No Surprises

FIFA Fussball-Weltmeisterschaft, La Coupe de Monde, La Coppa del Mundo, World Cup, whatever you want to call it, it's taken over my life for the past few weeks. The Socceroos may have been kicked out by the Italian diving team but there's still plenty of excitement left to go. I am now resigned to supporting my ancestral countrymen... Lampard, Beckham and friends.

Over the past 9 days I have flown to Germany twice, the first match being Portugal versus Iran in Frankfurt, I didn't actually make it in to the stadium as I lost my tickets and found a lot of money, if you catch my drift ;) you can see the photos here. The second match was Australia versus Croatia in Stuttgart where our valiant heroes produced the most important display of courage in their previously uneventful history, my photos are here.

If you notice an improvement in quality of the photos it's because my little Pentax camera was somehow left on a train in Holland several weeks ago, so I have now upgraded to a semi-pro Canon S2 IS with 12x zoom and an all important image stabiliser, I'm sure you're all very excited.

Lucky

I told you not to get me started on the World Cup, too late....

I GOT TICKETS. For now it's only Portugal versus Iran, but this is pinnacle of the beautiful game, 2 thirds of the world will stop for 4 weeks of utter bliss, hope and honour. So on 17th June I'll be in Frankfurt living a dream (can you tell I'm excited?). Hopefully some Socceroos or England tickets are yet to find me, that would be more than unbelievable.

Update: (21st May) I managed to get a ticket to the Socceroos crutial World Cup showdown with Croatia on 22nd June in Stuttgart, this is better than melted prosciutto fat (from me, thats really saying something).

The Tourist

What!!! Who made this blog and didn't tell me? Just kidding, that's my lame excuse for updating it. Well I've got broadband in my tiny London flat now so look out this blog is gonna get burning like vindaloo. A lot has happened since the last main post, I've been through 11 countries (including driving through 5 in one afternoon). So I thought I'd put some quick highlights of my travels over the last month or two (in no particular order).

• Bangkok's mixture of crazy atmosphere and peaceful people.
  
• Island life in Malaysia, the sound of waves over the hum of an conditioner.
  
• Oli Kahn walking on to the pitch of the Allianz Arena to his own theme song (Bayern Munich vs FC Cologne).
  
• Lake Como, the most beautiful lake ever, as if any one can know that Napoleon.
  
• Driving through the imposing Brenner Pass at 150kph (Austria to Italy).
  
• Hitting 200Kph on a German autobahn in a little French car.
  
• La Brigue, the little French village I stayed in for a week, the gallery speaks for itself.
  
• Being admidst the craziness of Juventus fans in the Stadio Delle Alpi during the Champions League Quarter final with Arsenal.
  
• Driving through falling snow in March (in a 2 wheel drive car with no chains, oops).
  
• Trying to tell a french car rental company that it wasn't my fault the side mirror fell off.
  

If you haven't yet found out, I've been updating my photo galleries lots since I left so have a look (Wazza, I used iWeb to create the galleries from iPhoto = best and quickest thing ever). As for upcoming news, I'm going to Germany for a wedding on the 3rd June then overnight training to Rotterdam for the Socceroos vs Holland!!! Don't get me started on the World Cup, I'll get too excited.

Anyway, eat up all your meat based foods and while you're at it email me at dave at davebangay.com.

Photos, photos, photos.

Yep, I really should have posted these earlier but check out my first batch of photos from Bangkok, Singapore and Tioman Island. Visit the link below:

http://www.davebangay.com/photos/

1 Week 5 Days

Not long left now. If you haven't heard by now, I am off on my world travel starting at 1:15am on the 14th of March 2006 (my birthday). Too much to do, at least I just sold my car thats something. On Monday night I said my last goodbye to the red rocket forever.

Just in case u want to know where I am headed, here it is: Bangkok 1 night, Singapore 2 nights, Tioman Island (off east coast of Malaysia) 3 nights, Singapore 1 night, then arrive London via Frankfurt on 22nd March at 8:05am. After a few days with my friends Jackie and Dan, I will hire a car and drive across France, Germany, northern Italy and then down to Barcelona for a few days. All this hardcore travelling will end about Easter when I go back to the land of Hope and Glory (England) to settle down for a fair while.

Keep posted as I'm gonna be updating the blog a lot more regularly.

So eager to get out the door

Why is it that we are never hardly ever happy where we are. That green hill looks so much better, always eager to get out that door to only realise that we are standing in artifical sunlight. The important thing is how do we enjoy a place with no motivation that just burns us out or holds us back.

I'm getting a bit too introspective but how about the battle of truth and desires. The truth is that none of our selfish desires hold any weight in reality but the cleansing light of truth burns the desires away, burning is always painful. I don't really know where I am going with this but what if we could exchange the need for escape for the need for truth, not easy huh. So if we put all all the energy that would have been spent wishing we were somewhere else into looking for the truth, we might just find ourselves on a different sort of green hill.

If you didn't get any of that, don't worry about it, I'm just rambling.