Sunday, July 21, 2002
in zagred, croatia today for a day of transit before budapest. dubrovnik yesterday was so special that this morning i had to be dragged from it like a 5 yo kid from a lollie shop. i want to go back already.
finally yesterday i got my head around the elements of this yugoslavic war. it just makes me so sad that people can act like they do. it was tradgic to see so many unhealed scars of the shelling campaign in such a beautiful and innocent town.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
For the last 2 days i have been in Split, Croatia. a beautiful mediteranian town on the adriatic coast, with the old town composed of some excellent roman ruins. im sitting in a little but funky cyber cafe next to the "temple of jupiter" and the pebble beach.
i have decided to quickly break my silence to foward this most amazing story from an Uppsala mate Steve (we have travelled around alot together this year, and he was one of da kantorz boyz). he describes it all in this funny email, and at the bottom i have put the link to his photos. read on....
"As you may recall, I informed you all that I was not gored at the
running of the bulls. The situation has been somewhat changed since
then. There is only one thing stupider than running with the bulls,
and that is running with the bulls twice. Once again, DONT PANIC IM
OK. I kinda went one on one with one of the larger bulls (a 509kg
leviathon called "portentoso")- not that there was ever any real
competition (he didnt stand a chance) He decided to run the WRONG
way during the running and I was kinda caught offgaurd standing up
against the wall with a camera in my hand while i was taking photos
of the female bulls (they are not so aggressive). It stood opposite
me for about 4 seconds staring at me, and I considered the best
course of action to stand completely still- it would not consider me
a threat and surley would not charge. I learned this from watching a
bull fight the day before. Well this little theory turned out to be
completely wrong, and it charged me, but luckily I managed to stay
in between its horns. Then after knocking me head over heels, it
picked me up off the ground by its horns and threw me back and forth
across the alley, and ultimately into the walls. I tried to stay as
low to the ground as I could, and resist the urge to get up and run,
as surley it would gore me in the back. The scariest part was
probably when it had me up against the wall and was repeatedly
charging the wall denting the metal grate centimeters above me. I
realsied at this stage that it was not just defending itself, it
really wanted to turn me into swiss cheese. Apparently the fact I hadnt showered or slept in a bed for 4 days did not deter him. It felt like an
hour, but i think it was messing with me for about 40 seconds or so.
Incredibly, I was almost entirely unharmed. Sure I have a lot of
sratches and some deep bruises from attempted gorings, but I walked
away from the incident, and did not require medical attention.
Although my favorite pants are completely shredded. I cant really
explain why I was so unharmed, except that it is yet another
incidence of my lifetime of extraordinary luck. Perhaps its some
kind of sign, that i have to do something very important, like,
ummmm, try more Belgian beers. This may sound shallow, but man you shoudl try them!
On the bright side, I am on the front page of the Spanish newspaper,
I have been interviewed 3 times, and been given loads of free stuff.
The interviews were rather amusing, one of them went somethign like
this: "so what happened?" "I got gored by a bull" "what went through
your mind when you were inbetween the horns of the bull" "errr...am
i allowed to swear?"I was continally stopped by amazed spanyards in
the street so they could get photos of me- the expression on their
face when they saw me walking around can only be compared with that
of someone who sees a spectacular plane wreck and sees a sole
survivor walk out unscathed. Apparently people do not usually walk
away from such gorings, and if they do they do not walk away without
a single break, frature, or stich. I have been called "miracle boy"
and a "hero" by randoms in the street- althugh I dont see what was
so heroic about lying on the ground cowering while a bull
threw me around a street".
photos: steve gets gored
Monday, July 08, 2002
lets make the plans...
organising this trip to eastern europe has been slow-just dont try to go to bosnia from paris with an australian passport living in sweden with a students visa.
it feels like this process has been doing its best to try and pull down my enthousiasm about it all. it hasn't, yet.
these hassles have meant i can't go to bosnia, but instead it has opened the door for Hungry, Budapest, Franze Liszt and Bella Bartok. i am not unhappy bout this
my itinery at this point:
-meet sarah (oz)and alena (swedish/bosnian) in western sweden tonight.
-catch an overnight ferry to ?Suffrice in germany
-spend the 9th driving down thru central and eastern germany, to arrive in salzberg that night. we will stay there 9th and 10th. (wolfgang should watchout too). meet harly and john (NZ and Can).
-11th (?12 adn 13th) Slovinia. Bled and other towns (i want to find the lake where the slovinian rowers trained to beat us)
drive to croatia
-15-21st in croatia. the western coast and zagreb and split
-train from zagreb to buda where i will stay till around 26th-exploring more of hungry once i have arrived. meet sean there.
26th-begin to drive back-would love to spend a few days in poland too if possible,
back to sverige by the 28th ish.
then mum, dad, and bro will be here in sweden for a few days. man, i will have a few days to clean my room, remove my dread locks and hide my tatoos. the best part is that now i can eat at all the expensive resturants of uppsala....he he
the next few weeks will be low on blog and email and contact. one of the commandments of blogging life: the more i do, the less i write and vice verca will again be true for july and august. see ya all, ab
outside my room right now, at 1:15am. the endless swedish summer sunset. it is quite dark down on the ground, but the sky never gets very dark. always in one corner of the sky there is some light concentrated, an endless sunset that never goes away. it will stay like this for about another 1.5 hours, after which the rest of the sky lights up. by around three even the ground is very bright, so you could, for example read the fine print of a newspaper-in fact a great thing to do after a moderately big night. for the really big night, you come home at, say, 5 and your body begins to refuse to go to sleep. it gets all perky for the coming day, and seems to forget the debauchery from just before.
of course, midsummer in sweden is the best for this type of global and solar system positioning stuff. around then, particulary a bit further north, like kiruna where i went to the ice hotel and dog sledding, the sun never sets. you can play golf at midnight.
good work leyton. but are we as proud of him as we were for pat cash, or pat rafter?
Sunday, July 07, 2002
its getting closer.........soon we will be on mars.......
Friday, July 05, 2002
i was a bad tourist in paris. i lived there.
i think one of the legacies of this year will be the fact that i can now travel. i have managed to develop some of the many effective habits and methods of someone who travels alot. but also my own way, my own indiosyncractic way to lets me seek out what i like quickly and thoroughly. the problem was that i forgot them all in paris. when i went out i rarely took my camera, i didn't meticulously keep my diary like i have since the day i got on the plane in adelaide, the pages of my guide book werent dirty with usage. in paris the day to day became more important. my eyes stopped scanning the horizon and started looking at what was infront of me. in effect i was living there rather than visiting it. it was three months in sweden before i woke up and thought i am no longer a tourist; i now know how alot of it works, i have some capacity to predict things cos i have often seen them before. in paris i became immersed in a world that only lasted for one month and it felt the same. its culture and life swept me on to this rushing aeroport excalator. i felt like all the little parts of me where being expressed or at least had the potential to be. and in this place you become more you than you thought possible before. you meet people there with the same way of thinking, even further developed in your way of thinking than you, and you learn so much about yourself and others. it pushes you along to be more individual and more of you.
it is strange to feel at home with everything about a city when it is still new. crammed up against people in the metro that always smells like piss, strolling around the paris of Artists, the paris of Napeleon, Mitterand, or the Gollo Roman Period. even chatting to randoms in slow french but real french. i seem to accept the place for its good and bad, and the balance was tipped over in the positive.
The Parisian café
is one of those surprising things about paris that leaves an impression. Every city now claims to have a burgeoning caféestrip where you can find the lattés arguing with the chardonnays. But in paris, the most supreme and original café societies of all you find something different. Is it the waiters, the small round tables with a gold rim that collects the dust and the little pictures that look up at you thru the glass, the portrates of french actrices or presidents on the wall, or the smoky air and archaic feel of the decor? Don’t know, but they culminate into a mood that is more personal and historical than in other cities. They have been a Parisian institition for many hundreds of years, and now are deeply set in thier style and ways like the locations they have remained at for hundreds of years; unswayable from trends but also retaining their own coolness.
On one of my last days I was chillin in a little café on a corner of a three way street. It is located in the 2nd arrondisimont, to just a short walk north along Rue Monmatre. I was pondering my fast evaporating time in paris, and the mornings lesson on prepositions and pronouns. After my second expresso I started to write stuff down in my notebook on the cafes, and well now I write the English translation (of what I was trying to write at the time in french)
The first thing you must do is chose what type of café you want to go to. A Café in Paris is a place that serves alcohol and food as well as your favourite brew. The food can be a more simple dejeuner or if you search a little you can even find diner. Quite often you will see “Café, Brasserie” on the outside sign indicating this more developed part of the café. The other is the saloon de The. What sounds incredibly pretentious and something I would expect to find only on oxford street in sydney, is in fact a very common and an relaxed. You can drink your coffee and the, while eating some patisseries or nibbles. You don’t usually get big meals, although I was told yesterday by a friend that more and more you will see these saloons also evolve.
The name of these places is always distinctive. “Le Napoleon” “Les Deux Margots” “Chez Nicoloas” “Le Flore”(flora) or my favourite “The Slug and the Lettuce”. They often name people or things which makes it feel personal when you walk in, while in contrast I noticed that in London and often at home you while find pubs and cafes named after places. The Oxford, The Edinburgh, and all the royals type names like “the Queens Legs”-(to dad, if you remember that joke).
After your choice you sit inside near a window or on the terrace to maximize your seeing ability and your ability to be seen. The tables and chairs are always cramped together; in a busy café you will actually be sitting immediately next to someone. Out on the terrace they all face outwards, so you have a line of chairs immediately next to each other backed against the front of the café; the tables are then placed infront of every two chairs.
The garcon then quickly appears; immaculately dressed; white shirt, black tie and the most haute expression he can conjure up. “Kse Kse vo-prefer, monsieur?” he spits out too quickly and with a strong Parisian accent. If you aren’t ready to give your answer quickly and in perfect french, the drama begins; with eye rolling, looking about, watch glancing, and finger tapping (although as I said earlier a better way to deal with these guys is to begin in slow french and let them change to English).
“oui, un expresso et un botelle d’eau SVP” i reply. they return quite quicly and hand you your morning heart starter. The bill depends where in paris you are. If in a touristy area you are likely to get hit with a 3-4 euro bill (double for A$), and of course you get the best quality bottled mineral water that money can buy for about 3.80euros. but a smaller place like the one opposite madam et monsieur Girads place where I would sit at night to do my homework wont charge more than one euro for a pretty nice cup of coffee.
You leave you money on the table at most places, except at the places where there are a lot of beggars nearby who have a habit of taking their own cut for the service.
Sacre Coeur in Monmatre.
Senegal Vs Turkey at Hotel de Ville. the relative cosmopoliton harmony in paris was put to the test when two of the biggest migrant groups in france fought it out in the quater finals of the world cup. the world cup was big (even when france exited so prematurely). but this match had more than foot ball about it, as the hundreds of anxious riot police testifed.
there is a nasty edge to paris. i have heard it said that in the parisian suburbs, frances 100s years of colonialism and dominace has come back to haunt them. at a free concert in the very cosmopoliton eastern paris at the place de la republic, ii noticed there were alot of angry looking migrants. As raul says in his usual way of simple pertinancy, "alot of the immigrants here have really bad feelings".
Most of this influx has added this great feeling of being at the centre of a cross roads of many cultures. you can get great food, festivals and creativity. And if you are a girl, you are more likely to be harrased from one of the ever persistant french guys (les mecs) than anyone else. but there is no denying there is a feeling amongst the parisians that they are not happy with the rate of change of their city.
i couldn't resist. the huge lake infront of the versailles chateau where the french navy would chill before mounting attacks on countries like the swedes. i saw the rowing boats and thought "man, i wonder if i could make barney, leigh, neil and paul jealous with this?". it was definately a different feel to belgium or scotland.
the palace at versailles. one of the few proper touristy things i did. a huge lasting symbol of the wealth of the french royal family before the revolution. from here Louis XVI and his wife were dragged into central paris by the angry mobs and put to the guillotine. later Napoleon, who helped in the 1789 revolution, interstingly founded his own little palace on the grounds too.
moi, Brian (north england), Raul (spain), Duncan (london). the three other students living with me at Madame and Monsieurs Girads maison. we ate like kings, slept like a pharohs, and had had some funny times struggling through our stories in french.
You never feel too far away from some poetry, some art or philosophy. this was on a wall in the arty/gay area next to the pompidou centre. I think the half naked guy next to it was the one who did it. the empty bottle of booze next to him hid nothing about how pissed he was. but he sat there on the ground wide eyed, with artistic intensity, painting some truely weird abstract art. he had had paint all over him, in his hair, on his chest. i think he thought he was a basquait or something. and in paris street art, tagging, and poetry is acceptable and even sort of encorouaged in its own way. cool in paris is looking intellectual, and having a pile of second hand books under your arm. on metro posters too you will find little political or philosophical messages. "La police sont fascites", "liberte pour les femmes" on a advertisment with girls in underwear.
Monday, July 01, 2002
c'est fini
i woke up in london this morning for a two day sejorn on my way back to sweden. my romance with paris has ended all too quickly. the normal laws of time and experience where all messed up. the month of paris was like being on an express flat escalator like the ones at an airport that save you the long walks between terminals. i seemed to jump on one of these when i first arrived-initially the sudden increase in the pace of life caused me to arch backwards as my legs speed up without the rest of me. then i quickly joined the tide of people running along its path. an adelaide boy, just having spent 5.5 months more in the quiet uppsala, was transformed into the hyperstimulated mania of paris. and i was hooked. i didnt need to sleep, i was learning french and parisian culture, music and people. i had caught a fever of The Moors Last Sigh: when you age twice as fast you must live twice as much. meanwhile time remained usual for those who had decdied not to take the escalator. as i hit the end of the month, my body has stumbled foward with momentum as my legs slowed down to touch the earth once more. - never before would i think of london as a chainging down of gears.
being in london
is bizzare. i have spent the morning trying not to get run over by the left hand side traffic again and had to get used to being in an english speaking country.
and never before has london felt so much like home. the fashion, the adversting in english, the familiarity of the names like kings road, knightsbridge, baker street green park, hyde park etc etc.
and there are bits an peices of australian culture everywhere. i am reading the time out guide to street culture (a great travel habit i started in helsinki where the first thing i do in a new city is buy the local guide to to street culture) and saw stuff about russle crowe, natalie umbraglias new ulbum, kylie shit, and johnny howard satire. they actually know stuff about australia here rather than it being just an exotic place that they would "love to travel to one day if it wasnt so expensive".
and i am taking pleasure in being polite too. cos one i have a command over english and the people hearing it here in london are very receptive to a gentlemanly mannered young man who knows how to be polite. ihere it is valued where as in france my french wasnt good enough, and in sweden they are too direct and you look like a pompous english loser if you try.
i have been living with mary and dennis, anna and rohan in their north london house. after 5.5 months of constant student life, isolation from the rest of the world, it has been a really big surpirse how every thing feels so strange. being in a family, talking about famil,y matters has been felt forgein.
oops time to go. i have run out of time, and need to catch the piccadily line to soho before the aeroport at 5. ill be in touch with everyone soon from sweden.
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