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A couple of worthwhile exercises for your free time which have come my way in the last couple of days:

• GetUp’s new campaign is called Equal Before the Law – if you support equal rights for Gay and Lesbian Australians, sign the petition calling on the government and oppostition to implement the recommendations of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report released last week.
• Australia’s most intelligent, stimulating and thoughtful magazine, The Monthly, is offering to send a free copy to anyone in Australia who asks for it. Just go here and fill in your details. If you’re not a Monthly reader I really recommend you give it a go.

So, Glastonbury was pretty cool, but we left early. Brent woke up unwell yesterday and in need of medical attention, so we took the difficult decision to escape the mud and chaos for a warm bed and a hot bath back in London. As much as we would have liked to have stuck it out, we have the long journey home in a couple of days and it wouldn’t have been OK for Brent to be sick on that journey, so that was it. After a long sleep in a proper bed he’s feeling better already.

Glasto was amazing, exhilarating, hilarious and fun, but also a lot of hard work with the mud and the crowds. We had two days there before the music began, and the first day of the festival proper, to watch the village become a city and the city become a mudbath … photos, including of us in fright drag, will be forthcoming in due course.

Some of the acts we managed to catch included Reverend and the Makers, Chumbawamba, Oi Va Voi and Amy Winehouse, who was very entertaining if a little, um, under the weather. Horsemeat Disco’s Glastobury gay space, NYC Downlow, managed a pretty faithful recreation of queer New York circa 1978, if you excuse the grass dance floor and awful English beer – lots of fun and probably my favourite part of the festival.

As our holiday draws to its close I feel a little sad to be ending the fun and games of the last three weeks, but I’m also looking forward to getting home and seeing my guys again. Plus there is the next big adventure – our new home (once we get the mortgage approved) to look forward to.

Photo: A reveller walks in mud during the Glastonbury music festival in Somerset, south-west England, June 22, 2007. (Dylan Martinez/Reuters)

This will have to be an unsatisfyingly brief post from Istanbul, where we’ve been for nearly a week and from where we’ll be departing in a few hours. I know I haven’t posted anything at all and I am bad but the problem is that the city is just too lovely, the weather too good, and the distractions too – er, distracting – to be sitting in front of a computer babbling on. I have been jotting in my diary and I hope to find some time to share some observations when I get home.

Paul and Will in front of the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii), Istanbul

I can say that this has been a really great trip so far – no significant hassles, and both Budapest and especially Istanbul are charming, fascinating places to visit. Our train journey across Europe was satisfyingly slow and more comfortable than expected, with lots of time for reflection, discussion and just watching the world go by our window. Our travelling companions in Istanbul, Will and Aaron, have been lovely and great playmates.

This afternoon we’re heading back to London (the quick and dirty way) to meet up again with Will & Aaron, then on to Bristol overnight and to Glastonbury tomorrow for the festival, which is where we’ll be until Sunday. I suppose it’s possible (likely, even) that there will be internet access there and I may even be inclined to post something along the way.

But don’t count on it.

Just a brief update from Westbahnhof station in Vienna, where we are in the process of changing trains. Our journey from London to here has been pretty easy, on the Eurostar to Paris and then the Orient Express to Vienna. In an hour or so we will be on another train, the Avala, to Budapest where we spend the next couple of days.

Travelling by train is so comfortable and easy and human scaled — we have the privacy of our own cabin, a comfortable bed, and instead of sitting in a cramped seat waiting for some trolley-dolly to toss a muffin and a cup of tea at us, a nice bottle of Bordeaux, cheese and baguettes purchased from near the Gare de l’Est in Paris. The scenery rolls by, and when the time comes the man puts the bunks down so we can be rocked to sleep in the gentle embrace of the train.

More when we get settled in Budapest.

Travelling – exploring unfamiliar places, seeking out new experiences, actively going in search of the exotic and extraordinary. It’s an odd concept when you think about it, that humans would cross great distances and endure substantial discomfort just to look at stuff that is a little different to the stuff they look at at home. But we do. It is an artifact of modernity that has grown into a very popular passtime (if the crowds in central London around the various tourist haunts are anything to go by).

Having both been to this town a few times before, Brent and I are trying to approach it from a consciously reflective position. Yesterday on Westminster Bridge I saw this young kid, maybe 15 or 16 years old, one of a hoard of tourists crossing between the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye, or vice-versa. He was taking photographs of the Thames, as were many others as they crossed. But he didn’t seem to be making any effort at all to record anything of significance to himself, just snapping mindlessly because that was what one does when crossing Westminster Bridge as a tourist. He just lifted the camera, snapped a shot, and another, then walked on.

When this kid returns to wherever he came from, I imagine he’ll show his holiday snaps around, but he’ll have no narrative to connect them with. They’ll just be photographs of some river taken from some bridge in some town overseas with a big ferris wheel.

Here’s what William Wordsworth thought of that view on 3 September 1802:

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

To be so disconnected from what is going on around you that it is incapable of having any meaning as an experience but rather just another empty photo opportunity in a day or week of shuttling from vacuous experience to vacuous experience. This is the normal world of the tour-group tourist, and Wordsworth’s words foresaw the dullness of soul it reflects.

If being on Westminster Bridge (or at the foot of the Great Pyramid, or inside the Aya Sofia mosque, or wherever) has no particular meaning as experience, why bother? Is it any more authentic to have been there and taken a snapshot (but not reflected on it or sought meaning from it) than to have looked at a picture in a book, or seen it on TV, or just never have engaged with it at all?

Yesterday as we wandered around the city, strenuously resisting the urge to sleep all day after a 24-hour flight from Australia and just as strenuously turning the other direction whenever we chanced upon a crowd of tourists (difficult, in central London) we decided to avoid all museums, galleries, exhibitions, historical sites, churches and other “tourist attractions” – except those we stumble on without intending to. We will explore the cities we visit on foot, and if we can find a quiet moment in a handsome street or stumble upon a local delicatessen where we can try some regional foods, if we can meet a local or two, lose ourselves in a bookshop, learn just a little and open our eyes to the real world we are in, that is what we are after.

After sitting in an economy-class seat for 24 long hours, standing in the immigration queue at Heathrow for a couple more, after dragged ourselves and our luggage halfway around the world, surely we owe ourselves at least that.

We bought a house yesterday. It’s a tiny, owner-built mudbrick house on 9 acres of forest about 10 minutes from where we are now. Solar power, composting toilet, gas fridge, the full deal. As you’ll see from the photos, it’s a bit of a ‘hobbit house’ - not too many right angles, very (ahem) ‘rustic’ in parts and lots of unique features like the dragon that greets you as you come to the front door. It’s in a great location with a good-sized dam behind the house and a big shed at the top of the hill.

It’s been a crazy few weeks, trying to buy the place before we go away on holidays today, but we finally agreed on a price yesterday and exchanged contracts at 11 o’clock in the morning. We really like the place and, assuming the bank likes it too, we move in early August.

More photos after the jump.
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