What a Day. Almost Exactly

Transcribed from my messy notepad while in transit. Well, an attempted transcription. 21/9/09

Well I’m a bit tired for masses of textual output right now - I’m currently about ninety minutes from Kuala Lumpur. It’s coming up to 7:20pm local time, I think that’s 11.20am GMT, but I’ve lost track. So that’s twenty hours travel time so far from Bradford yesterday. I’ll jump straight into the action by announcing my stupid jacket ended up costing me a little over £100. Well, I say ‘stupid jacket’ - more stupid me for a) leaving it at my mum’s house, meaning I had to head back there before the bus station, and b) for cutting it so damn fine in the first place. We (my mother insistent she be present to ‘see me off’) got to the bus station literally as the driver was pulling out (of the bay, not in that Catholic kind of way). Waving frantically at him to stop, he was having none of it. How rude: sticking to his schedule and not waiting for me. Asking at the National Express office for advice, the man frowned as he informed me it was the last London-bound coach of the day. However, he suggested by taxi I might be able to get to Leeds before its scheduled departure and just hop aboard. Worth a shot. My mum, of course, had to tag along too, no doubt reasoning a bit of highly-panicked tension would ease the situation. We were making good time, zooming through amber-going-on-red lights, weaving in and out of traffic, ploughing into the occasional cat and small child. The whole twenty minute scene became horribly reminiscent of a sequence from season 3 of 24, but not because of the dangerous driving. Anyone who’s seen it may remember a part where Jack and his squad are stealthily entering a building where they’re certain the baddy (I think his name is Saunders, but without Google I’m lost for verification…which is where transcribing something from a notepad gets tricky - do I look it up right now and cheat? Or do I add a pointless parenthesis-enclosed section to pad out my word count? Who knows? If you do, let me know. Anyway, he’s the Oxbridge bio weapon-toting English villain - now read back before the initial bracket to make sense of what comes after this one) is hold up, and you’re thinking ‘YES! He’s going down!’ as it flicks between shots of their advance toward the control room, and Saunders (I’m sticking with Saunders) being completely oblivious to his impending ass-whooping. The tension builds as they’re about to smash the shit out of the door just in the nick of time. ‘FREEZE SCUMBAGS!’ (or something equally PG-13) is roared as broken wood fragments and a million guys with guns fill the shot. A few seconds later comes the dreadful realisation that they’re at completely the wrong place. To use a Bradford term, they’d been skanked. With two minutes to spare, competent taxi driver man had dropped us at the train station, not the coach station as requested. I was so psyched and ready to run, we just paid the man and ran for the signpost-devoid terminal, so by the time we’d made our own dreadful realisation, he’d already buggered off £20 the richer. Argh! What a prick. Catching up with the coach was now off the table entirely, but ‘it’s okay,’ I thought - Jack always gets his man, eventually, even if he has to pay dearly for it. While forking out £83 for a train ticket to London isn’t quite the same as shooting your boss in the head, wrapping him up and DHLing the body to your local international bio-terrorist, it still stung.

So that was that. It was buy the ticket or not get down to Stansted for my flight at all. Spend £83 to not waste £188 + £45 + £120. It simply had to be done. Oh well, on the plus side, I’d arranged to meet my good friend Jodie initially at 8.30pm when the original bus from Bradford was due in to Victoria Coach Station. By train I’d got to London an hour and a half earlier, so we had more time to catch up. We met at Kings Cross where the decision was made (preventing any further bus-missings) to head directly to my Stansted-bound bus stop, THEN find a nearby drinkery. With my classic directional ineptitude on full display, it took a while to find, but fortunately BlackBerry #2 was on hand to provide some Google Maps action, after #1 had met a Buckley-esque watery end just days before. Combining that with my trusty £1.99 compass, we were able to navigate from Victoria tube station to our destination without too much trouble. It was great to see Jodie again, and the pub we found just across the road was the very aptly-named Traveller’s Inn. We caught up over a beer and a milkshake, a drink not enough pubs offer! Two hours of chin-wagging later (with a small about of talking between), we headed back over the road where, most kindly she watched over my stuff while I went to the toilet - that being the most irritating thing for solo traveller laden with bags. Forced to risk putting your stuff in a puddle of wee while cramming yourself into a tiny cubicle is no fun at all. Promising to keep in touch and send a load of poorly-worded postcards, the bus turned up and we said our goodbyes.

From then it was to be and hour and a few minutes to Stansted Airport. Only there was almost complete gridlock in central London around Marble Arch and we moved barely a hundred yards in forty minutes. Just as I was becoming increasingly certain that some Anti-Me-Getting-On-That-Flight conspiracy was afoot, our thoroughly irritated driver broke free of the traffic and started speeding toward Essex like a coked-up Chelmsford fuckwit after a night at Gatecrasher. We arrived around thirty minutes late, which was perfect timing for checking in and going through security. By 12.20 we were told to advance to our gate for what was to be Stansted’s final departure of the evening. Oh, this wasn’t before I was treated to an intimate body search by (unfortunately) an elderly man pushing 70, not one of those none-existent attractive twenty-somethings working in airport security. Tactfully sliding the back of his hand over my crotch either as the final search protocol or a ’thanks for not being a terrorist’ parting gesture, he waved me through with a cheeky smile.

Since then it’s all been very routine, including my subtle switch back to the present tense. Air Asia seems a very competent and good-value airline. The plane’s upholstery is a bit dated (think fabric from an early 1990’s DFS advert, or that couch dumped on your street) but the leg-room is definitely to western size, not, as I feared, a shorter oriental spec. In fact thinking about it, there’s a good few inches more than on Ryan Air, which means there’s at least a good few inches. And at the risk of sounding like a filthy pervert, the air hostesses are all very easy on the eye. It’s strange because it’s the exact team glamorously adorning the Air Asia front web page, so having been on the site tons of times in the last few weeks to do my obligatory post-purchase price check to (needlessly) assure myself I got a better deal, they all seem oddly familiar.

As this piece runs out of steam, and I out of time before landing, I’ll just note that this is the first plane journey I’ve taken where an entire day’s sunshine has passed me by. Travelling against the earth’s rotation the sun rose and set without about six hours, through which I mostly slept. It’s quite peculiar losing eight hours I know won’t be reclaimed for at least a year. Anyway, while I’ve still got a few minutes before my notepad joins the masses of electronic goods and their related plugs and wires in my rucksack, I’ll just quickly mention the passenger demographics - mind-cripplingly boring as that sounds. It’s a bit of a mixed bag really. Probably a 25/75 split between those (prejudicially, of course) I’d guess were Malaysian and the western-looking people. Of the westerners, It’s predominantly youngsters such as myself - I’d say between 18 and 35 mainly because that puts me far closer to the middle of the range than 18 to 30 would. There’s also something of a middle-aged and grey army onboard, but thankfully I won‘t be making any poor terror-themed jokes about dangerous old weapons. I’ll just say I think setting up such a ludicrously cheap route into the heart of south-east Asia (or at least a gigantic regional hub) has been a really shrewd move by Air Asia. Being able to fly London to Melbourne for £175 - which it would have been had I booked the KL flight a few months earlier - is mental whichever way you look at it. Unless you are a mental, in which case you’re probably a bit preoccupied with crazy stuff to care about the comparative cost of long-haul air travel. But honestly, comfort-wise, this is definitely equal to British Airways on a similarly long flight from San Francisco to Heathrow. All you’re missing is the free food, booze and on-demand video player - but how much does it really cost to get tanked up and fill a bag with Gregg’s pasties before you get on the plane? As for the entertainment, I’ve got an iPod, a book, a cheap notepad and (not so cheap) pen to keep me going.

Now, provided we don’t nosedive into the tarmac in four minutes time, cracking skulls and smashing the faces of everyone onboard, It’s been a long but pleasant journey. Thanks Air Asia! Now give me money for bigging you up to my four entire readers.

P.S. No, we didn’t all die.

A Bit On Norway.

Oslo ain’t cheap. But don’t let any Norwegians hear you say that! Before heading there I read that any comments of such a nature could be construed as an attack at their country’s economic prowess - so don’t do it. Vocalising your disdain for whaling or other morally-questionable professions could get you in a similarly awkward situation, although they’d probably talk you round so succinctly, you’d be fantasying about clubbing baby seals in your sleep. See, they’re a proud, practical, and intelligent people, most of whom speak our mother tongue better and with more eloquence than fifteen of your average fifteen year-old mothers in Britain. Put together. Actually, that doesn’t sound eloquent at all, more thick and gobby. But suffice it to say they’ve got some smarts, and they’ll happily argue with a less-informed tourist should you be comparatively thick and gobby enough. So, how expensive is it? Well a pint will set you back about £7, a McDonalds meal around £12 - Space Raiders, £16.50 a bag. Na, just kidding - not even Scandinavians would pay over 15p for such a scuzzy pickled-onion-flavoured corn snack. As much as my friend and I had decided not to keep banging on about price differences between England and Norway, it was impossible. I tapped her on the shoulder whenever the most humdrum of supermarket products was three times the price “Holy shit! Uncle Ben‘s is five quid a jar!” She’d pull on my sleeve whenever something cost almost the same “Ooooh, toilet duck is only fifty pence more than Tescos…I wonder why?” After which we’d exchange complex theories about the potential reasons. Perhaps Norwegians don’t poo so often, or scoffing whales make for cleaner poos, or maybe it’s just subsidised by a government paranoid about poo-stained toilet bowls.

So Oslo. It is a rich city, not just economically, but also culturally and, surprisingly to me, ethnically. I’m assuming all other ignoramuses like me considered Scandinavia to be whiter-than-than-white. Cities the Third Reich would fill their pants over - right before they realised hating everyone else on the planet wasn‘t their thing. However, wandering around the Norwegian capital there’s seemingly hundreds of Pakistani and Indian restaurants, plus a ton of Vietnamese, Turkish and Polish businesses - I understand there’s also a large Swedish and Dane contingent, but then Scands all look the same, don‘t they? Sorry, that was a poor attempt at racism. Nick Griffin would not be proud. From the tiny snapshots I observed, everyone seemed to get along swimmingly.

Although Norwegians (very generally) have a reputation for their direct, almost to the point of rudeness (well if you didn’t know already, you do now - so spread it around so I‘m more justified in saying it), I found the vast majority of Oslo(nian?) folk to be warm and helpful - especially the unlikely middle-aged man in the tourist information centre who noticed my British Sea Power t-shirt and gave me a thumbs up. Bumbling up to several locals while slightly lost hiking near Sognsvann lake - very picturesque and well worth the short train ride to the north - in their perfect English they were happy to point us in the right direction, right direct as it may have been. They’re also not prudish. There’s more naked statues in Oslo than there are euphemisms for nakedness. They mainly congregate in the Vigeland Sculpture Park, tucked inside Frogner Park a little out of the city centre. Not that I’m ripping any of this off Wikipedia, but there’s 212 in the buff, completely starkers, bare-skinned, totally bollock (or equivalent lady parts) naked, bare-skinned, nude figures - and that’s me out of synonym ideas. They display an array of human emotions, ranging from gut-wrenching sadness, to heart-warming loveliness, with some homoerotic and just plain weird thrown in between. In fact, they‘re mostly just homoerotic and weird. When guys aren’t just standing and staring at each other’s genitals, they’re wrestling (while staring at each other’s genitals) or simply striking a pose gayer than Mr Gay UK (while staring at their own genitals), they’re trying desperately to shake off a tiny ninja baby attack, the target of which I can only assume is genital-related. The park’s centrepiece, however, is genuinely impressive: a 30ft (or so) granite column made entirely of intertwined figures, their mass embrace is actually quite moving - in my view, a must-see for anyone visiting the city. If you’re a bit of a perv, it’s even better.

Before this just peters off into a condensed list of other Oslo attractions worth a visit, I’ll write a follow-up at some point, where I’ll no-doubt talk about the Edvard Munch exhibit (he wrote the Scream horror movie series), the Museum of Modern Art and its massive inflatable slide (it’s the tongue of a giant mouth that comes from where women pee out of), and expensive bus station toilets with free sick and heroin residue. Tune in next time for that and tons more! Or if I can’t be arsed, this’ll have to do, won’t it? So there.

An Introduction

Hello! I suppose I'm the Ambling Oak, which is sounding like a worse blog title every time I say it. But for now it'll suffice, and I can always change it later when all my friends start sending me textual giggles and out-loud laughs about the lameness of my choice. In any case, my name is actually Andrew Whiteoak - see? SEE?! Oak. Actually I've decided it's brilliant and should definitely stay - and, continuing the sentence before the first hyphen (-), I quite enjoy travelling. I also quite enjoy writing. Writing about travelling is quite enjoyable too - almost as much as using the words 'quite' and 'enjoyable' four times each in the last thirty-four words. But enough with the schtik! I'm heading to New Zealand for about a year at the end of this month, and felt like my travel scribblings needed a permanent home, so this is it. In the next few weeks before I leave I'll hopefully finish up and post some (as yet unwritten) writings on Oslo (the world's most expensive city) and Norwich (the world's least genetically diverse city - actually that's mean, I love it).

In the meantime though, I have two other blogs to give you an idea of my style, should you feel intrigued (or just daft) enough to take it look:


ImprovisedNorthAmerica.blogspot.com - This blog charts my journey across North America in March 2009, where all knew when I arrived was my flight to New York and first night's accommodation in Harlem and my flight out of San Francisco just over two weeks later. Half the entries were written on my BlackBerry on the road, while the more lengthy ones were written up once I got back. I managed to head down to Mexico and up to Canada along the way, with a whole heap of excitement and sprinkling stupidity too.

AND

GermanToEnglishWritings.blogspot.com - Don't worry, it's not in German. It's a collection of about 160ish pieces written in the past 12 months based on random word selections from of my German To English dictionary. Some work, some don't, but they're all produced quickly and without a massive amount of editing.

Hope you enjoy some of it,

Andrew.