Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: tourism

  • winter blast

    Try to work out whether I can afford to get back over to Ghana to see my sweetheart, I asked a friend: how long will this pretty autumn weather last? We know all too soon it’s going to get misty and grey and damp and bitterly cold – but when?

    Oh well, he said: November is the greyest month. You could go in November and miss the Nieselregen.

    Nieselregen is a kind of drizzly slushy snowrain that gets inside your spirit and rusts it out.

    Or, he said, December is ok because everybody’s looking forward to Christmas – and at least if it rains, it might snow. But you could go in January. January is the coldest month.

    January seems to me such a long way away, I said, in a very small voice. We were sitting under the trees in a quiet marketplace and had large beers in front of us.

    Go in February, he decided. Because by February, even Berliners are sick of it and everybody just wants to stay in bed for the rest of their life. At least in March, the weather is still horrible but you can feel the change approaching. Like, ‘Just sixteen more weeks til I’ll be wearing my t shirt.’

  • I spoke first

    In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,

    “Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”

    Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”

    People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.

    “Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”

    “That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.

    “Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”

    This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.

    Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.

  • men in dreads

    Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had jangly sandals on display and drooping felt hats so dusty and untouched they might have been made for Stevie Nicks. “There she is!” cried the taller one, swinging hip length dreads. “Our sister from another mother.”

    I stood still, as they must have guessed I would do. The expression on my face was conscious, self conscious, enquiring. “We have met before,” his companion told me, “we spoke with you the other day.”

    I was quite certain I had never seen them before but fear of racism held me silent. Later I wondered how many Western women they trapped each week using this same trick: liberal women, hippie women, who are afraid of seeming prejudiced. Who feel responsible for the prejudice of others and when they travel the world, labour to make up for it.

    “We love your walk,” said the man in dreads. “So free and you walk like a soldier.” Do soldiers walk free? Aren’t they more inclined to march? But I knew what he meant. I was striding and looking about me. I was swinging my hands. African women, I suppose, undulate.

    There is a faceted splendour in all the people round me that keeps me always smiling and staring. I love that we find each other so compelling. People stop me in the street to say, “I love your height.” Men say outright, “Give me your number and I will call you.” I spend all day saying, “Thank you.” I say, “Thank you! Good evening!” “Thank you, but no.”

    I buy a ripe plump mango and the stallholder slices it for me with a curving blade into the palm of her hand. Walking home I eat it with a cocktail fork. I buy a Coke bottle filled with popped millet, like tiny buds of popcorn, and groundnuts – peanuts – which is perfectly salted, and in the morning I pour it on the bowl of mixed fruit I have chopped up for breakfast. My companion has never seen fruit salad and he looks askance at my heap of mango, banana, papaya, custard apple, and popcorn. Then he starts to eat and we both fall on it, good, delicious, fresh. I was not keen on the goat gizzard skewers. I am nerving myself to try grasscutter on a stick, which is a little rat-like creature grilled over the coals and eaten off a skewer. I buy kelewele, which is plantains rubbed in spices and grilled at the roadside. It’s sweet with a toffeed sharpness round the rim. I buy a coconut and the man lops it expertly, and after I have drunk the juice he chops the wood open so I can gouge long loops of slippery flesh and drop them like fishes to a seal into my mouth.

  • East German joy

    Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.

    I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”

    These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.

    I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.

  • the young man with a long way to go

    The young man in the place where we are staying is Moroccan and comes from the desert, which he describes to me as ‘sympa’, sympathetic, a kind place. As opposed to the hustle and throng of the medina where people greet us ‘welcome, welcome,’ and return smiles with great warmth and ease and employ the most genteelly probing sales techniques in (they say) the world.

    This young man is named ‘given by god,’ or ‘gifts of god,’ and we looked up his name in a list of the 99 names of Allah which, I only slowly realised as we were discussing these names with a nearby restauranteur, are perhaps not so much names as qualities. God the good, god the great, god the compassionate, god the wise. Similarly it dawns on me, belatedly, decades after the life on Java I so cherished as a child where we lived between three mosques and stayed indoors during the ferment of election week, that the prayers which play continuously in some hole-in-the-wall shops in the souk are not petitions, in the sense that I would understand prayers, in the sense I sometimes grope for in extremis and despair, longing in the depths of my pained heart to have someone to pray to; they seem perhaps more like resolves embedded in long and winding stories. And so they came upon a beautiful oasis. And there they could water their camels and have something to eat. And so god said to them…

    I am improvising, here. Who has any idea what god might be saying? not even the solemn Jehovahs Witnesses who came to my door with their beguiling brochures and then, when I grew just a little too interested, felt honour-bound to warn me away from the technicolor gloriosity of the illustrations. “This only… artist impression of heaven.”

    Ah – then. But god or, as I would put it, kindness, knowing, understanding, meaning, the connectivity of us with the world and with one another – a kind of exalted humanness, in fact – speaks to me in the trees and in the wind pouring through them; a sort of devotional prosperity I have dwelt in since childhood, when I used once to wander the markets in Jakarta and the coconut groves on the shore opposite Krakatau in a scintillated state of constant and ever-changing concentration.

    So, Gift of God has come to the city in the north, leaving his desert homelands behind, and he tells me he has been here in Fès only three months. He had a job in another pension but it was a bad place. He came to this house a week ago. Ah! I say, cupping his shoulder with my hand, from the side rather than from above because of the war between affection and a horror of condescension. Then you have been here only four days longer than us! Yes, he says, creasing his face in a serious, shy smile.

    This morning as I was lighting out across the courtyard with my books in my bag this young man approached me on his soft shoes. Would I like my breakfast now? I said, You know, thank you, but actually I think I might go into the adventure and just eat somewhere on the markets, today. Oh! he said, and dropped his head and an expression crossed his face that hurt me, as though I had hurt him.

    “It’s not because I don’t like the food! It’s just – I wake up and go, I’m in Morocco! And so I just have to go out and…” On the sunstricken square my lengthy sweetheart joined me where I was so deep in the book I was reading, a book about politics that I find difficult to understand, that when he crossed the sun and grasped me by the shoulder I started. Around us gentlemen of Morocco discussed – I imagine – politics, I imagine their talk is dry and knowing and cosmopolitan, world-weary, courteous, and wise, I hear words which are the names of countries and think, they are speaking of world events. The first morning I was almost too shy to sit down and had to approach the cafe, whose restful shelter I craved, by way of a huge loop up and around the street before I could cross the road at a tentative, oblique angle and ask the courtly waiter diffidently in my execrable French, excuse me? am I allowed to come in here? even as a female? I was the only woman in the cafe, almost the only woman in the square, and when I wanted to go downstairs to the bathroom they flew into a flurry of small-scale preparations and I was handed a door handle, by which to access the second stall – for women and for, I guess, tourists, as it has a Western toilet and sometimes even a roll of paper.

    The second morning I sat down in the blaring sun at a tiny table and was moved almost to tears when the man who had been sitting by me yesterday and whom I had greeted said, inclining his head, “Bonjour,” and even asked, “Ça va?”

    To have a courteous neighbour, who is reading the newspaper in Arabic and a battered paperback in English; to sit in the sun, after months in wintry Deutschland – it sends me down into a contentment that is very much like sleep.

    The young man in the pension, Gift of God, smiled his grave smile on our third night in Africa when we asked, where would be a good place to eat. He told us he had made a very small number of ‘connections’ in Fès, since he came here three months back alone, and his friend Mohammed runs a good place, very cheap, under the large tree which is a landmark as there are so few trees in the medina at all. “That young man has a long way to go,” says my companion as we cross the square. and for a few moments I am startled, before it clicks into place: that he will go far. We eat at his friend’s cafe, treated royally. We practice the gesture courteous Moroccans use, of a hand pressed level across the breastbone, touched to the heart, moved, thank you, I am sorry. Walking the medina I also use the fellow gesture which takes place a little lower, pressing across the tummy with my other hand, saying, “On a manger.” I hope this means, thank you, we have eaten, and use it to reply to the touts who hand laminated menus outside every restaurant (“We have wine!”) My German companion thinks the tummy is called the stummy, and recently revealed in conversation that to him this is because the stummy is the seat of all stamina. This makes sense. Stomach, stumina, stummy for short. Now I find out he is calling the guys who hawk the restaurants ‘shouts’, perhaps a better word than touts. Meanwhile in German, he says, I make ‘sweet’ childlike errors in a thicket, or fog, of laughably elaborate courtesy. Elaborate formality – to a German! that kingdom where a Keep Off the Grass sign will begin: Very honoured forest wanderers and forest wanderesses, please be advised…

    So on our first week in Fès we navigate our way with his terrible French and my awful French and the few paltry words of Arabic we have learned: principally ‘choukran’, thank you (hand across heart), and ‘la choukran,’ no, thank you, to which I’ve improvised a kind of Bollywood head-waggle of the hand.

    By the fourth night the influx of new sensations and sights have exhausted us and we go back a second time to the same restaurant. Mohammed greets us with cries of warmth and manifests a place to sit when almost every seat was full. He flaps the fancy tablecloth like a magician producing a bunny. I watch him do this over and over, I remember the rapid-fire thought processes and sly courtesies of hospitality work and comment, when he comes by to tip more bread into our basket, that it is like surfing. “Yes!” he says, jubilant, “exactly – like surfing.”

    This man has learnt all his English by listening to customers and he asks, what is the word in German for I will be awaiting you. Germans sometimes say to him, “Vielleicht später,” maybe later, when he offers a menu. We search among our words before lighting on Ich bin für Sie da, I am here for you, explaining this is “very gracious,” making gestures of graciousness like a king. “Ah!” he says, satisfied, Moroccan: “Ah! Yes! That – is most important.” He asks us to speak it into his phone so that he can learn it, and I take a photo of the two them with their sweet heads together, listening in on one departed French or Spanish or German tourist after another, speaking in all their different voices the phrases which comprise his vocubulary, each of them adding a drop to his store of hospitality.

    To my right, five Chinese students are spending the night with their phones. They are so absorbed that even when food arrives they ply their forks round it, scrolling onwards through the fascinating replacement world. A commotion of drums festers in the distance, around a corner in the narrow lane which is hung with handicrafts for sale. “Hand mad” says a sign above the racks of point-toed slippers. “Prix fixe.” I have seen tourists walking through the busy markets with expressionless faces shielded by devices set to continuously record, and I wonder how it must feel to be videoed a thousand times in a year by people who don’t seem to bother to even acknowledge one’s humanity. The students issue their drink orders (avocado juice, banana and orange juice, freshly pressed, with sugar and without) free from any thank yous or any please and Mohammed presses his palm across his heart as though it aches, saying in English, “Thank you, guys, I bring it right away, great, please, certainly.”

    The clatter of drums is coming nearer and I am craning to see past the French family who have stationed themselves in the passage to wait for a table. Two men, gaily dressed in such bright robes and complex festoonments my eye cannot grasp them, holding up their tiny drums, the skin of the drum painted with henna, stamping their soft leather boots and singing splendidly – I ask if I can take their photo and the taller says, “Foto!” and they both fall to attention, and then he puts his cupped hand out and I realise I have no coins. Mohammed is passing with a clutch of creamy avocado juices from the stall across the way. On his way back I put out my hand. “Est-ce que vous pouvoir me louer un peau de l’argent pour les musics?” This doesn’t exactly mean, Can you please lend me some silver to give to the musicians? but it’s the closest I can get.

    Sure, he says, without pause, digging in his pocket and showing me the coins. He selects for me and presses them into my palm: three, four dirham is plenty.

    At the end of the meal we want to pay and I say, “Plus the four dirham,” and Mohammed looks puzzled. “You lent it to me, for the musicians,” I say.

    “Ahh!” He shakes my hand, pressing his heart. “My friend.” “Thank you so much,” I say, “We love it here, we love your restaurant,” and behind us the French family jostles forward, scenting seats at last, and we say goodbye to the other Chinese students on our other side who have been telling us they woke up this morning in tents in the Sahara and could see the ‘galaxy’ but it was spoilt rather because there was ‘no service’.

    “You went on a self-catered tour?” I said.

    “No service,” the good-looking leader repeated, jabbing his finger at the sky. We walk away, tired in the stummy and thinking as we come home how extremely gentlemanly, how classy it is of Mohammed to have lent me the money for the buskers and then to have instantly forgotten the debt. Morocco seems to me so complex and inspired, I have the feeling of a rich, fine intricacy, am rejoiced to see how gently and tenderly anyone with a disability is handed up the stairs or into vehicles, I see the brutality, I feel my heart aching with the real inevitable charge of life that in ‘our kindergarten countries’ as my Berlin companion has called them this week is simply absent, or at least invisible, and when we are not afforded the luxe protection we experience as our right, we sometimes grumble at god, who has not given enough, whom we can call on with praise for sparing the floods our children, as though this were not an insult to the humanity of all the other children swept and drowned, as though the Acts of God excepted in the fine print of every insurance policy were not just and not our desserts, but rather an interruption to the service we expect, and for which we would pay nothing but our words.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • to meet my father

    I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity.

    My mother says, you’ll find him much changed.

    I’ve barely spoken to Dad since his cancer swelled and got into his bones. It has taken him over only slowly. The oncologist gives him so and so many months still to live. Meanwhile the effects of the stroke a decade ago slow his walking and, sometimes, his concentration and that makes it harder for his body to cope with the disease. What will kill him, it seems, is one in the string of pneumonias and influenzas that have infested him since he’s been in and out of hospital. An iatrogenic death: caused by the healer.

    Dad is so generous and has faithfully tried to be a good father to us. In recent years he has taught himself, probably at my brother’s prompting, to say, awkwardly, “I’m very proud of you.” On the rare occasions when I speak to him over the phone he says, every time, “I love you, pet.” He never used to say this. If I said, “I love you,” he would say, “I love me, too.”

    I find these feats of compassion to be particularly moving as his own father leapt from a bridge when Dad was only twelve. His brother was ten and their baby brother three weeks old. Sometimes people’s opportunities to learn parenting skills are so cruelly limited.

    On Saturday I will fly out to Frankfurt, and then to Bangkok. This was an innovation we cooked up because I need to turn up healthy and strong and not be one more member of an unwell household ailing and needing care. When I first flew to Berlin the thirty hours’ travel left me trembling and unable to rest, I was swimming uphill, underwater, and though I was sick with hunger trying to eat made me vomit.

    The thought of leaving Berlin as the hot weather finally unfolds, and of flying in to Brisbane where winter arrives in inverted commas, fatigues me more than I can say. I have just gotten settled and it’s taken me 18 months. I’m so slow to adapt. Parts of me stay behind, or perhaps travel by the old seaways. I have looked up the forecast for Brisbane and it’s planning to be blue, beautiful one day, perfect the next. Mum says, “There’s a cold front coming, in Tenterfield they’re predicting snow.” The weather channels show rows of cheerful whole suns, and temperatures similar to Berlin in the Spring. So I guess I’ll be wearing the same clobber I’ve been wearing these last sweeter months.

    In Berlin now Spanish tourists are beginning to cycle past in the street bare-chested. Girls come out in their fluttering dresses, like pennants; there’s a fashion for unpleasant prints. All the tattoos are on display and we’ve seen the first way too stoned person of the season, sitting on a bench under an invisible sack of cement, their eyes so round and so sore it looked as though someone had drawn in cartoon rings.

    My father’s muscle tone is so deteriorated he finds it difficult to swallow. He has to eat sitting forward, with supervision and great care. So I have chosen out for him all the disgusting comestibles he loves, in the softest forms possible: raw meats, and potted intimate organs, all the indelible edibles with which shelves in a German deli seem to me literally to groan. I’m going to make him builders’ marmalade for breakfast, which is Metz – raw pig mince – mashed with raw onion and served on bread. I’m going to tempt him with Sülze, a kind of jelly quivering with the flesh of a pig’s head and sundry choppings of gherkin and carrot.

    As well as the pulverised raw meats in glass I have a light jumper, four fresh new blank notebooks and a jar of ink, six books to read, and my sunglasses for crying in public places. I have all my old familiar fears and they’re heavier than anything. I have visions of our plane catching fire in the engine and plummeting out of the sky, extinguishing in the giant ocean, coming to rest in the plastic-loamed sand. I pray that an accident won’t happen. I pray Dad will be there when I get to the house, for there is no one now well enough to come pick me up, and I’m planning to call him and tell him so. It’s hard to say goodbye but it would feel even worse never to say it at all. To say: fare thee well and thank you. I will honour your name. I will never waste the kindness you showed. I have loved all the love.

  • the true markets

    On Sunday in the midst of strife I had a most wonderful day. Met an acquaintance who wanted something from me, and we walked into a foreign land so familiar that I fell into my childhood, and the sweet world intricate and divine which sustained my deepest breaths when I was seven, nine, twelve, eleven rose up in me and about me again and the trees were all there, we knew each other, the soft wind… I cannot describe and no one can transport that essence, the spirit of the place wrapping its tendrils like

    a delicate sweet love

    like a plant which is birdsong, a vine divine

    or like the bride of the forest who shyly beckons shadows, and sings underwater, and has rooms for all our grief.

    You walk in through the trees and there are people everywhere, eating and chatting. I took two hundred photographs. I remembered wandering on my own in the pasar, on the markets, in Jakarta

    alone but never alone, and the trustfulness held in the colourful world back then. Adults were sexy and cool. They didn’t impose. Nobody touched me. Only the lady, the old ibu, wrapped in her thin scarf who took hold of my head in Blok M and cried all over my face, down my neck, her reddened betel-nut tooth stumps, and her grace and words: this child, this girl, she has depth, she is in the world, she is a soul I can see, she is one of the ones.

    I can’t remember her words. But I will never forget the shy proudful sensation of her touch on me and her recognition, down from the mountains, the cave with a wall solid behind it which creates a resonance.

    On the bright Thai food markets which began, my Peruvian friend told me, from the longing people had to scent and taste their lovely homeland

    where food is beautiful, and fresh like birds, cooking a kind of singing

    not all pickled, roasted, brewed, we found Asia in Berlin. The laying out of rugs and seagrass mats. The bright umbrellas and bold plastic implements, lime green, orange, blue. All the families squatted comfortably at their esky tables and their cardboard carton frying-boxes, each carton spattered inside with dark from the oil splitting off in the toiling wok –

    There were stalls everywhere, low at ground level, people squatting on their mats pounding and chopping and skilfully frying things. Freshness drew me and my acquaintance, who had said “I will be there for you in this hard time” but in five hours asked me not one question about all of my news and myself, down one grassy alley after another, under the trees, and out in the big clear grassy field. I overheard a Berlin punk on his phone saying, “We are here in the Hauptfressgasse,” the principal pig-out aisle, “come find us,” and the sky

    with its inimitable piles like God’s geography, pleasurable, transient. The sky was a beast you could watch for hours straining its leash. And then the train home so swaying and fast between the treetops and the speed was exciting, the lurching and long corners, the sense of riding rapidly above the grimy familiar streets and swinging, like an ape so joyous in his homeland, vine to vine, hand to hand, song to song – that was all I was conscious of. It was such a relief.

    I wouldn’t say I was drunk. But I was so very, so very, just so relaxed. A lady under a purple umbrella with a carton-top of bottles, the world’s smallest, freshest bar, mixed up an unholy powerful brew. In Thai German Spanish she said, “You want capina? You want mosquito.” I chose mosquito. Then she sliced the lime with two sharp chops, into the palm of her hand, with a cleaver and crushed it in the cane sugar with her big pestle. Mint leaves then she filled the whole beaker to the rim with gold Havana rum. “Drei Euro.”

    Clear tubs with jelly shapes swimming bright and glutinous in the milk, milk of the coconut, mother that travels long seas. The plangent scrabble and wail of unselfconscious Asian voices, familiar in my oldest memories and so sweet and salty and spiced and honest to my ear. Berliners roar, a guttural beery spume: in blaring Jakarta the screeching, the Bulgarian mountaintop want of modulation, the intensely modelled fineness and discretion – that is culture, or one early formation of cultural expectation, to me.

    People sitting crouched around a frayed mat under the trees were throwing yellowed dice high again and again, some unfamiliar game printed on the cloth they had spread between the five of them. Little children kicked their legs. I ate and ate. Every mouthful seemed precious. The fresh feisty fruitfulness, realness, diverse sprung view. There were plates of fried insects, sweets wrapped in banana leaves, hot spicy soups. Bright pink milky drinks and bottles garlanded in flowers. I had satays, dumplings, green papaya salad threshed in a trophy-sized mortar which filled my mouth and throat with remembered fire. The high thick combing trees foamed around the park, a large, open park, almost concealing the buildings. We could have been anywhere, we could have been in the Seventies when adulthood was a charm I held inside me. Could have been in the tropics. Could have been out to sea somewhere in the congruent, lasting, more intricate world, that was built by many hands and had trees and is gone.

  • Olé au lait

    When I travel I am never alone because always there is the companionship of my shyness. This sometimes feels like a long shadow I drag over things (‘allo, scuse us, thank you, pardon me’) and sometimes like a large soft yielding mass I work my way through to reach people, to reach the surface: the world, spiky and free. Cities are terrorising for a shy person. At the same time I fall into this kind of trance of exploration and love where I can spend a whole day feeling my way up hills and round corners and scurrying joyously from one shadowed alcove to the next, under trees feeling the spent light curl up inside itself and sleep on its own downy belly, like so many dormice, striking out into the sunlight and forcing myself – by dint of a good hard short talking-to, you can do it c’mon just do it, to stride across the diagonal length of the largest square in Spain for example where hundreds of people in throngs stand about pointing their implements at the view (stonemasonry, cafes rooved with white umbrellas, and the freemasonry of each other). Most mornings it takes some courage to leave the sanctuary of my room. I walk into the breakfast bar. People in Germany and Spain seem to greet each other in such situations, in Australia that would be only me. I gather my comestibles: yoghurt, tea, fruit. I put the room key in my pocket and step out into the day.

    In Madrid the days are blue and whole. The sky runs freely with very often no clouds of vapour dissolved in it. From the vantage point of the ancient city you can see mountains, towns, all of Spain. Coming on this vista unexpectedly down a narrow alleyway between the little high houses I catch my breath and start to cry. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful, it’s reached through an endless twisting byway: like the past.

    On my second day I fell into a little bar and cafe called the Cafe Olé. As well as cafe au lait they serve spirits, wines, beers, and a raft of different kinds of open-faced sandwiches including one variety loaded with solid chunks of solid Spanish omelette, tortilla. It’s almost Germanic, that one: potatoes on bread. The lady who cooks brings out tray after tray and people wander in out of the sunlight and order, familiarly, stand there and eat. I discovered the sweetest, lightest pastry on earth. I went back another day and had it again: the coffee and the pastry cost two euros. The third time I ate it I discovered it is made from a transverse slice of baguette soaked in egg and milk, what on an English menu we would call French toast: a babyish kind of comfort food with just the right amount of sugar through it. The bread dissolves into light, fruity custard. They serve it with knife and fork. I was so happy there, eating my torrija and soaking up the atmosphere like bread sucks milk, the soft feeling of being included.

    Later in my long visit I found other places where I felt at home. The city itself felt welcoming, ancient, its splendour laid open and well-worn. Finding oneself tripping down a turning side street with some enticing view hovering at its end, finding oneself saying out loud without really intending to, “I just – feel – so happy here!” You know the affinity with places. I noticed the needling cypress trees and their green dark clots; the way they seem to sift the wind and sough it into a cradle song that reminds me of islands, distant and far-offshore islands, and afternoons spent on my own as I wandered the hillsides of my grandfather’s old farm and laid my face reverently, familiarly on the warm stones with their mottled discolouring like an old lace badly stored, greenish purplish blueish white grey colonies. And mosses, the velvet of ancient things and my favourite plant. It all feels so personal. Like the fold-down table off the back of a stranger’s seat on the airplane I seem to have been boarding and reboarding every month or two since I was a baby. That private space unseen in the public glass, the back of the mirror, inside of the knee. The pinkish smell of my own fingertips. The plants that grow in between stones.

    A lady who runs a shop in a large, chill, drafty barn halfway up a steep hill with an unfamiliar flag hung out the front told me, in labouring English far better than my almost-nothing Spanish – español silencio, the Spanish of silence – these things are from Malawi and she visits every year, they are running their own school in this community and the school children and their families make these products – apart from those over there (her white arm waving, a hanger of bead necklaces and assorted things), “Those are from French.” “French?” I said, “so, a colony?” Yes, she said, “things of my French.” Looking closer I could see of course she meant second-hand, these were things friends had donated: a handbag with the tag still on, an ornate belt, a necklace of shells. “This,” she said, “I make myself. In my terraza,” the courtyard of her home. It was a cake of clay soap which she wrapped for me in newspaper, explaining, “Is very good for the soft sky.” For the sky. “My sky,” she showed me, stroking the belly of her forearm invitingly, “very soft, very soft.”

    The smell of Malawi is like the smell of Java where I grew into my childhood and where I have never been back. The Java that I long for doesn’t exist anymore, the outer islands have been logged, the mountains hollowed for high rise and bridges, everything ruined and mined. We won’t talk about that. I went back afterwards to the Cafe Olé and sat there gazing and writing and that is where I gradually came to terms with the place and its strangeness and my strange attraction to it; the sense of knowing and belonging that I also found in old Lissabon, with its needled cypress trees, its castled mountain tops; its alleyways, its tiny, remote, yet intimate vistas. I gave the bar tender my careful request in Spanish, marshalling my few dozen words: “por favor,” “cafe machinata,” “decafinado,” “miel.” To order a pastry I could only say, pan bread and azúcar sugar: sweet bread por favor. All I can do in Spanish is eat. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Australia.” “Ah,” he said. “When somebody come in… who is friendly… open-minded, like you: open heart: they are always Australia. Or… Irish.” I smiled at my hands. He said, shrugging, “To us… you look English.”

    In a flurry of Spanish he turned to the older man sitting at the bar, refilling his glass of some creamy liqueur. “Something, something, Australian,” he said and I tried hard to eavesdrop. The one or two words one gleans in a spume of an almost entirely new foreign tongue feel like shells vouchsafed by the sea: there is so much more, beauty, so colourful and alive, in the rolling deeps under this enveloping foam. The bar guy pointed at me, explaining something. They both nodded, their gazes resting on me as I ate. “Cafe delicioso,” I ventured, and he smiled: all warmth, no malice, free.

    We sat in silence in the quiet cafe, which is dim and all clad in dark wood. Dusty things stand on the higher shelves above the rows of glinting liqueurs. Right up top is a wooden matador, proudly erect in his faded scarlet togs and with one hand rearing up almost to the yellowed ceiling. We sit like birds under the shelter of his masculine wings. The tomatoes on the sandwiches are very red, no white in them, their seeds a dark greenish orange and filling the gleaming segments like jam. I stroke the soft sky on my arms. A beautiful woman comes in, glamour clinging to her like light from the street. She reminds me of Jennifer Lopez, only older. Casting off her garments and bags she sits down on the stool next to mine. After a long long time I put my hand on her forearm like a moth. “Bella,” I tell her, probably in Italian: “muy bella.” I am? she asks, pressing her hand to her breastbone. “Si.” And she says, something something, your eyes: showing me by opening her own very wide and indicating me from one eye across to another. Very… something, much something else. I would love to know what the beautiful Spanish lady said about my eyes. But I can’t understand and say thank you, and we lapse into silence, the two men also, the bullfighter magnificent and motionless above us standing guard over the ages: he is holding up the ceiling, roof, the whole soft sky with only one hand and the cargo carved modestly in front of his matador pantaloons seems to my shy glance so imposing from below it is as though we are all drinking coffee in the shelter of its fruitful shade.