I am now a man of leisure. I’m sure you’re all dying to know what I’ve been up to the last month or so, and the short answer is: absolutely nothing. Or, as everyone loves referring to it – I’m now a bit of a bum.

But to tell the truth, it’s not exactly everyone else’s fault that I’m referenced like that. I have no small part to play in it. I’d like to present a now infamous conversation between myself and Niall, a friend from Sydney who is also not working at the moment. The conversation went something like this:

Me: hey, since we’re both not working, we should bum around during the day together.
Niall: yeah, that sounds cool!
Me: we can be bum buddies!!
Niall: ….
Me: (realising what I’d just said) ….

I then made the mistake of telling Cal’s cousin Tim (who is graciously letting us stay with him at the moment) about it, who promptly relayed it to everyone he’d ever met. So now I’m the infamous ‘bum buddy’ a title I don’t see myself shedding in a hurry.

So moving along, life is pretty good right now. I’m writing this on my phone in the park outside the Tate Modern in a beautiful sunny day – the first of which we’ve had here in months – and all is good. I know I haven’t posted here in a while, so here is a concise list of what you’ve missed:

• Finishing up at Ninja Theory, and feeling sentimental about it.
• Moving out of our place in Angel and into Tim’s.
• Going to Center court at Wimbledon
• Going to watch the Tour de France start around buckingham palace.
• Bought a Nintendo DS.
• Coping with Facebook addiction.
• Went to see the new Transformers movie (twice) which is so awesome it hurts.
• Deciding to get a tattoo, and then deciding against it on the day I was going to have it done.

And finally, the reason for the blog title being what it is and not some crappy pun related to ‘bum buddies’ is that last weekend we went to Hamburg. We also had the pleasure of being accompanied by Tim, who not only had lived there for four years and knew everywhere to go, but spoke german fluently. It was the first time I’ve been on a trip like this with a ‘guide’ before, and it made the experience that much more enjoyable.

I’ll start with what I’m still catching grief for today. To set the scene, I bum around during the day while Cal works. For that reason it was suggested that it would be smart for Cal to leave her bag at home, and have me bring it to the airport with me and meet her there. I think you night be able to see where this is going… Luckily Cal had her passport in her purse, but otherwise spent the entire weekend with the clothes on her back and nothing else.

This made me hugely popular.

Moving right along… Our first stop after we’d got in was the Reeperbahn, which is more or less like the red light district in Amsterdam. It’s quite a fearsome strip – there are just so many bars packed into such a relatively small space that it blows one’s mind (or one’s something else if you go into the seedier places) – it really says something for the German efficiency for putting it all in such an accesible spot. On this first night, we walked up and down a few times, stopping here and there for drinks. It was more or less a recon run for the next night’s planned drinks.

The next day was spent exploring the docks – an area that was heavily bombed during WW2. Callina was also somewhat insistent on buying new clothes to wear, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. She ended up buying some St Pauli gear – a local crappy football team – which is popular with all the tourists because their symbol is a skull and crossbones. Here’s Cal modelling it:

Saturday night began with a Portuguese fish restaurant which Tim had previously discovered. It was a bit out of the way, which meant that there were no tourists there – just a bunch of locals. I have to say, with the possible exception of lobsters on the side of the road in Na Trang, Vietnam, it was the best seafood I’d ever had. We got a prime spot in the restaurant, right next to the kitchen, so we could watch the chefs cut and prepare the food. I originally was planning to describe everything we had in detail, but instead I’ll provide you with a picture, since it’s worth 1000 words and all that stuff.

This was one of the dishes we had.

Once that was done and we were satiated, we went back to the Reeperbahn, and began the pubcrawl. We all had a great time, and ended up doing somewhere around 10 different bars or clubs in the night. One of them was a Brazillian/Salsa club, which Tim particularly enjoyed:

The next morning provided yet another example of how I can be really really dumb sometimes. I had taken it upon myself to make sure that Cal and I were ready to check out of our room at 11am. As we’d gotten home at about 3:30 I wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t go over that time and be charged. I was so paranoid about this that throughout the night I kept waking up, checking my watch, and then going back to sleep. So I wake up, check my watch, notice that it’s 10am, and decide to get my stuff together. I wake Cal up too, who isn’t too impressed at being woken from a restful slumber. We had organised to meet Tim in the foyer, so, once we had showered and gotten ready, we trudged down to meet him at 11am.

But he wasn’t there.

I pulled out my phone to send him a message, but I noticed something weird. My clock said it was 9am. I looked at my watch, and it said the same. 9am. Somehow I’d misread 10am as 8am, and had managed to get us up two hours early.

This, again, made me very popular.

And so that was really it for the trip. When Tim emerged at 12pm (the actual checkout time – so we were actually 3 hours early) we spent the rest of the day wandering around the harbour before heading home to a glorious day in London.

Now that that’s out of the way, I do have a brief update about the trip. Rather than being away for ~4 months as we’d originally planned, it now looks like we’ll be away for 7 or 8. The reason being that Gus and Shelle are getting married in Feb in Sydney, and that’s something we both can’t miss. So, rather than finishing the travelling when we finish doing the Mediterranean, we’re going to like low in India or Thailand for a month or two, before coming back to Australia for Australia Day and the Wedding. We’ll have more details on this when the time approaches.

Finally, Cal and I are leaving for Spain in a week from now, and while I know I say this often, we’re going to be updating a lot more, seeing as, well, we’re going to have more interesting things to say. Keep your eyes peeled!