The Germans have quite taken the concept of the sausage as a snack and refined it to an art-form. These are not shrivelled sangers that have sat for hours, rotating in the rear of a stale display-cabinet. No, these are proud, bulky bratwurst, and they glisten with fat as the woman serving me drowns them in tomato sauce and finishes with a dusting of curry powder. She’s not done yet though, and she gestures at the board behind her and offers me the choice of additional sides: fries with mustard, fries with mayonnaise or either of the previous with beer. I feel my heart palpitating involuntarily as I consider the health ramifications. Fuck it, I’m on holiday, right?

I’m perched in the corner of a converted metro car hiked up on concrete blocks a few streets from the budget terminal of Berlin airport. I’m hiding from the biting minus-ten wind while I wait to see if Nick is on the next flight from Riga, or Budapest, or wherever. Email isn’t particularly easy to get your hands on in Eastern Europe and our method for meeting up in Berlin was as simple as “Meet you on Tuesday at the airport?”

Now, faced with the grim reality of being stuck in this car eating Currywurst until I die of a heart attack, I consider the downsides to our plan: we have not considered that Berlin may have several airports, I have no idea what city, or country, Nick is coming from and thus no idea what carrier or arrival time is to be expected, and our only means of contacting each other is by email. I order another beer.

I’m the only non-German in here, and I listen. My German is even worse than I expected – I’ve forgotten so much in the years since I spent my Saturdays vor die Schulbank. Painstakingly memorised tenses, cases and verb tables forgone for simple words. As I find out later, near everyone in the centre speaks English and there’s little chance to practice. I’d love to come back and spend a couple of months here: jumping from rural village to rural village. I think in future any European trips will be country by country rather than trying to fit an entire continent in a few short weeks, which is just madness.

A few hours later, when I’m camped on my pack in departures, and beginning to toy with the idea of scoping ahead for a hostel, Nick shows up and we run for the next bus to the Metro. It all feels so safe and normal that it’s easy to forget we’re on the other side of the world from when we last spoke. He tells me how he spent the previous night sleeping in a bus shelter, and I have to laugh when I imagine him suited up and entangled by the firm back in Perth.

It’s late, but the centre is brightly lit. A hint of ice in the corners of the windows, but not yet snowing, and above everything Alexanderplatz looms like some doomed vision of a constructionist future, one where architects learn by smashing huge geometric blocks into each other until they fit.

Posted in Travel on Monday July 7, 2008. Shoutouts.

I’m at the Heart of Gold, a Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy themed hostel in the centre of Berlin. There is Vogon poetry on the walls and the wireless password is, charmingly, “Don’t Panic!”

I’ve dragged myself out of bed early today, fighting a pounding headache to slouch against the wall of the shower and pass out for a while. I gingerly make my way downstairs, grab a seat at the bar, and supplement my hangover with strong black coffee. I watch people walk to work through the huge double-glazed windows. Fuck, I feel terrible. Two equally bedraggled Eastern Europeans sit one table down from me, looking for all the world like escapees from the Lone Gunmen, but both tapping away on tiny iridescent-shelled Sony laptops. I would imagine that each is worth more than the entire contents of my pack, and probably my ticket over here on top of that.

The latest travel accessory amidst the backpacker set appears to be these ultra-portable laptops, to take advantage of the free wireless internet available at most of the bigger hostels. I can’t imagine lugging a laptop around for months and the thought of two thousand dollars of rigid, non-waterproof fragility in my pack doesn’t set my heart on fire. Then again, I tend to pack lighter than most.

The purple haired girl minding reception has given up watching the bar and has ducked outside for a fag, steam mingling with smoke as she exhales. It’s got to be below zero out there, judging by the scarves and jackets of the office set as they tromp past my window in charcoal-hued lines. No one glances up as they scurry along and I sit and watch, savouring my coffee. I think the panadol is kicking in, or whatever it was, in familiar red and green packaging covered in dense German compound-words. The blonde woman on the box sure seemed happy, and it appears to be doing the trick.

In the bar they’ve got the central cranked up and I’m comfortable in a tee-shirt, an old one from the threadless heydays, with a monkey pitching a Molotov at the viewer. Our lady of the bar blows on her hands, then flicks her cigarette against the wall and shoulders the door open and grins at me as she wanders back behind the bar. “Cold?” I ask, as I reach for one of the perfect, identical bread rolls heaped in a messy pyramid on the counter. “It’s not bad. For January. Usually much colder. You know, snow.” I grunt sagely, as she grabs herself a coffee, and focus on my roll. I’ve stuffed it with cheese and it’s perfect.

“The shirt, what does it mean? Is it supposed to be funny?” I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny, just irreverent, one of those stupid visual puns that makes you do a double take. I take it with me whenever I go overseas, a stupid custom I’ve picked up over the years and one I’m not sure Glebe realised she was buying into when she stole it from my apartment and took it to Korea. She sent me a photo of herself, with it pulled up over her monkey ears, ninja style, as she flashed peace signs in a generic hostel dorm room. I hadn’t even noticed it was missing, and spent the day at work wondering who’d taken the photo. I pause for rather too long, “No, not funny, just strange. Like, a joke because it’s unexpected.” She nods, and heads back to reception to help someone struggling with a bundle of dirty sheets.

You can grasp very little of the character of a city in a few short days.

Posted in Travel on Friday June 20, 2008. Shoutouts.

It is not a song I would expect hear a busker sing, nor is it one I would expected to be rendered so perfectly. His voice echoes off the narrow, tiled walls of the tube station, audible long before we can see him. The verse he sings is about filling your lungs to anchor yourself and, as we emerge into the frozen crystalline sunshine, I hold on to the idea.

The cold hammers into me and I force air into my mouth. I can feel my teeth begin to freeze; tiny points of off-again, on-again pain – a symphony of ice-cream headaches. We walk a slow circle, the endless green grass and blue sky confronting after days of slate-grey London.

There are three kinds of geese here, and I watch a trio of the large grey birds waddle toward the green, the one in the middle aggressively weaving as it nips at the tails of the other two. “They move like dinosaurs,” I say, “or at least they move how I think dinosaurs would have moved.”

He turns and watches them make their way up the hill. “They move like we’ve been made to expect dinosaurs to move, by movies that probably modelled their dinosaur’s movements on birds.” I guess that’s as precise an answer as you’re ever going to get.

I turn back toward the lake and watch a father jump onto a park bench and begin to slow-dance, his three children trailing after him. “But why, Daddy?”

“Because that’s what birds do, ‘innit. They shit on things.”

Posted in Travel on Friday March 7, 2008. Shoutouts.

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends
when you pass them at night under the silvery, silvery citibank lights
arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under
oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over
surprise, surprise they wouldn’t wannna watch
another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults

-The National

Posted in Shutterbug on Thursday February 14, 2008. Shoutouts.

The air hostess stows my bag under the drinks trolley and makes me put my jacket on for take-off. The French man next to me rather resents being told that he too must put his on, and splutters and flaps for a while. The hostess nods and smiles and looks like she wants to slit his throat. My first Ryanair flight and I can barely force my legs under the seat in front of me. Welcome to the ten quid carrier. Would you like to buy a drink? Ice is extra.

One of the reasons budget carriers are able to offer their flights so cheaply is because they fly into tiny rural airports miles from anywhere and rely on bus connections to ferry you back and forth from the city you’re actually aiming for. Such was the case with Milan to Paris: our plane landed in Beauvais, some 80 kilometres north-east of Paris proper. A canvas tent shaking in the rain, while punters fight to jam their bags onto the bus and the bus drivers huddle together to light cigarettes.

Normally this would present little concern, but when you’re sick and it’s 11 pm and pouring with rain, all you want to do is crawl into bed and forget the day even existed. Ordered on a list, negotiating a long bus journey followed by a succession of metro transfers is right up there with attending knitting lessons and jabbing salad forks into your eyes.

Just after midnight, we make it to the station nearest the hotel I have scammed for 15 euro for the night. We climb the stairs and emerge in the middle of a red-light district and, given the way the day has progressed thus far, this does not surprise me the slightest. Neon tits flash into puddles on the near-empty streets and a man huddled in a doorway half-heartedly offers us a lap dance. Frankly, I doubt he would be up to the challenge.

Still, we find the hotel and it’s quiet and clean. The double bed in a room alone a welcome novelty after two days faced with an old man snoring so hard the walls shook. I lock the door and wander around naked for a while, just because I can. Then I watch some TV on my bed, just because I can. I consider drinking all the beer in the hotel fridge, just because I can, but decide against it after working out it would cost me approximately seven times what the room itself did.

In the morning, I’m up early and wander the streets of Montmarte in the drizzle. I find a café and duck inside. Leg 2, here we come.

Posted in Travel on Thursday February 7, 2008. Shoutouts.

The strange looks begin as soon as we hit the cycle path next to the Elbe, and don’t let up for the remainder of the day. It seems that riding around Dresden in the middle of winter wearing shorts is not appropriate, or at least very un-German. Reactions vary; looks of horror from the elderly users of the bike path, laughter from those closer to our age and pointing from children, who stand open mouthed as we wobble by. That our bikes are older than many of the surrounding buildings, and squeak and groan with each pedal forward, does not aid us in slipping by incognito.

Australia day, and we’d set ourselves a mission of riding some 60 kilometres south to Sachsiche Schweiz, the Switzerland of Saxony, a large national park bordering the Elbe river. The aim of this journey was to climb some of the huge rock formations further down the river where, in the Middle Ages, a fortress had been built to repel invaders. Rather than bore you with details of the ride: long, beautiful, and broken at intervals for Gluhwein, I shall point you toward the photos on flickr and skip forward to five pm, with dark rapidly approaching, and us electing to press on toward Konigstein, a fortress town some five kilometres further up the river.

In hindsight, walking up a mountain through a forest in the pitch black was perhaps not the brightest idea, but as with so many other tales that end up as being worth telling, it made so much sense at the time. By the light of torch, we made it to the summit along a near-vertical cobblestone path and slogged around the perimeter of the imposing ten-storey fortress walls. The wind had picked up and whistled in our ears, threatening to blow us off the edge. Unsurprisingly, we were completely alone at the top.

We elected to take what we assumed would be a more direct route down, but rather than dog-leg to the right as expected, our chosen road dipped into the forest, crossed under a bridge, and became an alarmingly narrow mud track. Then it started raining. Some forty minutes later, with us wandering through a huge open meadow with no idea as to the direction of the nearest town, our torch began to reflect what were unmistakably a pair of animal’s eyes bobbing toward us.

As we debated the stage at which the previously agreed secret code for “piss-bolt” would be deployed, the eyes abruptly veered to the left and disappeared. There was indecision amongst the party as to whether this was a good thing and as we tried to illuminate both the track in front and anything trying to kill us from behind, it continued to rain. “Germany has wolves, right? What about bears? Oh shit, remember the bears.”

Over the past few days I have been made to understand just how limited my German was. However, the tiny white sign with “Am Stadtzentrum, 20 min” made me feel like was ready to converse with fluency. “This way, it’s this way!” The years spent with Thomas and his moped not wasted after all.

Returning to our bikes, wheeling them back into town, and then shouldering them onto the bicycle carriage for the 50 minute train ride home may have been the happiest moment of my life. We had survived the near-brutal wilds of near-rural Germany and we were headed directly to beer.

We celebrate the rest of Australia day with breaded dumplings and beer, whilst the Hungarian shop owner shouts gruffly into the telephone and blows smoke at the no smoking sign next to our table. My whole body aches and I am studiously not thinking about the pain that will be had clambering over the giant chair to get into my bunk.

Perhaps tomorrow we can try taking the bikes in shorts and t-shirts and gauge the reaction. That’s for tomorrow though. For now, sleep.

Posted in Travel on Saturday February 2, 2008. Shoutouts.

It all started as we admired the moss covered walls and trails of browning ivy on the walls of a typically spectacular church near the Rathaus in Berlin. Near the entrance to the church we noticed a statue of a snarling bear and elected to take a photo with said bear.

Common themes in German stone-craft encountered thus far consist of “animal clawing at viewer,” the ever popular “man on horse kicking the shit out of lion” and not forgetting the equally likeable, “man with sword stabbing the shit out of lion.” Small variations on the above theme also exist and, while they may or may not involve spears, largely end with the lion getting fucked.

Anyway, two elderly German women indicated with much vigour that they would take our photo with the bear. After much shouted instruction that we were to far to the left, or the right, they apparently neglected to hit the button at all. Bearless, we were forced to improvise. From then on, a rapidly devised game ensured the non-observant traveller was obliged to pose with any bear spotted along the way.

I present the Berlin Bears, part of a rapidly growing collection of retarded travel snaps:

Posted in Shutterbug on Monday January 28, 2008. Shoutouts.

We poured over the coffee-table book the night before and in the morning walked down the broadway to an instant photo place, five PCs in the back room. Vague and non-specific printed map in hand we plotted our route through the labyrinthine tube network, our final goal a huge yellow flower on a wall near Bethnal Green.

Banksy is an icon now, his tongue in cheek creations worth thousands of pounds. Still, as we wander the streets of suburban London, we don’t see anyone else obviously doing what we are. We find four and are running concentric circles around where we think the fifth should be when a man pushing a scooter approaches us, “It’s not here. I know what you’re looking for, and it’s not here any more. They sold the wall it was on, the whole thing. Took it out and built a new wall. Two thousand pounds.”

“Oh,” we say, “that’s crazy. What a pity.” He snorts at us and rolls his eyes, “Crazy, yes, but it was there for three years,” as if it were stupid of us to dawdle on the opposite side of the world. Most don’t last a week.

There is a crack that runs the length of the Tate Modern, and I spend the afternoon looking at Pollocks and Mondrians, but nothing comes close to finding that yellow flower on the wall. Art is always personal.

Posted in Travel on Thursday January 24, 2008. Shoutouts [1].

Until today, Crouch End Broadway was simply the name of Blur remix. Now, as we skip up the hill from the King’s Head, it takes on a gritty reality. Lorna and Neil are in front of me and I can remember doing this five years ago in Kobe. Four of us then, running the tiny streets and disturbing salarymen as we opened closed doors in search of the perfect alcove bar. Neil says he doesn’t get paid for flights to Delhi and I wonder how that can even be legal. Three day turnaround on flights from Paris.

Later, Lorna and I finish a bottle of gin and argue with each other more out of tradition than any real sense of disagreement. We’re going to go look for Banksy pieces tomorrow, after we Google for them. “I love how it’s become a verb in English,” she says, “but I’ve always wondered whether the same things works in French. Googleur. I asked Marion once, but I don’t think she really understood.”

Everything is pink here, and in the morning Lindsay has the cups arranged, ready for tea.

Posted in Travel on Wednesday January 23, 2008. Shoutouts.

I think the stress finally starts to dissipate after we shoot past Geraldton and continue up the coast. The day hadn’t started well; a crunch and a squeal as someone backed into my driver’s side door. Your charming accent not quite excusing you from muttered misgivings and photos of the damage for the insurance people. “We mustae been lookin’ the wrong way. Dinnae want to back into a person walkin by, God help.” Apparently cars don’t figure quite so high on the big man’s priority list.

I assumed that getting on the plane would do it, but as I sat waiting for the yellow-coated engineer to fix the back door of the plane that wouldn’t quite shut, I realised I was gripping the armrest a little too tightly. “Can I grab another of those little bottles, ta. Cheers.”

Earlier, I had blagged an invite to the Qantas club and once we hit Changi, I wandered across, feeling like an impostor amidst the suits and handmade shoes. I stood under the shower for half an hour listening to elevator music and boarding calls before I felt human enough to emerge, ready for the next leg.

Posted in Travel on Sunday January 20, 2008. Shoutouts.