kate’s adventure

getting in to england was pretty smooth, but that last leg in to london was more difficult. naturally, there was a tube strike that day. i was directed through a maze of tunnels to the bus station, then a maze of options where i had to buy my ticket with a touch screen. i had to select the time i wanted, but it let me complete the process for buses that were full, then sent me back to the start to try again. four times. this was on the machine that worked! ticket in hand i found my way to the buses, a small concrete stand of diagonal parking with no signage, which reminded me uncannily of a little town in south-west spain where we got stuck taking buses on my last trip. not what i expected at heathrow airport! still, the bus arrived and deposited me somewhere in the vicinity of where i needed to be. about 45 hours after i left home, i found lisa at her work in buckingham gate. who´dve thought buckingham gate is the street that points right to the gate of buckingham palace? certainly not anyone i asked for directions.
with my pack safely at lisaś, i headed into the nearest park with no shoes and a big grin on my face. i think i talked to more people in an hour or two, than i had in the previous few months in sydney. i saw the queen drive by, heralded by a million photo takers and a very big brass band. it wasn´t the changing of the guard, they marched round a big block and in to a bunch of old buildings, where they continued to play for a guest list of more uniforms and suits. however none of them matched the two men, presumably off for a picnic in cream linen suits, matching straw hats and a wicker basket.
the next day i took full advantage of the daily cap on my nice new oyster card, and took a tour of london by tube. eight different tube stations kept me walking all day from one end of town to the other, vaguely recognising some places and not others, alighting at some stations to find i´d walked right past them an hour or two before! i really overdid it down berwick street, bethnal green road and brick lane. street markets, costumes, bangladeshi food, fabrics, hats and interesting looking people. everything but tents. and of all the questions one can take away from a city, just what was that film playing in a little junk shop in the top of brick lane, with someone tap dancing in a bowling alley? sound familiar to anyone? anyone at all?
the rest of my time in london progressed at a more reasonable rate, staying at lisaś totally unfurnished new place and wandering round camden markets with her, until at 3am monday, when it was time to start the bus-train-plane trip to bulgaria and the real start of my travels.

I´m currently in Zagreb with free internet, 15 minutes at a time, so iĺl try to get some of these out, despite the interesting keyboard. I only have 40 pages of notes so far…

My flights were wonderful, thanks to JAL and swine flu – green tea and hot facewashers and, most importantly, a whole row to lie down in. Even in such favourable conditions, I didn’t get much sleep on the plane, but that was ok too, as JAL put me up for free in an airport hotel since the flights don’t match up.
Thus I got my first little taste of Japan; at the end of the trip I’ll have time to explore Tokyo, but so far it’s an airport, a room, a couple of shops and a short stretch of road.
The road was nothing exciting. stuffy and faintly bad smelling, the patches of lush greenery hid mainly parking lots. We were quickly and efficiently taken through to the hotel, and when I went for a walk later, I had to turn back after five minutes when said greenery came right down to the road. I had seen tennis courts, an indeterminate religious building with manicured gardens and a seven eleven.
Exploring my hotel room was more fun. The view of carparks turned into city lights as darkness fell, there was a kimono and slippers and tea. I’ve developed quite a taste for Japanese green tea, very different from Chinese green tea. The bath made me very happy, but the highlight really had to be the toilet. It had a set of buttons to the side, offering two kinds of bidet function. It turns out this is a basic version, compared to the ones I later saw at the airport, which also sported seat warming, “powerful deodoriser” and canned flushing noise with volume control! That bathroom also had one squat toilet, sans extras, and a careful map outside the door to explain all offerings.The airport shops kept me amused for a while, the highlights were fake meals – make your kitchen look like a japanese restaurant! and hello kitty phone ornaments – kitty on a tram, actually lying on the roof with her head the size of the front of the tram, kitty in sushi. with wheels. naturally.

Next up, london – sofia – skopje – zagreb.

this is a fragment i never finished. one day…

When I finally left Denmark, I hitchhiked for three weeks down to Madrid. Here are some photos which I didn’t take, as I didn’t have a camera. They are photos I wanted to take, so thanks to everyone who did take them, and published them on the net for me to borrow until I can find my own.

I had to move out of my room in Copenhagen on the 17th of the month. Any month, I had to pay up till the first, but move out two weeks before. Consequently I found myself, three days after limping back from Amsterdam, dragging all my worldly possessions to Marie’s flat with no plans, or real ideas of what to do next. Thanks to Kim, her partner, the next morning I found myself standing on the side of a good road, with a sign which read ‘Germany’, and most of my stuff safely at the post office on its way back to Sydney. Both these good people, being european it seems, had done this before.

In under two minutes of standing in the light rain, my first ride showed up, and indeed, drove me to Germany.

My last ride of the day wanted to take me back to Belgium to meet his wife. He proudly showed me a photo of his two little kids. He shared his dinner with me, all he needed being stowed under the bed behind the seats. He offered me somewhere to stay the night: his bed.

We were going right past Münster, so I decided to visit Marie-Claire. I rang home for her number and got my parents up at 4am. at about 7am they rany Marie-Claire’s parents and sent me the number. I rang, to find she was out and he was just leaving – “couldn’t you just stay in a youth hostel for a night?” Sure. At the highway at Münster.

My driver wanted to stop before Münster, and take me there in the morning. Somehow I got him to travel a little further, but I still had nowhere to sleep, at midnight, at Münster truck stop. I was wondering how safe his top bunk would be, but it was growing obvious that the answer was not at all. Bonn University Marie-Claire and Gervin drove me in to Bonn where they were going to a funeral, and dropped me solicitously at the train station in the middle of town. I had to walk all the way out to the highway, past this here gorgeous university, carrying my new blow up double mattress, sleeping bag and half a tent in a big fake leather suitcase so old that didn’t even have wheels. As well as my big heavy backpack. Dresden old town ruins From there I hitchhiked a big wobbly course across Germany, reaching Dresden that night. With bags in tow. In the morning I hired a bike and set off to see more of Dresden than I had seen of many other places. Someone else had the same idea as me of photographing this interesting jumble of the old town, complete with turret showing through window. Hopefully when my bags come back I’ll have my own identical photo. Prague and this is Prague, the charming city where I got everything I owned stolen. money, passport, clothes, food, books, diary, notes, everything but the clothes on my back, my atlas a pen and two sheets of paper. Luckily it wasn’t too warm a day, and I was still wearing a knitted jacket, though my coat was gone. A couple of people were very helpful, particularly one who helped me find the consulate, let me use his phone and loaned me money to cover two more nights in the youth hostel I had just checked out of. Said hostel leaked rain from a hole in the wall above the head of my bed, but I was able to hoard breakfasts that kept me from starvation for the next couple of precarious days of travel.

Budapest. I took off on a whim from Vienna, worried about getting to Madrid on time but still going the very opposite direction with a sign saying “BRAT. BUDA.” I’m glad I did, even though I only got to spend one night, and spent half the time visiting every bank in the city, unsuccessfully trying to access my money. It’s a beautiful city, with an air of faded glory. The buildings may be crumbling round the edges, but they’re solid and dignified, substantial.

udine…

mestre, milano…

When I couldn’t stand Italy any longer, I changed course and went north to Switzerland, which was minorly closer to Milano than France, though it was a detour. I wasn’t really expecting better, but suddenly everyone was pleasant and helpful, and I got to see views like this!

This time I had a destination in mind. My maps told me I had to get to Hospental, where there was both a youth hostel and the crossroads I needed, to be able to travel back west. Unfortunately noone has ever heard of Hospental, it’s a tiny mountain village above St Gotthard’s Pass, apparently the longest single tunnel in the world, at 17km.

My last ride dropped me at the entrance to the tunnel, the foot of the mountain. Noone came past. I started walking. By now I had two small backpacks, one on the back and one on the front. I had shoes. I also had 3kg of yummy but squishy Italian stone fruit in my bag, that I was thinking I might have to live off for a while, if I didn’t get stuck in snow and freeze to death without even my trusty coat. I was hearing bells. It looked a long road winding back on itself, up the mountain. At one point there was another road not far above my head on the steep slope, so I cut the corner by climbing over the fence and up the hill. There were footholds pitting the entire surface but it was still quite scary. Later I discovered that there seem to be two roads up that mountain, and I changed from one to the other. Anyhow, I kept walking. The sound of bells grew more distinct. I walked around the corner and a valley opened up below me, full of little yellow flowers, and cows. Millions of cows. Wearing cowbells!

Way over the other side there was a little farmhouse, but I was too tired to walk around to it and try to explain myself, so with the infallible logic of exhaustion I kept walking up the mountain.

Greetings from Denmark!!!

I’ve put this together from the scraps that I was forming in Denmark, but never managed to put together and send. I hope I haven’t republished chunks from the last one, but I’ll read it over later to make sure. meanwhile, it’s here:

It’s saturday and I’ve just gotten back from doing some emergency shopping before everything closes for sunday. Walking back from the metro there were a few spots of snow flying around, but in the last five minutes that I’ve been watching, the sky has filled with puffs of at least a centimetre wide. In front of my window there’s a path and a row of bikes, then a leafless hedge with a leafless tree sticking out of it, a row of cars and a patch of grass. When I turned on my computer there was no snow on the ground, but now most of the grass is covered in white, with a few spikes sticking up here and there. The paths are absorbing it like rain, but the hedge is blooming fluffy white, and the tree has gone graphic, with each branch and twig becoming a stripe of black, topped by an equal stripe of white. It’s a perfect time to sit down and write to you all.

I love the way the city is set up. There are lots of old buildings around the place, not just churches and palaces, but real residential and commercial buildings, which are still in use. There’s a long row of stately five storey buildings, overlooking 20m of park before the water, which were built for the merchants who first made the place into a city (Ko/benhavn translates as Merchants’ Harbour). Nearby are the oldest terraces in the world, single storey houses, each row sharing a single low pitched roof, they are still painted the original bright yellow and fulfilling their original purpose of housing the navy. King Christian IV had a great impact on the city. He lost land in every war he was involved in, but he built lots of extravagant buildings, so everyone loved him, built statues of him and named things after him. From some points you can see a dozen green-roofed buildings, turrets and spires of all different shapes

Walking through the latin quarter is fun. This is where my department is, and the Royal library which looks like a church, but has always been the library. It all makes sense that a Latin Quarter is where all the students were, who used to speak Latin! Streets here are a glorious jumble of shops, at all different levels. There are windows at ground level, with little steep steps going down to the door, and a separate flight somewhere else, going up to the next level which has its windows starting at head height. On one side will be a normal shop, and on the other a covered driveway, with gates or doors, leading to a substantial courtyard and various other buildings inside. I went past a driveway today which had wallpaper, wooden floors and some kind of a greek frieze running along the top.

The Institute of Political Science has its own fantastic building. It’s brick outside, laid in fancy patterns with greenery creeping over one corner, but inside is all wood. It’s like the Labyrinth, with things changing each time you try to find something. There are at least four staircases, and they all go different places. I once had to find my way to the fourth flour to see my lecturer, and with the help of someone who knew the place better than I, we took the main staircase one floor up, went through some doors and rooms and halls, all with different floor levels, until we came to another staircase. This was steep and narrow, with wooden stairs and fancy baulstrades, but white walls, rather than the heavy wood paneling of the grand main staircase. At the top we came to a locked door, so we climbed back down one level, and luckily that door was unlocked. So were the next three, which separated off three successive rooms, small, dark, empty and on different floor levels. Through the fourth door we came to another staircase just like the last, and this time the top door was open and I managed to reach my destination.

Finding a queer scent’s taken some perserverence. People came round to all the introductory sessions to advertise the International Cafe wednesday nights at Studenterhuset, and each time they would also announce that thursday is jazz night, friday is rock night, and tuesday is gay day, if you’re into that sort of thing ha ha. I was annoyed at the treatment, but at least I got some information. The first tuesday night we all went to dinner and then sat around some boring pub making boring conversation about where we all came from and what the nightlife is like here. When someone mentioned studenterhuset I opened my mouth for the first time in hours to ask how I could find it. ‘What, from here? but it’s gay day tonight…’ and even though I said yes, I want to go, they ignored me and went on to tell me about the great array of suitably straight bars we could go to if we don’t want to stay here. Half an hour later I got some vague directions from someone, stopped waiting for the people who were just going to have one drink and leave, and embarked on my very first, mapless expedition through the city. By the time I found the place it was pretty late (at least by my standards) and I was too exhausted to even go in, especially when it looked like it was all boys.

I went back the next week though, straight after my first Danish class. It was frustrating how my classmates were all very anxious to misunderstand ‘no, I’m not going home, I’m waiting for the other metro to Norreport to go to Studenterhuset’ as ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night at the International Cafe’, but I achieved my destination – only to find the whole place was dark and there was a note on the door. I perservered until I was fairly sure that it said there was a student meeting on, so I took a deep breath and walked in, relieved since a meeting is much more my style than anything else I could have expected in such a place. But the dramas most certainly didn’t end there. From inside the door I could see people sitting with their backs to me, watching a film in danish. There were at least a couple of women there, which stopped me worrying that there really was a good reason why people didn’t want me to go. Someone came over to me and told me that it was a private function and I should go away and come back on a wednesday. When I didn’t turn around and walk out, he took me to the bar and gave me some leaflet, which I studied hard to find some relevance, but it was a general ad for studenterhuset. He was doing his very very best not to frighten the poor confused foreigner, apologising for his very existence, saying that I shouldn’t worry, it’s only once a week, referring to them as Blus and ‘a student meeting’ and carefully ommitting any reference to gay or queer, taking the gay magazine I picked up out of my hand and substituting the generic leaflet, until I said ‘but I’m here on tuesday ESPECIALLY’. He stopped mid sentance with his mouth open for a second, then proceeded to apologise for his apologies. Finally I got to sit down and watch the end of the first danish gay film, which was so incomprehensible that I only figured out who the gay character was because he jumped in the river and drowned at the end. Finally even that was over, the lights and music came on, the bar was opened, and I was in the thrilling situation I had run away from the week before, of knowing noone where everyone else knows everyone else.

I was finally spotted by someone who didn’t assume that a stranger surely wouldn’t want to talk to them, and a woman came over and welcomed me. I was introduced me to their other new recruit who couldn’t speak danish, a pleasant if very nervous boy from france, and we were sent over to sit with the only table of boys who were talking in english at the time. My new friend immediately resumed an intense conversation where someone was explaining how you really can stay friends with your ex boyfriends, and I asked the first woman if there were any girls I could meet instead. I’m interested, if a little embarrassed, to see that even here, where the most political activity seems to be watching movies in a bar, such a question, even innocently, is not really acceptable. She laughed, said she didn’t really know any, leaned over to the woman working behind the bar, and told her what I had said so they could laugh together. Then she more or less walked away and left me with the boys discussing their exes.

Well that’s the story of my first timid step into that world. It has gotten better, I’ve been back a couple of times, met more boys who are all lovely, but it’s still obvious that, as much as they are happy to talk to me, their attention is liable to wander from even the most serious conversation as they have one eye looking right over my shoulder. I’ve even met some girls who are also very nice and greet me charmingly when we’re formally introduced. Everyone assumes each week that it’s my first time there, though when it actually was, I was ignored. I guess that’s a ’scene’ for you. There is a more serious side to the organisation, holding lectures and things like the film before they open the bar most weeks. That’s much more my style, but of course the language barrier means that of the last few lectures, the only one I could understand anything of was the one with endless diagrams of male anatomy.

The other night I went bowling with them, and the whole atmosphere was different. People were friendly and ready to talk to me without needing someone to introduce me to their notice. There were only two women there, but they took me under their wing, translated for me and made sure I was included. afterwards we went to a couple of bars which was as exciting as usual. The international students had organised a party at the politics department that night, with a belly dancer, so a couple of us went off to that for a while. We turned up just in time to hear the applause, but I had made my appearance, and with all the little straight girls who keep on yapping about their boyfriends all the time, it was a very amusing environment in which to have a loud conversation about elevator looks and picking lesbians by appearance. She picked out two likely suspects, but I never got her opinion on the rather gorgeous woman who keeps greeting me very attentively with these wide-eyed smiles I have absolutely no idea what to do with!

After a while we rejoined the others at Pan, the biggest gay nightclub in scandinavia. It’s not big. And there were droves of straight girls, some with their gay male friends, and some quite obviously dancing with their boyfriends. Tiresome, especially on a dancefloor of maybe four metres square. There was karaoke, which was amusing. About half the songs I heard were in danish, mostly eurovision entrants, and everyone joined in singing them, clapping and all, even while they were grimacing at the cheesiness.

I have now attended two danish classes, which have demystified a few things, but not a lot since they insist on teaching us how to say Hvor komme du fra? Jeg kommer fra Australien. Jeg er australier. I always knew it was going to be bad, but we’re working from an exercise book with scribbly cartoon drawings all through it, like you’d use to teach an eight year old.

the hedge outside my window is getting greener and greener every day, there are tiny little green dots all over all the plants which have looked dead all winter. Round the side there are daffodils growing in the grass, patches of little blue flowers, bigger white and purple ones and a few beautiful red flowers which positively glow in the sunlight. Rows of big wicker armchairs with blankets in them are popping up out the front of cafes.

Greetings from Copenhagen!!!

The first eagerly expected piece of information contained in Kate’s Exciting Adventures Volume 5 is that there is no such thing as Royal Copenhagen Icecream in Copenhagen. Sorry to disappoint you all.

I’m living in a college of about a thousand students, in five massive eight storey buildings: nos 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Why? I don’t know. It’s called Gro/njordskollegium, ‘green fields college’, and the view is so delightful, it’s just such a pity I’m on the ground floor. The Metro tracks stretch overhead to form one side of a huge courtyard, around the rest of which is ranged a random series of other big, grey buildings. In the centre is an enormous puddle of a building site, with a wire fence and lots of concrete, but no signs of life. The buildings are grey, the Metro is grey. The fence is grey, the ground is grey, the water and the unending expanse of clouds are also grey. It feels like the set of some post-nuclear-holocaust movie. From the Metro station, forty steps up, you can also see some yellow cranes and blue shipping containers over to the side, and our buildings have a panel of colour next to each big square window. From the other side of the platform the view is miles of scrub stretching out to some smoke stacks with permanent trains of smoke fixed from the top. But then, even gratings in the pavements steam in this weather. Maybe something will turn green in the spring.

So yes, it’s very cold at times, and there’s been a little bit of snow, but now that I’ve waterproofed my boots so that my feet don’t get wet, it’s perfectly manageable, as long as I don’t have to stay out in the wind for long periods of time. Hats and scarves and boots and coats and layers are just a fact of life. I’ve worked my way down to only one pair of socks in my boots, and learnt to wear a sleeveless top, under a long sleeved thermal top, under whatever else I’m wearing. The latter was by hard experience, as the first time I went out at night I wore my warmest clothes, with my nightdress underneath for extra protection. Waiting for the metro I was very glad for all this fabric, but after five minutes in the little restaurant with a hundred other international students, I had to go into the bathroom and take off my dress, to eat dinner in my crumpled old nighty, with the sleeves rolled up as high as they’ll go! (not exactly presentable dinner wear, still it looks sufficiently similar to my other long, red dresses for its identity not to be obvious)

I’ve been getting out a fair bit, which has been fun although I’m very glad to be curled up in bed, writing tonight. One sunday night I went for my first foray into Christiania, the hippy town that’s been established for thirty years in an old army barracks, one stop closer to the city than I live. It was an interesting evening in many ways. I was following an email from one of the macquarie students who has already been here a semester, but whom I have never met, so I wasn’t too sure about going in to the Operaen, but took a look around, as best I could in the dark. It’s a funny collection of buildings and other makeshift accommodations, all painted up, with a focus to Pusher Street. There were plenty of people wandering around, and a fair number making themselves comfortable next to big metal drums with holes punched in the sides and fires lit inside, supervising permanent looking little benches where, true to propaganda, they were selling pot in various forms. They were doing a good trade and it was all out there in the open. Apart from that there were various sculptures and other ‘things,’ such as a canoe being used as a planter, funny shaped walls with fancy brickwork, and quite a range of interesting variations on the bicycle. It was too cold so I went in; I’ll have to return in the daytime to get a better idea of the place.

At the top of a rickety, narrow flight of stairs was quite a good hall, though it seemed to be made of wooden palings and you could occasionally see out through the gaps. It was filled with people crowded around little tables, listening to some vigorous brazilian and cuban music. There were kids running around, and the occasional dog. The smell of pot was heavy in the air and very few people were up and dancing as they should have been to such music. Unfortunately it was almost over, though we were treated to an encore in the form of one of the kids, maybe ten years old, who just got up on the stage and proceeded to play a fantastic drum solo, standing on the wrong side of the drums, with his back to us. When he was done he just walked away amid enthusiastic applause.

By that time, probably the whole contingent of Macquarie people had turned up, complete with various other australians and friends, and we wandered down Pusher street to the Nemo cafe. Stranger than the cafe, where there were huge fishtanks full of huge fish everywhere, even forming a creepy ceiling to the toilet cubicles – was sitting in the middle of Copenhagen, with a bunch of aussies. As I have never met any of them above a few times, I can’t judge whether they’re really like this, or just putting it on for the occasion, but they’re mostly boys, and with a few exceptions, walking talking stereotypes of the ocker aussie male. I’ve known sufficient assorted westies and surfies and country blokes and all, but this bunch are just remarkable, all the more since half of them come from pymble and turramurra and are studying law!

They were discussing skipping classes to go to Turkey for Anzac day, and how ‘awesome’ it will be to sleep out on the beach with half of australia and go to the dawn service. They were constantly sending and receiving text messages from people here and at home, and talking about their conquests, though buying someone a beer and exchanging a few words seemed to show enough potential to rate in that category. Someone had been accepted to a swedish website for ‘beautiful people’ and sat there silently, looking exceedingly self satisfied, while his neighbour explained for him how he had been exchanging messages with someone who looked ‘hot’ (from a headless photo on the same site) but she just must have lost his number since she hadn’t turned up yet, or sent another message.

Someone was referred to as ‘the one who looks like a girl, not that I’m saying anything against him,’ The same person managed to work in the phrase ‘…must be gay’ three times in five minutes, and when I commented to my neighbour that he was a trifle preoccupied, I was reassured that he was very straight and not at all homophobic. Well that’s okay then. It was the kind of jovial atmosphere where if I expressed my cringing in words, any particular objection would be dismissable, because surely noone meant to hurt anyone, and surely all present company understood that everything was innocent fun. I just sat there and listened, and occasionally made very brief, ever so slightly sarcastic remarks when necessary. The few women seemed perfectly nice, but as usual in such circumstances, there was some barrier and I couldn’t talk to them. there were a number of conversations going on simultaneously, but at no point were they between women. Males would talk to anyone, but females only to males. There was a very rigid structure through all the conversations, and nobody seemed to notice. I could contribute to a conversation by addressing any of the male conversants, but the slightest comment made directly to the woman next to me was against the rules and dealt with as quickly as possible, without her focus ever wavering from the previous site of the conversation. So I watched the talk, and many beers and cigarettes being consumed, like a documentary on the mating rituals of feral animals, taking over a new environment, oblivious to observation.

The cringe is not restricted to associating with other australians – in fact, their company can actually be refreshing considering the attention I get from the rest of the world. The first person I met in my kitchen started talking about crocodiles as soon as they found out where I was from. He said there’s this guy on tv all the time, steve someone, with crocodiles. I walked over to the tv, changed channels, and sure enough there he was, crocodile and all. We seem to have some sort of cable tv, including an animals channel. They do cover other animal stories, but they never stay away from australia for too long.

One day I got on the wrong train and ended up at a suburban shopping centre. It was depressingly familiar, but in the middle of a walkway there was one of those temporary stalls, selling ‘Australian leisure wear’: oilskin hats, coats, trousers and chaps! Back on the train there were ads for ‘Reef ‘n’ Beef’, australian cuisine, saying things like ‘Sorry sir, the crocodile ate the tiger prawns, can I recommend the buffalo?’ and ‘please select your crocodile from the tank’. Everyone has been to either Sydney or Melbourne or wants to. I’m quite glad I can answer ‘sydney’ not something like ‘coonabarabran’ when everyone asks me where I live, but I think I’m going to throttle the next person who tries to tell me that we all come from prisoners. Many danes seem to be convinced, because there are lots of Turkish people in the not so nice areas of the city, that they have the highest percentage of immigrants (8%!) and greatest ethnic mix anywhere, and that australia is an english monoculture with some aboriginals – and kangaroos. And koalas, and digeridoos, and Steve Irwin. I’m tiring of launching into comprehensive political discussions about immigration, multiculturalism and assimilation with people who can’t get over the fact that there are significant asian populations in the country.

Still, in everyday life, I’m the ‘migrant’, rather than the celebrity. Talking to Danish people is okay, I’ve come across very few people who don’t speak english, and if I can’t communicate well with someone they apologise profusely, because my good english is obviously more valuable than their knowledge of two or three or seventeen languages. If a stranger starts speaking to me in danish, I only need to indicate that I speak english and they will immediately translate themselves. I’m embarrassed that it’s so easy, that even in someone else’s country I’m the one in the right.

When it comes to written danish, however, I’m learning a bit about the more serious embarrassment of illiteracy. Signs are in Danish, and sometimes they’re important, though I’m never quite sure whether they’re important enough to ask about. I’m quite dependent on strangers in my day to day life, which is a very uncomfortable situation. I had to sign a contract for my room, and I don’t know what it says because when I asked nicely the only reply I got was that it was perfectly standard. I was then given a whole sheaf of papers, which I didn’t dare ask about since she already looked annoyed. I came back later to find out how to use my voicemail, having found opportunities to casually ask three people in my kitchen, none of whom really knew. I was obviously bothering her in her calm administrative life, but she eventually deigned to tell me that I ring this number here, and type in that code there. I thanked her profusely and went home to try. I was ecstatic to find I was able to follow those instructions, only to be met with a recorded message, which I can only conjecture was giving me numbers to press for different things. Weeks later I haven’t managed to find someone who cares enough to tell me what I do from there. People don’t seem to realise how difficult it is to interact appropriately with your world without writing; I can’t read the signs on my own kitchen door, but I met the same situation when I asked. They were perfectly pleasant and happy to answer, but instead of getting up and showing me what each one was, they stayed where they were and told me about one of them, until the conversation lead elsewhere. It could be that the other notices are irrelevant and out of date, but I don’t know that – I don’t even know which one it is that was explained!

The supermarket is also interesting without language. Prices are okay, I’m learning to divide numbers by 4.2 (I don’t even know if that’s still the exchange rate); but special offers are a worry. What’s more, if I can’t tell what something is by the packaging, then the label is very unlikely to help. I bought a cardboard box with pictures of apricots on it; it didn’t rattle and it didn’t move. I hoped it was dried apricots, but when I got it home I found it contained a big sachet of what I later found out was apricot porridge, something very similar to jam! Every activity, small or large, involves language, and I’d hate to think what it would be like to be in this state permanently. Even worse, to arrive in Australia without speaking English, and to have to deal with a more physical barrier than embarrassment, in order to get an explanation. I’d think australians would not be nearly as accommodating, but either way they would certainly not be as able to help.

I am doing my bit and trying to learn as much of the language as I can in the four months I have here. I have now attended two danish classes, which have demystified a few things, but not a lot since they insist on teaching us how to say Hvor komme du fra? Jeg kommer fra Australien. Jeg er australier. Aaargh! Who cares where I’m from? I’m not there now. Why do I want to talk about it all the time – and besides, who is going to ask me where I’m from in Danish? They’ll ask in English unless they actually think I’m Danish – and then why would they ask? I need to know Excuse me, did you drop your scarf? But maybe I’ve just been reading too much education theory.

I always knew it was going to be bad, but we’re also working from an exercise book with scribbly cartoon drawings all through it, like you’d use to teach an eight year old, to add insult to injury. Still, I’m slowly getting used to the pronunciation, which is very good. The vowels are all confusing and there are so many silent letters that spoken and written forms can look like completely different languages, but the most important element to even being able to repeat what someone says, was to find out how to say the ‘D’. You try to say ‘th’ from ‘the’, with your tongue down behind your lower teeth, until it sounds very much like an ‘L’. It sounds strange and feels stranger, but it’s something that I would not have learnt if I didn’t do the class, so I’m satisfied that I am actually benefiting from this infuriating exercise.

I’m sure you will all find it highly amusing, but the other night I was a bartender. With a bunch of the same aussie boys, no less. It was at the International Cafe, the regular night for international students at Studenterhuset, which seems to be the closest thing there is to a student union here. There were six of us, for the first shift from seven to eleven, and when we were given our five minute training, I wasn’t the only one who wondered how we’d ever get through the night. There were bottled beers and draught beers and normal beers and luxury beers and imported beers, not to mention wine, spirits, soft drinks and luxury soft drinks. They were all at different prices, and broken up into regular price, member price and house price too, plus free coupons, and we were also signing up members in the middle of it all. To top it off, the price lists and cash register were all in Danish, and of course none of us knew the currency.

Before we ran out of glassware I had a row of pints of froth lined up along the bar, but after a while I was filling the big squishy plastic glasses up to the top without stopping the tap, while also opening bottles with the other hand and somehow managing to give change back to the right person! One person either forgot his change or gave me a hundred kroner tip, and I think someone tried to buy me a beer, except I only realised when he finally left with it, looking annoyed. The other volunteers weren’t too pleased about how little free beer they had time to drink, but I managed to get through at least six bottles of good orange juice, which kept me alive and even seems to have killed the cold I’d had for a couple of weeks – a good outcome for a night in a smoky bar! On that count though, it was the best place to be: the whole country is sickeningly full of smoke, even my kitchen, and therefore my own room somewhat, since all my clothes smell of it. At least Studenterhuset seems to air the place out or something. Maybe there just wasn’t room for smoke particles with all those people. The place was packed like circular quay at new year. When I ventured out to pick up the empty bottles that it’s illegal to have lying around for fear of a fight, I several times fell over people’s feet and various other things, but was supported upright by the crush. Behind the bar was definitely the best place to be. I saw many people who I would never have seen if I was stuck in the crowd getting agoraphobic while pretending to talk to someone whom I couldn’t hear, and no one hassled me about not drinking!

In other news, on sunday morning I looked at my hair and decided the ends needed trimming. So I got out the cheap scissors I had bought the other week, and cut a good five cm off the bottom. I didn’t like it very much, so I cut it a bit shorter. I didn’t like that either, so I ended up with it down to my chin and a little higher at the back, the shape you’d get if you tied it up at the back and cut it off, though that’s not how I did it. It’s been fun; I like the look and a million people have told me that they do too, it moves, which I’m not used to, and it isn’t cold because either way I have to wear a scarf outdoors. It’s troublesome though, which is mostly why I never did it before. It gets in my face and I have to fuss with it before I go out, because there’s a very fine line between being presentable and not, and I have no experience with that kind of thing, because all I’d ever had to do was put a brush through it and it would behave reasonably. It won’t just curl and be done with it, as I’d been told it would when it’s not so heavy. Instead it sits there and points in different directions.

So on friday, when I found it had already grown half a centimetre after years of doing nothing, I figured that whatever I do will grow out soon, and got the scissors out again. I didn’t have too good an idea of what I was aiming at, so I didn’t achieve it, and ended up with it about 2cm long all over. I like it, but it looks a little odd with many of my clothes. It’s also giving me a headache with sensory overload; the hairs are millions of little feelers, constantly reporting data about the wind, the insides of hats, pillows. Even worse is when there’s nothing for them to feel, and they’re just standing there, reaching out, expecting. It’s quite difficult to relax, but I’ll surely get used to it before it grows out a bit and does something else strange. At least my secret fear wasn’t realised, that I someday cut all my hair off to find I have a funny shaped head and everybody laughs at me for a couple of years. It’s good to know, even if the price is all my towels and clothes and even shoes being full of millions of tiny, itchy little bits of hair. I await the reactions in class on tuesday.

I finally have contact details!

c/o Gro/njordskollegiet

Gro/njordsvej, vaerelse 1123

2300 Ko/benhavn S

(“o/” means the line should go through the o, and ae is joined in one letter.)

phone: 32876022

code for Denmark: 45

I hope to get a mobile soon, but it’s not organised yet. Sorry to anyone who sent me text messages any time since I flew out, I can’t check them and apparently they die after a month.

It’s wonderful that so many people are writing back to me, I don’t feel nearly so far from home. I hope to also hear from the rest of you soon – even if you don’t think anything exciting has happened! There are plenty of quiet times (or not so quiet, in a multi storey college) when I’m very grateful to have such good friends, even if you’re so far away. And a number of you told me you’d be talking to people who don’t have email for me, too.

There’s so much to write here, and I don’t feel I’ve told you much despite so many words, but I think I’ll send this installment off, with the addition of an account of the Pergamon museum in Berlin. I didn’t write it at the time, feeling unqualified to do so, but I was asked for a description, and I think a few more of you might be interested, too. So here it is.

the first thing, which takes up a significant section of the museum, is the actual Pergamon temple. They are in the process of recreating it, so one side was missing and there was a lot of scaffolding in the way, but what they have is being arranged, as it was but inside out. Instead of it being an exterior, you stand in a huge hall and look up an enormous set of steps towards the back wall, and the reliefs and statues which came from the side walls are actually turned around to face inwards towards the steps. I climbed the steps, which took an effort – there was a sign saying to take care, the museum accepts no responsibility, presumably for a heart attack or falling down – but looking down on people s heads below was amazing, even when faced with a white wall and scaffolding in front.

At the top are immense columns with decorative tops. There are more columns, and even larger ones, in the next couple of rooms. You can crack your neck looking up to the top of a doorway and imagining it new, and there are also large chunks of the tops and what they held up, (you ll have to tell me what all these bits are called, I have no language to describe them effectively) positioned at human height, so you can actually get close to the elaborate carvings.

There were also a number of statues of lesser gods and goddesses, (they don t have the important ones from the other side of the temple) which were life size or just larger, but most of them were badly damaged, and some were just a shapeless blob supporting two or three fragments of definition. The relief down one side was in better condition, two or three metres tall and running the length of the wall, with more gods and goddesses running around. I hate to think how they got their hands on all this, or what happened to the rest. Apparrently much of the damage is quite old.

The next rooms contained more greek statues of gods and goddesses and various nobility, busts of philosophers and generals, and even some normal people, mostly attendants to mark tombs. Almost everything was in stone, but there were some other materials too. The rooms were laid out in as strange fashion, so I was never quite sure if I was following the chronological progression, but much of it was very realistic, though idealised, while a few were stylised, and in colour. There were a few wonderful, strong women, and I must have walked around one of them at least eight times as I tried to follow how she was wrapped in her toga or what ever it was. all the folds and crinkles were so detailed that I could nearly do it, but something didn t quite follow. There were also some roman reproductions of the greek philosophers, which were a popular garden ornament. Some are still under discussion, over whether they are actually greek or roman. Either way, their appearance was apparrently not based so much on what the person originally looked like, as some kind of codification of what school they belonged to.

The next exhibition was from Babylon, the processionway and throne room from Ischtar-Tors. The throne room was overwhelming, there were walls everywhere and grand arches. I don t know how much of it they have, or whether the shape and size are correct; certainly the walls of the processionsway have been set up 8m apart, rather than the original 24. Still, everything was covered in blue enamel tiles, with yellow animals standing out in slight relief out of the actual tiles so they are cut up like a jigsaw. The accuracy of the arrangement of the animals is uncertain, but the way it is set up, the large walls either side of the arch in the throneroom each have two columns of six rows of animals, and the rows alternate between unicorns and these fantastic creatures with a thin dog s body, snake scales, tail, tongue, head and neck, leunig curl on the top of the head, unicorn horn, horse s mane, lion s front legs and eagle s back legs.Both are in the same formal profile, facing the arch, with legs arranged for walking, so all four are seen. Down the processionway, there were life size lions of the same construction and pose, perfectly spaced and following eachother down each wall, away from the throne, which I found surprising. The friezes were set on unfinished walls, the battlements at the top were too low, the street too narrow and much too short, and certainly not on the top of a hill with more battlements zigzagging down to the base as the model showed, but it was breathtaking even so.

The Assyrian exhibition was next, there were many small articles but what I remember best is a pair of big stone lions with eagle wings facing into a doorway. They were about 1=m tall and from the side they were standing in the same pose as the babylonian animals, with four legs on display, but from the front they were standing neatly with their two massive front paws together, so they actually ended up with five legs. They looked quite tame, friendly and cuddly. The final exhibition was Islamic art, with a dizzying array of different things, all ornately decorated. There was a beautiful device for working with astronomy and astrology, with a series of fine metal discs inscribed with all sorts of things, and with holes to see through to other discs. Some amazing metal filigree, a few examples of calligraphy, a display of traditional carpet making and the start of the German carpet making industry. There was some stone carving, very busy but nothing like the finish of the rest of the museum. There was a whole room of detailled red wood veneer, the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the doors, I hope noone was supposed to live there, it would surely drive you mad. There were also some niches – I don t know what they actually were, they probably displayed things, but they looked like miniature interior corners of very fancy gothic churches or Escher drawings, with insane ceilings, some constructed and some carved out of wood, and meticulously painted up.

Kate

21/2/04

Greetings from Berlin!!!

When I got off the train in Berlin, the first thing I saw was a couple of people wearing sandwich boards about american politics, and handing out papers. Naturally I went and talked to them, actually hoping they could point me to somewhere cheap to stay. They turned out to be the LaRouche youth movement and we got into quite a discussion. The one I was talking to was weaseling out of identifying as left or right, which is always annoying, but they certainly looked like a leftie cult, and on the topic of american politics and globalisation they sounded like it, too. Eventually they had to move off, and they offered to put me up for the night, so having nothing better to do, I tagged along. They met up with another half a dozen people, and we caught the u-bahn, where they sang on the train, in two or three part harmony no less, and made rousing speeches. When they announced that you can’t just sit on the train and look forward, the few passengers smiled, continuing to look straight ahead. At the station there were another thirty people or so, the whole group bar a dozen or so who were sick in bed. Eventually we all made our way to their headquarters, a large building in east Berlin, which includes a dozen dormitories with bunks and various other bedding arrangements on the floor, and a big room for eating and having meetings. They were all camping here for a week, after having been in Paris last week, but I found out later that they actually do this full-time! There was one person mentioned who held down a job, and one who went to uni. They spend all their time promoting the cause, educating themselves and doing ‘interventions’.

That night, they took me to an intervention. I was a little concerned as to what I was about to be involved in, but in the end we fronted up to a private evening of speakers at some American-German friendship society, with leaflets, and tried to get in. I would have liked to have heard what some of them were to say, and I’m not quite sure whether we were supposed to be in support or opposition, but when it was found that we were not on the guest list, we were turned away. So much for intervening; we stood safely outside the gates, and I froze, while the other five, twenty year old boys, discussed whether we should try to get in again, or climb over the fence (the gate stood wide open) to distribute the magazine, “Children of Satan 2”, to all the cars, or whether we should stand there and wait for everyone to come out, to give them the material in person, probably two hours later. There was further an intense discussion where everyone agreed that we were kicked out because the “synarchists” knew who we were and were scared of us. Then everyone agreed that it was a great coup that a few people who had walked out early had taken the magazine – and some had even smiled and been polite! We came back to a three hour debriefing, where I found out they had spent all morning at various stations, gone to one of the unis in the afternoon, and back to the stations in the evening. They got mixed responses at the uni, they were turned away by security when they fronted up, en masse, singing, but return in groups of two or three and did lecture bashes, which were mostly well received.

Over dinner I had a chance to speak to many people. Almost all were incredibly friendly. They came from france, germany, sweden, denmark, belgium and america, and a couple of brazilians were expected soon. Whenever they heard I was australian, they said ‘you know, we have an office in australia! you should get in touch’, and when they heard I was going to denmark, it was ‘you know, we have an office in denmark! you should get in touch.’ They talked of oligarchs and synarchists, (by which I think they mean anyone they don’t like), and how we should look to the truth. At which point I would have to tell them that I didn’t quite agree with their idea of ‘the truth’, and of a score of similar exchanges, only one accepted my right to have similar politics (on the level being discussed: Bush bad, Cheney bad, need an alternative…) without perfect agreement on the philosophy. It forever came back to Plato, I was also told that Leibniz would kick my ass, but even more frequent was ‘LaRouche said’, ‘Lyndon wrote’, ‘Lyndon told us’…

What I was waiting to see was the mosh brigades. I did receive an inadequate explanation of the name, some general in some army decided that with such turnover in troops, they had to be educated in small groups with the experienced teaching the new. In fact, it was a curious attempt at education through socratic method. Three of us were sitting at a table, half a dozen others wandering in later, and we were provided with copies of a paper by Gauss. It was a mathematical text, declaring that many mathematicians put too much unnecessary reliance in imaginary numbers, and proceeding to explain his new way of solving a particular problem, without using them so much. As we waded through paragraph after paragraph which carelessly explained the dispreferred methods of solving quadratic equations, most of us having insufficient maths backgrounds for the task, someone piped up to ask ‘but why did Lyndon want us to read this paper?’ Of course no one had the answer to her cryptic question, so, carefully not assuming the role of teacher, she proceeded to do the same job, and slowly, but without real dialogue, she supplied all the answers, or as many as we were going to get. Her point was something about how Gauss knew the real truth, and everyone else was blindly following some wrong and evil tradition… it wasn’t about understanding maths at all! She was then quiet for a while, only to turn around her page to display what she had been working on – a cartoon of many maths professors, fat and wearing wrinkly clothes, prostrate on the ground worshiping the idea of the square root of minus one! They proceeded to discuss these non-ideas of the philosophy behind the maths, before diligently turning back to the paper. As earnest as they were, I doubt Socrates would have been impressed. The other example I had of the style was where someone challenged me to double a square. He drew a rough little square on paper and wanted me to draw another of double the area. He doggedly refused to explain anything to me so that I could work it out for myself – but unfortunately this included not clarifying what he was asking, why I should do it, or anything else, so I was completely unprepared and could not do it. I never did find out whether it was a trick, or whether there was a way of doing it precisely, or whether, though I doubt it, it was actually a problem to which there could be several methods, which requires some creativity and thought. Once I was safely away a couple of people reminded me that if you draw a diagonal line from corner to corner of a square, that is the side length of a square with double the area of the original.

At any rate, I had been living there for 24 hours, and had been present for all the large group activities, and many people didn’t know I had gone and wandered around the city while they were out proselytising in groups of two or three. They naturally thought I was one of them, the Australian contingent, so I got to see some of the less public face of the movement, where, in the same breath as they called themselves revolutionary, they admitted to being ‘conservative, or rather preservative’. They talked of euthanasia as people being killed off in hospitals, and some abstract idea of life which is always worth living no matter what horrible hypothetical situation was presented. I naturally asked what they thought of abortion, and after some shuffling, one of them mumbled that surely they should be against it? This was typical of the group’s responses to my questions, the movement has some nasty views, but the most problematic ones obviously don’t get discussed too much with the people on the ground. They get told what they need to, what will keep them in the movement, motivated and isolated from the rest of the complex world. maybe if they stay to out-grow the youth movement they’ll be so indoctrinated by their strange experience of the world to never question things that, at the moment, most of them don’t want to think about. It’s all about a moral revolution! After dinner someone pulled me aside and in a round about way told me there was really no room for me that night. I was quite glad to run away as what I had just heard made many slightly disturbing loose ends fall into place about them, though it would have been nice to tell me this before 9pm. I set off with my coats and bags to find a youth hostel they had recommended, and wandered up and down a dark, snowy street with heavy bags looking for a non-existent hotel. I started talking to someone who confirmed there was no such place, and invited me in for coffee, which I was so tired that I accepted. I had to get myself out of there rather quickly, but still an orange juice and five minutes sitting in the warmth, without my bags on, did wonders for my ability to get back to the station and find a place to stay. By the time I checked into a backpackers hostel across the road from where I first got in to Berlin, everyone was asleep but I was more than happy to change in the dark and crawl into my slightly overpriced but secure bed.

The rest of my stay in Berlin, I was only in danger of freezing. There was much more snow on the ground than in Münster, and I tramped through inches of it, with piles of autumn leaves underneath, through an enormous park full of larger than life monuments, covering half of west berlin. I also got to walk over an icy stream, which was exciting. It felt quite peculiar, partly from insecure footing and partly from the idea of walking on a river. That day I made it to the Technical university, and found the stall of some kind of student union or strike action group, set up near the main entrance. They had the same complaints as the Münster people, although there was obviously more happening, as could be expected in a major city. Apparently the Free University (free as in not legally restricted in which subjects it can offer) cut its sociology department down to one lecturer, who somehow felt unwelcome, and left to set up the Open University. I don’t know much about how it works, but it seems to run whole courses and carry on like a small department, while it uses a few rooms in another uni. German unis seem to be very tolerant of students using the campus in whatever way they please. The larouche people were escorted off the premises when they were singing and making noise, but then they didn’t belong there, either. There are banners draped everywhere around the campus, and my first thought on seeing them was ‘how did they get permission to do that???’ Notably there was an enormous one, somehow secured to the high ceiling, a very prominent position in the main official entrance to the uni, some kind of snowed over display with broken pickets out front, and six bedsheets, each bearing a letter of “streik” hanging out of a row of windows high up in the building across the road. Of course the right to such free expression, in protests, alternative education or even setting up stalls in prominent places is likely to be one of those things under attack in the restructure of the next two years.

Apart from a visit to the Pergamon museum, an amazing mix of ancient greek, babylonian, assyrian and I can’t remember what else artifacts, I spent the rest of my time wandering around east berlin. It’s an amazing place; there are some fancy old buildings, and some shiny new ones, but the majority of the place is full of the big grey severe blocks that one can expect to find there. They are very beautiful in there own way, they are solidly located in history and still have a real atmosphere about them. They are covered in graffiti which is much more expressive than what I’m used to seeing, and besides, there is a certain style and spare elegance about much of the architecture itself.

I made it down to the East side gallery, one of the few remaining sections of the Berlin wall, which is covered in a series of paintings. It seems they were painted throughout the period the wall was standing, and many have been restored since that time. It is a long wall, separating a highway from a river, and despite never having been so cold in my life, I walked the length of it. Many of the paintings are beautiful, all in different styles, some exploring themes of freedom or the lack thereof, and some not, but the wall itself is fairly innocuous. It had a few sections of barbed wire along the top, but so did north sydney girls high. The wall reminded me more of any other barrier against a highway, rather than a tool of repression or site of resistance. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to hunt down the other one or two sections of the wall still in existence, to see if they still carry more meaning. On saturday morning I had to set off back to Münster where I got to see the place Marie-Claire and Gerwin are about to move into. It’s further out of the city and had views of a cute row of houses beside a field with horses and sheep, and it’s enormous compared to where they are now. It’s a unit on two levels, and upstairs has a very high ceiling, which is only about half a metre wide, and then falls steeply down to the walls, which are less than a metre tall. There are no light fittings, just wires sticking out, which is apparently common in Germany; the tenant supplies almost everything, including lights and kitchen! This was a rare find, already having a kitchen.

The next morning I got on another train to Copenhagen. I felt a little ill, but I wasn’t sure why until I looked behind me, to discover I was sitting in the very last row of the non smoking section, which was marked off from half a dozen people chain smoking, by panels of glass between the seats, yet absolutely nothing closing the aisle. I was almost at Hamburg, where I had to change trains, but I was in such a hurry to get away that I got off at the stop called Hamburg – Harburg, and by the time I lugged my dodgy suitcase, backpack and other stuff up the stairs and realised I was in the wrong place, my train had left. I easily got another train to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, but I had missed my connection, and there wasn’t another train for four hours, most of which I spent dragging my luggage from one end of the huge station to the other, trying to find information, waiting for another train which never came and would have had an extra two connections and only saved an hour anyway, and trying to phone my mentor who was to pick me up at the station. Eventually I found a service point with a phone that I could use to call another country, but when it was a wrong number I dismally settled down to wait, figuring there was nothing else I could do. Luckily I started talking to someone who decided to help me for the reason that I was roughly the same age as her son. She lived in Denmark, so she knew that it was the code I had been told to phone that was wrong, and she let (made!) me use her phone as soon as we were over the border, got me to call again when we realised we would arrive 25 minutes earlier than we had thought, helped when the conductor fussed about me not having a reservation, gave me money for a payphone in case I couldn’t find them, made me eat half her food, bought me a drink, and gave me an impromptu Danish lesson! For this, I was obliged to sit with her in the smoking section, although it wasn’t as bad as the other train. The end of this story is that I did make it to Copenhagen, my mentor found me and it all worked out; I have my first class at 9 tomorrow morning, so I shall hopefully be able to send both these emails tomorrow and leave an account of this place to another day.

Kate

4/2/04

Greetings from Germany!!!

I have now been in this cold country for eleven days, and I leave tomorrow for Denmark. At present I am on another train, traveling from Berlin back to Münster. It has been an eventful week and a half. I got in to Frankfurt airport at 5am after a tolerable flight – I was one of the only people on the plane to have a spare seat next to me, so I could lie down, after a fashion. From there I took a train straight to Münster, which took me another 5 hours. The sun rose about half way through the journey, so I missed the south but saw plenty of countryside through the middle of the country. Lots of fields, trees with no leaves and cute square houses with two or three storeys of windows and a little roof perched neatly on top. Occasional towns with half-wooded houses, all very quaint.

I was in Münster four nights, which allowed me to see a fair bit of Marie-Claire and Gerwin, and to get in the way terribly, as I was sleeping in the tiny dining room/study, the only room in the unit but the bedroom, toilet, and kitchen complete with shower. It was pleasant, though, and I was very well fed. They refused to speak German to me, though quite happy to do so in front of me. Everyone is so delighted to practice their english on a real, native english speaker but I escaped to the food market and managed to have a couple of very slow, simple, stilted conversations with people who simply didn’t speak english, so couldn’t take the easy option.

The city of Münster is centred around the university, lots of expensive shops and many churches. I did feel uncomfortable being dragged into all these churches, but they were amazing anyway. Between them and various other old buildings you can work at getting a feeling of how it must have been without all the new buildings next to them, however it’s not easy, and for good reason – Münster was completely flattened in the war, and all the stately old buildings are actually very new reconstructions. I went to the archeological museum which would have been much more interesting if I could have read the captions, and the Picasso museum which had a stunning exhibition of French poster art from the 1900s, from Tolouse Lautrec to Mucha and a bit of Picasso thrown in too, but I went back a second time to the Münster art gallery, which had amazing Baroque and Gothic collections, where you could get close to the stonework, apart from the rest of the painting, sculpture, stained glass, metalwork, and other objects including these small cupboards with drawers inside doors inside bigger doors, and maybe a recess for a mirror, and every face covered in ornamentation, between impossibly fine inlaid wood veneer work on the outer faces and 2cm deep wood relief and sculpture work on the inner doors, not to mention painting and gold inlay and I can’t remember what else covering every inch of the piece. This seems to have been quite an artform, as there were half a dozen of them scattered round the gallery. The other half of the gallery was modern art, which I thought also exceptional, but then I’m only used to Australian galleries, so maybe it’s not so unusual. Anyway, the nineteenth century gallery was wonderful, with all sorts of things including some wonderful art deco and noveau paintings, furniture, metalwork and all. The pre-1945 gallery had plenty of good German Expressionist paintings which I appreciated immensely, and there was a fantastic post-1945 collection as well. The temporary exhibition was Munch sketches, which were also interesting, but not nearly as much as the permanent collections.

While in Münster it started to snow, and I went for a walk down the Promenade in the snow, which was great except that it was the one day I rested my feet and wore shoes instead of boots, and my feet and four pairs of socks got all wet. I wandered into the univerity and found the student association, which was interesting. They had one big room taking up at least half a cottage, from what I could see, and I learnt that this was not the whole organisation, but only the bit belonging to the department of pedagogics. There were piles of paper and junk and mess and posters, and a couple of computers and a phone, all in all a friendly activist space to my mind. There was only one person there but I talked to him for a couple of hours, and found out the situation somewhat. At present, german universities are free, but in two years fees are being introduced, and at a rate not too far from what we have in australia at present. He was very depressed at the lack of interest, but I’m not quite sure what that means, since I laughed with delight when he said they tried to involve school students in the last rally, but only fifty braved being forbidden outright by their principals, to turn up. It didn’t give him much comfort that I could so easily play the ‘so you think you’re hard done by?’ game. I hope in my travels I find at least one uni which is not only doing better than us, but is also confident of that fact.

On the saturday night I went to see my hosts sing in their choir. The music was beautiful, a Mozart piano concerto and requiem, but I just couldn’t keep my eyes open for two hours sitting in a church on a hard wooden pew. Gervin’s parents were there and that night I went back with them to Nordhorn, near the Dutch border. I stayed there three nights, which was very pleasant, if slow. They were eager as everyone else to try their english, but with much effort on my part we started speaking a mix of languages. They have a cute little dutch house with a steep roof, which meant that my tiny little room had half as much ceiling as it did floor, but that works out fine, for it sloped away above the bed, with still enough height in the wall to sit back on the bed. The whole area was charming, with streets full of these quaint houses, occasionally interspersed with a cornfield or two. On the sunday we went visiting, which meant much sitting and smiling for me, but we all went for a walk around the area, and I began to see the styles and differences of the architecture, within a coherent theme or set of proportions. The same can be said of Australian architecture; although the variety is much greater than found in this little town, there is a certain idea of proportion that almost everything conforms to. The oddest thing I saw was a certain cornfield, next to an ordinary suburban house, and stuck between the two, on a pole next to the footpath, there was a cigarette dispenser. Germany is covered in cigarette ads, and I was even offered a sample packet of something at a train station. But in a cornfield!?! Moves are being made to ban smoking in certain places, but the ads are still everywhere, it’s quite unpleasant.

The next day we ventured into Holland. Monday is not a good time to see small towns, and everything was closed, still we wandered around Ootmarsum and looked in the windows of commercial art galleries. There was a synagogue, established in 1843 and used until the war, it had an inscription with the names and ages of locals who died. I got dragged into another church, but the most amazing thing about Ootmarsum is the cobbled streets. Everything is cobbled, with many different designs. there were two gutters down most roads, cobbled straight or diagonal, with maybe a fan design cobbled down the centre and complex weaving patterns on the footpaths, and it just seemed to extend up into all the little brick buildings. We also went to Denekamp, which boasted a georgian manor or something with ornate gates, and a long straight treelined driveway, and nothing else. Back in Germany we stopped at Lage where there was a ruined fortress built in 1183 which was quite impressive, although there was a fence and dogs to keep us away. There was not much left since the bishop of Münster went to war with the bishop of Amsterdam in the sixteenth century or something like that, not to mention subsequent warfare.

Apart from that we played chess and checkers and rummikub and who knows what else, and I tried to know what to do when they often said grace before meals. On the tuesday I took the train to Berlin, a journey I am presently retracing. It is an interesting trip, with more and more snow, the further east you get. There are more fields and cute towns, and some rather larger towns built around railway stations, what looked like a shanty town set on a slope overlooked by a castle, random ruined buildings and whole areas with bits of roofs missing and all the windows broken or boarded up. We went past Wolfsburg where the VW factory stretches along the other bank of a river for two or three lengths of the train, building up to a big head on the east, with huge smokestacks. Right now we’re going through Osnabrück, with big square three storey houses with regular windows and no eaves, standing very close together, and painted all different bright pastel colours on different faces. Every so often there is half a house, in a row with the others but cut straight off with a wall extending down from the peak of the roof.

I think I’ll save my adventures in Berlin to the next email, which I’ll hopefully finish tomorrow, on the train up to Copenhagen, not that I’ll necessarily be able to send either yet.

Kate

31/1/04

Greetings from Singapore!!!

Hi all, This is the first installment in Kate’s Exciting Adventures, written with my feet up because I’ve done so much walking that I don’t think I can move for a couple of hours. I’m nearly at the end of my three days in Singapore, and although everyone frowned and told me two days would be enough, I am sad to leave and haven’t seen as much as I’d like.

I’m living in a little budget hotel on Jalan Besar, if that means anything to anyone. It’s more or less within walking distance of the city centre, but I only went there once, and got out as quickly as I could. There is a huge difference between there and where I am. In the city, I could easily have been in Australia. Everything is in English and the big shopping centres are full of the same shops I don’t want to see anywhere. I wandered into a Spotlight to compare – it was identical down to fabric designs I recognized from four days before, except that everything had a better range of bright colours.

Chinatown is also quite similar to ours – or should I say Chinatown, Sydney is similar to Chinatown, Singapore. However, it’s much larger and more confident, and spills out into the rest of the city. I don’t know what it’s like the rest of the year, but right now is Chinese new year, and there are agoraphobically enormous markets inhabiting blocks and blocks of three-story buildings with three or four rows of stalls covering every square centimetre outside as well. They sell all sorts of useless junk in red and gold, all the regular stuff you’d find at Paddy’s Market, and lots of food, fresh drinks and various huge fruits that I don’t know the names of. There are huge pots of flowers and citrus trees everywhere, which is stunning. It seems half the population earn their living by making and selling the same useless junk as fifty other stalls in the same street, and people obviously don’t stop buying it. Just like the christmas industry.

Where I’m living is more interesting. I’m just up the road from Little India and Arab Street, both of which are local communities, though one also sees many tourists in the main shopping streets, on account of the amazing array of fabric shops. Thai silk, Indian silk, any other silk you can think of, in hundreds of brilliant shades, embroidered silks, embroidered nets, embroidered anything, linens, Chinese brocades, laces, French and Italian fabrics… Where you see no tourists, however, are the millions of tiny food shops which line the streets everywhere but the tourist attractions. One of my local food outlets is Pigs Organ Soup King and another sells Fish Head Steamboat. And nothing else. Many of them only sell one or two things. Signs like Vegetarian Raw Fish are common, and I’ve found that anything which calls itself vegetarian will have meat in it, but at least there will be vegetables too. Mind you, I’m not complaining, I have found plenty of food that I’m prepared to eat, big, tasty and interesting at about two or three dollars a meal, though there’s always that element of risk. Also, I have thoroughly enjoyed the range of juices readily available. From 70c for a little carton in a seven eleven to a couple of dollars made fresh almost anywhere, I have tried starfruit, ripe soursop, grape and aloe vera, fuji apple and aloe vera, sugar cane, water chestnut, guava and I can’t remember what other juices where I would usually be grateful for orange. In this oppressive heat it’s another little bit of air conditioning.

It seems that most of the people here live in big, severe apartment blocks. They are about twenty storeys high, old, grey and uniform. They are identified by number, from no.1 near the city, to the two hundreds out this way. On some of them, there are five short tubes sticking out at an angle from under each window, to hold long poles for hanging washing on. Most of the poles are bent with age to different droops, which gives these blocks a dejected, sinister feeling. Some are being rebuilt, and a few small style features and use of colour makes an amazing difference for buildings of the same dimensions as the old ones. The units are rented from the government, and the last vestige of the welfare system they had in better times is that your unit is given to you to own when you turn 55. It’s surprising that the government doesn’t do more, considering how visible they are. Apart from millions of government buildings on the way from the airport, as severe and dignified as the apartments, there are signs all over the place. Outside of tourist areas, the only advertising is by the government. They’re running a kindness campaign where everyone is exhorted, in four languages, to be courteous and friendly – and people certainly are! Other random signs suggest you improve your english, or maybe learn mandarin, or advertise some competition in some way related to citizenship, or an organised day for cleaning an area. There are signs everywhere telling you where not to cross the road, some places there is even a flashing sign next to the walk light, counting down the seconds till the red light. The police are not overly visible, though I find them intimidating when one appears because they don’t have little suits like ours do, it’s much more like a combat uniform with big boots, navy canvas pants and top, with sleeves to show off the biceps. It’s the same as the army uniform, in khaki and camouflage, and that is much more visible, especially owing to whole double-decker buses advertising “We never mistake peacefulness for peace” on one side and “The mud on my face is soil. Our soil.” on the back, another had “Our army the decisive force” and “You will defend what you value.” And I was upset by Australian army advertising!

The transport situation is very interesting. It costs thousands to get a license to buy a car, so there are no bombs – almost every car is smart and new and has a reader on the dash to accrue charges when it goes past certain places in the day time – those places are everywhere so it’s expensive to drive in the day, but not so at night. These taxes obviously don’t apply to bikes, as there are elderly motorbikes, pushbikes, motorised pushbikes, scooters, and various three-wheeled passenger contraptions everywhere. Taxis have electronic signs on top to say whether they are full or empty, buses have a funnel where you pour your coins in and don’t give change, but many are double-decker and there is a machine which displays how many seats are spare upstairs, and they all have TVs. Even newer and shinier are the MRTs, for Mass Rapid Transport, a train system which is still being built. Trains arrive every two to six minutes and are very efficient. The tickets are heavy cardboard, you wave it over the surface of the reader at the gate, and when you’re finished with it, you return it to the machine for a $1 refund.

It is the mix of the old and squalid and the new and efficient even in the poorest areas that I find so interesting. The place is indeed clean in terms of very little rubbish on the street, but walking down this street the shops are holes in the wall, spilling out over the footpath so you have to walk on the road half the time. There are many selling basins and stoves, steel tubing and cabling, fancy car wheels, fish including some huge thing with a bulbous forehead in the front-non-window, dried fish and fruit, and birds in wicker cages, including budgies, sparrows or something, doves which were attached by the leg to flat hanging baskets so that when they got excited and fell over the edge they looked dead, just hanging by one leg, and huge intelligent tropical coloured birds which were amazing to watch, but so sad, with a chain attaching their leg to a stand. Most shops have many ancient, decrepit fans spinning away without their safety covers, but plenty are airconditioned so that it was cold inside, and indeed all the way out to the kerb, under some awning but with no doors to keep the air in. All escalators are fast and efficient and in these dingy little eating places many kitchens are beautiful, but I was woken up by a rooster this morning, and people sit for hours in shop corners. Sunday night near little india there were hundreds and hundreds of young indian men milling around on the street, doing nothing. I’m told there are more women than men with jobs, which somewhat accounts for the masses of men around the place. It doesn’t account for why very few women will talk to me, the men are wonderfully friendly but women mostly don’t speak english and seem more reserved anyway, though the situation changed a little when I tried wearing a sari.

Well there’s my musing on Singapore, I get back on the plane at 11pm tonight to fly to Frankfurt, from there to take a train to Münster in the north of Germany, where I’ll stay with Marie-Claire for a couple of weeks.

Kate

19/1/04