From The Morgue

Andorra is one of those tiny countries, the ones that aren’t large enough to merit a block of colour on large-scale maps and are instead identified by a line pointing at their location. The ones you forget about, basically. It’s sandwiched between Spain and France in the heights of the Pyrenees. The local language is Catalan, same as Barcelona. It uses the Euro as currency even though it isn’t part of the EU, and both the Spanish and French postal systems are in place, everywhere there is a post box for one there is a post box for the other alongside. (Which reminds me of the three parallel postal services we had at one time in New Zealand, each with their own stamps and letter boxes, and once again I shake my head at the folly of
it.)

There are two things to understand about Andorra:

• it is high in the mountains
• it levies no import duties

The first is important because mountains mean slopes with snow, and slopes with snow means ski. All of the towns in Andorra are basically ski resort hotels and the homes and shops of those serving the skiers. So while the high Pyrenees are incredibly scenic, anything resembling a local culture is pretty thin on the ground.

The second is important because of what it means for the central town, Andorra la Vella (which I believe just means ‘Andorra Town’. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) and more specifically its main street. Well, it really is just a main street. And all along the main street are exactly the same shops you find in the duty-free sections of airports. Cheap consumer electronics, copious amounts of alcohol and tobacco, and all the rest. It’s a giant mall in the mountains.

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A weekend trip was in the offing. The posse were Julian and myself, and three of Julian’s fellow language assistants, Lucas and Julia whose car it was and who were organising the whole thing, and Leanne. Lucas is from Argentina and would serve as chief translator for the trip, while Julia and Leanne are both from the UK, London and Leeds respectively. I’d met all three on my first day in Auch, joining them and Andrew for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet lunch mere hours after stepping off the train and surprising Julian with a phone call saying ‘Viv, I’m at Auch train station.’

It is appropriate now to give due respect to Julian for coping with my unexpected arrival with such good grace and charm and, indeed, enthusiasm. Cheers.

Anyway, Lucas, Julia, Leanne (and also Andrew, who was not along for this mission) had made a previous expedition to Andorra a few weekends before, and they had lucked onto a nice three-star hotel with Jacuzzi, kitchenette and enough room for six, all for 60 euros a night for the room. The deal ran out at the start of December when the ski season kicked off, so they were keen to go again and I was in the right place at the right time.

Friday morning, mere hours post-Tip-Top, we set off. Lucas drove with great consideration and Julian held tightly to the doorhandle for most of the journey. There were no accidents, and Julian was a bright light for us all, enough that he managed to inspire me to overcome my own hungover state. I was a third of a bottle of whisky down on Julian, after all, and if he could rise to the occasion then damn it, so could I! The car was small and Leanne was jammed in between us, doing the best she could to be happy about it, and the journey was full of corners, and when you touched your skin to the windows it was clear exactly how cold it was getting outside.

As we rose into the mountains I was more easily able to put aside my queasiness. The views really were stunning, and when we hit the snowline I was sold. I’ve done lots of describing of mountains lately, seeing as I’m currently in Switzerland, so I’m not going to make the effort here, but they were massive, impressive, and very different to the Alps in ways I can’t quite put into words.

We got settled into the hotel, which was everything that had been promised, and sallied forth to Andorra La Vella for a shopping expedition (I managed to resist temptation). Not fond of malls, I was quite ready to return to the room for a nice meal and a relaxing evening of conversation, ‘Jaws’ in German, and a very pleasant Jacuzzi.

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Saturday morning and we jumped back in the car and explored the country a little. The highlight for me was leaping out of the car into snow a foot deep or more, and the impromptu battle that instantly developed. I threw my first snowball, badly, achieving spiritual communion with Charlie Brown after all these years. The highlight of course was Lucas leaping headfirst into the snow in a pratfall so spectacular he either planned it or is truly one of the world’s great stumblers.

All too soon the cold had eaten into our fingers and we were back in the car. We ended up back at Andorra La Vella, in a small bar/restaurant just off the main strip where we shared a half-dozen plates of tapas. These included spiced fish, potato wedges and slices of chorizo and other sausages. All in all, very filling and very tasty. Then we returned to the hotel room to relax for a bit before heading out again after nightfall for the main event of the evening: Caldea.

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Caldea is a health spa complex right in the heart of Andorra La Vella, its glass-walled central tower rising high above the surroundings in a narrow pyramid. Inside it’s a multi-leveled arcade of subdued lighting and bubbling fountains, expensive tourist shops making way for a large reception area for the various areas of the club. It didn’t seem like a real environment, and after a few minutes I realised I was being reminded of the kind of set you’d see in an episode of Star Trek.

We paid about 20 euros each for entry to the complex for three hours, from 9pm to the closing time of midnight. After hurried changing and much faffing about with the lockers, trying to convince the keys to work, the five of us strode forth into the heart of the complex. Oh, lord. If the reception area had the garish shiny futurism of a Star Trek television episode, the main space was like a big-budget Trek movie where the crew go to the pleasure planet, crossed over with the barmy 70s sci-fi décor of, say, Logan’s Run. (Note, however, that I found no evidence of sinister goings on behind the scenes.) The main pool was huge, roughly oval in shape, all about waist deep or slightly deeper and a very pleasant temperature. The ceiling was very high above, and a few storeys up on the walls were full-length windows into the on-site restaurants, where diners ate while gazing over the whole interior. More important, however, were the other pools above the main one.

From within the water there were staircases rising up to five enormous basins, set at varying heights above the pool, each large enough for a dozen or so people to settle within. From below they looked like shallow half-spheres with water spilling over the edges and cascading down to the main pool. They were at a variety of temperatures and included different kinds of designer turbulence, the piece de resistance being the highest pool where you could sit against jets of water designed to massage the back. There were six sets of jets evenly spaced around edge of this pool, and you started at the weakest and proceeded around them until you came the last, which pummelled the tensions in your back into a most pleasurable submission.

As impressive as all this was, it was only the beginning. One arm of the main pool went outside, waist-deep all the way, where the city lights played against the mountainside and steam poured upwards off the water. Here there was a circular channel with a strong current and a number of other nooks and
corners. Also outside, but set apart from the main pool, was a large Jacuzzi in a particularly dark corner of the courtyard. To find this one you had to brave the icy cold exterior while soaked to the skin, and when
you found it, it was a great pleasure to jump in. The real problem was working up the nerve to get up and out again.

There was a very cold dunking bath alongside the hottest of the pools, where Julian took particular pleasure in testing his resilience (greater than mine, I promise you), there were numerous alcoves where you could settle and rest, there were dark rooms and steam baths and stunningly hot saunas. I can make that last description with authority, as I spent some amount of time that I cannot remotely estimate in one of the hot rooms, and when I emerged I was indeed quite stunned. I wandered in a state of utter
relaxation to the side of the main pool and settled on to a deck chair, one of about thirty set out in this dark corner, although I was the only person to make use of them all night that I could see.

From this spot I had a spectacular view of the next stage of the evening’s dramas – the sound and light show. All through the evening there had been soothing music thrumming through the sound system, music that actually enhanced the atmosphere rather than polluting it. Now the lights dimmed and changed colour and the music changed tenor, becoming a medley of classical and semi-classical themes that were vigorous, rousing and sometimes sinister (including that particularly ominous piece that gets wheeled out in every second Hollywood film, the piece of music that all by itself makes me put Young Sherlock Holmes in the scary movie category, you know the one, dum dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum, dum dum dum duuum duuum dum dum…). While that was going on water spouts were rising and spinning in the middle of the raised pools, arcing water into the air to rain down on the main pool, sprays
rising and receding in time with the ebb and climax of the music, all building to a glorious purple finale where ice-cold water leaped from unexpected jets to fall on to the exposed parts of a delighted, squealing crowd in the pool. Magical.

The same show came again about an hour later, but the time went very fast. I drifted from pool to pool, and couldn’t quite believe it when midnight came and we were all ushered out of the water – I can hardly think of a time when three hours has passed so quickly.

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One other part of the Caldea experience you should note to really get a good impression of what it was like: the sheer amount of affection on public display. There were a lot of couples making out all over the place. I’ve been in Europe for a couple of months now but it still rings bemused ‘get a room’ bells in my prudish NZ-cultured brain.

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So ended our Andorran expedition. The following morning, after what were universally agreed to be very restful post-spa sleeps, we piled into the car and set off on a roundabout return route that took us through Spain. We stopped for lunch in a small town called Sort, and again enjoyed a healthy spread of tapas. Of particular note this time were the snails that Lucas and Julian ordered. Now, I’ve heard it said that eating snails aren’t the same as common garden snails, but I couldn’t spot any difference. Imagine a cast-iron tray, about the right size to bake cookies, and cover it with a layer of snails from the garden, and you have a precise image of what was delivered to the table. Of course, the snails weren’t moving. To eat them you pick them up by the shell and jab at the little beggar inside with a wooden pick, dragging him out and into your mouth. The consistency: chewy and juicy. The taste: they were coated in a rich buttery flavour, and some of them were particularly spicy. I had four in all, enough that I can now say with confidence that yes, I have eaten snails.

Yum.

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And Hoa spells his name Hoa, not Hao. Thanks Jon Ball for the correction. Sorry Hoa! I did know, I was just stupid!

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morgue

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Two announcements before I start ranting:

(1) Londoners: I’m getting into London this Saturday afternoon. I’m leaving again on Thursday and probably won’t be back until after New Year’s. I’m keen to see as many of you as possible, particularly those I didn’t manage to catch last time, so give me an email or wait until my phone is in the UK and contact me there, 078 17772635. Suggestions for Saturday night gratefully received.

(2) Wellingtonians: heritage couch free to a good home! My sister’s shifting, and the couch she inherited from me is surplus to requirements. This is the marvellous gold/green creature that so happily participated in every party at Todman St. It’s a bit threadbare but it’s dead comfy and my mum has a photo of me sitting on it as a baby, so it’s been in the family for a long time and I’d like to see it placed where someone will give it the same loving attention I always did. Anyone interested, call Miriam on 021
137 8640. (You’ll have to pick it up, mind.)

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After my expedition to Montpellier, Avignon and Carcassonne, I returned to Julian’s place in Auch. I was backtracking for a very specific purpose: I had been invited on what promised to be a very worthwhile expedition to Andorra.

So, Friday morning and the bags were packed, the car loaded, and we set off bright and early. Very bright and very early. This was a problem. you see, the previous night we had experienced… Tip Top. And Julian had experienced it more than anybody.

Let’s see if I can run this down.

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Julian lives in a roomy apartment next to a high school. The education system that he’s entangled in, working as a language assistant, also provided this accommodation which he has, essentially to himself. He does have a nominal room-mate, Jan, who only very occasionally appears to make use of his sparsely furnished room, thus giving Julian all the freedom he requires to kick balls through doorways. Mostly, Jan lives with wife and children in a different place entirely.

When I got back to Auch, I was surprised to find that Jan had chosen to materialise. He’s tall, very agreeable, quite young for someone with wife and multiple children, and when he practised his English with me it was really quite good. Certainly vastly better than my French. Anyway, that Thursday November 22 was the night of the release of the new Beaujolais, and Jan proposed we go out for a little drink to mark the occasion. We readily agreed. We would, it transpired, be meeting up with another person, a
female colleague of Jan’s. All well and good. Evening came, out we went, and the wine was ordered and tried – as Julian put it delicately, ‘it’s very young’. Jan agreed that it’s always terrible. (Why the entire country makes a song and dance each year over what seems to be universally agreed as a crap wine, I have no idea. Genuine French culture for you, anyway.)

Jan’s friend showed up, a fierce-talking chain-smoking deputy principal just barely in her thirties, one of those women with career in her blood. As we consumed more wine I was less and less able to understand her rapidfire French, and before long she and Jan were having an intense and unintelligible conversation across the table, the barrage of French diagonally separating me from Julian. We just smiled and nodded to each other and the wine kept coming.

Finally we got up to leave, and I was quite ready for bed. But the night was just beginning. We jumped from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, the time getting later and later. As Jan and his colleague sink deeper into each other’s company, Julian and I welcomed fellow language assistant Andrew, who had been led a merry mobile-phone chase around Auch before tracking us down. Andrew is an sturdy Irish lad of 21 years, with a ready smile and a penchant for rugby. It was at his rugby training that he met Go, who was also with him that night. Go is Japanese, represented Japan in the Sevens at one time, and played rugby in Canterbury, befriending along the way such Kiwi rugby legends as Todd Blackadder, former All Black captain. And here he was in southern France, with not a whit of French to his name, to play rugby for Auch.

So we chatted, and marvelled at how Go really is called Go, and I was able once again to wheel out the story of how I used to play basketball with How and Why. (Although, okay, not at the same time, and their names are spelt Hao and Wai. Hey Hao! You’re an anecdote!)

And then we made it to the infamous Auch nightspot… Tip Top.

They checked us in the camera before opening the door to let us in. It was by now circa 2am on a school night but the place was just starting to fill up. I was ready to go home but I hung on – I couldn’t leave Julian behind! The group’s reasoning process was by this time well impaired, and with a bottle and a half of Beaujolais under my belt alone I was in no state to lead the group out of the Valley of Death/Tip Top. I called it a night when the bottle of whisky appeared, leaving Julian to battle on while Jan and his colleague were, ah, becoming steadily more collegial.

Julian sprinted in sometime in the region of 5am, a third of a bottle of whisky later. We were due at the car about 9.30. It was, needless to say, to be a long ride to Andorra.

Oh, Jan appeared at 9ish, as Julian and I were getting ready to leave. There, my friends, is another piece of French culture for you.

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next: Andorra!

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When I look to my left I see an array of red-brick apartment blocks, three to five stories high, arrayed in a loop around a block of bright green that could have been drawn in with a felt-tip pen. Near to me there’s a sloping rock garden leading down to the driveway, to its left a small play area, a wooden tower with a pyramid roof and a slide rolling down from it in a narrow plastic wave. On the top floor of the nearest apartment block there’s a man in his twenties on the balcony. He’s leaning inside the sliding door to talk to someone else. He has a shoe on his hand, a black workshoe. On the balcony railing, looking down on the concrete path at the foot of the building, is a santa claus figure, two feet high with a smiling cherub face and waving his glove to the nonexistent passers-by. The trees to the left of that block have given up to winter already, their limbs bare or fuzzed with brown, but to the right they are still green, although fading. It has rained through the night and is starting to rain again. The drops come down thin and perfectly vertical.

These buildings make up the bottom third of the view. Beyond the apartment blocks is a hillside. It is an almost vertical slope covered with tall trees, almost all of which are bare of leaves. The ridge rises and falls sharply, echoing the shape of the children’s slide.   The hillside makes up the middle third.

The top third is cloud. Cloud is heavy here, rarely lifting, sometimes casting tendrils of mist down into the valley where they settle or drift, sometimes enveloping the whole valley floor in a cloud so thick that one can only hear, not see, the destination of a thrown stone.

It’s a beautiful valley. A few days ago I went for a walk, it turned into a five-hour expedition, to see what I could see. All around there were hills and mountains, wreathed in fog that occasionally teased me with areas of clarity – snow on the pines here, a steep bank of green there. I walked from Stansstad village to the larger town of Stans, and kept going, following the road and railway line up the valley. Had I kept walking I would eventually, long after dark, have made it to the ski resort of Engelberg, at the foot of the Titlis mountain, one of the giants of Switzerland. This is also the place where Craig, my co-host and old friend, is teaching.

Titlis was obscured by intervening hills and mountains, but there was plenty to see around me. The valley floor has wide fields, impossibly green, agricultural stations mingling with the fringes of the towns. The sloping valley sides, as green and smooth as a pool table, play host to tiny gatherings of cottages, halls and churches, while in the centre a bright red train runs along a slowly curving line. It reminds me of nothing so much as the model railways my grandfather so enjoyed; too detailed and delicate and unblemished to be real. As the eye drifts up the slope the green shifts to white at the snowline, or sometimes to a line of white fog that had wiped away the upper parts of the hill like an eraser to a pencil sketch.

The clouds lifted as the day wore on and I was treated to more and more of the mountains until finally, late in the day, I had a clear view of the two nearest peaks, the Stanserhorn just above Stans and Stansstad, and the more distant and still taller Pilatus, both classic mountains, studded with dark green trees and steep slopes of rock and snow, towering paternally over the small villages.

And I’m told its even better in summer.

——-

Saturday night and Craig and Marcel were dinner party hosts. Eight of us gathered around their dinner table for a traditional Swiss raclet. Two hot grills were set in the middle of the table along with a wide variety of cut meats (bite sized), slices of cheese, small baked potatoes and gherkins. you cook for yourself at a raclette, putting the meat cuts on the top of the grill and plucking them off to your plate and your mouth when they’re ready, and melting the cheese slices in special trays with handles that sit under the element. When the cheese is good and melted you scrape it off the tray with a wooden scraper, over the potato or gherkin or whatever it is on your plate that you want to douse in cheese. And then you eat, and throw some more cheese on the tray and some more meat on the grill.

It’s reminiscent of the traditional kiwi barbecue, but it has more in common with the happy camaraderie of a good fondue party – that of course being another Swiss winter specialty. I thoroughly enjoyed myself, listening to conversations switch from English to German and back again and indulging my affection for cheese. I managed to completely cover my melting tray in a bubbling, browning crust of cooked cheese, clearly the sign of a rank amateur.

The Swiss love their cheese, and they also love their chocolate, represented at the dinner party by Craig’s ridiculously intense mudcake which gave me a glorious headache when I was halfway through the square-inch section I had.

(Craig, making the mudcake, checks the icing: ‘hmm. needs more chocolate.’ Unwraps an *entire block* of Swiss chocolate and dumps it in. Oh Lordy.)

———

Sunday, Craig and I went driving. Switzerland is surprisingly small, since we went almost the width of the country in a couple of hours, travelling via autobahn from Lucerne in the German language area to Gruyeres in the French language area. This is a small, well-preserved medieval village with castle on a hill overlooking the lands the Count once ruled, and itself loomed over by a range of stunning alpine heights, which happily were under sun and blue sky when we arrived. It has given its name to the cheese, but I was more interested to find that the name comes from ‘Grue’, the heraldic creature on its coat-of-arms, a sort of fearsome heron. The reason we made this pilgrimage, however, apart from as an excuse to do a grand tour of the Swiss countryside, was the HR Giger museum.

Explanations. I’ll try and keep this short.

When I was 11, my friend Luke managed to source a bootleg video copy of Jim Cameron’s film Aliens, newly out to the rental market. We settled down in my lounge on a sunny Sunday afternoon to watch. It scared us so much we had
to turn it off half way through and go for a long walk before we had the nerve to watch the rest.

Thus Aliens became my favourite movie of all time (a title it holds to this day, still seeing off all challengers). Furthermore, I’ve long been active in the roleplaying game scene in Wellington, and between 1995 and 1997 years I organised a series of well-received events based around the Alien movies, involving nearly 150 people across all the different events. Thus my reputation as ‘the Aliens guy’. Since the last event, in December ’99, I’ve given the Aliens thing away through total burnout, but still my reputation precedes me and Craig had the Giger museum well and truly on the list of things to show me. And I’m glad he did.

Giger is the Swiss painter/sculptor who designed the creature in the first film, and the success of that movie is largely due to the absolutely terrifying nature of his design. It didn’t come out of nowhere – through the sixties and seventies he had created a series of airbrush paintings exploring the juxtaposition and integration of the biological (usually in
terms of the human form) and the mechanical. These are some very disturbing images; there’s something very visceral and primal about their impact, about combining biological elements with mechanical structures and experimenting
with different kinds of interface, not least the often overt sexual/death
imagery that is part and parcel of any exploration of biological reality.
Furthermore, while a surrealist, Giger specialised in realistic depictions
of coherent environments and landscapes – they don’t distance you through
abstraction, thus making the impact of the bizarre entities and structures
he designed still more profound. There’s a beauty to it, but there’s also
something abhorrent, and in a way it’s the combination of beauty and
abhorrence that is the most important thing about Giger’s works. (For more
on Giger, see www.HRGiger.com)

The gallery is spread throughout three floors of a house in the middle of
Gruyeres, and it included lots of things I’d never seen before, and lots of
things I had. Seeing the originals of images I had been familiar with for
well over a decade was a lot more exciting than I expected it to be,
particularly the originals of Giger’s little-seen designs for sections of
the first movie that were cut from the first draft of the script. The
filmgeek in me was most excited, however, by the extensive design sketches
Giger completed for Alien 3, almost all of which were not used and none of
which I’d seen before. I can see why they weren’t used – they were very,
very weird and disturbing, far too weird for mainstream Hollywood. Hell, if
Alien 3 was my movie I wouldn’t have used them either. But they were
absolutely fascinating.

Craig – thanks for organising this, because even if I’d known it was there,
I probably wouldn’t have bothered to go, and I really would have missed out
on something cool.

——–

My tan is fading.

——-

Be well you all,

morgue

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Switzerland began with another train journey, a long one. I farewelled Julian and left Auch on the 7.30 train and pulled into the station in Lucerne three changes and almost fourteen hours later, just after nine pm. It was a pleasant enough ride, lots to see through France, particularly tripping over a flooded landscape where fields were submerged, fiery autumnal trees spiked up from brown water, and isolated cottages rose like ghost ships out of apparent lakes. It was dark by the time I was cruising through Switzerland but it was also apparent I was in a different place, a long way from the placid south of France. The view from the train showed lights arrayed on slopes and around lakes, and there seemed to be a lot of people working late at the office buildings we were passing. The stereotype of the Swiss-German work ethic is very true; and sure enough, the trains did run on time.

Through the journey I read from cover to cover Herman Hesse’s 1920s work ‘Siddartha’, a distillation of Eastern philosophy into the form of a novella, along with explanatory notes from some bloke who prepared the Picador edition I was reading. It was a great read, and I must make due shout-out to Aaron Andrews who made the trade – I think I got the better part of the exchange, coming away with Mo Yan’s satire of Chinese culture ‘The Republic of Wine’ and ‘Siddartha’ while he had to walk off with Edward Rutherfurd’s history lesson/potboiler ‘London’. Sorry about that.

(Now’s as good a chance as any to mention the way reading is so huge in backpacker culture. Everyone reads and talks about what they read and trades old books or simply gives them away – a finished book is just dead weight, after all. I have been consistently surprised by the kinds of books getting read. They don’t tend to be the ones on the bestseller shelves of your local bookstore. Instead you see a lot of classics – I’ve seen Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald… and a lot of more modern works, but ones off the beaten path are fairly common. Lord of the Rings has finally disappeared from the circuit, apparently, I’m told it was what everyone was reading nine months ago. Harry Potter still turns up now and then. Anyway, there’s no real point to this aside, except to say that everyone reads, and they read interesting stuff, and it’s all good.)

Right, where was I. Oh yeah, Hesse. Well, he was German, but he ended up in Switzerland. So there you go. It was even relevant.

I was met at the platform by Craig Duncan. He’s another old friend, one I met on the same first-day-of-intermediate-school that provided my first meeting with Leon, travel buddy on the first part of this mission and again through Portugal, and Adrian, kind host on that first anxious night in the northern hemisphere two and a half months back – a fateful day indeed. Craig is now living with his partner Marcel, who is Swiss, here in Lucern He’s currently teaching hotel management law at a hotel management school but as I understand it other opportunities are appearing all the time so I don’t know how long that will last. He and Marcel live in an enormous, beautiful apartment in Stansstad (I think that’s the spelling), a short car journey from the Lucerne train station. To my eyes they seem pretty well set up. I’m told they have a great view of the mountains but it has been foggy, but still scenic with the nearby craggy hills, and the lakeside just a short walk away – this is very nice indeed, especially with the fog drifting over its surface and obscuring its far side.

I’ve been here a full day now, and apart from a bit of walking about the neighbourhood I haven’t done much – most of today was spent in intense catch-up/discuss Switzerland mode with Craig. Nevertheless I can pass on some things I have noticed about this country that differentiate it from all the others I have been in since leaving New Zealand:
* no dog-gifts in the streets
* no-one asking me for money
* some evidence of driving laws

All of these are changes for the better.

Right now I am stupendously full after eating an enormous plate of food prepared by Marcel. I will sleep this off in the room I have all to myself in a comfortable bed with a fogged-out view of the mountains, and the only unnerving thing will be the full military kit, rifle included, sitting next to my bed – Marcel is off to military service on Monday.

I’ve never shared a room with a rifle before.

——–

Shout outs to Luke and Sam, who got married on Saturday, and Dan and Chrissy, who did the same thing on Sunday. Hope the days were, respectively, a blast and a blast.

And to Julian, my kind and generous host in Auch, who for some reason walked me to the train station at 7 in the morning. Cheers.

And to Tintin.

——-
morgue

is in my mouth. mmmmmmm. I had a late-night chocolate crepe. all of europe has a sweet tooth but this really is ridiculous – a delicate crepe liberally sprinkled with sugar and then thick, melted chocolate poured warm into the folded nest and then you just can’t quite eat it fast enough and the chocolate goes all over the white plate and it really is divine…

———-

i am in Montpellier. It’s a great town, elegant and sincere, with a pedestrianised heart that keeps going and going. I’ve found it a bit hard to penetrate the nightlife, much as I found Toulouse by night somewhat impenetrable – both student towns, both very pleasant, but unless you want to stand and drink alone they can be difficult after sundown.

i spent a bunch of days in scenic Auch, west of Toulouse, before heading here. There I enjoyed the hospitality of my childhood friend Julian McKenzie, working in Auch as an English language assistant in the high schools. We’ve had a fine old time, and he’s taken me to a different bar each night, and introduced me to a pleasant bunch of fellow tutors. In Auch there is a cathedral and a statue of d’Artagnan, so I’ve seen both of those about a thousand times as well.

France is interesting. The suburbs look more like suburbs to me than elsewhere in Europe. The people I’ve found to be very pleasant indeed, even as I butcher their language and drop its twitching corpse in front of them and expect them to LIKE IT, okay??? Let’s just say I’m better at listening and reading French than speaking it.

(This is the perfect point to note that I had to jump through numerous hoops to study French in my sixth form year, leading to the pleasant solution of being sent to the girls school down the road for that class… it might even have helped my French a bit. More notably, it gave me a wonderful friend, hey Melissa!)

(okay, it also gave me a good story to wheel out when schooldays talk gets going, but thats by the by.)

———–

the place is about to close around me and I’ve barely begun to write! more will have to wait. I had a coffee in a cafe last night and filled 16 pages of notebook with furious scribble, so there are definitely things to be said.

in the meantime, I’ll just recommend those who have time to check out Krzystof-from-Barcelona’s webpage, its fascinating reading.

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/journal/?pics=small&doc;_id=120

a bientot!

morgue

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I spent a few nights in San Sebastian. These nights just happened to be over all saints day, which are pretty big-deal holidays in Spain. On arriving at the train station and finding via phone that the hostel was full (despite promising us there´d be no problem when we´d called that morning), we actually listened to one of the room touts at the station.

(Whenever you arrive at any place with a backpack on, there will be someone at the station offering you a room at a handy price. Usually the best plan is to walk past these people, but they can come in useful, as here.)

We ended up in a dinky little room right smack in the middle of town, about two doors along from the big fancy hotel that, the tourist brochure gushed, was where all the big names stayed when they came to town for the San Sebastian film festival! So the location was great, and the price wasn´t bad at all, thanks to some nifty negotiation by Ella.

We went exploring of the old town, which is right nearby, and find large numbers of bars, a reminder that this is a big tourist town. The oddest thing is stumbling on the presence of a fifty-foot woman, well, perhaps thirty feet – I came up to her shin. She was made of cardboard and dressed after Xena, and promoting the San Sebastian festival of horror and fantasy films, which was going on all over town. She loomed at the end of a long narrow street, and whenever we walked through the old town we´d glance down and see this woman with her sword in the air far, far away. It was, I have to admit, pretty fun.

San Sebastian consists mostly of two beaches, which are both beautiful. One of them is excellent, yellow sand and pleasant surf and long and wide, but the other is simply magnificent, a glorious curve of archetypal beach-ness that just kept going and going. Hence the tourist destination. At night the beaches become the domain of groups of teenagers drinking under the walkway, but they´re still very pleasant, and the strange curve of the bay inside the harbour mouth gives rise to interesting surf. At either end of this beach are hills, neither of them too large, one of them rising up over the old town and playing host to a grand lit statue of Jesus, which itself rises out of an old castle/fortress… we explored the fort by night after finding the gate unlocked, which was hair-raising and not exactly informative, but did give a great night-view of the city when we hit the top and relaxed at Jesus´feet.

The other hill is climbed by a cable car, which both Ella and I weren´t interesting in using, so we tromped up the road. It´s on a similar scale to, say, Mt Vic, maybe a bit higher. Anyway, just near the top we find the road blocked by a guy with a road barrier and a sign saying you have to pay a euro to proceed, because, apparently there were restaurants and a lookout up top. Well, we weren´t standing for that nonsense (its the *principle* of the thing), so we settled at the side of the road just in front of the barrier, where there was a pretty stunning view, and hung out. For a very long time. I thought the guy would be perturbed but he didn’t seem to be, Ella was convinced he was having too much fun raising and lowering the barrier arm when cars came up or down to really care about us. He did seem to enjoy raising and lowering the arm.

On our last night in town, we went to a bar for tapas – small snacks that you consume with your beer, arrayed all over the bar surface in an enticing smorgasbord – which served as our dinner. I can´t even describe the things I had, but they were all very nice indeed. Then we found a notice saying there was a free movie at a cinema down the road. So it was that Ella and I ended up watching the ’57 Hammer classic The Abominable Snowman, starring Peter Cushing, in the foyer of a cinema with one other guy and the cinema staff. Peter Cushing is even more dashing with a Spanish voice.

—-

Ella is gone, and I strike out alone for Toulouse tomorrow. From the calls I’ve made, everywhere seems full. Will I find a bed? Will I survive? Don’t touch that dial.

—-

Jocularity from the UKers in the hostel after the All Black´s big loss in the rugby test to England. Hope all of you back home are staying indoors until the riots have ceased.

morgue

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I didn´t talk about Barcelona last time I was here, except to say it was great and I was going to come back. Well, I have.

——

The past few emails you´ve probably noticed I´ve been mentioning this person called Ella that seems to be in all the same places I am. The reason is we´ve been travelling together for the last couple of weeks. She´s Canadian, which (as those who know my history will know) is an instant bonus point, and she´s a writer, which earns another. She, like all the best people, is capable of being utterly absurd and deeply profound, often within minutes of each other, and with complete sincerity for both. (I´m even stealing from her in saying that.)

She’s a Winnepegger. She has long brown hair. (Clear enough mental image for you?) And she´s become a fantastic friend very very quickly. She´s been supporting me through emotional rollercoasters and a nuisance of a cold (which is now all but gone, thanks for asking) and she´s generally an amazing person.

But, in terms of the stories I am telling you, there´s one thing you should remember: she speaks French and Spanish, and she could get by in Portugal as well. The deal is, she´s the translator, I´m the bodyguard. (Stop laughing. Stoppit. Yes, I know, I know. Look, she´s much better at her job than I would be at mine, but I figure I can play the odds on this one a few more days. Just shhhhh. She thinks I know kung fu.)

So we´ve gone to some places I would never have gone to alone. I´d like to take this opportunity to publicly give the big big ups to Ella.

———-

Anyway, so I´m back in Barcelona. Yesterday Ella and I went to see the Sagrada Familia (my third time, still amazing) and Parc Guell (my second time, still amazing). I had been craving getting back to the Park – it´s my favourite place in the city, I think, even knowing that the city is full of great places. The last time I was there I didn´t get to linger as much as I would have liked…

…cue flashback music, go to black and white…

(1) morgue wandering around Barcelona with two reasonably normal looking American guys of a similar age to he… VOICEOVER: …because I´d fallen in with some jumped-up crazy punk rock guys from Fargo, Shipley and Mark.

(2) Mark stroking his beard and thinking about Amsterdam… VOICEOVER: they´d seen some interesting things on their travels

(3) Shipley lifting up his t-shirt and rubbing his nipple, apparently while dancing, as onlookers regard him, appalled. SFX: that “its getting hot in here” song VOICEOVER: and picked up some interesting habits

(4) The trio in montage at Pârc Guell, past the amazing works of Gaudi, strange pillars, crosses on a panoramic lookout, the steps with the colourful lizard, the corridor that looks like you´re inside a cresting wave, and more, faster and faster and faster, intercut with Shipley looking more and more uncomfortable. VOICEOVER: but the real problem was the quart of juice Shipley sucked down at the wrong time.

(5) Montage goes past faster and faster until it´s just a blur and suddenly CRASH CUT to still shot of Mark and morgue hanging around outside the toilet. The door opens, Shipley comes out, shaking his head. He pauses, looks thoughtful, turns around, goes back inside. (Astute observers will note that Mark looks somehow gleeful.)

(6) Different shot. Still waiting outside the toilet. VOICEOVER: the gates were opened, so to speak.

…end flashback, back to colour…

So. This time, Ella and I were careful with our food and drink, and we were fine. It´s a stunning place. We could have lingered for a long time. I´d like to think, if I was a local, I´d go there often. Places like this shouldn´t ever be taken for granted.

Barcelona keeps opening up new possibilities. I could stay a lot longer, but the road onwards is beckoning.

——-

Shout outs to my amigos from Fargo, who I have shamelessly mocked for purposes of your amusement.

morgue

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First, Leon followers might remember this from an earlier email:

“Leon has headed off on his own, back to London… He´s going to try and get things going in the theatre scene, and with a bit of effort and a pinch of
good luck I´m sure doors will start opening.”

Well, he´s now working backstage on this thing Ken Branagh is directing. So. Now you know. (The show is called ´The Play What I Wrote´, check out
http://www.theplaywhatiwrote.com/ for more info.)

——-

Okay.

Second, while Percy´s funeral was occurring back home I was wandering the streets of Barcelona alone. I was pretty tired from travelling, and I´d been in a bar with some new hostel friends, and then I just wandered a bit. And I ended up checking my email, and received a flood of messages from people who´ve been reading these emails. And it was actually a really important thing for me. So thanks.

——

Third, because email has been so bitsy and inconvenient and quite frankly I’ve had other things on my mind, I´ve given pretty scattershot coverage of the last several weeks.

Here´s a flashback.

I stayed in Lisbon until Thurs Oct 24. You´ll recall I wanted to see fado, but ended up eating pizza and watching a video with Lisbon native Tanya and hostel-friend Amund. Well, my local contact Rui decided he was going to do something about that, and two nights later he mustered his compadre Ricardo and they went to meet me at the hostel, as arranged by email the day before.
The problem, of course, was that I had completely screwed up what day I was doing what and had in fact crashed out in bed when he arrived. Rui and Ricardo sat in the bar for what must have been hours waiting for me and finally sent the guy at the desk up to knock on my dorm room door. Guys at hostel desks don´t normally do that kind of thing, but there you go.
(Actually, the guy at the Rome hostel kept running messages for me as well.
Maybe I´m a bad hostel guest.)

So I´m just starting to drift off to sleep and there´s a knock and the door opens and the guy says there´s some people downstairs, and I jump out of bed and get dressed and run down, and along the way I realise what I´ve done ´- lost track of what day was what. There was a rogue Munsday in there that threw out my calculations, I guess. (Munsday = that day of the week that either should exist or accidentally does.)

So, Rui and Ricardo are astonishingly gracious, and won´t even hear my
abject apologies and general feeling of foolishness, and we jump in
Ricardo´s car and head down to Alfama. Alfama is the real old town of
Lisbon, the part that survived the 1755 earthquake (hope my date is right
Rui). It´s a hillside crammed with tall and narrow lanes and tiny squares,
honeycombed with small bars and restaurants, full of atmosphere. We enter this little fado bar and order a beer each and sit. There´s hardly anyone in the place. Things get weirder when three of the clientele reveal
themselves to be the musicians and singer by ending their break and taking
the floor. And then they began. There were two guitarists, one playing a
conventional instrument and the other a portugeuse guitar, and the singer. He was an older man, immaculate in suit and tie, holding himself very straight, and he sang and they played and it was amazing. Throughout I was reminded of the flamenco singer I´d seen in Barcelona and his dishevelled
appearance, his movement, the wildness in his song. This couldn´t have been more different, and yet the same in so many ways, deep expressions of
profound sadness, heartwrenching emotion, laying out the truth of life. Rui
and Ricardo said that it was an example of the difference in character between the Portuguese and the Spanish.

The musicians took a break. Rui and Ricardo told me about the history and
importance of fado and soon the musicians returned, this time with a young man singing (yet another of the audience transformed into performer), his voice full and rich, technically brilliant, although perhaps his heart wasn’t old enough to have learned the sorrow of his colleague.

And all of this to Rui, Ricardo, myself, two other locals, and the bar staff.

Astonishing. I recall Tanya´s words from when I was asking her about her nation and culture – “we are a sad people”.

——-

Thanks Rui and Ricardo. And I better also point out that the only impression I´ve given of Tanya is ´don´t waste your time with Fado, eat pizza instead´, which isn´t a very good picture. She was full of love for her country and full of insight about what was around us, and it was thanks to her that Ella and I made our way north from Lisbon to Geres, land of the giant slugs – but that´s another flashback.

——-

morgue

[waybackmachine link to original]

I’m in San Sebastian. There is a beautiful whitesand beach and the sun’s
coming in like it wants to see what’s going on. Not much is, there’s only a
few people, the season is off but the weather’s still on. It’s a nice place
to sit and think.

In the first minutes of All Saints Day my grandfather, Percy Patrick Geddes,
passed away.

He’s one of the reasons I’m travelling. Growing up, it seemed to me that he’d been everywhere there was to go. He and my grandmother Felice drove all over New Zealand, all over Europe, to so many places. I was always finding out about more places he had seen and I’m sure there are plenty more that I still don’t know about. He loved to travel.

He was a great grandfather and a great friend and a great role model. I guess I idolised him without even realising it. He did living the way it was meant to be done.

——–

So I was sitting on the train on the other side of the world from my family and I’m feeling every mile of the distance. I love to travel by train, and that’s another thing I get from Percy, railways man with the train set in the garage; I love to feel the carriage rock, love seeing the scenery scrolling past. The trip from Leon to San Sebastian goes through barrens, wide swathes of brown with low hills scattered with deep green, the sky thin
and grey. I was remembering all the things there are to remember and
feeling the ride carry me forward, a bit overconfused, a bit down, and I
began to wonder if I could even call the image of him to mind.

As if in answer, I suddenly saw him right in front of me, sitting on the seat ahead and facing me, smiling, wearing his thick coat and his hat and smiling that way he smiled. It was incredibly vivid, like my brain was
slapping me upside the head for being so foolish: of course you can remember him!, it said to me, look! And my imagined Percy grinned at me, nodding agreement.

It felt good.

——–

Family, I’m thinking of you.
Friends, thanks for the support, especially Cal and Billy and Ella-on-the-spot.
I’m getting on, and travelling. The last thing I said to my grandfather before leaving new zealand was that I was following in his footsteps. I didn’t say this bit, but I meant not just around the world, but in life. Because, like I said, he did living the way it was meant to be done.

Take care everyone. We are a beautiful place.

morgan

[waybackmachine link to original]

I received a 1.5meg spam that disabled my account, and only just now cleared it.

—–

I´m still in Portugal. There are some good stories to be told, such as the Andrew three-peat, the exciting trip to the wrong Geres, the giant slug, and the night I saw Fado despite a very high level of personal incompetence (thanks Rui!).

But I am not going to tell these stories now.

Because I have a cold.

Bums.

morgue

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