I wrote:In fact, the whole region between, say, Liège and Paris is entirely depressing.

The EA boards wrote:Peter

Location: Belgium

glueman wrote:Russia...

Peter wrote:Scotland.

On a saturday night in Edinburg i could almost feel the violence in the air.
All the pubs i entered had at least one drunk guy shouting at me and my mate while the rest of the pub stared at us like we were going to get our heads knocked off.
All the houses in the city center covered their windows at night.
Just looking at a guy for a second got him shouting across the street "Hey prettyboy! What are you looking at!?
It seems silly saying that but we got all kinds of comments and shouting drunkard everywhere we went.
Same thing in Glasgow.
All the guys looked like bulldozers on legs.
Overall violent vibe. Gave me the creeps.

steve wrote: Las Fallas .

Josef K wrote:

Peter wrote:Scotland.

On a saturday night in Edinburg i could almost feel the violence in the air.
All the pubs i entered had at least one drunk guy shouting at me and my mate while the rest of the pub stared at us like we were going to get our heads knocked off.
All the houses in the city center covered their windows at night.
Just looking at a guy for a second got him shouting across the street "Hey prettyboy! What are you looking at!?
It seems silly saying that but we got all kinds of comments and shouting drunkard everywhere we went.
Same thing in Glasgow.
All the guys looked like bulldozers on legs.
Overall violent vibe. Gave me the creeps.

.

NerblyBear wrote:
Am I mistaken, or isn't Scotland usually seen by other members of the U.K. as an Alabama-style backwater?

When you drive into La Paz you get a real sight. It sits in a canyon
and on approach it looks like someone aerosol sprayed buildings into
this huge hole, with the city appearing as if it is trying to climb
out of the chasm. The geography of the centre of town is simple, if
knackering to negotiate. It is like a piece of folded card, the main
thoroughfare on the fold with avenues climbing up from
it. The city has no shortage of gradient. Our hostel was
seven blocks up one of these avenues, so my four days there were
marked by plummets in the morning and whingeing ascents in the late
afternoon.

I would recommend La Paz to you all. It is a proper city with proper
people, and it is dirt cheap to boot. After sticking to the more
obvious tourist haunts for the previous fortnight, it was refreshing
to be somewhere the tourist hard sell was not all-pervading (though it
is there if you want it). It is not the prettiest of cities for
sight-seeing, but it has a busy and involving character, great (and
ridiculously well-divided) markets, tasty food at stupidly low prices,
a few cool museums and some neat excursion options. A good place to
shop for souvenirs, if you are into that kind of thing. The
Witches Market has cornered the market in condor feathers and
grotesquely dried llama foetuses, some of which have managed to retain
their fur. I did not have to heart to enquire after their uses.
Stick that up your pipe and smoke it.

The most famous of the offered excursions is a day long downhill
mountain bike ride on the bumpy and vertiginous "most dangerous road
in the world" from La Cumbre to Coroica. All around the Bolivian
gringo trail you see tourists sporting T-shirts bragging the survival
of the wearers. Sadly, I wussed out of this, ostensibly due to a
dodgy knee from the trek. However, my balance, coordination and fear
of painful death also played into the decision. A reasonable minority
take a final fall every year on the ride, and only a couple of months
back some poor girl met a grim fate when she dismounted from the wrong
side of her bike and fell several hundred feet. My concern that my
bearings might go similarly awry were backed up by Reece, who after
observing me for only a day expressed a desire to follow me on the
ride with a camcorder with the hope of getting some valuable footage
for a snuff version of "Beadle´s About".


Coke no Coke
The best museum in La Paz is the small Museo de la Coca, which
hopskotches between a history of the uses of the coca leaf,
dissertations on the opinion that chewing it is fine, cautionary
social commentary on the cocaine derivatives, semi-scientific
descriptions of the make up and processing of the plant, and some
hilarious manequines to illustrate recent abuses of coke. My
favourite was of a crazy looking westerner in a grey suit sitting legs
akimbo on an office floor, with a packet of powder in his hand and an
array of drug paraphenalia scattered around him. I have never been a
fan of the drug: too many connotations of bad `80´s movies, Daniella
Westbrook, big hair and cockrock, plus, as you know, I need little
external encouragement to talk sh!t anyway. However, I have friends
that I respect whose opinions differ in this matter and who mock our
reliance on mere fermented grain and grape products. (A prize of my
four remaining bolivianos to whoever guesses correctly the person on
this email list who bellowed at a pothead friend "Enough of this
natural crap, I want chemicals. Synthetic chemicals! Man-made
progress!") Bad dental hygiene and sun exposure aside, the worn faces
and mouths of of the leaf-chewers that I saw make me dispute the claim
that this is a healthy alternative, regardless of its traditional
place in Andean culture and weird magical practices. However, the
information supplied in the tiny two rooms is in places
mind-blowing: after banning the processing and export of the plant
through international law, the rich countries set up a "Cocaine Club"
of industrialised countries with a permitted limit of annual cocaine
production for medical purposes. If memory serves, the US and the UK
have the two largest portions, whilst Bolivia and other coca growing
countries have none. Coca exports are said to exceed all of Bolivia´s
legal exports combined, and cunning plans such as to pay farmers to
destroy crops have unsurprising led to eventual increases
in production, most of which ends up the States. I say legalise the
drug and put a whopping tax on it, which would go a long way to
helping Bolivia out of its mess. This is not an original idea, I
know. I probably nicked it from the Mail on Sunday.

Ever-visible armed policemen, SWAT teams, riot gas launchers and
recently bullet-scarred presidential palaces make La Paz feel a little
more feisty than most cities that I have been to. Only last year
there were country-wide riots over a dispute over natural gas rights
(the then-ruling party wanted to sell them off to foreign firms, but a
general mistrust of corrupt government and nationalist pride kicked
things off), and the authorities do not seem to be taking chances.
There is a real sense of fatalism about the place. Nevertheless, the
city feels relatively safe. I did not sample the nightlife, but
drinking in Bolivia is meant to be on the excessively hardcore side.
This was apparent from my arrival in La Paz, when I was greeted by the
sight of a fairly well-dressed guy staggering out of a nearby bar
absolutely plastered. I might have thought this as a one-off, but
this sight was repeated in other part of town twenty minutes later.
It was only one on a Friday afternoon. In other parts of Bolivia, the
tinku tradition reigns, which is basically an all-out ritualised
drunken fistfight sanctioned at local festivals, sometimes with rocks
and other weapons, women fairly not excluded. Fatalities are not
uncommon. Personally, I am quite glad of the failure to
institionalise this at a previous MM summer party.

steve wrote:I haven't been too many weird places. Valencia, Espania during Las Fallas is probably tops.

DregsInTheCrowd wrote:He proceeded to place the third cock ring in its proper place, which he waved around a bit, rapping, playing the Verve Pipe in the background, drinking Sprite Remix.