Not the end, just a pause. Until the next adventure beckons.

merrily merrily merrily merrily

When you step into an art nouveau painting, anything can happen. Life size puppets can come alive making you jump and your heart skip a beat as you walk down the steps that lead to Prague Castle. When you are in this painting you look around and everything is so beautiful you could almost cry. The sea of red tiled roofs, the trees with branches filled with pink blossoms that sing in the first true days of spring. In the painting there are no tourists or the multitudes of marionette shops or the cheap miniature astronomical clocks in the windows. Instead there is a glass of wine at the castle vineyards overlooking the city as the sun goes down.

With one foot out of the painting I can see wide blue skies, sunrises over the sea and familiar faces on the other side. But first a dash to Koln, a day trip to visit an alternative art gallery. Who would have thought it would be so interesting. Who would have thought the sun would be shining and the air filled with such a warm summeresque breeze that hundreds would lounge near the River Rhine from morning till night, when the groups of teenagers would then make bonfires on the beach and start to drink their cheap wine. It seems that one minute I am in the art nouveau painting, swanning around in a magic peaceful land, and the next minute I am swanning around naked in a luxurious German spa, sweating it out in the scented spas and bathing in the private lawns, the Rhine just over the hedge and beyond the public park. Bizarre is backpacking.

There was chocolate hail on bread and real hail in the streets and in my hair; snow and sangria; kids who had swapped mundane life to be balls in a pinball machine; goblin rock in basements in Prague and crazy New Orleans musicians who call themselves Sick and work for the freak show; stroop waffles and crepes and pizza and an extra five kilos to join me home; Americans, Argentineans, Germans, Slovenians, control freaks, obnoxious teenagers, spaced out potheads, daydreamers and gypsies. We are tourists and backpackers and visitors and travelers and guests and sometimes we finally feel like locals. We are all a little bit strange and we are all a little bit the same.

I find inspiration in a peeling burgundy wall in Budapest and then in a plastic bag blowing on the tram tracks in Prague and then, of course, in the art galleries that are hidden down side alleys in every city and in the people on the streets singing or the squatters selling their wares with the Alhambra standing grand behind them.

Days on trains with the world passing by. Nights in hostels playing obscure card games, let's make up the rules as we go along. Worm - Shoe – Milky Way – Parade… "Parade??" they ask. "The worm, in the shoe, in the milky way; you, me, the stars, the planets, we're all in one big cosmic parade dude." "Anyone that says anything that hippy has to win the point." Perhaps I really did get lost in the depths of Bohemia!

Three months is filled with friends and solitude and wonder. I want more. It is a lucky thing now, that my wing fell off in Barcelona.

xxx

from pest to buda and back

Built in the 16^th century the Rudas bath in Budapest not only has history seeped into the walls, you can smell it is old. The water that streams from the mouth of the statue and into the bath is warm and luxurious but smells too much like curried eggs to stand near for long. Drifting over to the other side of the 30 degree indoor bath, that today on Tuesday is open only to women, it is easy to be lulled into a state of calm. Although after almost three months of picturesque wanderings through a handful of European cities I find I am in a state of calm most days.

And so you bathe in the water of the centuries old Turkish bath, in an octagonal stone room with beams of mottled coloured light filtering through the stars in the domed roof. With the friendly French woman you try the steam room where conversation is replaced with trying to breathe, then the dry sauna, then you plunge into the small cool water bath and then into the 40 degree bath. Warmed to the core the drizzle following you from Buda back to Pest is barely noticeable.

Back in Pest they carry posies of daffodils and escape the rain in cafes where the walls are decorated with pop art and red paint and chairs are displayed in the top window sill. At night they drink and dance in bars that are inside but outside with plants and wall paper, graffiti and games of kicker, cartoons projected on the walls and an old car for a DJ booth.

Over the bridge and across the Danube River is Buda. With the buildings surrounded by leafy green trees and a castle and cathedral standing amongst it all. Buda is beautiful. Beautiful is Buda.

And everyone at The Groove is having a grand time in Budapest. And then the Iceland volcano erupts and everyone is happy to be stranded in Budapest. And then I take my last lap of the streets, I take my last photo from Margaret Bridge, and I wish that I too were stranded in Budapest.

the tragedy in irony

She catches my eye, the old beggar woman. There are beggars everywhere of course. Beggars on the streets of Prague, in the parks of Paris, in the metro stations of Barcelona. But in Budapest they seem to carry a particular sadness. Like the young women cradling her son, a paper cup next to her dress, her stare distant and forlorn.

The old Hungarian women, or maybe she is from Russia or Poland, is hunched over, almost as though bowing at the passersby who walk past without so much as a glance. Her wrinkled face is half hidden under the traditional blue and white patterned scarf she wears over her head and tied under her chin. She is tucked into a big brown jacket. Behind her the two story tall polished windows show suits with price tags in the thousands. There she stands, in front of Hugo Boss, her small hand outstretched.

Maybe she is someone's grandma.

hats and coincidences

A day in Prague…

There is much more to say, and I say this before I have said anything at all.

But for now I can share one day in Prague. I went wandering, there was no plan. Is there ever?

I find a café bookstore, my favourite no matter where the city. I write and read and eat a breakfast burrito and peruse through the books that between their covers I know will delight and inspire. Secondhand books obviously being the best – words and an unknown past all rolled into one. I go wandering again in the cold cold cold. In and out of art galleries under Charles Bridge where I find presents for everyone yet buy nothing. Walking across Charles Bridge in the rain I can't help laughing out loud followed by wearing a crazyman's grin at my umbrella and everyone else's being blown uncontrollably by the wind. Amidst this craze of wind and light rain and laughing I stop on the bridge to check out some prints. The Russian says "the weather is crazy". It is. "You know why it is crazy? It is crazy because the Polish president was just killed in a plane crash. He is here no more". Then he pulls a bottle of spirits from his jacket and I am drinking chilli whisky on Prague's famous bridge.

I find a second hand store and think I hear Australia accents. But no, New Zealand, I often can't tell. I chat with the New Zealand girl who came to Prague for a five week course and fell in love with the fairytale city so stayed and set up a vintage store. I buy a green bowlers hat from her, the style you may remember was worn by Charlie Chaplin or in the paintings by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte. I wear the green hat to keep the rain off my head and head to the old town square which is filled with coloured streamers and giant eggs to celebrate Easter. A bookstore called Kafka catches my eye, and in Franz Kafka. It catches my eye not because he is one of Prague's famous literary sons but because he was a favourite author of my dad's. And in there I find a book that I had been looking for this whole trip. So uncanny this life can be. The original cover of The Unbearable Lightness of Being features a hat on the cover, just like that on my head only brown. A coincidence will always make my day. More than one and there can be no doubt, if not for just for that moment, everything is as it should be.

making the world smaller, just for a moment

And then there were more. More wonderful, caring, welcoming family members to be found on the other side of the world.

They showered us in chocolate, it was Easter after all. It seems by now the croissants and crepes and cream and now chocolate has caught up with me and I sport a new European winter coat. Oh dear.

Easter breakfast with cousin Viola, Easter lunch with beautiful Aunty Fanny and Uncle Rudy, and then we meet our cousin Iris for the first time.

We stay with Viola who feeds us more chocolate and chips and lollies and grapefruit flavoured beer. We go swimming and take a Sunday drive.

We know it has been too long between visits. But maybe we have just made that huge divide from little Port Lincoln to little Werne a little easier to cross.

of windmills and tulips and little girls in clogs

When I was a little girl I dreamed of far off places. I dreamed of The Netherlands.

What was it like where my grandpa had grown up?

In my dreams I conjured up fields of tulips with Dutch windmills in the distance and little girls like myself running through the fields wearing little wooden clogs.

Two grown up little Dutch girls we stop the bus at Wassenaar Oldenbarneveltweg and with our suitcases safely in tow walk down the street Hugo de Grootestraat. The street where our great-grandfather built half the houses Uncle Tom later will tell us.

We peer eagerly in the windows. "Do you remember what they look like?" Sigrid asks. And there at number 1 is Aunty Nelly waving somewhat frantically.

How peculiar yet wonderfully familiar to be with family on the other side of the world. They speak to us in English but sometimes forget and speak to us instead in Dutch, thinking that we understand. Not wanting to be rude we smile and nod.

An amazing meal is prepared, which reminds us of Pup and Oma and that amazing pot roast gravy we have never come to master. We steal glances over the table as to whether we should lick our plates clean, but decide it's probably best not to make ourselves look like little Aussie ferals.

Through the streets of Wassenaar we stroll, through "the village", past the house where Pup and Uncle Tom grew up, past the florists selling rows of tulips, past the old Dutch windmill that has been converted into an art gallery.

The little girls in wooden clogs however, were nowhere to be seen.

three days in the city of bikes

It is Europe's epicenter of cool, Amsterdam is. Canals, bikes – not just any bikes but the divine old school Dutch bicycles – houseboats decorated with potplants and colourful windmills, terrace houses lining the canals that are slightly askew leaning this way and that. Wafts of sweet smoke drifting from the coffee shops. Mere shards of glass that separate you from the rows of women sitting under red lights in skimpy underwear. And what is this? A vintage store you are after? Well look no further my friend. It is a vintage lover's heaven. Hours we spend trawling through the hoards of clothes and shoes and bags and belts. If only an inch of room remained in my suitcase.

"It always rains in Amsterdam" we are told by a random local. And rain it does. We hide from the rain in the pubs and clubs of Leidseplein. The next day we hide from the rain in bed nursing severe, yet completely worthwhile, hangovers.

A chocolate craving leads to the all important question… "Is this normal cake?" asked oh-so-innocently while pointing at the tray of cake and cookies on the counter that sit amidst hash lollipops... "It's space cake" is the patient, albeit painfully obvious, reply. But of course it is space cake, it is being asked for in a coffee shop in Amsterdam. And when you begin to worry about the bunk above collapsing and wonder, if it does, will it lead to a broken nose, or worse?, you can be certain it is not 'normal cake' at all…

In Amsterdam they have vintage covers, like a shower cap, for the bike seats. When it comes down to it this really says it all. Amsterdam is cool.
 

in an oil painting we travel

We travel through the German countryside. Even if I had been blindfolded and on a magical mystery tour only to wake up on this train I believe I would have known I was travelling through the German countryside. Tall alpine forests, green fields, grey skies, a light drizzle of rain. It is however the brown brick houses with white window frames and steeply slanted tiled roofs that give it away. A child jumping on a trampoline out the front of one of these cottage homes reminds me that this is real and I am not travelling through a landscape painting.

But the painting continues as I order some snacks on the train only to be served by a man in a red pin-striped shirt with shoulder length artificially waved hair and a bushy moustache. I buy Pringles; the Germans buy trays of currywurst and huge pints of beer.

Then out the window the bicycles give it away. Hundreds of them. Bicycle parking lots. Every second person on a bike.

With nostalgia in my heart I like to think we have arrived home for the first time.

We are in Holland.

in the land of grunge and chewed-back nails

They way they walk upside-down is more graceful than my right side up walking. With elegant poise they hover above the audience. They slide headfirst down fabric and ropes, heads landing inches from the stage. They twirl in hoops and defy gravity on swings. The male dancers answer them climbing up poles and bounding over one another's shoulders. A story of first love, of those butterflies in the stomach and laughter in the air; a story of love that is broken, intense yet insatiable; and finally a story of finding the love that fits like a glove. The dance production Versus, at the Chamaleon Theatre in Berlin's trendy Mitte quarter is gravity-defying magic.

We eat sausages, potatoes and sauerkraut for dinner before the show.

The next day we get inside the dirty grungy city that is Berlin. The art squat which is at once covered with murals, surrounded by sculptures, filled with living artists and also has a stench of stale urine from the vagabonds who use it as a toilet. The street art, a recent fascination of mine after the stunning works of El nino de las Pinturas in Granada. In Berlin you could say that the walls talk. In a city where only two decades ago a wall divided the capitalist west and the communist east, today the walls tell a different story. A painting by one artist is answered by another. Art on the walls change a neighbourhood. The building of one hundred faces brings hope to a community. The number 6 is found on pavements, a rock here or there, Banksy makes an appearance with his spaceman and meanwhile how will little lucy kill her cat?

Berlin when I think of you I picture chewed back nails, leg warmers and a recycled beanie… confident but not cocky, grey but not miserable, we but scratched at the surface.

you fall in love

In Paris you fall in love. In love with the pastry shops no less.

Let the cream, crepes and croissants begin.

"Every bite just gets better" she croons with a mouthful of what can only be described as the best dessert we have sampled in this sugar and cream-fuelled dream. It is a tart like construction, with diced and sugared apple lining the biscuit base, topped with the lightest and fluffiest custard meringue, finished with a light caramelising. In Paris we have a picnic by the river.

In Pars you fall in love. In love with Montmartre where Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet used to hang out. In love with the chic style. In love with the Eiffel tower at night; with Charlotte's friend's bar; and with Parisian vintage clothing.

In Paris I am once again inspired. Once again I am filled with ideas to take up my days when I venture back home. We walk past a building covered in streamers. An art squat we have found. Bohemian artists took over the abandoned building in the eighties and now have opened it to the public. We walk amidst living art. Artists are busy putting paint to canvas, welding, filing and making sculptures out of folded used subway tickets. The walls breathe art. Whole rooms become art installations. The doorways are painted, coloured flags fill the spiral stairwell. I am inspired.

Spud baby, I'm turning the shed into an art studio x

 

 

the driver is on strike

France is on strike. At least our train driver that was going to take us from Spain to Paris is on strike. This we know for sure as we are led down to an empty train in the Spain Franca border town of Hendaye at 11pm and plonked in a tiny couchette to sleep for the night … on a train going nowhere. And the next day when the darling Charlotte takes us on our Parisian tour, it is perhaps our absent train driver we spy, on a public strike marching past the July Column in centre of the Place de la Bastille.

sweet gelati on a Sunday

What did you do today? "Just a quick trip to France and back actually…without even meaning to". We had jumped on a train to book our overnight journey from San Sebastian to Paris and had ended up in a little town where I noticed they answered my broken Spanish in a completely different language. Well oh my, it seems we are in a completely different country. Little do we know that tomorrow night we will spent the night in this small French border town called Hendaye, on a train going nowhere.

Back in San Sebastian the weather is warm and the dresses are on as we check out the surf. Boasted as Basque Country's most stylish city it feels much smaller than its 183,000. I guess you could call it stylish, you could also call it swanky, or maybe sophisticated with its upscale apartments lining the promenade and designer clothing stores dotted down the shopping strips. The waiter gives us a free serve of San Sebastian's signature Pintxos… which is much like tapas… because we clearly have no idea what is going on. The old town is jammed packed with pintxos bars. Peek in the doorway and you spy plates and plates of cute creations on baby baguettes…and just as many people standing and chatting while nibbling on these mini meals and drinking glasses of wine.

We make the most of the muggy breeze with sweet gelati. Giggling like children in a playground we skip to the pastel-coloured carrousel and race for the best ponies, Sigrid glaring at the little girl that scored the good ones before us. Round and round and round and we turn the ride into a photo shoot on a warm Sunday afternoon.

and so we walk

We have created a walking monster. Every day five maybe six hours. The wining and dining has waned and is replaced with walking, sightseeing and window shopping. Sigrid, Claire and I walk; and so we walk. Walking along Las Ramblas, through the winding streets of el Raval, into the funky barri gothic quarter where artists work in their half hidden studios tucked behind painted doors. Walking past another of Gaudi's impressive yet unfinished churches and then into the hip Born quarter. We meander through the zoo, past the very human-looking apes and chimpanzees, back out into Barcelona city again, past the park, around the art gallery, back to las Ramblas and round and round the markets slurping on the 1 Euro fresh juices of strawberry and kiwi, banana and raspberry, coconut and mango – heaven in a plastic cup.

At night we walk in circles to find the cheap cava bar recommended by RyanAir. In a little alley that we had already walked past, behind another unnamed door is a crammed bar filled with locals eating their cheap burgers and drinking their cheap champagne getting ready for a night on the town. There is little chance of us getting served in the next ten minutes so we test our Irish luck on St Patrick's day and the 6 euro jugs of sangria and the soccer game with Barcelona vs Germany on the television amidst a bunch of cheering supporters it seems a good fit. A chance encounter, a friendly conversation, another walk and a reggae, funk and hip hop jam session sees our walking shoes off and our dancing shoes on.

As we walk home, past the quarters, past the port, I watch the locals cruising past on their hired red bikes. For 24 euro a year you use these bikes to get around the city at any time of day or night. Walking is good, but dare I say it, cycling is superior for sure. I daydream on the way back to the hostel… I am living in Barcelona, an after-work cerveza in Born and I ride my bike home, no helmet of course, basket filled with fresh market food, a bread stick and a bottle of wine, of course.

joining the gypsies in parc guell

I arrive at Parc Guell ready to go. Armed with a few pieces of my jewellery, maybe seven pendants and two necklaces, a little napkin (stolen from the restaurant in Morocco that charged a fortune for some dips and a chicken pie) to put everything on and some price signs my eyes scan the area for a good selling spot. But there's something missing. Where yesterday it was filled with people selling rows of cheap sunglasses, jewellery, paintings today there is not one seller in sight. Then we spy the police in the corner. This confirms it, it's obviously illegal. But it is a gorgeous day and with a picnic of cheese, mettwurst, strawberries and oranges there really is no better place to be than sitting on a grassy hill in this weird and wonderful Alice-in-Wonderlandish park overlooking Barcelona. Sure enough an hour or so later the police are gone and the hawkers are back out. I join in the fun, pick a spot and lay out my slim pickings. Forty-five minutes with a few glances and I am rather bored. I think the fact that everyone else has about 100 items on offer stands me a slight disadvantage. Time to try a new spot and liven things up with some Spanish guitar playing by Gabriel. The two angels, Raffael and Gabriel, busk in the park. The music doesn't entice the customers and I am about ready to through my napkin over my shoulder and call it a day. But one more spot we try. And success! As I lay out my little napkin and position stones and an orange to hold it in place some tourists check out my wares. I tell them how I make them and a sale… oh yeah. She asks if I study art in Barcelona, oh if only! I tell her "you have come all the way to Spain from Romania and have bought a necklace handmade in Australia from an Australian travelling through Barcelona." Clearly the winning sales pitch as her friend snaps up the other necklace straight away. So I sell my jewellery in Parc Guell. Such a novelty. The other sellers have their eyes on me, the new girl. They come over and check out the competition and warn me to watch for police and to pack up by 4. The risk makes it all the more fun. But pretty elated by the sales I call it a day. Sigrid, Claire and I set off for Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.