The World According to Spaz The ramblings of a man from a place going to another place completely different to the first place.

Travelling has never really appealed to me, and after my last two quick jaunts to Norway and France, a highly odd couple if you asked me, I’ve been trying to understand exactly what has been holding me back, and the conclusion that I came to is something that I’d consider to be fact more than opinion.

No one likes travellers.

No one. And why would you blame them? Travellers smell. They dress badly. They pollute internet cafes filling up their travel blogs with inane travel anecdotes about experiences like "well everyone, the Parthenon, well, you just have to experience it, WORDS CAN NOT DESCRIBE". They have stupid accents and are constantly and rather vocally amazed when they meet another one of their kind who has the same stupid accent that they have. They don’t really know how everything works round here and as they’re catching the night train to Milan in a few hours they probably don’t care to find out. Sure they’re putting their fancy foreign money into the local coffers, but by their very nature travellers are a stingy lot and are not going to even feign a reach for your top shelf. They like to walk around all day looking at statues and parks and monuments and other free things, so what makes you think they’re going to be any different round the shops? Plus travellers listen to a whole lot of crap music on crap buses and love to sing and dance to anything crap just because they’re happy and damn it why the hell should I even pretend to give them the time of day let alone tell them which is the way to the post office. Not LOCAL??? They should be bloody well hunted in the summer. They are cashed up vagrants polluting the world with their foreign unsightly ways. Filth.

And then… I went travelling.

If you’ve never been travelling, I tell you it’s bloody unreal. You can smell. You can dress badly. You’ll be in some strange far off town in Scandinavia and you’ll meet an Australian and even though back home you’d have nothing in common and would probably take the piss out of them for wearing a Shins t-shirt like 5 years too late, you are instantly BEST FRIENDS! You can breeze into a new town, just potter around doing nothing all day and it’s not boring. You can fall asleep in a park because you’ve fulfilled your agenda of eating for this hour and the next window for eating isn’t for another twenty minutes. You don’t really want to carry too much stuff so you don’t really spend any money, and besides there are loads of really mundane things that you will take pictures of thinking that they are amazing because the English translation of a Bicycle Shop in Norway is “Big Fat Dyke Fruitbat” or something. Then you can put a picture of it up on your travel blog so that all your travel blog mates can link to it from their travel blogs. Plus you’ll be in a bar somewhere in Toulouse and suddenly Jet will come on the stereo and although you completely hate Jet and consider them to be the musical equivalent of an ingrown toe-nail operation, by crikey they’re an Aussie band mate and if there is one person left in this bar that doesn’t understand that I’m Australian and that Jet are Australian and that Jet and I are Australian together, well then you may as well have been up on the cliffs at Gallipoli eating Turkish delight and taking pot shots at top Aussie blokes who died so that you could have a bloody grouse life.

But the best thing about travelling, is that you can wake up in the morning, brush your teeth, have breakfast (take an apple now Kate, even though you’re not hungry slip one in your bag for later, get me and Josh one too), and embrace the day safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to go to work. And this is why I'm pretty sure that 90% of the bums you see on the high street haven't had a woman break their heart or a family disown them. Nope, they're just travellers who forgot to go home.