If you haven’t already seen it, I was in my local paper last week

Here

There is also a very good article about Esperanto in The Times.

Here

I am currently in an internet cafe in Bialystok, Poland. Up until about an hour ago, I had not been having a very good day at all

Babel and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, following a long and unpleasant journey across most of Poland, utterly fed up and exhausted. We were fast asleep by 7pm on Monday, but yesterday felt better and decided to explore the town. With the help of some tourist brochures translated into Esperanto, we duly did so, a procedure which lasted approximately three hours. That is to say, within three hours we appeared to have seen every single sight which Bialystok possesses, and were thus rather at a loss for something else to do.

In the absence of any better ideas, we spent Tuesday afternoon getting drunk. Eight glasses of wine later it was time for bed, after a brief stop off at a nearby pizza place to grab an evening meal. We committed the grave mistake of sitting outside to eat with some friends… The result is that this morning I have woken up with in excess of twenty fly bites on my legs alone, with the upper half of my body being even worse off. I can’t count all the bites on my back because I can’t see them all, but I would hazard a guess that I must be the proud owner of about 50 bites in total. And yes, they itch like hell. All 50 of them, at the same time. It was pretty difficult to sleep last night (more…)

No time or expense has been spared in producing this exceptionally cool map which shows where I am going to over the next two weeks. Please don’t tell Babel it’s here – my attempts at graphic design are prone to upset him

There will be no posts on this blog for the next two or three weeks, as I am going on holiday

I shall be flying to Prague on Friday morning, from where I will travel to the town of Liberec to attend the IJK, the world Esperanto youth congress, which runs between Saturday 18th and Saturday 25th July. Babel and I are heading to Prague for a spot of sightseeing that weekend, before catching a bus to Warsaw on the Sunday night and from there heading on to Bialystok by train. Bialystok is the location for the UK, the World Esperanto Congress 2009, and we will be there until Saturday 1st August, at which point we have a rather complex journey home via Wroclaw. If you can’t figure out why this is complex, try looking at a map of Poland If all goes to plan, I will be home again on Sunday 2nd August… home for a very brief interval, I hasten to add, as I am going to Austria on August 8th

I’ve been planning this for so long that I’m starting to feel rather excited now, but this week I’ve also started feeling scared. Having organised it all myself, I’m worried that something will go terribly wrong and we’ll get stranded somewhere random, unable to speak a word of Polish…

Wish me luck!

Last weekend was the annual JEB Summer meet-up which this year took place in Felixstowe. Previous JEB summer meet-ups have been in Buxton and Stratford. Previous meetings have been various degrees of fun but this year was probably my favourite; firstly because it was so relaxed and secondly because we were at the seaside

The day kicked off with a rather early start for me, leaving home at 9am to ensure I got to Leicester for 11. Babel and I were planning to be in Felixstowe by three, something which he assured me was going to be possible with the inclusion of an hour for lunch, despite my protestations that it would take five hours to get there. Babel turned out to be nearer the mark than I was and we did indeed arrive in the early afternoon after a very pleasant, if slightly warm, drive down to Suffolk and an enjoyable stop-off in a little pub somewhere called Stowmarket. I was impressed that we managed not to get lost during the entire journey until right at the end when we were looking for our campsite and Google Maps played its favourite trick of insisting our destination was somewhere where it couldn’t possibly be; this time, off the fifth exit of a roundabout which only had four exits (more…)