Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries

I’ve had a new travel article published in the latest issue of stalkingElk (a comedy satire magazine, for which I am the ‘roaming correspondent’) about the very best cemeteries to visit in Europe.  Here’s how it all starts…

“You can’t beat a good graveyard. An inexorable fixture in every childhood – whether burying your gran, losing your virginity or dabbling in the occult – cemeteries also offer the more adult pleasure of killing time prior to your own pathetic demise. So however you like to do it, from taking a walk out of the grim city to spotting D-list celebrity gravestones, here are ten of the continent’s finest time-killing cemeteries…”

If you’d like to read more of ‘Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries’ – and you really should, you know – you can click here for the whole article. Or if you want to read more similarly-flippant comedy nonsense, you can visit the stalkingElk website to buy the whole mag for three measly quid.

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #3

Père-Lachaise – Paris, France

————————————————————————————————–
Everyone loves a celebrity corpse, and there are quite literally piles of them in Père-Lachaise. Renowned as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, this enormous Parisian landmark is also home to Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Molière, Marcel Proust and Édith Piaf (three guesses what’s written on her tombstone. Wrong: there’s nothing.)

But it’s not all about the famous cadavers: come for the dead, stay for the décor. Père-Lachaise’s ornate memorials, leafy walkways and lovely smoke-free follies help create a calm oasis in the frantic French capital.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #2

Old Jewish Cemetery – Prague, Czech Republic

————————————————————————————————–
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is, rather predictably, a cemetery for old Jews: specifically, those who snuffed it between 1439 and 1787. During this time the Jewish community was kettled into a tiny ghetto, having to stuff their stiffs into a 60-metre-square graveyard, and so over three centuries it was crammed with around 100,000 bodies. Which explains why it has Europe’s highest concentration of tombstones.

FUN FACT!!! Prague’s famous cemetery only survived Nazi occupation because Hitler wanted to preserve it as ‘a museum to an extinct race’.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #1

Cross Bones – London, England

—————————————————————————————–
The most famous resting place in London is, without doubt, the wonderfully gothic Highgate: the eternal residence of everyone from Karl ‘Commie’ Marx to Douglas ‘Galaxy’ Adams; Michael ‘Benzene’ Faraday to Jeremy ‘Withered’ Beadle. The capital’s most interesting cemetery, on the other hand, is Cross Bones.

An unconsecrated necropolis for so-called ‘Winchester Geese’ – medieval prostitutes who were licenced by the Bishop of Winchester to work within Southwark – it is simply a mass grave for those deemed unfit for a Christian burial: the outcast dead. Now it’s most famous for a cracking Halloween procession.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Top Marx: When Socialism Meets Tourism

I’ve had a new travel article published in the July issue of stalkingElk – a comedy satire mag, for which I’m the ‘roaming correspondent’ – all about when socialism meets tourism. Here’s how it begins:

“Look at the condition of communism today and it’s easy to conclude that Karl Marx has been forgotten. China is now home to twice as many KFC outlets as giant pandas. Vietnam is famed for its vast income and gender inequalities. And while Laos’ clampdown on the media is a big commie tick, its free market policy is like defecating directly into Lenin’s cold, dead gullet. Each of these states, a mere two decades after some vexed Germans shouted at a wall, are now about as socialist as Joseph McCarthy in a kaftan.

However, not every socialist state has opened its arms and spread its legs to greet rampant capitalism: there are still three corners of the globe where hard-line communism stubbornly prevails. Three of the most unique and alien places on earth. Which makes them three of the most interesting places to visit…”

If you’d like to read more of ‘Top Marx: When Socialism Meets Tourism’, you can click here for the whole article. Or if you want to read more of the kind, you can visit the stalkingElk website and buy the whole mag for just £3. Bargain!

Socialism & Tourism #3: North Korea

Prior to the release of my new travel article about socialist tourism, I will be previewing a few of the commie states featured. This last one is North Korea.

If travel is about experiencing other ways of life, then it doesn’t get more ‘other’ than this. North Korea is the most isolated country on earth, cut off from reality by a totalitarian communist government that imprisons its citizens in a 1950s vacuum. This not only means North Koreans have never questioned Lady Gaga’s gender or not shut up about The bloody Wire: they have no idea man has been to the moon.

Consequently, visitors must accept strict limitations on what they say, as well as what they see. But that doesn’t mean the tourism is humdrum – not a bit of it. Visit the Democratic People’s Republic and you’ll get to board a captured US warship, be dwarfed by a colossal bronze dictator and witness the largest gymnastics festival on earth. Oh, and you’ll get sneaky peeks of reality too, like malnourished workers in rice fields and legions of rats scurrying through the metro. Continue reading

Socialism & Tourism #2: Transdniestr

Prior to the release of my new travel article about socialist tourism, I will be previewing a few of the socialist states featured. This time, it’s Transdniestr.

Following Poland’s 1989 overthrow of the commies, Soviet states toppled like pissed dominoes. Within two years the USSR had gone and socialism in Europe was finished. Or so you might think. Actually, as Poland and co. marched towards democracy, one sliver of Eastern Europe was left behind.

Transdniestr, a teensy region in the east of Moldova, broke away from the then Socialist Republic in 1990, following ominous rumblings of reform from Chişinău. After a two-year girly fight, a fresh yet familiar socialist system was formed under cuddly, pastry-faced autocrat Igor Smirnov… and it’s one which continues unopposed to this day. Continue reading

Socialism & Tourism #1: Republic of Cuba

Prior to the July release of my new travel article about socialist tourism, I’ll be previewing a few of the commie states featured. First up, it’s Cuba.

Let’s begin with the most visited communist state in the world. In many ways, Cuba is your classic Caribbean paradise isle: home to pristine beaches, poncy hotels, sweaty nightclubs and overpriced trinkets. Yet with socialist giveaways on every corner, from omnipresent Che murals to dilapidated American Buicks, it doesn’t take Tony Robinson levels of surface-scratching to see that Cuba is an island unlike any other.

Socialist since 1959, the country now boasts over two-and-a-half million tourists – including law-dodging Yanks – each year. While most stick to the bespoke capitalist bubbles along the coast, sipping mojitos, smoking Montechristos and swaying to samba music, an intrepid few venture inland to see Castro’s Cuba for what it really is: a steaming great mass of socialist contradictions. Continue reading

Weird Beards and Other Bohemian Oddities

I have had a travel article published in the May issue of stalkingElk – a brand new comedy satire magazine, for which I’m the official ‘roaming correspondent’. It’s all about the more hidden and unusual side of Prague, and here’s how it starts:

“The Czechs have given us many great words over the years: from ‘pistol’ to ‘polka’, ‘robot’ to ‘howitzer’. But when it comes to haughty pomposity, nothing beats ‘Bohemian’. A drama student’s wet dream of a moniker, it tells the world you are both somebody with artistic leanings, who refuses to conform to the conventional standards of behaviour, and a pretentious tit. So surely Prague, as the capital of Bohemia, is the world’s least conventional city. Well, if that means it has some weird shit then yes. Yes it does.

Here’s just a small sample of Prague’s many peculiarities…”

If you’d like to read more of ‘Weird Beards and Other Bohemian Oddities’, you can click here for the whole article. Or if you want to read more of the kind, you can visit the stalkingElk website and buy the whole mag for just £3. Bargain!

Bohemian Oddity #3: Mezi Ploty Festival

Prior to the late April release of my new travel article in stalkingElk, I’ll be previewing a few of the Bohemian oddities that will be featured. This final post is about Prague’s maddest – in every sense – music festival.

There are some amazing music festivals in Europe. If you were so inclined, you could start the party season at the multimedia, Renaissance subculture festival Netmage in Bologna, take a break at the arty, classical ponce-fest that is St. Magnus on Orkney and then end your summer with the intimately Arctic mish-mash rave of Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavik. But for all Europe’s unusual, eclectic music festivals, none come close to the bizarre two-day summer music and theatre bonanza that is Prague’s Mezi Ploty. Continue reading