Cultural Revelations of an Australian in Paris (CRAP) #1: café culture

café culture comes in many forms. in paris, when the hipsters and groovesters are out sipping their espressos, it is strictly to see and be seen. nothing demonstrates this better than the way people sit: everyone faces out onto the street.

advantage: when you're cruising down the cobblestone streets of paris and you pass a hot frenchman sitting in a cafe, you don't have to make a scene in order for him to notice you: he's been watching you all along!

disadvantage: the realisation that the city is bursting at the seams with superficial motherfuckers!

icelandic export

when you stand up through the window in the ceiling in the little sleeping part of our 17m² apartment (yes...the ceiling is so low that you can stand up through it), here is the view! ahh yes we are unmistakably in the city of love!

today was our first full day in paris. we arrived on tuesday afternoon, but within 24 hours were on a plane headed for manchester where we spent a couple of days falling in love with that funky north english town. we loved it so much that we are both wondering whether or not we might want to live there in the future...what a wonderful vibe that city has...

why were we there? was it a case of 'why not' because easyjet sells tickets for the price of a meal in paris and we wanted to smash the environment? was it because we need to be constantly on the move to validate our existence? was it to prove to ourselves that we're bourgeois international jetsetters? or was it because i told g some time ago that since MJ died, the only living person that i actually wanted to see in concert was björk, and she was starting her tour at the manchester festival with a series of concerts to which g bought us tickets for my birthday? it was all of the above!!!

yes it was lots of fun :) incidentally we went and saw the new x-men while we were there which is another one of my pet 'leave your brain at the door and go get yourself entertained' loves. has anyone checked out the actor who plays magneto - the auschwitz survivor with the power of magnetism? fetch the smelling salts!!!

goodbye les wolves!

we spent a few days in alsace chilling out before heading to the big P

here's g, his sisters and his mum

a whole pack of wolves!

highlander

we were so over cities that we only spent an hour or two in vienna, then crossed salzburg, innsbruck, munich, zurich, and every other city between slovakia and france off our list and just headed for the hills for a week of alpine relaxation. in austria we stayed in off-season ski guest-houses, and in switzerland we were lucky enough to be hosted by anja's mum for a few days high up in the mountains near the italian border - thanks susana!

the alps in austria and switzerland were so beautiful that it left us breathless. the swiss scenery was bigger, more intense, more striking. but for both g and i, the lush green hills of austria were even more beautiful (if that's even possible), and, still captivated days later, we realise that we have left our hearts there. we'll be back!

it was a wonderfully relaxing way to end our 2 week holiday from a holiday that in many ways was 2 weeks too long. perhaps it sounds too bourgeois to say that we are suffering from tourist fatigue? but both of us are ready - and have now been ready for many weeks - to get to paris and start our new life there. we're itching for it, hungry for it, greedy for it. we'll be in the city of lights - the city of lovers - in just a few days!

incidentally, was anyone else transported back to their childhood by the first video's themesong? oh the 1980s...*sigh*

...na na naaa na na naaa na na naaa...

cities are for living in

only 50km apart, bratislava and vienna have many similarities. both are on the danube, both are the capital of austria, both appear to start with the letter b. both cities are like a deer - not a small deer or a large deer, but a medium deer that stands alone on a highway at night when you slam into it at 120km/h in a rented vehicle, and that deer - the deer that is now splayed across your windscreen with what appears to be a purple bone protruding from its neck - that deer just manages to turn its head and look you straight into the eyes. your eyes. it is staring and staring, and then it is sliding, and then it is gone. had that deer survived - and who knows whether it did - had that deer survived and given birth, it would surely have given birth to a creature that was half-man, half-wolf. that wolf-man, after the baby-check and other necessary formalities (including photos with the extended family which can be time-consuming as herds of deer are invariably large, and operating a camera with hooves is virtually impossible), that wolf-man born of a dying deer would have looked out from his jacuzzi in the forest through dark sunglasses, and after taking a swig from what you at first believe is a fishbowl but is in fact a giant cocktail glass, that wolf-man would have looked you straight in the eyes - your eyes - and stated in no uncertain terms: give me ambiguity, or give me something else.

babička in rožnov

we spent a few days with my grandma - my babička - in rožnov pod radhoštěm, a village in the east of czech republic. it was great to see her again!

and did a few little walks through the forests and the green green hills :)

krakow

my grandmother, the only one in the extended family who admits to believing in any gods, said to me before we went to poland: 'watch out ondro, they're fanatics over there. they're militants.'

incidentally the polish countryside looks like a bomb hit it. are they spending so much time in church that they can't do a bit of a clean up?

in krakow, at 10 o'clock at night, we passed a church (not the cathedral you see in the vid) and there were people chanting inside. i love the sound of chanting in churches/temples/mosques etc, and rushed in to make the recording you hear on the vid. the place was packed. i looked around at all the people - tourists surely? - but then i realised that i was the only one not chanting, and the people around me who couldn't fit on the benches we'ren't crouching down to get a better photo of the ceiling - they were kneeling down and praying to jesus and mary and john and the others. i had that mild sense of panic you feel when you're surrounded by people for whom the basis of life is an abortion of logic. after a minute i left and found g waiting outside. 'i couldn't go in' he told me. 'i can't be in confined spaces surrounded by fanatics'.

there were pictures of blessed pope john paul II all over the place. on trams, in parks, on buildings. hasn't sinead o'connor been clear about the fact that this man is the enemy of the people? get your rosaries off my ovaries jp!

please check your horoscope for more details.

6,000,000 dead in the congo since i left highschool...

the atomic bomb museum in hiroshima and the jewish museum in berlin are places where the inhumanity of man is presented in such matter-of-fact, excruciating intimacy, that one is moved by an overwhelming sense of empathy - based on our common experience of being human - and one's view of life is changed. auschwitz needs no introduction, we all know of the horrors that occurred there. but the way the site is mismanaged, turning sorrow into cash by way of duplicity, and churning thousands of people through dry presentations of items with no human stories - nothing personal that one could access the site by - left us feeling angry and cheated for days afterwards. information presented by signs and tour guides were often conflicting, sometimes leaving out facts, at other times exaggerating. surely the truth is enough in a place like this? what more could possibly be needed? what a terrible, terrible shame for the victims, and to all humans who have inherited this historical legacy.

i will make one note though. of the many hundreds of thousands of gays that died under the nazi regime, about 15000 died at auschwitz after short lives as the lowest rung of all prisoners. upon liberation, some were forced to complete the sentences (for sexual perversion) that the nazis had given them by british and american lawyers who saw their crimes as valid. they are the only minority group who didn't receive compensation from the german governments after the war. and yet, of these thousands of victims, not a single sign, not a single utterance by a single guide was made of their existence at auschwitz among the long lists that were presented of other peoples murdered there. how are any of auschwitz' victims served by the exclusion of some of their members from history? does this not reduce their suffering too? why does politics play such a role in what we are allowed to remember? and if ever i wonder whether i'm over-reacting, i only need to check into a krakow hotel and get a snigger from reception staff when we insist on a double bed and not two singles, or walk through a medieval town square during a glorious sunset where loving straight couples walk hand-in-hand without thinking twice, but where i - with a pang of shame and pain - choose not to hold my lover's hand for fear of having my head bashed in, and then i realise that i'm not over-reacting, and that the way we remember history determines the way we live our lives today. in fact, i'm simply not angry enough.

keep congo in your hearts.

český krumlov and the festival of the five-petal rose

we knew that we were in czech republic just by listening to the radio - suddenly the music was modern and funky, as if we had been suddenly delivered from the 1980s that still plague modern germany. we scooted on down to český krumlov for 3 nights to soak up the UNESCO world heritage buildings, but got sucked into a time warp and thrown back farther than the 80s. in fact we were transported all the way back to the middle ages!

WTF I hear you cry. we asked ourselves the same question when we found out that we had turned up during the medieval festival of the five-petal rose. as it turned out it was a celebration of all things medieval in a setting that lent itself to the experience – a 500 year old town preserved in its entirety. there were hordes of people dressed in medieval costume, medieval food, medieval music and dancing, live chess by people dressed as pawns, bishops, knights etc on a 20 x 20 metre chessboard, jugglers, jousters and more!

It all had the makings of a geek-fest that could go horribly wrong, but it was so well planned that it went horribly right. It was pouring with rain half the time but people were just really into the spirit of it – everyone was there to have fun. A busload of chinese tourists even turned up in medieval costume – it was wild!

At midnight we stood on a little island in the river under a cliff that overhangs the town. From the castle roof we watched fireworks exploding overhead as people called out in jubilation. I was holding G’s hand so tightly and in that moment there, I felt so wildly, presently, wonderfully, completely alive.

On our final day before heading east we headed out to šumava national park and did a little hike/got lost in the forest and bushbashed for a few hours. It’s so good to touch base with nature!

dresden

decades after the allies incinerated its inhabitants, another atrocity occurred in dresden: reconstruction. we visited this totally fake baroque city on our way to the czech pastures.

fleeing the reconstructed old town, we crossed the bridge and passed a group of angry protestors surrounded by police, screaming at the top of their lungs for a certain minority group to get out, out, OUT of germany. there was hate in their eyes and in their hysteria, and I felt that common fear one feels in the presence of angry fascist mobs. who did they want out of germany? the nazis! when did they want them out? now! i didn't even realise there were that many nazis left in deutschland...?

and then we reached the other side of the river and wandered up a street packed with nazis. everyone was selling hate-food and playing loud hate-techno with sub-sub-woofers that must have been screwed into the ground to make the pavement shake like it did. then at the end of the street was a park filled with drunken punks tattooed from head to toe, with the shit pierced out of every available and unavailable surface, crates of empty beer bottles littering the grass and hateful glares through hateful eyes. were they nazis or were they anti-nazis? were they extreme right or extreme left? all we knew is that we extremely wanted to get the fuck out of there.

We were left quietly pondering whether the city hadn’t been bombed 66 years too early…