lucky just to keep afloat

Brisbane - For my birthday, I get hail. When Nick Tee and I leave his apartment it is the end of a breezy, sunny day, and by the time we get to The Alibi Room all we can do is sit in his car and wait until big marbles of ice have stopped smacking against the roof before making a break for it. From the safety of the bar, we watch people wading through a flooded intersection, failed traffic lights blinking orange. Once, when the rain abates for a moment, we see the unmistakable shape of an inch-long cockroach crawling along the footpath. I'm 24, and the end is nigh.


Auckland - At the old bookshop I buy a great stack to add to the stack I amassed from working there five years ago. The stack is unread, neverending. Karel and I have coffee behind the counter and incidentally a few people buy books.

Home Sated

Bite-sized Italy and Spain for someone with a really big mouth...
Between Venice and Rome I spent a weekend in Bologna. In his tour of the city, my host Andrea showed me San Petrono's - a basilica which began as a beautiful marble construction, but then took on a rustic aesthetic when the jealous Vatican refused further funding. So the story goes. The tour also included standing at opposite sides of a portico, facing away from each other, whispering into the wall and having our words meet the other's ear as if we were standing right beside each other. (This reminded me of being in the igloo at Bimbo's.) There are two towers in Bologna which, Andrea informed me, were built by two important families in the 12th century - the taller Asinelli Tower (97m), and the Garisenda Tower (48m). Bologna is a student town, and traditionally the Arts students cannot climb the Asinelli Tower before the end of their degree; superstition has it that their studies could last indefinitely if they do. So I climbed the tower on my own, and had my first bona fide experience of vertigo, complete with racing heart and sickening downward glances, as I ascended the wooden stairs to the lookout. I thought of forgetting it a few times, but pride kicked in and I was rewarded with a stunning view of the red student town, spread out all medieval-like before me in the 9am sun.

Starstruck/Chloe from 9 to 5

This afternoon Yann showed me his friend's short film about growing up in Brittany. The style was very personal and simple - lots of hand-held stuff. I thought of Agnès Varda as I watched it, and how much I enjoyed studying her films in that one film subject I made such a mess of at uni. I thought I'd quite like to see more of her films, and the thought of spending my Australian summer hunting down Varda DVDs made me excited to be coming home.

Then I mentioned her to Yann. Yann told me she lives on his street. Agnès Varda lives on his street. She has a studio near the Vietnamese place on the corner. The day I went with Yann to get bo bun in said Vietnamese place, she was actually sitting there enjoying her lunch, and I missed her. 

Definitely moving to Paris.

Cole Portering

Pre-Berlin II, I revisited Paris. The weather was mostly rainy; I made use of it by catching up on adminy-type things and seeing the stuff I missed last time. The Pompidou Centre was predictably impressive. The Palais de Tokyo was full of strange things for me to note in my wee book and make esoteric allusions to in later writings. The Cite de la Musique was holding a Serge Gainsbourg exhibition - titillating. Afterwards I wandered through the autumnal Parc des Buttes Chaumont and around Belleville, using up the last of the film in Yann´s camera on wistful shots of young families enjoying the last hours of sunlight.

Dee, my work friend from home, was also in Paris, and we timed our Eiffel Tower ascent perfectly - looking out over twilit Paris from the second level just as the lights above us started their hourly five-minute flash fest.

Yann and Juliette took me to bars and parties with their lovely French friends, all of whom apologise for their English even though my French is clearly so much worse.

Kicking through the fallen leaves in Parisian parks must be one of the best things about living there. It´s insanely beautiful. In the Jardin du Luxembourg little kids use sticks to prod little sail boats across the Grand Bassin. Those lucky little bastards.

Paris Paris Paris. So nice, in fact, that I´m heading back there today to enjoy my last weekend in the northern hemisphere. The longer I´m away from London, the more unbearably bleak that city seems, so I´ve chosen to spend as little time there as possible, getting the Eurostar early on Monday and jumping straight on my plane at Heathrow without looking twice at the various circuses.

Next edition: Spain and Italy, really.

Bite-sized Deutsch - contains nudity

No one likes reading a long blog. This potato isn´t very good at motivating herself to write long blogs, either. So we will cut our memoir into digestible pieces. Beginning with the latest: Germany II.


I returned to Berlin and the ravishing company of Amy and Adrian the Saturday before last. Our week was filled with arty stuff - multiple exhibition openings which we attended with Vivian and Liz, also visiting from Oz.


Berlin was well and truly freezing by the time my second visit began, and it was a wonderful, warm relief to spend one evening in a German sauna, where the five of us paraded around nude with the best of them. We withstood the hourly towel-twirling - what a strange job that would be, ladling water and tea tree oil over the hot coals and making a helicopter while about thirty naked people sweat and flinch and rub ice all over themselves. We hurried into the cold showers. We sat unperturbed in the freezing courtyard and watched the steam rising from our legs. We dozed under enormous cream blankets, then woke up and started all over again. Afterwards we went for curry at a tiny place that Amy knew. I thought I´d never be cold again.