The rain dance
------------

Every time I go to Spain I like it more and more.

I like the fact that you can sleep the entire day away and still be able to go shopping when you drag yourself out of bed at 19:00. I like the fact that you get a tasty little schnack with your beer. I like the fact that no one bats an eyelid when it's midnight and the woman sitting next to you in the bar is bouncing a tiny baby on her knee. And I especially like the fact that the further south you go, the less likely it is to rain.

This is how I happen to be back in Spain, only a few weeks after spending a soggy couple of weeks in the north of the country. As we watched yet another dark cloud roll in over the Catabrian mountains and the fat drops hit the windscreen, we realised that no matter where we go in the world, or when, it rains.

Yes, my friends, we are the people who made it rain in the Sahara desert, one of the world's driest and most hostile regions. The UN should seriously employ us as drought relievers. Other examples include having our Cuban beach idyll marred by hurricane-like weather, a weekend in Budapest almost resulting in trench foot and a visit to Venice almost causing a humanitarian disaster. Venice is not a place that needs any more water than it already has.

My personal favourite, however, is when we arrived on the Croatian island of Dugi Otok one a hot July day. Twenty minutes after we landed, in rolled the clouds and down rolled the rain, torrentially, for a good five hours. "The locals are overjoyed," exclaimed an old man, who'd moved to the US when he was a teenager and recently moved back to the island. He'd taken pity on us as we sat shivering under the parasol at the island's only open restaurant watching the panicked yacht owners leaping onto the dock from their expensive, lolling, flimsy boats as the water got more and more violent. He invited us to his house for cheese and homemade raki and continued,"it's not rained for 52 days and people were really starting to get worried."

Almería
-----------

So, with the obligatory cheap flight booked, we trundled off to the "driest place in Europe" and dared it to rain.

In my opinion, the tapas are definitely better in the north. But what makes them almost as good in Adalucía is that they come free with every drink. This is great if you like to eat octopus, which seems to be what you get a giant scoop of, sometimes slathered with mayonnaise, sometimes pickled in vinegar, whenever you order a drink. It's not so great if, like me, you think that octopus tastes like murky sea water and has the texture of old car tyre or like Portugeezer who practically vomits at the mere whiff of the stuff.

Spain is full of old people and Almería city is no exception. I don't know whether they live longer, or whether all the young people move to London as soon as they finish school to work in a bar giving the impression of a greying nation, or whether they are just dragged out more by over-zealous daughters-in-law. Every evening, without fail, in every town, little old men with their pants up to their nipples shuffle up and down and little old ladies totter along in their sensible heels.

Away from the zimmer frames and blue rinses of the main square, we found ourselves a bustling bar off one of the tiny medina-esque alleyways, where I hastily ordered 'cheese fondue' sin jamón for my tapa to accompany my new found most favourite drink - Tinto de Verano. I was very disappointed when cheese fodue turned out to be a finger sized slice of bread with melted cheese on it. I think the cook decided to teach me about the importance of being a carnivore in Spain by hiding a lump of ham a centemetre below the cheese. Grrrr.

The next day, we made it out of bed just before the shops shut at 14:00 for siesta. Within about five minutes of leaving our hostal, I had to duck into a shoe shop to cool down in its frosty air-conditioned lovelines because it was 31 degrees in the shade and I was panting like an over-exercised donkey. While I was in there cooling down, I happened to peruse the shelves and realised that almost everything was on sale. The prices were so cheap, I actually wondered whether the price was per shoe and Portugeezer went to ask the girl behind the counter who stared at him like he was on the run from a mental hospital.

When we were in the north, we'd seen several shoe shops that had signs in the window saying 'we sell single shoes' and we had assumed that it was quite normal for the Spanish to buy one shoe at a time, although we couldn't quite work out why. Lots of one legged-people in remote villages because of too much inbreeding perhaps? Buy one this week, buy the other next week when you get paid? Some sort of strange fashion fad?

Once we'd established that the price was per pair, all hell broke loose and I am surprised I only left with two pairs...



Baza
-----

I'm quite obsessed with sleeping in unusual places and had found us a troglodyte cave house in the middle of nowhere to go and be troggy in. We drove a couple of hours north across the mountains, past the place where they filmed the spaghetti westerns (and I learned that they are not called spaghetti westerns because they were filmed in Italy as I had thought for my entire life) and numerous other crap films like Zorro and arrived at our trog cave in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing but dust and a huge orange rock-mountain that made me feel like I was in Arizona.



The owner of the cave house was a perpetually happy, rubber-faced Belgian called Sam, with a barrel-shaped labrador called Red Bull. Sam looked at the gathering clouds in the sky and said, in the weird mix of Dutch, French and English we were conversing in, "It's been sunny since April, not a cloud in the sky until today. What have you done?"

The cave house was amazing - painted bright white and full of lumps and bumps and curves. There was a huge double bed, built into the far wall with two separate pillows. I was happy to see two pillows because one night with the ubiquitous 'divorce pillows' that they are very fond of in Spain was already enough. I named them that because expecting two people to share one long, thin pillow is a recipe for trouble, especially when my penchant for sheet and pillow stealing and general bed-hogging is thrown into the equation. I wonder how many times 'pillow issues' have been cited in divorce cases.



Because there are no windows and only one door and they are buried under tons of rock, cave houses have a constant temperature and are cool in the summer and toasty in the winter. They are dark and cosy and once the door is shut, there's no natural light whatsoever; even the most hardened of insomniacs would find it difficult not to get some shut eye in there. Being in the middle of nowhere and having walls several meters thick meant absolute silence. I had fantasies about moving there for winter to hibernate and suggested it to Portugeezer but he was already half-hibernated and only grunted his approval.

Our little cave house had a little swimming pool too and we swung about in the hammocks drinking my homemade and improvised Tinto de Verano (red wine, ice cubes and sprite) and chomping on lumps of manchego and wolfing down olives, while Red Bull sat patently underneath our hammocks ready to hoover up any stray crumbs that might come his way. By early evening, it was starting to get cold and I feared that I might be about to catch pneumonia, so we gave up on the pool and warmed up in our cave.



Later that night, we drove to the nearest town, Baza, which wasn't very near at all. Baza was supposed to be having its fiesta, but the only thing we could find were the remnants of a children's puppet show on the town's main square complete with hyperactive children buzzing about while grumpy looking men dismantled the stage and adoring abuelas sat in huge gangs on white plastic chairs keeping an eye on the beloved niños.

Around the town square, I noticed about eight photography shops, which I thought must make for very healthy competition. In every window, alongside the usual cheesy, forced, soft-focus wedding pictures, each shop had very bizarre pictures of babies dressed like adults and performing tasks like policeman, secretary, fireman. Very freaky.



We walked around for ages trying to find somewhere to eat and ended up in a small bar at the top end of the town. I ordered a half ración of deep fried shrimps. I like a shrimp or two, but more than about five is way too much. My eyes almost popped out of my head when they delivered me a gigantic heap of shrimps. Let's just say that the scruffy stray kittens cowering in a doorway nearby probably thought they'd died and gone to kitty heaven when I started chucking the shrimps, one by one, in their direction.

>> Next: drugged up Flamenco in Granada and hippies, nakedness and the worst wine ever in Las Negras. Stay tuned to find out whether it rained or not >>

Amsterdam > Weeze > Santander

Some things in life are just not fair. Like going to Spain in July to get some sun, for instance, and spending nine days dodging torrential downpours, shivering in shorts and wondering why you did not bring a coat with you.

The Portugeezer and I do not tend to do much research about our random travel destinations. In fact, the usual way we decide where to go and when generally goes like this:

"Look! [insert sheep transporting company/ budget airline name] is having a sale. Tickets for FIVE euros to [insert destination] if we book within the next four seconds!"

A few clicks later and we're usually booked on a cheap flight somewhere faster than you can say "Carbon Footprint" or "Deep Vein Thrombosis", usually departing from some random airport in Germany and returning to another random airport in Belgium.

This is how we happen to be in Santander, which turns out to be the cheapest way to get to Asturias. This lack of planning is also why we happen to be going to a place about which the most impressive thing is the fact that it's incredibly lush and green. Incredibly lush and green in Spain means that it rains. Almost constantly.

"Asturians are always ready for the rain," boasts the travel guide I've bought, as I sit in the nasty blue and yellow sardine-can that is Ryanair. I glance longingly at the burning sun and the freak 30 degree heat as it leaves itself firmly in Germany. Yes, that's right. Germany.

"Asturias is not a wine growing region," mocks the book. Panic! No wine? No wine means no grapes. No grapes mean no sun. More importantly, no wine means me not drinking any wine.

"Cider is the chosen drink here," rubs in the book, which I am now considering giving to the irritating child in front of me to rip up. Cider means apples. Apples like to grow in cold, wet climates. I grew up in one of those. I know the misery it causes, especially in summer.

So, when we arrive in Santander, which is in Cantabria and not Asturias, but that doesn't matter because the weather is the same in both places, it is not altogether surprising that it is raining.

Er, have you got anything smaller?
----------------------------------------------

We go to pick up our rental car and discover they've run out of normal-people sized cars and the only thing they have left for us is a massive, ugly, beige seven-seater Citroen Picasso. I guess the only people who own Citroen Picasso's are people with very big families or people without big families and certain small body parts. And, who the hell buys a beige car? It's seriously huge.

The back seats and floor are covered with crushed up crisps. The lady explains, "We are eh so ebusy, we did enot have etime to eclean it!"

"No problem," I say, neglecting to add that it's going to look a hell of a lot worse than that once we explode inside it.

I 'drive' a six year-old 50cc scooter with the incongruous name of "Alfie". I do not have the necessary skills to reverse park a 2 litre engine bus into a tiny space on a busy road. I also have a rather nervous disposition when it comes to reversing large vehicles after a rather embarrassing reversing 'incident' when I knocked over a very old and important historic monument in front of a pub full of drunken people. I've never quite gotten over it. Nope. That car has to be changed.

We whinge for half an hour and are subsequently offered a "Berlingo" which is basically a delivery van with seats in the back. It's also beige and even more ugly than the bus. In the end, we take the bus with the promise from the car rental company that we can change it tomorrow at the city centre branch and a promise from the Portugeezer that I will not have to do any reversing in it.

We arrive at our "pension", which randomly and rather coincidently happens to be two steps away from the car rental company's other office. The old woman running the pension is wearing a shapeless flowered dress that all Spanish old ladies wear. She shows us our room, which has two beds in it and we ask if she has a room with just one bed. She says, "No. If you don't want this room, you can leave now, but you have to pay me anyway, so I don't care." Nice. Verrrrry nice.

Next > Lost in Basque Country

A bridge too far (especially when you forget your sunblock)
----------------------------------------------------

After more wandering and buying of useless crap, we decide to rent bikes and cycle across the Golden Gate bridge. We make our way down a hill, quelle surprise, and are stopped in the street by a boy.



He's about 18, with braces on his huge white teeth and wearing a baseball cap backwards. His shorts are almost down to his ankles and he has thick white socks on with his shoes. He looks like he just fell out of a Pepsi advert.

"Hey man," he says, "Do you, know, like, where, like, I can get any, like, band t-shirts from?" He motions towards Vee's t-shirt.

We tell him that he should go up, it's always up, to Haight where there are lots of t-shirt and music shops. Then the conversation went like this, I kid you not:

"So, where are you guys from?"

"I'm from Portugal," says Vee. I never really bother telling people I am from England. As soon as they hear Portugal, they forget I exist.

"Ahhhhh Really, I'm from Portugal, I have, like, family there"

"Which part of Portugal are you from?"

"Aaah, I dunno."

AH AH AH AH AH AH AH.

Knobbly bits
----------

We find a bike rental shop. The girl renting us the bikes has a horrible skin condition. She's covered in tiny knobbles all over the place. I try not to wince or react in anyway and pray to the giant apple god that whatever it is she has is not contagious when she gives me the pen to sign the contract in about thirty different places:

Yes, I was offered a helmet. Yes, it is not a mistake that I refused the helmet because I did not want to take a helmet. Yes, I promise not to sue you if I fall off my bike and smash my head open like it's a watermelon falling from a great height because I am not wearing a helmet, even though I was offered one and refused it. Yes, I agree that falling off the bike can only be my own fault and in no way the fault of the crusty girl who rented me the bike. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The girl yaks and yaks and yaks on so much that I start to wonder whether she has tiny knobbly bits all over her brain as well.

"Naaaaaaah," she says when I ask her if there are many hills to cycle up on the way to the bridge. "Just a small one to get to the bridge entrance and it's downhill all the way there and on the other side."

She lied. Clearly I'd also forgotten that wherever you go in San Francisco there's infinitely more uphills than downhills and spout out many profanities about evil bike-renters with knobbly skin while cycling up several near vertical inclines in the first of about 45 gears.



Cycling across the bridge is great, even if the traffic roaring past on highway next to the cycle path causes the structure to bounce about in a rather alarming manner and even if you have to dodge huge gangs of camera-weilding Japanese tourists wandering aimlessly on the bike path. And I thought that only happened in Amsterdam. Why do people do that? Do you wander around in the middle of the road in your own city? Well, do you? I thought not.

On the other side of the bridge, the rolling hills are an amazing shade of green and we decide to cycle to Sausalito, which is very scary because there's no bike path and there seems to be a speed limit of anything-you-like as long as you drive dangerously close to those stupid cyclists who are not wearing helmets as fast as you possibly can. Sausalito is a very rich place and is full of yachts. We have an hour or so until the ferry takes us back to the city so we stop and eat amazing Mexican food at Sausalito Taco Shop, a cute little wooden shack with brightly painted walls. There's a very apologetic note explaining that the reason you have to pay for your nacho chips instead of getting them free like you do in every other Mexican restaurant is because they are homemade. It's the first time I've ever eaten homemade nachos and let me tell you, once you eat homemade nachos, you'll never, ever buy Casa Fiesta's cardboard triangles from Albert Swine again.

They serve us strong sangria in a huge glass which does not really help the fact that I seem to be developing severe sunburn and sunstroke, although at this point, I just feel rather hot and thirsty and do not know I am in the process of developing severe sunstroke and sunburn. There's an ominous rouge aura radiating from all parts of my face except those that were covered with the oversized sunglasses that I'd purchased for $10 earlier that day. I look like an albino panda.

The ferry back to San Francisco is the second to last ferry of the evening and it's packed with people who have done the same as us and can't face the cycle home. There is a queue of at least 100 bikes and I start to panic that I won't get on the boat and will have to cycle all the way back home up those huge hills so I queue like a Dutch person (i.e. not at all) and clandestinely push in as close to the front as I dare.

The boat has no proper space for bikes and for once, I truly appreciate the wonderful pragmatism and practicality of the Dutch; they'd always make sure there's ample space for bikes on a boat that takes hundreds of cyclists across the water several times a day. There's a man with at the entrance bellowing at us, a bit like the security guy from JFK, to:

"Hurry, it up, I've got forty more bikes to fit in here. You, there, put your bike THERE. LEAVE THEM UNLOCKED, and move out upstairs, come on, come on..."

I glare at him. I don't like being given orders and I don't like being made to feel like an idiot when the only idiots around are the ones who haven't removed the seating and put in bike racks. There's major chaos because the place where you have to buy your tickets blocks the way that we all have to exit the area where we put our bikes. The bikes are piled on top of each other and leaning against chairs. As they are all rental bikes, they are almost all exactly the same and I envisage fisticuffs occurring when we have to unload at the other end.

We spend the 20 minute journey, being windblown on the upper deck, which feels rather nice and cooling on my roasting flesh. We sail close to Alcatraz.



I realise how horrendously foreboding it is and how horrible it must have been to have been incarcerated in there. Although, I also think that if you bulldoze all the buildings to the ground and build a nice wooden hut and plant lots of palm trees (with which I have developed an unhealthy obsession and think I might start refusing to travel to any country that does not have palm tree-lined streets), I could quite happily live there with my Portugeezer, an internet connection and a few big dogs.

We arrive at San Francisco.



And I am yet again amazed at the fact that we all have to actually carry our bikes up a flight of stairs to get out, with constant drone of the bellower telling us to hurry up while little old ladies trip up the stairs with a bloody bike on their shoulder. Long live America.

Castro, but not the Cuban one
------------------------

After returning our bikes, we decide to go to the Castro, San Francisco's infamous and totally clichéd gay district for some booze. We pose gaily (no pun intended) outside restaurants and bars with amusingly stereotypical names such as:



and



and find ourselves a quiet and welcoming bar a little way down the hill and away from the main drag, which is heaving and pulsating with very loud music. We sit at the bar and sup very strong margaritas slapped on the bar by a very buffed and tanned man who obviously spends all his time and money on getting buffed and tanned and only does the slapping bit to earn the money for all the buffing and tanning. I return his slappings with my own slappings of dollar tips on the bar and feel totally integrated.

As we will leave San Francisco in a few hours, we decide to have a few drinks with Nick, Fergal and Tim, who have randomly also turned up in the Castro. We end up in a bar on the main drag. I'm the only woman in there. I go to the bar to order some drinks while Nick bounces off somewhere to check out the action and the others find a table as far away from any action as possible.



The hairlessly bare-chested bartender pours a massive extra slug of tequila into one margarita and, with a wink, says "That one's yours." I decide that it's great being a woman in a bar full of gay men.

When I return to the table, I find three shocked men trying not to look up and Nick in hysterics, telling me to look up at the TV behind me. I do and nearly choke on my cocktail. There's no-holds-barred hardcore gay porn on a huge flat screen TV. This, Nick explains, is not normal. He's done the rounds and found out that the porn film awards are taking place and so the nominated films are being shown in the bars. Although my back is to the TV, I can see the reflection in the window I am facing. It's like watching a train that is about to crash. You know you shouldn't watch, but you can't help it and every three seconds, I catch an eyeball full of stuff that eyeballs should probably not be exposed to too many times in their lifetime.

Nick bounces off and returns two minutes later with two men, both sporting buzz cuts and very purposeful tans. One of them is wearing what looks like a a dog chain and a big padlock around his neck. Nick proceeds to introduce them to us, pointing out our various nationalities. We all shake hands with Padlock and his keeper. Padlock is very enamoured with Vee and excitedly tells him that he has Portuguese heritage and that his stage name is somebody Silva. Then Nick says,

"And is it really you in that film?"

They both nod proudly. We all nod proudly because we are not sure what else we can do other than nod proudly. After lots of proud nodding, they nod off and we finish our drinks.

It's late and we have to get the train back to Palo Alto. Vee and I make a mad dash halfway across the city to the train station where I sit and roast quietly in a corner looking a bit like a very angry tomato and cursing myself for not putting on any sun block. We sleep for a grand total of three hours, which is not enough when you've drunk way too much tequila, and have sunburn so terrible that the ice cubes you take from the freezer to cool your face down melt, literally, the moment they touch your skin, and run off to get the ridiculously early bus to the airport for our ridiculously early flight to Seattle....

Getting our fix
-------------------
Me and Vee are addicted to garlic and it's been a while since we've had any. The priority of the evening is to score ourselves some cloves. We wander up and down, but curiously, mostly up, looking for the precious white stuff. I'm getting delirious with hunger and the hills are annoying me and I whine:

"Here! Look, this pasta place has pasta with garlic sauce. Let's just go here..."

But Vee is already next door with his nose pressed against the window. He looks a bit like one of Pavlov's dogs.

"It's...a GARLIC RESTAURANT!"

Within three seconds we are inside "The Stinking Rose" and loading up our garlic bready buns with lashings of aioli. I order a blueberry margarita and slurp it down a bit too quickly. I declare that it's really weak and blah blah blah on about how it's impossible to get a decent margarita these days. However, ten minutes later I can hardly focus my eyes or formulate full sentences and have to retract my previous statement.



We move from our romantic little window table-for-two to a large booth for four, where we lounge and loll on red leatherette seats in a tequila-ed up state and are generally silly until the uber efficient waiter brings us our bill. Without us asking. Which is something they do in the US and I know why they do it, but it's still very strange. I think about American tourists in Amsterdam, patiently waiting for their bill, not getting it, plucking up the courage to ask Marloes-the-waitress (who is busily having a ciggy outside or texting her mates or picking her nose) for it, then still not getting it for another twenty minutes, then getting it slapped down on the table with all the finesse of someone killing a fly.


Barflies
----------
Once our garlic and tequila cravings are quelled, we meet Tim at a nearby bar. It's supposed to have good live bands. The bar does indeed have a live band, although I am not sure how good it is, with a crazy-looking woman playing the piano and singing Blues songs, accompanied by a drummer and a guitarist. They are all over 50. The place is a spit-and-sawdust type of place and there's one old woman working behind the bar by herself. I guess her husband is the geriatric bouncer on the door who probably can't even see my passport as I wave it under his nose. He nods us in with a slight twitch of the head. The woman behind the bar limps and is obviously in pain. She has some sort of rudimentary back support tied around her waist. It actually looks like something she made herself. But she whips the tops of bottles with the kind of efficiency that you only get when you've spent the last 40 years doing it. I sip my extremely weak Corona, which is half the strength of the stuff in Europe, try to calculate how many I would have to drink to actually feel any effect, and watch the poor old lady carry six beers in one hand as it's more interesting than watching the crazy lady band.

On the Road
-----------
We soon tire of the band bar and go to what turns out to be the only bar that I actually like in the entire trip, Vesuvio, which is located on Jack Kerouac street. I like it even though the first voices I hear inside are Dutch. Those Cloggies get everywhere.



Tim orders a local 'steam beer' which tastes like cardboard that has been soaked in rainwater for a month. There are many things the yanks do very well, but making, serving and drinking beer is absolutely not one of them.



I take the crappy beer back to the bar for him and tell the guy that it tastes awful, fully expecting him to shrug and tell me where to go. But he takes the pint, pours it away and asks me what I want instead. Now that's what they mean by "The customer is always right".

Toilet tradition
------------
On one of my trips to the toilet, I notice what it is that's the weirdest thing about American toilets. It's been bothering me since I arrived. It's not the shape, which is more like the toilets in Japan than in Europe, or the fact that the water swirls the opposite way...it's that the opening that the water goes down is really, really, really small...ahum....sorry, I digress...

Waffely versatile
----------------------
We retire back to "Hotel" Amsterdam and sleep like coma patients for several hours. We wake up to the smell of the 'free breakfast' we had been promised wafting through the large cracks between the wall and the doorframe. I'd tried to cover up the cracks the night before with an elaborate system of coats and towels because I thought that someone would obviously spend the entire night peering through the cracks into a dark room to watch me sleep. I am sure I once read that tequila induces paranoia.

We bounce downstairs to the basement in search of food and are instantly reminded that we are in a hostel. Breakfast consists of a waffle machine, an enormous jug of waffle batter and a queue of hungry and hungover student travellers, clutching plastic plates and forks, trying to work out how to make waffles. Firstly, I don't like waffles, not because they are Belgian but because they taste like lard, and secondly, there really isn't that much in this world that I want badly enough to queue up for it. I find a lonely,random mug on a shelf, try to ignore the fact that it's probably been gummed by some student from Birmingham and not washed properly afterwards, pour some coffee and add some powdered creamer. A very sunburnt blonde Australian boy wearing ripped jeans and those irritating rip-off Brazilian flip-flop things on his feet sees me shaking the white stuff into the coffee and bounds over, points to the white powder and says,

"Ahaa, do you know what that is?"

I tell him it's powdered creamer but what I really want to say is "Logically speaking, what do you normally put in coffee that's white, and doesn't always come in liquid form and is not sugar? I'm surprised you made it to the end of your street, Bruce, let alone halfway around the world."

The coffee tastes worse than you could ever imagine coffee with powdered creamer tastes. In fact, I would probably swear that I've had better coffee on KLM. We decide that our hostelling days are over and go and get ourselves uber strong espresso and some grub from a nice little cafe round the corner.

...

More adventures in San Fran

That night, we take the last train from San Francisco to Palo Alto. As we set off, I settle back into my chair in a mildly drunken manner and try to fall asleep.

"Good evening folks. As you all know, this is the last train out of San Francisco ... so I don't want ANY CRAP!"

He screams the last words and I am jolted awake. He continues:

"So sit there QUIETLY. I don't want to hear ANY loud music. I don't want to hear ANY loud laughing. I don't want to HEAR your electronic devices. And, as far as I know, we have not installed foot stalls on this train yet so keep your FEET OFF THE SEATS. Oh, and you need a valid ticket. If you haven't got one. GET THE HELL OFF MY TRAIN."

Nice. At every station we stopped at, the driver offered the drunks a little anecdote.

"Next stop Bayshore. According to a 2007 survey, Bayshore has the highest suicide rate in California."

Still Jetlagged
------------

After waking up at the crack of dawn again but thinking it's dinner time, we take the train into the city again. We decide we are going to stay in the city for the night instead of going back to Palo Alto and busy ourselves finding a cheap hotel, which, in San Francisco, is not easy. Firstly, because it's almost impossible to find anything in Downtown for less than $60 a night that doesn't involve shared bathrooms and bunk beds containing irritatingly nice and friendly Danish students with irritatingly perfect English accents and even more irritatingly perfect skin and secondly, because going from hotel to hotel in search of a room in a city that's made from mountains is really, really tiring.

It seems that the term 'hotel' is used quite loosely in the US. A few times we see a place that looks suitably shabby enough for our measly budget, only to find that there is no reception, no bell and a locked door. Another time, a desperately sad looking Indian woman lets us into her hotel, eyeing us suspiciously. The place doesn't look too bad although it smells of disinfectant and it's the same disinfectant that they used to use at primary school when little Johnny guzzled too many sweeties and chucked up on the floor. To me, that disinfectant has only one purpose, and that purpose is to hide the smell of vomit. The hotel smells like one big sweet-eating-bile-ejecting fest to me and I feel like ejecting some bile myself. However, the rooms were to rent by the week only. Then I see this sign ...



... and we retreat hastily. In fact, this is a sign that I start to see everywhere in the city and I wonder whether there's really a risk or whether it's just another way to avoid lawsuits. I wonder about the people that work in buildings that are seemingly full of asbestos or lead piping and think many of them don't have a choice except to sit there and breathe in or ingest whatever it is lurking around. I wonder if they have to sign some sort of waiver when they start work..."I will not sue you when my baby is born with three heads..."

We turn a corner in the amusingly named Nob Hill area.

"That's it." I say pointing up the almost vertical incline. "We're staying there. End of story."



We hike up to Hotel Amsterdam, which is in fact a hostel but has some private rooms with bathrooms, and more importantly, has no signs telling me that if I enter the building I'll be growing tumors within five minutes. I've never much been into communal living and the hostel scene; I need to be able to sit on the toilet without the threat of Danish Lars and/or his friends Lars and Lars bursting in on me. We haggle with the disinterested girl on the reception for a while. Then Vee, rather ingeniously, says:

"Do we get a discount if we are actually from Amsterdam?"

We do, and the pigeons have landed in their nest. We dump our bags and go off in search of stuff to see, donuts to eat, weak coffee to whinge about and crap to buy.

In China Town I buy a cool wooden Chinese flute. Vee stocks up on T shirts. We duck into a random bar for a (Chinese) margarita. At Union Square we sneak into a posh hotel and ride up and down in the glass lifts like lunatics and get great views of the city.



At the tacky Fisherman's Wharf we watch sea lions bask in the sun and look out to Alcatraz in the distance.



On Market Street we stop for a sandwich. This sign on the wall makes us feel very welcome.



I'm tucking into something grease-soaked and liberally lashed with mayonnaise when I hear this horrible rasping sound, like something rattling around in an empty box, accompanied by a weird wheezing sound. An obese woman is sitting about ten meters away from me, scoffing a donut, and the sound is coming from her.

She can't breathe. By the size of her, I am surprised she can even walk. The lower part of her belly is resting on her knees. Even though I've seen several extremely overweight people since I arrived, it's still shocking to see people that big. In Holland, it's really rare, if not impossible, to see someone who is clinically obese. In the US, there is a dangerously fat person on every corner and it's easy to see why. Every street is lined with places serving food and pretty much nothing else. You're never more than two steps away from your next calorie.

Since we arrived, we'd both been continuously hungry even though we were stuffing down more food in a few hours than we'd normally eat in a day. Donuts! I was consuming donuts! I would never eat a donut in Holland but they taste so sugary and light here that I want to shove them down my gullet all the time and it's pretty much impossible to order a coffee without getting about a pint of it too. I began to ache from swallowing too much. And I began to wonder whether the reason why people are so fat is that the food has so little nutritional value that you have to keep eating more and more to get your body's needs and all you absorb is the fat and the sugar because actually that's all there is.

Anyway, I don't want to look at fat lady but I can't help it and I crane my neck to check out the flab. I feel sorry for her. I want to slap the donut out of her hand and shove some lettuce under her nose. When I turn back around and look at the greasy lump of bread in front of me I suddenly feel overwhelmingly sick. All I can hear is her rasping for breath. I don't feel like swallowing my grease with the accompaniment of obesity in the background. There is no way I can finish my sandwich. Every time I try to take a bite, an image of my stomach hanging over my knees just like fat lady's pops up.

On the hippie trail
---------------

Up in Haight and Ashbury, the seat of the 'Hippie revolution', I buy shoes and we eat pizza with slices of potato and whole roasted cloves of garlic on it. We pose in front of Jerry Garcia's old house.



I walk into a tee shirt shop that stinks so badly of marijuana that I have to leave. Gangs of greasy 'non conformists' with dogs and bottles of beer beg for money or say they'll take a photo of us for a dollar. Like I'm going to give you my camera - there's a reason why there are pawn shops on every corner. There's a lot of young people living on the streets and I get the impression that for some of them, it's a choice. I see a very healthy and happy looking kid, about 20, with perfect skin and teeth. But he's filthy, and has no shoes.

We walk through a tiny corner of the Golden Gate park and it's absolutely packed with random alcoholics, hippies, squatters, people playing drums and guitars, and kids having football lessons. We accidently find ourselves in an area that is an "Adults with Children ONLY zone" where several signs proclaim that adults are only permitted in this area if they are with a child. I want to scrub out the 'a' and see what happens when the sign reads that adults are only permitted "when with child" and then think that perhaps I better lay off the sugar. I worry we will be accosted and arrested for being filthy perverts because everyone who walks through a children's playground and who is not with a child is categorically a peadophile but it's ok and we manage to sneak away.

The sun is shining and everything is so green and there are millions of palm trees and exotic plants just hanging around. I decide that I really like San Francisco.



... Next up...the Stinking Rose, burnt skin, gay bars and more, much much more...

The hills are alive...

The old body clock is totally out of synch and I wake up at 06:00. A strange thing is streaming through the window and after a while I realise that it's the sun. After a greasy grilled cheese sandwich in a retro diner at an hour I haven't seen for a very long time, probably since I was at primary school, we make our way into the city on the Cal-Train. Trains in the US are like everything else in the US - massive - and I am surprised that trains even exist, given the yanks' reputation as a nation of car lovers.

We arrive at the train station which, if it had been built in any European city, could only be described as 'quaint'. For a city the size of San Francisco, the train station, end of the line, would not look out of place in toy town and I wonder what travelling Americans make of the behemoth stations we are used to in Europe.

As we are both a bit hyper, we lark about taking pictures and bouncing up and down the platform ...



... until we realise that there is no one on the platform anymore and a huge security guard is rattling the glass door at the end of the platform, screaming:

"You two! Hurry up! Hurry IT UP or I'm gonna have to lock you in."

Outside the station a middle-aged black man standing on the street says:

"Hey you two, are you ok with drugs? Because if not, I'm your guidance." Is he offering us drugs? Or is he some kind of god-squad saviour type asking if we are addicted and need some help? I know we are a little jet-lagged and disheveled because of the backpack-itis our clothes have contracted, but really, we don't look like we just shot up...

After five seconds I realise that living in Amsterdam for any length of time means that your body actually forgets how to walk up and down hills. Unfortunately, there are more hills in San Francisco than there are in the Sound of Music. This realisation prompts many hours of whinging about painful tootsies and a newly found impassioned hatred for the concept of the incline. Missing Alfie-the-scooter back home, we try to rent ourselves a scooter to quell the whinging, but at $129 a day, it's the same price as renting a car for an entire week and so we are stuck with blisters, aches and whines.

The first thing I notice about the city is an astonishing amount of homeless people - not just crackheads and alcoholics but 'normal' looking people, well as normal as one can look when one sleeps in a doorway. Some push shopping trolleys loaded with stuff; some sit forlornly in doorways with battered backpacks. Some hardened boozers have caught onto a trend and hold cardboard signs saying "Why Lie? I need beer.", which makes ignorant tourists laugh, take pictures and then contribute a dollar to the renal-failure fund.

One size fits most

Given that we both sport rather large masses of wild and unruly hair, we generally travel with a hairdryer but the electrical current is too weak in the US to make ours work. I guess this is so the idiots who stick knitting needles in plug sockets only get a mild shock and not the death they, and we, deserve. We decide to buy a hairdryer and venture into Walgreens, a pharmacy that has more branches in a square mile than Albert Hein has in Amsterdam.

Walgreens sells pretty much everything you want or or need, or don't want or need but buy anyway because consumerism is infectious and let's face it, there really isn't much else to do in the US except consume.

I wander around in awe at the sheer amount of stuff available and come across this ...



... which made me laugh and wonder which obese person could take enough time away from face-stuffing to file a lawsuit against the manufacturer.

"Your honour, I bought a swimming cap which stated on the box that one size fits all...the distress caused by my fat head not fitting into the 'all' category has caused me untold suffering. I would like $5690645064564568646450968 compensation."

I wonder how fat your head has to be not to fit into a swimming cap. Then I wonder how many people whose heads are so fat they can't fit it into a swimming cap can actually go swimming. And then I wonder where on earth they get swimsuits that are big enough...and then I come across this which jolts me out of the world of fat heads:



There's random stuff locked away in plastic cases. You have to ask the staff to open the case for you if you want to buy whatever is contained within. I can't work out the system of classifying what is deemed precious enough to be locked up. All the deodorants and some brands of shampoo and shower gel are behind the plastic, yet more expensive brands are not locked away. I really do not understand the logic. I marvel at the system for ages and take pictures until a greasy girl in a red Waldgreens sweater hovers too close for too long trying to intimidate me into leaving. We take the $19 hairdryer to the checkout, where the bloke takes our money, presses a button and our change flies out of a machine at the opposite end of the counter.

Outside Walgreens, an Indian man is playing a homemade electric guitar that he as made out of a chainsaw. I feel like I am on a different planet.

Mexican Mission

I once spent three weeks in Mexico. Being a vegetarian, not actually liking spicy food and trying, bravely, once, to eat some sort of soup from a roadside stall and violently vomiting it all up less than an hour later, meant that, in Mexico, I stuck to eating quesadilla or plain tortilla every day, three times a day for three weeks. Understandably, when I got home, it was at least six months before I could even look at a tortilla. Thank god those days are over because I could not wait to stuff my face with yummy Mexican food.

Later in the evening, we make our way to the Mission, as I've read that the best Mexican food to be had can be found there. I'm on a mission in the Mission to find myself the biggest saltiest margarita I can find. However, I've forgotten that Americans seem to have had a difficult time getting over the prohibition, even though they've had over 90 years to do so, and hold the bizarre puritanical view that booze is evil. Yes, people it is evil, but only the morning after. Anyway, finding my margarita proves difficult because most cafes and restaurants do not serve booze.

Of course, the place with a massive queue outside it and an hour wait for a table does serve booze but not even I'm that desperate for tequila. So, we find a small taqueria where the staff speak about as much English as I speak Spanish, which is pretty much nada, and we order Pacifico beer instead. It's not a margarita but it's booze and I'm happy. I get asked if I am over 21, to which I respond, "Yes, ten years over 21 hactually..." Although I am secretly pleased that he asked.

Vee orders a burrito that's almost as big as his foot and I scoff down a massive shrimp quesadilla complete with lashings of sour cream, a big dollop of guacamole and a large scoop of refried beans. Together with beers, our huge and tasty meal comes to $12. After dinner we wander a few blocks south and realise that wandering a few blocks south is not actually a very good idea. It's amazing how the streets and atmosphere change almost instantly from one block to another and for the only time during the entire trip I feel uneasy. There's hardly anyone about. The zombified crackheads who limp about and hold out their hands and mumble continuously don't frighten me; they are too smacked up to cause any harm. It's more the occasional gangs of boys on the corner who stare at the obvious foreigners as we walk past.

Once we are safely back on the bus, I read in my guide book that the streets we were just perusing should be 'avoided at night at all costs'. Oops.

Bruxelles > New York > San Francisco

We arrive in San Francisco half-dead and starving, as is a usual arrival state for us with our habit of buying extremely cheap budget flight tickets that mean travelling to Belgium or Germany at unholy hours before we even embark on our journey to sunnier climes.

We had to 'go through immigration' at the first port of call in the US, which was New York JFK. This involved queueing for a long time, putting all ten of my fingers on a greasy touchpad that had seen thousands of grubby fingers in the last couple of hours already and was covered in the smeary remnants of other people's DNA and then answering questions put to me by a semi-literate man wearing latex gloves that were too big for him and who had cotton wool shoved in both ears. Welcome to the US of A!

"So, who are you staying with in San Francisco?"
"A friend."
"And how long have you known," he pauses to sneer, "this 'friend'?'"
"Er, I don't know him...he's a friend of my boyfriend."
Silence. Stamp, stamp, type, stamp, scan, type, look, stamp, type.
"What kind of work do you do in the Netherlands?"
I am prepared for this one. Must not mention the word 'writer'.
"I am a communication specialist," I say. He has no idea what that is. Neither do I.
Stamp, stamp, stamp, final look, stamp.
He's about to staple my visa card into my passport but realises there is something on the other side of the page he's chosen. He looks, sees that it's a visa for Russia and then gleefully jabs the staple right through it.
"Here you go ma'am, enjoy your stay."

We pick up our bags, pass by a disinterested customs officer and queue up to re-check them in. As we stand there, a man barks orders at a group of elderly nuns who shuffle towards him as fast as they can, which is not very fast because they are wearing sensible old lady nun-shoes, and cause chaos as people try to rush past them to get to the transfer desk. The lady at the transfer desk shouts "You gotta hurry!" when she realises our flight leaves in twenty minutes. So we rush off and wait for ages for the antiquated lifts. There does not seem to be any stairs in JFK. The queue for security is huge too, and there's a fat man bellowing at us in a thick New York accent like we are new army recruits. The inflection in his voice indicates that he's been repeating the phrases so loudly, so often and for so long that he doesn't actually know what he is saying anymore.

"MOVE IT! Shoes have got to come awf. Your jackets have got to come awf. Move it! Move it along. SHOES IN THE BAWKS. JACKETS IN THE BAWKS. LAPTOPS OUT OF YOUR BAYGS. Belts in the bawks. Empty your pawkets. Everything in the bawkses. Remember, EMPTY the pawkets! MOVE IT!" We shuffle along like sheep.

By the time we reach San Francisco International, I've realised that most Americans don't actually talk. They bark. I've realised that most Americans do not talk in full sentences either - they simply issue commands, recite statements in parrot fashion and tell you 'what you've gotta do'. I've also realised that almost everything in America is designed to involve the least amount of constructive thought conceivable and the least amount of interaction with other human beings as possible.

We collect our bags and I find it strange that the baggage carousels are in a space that is completely open to the public. We make our way to the BART, where I make the mistake of trying to ask the obese woman in the glass cubicle a question. She's as far away from the microphone as she can get and looks at me like I could potentially spray acid in her face if she moves a centimeter closer, even though there is bullet proof glass protecting her from me and me from her. She shrugs at me. I say I can't hear her and she screams "Well, whaddaya want?" at me. I ask which platform it is for Palo Alto station and she points angrily at a sign, which I had completely missed, and which says "Palo Alto: Platform 1".

We arrive in Palo Alto at about 21:00, which is 9:00 PM to Americans, a dangerous system of timekeeping which causes people like me to miss trains and planes. The town looks like toy town. It's clean and low-rise and is full of clean and rich Stanford University students, wild-haired professors and parking inspectors. There's countless cafes and boutique bathroom and carpet shops and a low proportion of crackheads oozing about on the street compared to the rest of San Francisco. The apartment we are staying in is right next door to the Facebook offices and is located on the upper floor of a retirement home, which is used for short-term rentals and is why the corridor smells like very strong old lady perfume and disinfectant that has been shaken up in a cocktail shaker and liberally thrown around. Although we are completely delirious, we go with Joao to an Italian restaurant where one bowl of pasta is so enormous that it feeds all three of us with plenty to spare and costs $12. We stay up as long as we can but eventually, words start dribbling out of my mouth in an order that I know is not correct but I can't do anything about it, and each time I blink, my eyelids stay closed for a fraction longer than last time I blinked. We cave in and hit the sack at midnight...

... part deux on its way shortly....

Somewhere between Bruxelles and Paris

So, deja vu or what? Here I am on the Thalys again, fighting a losing battle with the connectivity which is dropping out every three minutes. All around me I see people staring whisfully at their screens as they wait for a page to load.

I have troffed my platter of fromage francais and am now sipping some vin rouge, which is, quite disturbingly, described on the bottle as "spicy and greedy". The suited trolly dolly guy offered me a choice of a mini bottle of German or French wine. I would have chosen the German one but thought that he would smack me over the head with it if I dared to insult Fronch vino in such a manner.

A man behind me has just spent 45 minutes on the phone to his computer support. "Ja, all the boxes are unchecked. Ja I've selected the Thalys network. Nee, it's just not working." I wanted to turn around and say, "DUDE there's no network at the moment; you're 20 meters underneath Brussels!" But I didn't because he's very, very big and mean looking.

So, since my recent trip to Morocco, where I was forced to parlez Francias at the best of my limited ability, I thought that my Francais had improved enough to enable me to converse fluently with the trolley dolly boys. Unfortunately, it was not the case. Oh the shame! I had to answer in English when they spoke to me. It seems the only french phrases I have perfected are a shrill and simple, "Non! Merci!", accompanied by hand shooing motions and averted eyes, and a hopeful sounding "Avez vous une chambre pour la nuit?".

Somewhere in Auteuil-Passy

There's a man drilling continuously in the hallway and a machine drilling continuously outside my window. According to the hotel brochure, my room has been soundproofed. I think this is because there is carpet on the walls. If I lean out of the window dangerously far I can see the Eiffel Tower. I did think I had nabbed myself a hotel in close proximity to it when I checked last night but, on closer inspection, I realised that it was just a crane and not the tower.

I've noticed that the French have a thing for pharmacies. They are everywhere. I guess that's because French people really love to lather themselves in massive amounts of perfume. Perhaps this is something to do with the baths and showers which leave me confused. I have a mini bath, and a shower, but the shower is not attached to the wall. I never understand this: Am I supposed to stand up and hold the shower over my head? Am I supposed to sit down in the bath and use the shower? Am I supposed to take a bath and then use the shower? The first gives me arm ache, the second just feels wrong and the third is a pointless waste of time and water and all three fail to make me feel clean or refreshed!

Last night I went to get some dinner and just like last time I was in Paris, I was struck with an overwhelming urge to eat sushi. So, I found a couple of places on the gps but each one I passed was completely empty. Maybe it's the credit craquement. Eating alone is one thing, but eating alone in an empty restaurant might result in me trying to slash my wrists with a sharpened chopstick, or at least drinking too much sake to remember how to get home. So in the end I settled on a nice Fronch corner bistro. After some Fronglais, it emerged that yes, there was a table pour une and no I don't want to sit right in the back as far away from anyone as possible and ok yes I could sit in the fenetre thank you very much.

I managed ok with the menu and just as I was getting out my dictionary to look up what ciboulette was, a waitress came bounding up and said "Do you want me to translate anyfin for ya." in the widest cockney accent I'd ever heard. At the other end of the window, there were some fat Americans yacking on and on. When a waitress asked if they wanted desert, fat lady said, "Oh no, I am full. How do you say 'full' in French." The waitress replied "Sature". Yes, they were both indeed saturated.

Right, I'm off to schmooze with the suited and the booted now. Au revoir, mes amis!