Scott Herbert

After yesterday's tour of Phnom Penh's misery, we're in the mood for something a little lighter today. We begin our morning with breakfast by the pool at the Blue Lime - a plate of tropical fruit, some walnut bread, pineapple jam, passionfruit juice, coffee and eggs. Good fuel for the day to come!

We decide to walk down Sisowath Quay to the Mekong Express bus office. It's nearing midday, and it's a hot, dusty, dirty walk along the Tonle Sap river. We cross the road to avoid the motos and tuk tuks parked on the sidewalk, but decide to brave the traffic again when we approach a woman talking to herself and smashing bottles on the paving next to the billboards and mud that designates the riverbank from the road. Sadly, that sort of behaviour isn't uncommon in Sydney but with limited medical care we don't really want to spend the rest of the day having shards dug out of our legs in a local hospital.

Up another few blocks and we finally arrive at the"proper" Mekong Express office - we say "proper" because along with a lot of agencies claiming to book the bus, there's several companies who have identical branding just with different text or slightly different colours. This office has an actual bus parked out the front of it so we figure we're pretty safe. We've used ME for our trip between HCMC and PP, so know what to expect, and are prepared to pay an extra $2USD each over the other companies for the familiarity on the four to six hour trip. But when we get into the office, the lady womanning the counter claims that we can't book the bus until 3pm. Huh? Even if we pay now, like we did four days in advance in HCMC? Apparently not. Cambodia, eh.

Sighing, we trot across the road to the Amazon Cafe and have a cool drink and look at their photos. We flick through the LP for suggestions of other stuff to do at this end of town - heading back south to the Palace was our plan, but now we're not so sure. A quick discussion and we come to a half ethical half tightarse decision that we don't really want to pay about $7USD each to go into Sihanouk's palace and see his shiny Silver Pagoda. Instead, we decide to go and see Wat Phnom (a shrine on the only hill in town) then walk up to the French Embassy, where around 1500 expats and Cambodians took refuge as the Khmer Rouge descended upon PP on April 17 1975. Powerful stuff.

After another long, hot, dusty, dirty walk seeing a more "real" side of PP than the riverside areas, we arrive at the towering white-washed walls of the Embassy. Even though it's guarded more tightly than Fort Knox, it's pretty powerful seeing the location of one of the major events of the beginning of KR power.

Last day of the trip! The hotel has a rather civilised midday checkout, so we dawdle and infinitely plan our battle attack for the airport, chucking our laundered laundry into one bag and a stack of clean "plane" clothes into the other. There's not much that's really pressing us into sightseeing in Frankfurt, so we walk down to the Irish pub near the train station and refuel ourselves with an "Irish breakfast" - it doesn't involve potatoes, but it does take the edge off our pilsner hangovers. It doesn't, however, do much to motivate us.

We walk towards the centre of town and it starts drizzling. We come across the enormous Euro and shake our fists at it. We try to find the Archeological Museum, fail, try again, succeed, then reject it when we find out that it's going to cost us six of the damned Euros to enter and that there's no English signage. We look at the river. Cold, bleak. We need windscreen wipers for our faces. We give up. We collect our bags from the hotel at 2.30pm and escond ourselves back at the Irish pub with its free (FREE! IN GERMANY!) wifi and Kilkenny pints and neverending Cranberries soundtrack. Then we wait. And wait. And wait some more.

Eventually it's time enough to get on a train to the airport, so we cross the road to the train station and do just that. From the moment the doors of the train close, we are hermetically sealed in airconditioning for what will be the next 36 hours. Yuck. Upon arrival at the airport we realise we're in the wrong terminal, so haul a cart with our bags on it up and down a bunch of escalators before finding the Korean Air check in desks and dumping the bastardly backpacks with glee. We assume there will be similar facilities airside as there was in the previous terminal, so go through immigration... only to discover a mass of construction, a smattering of fast food and a woeful collection of duty free. Our noses are both hurting by this stage, and we rue the pitiful newsagent which, unlike the all-in-one shops at Sydney Airport, only sell paper products - not the painkillers and antihistamines we need.

Cursing, we pass through security screening, but once we're through we discover that it's a bubble gate - separated from the rest of the airside facilities by sheets of glass and more construction, and free of any commerce centre for purchasing water. Meils, who is the Queen of Hydration, is told by airport staff that she can go back to the other side of the security screening and bring emptied water bottles through with her then refill them from the bathroom. She feeds the equivalent of $15AUD into a vending machine to get three bottles of water but it turns out to be a wise purchase, as the flight lacks the constant supply of beverages that we experienced on our way over and without them we would have shrivelled up in the overheated recirculating aircon.

We arrive in Korea at 1.35pm and quickly shoot down any ideas we may have previously held about doing a city tour. Instead, we stay in transit, go through more security and find the airside hotel, where we happily fork out cash to get a room for six hours. A hot, high pressure shower washes off the planefilth, and partake of a strange lunch buffet in the hotel restaurant before passing out for a couple of hours sleep. With waterbottles refilled, we head back down through the gate towards the plane, but much to our horror, we're confronted with another liquid screen before we're allowed on the plane. We skull the water and politely ask the Korean girl checking our backpacks to empty one of the bottles for us so we can refill it on the plane. Unfortunately, when we get onboard the on-tap water is cloudy, so we're at the mercy of the hostesses for liquids during the rest of the flight. Although we're lacking moveable head rests and personal entertainment units, we both find the second flight comparatively easy to deal with. Perhaps we've finally hardened up to long haul? We're home from the airport by 8.30am, pick up Dumpii our dog later in the morning, then stay awake for the rest of the day in an attempt to stave off jetlag. Y'argh!

We treat the hostel room, with its superfluous bunk beds and precariously positioned television, as an Escher-like exercise in patience. Seeing as we've paid for a 1pm checkout, we stuff around uploading some photos (Scott) and getting progressively addicted to Final Fantasy on the DS (Meils). We then shoulder our packs and walk down to the awesomest kebabery in Koln for some more lahmacun before climbing about the tram to get back to the train station and Dom.

The Dom is large. So large that God cannot see our heads through our beanies, apparently. It's filthy, looming, gothic exterior is countered by a mass of stained glass and mosaic flooring inside.



Pretty rad, for another church. We waste half an hour marvelling at its splendour before attempting to circle its base, only to be amazed and astounded by a post-war publication in the gift shop entitled "Hooray! We Survived!" and assume it was previously printed under the title "What Jews?".

We set up camp on the train platform for a couple of minutes before our train turns up. It's the last long distance venture of our trip, and although it's only going to take an hour and a bit to get to Frankfurt, it's nice that we're on a DB ICE rather than one of the rather less plush Eastern European trains for our last transit. Upon arrival in Frankfurt it's still surprisingly light, and we make the executive decision to walk to the hotel rather than get the tram, which turns out to be a fortunate event, as Google Maps was leading us up the garden path with regards to the hotel's location, and it is, as its website description states, only 200m from the train station - rather than the 1.2km and two tram stops that the internet suggested at us. Every step we don't have to take with our bags is a win, so we pump our fists and Meils does a dance of joy when we realise that we're right across the road from the Miele wash house laundromat. Clean clothes! Party time! Excellent!

We waste no time in checking in, and the staff at the Ambassador Hotel are as lovely as their rooms. We fear that we may have been irrepairably damaged from the Serbian experience, as every time we approach a hotel door we now grimace with apprehension about what might be waiting for us on the other side, so coming into a clean, spacious room with a tasteful mass-produced floral wall prints and pristine white sheets is a nice surprise. We grab the laundry bags, trot across the road and dump the offending items in a machine, then walk down the street to an Irish pub for a Kilkenny (we didn't visit Ireland this trip, so feel it our duty to partake in a wee tipple so that the Green Isle doesn't feel left out). After 41 minutes we return to the waschomat and chuck our clothes in the drier, then go to the pub two doors down for a draught Pils. The pub smells like old men, urinals and Welsh football players armpits, ferreal. A middle aged lady starts crying when "The Twist" is played over the jukebox. The bartender periodically breaks service to chuck some coins in one of the gambling machines on the wall.

After one drink we go back to the laundromat, where our clothes are almost, but not quite dry, so we feed the money slot a stray cat (or some more Euros, whatever) and go across the road to yet another pub for a couple of pilsners while the cycle finishes. It's a much more civilised place, run by a couple who speak as much English as we speak Deutsch, so we have an hilarious conversation which results in them feeding us Turkish ouzo for free after only two drinks. Oh, Deutchland, we see how you work now. This gesture of radness results in us staying there for another three pilsners, and dinner. Scott eats a delicious wurst. Yes, yes he does. Meils orders a beautiful lentil soup and spinat with fried eggs, which is no where near as good as Oma's (but still hits the spot).

Somewhere in proceedings we collect the clothes and then go "home" to the hotel next door where we foolishly consume more beer from the vending machine in the lobby and then crawl up the stairs to bed.

Hangovers are the product of sitting in a smoky bar the night before. We're awoken by a woman opening our door and asking us if we're checking out. "No, tomorrow". We pull the covers back over our heads and try and get back to sleep, but about half an hour the phone rings and a female voice on the other end tells us we need to move rooms. We look around at the piles of backpack guts all over the floor, rub our heads and sigh.

Long story short, we're forcibly checking you out of this room, and into a crappier one upstairs, sorry we forgot to mention this to you last night, no it doesn't matter that you booked your room two months ago, "it is how it is" as they say in Cologne. Bizarre.

Less fond of Cologne and with hangover remaining we wander out in search of food. We find an awesome Iraqi place and order some kebabs/gyros (or Lahmacuns as they're bizarrely called here, according to Wikipedia a Lahmacun is a middle eastern pizza) which turn out to be just about the best we've ever had, even taking into consideration our food-homesickness. This place has an open coal fire oven which they're roasting skewers on, it's like the Saray of Cologne.

By this stage we're basically touristed out. The thought of returning home seems more novel than exploring a new city. Eventually we decide to head to the EL-DE house, a Gestapo prison which has been set up as a museum. Cheery! But important, and in the spirit of education which has taken up a fair chunk of our holiday.

In the 10 cellar prison cells you can still read the charcoal/screw/fingernail imprinted messages left by many prisoners detailing their lives, those they miss, the execution count from the day before. Up to around 30 prisoners could be staying in a 4 x 1.5m cell.

Upstairs is a museum outlining Cologne's Nazi history, from the early 20th century to even the histories of high ranking officials who continued in public life unscathed after the war. For example, "Racial Hygeine" principles were still being lectured on by a former Nazi in universities in the 50s. Also upstairs is the secret to why the cells downstairs are so well preserved; these things were hidden away after the war, and it took research and then protests in the 70s to open this up to the public in the 80s. It takes a society decades to start healing after such shame.

We wander and find a "every-man" style pub, a few 40 somethings having an after work beer. It's Kolsch they drink here, lots of small breweries doing their own. We order a couple, they come in 200ml glasses filled from the keg on the bar. Beautiful. When you finish, like the night before, the bar-woman brings a couple more over to you. We begin to see their game, responsible service of alcohol - i.e. we drink, they take responsibility for bringing us those drinks seriously. It took us about 15 minutes to try to decipher the Deutsch only menu but we soldiered on and ended up with some schnitzel and roast pork.

We settle down for an early night back at the hotel, time to take it easy. It doesn't really happen, our new room is next door to the incredibly noisy lift mechanism, and Scott's newly found sinus infection is keeping both awake in between snores. Instead of counting sheep, we count the hours until we'll be home.

We wake up in our comparatively plush hotel room in Brussels well rested, and collect our threads from the dryer down the hallway. The luxury of clean clothes will not be taken for granted when we get home, nor will be the ease of machinated laundry facilities - attempting to hand wash a winter coat in limited hot water in Dubrovnik saw to that. The garden outside the hotel is more apparent in daylight, as are the backs of the quaint terrace houses interspaced with modern office buildings in the EU district. We pack our stuff, saddle our packs and check out, Metro-ing it to Gare de Centrale (Brussels' central train station) where we have noticed that the train we want to catch to Amsterdam calls at.

Our tickets have no departure time listed on them, and the departures boards at the train station only deal with trains stopping at main train stations in Belgium, so although we know our train is supposed to stop at Antwerp, we can't discern local trains from those continuing on internationally. Nowhere is the insignificance of "English" more apparent than here, where signage is tri or quad lingual (Flemish/Dutch, French, German and occasionally Italian), We wait in an information line for about a quarter of an hour, but we are graced with an English speaking ticketing dude (lucky, as Meils, who was allocated the task of figuring out what was going on with the e-tickets she'd bought online, only speaks enough French and Flemish to say "Good day. Do you speak English?". He informs us that our tickets are "open" and that international trains to Amsterdam leave at nineteen minutes past every hour, so we dump our bags in the luggage storage facility and go for a bit of a wander around the centre of Brussels for a couple of hours.

Our first stop is governed by our tummies, and is thus a restaurant with a giant waffle on the top of it. Waffles are apparently a traditionally Belg-y, and although we would not normally consume them as a breakfast food, it's lunchtime by the clock and we only have a limited amount of time here. The time limit also justifies our choices of Framboise and Kriek (raspberry and cherry beers) as accompaniments - though it is one minute after midday when they hit the table, so we don't feel in excessive need of an AA meeting. The waffles are drenched in a DIY pot of melted Belgian chocolate, but disappear from our plates in less than two minutes, so after negotiating the rather terse waiter, we get a cornet of pommes frites from the stand next door and drown them in mayonnaise before going for a walk around the centre part of Brussels.

We sidestep into a rather grandiouse old shopping arcade, packed full of touristy chocolate and lace shops. When we exit we find ourselves in a narrow laneway stacked with seafood restaurants, many of whom have their unshelled molluscs on display with vegetable produce on stands next to their al fresco dining areas. People not armed with fries are jumped on by waiters, some clad in humours tuxedos, trying to hustle them in for lunch. As the newfound Swiss of the tourist world, we are slightly pacified to find that most of the moules (mussels) around here are also priced at over 20Eu a serve - and the ones that aren't appear to hold the same culinary ilk as "discount sushi"). We escape unscathed, and turn a corner to find a shoe shop proudly flying a rainbow flag, a swingers club, and then the Belgium Scientology headquarters all in the space of a thirty metre block. We suspect that Adam might have done Belgium wrong. Where else could you buy your marbles back after losing them two doors down?

We step out of the laneway into one of the pedestrian streets leading into the Grand Place - a series of majestic structures built during the 1600s and pimped out in gilt for the pleasure of the masses. Despite the propegation of restaurants and curious fenced off area cordoning some young people doing what appears to be a bastardised version of tai chi, it's far less touristy than some of the other old squares we've visited on this trip, so we sit down and fill in our remaining time with a couple of Kwak and Chimay beers. A mad dash to the train station at 2pm sees us sitting on a platform waiting with our bags with five minutes to spare, and after realising that we're at the "wrong" (i.e. first class) end of the train, we stagger down the corridor and find a couple of seats for the journey up to Amsterdam. The trip is made rather more pleasant by a regular refreshment service, and the trilingual language announcements, putting us and our pitiful memories to shame (Meils, in a country confusion moment, asked for "un Chimay per favor" in the bar we were at earlier). It's also broken up by pretty scenery in the south of the Netherlands, with triangular houses and cows straight out of a delft pottery scene, and stops at Rotterdam and The Hague.

We arrive in Amsterdam at around half past five and it's miserable. Cold and with more of the omnipresent rain we experienced in London a couple of days ago. We can't find an ATM in the train station, and have about twenty minutes to get to the boat we're staying on, which has limited check in hours. We walk down the main street as per the instructions on the owner's website, getting progressively damper and spotting a grand total of zero cashpoints, which is unfortunate as when we finally arrive at the correct dock, soggy and aching, we find out that they only accept the cold hard stuff. We scrounge together 45 Euros, all we have on us, and the woman tut tuts at us for thinking that we could possibly use Visa in a tourist city. She also laughs at the fact that we walked about ten minutes more than we needed to... by using the aforementioned instructions. Is this some sort of Dutch humour that we're not getting? Perhaps. Anyway, our double cabin is quite cosy even if Scott has a hard time lying down without bending his knees, and we get an education in boating with the three second electronic delays on everything including the toilet flush. We de-moist as best we can and head off for a wander around the city.

We're not sure why the guidebooks have listed the red light district as a place that you "may end up as curiosity gets the better of you" - it seems almost impossible to avoid, although after seeing the fourth or fifth bored lady of the night standing in a window lighting a cigarette / brushing her hair / filing her nails / eating Mentos / looking for nits, the shock value disappears and we regard the whole thing with a rather disjointed "meh". The coffee shops spark our interest, but then we realise that everyone's smoking pot on the streets anyway. Our attention is all of a sudden wrenched away from the sinful scenes before us, when we realise that Amsterdam has a Chinatown district. Oh lordy, we can has rice? CAN HAS! After being deprived of any decent Asian food for the last four weeks, we ransack a restaurant and devour roast duck, soy chicken, vegetables with tofu, and some mighty fine Shanghai and BBQ pork buns, and a bowl full of steamed rice, washed down with jasmine tea. We could've cried, but we didn't, 'coz we're tough. We are full, but not so full that we can't move visiting our favourite Chinese place "Meat Filled Buns" to the top of our to-do list when we get home.

Back on the boat, we realise that although novel, it's not the most private of accommodation. Some middle aged Italian ladies ignore us when we greet them, even though we hear them speaking English to the boat owner the next day. It's probably part of their sense of humour, just like staying awake in their adjoining cabin thumping their suitcases (or perhaps each other) around the floor and resonating each bang through to our room. It's slightly off-putting being able to hear every bodily function from our strange neighbours, but we eventually get to sleep.

Another morning in the UK, and we farewell Ben and Nat in dawnlight - although as we decided last night, it's only temporary as we'll be seeing them again when they visit in March. We muck around with Vern for awhile before shouldering our packs and saying good bye to Kyoko, before trekking up the road to the bus which will take us all the way through the city and up to Kings Cross / St Pancras for our train to Belgium.

We dump our bags in the non-blown-up-by-security way, and after going through the wringer over what the electrical contents of them are (a forgotten mobile phone and Nintendo DS prompted the wrong sort of interest from the check in man) we negotiate a massive line in the underground station and get the tube a couple of stops away to Camden Town. The trip over is made more amusing by an error in signalling, resulting in the train in front of us being shunted into the wrong platform. The driver in front of us not only apologises for the fact that anyone continuing past Camden will have to disembark to the train across the platform, but also gives a cheery "it's not just you, it's me too - so if you're lost, just follow me and we'll all be ready to go after a short walk" - which seems to take the edge off and reminds us on the comparative infuriations of CityRail back in Sydney.

We wander around the market area which is interesting at first but quickly gets old when we realise they're selling the same crap sold at markets the world over ("hand crafted" wood products made en masse in Bali, quirky local t-shirts stating "I'm an English Teacher, innit" and multiple head shop stands staffed by white boys playing reggae at volume), so we stop at the Oxford Arms and have a pub lunch (beef and Guiness pie and cod and chips). A bit more sightseeing over the Lock and Meils waves her fist at the Dr Martens store (as her six week old boot zipper broke last night and is now not only coming apart from the leather, but is also requiring some sort of podiatric braces for its teeth), before we get back on the tube

Back at the station we are accommodated by a French guy who is smart enough to recognise that a photographic passport is a better form of fraud protection than the credit card that we paid for our tickets with, and thus saves us from having to dig through both packs to try and find Meils' wallet, which has a couple of different Mastercards contained within it. He warns us that "next time, you must ave ze credit card" - we just nod and smile, as his patronism is not as bad as the alternative. The idea of opening the packs for anything other than life's essentials is starting to provoke feverish chills on our collective brows. We collect a few more passport stamps and go through check in where the guy manning the baggage X-Ray machine asks us if we're brother and sister based on the fact that our backpacks are identical. No, just suckers for a Kathmandu sale. We have an hour and a half to kill, so we drink most of our remaining pounds at the bar before getting on the rather boring train to Brussels (boring because the sun has now disappeared so the space between tunnel and outside is difficult to discern). A quick stop in Lille (France, our third visit to the country this trip) and we arrive in Brussels at 7.45.

The metro is surprisingly easy to negotiate, or perhaps we're just getting less suspicious of the whole "effect public transport" caper. For the princely sum of E1.70 we only have to change once and come out of the Schubert train station right under the EU building! Things come up mooses once again when instead of requiring extensive following of map instructions hurridly gathered from Ben's internet connection some hours beforehand, we can spot the sign for our hotel (the Euroflat) from the metro exit. WIN! We dump our bags again and are pleasantly surprised by the spacious hotel room which even comes with a balcony and hilarious overdubbed American MTV. More importantly, there's a laundry right down the hall. We swear that when we get home we're just going to go nekkid for a couple of weeks, such is our newfound hatred of running out of clothes. We ignore the laundry for the timebeing, and head out into the multicultural climes of the EU district to find some dinner, eventually settling on what will probably (hopefully!) be the most expensive mussels we ever eat - 25Eu each. As a small concession, they are delicious, and the service is great too. The credit card is starting to bleed. We probably should've bought some bandaids from the street sellers in Sarajevo, where the AUD actually worked in our favour, as we can't afford them here.

We head up the road to a convenience store to get some non-alcoholic drinks to stave off the 9% Belgian beers we washed our dinner down with, and then back to the hotel where we get some priceless laundry tokens and Miele the living crap out of our dirty washing, then try and sleep with what auditorily resembles a frat party going on in the room next door to us. They do pipe down about ten minutes after we hit the sack, and sleep is upon us.

We wake up in Naples sans horseheads in bed, and alive despite Meils tempting fate with the "Mob Musicians" print on her Threadless t-shirt yesterday. We plan to visit to Pompeii so happily leave the hotel early and walk down to Corso Umberto to catch a bus back up to the Central train station. No way are we carrying our bags along it again, especially seeing as in daylight hours, the area is crammed shoulder to shoulder with university students and street sellers hawking counterfeit goods. Not the sort of madness you want to be tiptoeing through laden with fifteen kilos of backpacks and sore feet.

Post-boarding, we discover that the bus doesn't accept cash. We try and make the driver take our Euros anyway. Hey, at least if the transit police turn up we can claim innocence through stupidity. The driver doesn't care if we pay or not, he's too busy talking to one of his mates, so we stay on. Oops. Sorry Mum and Dad, we know you raised us better than that, but we're almost crippled by now. As it turns out, tourists dodging bus fares are the least of Napoli's problems. When we get off the bus we step straight into another gaggle of counterfeiters, this time punctuated by dodgy looking Italians (not the Roma that they try and blame all their crime on) trying to fence stolen iPhones, which are apparently as flavour as the month here as they are everywhere else. The lonely stolen Nokia in another seller's left hand comes with a far less overblown sales pitch. Scott watches his bag, as his iPhone is his second wife, and if it goes missing Meils won't give him any money to buy it back.

After dropping off our bags at the left luggage inside Napoli Centrale and having an Obama party with the baggage guy, we eat an hideously expensive breakfast at McDonalds inside the train station, mostly because we can't be bothered braving the hoardes outside again. This whole city of darkness thing gets old really quickly. Anyway, after paying the equivalent of $25AUD for trash, we are forced to pay $2AUD each to use the in-restaurant toilets, which is a practice we've gotten used to in "public" toilets in Eastern Europe where for a few convertible marks, zloty or crowns the WCs are meticulously maintained by apron-clad ladies and often decorated with pots of fake flowers and wall hangings. However, it does seem rather out of place in a major food chain - especially when the toilets are filthy like these are, and the charge is collected in a box labelled "donations." There should be a money back guarantee.

On our way back through the Central station we run a gauntlet of guys offering Pompeii tours, but push our way through to the Circumventi station where the Sorrento trains leave from. We have no trouble buying tickets, but massive trouble reading the timetable, which looks like they've used the trajectory paths of the traffic outside as inspiration for its layout. Thankfully, some helpful guards point us in the right direction using a combination of Italian, English and sign language. We offer them grazies, they offer us a cheerful "watch out for pickpockets!". We already were, but thanks for the reminder. As it turns out, it's not just the guards programmed to warn tourists - the overhead platform announcements also make reference to holding onto ones bags and the locations of the in-station police boxes every couple of minutes.

We get on our train without having any of our belongings removed from our presence, and its a quick forty minute trip down to Pompeii. Once off, it's only about a hundred metres to the entrance to the ruins, but the omnipresent crowd of people trying to sell us things (this time guidebooks) complicates the path slightly. We go through the gates of the main site, pay our 11EU each and chuck our tickets in the machines without a thought to maps or audio guides - it's a major site, there should be signs, right?

Errr, wrong. The astounding archeological discovery and preservation is only matched in amazement by the lack of information around the lost city. Worse still, there are no spots within the site to purchase previously mentioned maps and audio guides from - and once you leave, you have to pay another 11EU to get back in. After about two hours of wondering aimlessly (it's a huge place) being followed by a pack of stray dogs, we end up on the highly touristed side where there are displays of broken pots, urns and statues. After about another hour walking around we decide we've had enough and after asking a few fellow tourists about the location of the petrified bodies (excavated in the poses they were holding when the city was buried and then cast from plaster) and consulting with their maps, we're about ready to give up when we overhear a conversation about 'number 56' being the place to find the goods. We head down to the main entry and consult with another useless map (the streets and site numbers are listed on it but no information about what the site numbers correspond to) and then undertake a mad dash back across to the side we had visited earlier in the day. A bunch more searching uncovered several '56s' and it wasn't until we'd had an absolute gutfull that we decided to try one more area, labelled as 'experimental winery' on the gate to it... and came across a poorly maintained display of the bodies. O GRATE. HAPPY DAI.

OK, so the place was amazing, but if you visit, either get an audio guide or wait around for a guided tour to leave. Your visit will suck more balls than a Pompeii prossie if you don't.

Back on another train, and we arrive back in Naples in just enough time to catch an express service to Rome. We try to buy a ticket, and all is going well, until the ticketing counter guy informs us that he can't put through our transaction with a credit card, as he's already printed the tickets to say that we paid in cash. What? You have an EFTPOS machine sitting right there in front of you! Why didn't you ask us how we were planning on paying beforehand if the wrong choice was going to be the seemingly life or death situation that you are making it out to be? Failing to find a bankomat, we pick up our bags from the luggage storage where the friendly guy who gave Obama the thumbs up over his paper that morning gives us a lesson in counterfeit money, of which we thankfully have none tucked away in one of our backpacks. Back to the ticketing desk, this time with a different window dude, who quickly sells us some tickets and lets us know that it will be 38EU for both of us... not each as the previous counter guy had said. Given that we had 50EU on us during the previous transaction, and it was only the "per person" comment that complicated matters, we sigh, chalk it up to language difficulties, and run to catch the 6.24pm service to Rome.

The train trip is uneventful, we're in a comfortable carriage with two other guys who get on at one of the early stops. When we arrive in Rome we're pleasantly surprised by the Termini station, which lacks the chaos and confusion of Napoli and is all polished chrome and shiny glass windows. We shoulder our bags and walk down to the hotel, which once again seems like a long way even though it's probably only a kilometre or so. We begin to wish that pickpockets would target some of our belongings, if only so we wouldn't have to carry them. When we get to the hotel, it takes ten minutes of confusion before the receptionist figures out that we're staying in their sister hotel next door, even though the address Expedia has given us is the '1' part of 'Hotel 1,2,3'. Thankfully the faux Renaissance stylings and schmaltz of 1's reception is carried through to the adjoining property, and we end up cocooned in a roof-level room with exposed beams and a window in the ceiling.

It's about 10pm by this stage, and we're hungry. We walk to find "Tram Tram" - a highly recommended restaurant which is, of course, made more difficult to find by Lonely Planet's map. The place is packed, the service is terse, but the food is amazing. And expensive. Damn you Italy. But still, the spaghetti with anchovies, breadcrumbs and pecorino is a revalation, and the plate of calamari and prawns which Meils orders is perfectly cooked (and cleaned, unlike a previous meal in Dubrovnik). Scott orders a veal casserole which was obviously prepared by some sort of ethereal being rather than the Indian chef who keeps poking his head around the kitchen curtain to see how the diners are enjoying the food (or checking if he can shut up shop yet, either or). A carafe of house red completes the meal, and it's obvious that there is no Kaiser Stuhl in this country. The shine is only slightly dulled by omnipresent street sellers coming into the dining room and loading our table up with crap like wooden carved jewellery boxes, beads, cartoon laser pointers and roses. We long for Leichhardt, where that sort of crap would probably prompt a murderous maitre d' rage on the offending party's arses.

On our way back to the hotel, we almost pass an Italian reggae bar. Meils hates reggae, but can't toss up the opportunity to check out a fake-tanned Italian chick with dreads spinning vinyl like Ja is in her hands. Just kidding, the music and DJing was pretty crap, but we sample some Italian beer and Scott buys a laser pointer, torch and pen in one from a seller for a couple of Euro. We wonder if it will still be working tomorrow. We depart the reggae bar and mean to pick up some water from a little corner store, but then we discover that it sells beer as well, so we consider it our civic duties to partake of their tap and drink standing in the street whilst trying to decipher the Italian newspaper's excited headlines about Obama's victory. Just sharin' the love. We eventually get our water and head back to our attic abode for a bit of shut eye and recouperating before the Roman express hits our station tomorrow.

We wake up on the ferry with our sea legs firmly attached to our sea tummies which are firmly attached to our sea brains. This makes normal functioning difficult, if not impossible. Although we did get a bit of sleep in our single bench beds, the lack of fresh air due to the recirculated hot air throughout the ship has left us dopey. A quick wash in the rather industrial bathroom and then pulling up a pew on the rear deck as we approach the Italian coastline helps only marginally.

We arrive into port at around 9am, and follow the masses as there's been no announcement as to correct disembarkation protocol. We lug our backpacks down into the belly of the ship and through the garage, coming out of what would be its rear end should it be a mammal rather than a hunk of high tensile carbon. Arrival on solid ground prompts the immediate problem of staying upright, but this is overtaken by the presence of a single 8 person minibus to shuttle a hundred people from the dock across to immigration. We set off on foot instead, arriving at the terminal before the second shuttle load have organised themselves.

More mysteries await us at passport control, the guy coordinating arrivals sends us down to an EU line, which would have been great if we were EU residents as there was no one ahead of us. We correct the mistake and wait a couple of minutes before being given the most disinterested of glances by the customs people and ushered through with another stamp in our books. What passes for a quarantine station is supervised by a lady in intense discussion with someone in the glass box behind her. She doesn't seem to care about the X-Ray screening of the bags going through the conveyor belt in front of her.

Out of the front of the terminal and we are immediately rushed by "taxi" drivers, wanting 20EU to drive us to the train station. It begins to look like a good idea when the public buses fail to materialise and the mysterious Jadrolinja Ferries bus is (a) full; (b) has no destination signage and (c) contains a driver that prefers to waggle his finger at us than answer any questions. We come across another Australian couple who say that the number 20 bus goes to the station, and after running around the terminal and immediate surrounds with our backpacks (much to the frustration of Scott who was in the process of checking a timetable sheet when we ran after it the first time, only to be thwarted by a lack of Euro change) it does a loop back to our original destination, where the driver slams the doors on us while we're standing in them because the people in front of us won't move to the back of the quarter-full vehicle. Ahhh, Italia.

Eventually we get to the train station and buy tickets for Naples before storing our bags and setting off to find something to eat. We end up back at the train station cafe, eating some cold pizza slices. From what we've seen on our drive in, the train station is a fair distance from the commercial centre of town, and Bari is just another city. We look at the fountain at the front of the train station, then groan when we realise that we have another three hours to kill before our train leaves. Attempts to spend time in the great outdoors are thwarted by strange shouty men in a park, which we're used to, but not willing to entertain in our sleep deprived, wobbly state.

We arrive on the platform ten minutes before departure. The flicking sign above platform three states that the next train to leave from it is heading to Torino at 12.58pm. It now being 1.30pm, we take note and with the niggling words of Andrea, Meils' cousin's wife, in our minds ("Italian trains never leave on time if they're not cancelled") go against our better judgement and listen to the old Kiwi guy who is with the Australians (heading to Rome on the same train as us) when he says "nah, they just haven't changed the sign yet." The train leaves early. We're happy for all of a minute, until the announcement comes over the loudspeaker system that the train we're on is going to .... Torino. Massive FAIL results, and when the drifting Kiwi comes up to us with a cream bun in one hand and a goofy grin on his face Meils only restrains herself from giving him a serving because she's busy blaming herself for not trusting her instincts. We spend a tense few minutes musing over the situation, the possiblity that there are two train lines going east to Rome and north to Torino throws a spanner in the works as it's possible we might not reach a station that we can attempt to backtrack from for an hour or so. Thankfully, there's an older Italian guy in the same predicament as us, and with the help of an European railways map and a Trenitalia conductor, we get off the train at the next stop and wait five minutes before our correct train comes chugging along and we breathe a collective sigh of relief. Crisis diverted.

Somehow, presumably as the result of a continental time warp, our new train manages to run an hour and twenty minutes late into Caserta. Thankfully, there are trains leaving Caserta for Napoli every ten minutes, and we get on an "express" service, arriving at the Central station around 7pm. Only an hour and a half after what the Trenitalia website predicted for our journey... Naples is an easy city to find your way around though, mostly thanks to the piles of rubbish everywhere serving as landmarks, so we shoulder our bags and walk a gruelling couple of kilometres to our hotel, which is scarily located in a beaten up apartment block, up eight flights of stairs, lacking any signage (resulting in us buzzing guest rooms trying to find the reception) and with a strange man working the reception. The interior is ... cosy. But at least it's not a brothel. Hey, it was only $75 a night! It could be worse.

Scott's feet are giving him gyp by now, but the prospect of pizza at a traditional pizzeria founded in 1870 and colloquially known as the Temple for its production of deliciousness peps him up - until we miss the street it's on thanks to Lonely Planet's useless maps and walk an extra click trying to find it. But find it we do, and after taking a pink ticket and waiting ten minutes, we're sharing a table with an Italian couple, and ordering three of the six items on the menu - Pizza Margherita, Pizza Marinara, and two Italian beers. The other menu items, if you're interested, are Fanta, Coke and water. Not a chunk of tinned pineapple to be seen! We follow suit with the other diners, getting in, eating, and getting out. We've ticked the only thing that interested us in Naples itself off our list, and make our way home through the darkened streets to our hotel before collapsing into bed. Tomorrow, Pompeii!

Inexplicably, SSIS doesn't natively include a method for generating new GUIDs in the Derived Column Data Flow Transformation.

The get-around is to create a custom Script Component. In SSIS 2008, we have a choice of using Visual Basic or C# to write the script code; I'm going to demonstrate a C# script.

Let's say we have a Data Flow Source and a Data Flow Destination.
(you can click on these pictures to enlarge):



For the sake of this demo, the only difference between the source and the destination is that the destination has a GUID column, with no default constraint which adds its own NEWID() on insert. So we need to generate the GUID in SSIS. The usualy was we'd add a new column worth of data is by using the Derived Column transformation, but as I've mentioned (and you've probably found if you're reading this) there isn't a new GUID option.

So we add a script component.



Choose the "Transformation" option, hit OK, and drag the Source's green arrow onto the Script Component.

Double click the script component, then "Inputs and Outputs", then expand Output 0 and Add Column. Call the column whatever you like, but I'm going to call it "SQLNinjaGUID" so you can see how it's referenced in the C# code. Change the data type of the column to unique identifier [DT_GUID].



Jump back to the script tab, make sure we're using Microsoft Visual C# 2008 as the ScriptLanguage, Edit Script, and replace ALL of the code with the following.

using System;
using System.Data;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.Wrapper;
using Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Wrapper;

[Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Pipeline.SSISScriptComponentEntryPointAttribute]
public class ScriptMain : UserComponent
{

    public override void Input0_ProcessInputRow(Input0Buffer Row)
    {
        Row.SQLNinjaGUID = System.Guid.NewGuid();
    }

}


Now when you drag the Script Component's green arrow onto your Data Flow Destination, you should see SQLNinjaGUID (or whatever you called your new column) pop up as an available Input Column in the destination's Mapping tab.

Script follows, with little to no fanfare!


SELECT
        schemas.name + '.' + tables.name SchemaTableName
FROM
        sys.tables
  JOIN
        sys.schemas
     ON tables.schema_id = schemas.schema_id


Let’s say that the business you work for has also been around for many years, and in that time loads of little rules about the data have appeared. Market A works differently to market B. This car shouldn’t be included in this list of products. When pulling together a list of shoppers, we only care about those that have credit cards.

Every time a new project comes up, a new part of a public facing website or a new module in an in-house application, new stored procs are developed. Often, these procs are written by people who weren’t around when the DB schema involved was designed, or they haven’t got all of those little rules I discussed above memorized. Who does?

This is where Views can come in handy. Instead of building each of those annoying little rules into each new Stored Procedure that’s developed, build them into Views, and point all Stored Procs towards Views instead of Tables.

And I mean ALL Stored Procs. As a standard. If you follow this standard, you can be sure that when it’s time to implement a new business rule, you can find the appropriate View, alter some code, and all the dependant Stored Procedures will now follow that new business rule.

For example, you have a table called Lotto.Entry. It records who has entered a lottery, and how old they are. Supplying the website, there are three hundred stored procedures which access data from this table. The CEO at your company decides that it’s no longer ethical to be reporting on people under 17 who have entered the lottery. If all those 300 Stored Procedures are pointing towards the table, you’re faced with moving data around, or changing all of those procs. If the procs are instead pointing towards Lotto.vEntry, that view can have a “WHERE Entry.Age > 17” clause added. Other Views should point towards this View instead of the underlying Table, so that the business rules are “inherited” across the system.

Another advantage is that the business rules are centralized. You know to look towards the basic view of a table if you want to know how its data is handled.

Pretending to delete data is another thing that can be done in views. Let’s say you want the users of the website/UI to feel like they’re deleting data, but you want an audit trail on that data, and you simply want to hide it from the users. Add an “IsDeleted” field to your table, and a “WHERE IsDeleted = 0” clause to the base view of that table. The data is then easily “undeleted” in cases of errors.

Views are a centralized, transparent and predictable way of implementing rules in which your data is accessed.

Having a look through the new features of SQL2008, I was intrigued to find the new Declarative Management Framework. In short, it's a way to enforce various policies on your environments.

Without going too far into it (in this post), it made me think about what kinds of policies or standards I like to enforce as a Team Leader.

One particular area is in object naming conventions. This is always going to be an idiosyncratic/personal aspect of programming, but I’ve found that if one person takes the initiative, other people will follow. An agreed standard makes it easy to predict what an object will be called, cutting down on searching and guessing when you’re not familiar with a schema that someone else has designed.

Tables:
- No tables have a plural name, i.e. “Lottery.Entry”, not “Lottery.Entries”

Stored Procedures
- have the prefix “s”
- wherever possible include the main object they reference, what they are doing to the object, and by what parameters (if any, and only when there’s only one or two, otherwise use “filters” or “various” etc.) in the format “s[OBJECTNAME][ACTION]by[PARAMETERS]”. The main point is the object name and the action. This is open to a fair bit of interpretation, but here’s some examples
o Lottery.sEntrySelectByID
o Lottery.sEntryInsert
o Lottery.sResultSelectByFilters
o Lottery.sPredictionUpdate

- no underscores. One of my bugbears is guessing whether or not an underscore might separate one part of an object name from another. The simplest answer is to not use them

Views
- have the prefix “v”
- if they return fields from one table only, then they are named “v[TableName]”
- it they return fields mostly from one table, and reference other tables/views in order to bring back names etc,. for IDs in the original table, then they are named “v[TableName]Overview”
- no underscores

Triggers
- prefixed with “trig”
- suffixed with “AfterInsert”, “InsteadOfInsert” etc
- example: Lottery.trigEntryAfterInsert

Functions
- same rules as for stored procedures, but prefixed with “f”

Keys
- prefixed with “pk” for primary, “fk” for foreign, “uq” for unique
- perhaps “uk” would be more consistent for uniques? Hmmm I may have stuffed that one up over the last few years….
- reference the object name and the fields: e.g. fkEntry_LotteryID
- hey what’s that underscore doing there? I’m fine with underscores in objects that are rarely referenced which writing code off the top of your head. I think they’re fine in keys, indices etc., anything that’s not a view, proc or table

Indices
- ixTABLENAME_FieldName1_FieldName2 etc
- no need to reference INCLUDEd columns

Constraints
- “df” prefix for default constraints, e.g. dfEntryName
- “ck” prefix for Check Constraints

I’m sure there are plenty of people who would vehemently disagree with some of the choices I’ve made above. That’s great, and I’d love to hear why! My main point though is that having standards helps save time by making it easy for fellow developers/DBAs to predict what your objects are called when they’re searching for them. In a database like the main one I manage at the moment, where there are now over 10,000 objects, this can save some of the precious sanity we have left.

Excuses? Work, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, music composition duties. It's been a while since I've blogged. Well I haven't forgotten about SQL, in fact it's high on the priority list.

I've just received some new SQL books in the mail. It's time to have a go at some certifications again. 70-432 and 70-433, Database Implementation and Maintenance, and Database Design, respectively. Flicking through the books, there's so much I already know, but I've never actually been near SQL2008, so there's also some huge chunks that are absolute news to me.

I'm also starting a Masters of Information Technology at the University of New England, part-time by "distance education". My aim there is to broaden my knowledge of IT, being a person who "fell into" IT at work rather than doing an IT based degree first. The degree I completed in 1995 was a Bachelor of Science, majoring in microbiology and genetics. Now I'm a DBA. Go figure! Apparently it's not such a rare thing for your degree to not have a huge bearing on your career path anymore.

Well, anyhow, just wanted to let y'all know I'm still here. Catch you soon.

I didn't go to school to learn about computers, LIFE taught me about computers. I learned SQL on the job (well, maybe there's lots of study that's gone on since).

As a consequence, while I can write T-SQL better than I can write complete sentences in english, there's at least a few little basics that have escaped me along the line. So yesterday when I was trying to work out how to bring up a remote failed cluster node onto which I could no longer remote desktop, it was a revelation to me when someone told me how to remotely reboot a computer from the command line.

I thought "how do people know this black magic"?

And then I found the goods: An A-Z Index of the Windows XP command line

which looks quite similar to the TechNet article, but I'm not complaining.

There's quite a jump between being proficient in T-SQL/SSMS and understanding the guts of SQL Server. For example, being able to backup and restore databases is a handy skill, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. Under the water is the differences between the recovery models, the different types of backups, and the effects that doing backups have on recoverability and growth/maintenance of logs.

As mentioned in my post on "ongoing education", it's helpful to have reference resources which talk to you like a human, and pictures are pretty helpful too. So I'd like to pass on this amazing site: http://www.sqlbackuprestore.com/

It'll get you up to speed on the nitty-gritty of backups and restores a lot faster than any book or course I've attempted slogging through.

Just check it out if you're needing help, especially if you use Red Gate's backup gear, as he knows the innards of that lot intimately and provides a great lot of code samples which have saved me quite a few hours over the last few days.

Today I was moving the tempDB on a new server from the drive where every other DB data file sits to its own dedicated drive, with the intention of preventing drive contention.

To cut a long story short (and anyway I'm not even sure how I got myself into such a tangle) here's a couple of annoyances and their fixes:

Annoyance #1 - Reducing the Initial File Size of TempDB: If you right click a database, go into Properties, and Files, you can see the Initial file size of the database. Let's say that someone else set this DB up, and you'd like the initial size to be smaller. This is only really a problem you're going to get with TempDB, which re-creates each time you restart the SQL Service btw. So you type in a new value, and hit OK. Well, not OK, because if you re-open that same GUI, you'll see that your changes have not been kept! ARGH!

Solution #1 - Issue a DBCC SHRINKFILE (N'file' , size in MB) where the size in MB is an amount LESS than the initial size you wish to set. Then, ALTER DATABASE tempdb MODIFY FILE (NAME = 'file', SIZE = new initial size)

Annoyance #2 - Reducing the Number of Database Files: So you've got TempDB split up into too many files. So you go into the Properties, Files etc and remove the file(s), hit OK and they file's disappeared from the hard drive. But upon restarting the SQL Service for whatever reason, the files get recreated on the hard drive!

Solution #2 - They've got to be explicity removed from the system catalogue it seems. ALTER DATABASE tempdb
REMOVE FILE (NAME = tempdev2, FILENAME = 'c:\tempdev2.ndf')

Little secrets.

Reading msdn articles and whitepapers and textbooks blows goats as far as I'm concerned. I'm interested for about 5 minutes, max.

However I’ve been learning a lot about SQL (as well as plenty of other things) since I got myself set up in the RSS world, subscribing to blog and site feeds in Google Reader.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir on this blog entry about RSS, but amongst the DB people I know very few seem that savvy about efficient net usage.

These sites below publish regularly, and when you subscribe to them in Google Reader, you can get a heap of relevant information into your unread “inbox” instead of regularly checking sites to see if anything’s updated.

If you’ve got a gmail account, you’re crazy not to start using Reader, and it works great on mobile phones cutting down bandwidth hungry sites into nice little readable chunks.

So, below, are my favourite sites/blogs which update regularly with useful SQL goodies. At least check them out, and if you’re not already in the RSS feed world, get yourself subscribed to these guys in Google Reader and you’ll be picking up more info than ever in a digestible fashion.

Blogs:
http://www.brentozar.com/
http://statisticsio.com/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/sql-server/
http://blog.sqlauthority.com/

For sites, check out:
http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki and http://www.sqlservercentral.com/

Amazingly, even in SQL 2008 there's no performance testing/tuning GUI. But of course, you just need to know where to look to find free tools. Welcome to Codeplex.

SQL Nexus takes advantage of the SQLDiag command line tool that ships with SQL Server, sucking in DMV and Trace data to present in a great drill-through Reporting Services based interface.

Within an hour, I'd identified 2 hardware based issues with solid evidence to present to management.

Tip: Read the installation steps carefully; it's not an all-in-one install. Also, when directed towards a download of PerfStatsScript.zip, look here for the download.