K in the UK

Well it's good-bye sunshine, farewell every other language than English, so long food that is fresh, we've hit the UK and it's Fringe time, hooray!!! Now... it's just a matter of choosing a show.... hmmmmm
Perhaps this puts things into better perspective...
Cider is the drink of choice in this country and I can tell you, it does NOT come in small volumes!!!

We were lucky enough to score a fabulous if not slightly creepy for the ghosts allowed to roam free apartment right in the heart of East Melbourne, ops, no it wasn't, it just looked a lot like it... who knows what the suburb name was.. who cares, it was walking or at times stumbling distance from the festival hub and it was really, really big!!! It even had a key to a 'private' garden shared by all the other Scottish yuppies in the block. This is our street.. The front door.. our homely kitchen where we actually prepared some real food!!!
This was our favourite street. I suddenly realised that all my tight-arse budgeting for the trip had left me with pounds in my pocket. It was time to spend, spend, spend!!!
A typical Edinburgh street
Some dicks we found in a pub. Their mother's must be so proud!!!
Edinburgh Castle..The building, not the pub in Fitzroy. I was afraid it was going to fall off that steep cliff, it's quite amazing that its managed not to so far!
A travel souvenir I picked up
The break-up. See ya sister, thanks for the laughs!!
A shop display at Heathrow that I simply had to 'capture'Something like 3 days of flying and no sleep to be had. Ahhhh I look good!!!!

Was it love, or just Paris?

After spending the better half of two hours dragging our heavy back packs, newly acquired giant babushkas, bootleg vodka and stomach bugs derived from too much cabbage, potato and said bootleg vodka about the largest round about I've ever seen looking for the airport bus, we gave up, had our last broken Russian conversation with the cab driver and flew out of Cyrillic land and into the land of the baguette. This..... is Paris!!!
This was our favourite bar that reminded me of my favourite cafe back home: The Gal. We wasted the better part of a rainy afternoon here, gotta love holidays!
Sacre Cuer
Roller cop! There's definitely an 80's film in this... or perhaps just a damn fine film clip. People tubes: Pompadour
K's store... I must have been here before....?
K in Paris Sea of tourists at Montmart
Montmart picnic
Montmart liquid lunch: Jan style.
Eiffel K
French pigeons....
Our fancy pantsy Parisian dinner. Bonn Appetite
Drinking the rain away.... Jan in Paris
Barks in Paris, looking the part I might add.
Kissing K

Rainy day in Paris #1
Rainy day in Paris #2
A K between 2 K's
Rainy day in Paris #3 Rainy day in Paris #4
How we spent our rainy day in Paris...
This amazing little bar was like a mix of marilyn in laopard on speed. The bar, and its owner, were fabulous. What better way to appreciate it than with a K-based photo shoot! This was the matradee...
Bar posing with Jan
Bar posing with Winks ...with Jan again...
...with Barks... Ok, enough already!!!

Well in a fast becoming tradition, I got sick the night before the day we were due to travel, so instead of kissing a fine Parisian gentleman on the River Seine, I instead found myself bent over its wall contemplating sending my 'delivery' over the ledge and wondering if it would make it... I'm sure I'm not the first to stand in that spot and contemplate that same dilemma. Needless to say, I made it home, spent the night riding the porcelain train and wishing I didn't have to leave the city that makes me feel like a lady and allows me to talk like I'm pretending to be Audrey Tattou. But as they say, the show must go on, Edinburg; you'd better be worth it!

Beautiful St Petersburg

One last long-distance train trip and its goodbye strange, smoggy, smokey, smelly Moscow and hello St Petersburg: an instant inclusion to my favourite cities in the world list. It's definitely still Russia and holds all the same mix-matched culture that Moscow did, but unlike Moscow, St P avoided serious bombing in WWII (Thanks to Lenin for moving the capital just in time) and so canals, churches and amazing buildings adorn the streets instead of the communist-inspired concrete boxes of Moscow. Ladies and gentlemen: a Russian Supermarket! ok, so this was actually opposite our hostel in Moscow but I forgot to add it to that page, and figure we're still in Russia at least.....Russia's version of the P or L-plater symbol. I think it just means, 'get the hell out of the way, learner on the loose!' Coffee is served here with a straw! Meat chopping with an axe! St Petersburg, another city known for its glorious canals!
This church had the rather gruesome name of: 'The Church of Split Blood', so named after poor Alexander I who was not-so-subtly blown up out front. We could see this magnificent building from most angles of our travels of the city and I never stopped marvelling at its beauty. Believe it or not, this shot was taken at 11pm. What wonderfully long days we enjoyed here, although it was somewhat surreal partying till 'dawn' more often than we'd planned, but that's not hard to do when there's only 5 ours of official darkness... Europe was full of escalates that in the beginning, amused and thrilled me with their immense length but very soon annoyed and bored me with how bloody long they'd take. In St Petersburg, they were so long that I even fought my childhood fear of being sucked into them and actually sat down a couple of times whilst carrying particularly challenging hang overs, I could have knitted a scarf in the time it took to get from A to B! A fabulous little bar we found that claimed to be the smallest bar in St Petes. Whether that was true, (I'm sure we went to smaller), it was certainly the quirkiest, I'd never really thought of Lenin as a sex symbol or even a cult symbol before, but there you go. This was the first of many interesting bars that we 'crawled' to that night, the last being an underground underground underground eurotrash place that was very, very cool. A guy I'd met in another bar that night who looked like John Safran lead us there.... anyway, what goes on tour.. stays on tour in this case!

....and this was the advice written on the place mats, we followed it religiously that night resulting in me eating too many pickles! No, we haven't suddenly skipped over to ancient Greece, this is a church in downtown St Pete's believe it or not!Farewell St Peterburg, we'll come back some day!