Spati 

Germany

Thailand

Taiwan

Here’s a brief run down of my trip so far:

Frankfurt
I couch surfed with Bianca and Norman who must be the couch surfing King and Queen of Frankfurt. They have had over a hundred couchsurfing guests in their tiny flat. Bianaca’s third ever guest was Norman from Equador. He stayed a little longer. And they got married! My book reading was at Buchhandlung Schutt, which was  a lovely old book shop and three lovely girls from the publicity department of my German publisher Eichborn did the actual reading. Afterwards the gang at Eichborn took me to a bar and we drank lots of beer until late.

Frankfurt food highlight: Kalbsbraten (veal) smothered in thick cream and mushroom sauce served with spatzle and salad.

Buchhandlung Schutt in Frankfurt

Stuttgart
My biggest crowd so far (over 80 people – in pic at top of blog) turned up to my talk and reading at Buchhandlung Wittwer, a fantastic five-level bookshop in the centre of Stuttgart. This time an ‘actor’ did the reading and he even did all the voices and actions.  My couch host was the lovely (I’ll say that a lot in this blog entry!) Frau Dutzmann-Schoch who worked at the bookshop. Afterwards we went back to my host’s house and we drank lots of beer until late.

Stuttgart food highlight: Maultaschensuppe (a huge stuffed ravioli thing in a beef broth). I also had a very nice, but wind making, Linsen und Spätzle (Lentils and Spaetzle and vienna sausage).

Linsen und Spätzle in Stuttgart

Leipzig
In the beautiful old city of Leipzig in former East Germany I was talking at the very modern Lehmanns Buchhandlung. My couch surfing host Tina and her boyfriend took me to a great old bar from the former East German days that still looked the same (minus the Stasi agents lurking in the corner). Afterwards we went back to my host’s house and we drank lots of beer until late.

Leipzig food highlight: Geschnetzeltes mit Spätzle (an old favourite of mine – pork in white wine, cream mushroom sauce)

Lehmanns Buchhandlung and the poster for my talk

Rendsburg
Rendsburg is a charming little town right up near the Danish border. I thought I was going to have a nice quiet and early night after so many late nights, because my lovely couchsurfing host Ute had two small children. But, Ute (and the entire staff of Buchhandlung Reichel) took me out on a bender with lots of beer and some tasty but deadly shots of vodka and something green. We staggered home some time around 1.30.

Rendsburg food highlight: Pommes Frites covered in ketchup and mayo (oh, were they good for my hangover!)

My host Ute (and me) in Buchhandlung Reichel

So, tonight is my last talk (and hopefully not too much beer afterwards) and then I’m heading back down to Stuttgart for the Volksfest (where there will be lots of beer) and then I fly to Bali for the Ubud Writer’s Festival (where I’m looking forward to being in the one spot and doing my best to keep away from too many Bintangs!)

After seeing another dozen or so clowns, I finally found out that the Germans weren’t clown fetishists after all. It was acutally part of an ancient festival called Fasching and, as well as dressing up, people danced, sang and drank massive steins of beer for three days straight.

By evening, half the population of Frankfurt was rolling drunk, which meant there were a lot of very happy clowns. I saw them collapsed in doorways and throwing up in gutters. I even saw two clowns on the riverbank trying to make little clowns. I had the most marvellous time and, by midnight of my first day in Europe, I had three clowns, an ape and a nun as my new best friends.

This time I’m bringing my clown costume along – just in case.

For my German readers you can find out all the dates and times on my events page here.

This isn’t my first time couchskiing. For my book Sleeping Around (which, incidentally, just won 2009 Travel Book of the Year) I couch surfed at a ski lodge in the Chilean Andes. I didn’t quite couch surf, though. It was more like bunk-bed surfing and I had 28 empty bunk beds to choose from (it was the end of the ski season and the lodge was empty). I had three marvelous days skiing at La Parva, El Colorado and Valle Nevada with nice evenings sipping beer around the open fire while my couch surfing host Miguel cooked three-course meals every night. 

Mind you, when it comes to living it large in the world of couch surfing I met a French girl in Chile who hit the couch surfing jackpot. She got her very own wing in a sprawling mansion in a town in Argentina. She had sent a couch request to a host on the site and he told her to call him when she got to the town and he would pick her up. But he didn’t pick her up. His chauffeur did and he drove out of the town to this big grand mansion on a hill. A maid met her at the door and escorted her to her own private wing (with her very own lounge room overlooking the swimming pool). Dinner each night was in a huge dining room with serving staff. Not surprisingly, she didn’t want to leave.

Stupidly I didn’t get the host’s name or the name of the town. I’ve told this story to quite a few people and the first thing they ask is: ‘Where do I find him?’ Sorry, if I knew that I’d be sitting in that lounge overlooking the pool right now dictating my blog to one of the servants.

There is another thing that I don’t really like about ebooks. There is just something special about turning a page when you read a book. It just wouldn’t be the same pressing a button. Although, one ebook manufacturer has solved that. You just run your finger across the top of the screen and the page ‘turns’. That’s all very good, but what are you supposed to do with all your novelty bookmarks?

It’s Chapter Six of Brian’s Karaoke World Tour and this time I’m in the Philippines. I was in Manila ‘couch surfing’ for my book Sleeping Around when my host suggested that we do what all good Filipinos do. Go to karaoke. We went to a small karaoke bar and when I told Jude that I was going to sing ‘My Way’ he said, ‘You can’t sing that. You’ll get killed!’ Only the week before a man had been shot dead in a karaoke bar for singing My Way. He was halfway through the song when the bar’s security guard yelled at him for singing out of tune. He ignored him and kept singing, so the guard pulled out a thirty-eight-calibre pistol and shot him dead. His defence was that it was his favourite song and he didn’t like the way he was singing it.

It makes ‘and now the end is near’ rather prophetic, doesn’t it?

Apparently violence is common in Filipino karaoke bars and My Way is the most frequent cause of fights and deaths. A few months earlier another man had been killed and his friend seriously wounded when they sarcastically applauded a student who was singing My Way off-key. The student felt insulted, so when they left the karaoke parlour, he ambushed and shot them.

‘There have been maybe fifty or more shootings because of My Way in the past ten years,’ Jude told me. ‘And after the recent murder many karaoke bars in Manila have taken My Way off the song list.’

 ‘So what song did you pick?’ Jude asked as I handed my song request to the waitress.

‘My Way.’

I thought I’d give it a go. I actually won a karaoke competition once singing the song—okay, most of the other contestants were drunk, but that’s not the point. Besides, the large group of drunk Korean guys looked friendly enough. There was only one tiny thing that worried me. The security guard at the door was brandishing a rather large shotgun and was wearing a fully loaded ammo belt.

‘That was very good,’ Jude said with a somewhat relieved smile when I’d finished singing. ‘You won’t get shot for that version.’

‘Let’s do a karaoke bar crawl,’ I said excitedly. ‘Then I can do My Way in every one to see if I can get shot.’

There was no one in the second karaoke bar to shoot me. Unless Jude suddenly decided he didn’t like my singing. We were the only patrons.

The hosts of ‘Let’s Have Fun’ karaoke bar were definitely full of gayness. Two transvestites—who had lovely long, shapely legs I have to say—were hosting it. Their place was one of many large outdoor karaoke bars on the waterfront promenade. Because of the holiday they were all busy, but we stopped at the largest, which would have had more than a hundred people in the crowd.

I put my name down and had only taken a sip of my beer when ‘Miss Diva’ called me up onto the stage.

‘Where are you from?’ Miss Diva purred.

When I told her the two leggy transvestites hopped around the stage impersonating kangaroos.

‘So, what song would you like to do?’ Miss Diva asked when she’d finished her hopping.

‘My Way,’ I said brightly.

There was a loud ‘Ohh’ from the crowd.

‘You’ll get shot!’ Miss Diva said gravely.

I looked out at the crowd. ‘Hands up if you have a gun?’

‘See, it’s safe,’ I said when no hands were raised.

Miss Diva smirked. ‘Yes, but there’s a sniper up in that building.’

Our last karaoke bar was a midget bar. The bar itself wasn’t small, but all the staff were midgets—or dwarves, or little people, or vertically challenged folk or whatever is PC and accepted in polite company nowadays. Although the bar was called Hobbit House, Jude didn’t tell me about the bar’s unique staffing prerequisites and I got quite a shock when someone down at my knees asked if I wanted a drink.

We grabbed a table and when our waiter returned with our drinks, little hands came up and plopped them on the table. The bar may have been run by small people, but they had big prices. Our beer cost three times as much as in the last karaoke bar. I also noticed that they didn’t have Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ on the song list.

‘How do you say cheers in Dwarfish?’ Jude asked, after I’d got through my fourth and final version of My Way for the night without a single shot being fired in anger. 

Next week on Brian’s Karaoke World Tour: Switzerland

There is one stat that I’m quite proud of. Of the 59,599 cities listed my little ol’ hometown of Melbourne comes in at number 8 for most members (above much larger cities like LA, Moscow, Amsterdam, Chicago and Rio). The top eleven are (I’ve done eleven to get Sydney into the list so I can brag about having TWO Australian cities at the top of the list!):

Paris (20,897 members)
London (18,059)
Berlin (14,891)
Montreal (13,795)
Istanbul (9,723)
Vienna (9,715)
New York (8,370)
Melbourne (7,942)
San Francisco (7,436)
Barcelona (7,327)
Sydney (7,087)

Here’s some more riveting stats: The ‘average age’ of a couchsurfer is 27, but there also almost 9,000 over the age of 60 including 255 over the age of 80. Of the 1,268 languages the most widely spoken is English with 965,111 speakers and the least spoken languages include 13 Wayuu speakers, 9 Mapudungan speakers and all of 4 Lojban speakers. (I had to check Wikipedia – Wayuu is a local dialect from North eastern Venezuela, Mapudungan is from Argentina and Lojban is a ’syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic’ – uh?). There is one worrying statistic, though: 591,863 members are male, 481,863 are female and 14,198 list their ‘gender’ as ‘unknown’.

And for those that can’t make it to Melbourne this week why not come hear me talk in Bali. I have been invited to appear at the Ubud Writers Festival in October (7th – 11th) and I’ll be doing, well… I’ve got no idea yet, but most likely talking about my books and sitting on panels with other travel writers from around the globe. It’s a fantastic festival taking place in stunning locations all around Ubud (Harpers Bazaar magazine called the festival ‘One of the top writers festivals in the world’). I attended last year’s festival and ended up doing an ‘event’ – with about two hours notice. I was in Ubud to catch up with Tony Wheeler and while at one of Tony’s events the festival director approached me and said, ‘ So, are you okay for your session today?’ As I stood there wondering what she was talking about Tony butted in and said, ‘Oh sorry Brian, I’ve roped you in on a session with me for today at one o’clock!’. The session was fun and we talked about my travels around South East Asia with the original Lonely Planet guide book that Tony wrote in 1975. You can even catch a (tiny) glimpse of our talk on the video from last year’s event. And, if you do come all the way over to Ubud to see me then at least I can do is shout you a nasi goreng.