Friday, October 9, 2009

Constants and variables

Some things are the same in every country. These things include:
ducks (apart from Viennese ducks - crazy creatures)
pigeons
dogs (apart from Viennese dogs - very well behaved and pocket sized)
arcane underground rail systems
Australian backpackers
fat and/or stupid and/or loud American tourists

Some things are completely different everywhere you go, and it is confusing, and I am getting fed up with it. These things include the following:
light switches and their locations
toilet flushes
toilet bowl shapes
taps, soap dispensers, hand dryers/towels, and sink plugs. A note about these: there seems to be a competition running between airlines, train services and fancy eateries to produce the most bewildering combination of the above, which more often than not leaves your humble narrator struggling for ten minutes to activate the correct sensors or turn the correct knobs to get the whole arrangement to do its thing. More than once I have given up and walked away with unwashed hands.
computer keyboards
shower heads
arcane underground rail systems
service customs
beer
coffee
tea

A vast, overwhelming part of me just wants things to be normal again. I want people to speak English to me and sound like I do and make the same jokes and know what Marmite is. I want to eat Marmite. God, I miss that stuff more than I ever thought possible.
I want to see my friends, and other assorted people of import... I feel weird without them, like a piece of algae that used to be attached to a rock but got ripped off by the current and is now floating around with lots of longs trailing bits dragging behind. That was an incredibly inelegant analogy, but nevertheless accurate.
But things are good in other departments. We went to the hot springs at Bad Blumau, Austria, to the spa complex designed by Hundertwasser, which was gorgeous. We stayed at a farmstay half an hour's walk from the spa, with the incredibly hospitable Helga - mother of six, as well as running the farm and guesthouse - who was a beautifully typical jolly Austrian farmer's wife.
We stayed with Juergen, our Couch Surfing host, in Vienna. Time flew by as we talked and talked and laughed with him, and he took me out to see the sights at night on his motorbike. The next time someone starts talking to me about motorbikes, I swear that I will not glaze over and politely change the subject, for now I understand the thrill and sense of freedom you can get on these machines.
Now we are in Munich. So far we have been subject to leery men on the street and unexpected costs at the hostel (not to mention the broken washing machine), but I have faith in the place. Hopefully not misplaced.
Auf Wiedersehen meine freunden! Until next time.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Berlin

When you travel by train, you get to see some amazing landscapes. Even better, when you get in to a city you get to see some wicked graffiti.
There is a lot of graffiti in Berlin. A lot of buildings with broken windows, empty lots, general decay and the accompanying flowering of underground life. Unfortunately I didn't really get to see alot of it when I was there.
For a start, I was there for three days, one of which I spent in my hostel bed with a dripping nose and sinuses that felt like barbed wire implanted under my skin. Discovering the best places for street art and the coolest venues and cafes that only the locals go to takes some dedicated wandering. Of course, I could have taken the 'Alternative City' tour. For 12 Euros, I would be shown, according to the brochure, 'streets, squats and subculture'. Tempting. This is what attracted me to Berlin in the first place. But it seemed like such a lazy option, and (this may sound silly, I don't care) ethically dicey. I wondered what I would feel like if someone took tour groups through all of my beloved spots in Wellington; I wondered what would happen to those spots if everyone knew about them. After all, isn't the point of underground culture that it's difficult to find and hard to gain entry to? Anyway,I reasoned, the tour would probably not be worth the money (over 20 NZ dollars).
The sights we ended up seeing were the Sans Souci Palace in Potsdam (a heavily gilded Roccoco-era palace, with expansive and well-kept gardens), an exhibition of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist paintings (I was so tired by this point that I skipped right past the room containing a work by Jackson Pollock without a glance back), an exhibition of Bauhaus works, the Brandenburg Gate, a wander past the Bundestag (parliament building), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Checkpoint Charlie, a former part of the Berlin wall.
The things we didn't see, which I am still agonising about: a Pierre et Gilles retrospective, the East Side gallery, Lego Land, and any nightclub, bar or gig.
Berlin has a strange relationship with its troubled past. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sincere, profound experience, which manages to convey - as much as is possible in a work of art - some of the sadness, the immensity and the sheer heaviness of what happened in the Holocaust. But the same tour brochure that offered the 'Alternative City' tour made a tour of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp site sound like a funfair. They were also evidently making quite a lot of money off it, and off their Berlin wall tours, which to me feels a bit icky.
And in the Memorial for the Murdered Jews, people were playing hide and go seek (so did we. It was actually quite fun, and an ideal site for it). At Checkpoint Charlie, there is a museum - and a museum shop, presumably with fun souvenirs of Communist East Germany to take home to the rellies. There was a lunchbar across the road called Snack point Charlie.
Possibly my naive Antipodean eyes see things through a lens of too much idealism, but it seems like the pain, shame and tragedy of Germany's history is being exploited (by some) as a tourist attraction.
But maybe that's just how it goes in Berlin.

I"m writing from Prague, which is probably the most beautiful place we've been in yet. It also has the worst train station, which was practically Third World, and is the least tourist-friendly. And, like everywhere else, the hostel is full of Australians.

A bit more of Denmark

We stayed with Frede and his wife Angiuk for 3 or 4 days. Frede is a friend of my Dad's from about 40 years ago, and it's been about the same amount of time since they've seen or had contact with each other. As such, it was amazingly hospitable of them to invite us to stay with them, feed us amazing meals and not ask us to help clean up, show us round everywhere and (perhaps the most helpful thing of all) translate for us.
Angiuk is the first and probably the only native Greenlandic person I'll ever meet - unfortunately she couldn't speak a word of English, but she did show us many photos from her homeland, as well some traditional clothes made of seal skin and fur, figures carved of whale bone and walrus tusk and beautiful, colourful beadwork. I now know more than I ever thought there was to know about Greenland and its people - for instance, did you know that it's not necessary to tan seal leather in Greenland, because the air is so dry that it never decays? Also, did you know than untanned seal leather that has been kept in the damper climate of Denmark for several years and is starting to rot has just about the most disgusting odour you've ever inhaled?
I sure didn't.
In Denmark, we conquered: The Odense Domkirke (a really really old church), the Hans Christian Anderson Birthplace Museum, the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde (which has several preserved remains of Viking ships as well as modern day reconstructions, one of which has sailed to Ireland and back), the Roskilde Cathedral (where most of the Danish Royal family has been buried - most of the dead ones that is, haha, oh gosh that was terrible), and Rosenborg Slot (a palace in Copenhagen containing thousands upon thousands of Royal treasures in a Baroque-era interior).
My feet, they did hurt, and I did make this known to my august travelling companion, who was largely unsympathetic due to having contracted a flu, which was to fell me several days later in a hostel in Berlin. But that is another story.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Denmark is real!

No shit. I'm in it right now. There are strange letters on the keyboard, like æ and ø and å.
Glasgow and London and the Lakes District are also real. If you too have been to these places then you don't need my confirmation, but if you haven't then you can take my word as evidence.
We arrived in London after approximately 24 hours of torture under the guise of international air travel. In an eerie reprisal of that perennial Salientin-joke about Wee Hamish who did not stop crying fra' Aberdeen to Auckland, some children several rows behind us screamed the whole way from Singapore to Heathrow. I was welcomed in to London by the worst airport organisation I've yet seen and a terrible cup of tea from Starbucks. We made our way to Euston Station, where we sat on the grass and were stared at, as I tried to properly cognise the fact that I was actually in actual England and everything was twelve hours different and I was suddenly an outsider.
England is very old and very crowded and very manicured. All the gaps are filled in: hedges are clipped, trees have been planted, fences are painted. Nothing is wild except the weeds that grow to the sides of the train lines. We went for a walk when we got to the Lake District; the forest was a plantation and you could watch the 'Squirrel Camera' from the comfort of the cafe at the bottom of the hill (which, by the way, served some of the best hot chocolate I've ever had, an anomaly in this land of surly service and dishwater-strength coffee). And CCTV is absolutely everywhere.
Scotland is a bit rougher. In Glasgow people on the street sound like they are garlging ball bearings when they talk. Too many things have happened for me to bother retelling. Mum says to say that she is in love with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whom you can Google search if you don't know who he is. I was briefly inspired to relocate to Glasgow University, and am still mulling this option over... Glasgow is dirty in the most innocent literal sense: buildings are covered with a century's worth of coal soot and car pollution. Everything is older, bigger, more beautiful, more awe-inspiring than I could have ever imagined, and by contrast I felt young, small, scruffy and naive.
And now, Denmark, which is even older and several degrees more foreign. The houses have thatched rooves and cars drive on the wrong side of the road and the language is completely different (as opposed to Glaswegian, which admittedly does have a lot in common with English). We are staying with Frede, an old friend of my Dad, in the house that has belonged to his family for a hundred years. Down the road - less than 50 metres - is the church and graveyard where his parents are buried. The town was founded some time in the 12th century.
And this is normal here.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Broken window theory

(In response to the blacking-out out of the Ian Curtis RIP tag on Wallace Street)

the walls are not enough for these vandals.
your wives will be next - you'll find them on the doorstep, sunny Sunday morning, face down and covered
in spray paint. clean up graffiti before it spreads
to your sleepy suburb, your front gate and your beloved spouse.

Someone broke a window. But before that,
someone's grandfather got the cane
for speaking his native tongue in a classroom, and it's too late to employ measures such as
litres
and litres
of thick black paint.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Experience Overseas

Us humans really aren't as good at perceiving time as we think we are. A year, ten years and five minutes all go by and they feel the same to us. We know that things have happened and time has passed but our minds can never quite seem to grasp the weight of it. Our memories stretch and compress the bits of our life that have already happened, until they are way out of proportion.
As for the future, we make plans and expect things but it's always like a slap in the face when they actually arrive. The future is like one of those colouring-in books we used to have as children, the ones where you just washed water over the lines with a brush and the colours would come out on the page, grey-tinged pastels on a newsprint background and cartoonishly thick black outlines. A pale, insubstantial and two dimensional image of what's to come.
So when you're leaving the country, you speak of 'it hitting you'. It hasn't hit me yet, and won't until I'm on the plane thousands of feet in the air, that I'm actually going to a real foreign country. And then another, and another. Am I excited? Sort of, but only in the distant future of next week will it hit me. And those foreign countries are just like the colouring-in books and my grasp on the future: exaggerated and slightly mythical, but as yet still very translucent.

I am going to blog my adventures and misadventures as much as possible, or as much as I can be bothered because I will probably have more interesting things to do on my journey. Please do watch this space and leave me comments so I feel vindicated in my ramblings. It's nice to know that people are listening.
And here is a list of fun synonyms for travel:
sojourn
pilgrimage
voyage
mission
expedition
tour
progress
migration

And here is some brief trip information:
With mother. Fly out of AK 19/9/09 to London, train to somewhere in the North nearish Carlisle. Friends and relatives. Glasgow. Art and buildings. Denmark. Dad's friend Fred. More art and buildings. Eurail pass! Germany. Berlin. Munich. Oktoberfest! Austria. Italy. France. Spain. France. Belgium? England. Mother leaves. Germany? England? Ireland? The world?
Home.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Oh, just some stuff, you know?

So..
Things have been happening. Things haven't been happening.
That's a weak start to a blog, but how else can I sum the past few weeks up?

It's like one of those parties, such as the 21st I was at a few weeks ago, where you keep running in to people you knew a few years ago in high school or something, and they all ask me,
How are things?
What have you been up to?

"Well, after high school I went straight in to Uni, and I was doing this that and the other subject and then I decided I needed a break and now I'm just living with my mum and working in a cafe and saving up money to take an overseas trip, yeah it's alright I guess, I'm enjoying myself."

Later in the night, befuddled by drink and half-familiar faces, the conversations veer towards the surreal and jocular. But my replies only grow more honest as the evening progresses. A casual observer, if they didn't know me, might think I'm taking the piss, such is my sincerity. I soon reach a sort of zenith of erudition. I offer long-winded answers that speak about the big picture and the meaning of it all, and am seriously in need of someone to shut me up:

"How am I? Man, I've been up and down and all over the fucking place. It's been a long three years, lots of shit has gone down, and you know, I really do think that life is a beautiful thing and we are lucky to be living it."

"What am I up to? Just kind of living, you know, getting up in the morning, some days I have work and others I don't, I spend quite a few days sitting on my arse and sometimes I do shit.. I keep myself busy. I could give you a blow-by-blow account of the average day in the life of me, but honestly every day is different and they're all the same and there really isn't much to tell. I'm not trying to blow you off... But really, I think that's the essence of what life is like - apologies for getting all deep and meaningful - but really life is just some stuff happening and bouncing off some other stuff happening and it all kind of comes together, and it's beautiful, and that's really what God is and beauty and music and it's everything -
you know?"

Eventually, the booze takes over good and proper:

What are you up to these days?
"What am I up to these days?? What is anyone up to? What are we doing here on this fucking universe, in this godforsaken arse end of a planet?"

How are you these days?
"Good."
(A broad, fuck-off grin)
(Nothing else)

--

Make the change today: Every time someone asks you how you are, give an honest answer. Even if the truth is unpleasant. It's rude, I believe, to fake positivity. Less rude to confess that you have mad period cramps, and you didn't get enough sleep last night, and you're worried about where your life is going and things are generally pear shaped.

--

Yeah. What was I talking about? Oh, it doesn't matter, I'm sure you can relate. No, that's right, I was making a weak start to a blog, and then I got carried away trying to fix it. Yes, and then I was saying, sometimes blogging is a bit like one of those parties, like the 21st I was at a few weeks ago, when you see all these people you used to know a few years ago...

Elsewhere in life, I have been reading On The Road, and I think it might be influencing me rather too much.

--

I hope this hasn't been too much of a limp cock of a blog entry.
I hope you are well, and all your friends and family too. No, really. I love you all. Cross my heart and hope to die.

I don't know how I can make you believe me on this one. I've been sarcastic for so long that I can't remember what sincerity sounds like.