you're everybodys"? Of course I have been accused that with enough beer I am everybodies (not actually true as I am a truly monogamous).

Posted by ShoZu

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Travel Tales 1: The Road is long……

It is somewhat shy of five in the morning and we are jetting along a slick motorway avoiding the spray-blindness of trucks as we glide effortlessly past…
on the road…on our way to ride a plane to a foreign land…
I glance to my left and see a wave of low cloud undulate across the hills to the west of the Trough of Bowland it looks as if the sky is struggling to wake beyond it while on my right a poor artist a spilled a muddy grey across the firmament to obscure with bland…
Drifting now I can only think of brighter skies and motorways other and how perspective always forces you to see soft clouds on a sunny day as being parallel to the road ahead. you must have seen this, the illusion happens best if the road is straight with no deviation it seems as if the skies themselves have been marshalled on the manner that the land was regimented to so long ago…
the illusion of waves quickly passes as the grey swallows us up and we burst anew into another realm of thrusting mist,,,

Posted by ShoZu

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sorrowful eclipses…

Sometimes sadness comes on you at the oddest of moments…it isn't a predictable as an eclipse is, but how predictable is an eclipse without the tables and the maths?
Deep sadness is standing in the line of totality, it is complete blackness. you feel empty and you feel alone.
I guess one could extend the metaphor and use partial eclipses to have those moments of sadness that seem to cloud without fully enclosing us. But, that cheapens, lessens and doesn't really cover the loss of all light and life that you feel when the deep sadness comes over you.
the only consolation is that they are often not that frequent.

Posted by ShoZu

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Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…

Well it has been, and old proverbs do not die they just get munged, interesting times of late. And like that trouser-filling proverb intends in a fashion, they have not been good ones, but they have been ones…

My wife had her third miscarriage a week ago. I don't actually know why I am telling the world this, maybe part of some effort to feel something more about it. it isn't that I don't feel anything…it isn't that I haven't cried…it is that I still feel numb, maybe a little abused by my own reactions or something…I don't know. So hence I am writing it here. Which is actually just mad in so many ways, but there you go.

Next up it is sad that I pretty much ended a friendship I have had for many years, about seventeen of them in fact, but it is over. A lot of the problem was in fact me, I have changed in that time and in the last few years pretty drastically, but I had some life changes and they can do that to you. Anyway I put this friend through quite a lot and I thought we could make it through the problems we had, but I was naive and all I did was draw out the agony for them. Which was quite shit of me. I didn't intend to hurt anyone, in fact I tried to not hurt people and to make it up to those I felt I had hurt by the actions I took…

(Now for your information I didn't commit a murder or bugger a dog or anything, I fell in love with somebody who ended their relationship to be with me as they had also fallen in love with me. And even though that is wrong, we never did anything until the relationship was over, in fact I never mentioned how I felt until she had told me she was leaving her partner at which point I took a plunge and told her how I felt and she told me how she felt – this is fallout from that, but I had already changed before then as I had ended a very long relationship some months before- and had, understandably methinks, become a different person.)

…but I still failed. I guess that happens. This isn't an excuse or an apology it is an acceptance of what happened.

So, interesting times. Now I have the issue of telling all the other people I know and maybe explaining the same thing over and over again. it is never a fun thing and most likely people will be shocked, maybe upset, and maybe some of them will start to take sides or issue with what has happened…

Personally I hope they give support instead. Mostly because it isn't going to be that easy for anyone and I hate to think I am going to be causing any more distress than I already seem to have done…

Ch-ch-changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I cant trace time
(David BowieChanges)

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