casinowilhelm

casinowilhelm @ 2005-12-25T21:41:00

2005-12-25T21:43:21Z

happy christmas etc etc etc. keep it tinsel. well lapland.

casinowilhelm @ 2005-10-29T12:10:00

2005-10-29T05:11:24Z

I just read in a laos newspaper that some dodgy traders preserve beef using formaldehyde. The way you can spot this is if "doesn't smell and has no flies on it". So the official advice is, only buy meat that's covered in flies! Brilliant. I wish our government would say things like that.

more important than bird flu

2005-10-20T14:14:18Z

I hear fields of the nephilim have finaly got round to doing a new album...anyone heard it? Is it shit thrash metal or old skool goth? Has carl mccoy come up with any new lyric to match the classic "the flowers in your kitchen, they weep for you"?

blessed be.

some people are gonna get this twice...

2005-10-18T09:55:10Z

OK this email has been building up slowly like a bad fart so I think I better release it. (even though it's not even up to date)

So yeah, Shanghai. I made a bit of a mistake by spending too long there. For such a massive and well-known city, there isn't actually that much to see. I had to stay for a week though because of waiting for a visa extension. In the meantime I picked up a bout of dirty fish bucket revenge which cut down my ambition a bit. Still, some highlights were: finally tracking down some decent live music - a band called "cool fairyland" who are like a cross between early 80s cure/postpunk and some ancient chinese instrumental thing with a beautiful singer as a bonus extra. Also lots of decent modern art going on there - it's the home of the infamous brain chopping man. And I bumped into some of the people I did the cruise with and also went up that mountain with in Xi'an. Which was nice. Shanghai is basically just a city of business. It has some of the gaudiest skyscrapers in the world and you get a great sense of the old colonial history from all the european style buildings there, but apart from that it's all about rushing about making money money money then spending it on shiny things in department stores or on girls in overpriced bars.

So I legged it to hong kong where I met up with sophie, someone else I'd met before in xian. (yes, in a country of 1.4 billion people, I keep bumping into the same people over and over!). Her mum and rich banker step-family live in a huge super-swanky apartment on the hill on HK island with a private sports complex and an amazing view over the city - all for only 6000 quid a month. HOW MUCH!!?? (spot the tribute to ronnie barker, RIP). Her mum made me bangers and mash - absolute genius after a month of stirfries. HK is much much cooler than shanghai. It's a big sharp shiny city with proper bogs but enough crazy chinese-ness on the streets to keep it interesting. Lots of funkily dressed kids walking past dirty old markets with hapless animals being hacked up in them. We even saw a proper hong kong action movie being filmed on the streets. I stayed in a ramshackle place called chungking mansions which is basically a 16 floor fire hazard (some decent cheap indian food there too).

Around this time I thought it was all going a bit smoothly and well, so I managed to make like a bit more challenging by picking up an eye infection. Doctor in HK gave me some drops but it means I can't wear contact lenses much while it clears up completely and it keeps coming back and swapping eyes and stuff. (and my glasses are broken). V annoying cos I think when you're sightseeing it's quite important to be able to see...

Would definitely like to go back to HK one day, but with more money. In the meantime I had to go back to the dirty old chinese mainland. The difference across one border is stunning. From shiny to shit in 100 metres! Ended up waiting for a train in another wuhan-type place called changsha. There are many cities like this in china. They're nearly as big as london, only you've never heard of them and they look like gulags sprayed with KFC signs. You end up staying a night in them because you can't get tickets in advance to get out quickly enough. At first I thought this was a bad thing but it's been turning out quite well. I realised the people in these non-tourist-traps are amazingly friendly. Typical example: in changsha some nice chinese guy came up to help me, chatted for a bit and before I knew it, him and his friends are buying me a huge dinner (and refusing to take any money) and spending most of their day off showing me round the only local beauty spot (a place where opera singers go to practice and where mao once taught poetry to students before he got in the biz of five year plans and purging people.) This has since happened three more times in different cities. I swear I'm gonna try it in london one day, honest.

on my way out of changsha there was an entire department store burning to the ground right by the station - which I took as a sign to get out of the cities and go back to nature. So I headed up to a place called zianzhajie. It's a national park with these huge vertical pillars of rock that are hundreds of metres high everywhere. Like a strange alien landscape coming out the mist. The place also had monkeys running around which made it even better. Only downer was the mist which obscured everything for large parts of the day, like on hua shan. Also the hotel was a bit creepy - there was a power cut most of the night and it was deserted apart from the only other people in the hotel seemed to be the local prostitute and her pimp (who may also have been her mum - nice).

On from there to yangshuo an infamous backpacker hangout. Stayed at a strange hostel run by a quiet guy called wei and his family, where the meals are included in the price and you sit with the family to eat, and then wei teaches you something chinese. Learnt how to do a bit of calligraphy (difficult) and cook chinese food (easy - just nuke everything in a wok at high temperature). Very touristy because it was national holiday week but I had fun cycling off round the paddy fields and tiny villages with water buffalo wallowing in water. (it's what they do best) and whatnot.

and erm that was now nearly 2 weeks ago. My typing skills are not keeping pace with my travelling skills. Currently in kunming waiting for a visa for vietnam, cos I'm being kicked out of china in 4 days. Can't believe it's gone so fast.

beijing

2005-08-28T07:40:02Z

hello, bit of a travel update...arrived OK, stumbled about a bit bewildered and jetlagged for 24hrs, then started meeting loads of people from the hostel and it's all good now - was supposed to have left beijing by now but organising anything's a bit shambolic round here as you might expect. The word for it is chaos I think. Especially the roads - not so much just a paved area for cars but more public meeting space, cycle lane, bus lane, motorway and car horn concert all rolled into one with no respect for boundaries of any kind. This place is asia-max. next i go to ping yao then xian for the terracotta army action. My original plan of sticking to the east coast was blown away immediately. I'm learning mandarin but at such a slow rate I'll probably be fluent by 2050 - about the time china becomes the dominant world superpower.

I have learnt many things since i've been here. One of them is that pistachio shells sink in water. (but they float when the nut's still in there)

Also the pot noodles here are genius, they taste great and they don't even give you cancer like the UK ones (maybe).

Things I have eaten so far include: fried beetles, snake skin, goat testicles and bullfrogs. Mostly they proved that if you fry anything hard enough in loads of oil, chilli and salt it'll taste just like anything else. I could have taught them that as it's very similar to my own cooking.

Erm, hope yr all having fun and stuff. x

casinowilhelm @ 2005-05-20T20:07:00

2005-05-20T19:29:24Z

Went to the Ron Athey performance with lord_nitrogen last night:

It's described as "an operatic drama using both body and voice that explores the history of torture and personal suffering". So as you can imagine it was no mary poppins. I enjoyed it though and kind of got what he was trying to say (with the help of the programme notes) Highlight was when ron (the big tattooed man with his balls + arse hanging out) climbed onto a big sharp pyramid which went up his bum and then span himself slowly round on it, to the accompaniment of operatic shrieks and wails. It was a bit like an extreme version of shaolin monks. And in other places it got a bit comedy art-ponce like soething out of vulva from "spaced"'s early oeuvre (not so much her later work with hoover). But yeah was a great night, cheers lord nitrogen (how do you put peoples names in like everyone does on here?).

more may birthday action

2005-05-17T23:44:14Z

First of all, haven't been on here for a little while, and now I saw there's been some more birthdays...so happy (late) birthday emma and alex...

and talking of birthdays...CHECK THIS SHIT OUT IT'S WELL BEAST MAN INNIT!

http://www.burst-tv.net/mike/party.htm

Yes no excuses now you better be there. Cos I will be 30 and I need all the support I can get.

casinowilhelm @ 2005-05-10T23:01:00

2005-05-10T22:16:09Z

I had a spooky dream last night that the world was ending. In case it happens for real here are the signs, look out for them:

1. Enormous rectangular slabs start appearing all over the place
2. the world starts dissolving into space, starting on the other side of the world (sorry, australia) and gradually sort of crumbling away over a period of days. I didn't see it for myself but we knew about it because of:
3. Mass panic

But me and my friends (i didn't recognise them but they were definitely my friends)were cool as a cucumber about it all, even as the place got more and more packed with panicking people from all round the world.

It all seemed so vivid, it's been haunting me all day. Thought I'd share that.

casinowilhelm @ 2005-05-09T15:23:00

2005-05-10T00:10:38Z

Last night someone on upper street offered me 300 quid in cash for my red jacket. I turned him down. Me and that jacket go way back, it'd be like selling my brother (albeit at a rather tidy profit).

I regretted my drunken morality this morning, as I'm now skint again and could have done with the cash after all.