Our hotel was literally on the doorstep of the Eiffel tower. We didn’t go up the tower itself while we were there though because any chance we had it was either too foggy, closed because of the snow or the line was too long. Still, it’s magnificent to look at and pretty cool how there are no other tall buildings around.

While we were there, Paris had its heaviest snowfall since 1989 I think, but it didn’t get in our way too much. The full day we spent there we did a bus tour and got off at basically all the stops and saw a lot of the city that way. The Louvre supposedly takes 2 days to do properly, but most of the stuff is pretty boring so we just checked out the more famous stuff like the Mona Lisa. The rest of our time as spent walking around the city and eating some nice food. I tried snails for the first time ever and they actually weren’t too bad. I wanted to try frogs legs while I was in France too, but never got around to it.

After Paris, we headed south-east to Dijon (where the mustard comes from). A much smaller city, we did some walking around there and on our second day there drove 3/4 of the way to Lyon checking out sall villages along the way.

France is the first place, in particular Dijon, that we’ve encountered people who just have absolutely no understanding of English which made for some awkward dining and shopping experiences. We are in Luxembourg for a night at the moment and then a couple of days in Germany and it’s home time for me!

London was my highlight of the trip, akin to walking around a real life monopoly board. We did all the standard things road the underground, went to the Tower Bridge, London Eye, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Circus, Buckingham Palace and the list goes on. We did a few day trips to Birmingham and Manchester as well as a tour of Warwick Castle.

One of the best days was actually our last day there, driving back to the Eurotunnel we stopped by the henges at Avebury and Stonehenge. It was a really misty kind of day and just made for an eerie sort of feeling. Stonehenge in particular was amazing, to be up close to such a unique and famous spot.

Overall, an enjoyable time in England and nice to be able to understand the language again for a few days. I look forward to seeing more of the UK and in summer time if I do get around heading back for the 2013 Ashes series.

We attempted to go out for breakfast, but it was a ghost town around the hotel. We found somewhere crappy to eat eventually and then checked out as quick as we could. If our Brussels experience had ended there it would have been one of the worst places I’ve ever been to, but thankfully we drove into the main part of town.
We took in some of the sites like the Royal Palace, Parliament, Grand Place Markets, Cathedral of St. Michael and Manneken Pis. Lunch was probably the highlight for me, I had an authentic Belgian serving of black and white sausage with apple sauce. Just what I need after the ordeal of the night before and walking around in the cold all morning. Later, I had a pretty tasty waffle as well!

It was a short drive to Bruges. This time the hotel was less fancy, but perfectly located. We checked in just as the sun was setting and had the main market squares right on our doorstep. It looked amazing at night with all the medieval buildings lit up, Christmas lights and decorations, market stalls and heaps of people walking the stone streets. For dinner I had a Flemish stew cooked in Belgian beer, again hit the spot!

It snowed overnight and we spent the morning exploring more of the town before heading for the Euro Tunnel from France to the UK.

My fellow Life Fish JoopJan lives an hour or so out of Amsterdam. I missed him in Vegas by a day earlier in this year so I was keen to finally meet him while I was close by. He came into the city and we had a nice dinner, a few beers and he showed me around a bit. Even though I was incredibly jet-lagged that night, I had a good time and he is a really awesome guy. One of the things I love about online poker is the friend it gives you around the world.

The next day was a long and really enjoyable one. We started out by taking a canal boat tour, then went to Madame Tussaud, the Amsterdam Dungeon and the Royal Palace. The highlight came at night though when we did a walking tour of the Red Light District. It went for over two hours and included a 45 minute Q&A with an ex-prostitute. It was a Friday night, there were heaps of people around and the place was buzzing.

On Saturday we woke up to the first snow of the trip, we did a final bit of sightseeing and shopping in the morning and then hit the road for Brussel, Belgium.

The day we arrived in Singapore we got in at 5am and had to kill time before checking into the hotel. It was a super long day since I got very little sleep on the flight, but we managed to do a lot of things. Highlights included Duck boat tour of the city and harbor, going on the Singapore Flyer at night (massive Ferris wheel type thing) and going to the SkyPark on top of the brand new casino at night. The views from both the Flyer and SkyPark were spectacular.

On the second day we did a bus tour and at night we went out to dinner with my Uni friend Bryan, who I hadn’t seen since I graduated four years ago. He took us to a really great Chinese restaurant and ordered us an awesome meal, the best dish being the crispy chicken. After dinner, Bryan and I went out for a few beers while the other two went out shopping (a theme of the trip). It was great to catch up with him and chat about sport, sports betting, life in Singapore and politics. I didn’t know a whole lot about the Singaporean political system, but came away enlightened. Since he graduated from Melbourne Uni and returned home, he’s served 1.5 years of his 2 years compulsory national service in the army. That really makes you appreciate freedom I guess.

I caught up with Bryan again today before we went to the airport, did some shopping and we saw a movie to pass time before our flight. I’m super excited about going to Europe for the first time, albeit really not looking forward to the cold. I’d recommend Singapore for a couple of days stop over for sure, especially if you like shopping.

Pic 1: View of casino and Singapore Flyer with skyline in background at sunset
Pic 2: View from the top of the Flyer at night
Pic 3: For pwnchizzle’s viewing pleasure… this is me in my Singaporean gardens achieving ultimate enlightenment.

It seems a while ago now, but it’s only been a month since I got back from my amazing tour of the US with the Life Fish guys. We had stops in Hawaii, New York and of course Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. It’s definitely an experience I will cherish for the rest of my life and I can’t wait for our next big gathering in my hometown for the Aussie Millions in January.

I won’t be writing a big trip report, but I think a few of the other Fish might be so I look forward to those. My trip highlights included parasailing/snorkelling in Hawaii, getting drunk and walking through Times Square in NY, the Empire State Building at night and some of the big nights in Vegas. My lowlight was my laptop screen getting a giant crack in it, forcing me to have to buy a monitor while over there and disrupting my poker for a few days. A close second was probably the night that I caught up with long-time full-ring friend Speedle and he drank me into the ground. It was good to meet him in real life, but that guy likes a drink!

I did want to share with you silly little video we made in Hawaii, it’s mainly me making an ass of myself.

Petteytheft was the only non-Aussie in the group and we had a lot of fun teaching him about cricket and other things culturally foreign to him. He played in the main event, made it to Day 2, but unfortunately busted. I also had the chance to meet Fantasticcow and sethsethseth, Cow managed to cash in the Main Event.

I teamed up with skelm to play in the teams event and LacieK paired with Newmanmi. Star City has a new poker room, but this event was played on the floor of the sports lounge, it was kind of like an arena. Together we nursed a 20bb stack pretty much from the 3rd level onwards, never really getting above that in chips, but just managing to slowly chip up each level. With about 20 teams out of 70 odd remaining with skelm playing we got a crucial double up with AA > KK. Then the pressure was on me heading into both the money and final table bubble with about an 18bb stack. Early in the level with 15 players remaining a guy who had about two big blinds less than us raised in MP and it folded to me in the big blind, I shoved AQ obviously and he thought for ages then called with AK, not really sure what he was thinking about there… No luck sucking out and the next hand our K5 couldn’t crack AQ and it was all over.

A pretty frustrating night in the end, I would much rather have just busted early, but I loved the format of having one blind level on one blind level off, it almost made live tournament poker bearable. We played 8 odd hours all for nothing though, the other two busted in the first few hours with KK < AA and were joined by Pettey after he busted the main event. We had a good solid sweat from them as they watched from the bar. It would have been nice to make the final table and take a shot at Joe Hachem and co. who were playing at the feature table all night.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was our park cricket game. We bought a cricket set and managed to find a decent spot to play in Hyde Park. Pettey had obviously never played before and the other guys hadn’t played any serious cricket for a good few years. The standard was actually pretty high though, Pettey proved to be an absolute natural, especially with his bowling and he played some marvellous on drives with the bat, Newman showed some freakish agility with a run out in the field and ponchoko was much better than he had let on beforehand. The best moment though was one of the craziest catches I’ve ever seen, the one-hand one bounce rule was in play when skelm’s friend Johnny spilled a sharp chance on the full at deep mid on, he recovered quickly, avoided a lamp post and did a forward roll as he grabbed it to take a brilliant one hander on the bounce.
Our final night was spent ordering pizza in, drinking and playing a small stakes mixed game cash game in our apartment. The game was unbelievably crazy, for instance I over called a shove pre with 22 in NLHE, got it in vs QJ and AK and held and there were a bunch of other crazy pots, it was a late night and a great way to end the trip.

Hopefully, I’ll be catching up with all the guys again in Vegas next year!

I feel like Hong Kong and Macau were the perfect destination to wet my appetite for travel into Asia. We got by on English okay, but struggled at some points. Rohan thinks they had a better grasp of it in Thailand. I think that just under a week in each city was enough to take it all in and I can definitely see myself returning in the future.

Now that I’m home, my focus is turning to buying a house in the next few months. Hopefully, my haggling experience in Hong Kong will come in handy in the negotiations. Owning real estate is said to be the Australian dream (and the American dream and I’m sure everywhere else’s dream). I’m not entirely sold on the whole notion, in fact it kind of makes me sick the length’s governments around the world will go to in order to sell ‘the dream’ and then artificially prop up housing prices through their policy making and the presence of a central bank. It is kind of laughable that everyone just goes into the housing market expecting their house to be worth more in 5 or 10 years time, of course prices are going to go up because the government is involved in creating inflation and the prices for everything go up. When you actually look at real estate in terms of something real and tangible like the gold, you can see that over time property appreciates only marginally. All that is for another blog though. I’ll be cautiously dipping my toe into waters of real estate investment, and diversifying myself in other areas at the same time.

At night we caught the train to the CBD and had dinner then checked out Lan Kwai Fong, the ‘premiere dining and entertainment destination’ in Hong Kong. It was absolutely packed being a Friday night. It is basically a collection of pubs and clubs and it was so popular people were out on the street drinking. There seemed to be a very high volume of westerners there, surprise surprise. We decided we’d return on Saturday night, got some ice cream and headed home.