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Woke up a bit after nine am. It is now a bit after eight pm and I am very tired. Still not 100%, and spent a lot of the day walking.

I walked from the hostel to the library, then through the gardens to the bits of art in the gardens, which were great. There was a hot house for "sick plants" that had a whole lot of medical-ish type stuff in it, test tubes and bits of bandages around branches. There was a collection of bee hives in a field of wheat and Flanders poppies. The bee hives were panted in camouflage and each had a different monument on the top: the Arc de Triumph, The Brandenberge Gate (why does the French get a French name and the German name is translated?), the Pentagon, Westminster, the Parthenon. And a giant inflatable lotus in the pond that opened and closed.

(Tonight's viewing is "Minute to Win It" - a show that seems to embody all the worst things about "reality" and game show TV. I think I like it less than Deal or No Deal, which is saying a lot.)

Then I walked to Pier 2/3, which had three pieces. One was a video that I didn't really get and didn't grab enough to want to get. A couple of pieces by one artist that were interesting. And then a giant Ship of Fools made of foam that was grotesque without being gory, and which I loved.

Then I caught the ferry to Cockatoo Island, where most of the installation art is. Some of it is great, some of it simply isn't to my taste, and some of the video art is bad. There was one particular video piece that was really a film to weird to be shown in a cinema. One of the characters was played by a drag queen, and it apparently the set up led to "murderous results", and I really wasn't prepared to give almost twenty minutes of my life if the drag queen character was the one who was going to murder, or if she was going to go into a rage and commit the murder. (If the drag queen character and "the Maestro" had teamed up to kill the character played by the artist because they had other means of escape, then I'd have watched, but I had no way of knowing that.

Still, a couple of video pieces were great (and more so a couple of the site specific installations), which relieves me a little, because it means that I don't have to un-engaging video peices more time. The ones I like grab me right away.

(I hate Minute to Win It so so much, I might have to go to bed just to escape it. It will mean I can read my book, which is brilliant.)

Am in Sydney, where it is warm. Warmth!

Not feeling 100% :-( so I had a nap this afternoon instead of waiting around in Circular Quay for the ferry that would have gotten me to Cockatoo Island too late for the thing I had half a mind to see today.

But before that I did have lunch at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was yummy. They have two exhibitions on at the moment that aren't a part of the Biennale - Abstraction and Alfred Stieglitz. Also, an exhibition of contemporary Asian art for Biennale, so I have to go back to actually look at the art. It's not a bad walk from the hostel.

Also, my book is very good. I'm reading NK Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which will make book one of the year!

Lots of exciting things to see, so I'm going to bed now, just before eight thirty. It is also important because the film on the screen in the main room is The Silence of the Lambs.

Am in Melbourne, where it is wonderfully warm.

Am 25. Not really much different from 24, although the actual day itself has better weather and it was nice to have my actual birthday in the right time zone.

Went out to breakfast with Sam.

Went for a swim. I managed six laps! yay! um. That's 300 metres. The minimum for any type of certificate is 500 metre, plus 5 minutes treading water in your clothes. I probably could have made it eight laps, but it would not have been fun. I used to just take this for granted, and now I really shouldn't swim unsupervised. So I'm going back to the pool tomorrow and trying for eight laps.

Going out for dinner tonight. Should be fun.

Not sure what I'm going to do in the meantime, but sushi and some icecream sounds like a really good plan. Also, maybe a nap. Or visiting the art gallery.

Quick update before I leave the hostel in Köln.
Not much to say. It's positive temperatures here, and no snow, but the clouds are low.
There are a couple of good museums, but not thrilling.
The landscape out the train from Frankfurt was fabulous, we basically wound our way along the edge of the Rhein.

Bayreuth was much the same as it was when I was there last, except that it was covered in snow and they moved the bus station.

Frankfurt was likewise pretty much the same. M's apartment is small, but quite nifty. I got to do the last lot of washing of my travels. We went out for really nice Spanish food when I got in, which was about 9 o'clock after the train into Nürnberg from Bayreuth was late.

There was a great exhibition of George Seurat paintings at the Shirn Kunsthalle, which is where I saw the Klimt exhibition last time I was there (the one you needed ID to get into). And the Museum of Modern art was good. Some interesting-in-a-good-way video art.

Had lunch with S, watched a couple of films (including Friendship! which is in the cinema and lots of fun if you get a chance to see it: East Berliners on a road trip across the US just after the wall comes down. The New York skyline shot had the twin towers in it.) Met M's girlfriend, who's very nice.

Then I came to Cologne. (Did you know that Eau de Cologne wasn't French?) I have a train from here to Brussels and then one from Brussels to England. First, I am going out to find German dumplings for lunch.

Still freezing cold. I was going to go and see some art this afternoon, but I went on the free walking tour this morning and after walking in the freezing cold for almost four hours and then having a hot shower to recover feeling in your toes and fingers, all you really want to do is sleep. I avoided that in favour of going shopping briefly. I walked down to Alexander Platz, which is about five minutes walk and got myself a doughnut and a preztel and two DVDs and some chocolate to take with my to Bayreuth tomorrow. I did not walk back, because the Underground train from Alexander Platz stops (one stop down the line) directly outside the hostel and it had gotten dark and the snow hadn't stopped.

They're playing Triple J's hottest 100 here. I figured that out from them playing Alien Ant Farm's Smooth Criminal, and then a couple of songs that are really familiar to me although I don't like them. I had to Google it to get the actual disk: Number 9, disk one. It's a good one.

Walking cold was quite good. Good group and good guide. I want to lead walking tours in Melbourne! It's not actually free, it's "pay what you want" and the guide works for tips only, but it was really good. We went and stood on the car park built on the garden under which Hitler built his bunker. And we saw several examples of Germany's ability to build simple but thought provoking memorials. (They've certainly got the history for it.)

The first was the memorial commonly referred to as the Holocaust memorial, whose official name is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is am important distinction. In Jewish history the Holocaust is about the Nazi destruction of Jewish culture and murder of Jewish people. But the Holocaust as the Nazi program of extermination includes 5 million non-Jewish people. This memorial remembers the Jews specifically. (There's a memorial nearby to the disappeared Homosexualls.)

A Jewish American man designed the memorial. He has said that he was inspired by the Jewish cemetery in Prague, but that it is not supposed to be reminiscent of a graveyard. It's really beautiful. Stark. Just rows and rows of concrete blocks about three metres by one, and between half and four metres tall. You can wander in amongst them. And, because it's winter draw rude graffiti in the ice on the sides of them.

The second was the memorial of the book burnings on Bebelplatz. This is the square outside the King's library near the main Humbold University building. It was a Prussian building, so the Communists would have pulled it down, except that Lenin studied there. When the Nazis got together to burn books, they through them out of the windows of the library onto the square. An estimated 20,000 books were burnt.

An electric bus line used to run under the square. It's been decommissioned. There's a small glass square in the square, letting you see into the old space under it where they have built bookcases enough to hold about 20,000 books. There's no way in or out, just the empty bookselves. There's a plaque next to the window with a quote from Heinrich Heine, written in 1820:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen."
(That was only a prelude, in they place where they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.)

The third was in the watch house of the castle of the Hohenzollerns, who were the first ruling family in Berlin. It was used by succeeding powers as a memorial to the victims of the preceding regime. The Nazi's made it a memorial to the victims of the First World War, the East German regime as a memorial to the victims of Nazism. It's now a memorial to victims of war and terror. All of them. The plaque beside the entrance says things like, "we remember the innocent victims of war and the effects of war, we remember men and women who lost their lives for their religious or political beliefs". Quite poetic.

The actual memorial itself is a statue by Käthe Kollwitz of a woman holding her dying son. It sits in the middle of the empty space under a circular opening in the roof that lets in light and, of course, the snow. So she's covered in snow at the moment.

So that was my day. I saw less in Berlin than I wanted to, but being this cold is really tiring. I'm going to Bayreuth tomorrow for the weekend and then I'm going to Frankfurt on Tuesday. (Possibly via Dresden.) Then somewhere else on Friday. Monday week I go back to London to catch my plan on Wednesday. So much yay.

We are on a train from Inverness.

We wanted to catch the 9.40 from Inverness direct to Edinburgh, but that was cancelled. The announcement came through after we had gotten ourselves along the only slightly snowing platform to the full first class carriage (we have first class tickets for this leg, in an effort not to be standing for ten hours of train travel, as happened on the trains to Inverness.).

We didn't get on the 9.55 that would have taken us through Aberdeen in the hope that the 13.25 would still be running direct. It would have gotten in at about the same time as the train through Aberdeen, because there was a two hours change at Aberdeen. This train, also through Aberdeen, has only a 25 minute change, and gets us in about an hour after the later direct train would have. We were wise to take the chance that the direct train was cancelled. All trains between Perth and Inverness are cancelled due to something that happened overnight, and the only way out of Inverness is to head toward Aberdeen.

The landscape looks extraordinary. Blanketed by snow, except for the occasional field with very spiky grass. The sheep are able to eat the grass out from under the snow, and are quite comfortable sitting it. It makes me feel a little sorry for the sheep in Australia. They are so not built for the Australian climate. There are bits of blue sky and bits of foreboding grey sky. It was snowing quite thickly (although there was little wind) when we left the hostel and it was actually quicker for us to walk there than it would have been to catch a taxi, because it would have taken a taxi at least half an hour to drive to us.

There was a rabbit nibbling at the weeds in the retaining wall outside the kitchen window at the hostel last night, which a robin hunted for things under the snow weighted trees.

It is very very early on Christmas morning! Still one more sleep til Christmas properly, but Sam and I are up listening to Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Christmas Eve and Other Stories album. It is gorgeous.

We are in Inverness. It is cold and it has been snowing on and off all evening. It started just as we were coming home from dinner, so we decided not to go to midnight mass at the Cathedral. We had an easy day today. We wandered around town, bought some food for tomorrow, made a booking for dinner and went to the Christingle service at the Cathedral.

A Christingle is an orange with a red ribbon around it, four skewers with fruit lollies on the end and a candle stuck in it. Everything represents various parts of the story of Jesus, but it seems a little strange to me. And the kids eat the lollies off theirs as soon as they get back to their seats. But we did get to sing Away in a Manger and Once in Royal David's City.

We arrived in Inverness late last night coming up from Caernarfon. Various of our trains (in total there were five of them and a walk between stations in Glasgow) were delayed. We were travelling for about twelve hours. They held the train at Perth for us so we got to Inverness before the hostel reception closed.

I found a little magic growing crystal Christmas tree in the toy shop this morning, so we have that sitting on top of our presents. Presents! Also little chocolate puddings for dessert with lunch tomorrow because the supermarket wasn't selling little Christmas puddings. I suspect they had run out, although they hadn't run out of turkeys at 6pm.

Anyway, I hope everyone has/is having a good Christmas. I'm thinking of you all.

I should also direct you to Sam's blog: My Dark, Bitter Side is a Cartoon Fish. He is much better at keeping it updated than I am with mine, and you can up with where we are!

I am in Bilbao. I have been to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

It's a really interesting building. It looks great from the outside, and it suits the setting on the river quite well. It's not easy to make sure that you've seen everything. Whoever designed Federation Square has definitely been there. It's like a curvy version of NGV at Fed Square.

The major exhibition that they have at the moment is about Frank LLoyd Wright, which I actually wasn't terribly interested in. Also, a collection of video installation works from various Guggenheim collections, which I didn't like. Most of them failed to be interesting and the one that mostly worked was crude. There was a good bit of video that I saw with P and L in one of the small commercial galleries in Birmingham, but every time something restores my (never strong) faith in the medium, something else comes along to trample all over it.

I like Bilbao though. It's little and it has a river. It's very strange and kind of confronting to have everything been in two languages neither of which I understand. I'm not ever sure what the second language is. The first is Spanish. I have even less Spanish than I have French, and I struggled for my day in Paris between automatically speaking German and trying to remember that I did know some useful French.

I had Thursday in Paris between an overnight bus from Munich and an overnight train to Irun (followed by a bus to Bilbao). I had lunch in a restaurant in a lane near the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop, which I found by accident walking from the library to Notre Dame (where I thought there might be some street food, but there wasn't). I had wine with my lunch. It was great. I ordered rose instead of white because that's what I was used to drinking with P and L when we were in France. It was a Greek restaurant because I figured that was my best chance for getting lunch that had neither bread nor chips. I got to have dolmades and moussaka. And the waiter asked if I wanted baklava and, even though I'd been thinking that I'd really an icecream for like five days by then (most of my time in Munich) I figured I test my dislike of baklava. How wrong can you go with nuts and honey, really? The answer to that question turns out to that you can't go wrong with nuts and honey.

I go back to Paris on the overnight train on Tuesday night, and then I catch the Eurostar to London on Saturday evening. It only takes about an hour and a half because of the time difference (as in, two and a half hours of train travel, but arriving one and a half hours after leaving, clock time).

Oh! At the Guggenheim, there was a special exhibition, a re-exhibit of an installation by Richard Serra. Giant sheets of steel wrapped into shapes and you could walk into them. It reminded me of canyon-ing last year (OMG it was last year! July last year in Bryce Canyon National Park).

I have made it to Stow-on-the-Wold, which is in the Cotswolds, which is a place I have wanted to visit since it was mentioned in an episode of Buffy.

I was in Brighton, which was excellent and coastal and seemed, if not small, at least villagised (which London can seem at times, too). Also, there was the cute waitress in the cafe with the excellent carrot cake, and Simon Amstell, and some great coastal galleries.

Then I was in Portsmouth, which was pleasant. Foreshore, history, dreary weather. Lots of Top Gear on TV.

Then I was in Bath! The hostel in Bath was great. Halfway up Bathwick Hill (towards the University). An old, set back, manor house type place. Nice people in my room.

Bath is nice. All sandstone (or, at least, yellow). It has a Museum of East Asian Art. While most of the art is Chinese ceramics and funerary objects, there were some calligraphy instruments, some lacquer work, and an exhibition of modern works from Vietnam, which was brilliant. They were, all of them, great works and very different from each other. Seriously, the art in East and South East Asia (and, actually, the Middle East, too) is wonderful. Moreso than most of the Western Art, although the exhibition of art by the High Schools in the region around Bath was interesting, and there was a great piece in a gallery in Brighton that was like a water reflection of a cityscape. So maybe it's just that European and US galleries are only recently collecting Asian art.

There was a book in the shop of the gallery that at the kids' work called "Thirteen Artists Children Should Know." Two of the artists were women, only one artist wasn't while, and only two weren't European. Given that it's likely supposed to be a book to get kids interested in the history and practice of art, it shows a very narrow sliver of art. No minimalism, no surrealism, all paintings except for some of Matisse's stuff and some of Warhol's, no sculptors, no photographers. It's absurd to think that you can reduce the history of art to thirteen people, so why isn't it more broadly representative of the breadth of styles and artists and approaches? Something for anyone to recognise and be interested in.

Yesterday I walked along the canal from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon. Oh, I forgotten walking!

Bath is just too big. I'm in Stow-on-the-Wold now and had afternoon tea in Moreton-in-Marshes and was much happier. The canalside around Bath is actually quite different from the Birmingham to Stratford stretch of the canal. Also, there was a bit near the end where I could get off the towpath and through Bakers Farm Country Park. Very pretty. Excellently tiring.

Lots of walking to do tomorrow. After the hostel's cooked breakfast. I will definitely need it. It is an English fried breakfast.

Dinner time now. And then I will have to check on how well my clothes are drying.

I saw Simon Amstell (and his support act Arnad Chandra). Brilliant. Awesome funny.

Reminiscent of Daniel Kitson, although not so measured and not quite so extreme in the simplicity of the story and the diversionariness of the tangents. Well, there weren't exactly tangents, although the stories did turn back to other parts. Very clever, though, and aching self deprecation.

It was about how to be in the moment, between the past (which is just our perspective on things that we can't change) and the future (which is just imagined and doesn't exist). He started with "I'm lonely. Let's start with that." And finished with winning an imaginary bottle of champagne. In between there was a lot about how to live in the moment and the times he's failed to do so.

Like we're characters in someone else's dream. It was called "do nothing" because that was the advice that a Mini Cab driver gave him once, when it made sense.


There were two groups of fire twirlers in the park/median strip, packing up as I walked back to the hostel. And Ross Nobel's Australian Adventure is on tv here, and he went to Melbourne. I love my city.