V.O.P

It's come to my attention that an alien-life form is inhabiting Europe. They're everywhere, taking root - if Triffids wore trilbies I'd swear it was the second coming. But despite all appearances, they're actually not creatures from another planet - just from a few decades ago.

They're old people, and they're everywhere.

V.O.P., or Visible Old People, are a phenomenon I've really only encountered whilst on the continent. Wherever there's a fountain, a park bench, or somewhere that serves coffee that could power a Mac Truck, you're sure to find them sitting, staring, and occasionally smacking someone with their stick. While it can be unsettling to go about my business with forty replicas of my European granparents watching, I really like this aspect of the culture. I think there's more of an emphasis on the family, so the elderly aren't simply shunted into retirement homes where, if they weren't senile before they will be soon. Instead, they prop themselves in prime position, watching, and sometimes being watched by, the world around them.

Not to get morbid about things, and I know it's a kind of a horrible comparison, but it makes me think a little of the medieval 'danse macabre' theme, where death dances with kings, queens, infants, etc etc, making evident it's status as the one great leveller.




Or perhaps a less grisly comparison would be the 'ubi sunt' motif, which focusses on the transience of life and it's beauty, a popular theme in medieval Latin poetry and subject of my, ahem, erstwhile thesis. With the elderly so central to the daily comings and goings, it makes it almost impossible to remove yourself from the acceptance of, and understanding, of age, intellect, and experience -things I occasionally feel are totally lacking in Australian society. It does make me wonder too, whether if for our youth obsessed society, aging isn't taking on a similar role to the 'unknowability' of death that medieval artists tried to grapple with - one that, if we pretend enough, shunt them away, and use enough botox, it just won't happen to us.

Let's play a game ...

Imagine your favourite food.

No, wait. This is my blog, so here's a better one - imagine one of my favourite foods. Struggling? I'll help you out - a Portuguese custard tart.

Having no luck with the pastry p*rn? Try this:






Now imagine you are in a country where they are a national speciality.

Now imagine they cost a mere 85c.

Now imagine you have started dreaming about them every night.


Now imagine my arse.

Carlos' House of Horrors

I am currently writing this under my bunk. Well, technically speaking, not under my bunk, but under the bunk above me. It’s super comfy, my head is tilted almost at 90 degrees and the pins and needles in my arm are morphing into a whole sewing kit. Why would I choose such cramped surrounds to spin my textual tapestry, I hear you ask? Am I trying to ‘method write’ a Kafkaesque tale of confinement and constriction? Am I channelling the spirit of some long-dead literary genius - did Tolstoy work under such conditions? Did Barbara Cartland? Unfortunately no. I am running with the whole mind over matter thing because I have just stumbled into the hostel from hell. It’s true. I am currently staying in the worst, most horrible, seriously ick, hostel I have stayed in, I think pretty much ever. But, except for the unfortunate fragrance of eau de bin, it’s not the place; I’m going to be a judgemental beeyatch and put it out there: it’s the people.

See, this place was supposed to be relaxed. Chilled out, but not in filthpig fashion, just in a cruisey, friendly, nice easy place if you’re travelling on your own, sort of way. The kind of hostel where you meet people, have a few beers, hang out. You know. Normal. Easygoing. Friendly. Ja. Whatever. Apparently, it’s so friendly here that two of the inhabitants had sex outside my window on the footpath last night. But don’t worry, it’s ok – they can’t remember any of it. Nothing. That makes it alright.

Clearly I’m a geriatric prude stuck in the occasionally-maintained body of a 25 year old woman, but I truly hate these kind of hostels, hostels where there’s zero private space and people push and push for you to go out for 2 euro shots at whatever grotty club is down the road. I usually avoid them like I would sharing a toothbrush with someone who has oral thrush, so it’s unfortunate when, Colgate in hand, you realise that your bathroom buddies request was used to ameliorate his odd resemblance to Old Yeller. It’s just a really gross place. I travel in a way I enjoy – lots of reading, talking, and relaxing, and it’s annoying when all these things are made impossible by your choice of accommodation, particularly when you realise this after you’ve already paid.

What is it about some people that the minute they get on foreign soil they just behave like utter tools? I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here, and assuming they aren’t like this all the time. I really hope so, anyway. And these aren’t even just Australian bogans, who I could almost forgive, as they tend to get a little excited about the change of hemisphere thing—these ones are internationally sourced. And they're just as bad. I’m cranky, I’m going to bed. Ergh.

Postscript: the next day. I thought someone had cooked me fried eggs for breakfast this morning. But no, that was just the topless vision that greeted me of the girl who had sex in the bunk above me last night. Hurrah!

Will you be our mother?

Sound familiar? If you too have managed to attract enough Lost Boys to field a football team, we’re more similar than previously thought. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but over the last few years I’ve noticed a definite pattern present in the men who come a’knocking at my door. Either they are so old that they do it with a Parkinson’s tremor, need their food made denture friendly, and a microchip so they don’t wander off from the home again; or so young and miserable that they only want red wine, and will ask for the cork in order to plug their stigmata. Although a staple gun and a barcode can fix the elderlys without too much hassle, it is these guys my own age, these unhappy men, men with problems, men continually searching, that are tricky. It doesn’t seem to matter where I am or who I’m with, I always seem to find (or be found by, I’m not quite sure which) men who need someone to talk with, someone to lean on, someone to help them weather the storm. These are guys who don’t just have baggage; they have their own cargo hold.

Yet so many of the men I know have this fragility, a definite eggshell quality that lies beneath the occasionally-muscled façade. Perhaps that’s one of the joys of spending time with people who ‘think’ for a living, but I’m not entirely convinced that this is so. Rather, I wonder if it’s symptomatic of the general lack of communication and coping skills of so many men out there, something that is perhaps no great surprise to anyone who has a father, brother, husband, or boyfriend. Interestingly, men supposedly use (on average) less than two thirds of a woman’s spoken vocabulary. Thus they seem to be hardwired, or at the very least predestined, to work, play, and, of course, suffer in silence. In Australia, male suicides outnumber female by about 4-1.
A young Australian guy I met recently articulated this differences in a way both poignant and telling. We’d been discussing his family issues and relationships, when he said: “I don’t read, so when stuff happens or things go wrong, I want to talk about it, and, you know, express it, but when I really need to, I try and … I just don’t have … the words”. I knew he wasn’t the most ‘literary’ of my acquaintances, but he was clever and eloquent, and his confession left me genuinely floored. I tried to imagine a world in which my tools of self-expression—reading, writing, and talking—were either denied or out of reach, and simply couldn’t make it work. What would it feel like to look within and find a dyslexic game of Scrabble? How would you cope with a death, a break up, a friend’s betrayal, if all you had to work with was the equivalent of Pig Latin?

I listened to him continue with story, one not dissimilar from many men that I have known, and wondered again at what actually made him this time, and in this place, so haltingly spill it. Was it because we were both on our own? Was it the beer? Or was it just because I was female? And what was he looking for? Just the comfortable anonymity of a fellow country(wo)man who could understand right now but who would never turn up later in his ‘real’ life? Or was he seeking the opportunity to discuss and change the life that had led him thus far? Whatever it was, afterwards I began to ruminate on his admissions, and the strange fact that I often elicit such confessions from people, without ever been entirely sure why: I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t go to me if I had a problem.

Unlike when I was younger, however, I’m also now more cautious of my entanglements with these people. I listen rather than expound, and facilitate rather than advise. After too many encounters with men on self-destructo, or those longing to be fixed, I find that I’m getting slightly wary of the Sati game, and approach such guys with an equal mixture of compassion and caution. It seems wrong sometimes to worry about how to extricate my own life from this unhappiness, and as I get older I wonder whether self-preservation is the aim of the game, no matter how uncharitable it makes me feel.

Perhaps it’s worth remembering who shoots the ´Wendy bird´.

On having some 'me' time

When is a little thinking time too much thinking time? When you think you’ve had enough time to think about it? Or when you know you’ve had enough time to think about it, analyse it, write a pros and cons list, and consider it as a possible phd topic? Funnily enough, this is something that, aptly, I’ve been thinking about lately. It’s one of the pleasures and the pains of travelling alone. On the plus side, you get to meet amazing, generous people willing to share a drink or a life story; on the down side those people can be few and far between, often leaving you with those who are all too willing to share the tales of their airline ‘pee-yuuwk’, complain about the heat (it’s Spain), and get you to read the map for them. That’s when the big guns, or at the very least, a big book, need to be pulled out in order to end all spurious, stultifying, or just plain stupid conversations.

I have done the long-term travelling alone thing before, and still recall those months upon months of having the same conversation -‘where have you been, where are you going, how long are you away for’ - with a bit of a shudder. I really didn’t want to do it again. This time, however, I’ve organised myself so that three weeks is all the time I have until I meet up with a friend. I know, I’m spoilt, but it’s still feeling a bit long.

I was very resistant to coming to Belgium in the first place, primarily because my Masters degree had been so incredibly isolating. I couldn’t imagine how topping two years of hardcore library time with a stint in a small village where I didn’t speak the language would improve my ability to make like a human, a skill I occasionally worry is getting rustier.

I’m not quite sure how, but over the last few years I seem, somehow, to have taken part in a pattern of ‘aloneness’. Not necessarily ‘loneliness’, although sometimes that follows; but somehow as I’ve got older, the things I enjoy doing (reading, writing, exercising, playing music) have all become things that one does alone [Stephanie Trigg has recently written on something similar here]. Furthermore, as I’m one of the few of my friends who doesn’t live with a partner nor have an all-consuming 9-5 (or 7-10) job, occasionally I’ve sensed that the line between time out and simply time passing is starting to blur.

I do wonder if this is just a part of my character type: a watcher rather than a doer, a thinker rather than a player, but I’m not entirely sure. I still remember on my year 12 school report, my English teacher wrote that I had ‘slyly never answered questions in class’ (yes, that was ‘slyly’, not ‘shyly’). I was gobsmacked, as I thought that I genuinely didn’t know the answers until I went away, thought about them, and wrote them down - very much a case of the old adage “how do I know what I think until I see what I say?”*.

I find that I need time away from things to understand them, shape them, and process them in a way that enables me and my world view to fit. Is this right though? Should I be down in the lobby of my hostel signing up for a bar crawl with all the eighteen year olds on gap years? I don’t think so, but I hope this doesn’t make me the human version of the cockroaches I just saw crawling all over the jambon in a window display: in prime position but still scuttling out of view.

At worst, at least I’ll have 400 million years to get it right.

* I should just point out here to those few people who read this blog who don’t know me – I am actually not as obnoxious as it, on occasion, makes me out to be. I swear.

Hola!

Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

As I’m currently sporting bad skin, frizzy hair, and a crooked spine courtesy of my heavy pack, I don’t expect a panting squawk of “it’s you!” a lá Catherine Zeta Jones. I do, however, have one nice excuse for my heat related frumpery – I’m in Madrid and it’s hot hot hot. I now have five weeks to slough the mildew from my skin, replace it with a tan, and acclimatise myself for a later jaunt to the tropics.

However, I’ve just spent the last four days in London, staying with a very dear friend who was visiting on a research trip. We’d both never really been before, and funnily enough, had the same reaction. Blergh. I’ve never been in a city that seemed to be so entirely characterised by ‘busyness’. There are amazing things to see, of course (the Tate Modern is incredible, and all the museums are free – hurrah!), and I’m sure there are wonderful areas to live, but in between seemed to be such a blur of rushing greyness. We did, however, unlike so many people visiting the UK, have no complaints about the food. Perhaps I have a slight predilection for all things potato, but we had some great stodge that fortified us for the days spent battling the tube.

However, one particular aspect of staying with this friend was food related, as she has a severe nut allergy. I’d always known this, but had never really appreciated how difficult it was for her until now. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but absolutely everything contains traces of nuts, possible traces of nuts, maybe one atom of a nut, and if that’s the case, she just can’t eat it. Food labels were read, products sourced and some were even brought over from Australia – thanks, lack of UK customs.

It really got me thinking about the way in which I travel, as for me, food is an integral part of the experience. To the detriment of my tailoring, I do tend to treat travel like a global buffet, sampling bits and pieces as I make my way. Thus I’m pretty excited about the whole tapas experience that Spain has to offer. Having zero Spanish (I didn’t even know the word for ‘beer’ – devastating), it’s such a pot luck, pointing to the menu and waiting to see what turns up. Add to this a night owl culture, super friendly (and, er, hot) people, and sangria by the cask, and I think I may have just found my home away from home.

XXX marks the spot

Say, perchance, you’ve just finished your stint in a very small town. You want to live it up a little, out your inner hedonist, and make a little crazy; but where to go? Contemplating my future post-Tiny Town and with Sin City on my doorstep, how could I resist? I scrubbed off that pesky wholesome visage and exchanged it for a sunken pallor and a pair of regulation DDs: it was time to visit the ‘Dam.

Although I wasn’t too enthused by the prospect, I have to say, I’m a convert (although not quite in the way my accommodation intended). I love Amsterdam. Love it. I had no idea that through the marijuana and neon haze it would be so beautiful. It’s an amazing city, vibrant, relaxed, and I would love to be able to take a speedboat to my friend’s house; it certainly beats the hell out of taking a tram. It had great walks, great drinks, and a great atmosphere.

But we will not speak about the food. We will not. Hot meals from a vending machine make baby Jesus cry. People do not eat that.

Tastebuds aside, Amsterdam and I rubbed along quite nicely in a non-contagious fashion. I was staying right on the edge of the red-light district, oddly enough, in what was a Christian hostel. This wasn’t just any Christian hostel, though. This was like the S & M, latex, leather spikes, and vaginal muscle display of Christian hostels: it was hardcore. I’ve stayed in Catholic hostels in Italy before and assumed this would be similar – bit of a curfew in exchange for church subsidised rates and a few creepy crucifixion pictures. Nothing doing. Instead I found myself in a terrifying parallel universe where people kept asking me to prayer club all the time. Where’s the charity in that?

My 16-bed dorm was also filled with 15 cheerleaderish missionary types (and I’m not talking about their post-marital position of choice, either, they were actually young missionaries) from Tennessee and myself. When I asked them what they were doing in Amsterdam, one of them trilled, “We’re just lettin’ peeyoople know how march Jeesus loves them; watch y’all doin’ here?” ‘Jesus’ and ‘y’all’ in one breath and one very well-packed dorm? My eyes started rolling back into my head and my mouth started to froth – grammar and God all in one sentence. It was just too much.

As I mentioned before, I am an atheist, and I find the whole young-religious phenomenon just a bit weird. I think it’s a lack of irony thing, and that so many young people I know who have faith are just missing that certain something … which I suppose, is doubt. They’re just so sure about everything in a way that makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m not anti-religion, however, and I don’t mind church. Perhaps I just love a bit of hierarchy and the razzle-dazzle of the Catholic mass, and it irritates me when the Hillsong yoof throw a ‘God bless you’, or ‘God loves you’ at me, every time I leave the room; I would never even presume to speak on behalf of my own father, let alone for everyone elses. But hey, I suppose that’s faith, and that’s why they have it and I don’t. At the very least, points for actually going to a place where maybe they are needed.

Suffice to say, I had a grand couple of days and am now back in Belgium. More just passing through, really, spending the night in a hostel in Brussels. Which I think is how I think my relationship with Brussels should forever stay. See, Brussels and I, we have a few issues; we don’t always see eye-to-eye; we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, in lurve. I don’t know quite why, as I think it’s a cool city, but something about it just doesn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s the fact that every time I come here I get chronically, disorientingly, train-missingly lost; perhaps it’s because I still don’t really like waffles; or, perhaps it’s because every time I’ve ever been here it’s rained like a mofo. That’s right, even coming from a sunny 30 C in Amsterdam, Belgium was wet wet wet (but not wild – they definitely leave that side of things up to their northern cousins). And today I got caught short. No brolley. Stupid, idiot me. Stupid wet, idiot, wet, me, idiot. Wet.

It’s something that’s difficult to understand in sunny Oztralia, just how insidious the rain here can be. Absolutely everyone has SADs, and I’m fairly sure that if for no other reason this is because they are all be chronically afflicted with tinea (my hostel room was sporting a bottle labelled “Fungarest”. Ergh). It’s an amazing sight, though, when the sun comes out: people spend all day outside and turn themselves towards the sun like steadily reddening blossoms. Of course, as soon as a cloud comes along (and you know it will) they all close up a little, wilt, fade, get quieter and then go inside again, all the while planning their next solarium session.

I never thought it was possible to miss the drought, but even if it means we’re all showering in each other’s urine by the time I get back home, bring. it. on.

That’s sure to help with the tinea, too.