thefruitsofmytravels

Okay kiwifruits,

I fear my previous post may leave me misunderstood so I wanted to clarify my thoughts on art.
Kids these days have certain expectations made of them, I should know, I am one. We are brought up with the notion that the world lies in wait for our genius and ourselves, in wait for his possibilities. You can only imagine the disillusion we feel when we come face to face with this world we’ve heard so much about and realise hes not the demi-god our parents and predecessors have made him out to be, in fact, he’s a bit of an arsehole really.
Our suitor goes by many names, life, the world, existence, reality, but none of these prepare us for the inevitable shock that ensues. He is nothing of what we have been told. To parents and peers, he is charming and charismatic, promising everything. Behind the closed doors of our everyday lives he is not the man history portrays him to be; He is cruel and callous with no intention of giving us anything. He is not interested in our talents nor our passions. He has no time for our ideas and no patience for our excitement.
Glorified by the glossy pages of magazines and the beautiful prose of our contemporaries we find ourselves in a limbo that art has created in life’s honour. He has been canonised and thus become so ego driven that he takes this worship art has of him as gospel and we live each day through a biased lens, nothing ever matching up to the glory that was promised by art. I know art meant well, I do, but there are good deeds and good intentions and they are yet to meet and come to an agreement. The philosophers taught us to think and the painters told us what was beautiful, the writers manipulated words to inspire the sensations we should feel and now photography, film and television are collating these “raw” sensations and projecting them before our very eyes, wrapping life up in a beautifully wrapped package we can never open because when we try it is just paper-thin layer upon paper-thin layer. We remove the pretty pink of our childhood and no longer see through rose coloured glasses. Then the red is shed when love fails to live up to the romance created by the harlots of history, blue is torn down the middle when we face the prospect of 9-5 until, after years of sitting in front of this package removing layer after layer becoming more and more despondent all we are left with is black.
Our arranged marriage thus ends in disaster and we flee this life of loveless unhappiness, stifled ambition. We grow old and we grow wise and we realize we don’t need life and so we create a life of our own and live each day anew, enjoying an undiscovered beauty, cultivating an untold tale. It may not have the same fairytale quality of that which we were originally promised but it is real and it is our own. We pursue our passions, happy in the guise of mediocrity. Our talents may go unnoticed, our thoughts and ideas unheard, our history unwritten but we are living a life of truth and integrity. Away from the glitz and glamour of arts life, we rediscover life’s arts instead. We find a love less enamored of its own importance and appreciate the simplicity of true love. We find a beauty in things less adorned and discover an intrigue in things ordinary. And, if I may paraphrase the words of Australian poet, Roger mcGough, “we seek dreams more mundane, ambitions more easily attained and at the end of each day count our successes (adding 10 if we go to bed sober) by thus keeping one pace ahead of ourselves we need never catch up with the truth”, The truth that life is merely a boy whos mother told him he was special and so he went on to do great things, he became admired in vain, idolized, but he was just a boy, he could never live up to these things the arts painted him to be and so he became bitter and corrupted and thus is the legend of life for that is all it is, a legend. After all life is what you make it, anyone could be arts muse you just have to convince him that you’re worthy.
XxX

Hey blubes...or alternatively blueberries,

You know Las Ramblas? yeah you do! i KNOW you had your photo taken with the scary men dressed up as monsters who are too real to be fake and i KNOW you too thought to yourself, ‘I knew it! Bronzed winged creatures really DO exist, and chuckling to yourself thought they’re fooling us all! Well not me. And then i KNOW you walked away with a smug look on your face’ - well Raval is to the right of Rambla. Raval, hold up?! where the shit did that come from. Honestly - my arse but alternativly, my mind because i was thinking, a burden but I bear it and i was thinking, ‘I reckon raval deserves a blog entry because that shit is wack’. And so here i am, trying not to digress into conspiracy theories of bronzed, winged creatures too real to be fake, trying not to be distracted by the old buildings of Barri Gothic or expound on expensive exaimple or be swayed into mentioning the bright lights of Pl Catalunya - I’m going to try to stay on point, the point being - Raval and its awesomeness. Its like one of those places you could get lost in for hours and not have to spend a single cent, though if you had some sense you would spend your cents here rather than the tourist traps of H & M or Zara (I’m Australian too, I understand its an easy mistake to make as Sportsgirl is hardly a worthy substitute). Raval is where all the cool kids hang out, where the philosophy department of UB is, where the Museum of Contemporary art is, where this random shop I’ve posted a link to below is, where the skaters show their sweet skills, where the best second hand shops are, where the cheapest asian supermarkets are, where the coolest art shows are, where the indie zines are erected, where the skinny jeans reign and the the cool kids complain, where the buskers have the best beats and the b-boys breakout - basically, Raval is the shit and not to be missed when burying yo head in Barca. Good talk.

XxX

So goji berries, what up? I'm just gonna launch straight in..

My Friday is the start of my weekend in Barcelona. Since I’ve no classes on this day I venture into the world of sleepy satisfaction a day earlier than the usual. This day was spent inside the pages of Australian Vogue, a small pleasure allowed to me by the crossing of seas to English speaking Malta the weekend before. Sometimes its nice to escape into the sexy world of pretty pictures and lacquered layers; of overpriced consumerism and hyperbolic commercialism. The rest of the day was spent reading the terribly staid English prose of E.M Forster, which may have been the catalyst for events that would follow later that evening.
Fast forward past the incredible lunch of white bean, avo and tuna salad and into the double doors of Marias old world piso. She cooked an amazing spag bol that won our hearts while the 5 bottles of wine won our minds. We bonded with an American boy in Barcelona, aka her bf, Greg over rap and reality. The clock struck 12 intuitively, as the last drops of red were consumed after which we left the house to go to The Moon, a bar on the corner of Calle Provenca y Balmes. It is here I believe that the real story begins. Bikini is a bar we had planned to go to if the mood struck us, the mood had struck us. As we were leaving the moon we were accosted by two very respectable looking young men, both of whom were Catalan and obviously rich and arrogant enough to ask two girls for their number after a half a minute conversation in broken English, yet we consented and left thinking nothing of the exchange.
After Bri convinced the bouncers that we were both on the list in her broken Spanish we entered Bikini and went straight to the toilet, hmm possibly irrelevant detail yet honest and in the words of Christopher Mcandless, “Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness… give me truth.” Aaanyways, moving on… Bikini, has two rooms – one with Salsa music and the other full of girls in Bikinis, no I lie, its usually house music but the way the girls dress they may as well be in Bikinis. Naturally we gravitated towards the Salsa room to show of our sweet sweet skills – 10 minutes later I realized I was white and sat down to watch while the guy I was dancing with went to get his feet bandaged. Bri however was quite the natural so after breaking that poor boys feet I gave him Bri as a peace offering. They danced for two songs in a row and as the general etiquette is to move on after the song is over, I felt entirely redeemed. I never realized before but despite connotations of Salsa dancing, the hips and arse quality of the dance falls to the wayside as the song comes to an end. Its all very civilized, they kiss on each cheek, the guy asks the girl for her name and they walk away and find another partner as if they were in the elevator together and had reached their floor. The evening saw White Shirt, as he came to be called, sweat it out with more than 10 different partners…slut.
So my initial salsa awe grew into acute jealousy of the oh so sexy and coordinated couples and we had to leave but the other room left a lot to be desired so we decided to call it a night early, at 3 in the morning :|. Someone wise once told me nothing good ever happens after 2 am, actually I think it was an episode of How I Met your Mother but anyways I should have listened. As we were walking in pursuit of the exit Bri got a phonecall, which changed the course of our evening dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnn. No nothing so dramatic, (or was it?) just a drink with the nice Catalan Boy (or was it?) in a bar (or not).
So we jumped in a taxi to meet him at a bar but when we were on our way he rang to say the bar was closed and preceded to give us the coordinates of another place. As it was pouring with rain, we took shelter under a shop awning amongst 5 recently confirmed (as in confirmation, as in the catholic right of passage) teens who were celebrating with a night of drunken debauchery, ironic much? Religion is a total wank much? As our memory had grown a little hazy we weren’t sure of the exact appearance we were looking for until a hand waved us across the street from underneath a huge umbrella, like unnecessarily huge, like an umbrella designed for, how you say, ménage à trois. At the time we were just grateful for the shelter so we rushed along the street and into a building. As we mounted the stairs and he unlocked the door to the apartment that was meant to be a bar, it got weird. His apartment was HUGE and BEAUTIFUL and AMAZING and pretty much lulled us unto a false sense of adventure so we decided to stay. While he was in the kitchen getting us our choice of Heinekin from a ‘selection’ of beers Bri posed the probability that he wanted a threesome while I said something like, ‘don’t be ridiculous, he just wants to have a civil conversation with two young, foreign girls in the privacy of his own home’. He wanted a threesome. It took him the next 2.5 hrs to get to the point while we discussed everything from politics to art to Salvador Dalis rumoured sexual fetish for getting off on human excrement (or as Bri so eloquently put it, ‘you know pipi caca’ (which is Spanish childspeak for pee pee, poo poo). Its times like this that I seriously wish I had a recording device. He was totally honest with his answers and we were totally candid in our questioning which naturally led down that windy road of the taboo.
Eventually I grew bored of his boyish clichéd questions and suggested to bri that we make tracks as the sun had begun to show itself. It was at this point in the evening/morning that his intentions became well and truly clear when he blurted the words, ‘have you ever had a threesome?’ We burst out laughing at the predictable, and answered in the negative. His answer forced a repeat of the previous laugh, ‘yes once with two American girls’. Total. Boy. Cliché. Ahh slutty Americans, why must you perpetuate the myth and stroke their egos? So as if by telepathy we decided to humor the poor boy in his little fantasy. After a few minutes of rejection the suggestion lay dormant and his next suggestion was a greasy pizza on a napkin of sordid intent, ‘I love to watch movies on my projector, do you want to see it?’ we said ‘yeah why not’ and ended up in his room. We spent a brief moment admiring the projector and the movie Maria Antoinette (weird right? but he was weird so go figure) and after sufficiently sleuthing the bedroom, declined his invitation to watch said movie and went back into the lounge room.
This guy was the perfect character that you would expect of such a cliché. He dressed impeccably, in that metro, gay-ambiguity kind of way, spoke 5 languages, was clearly loaded, traveled all over the world with his job in Graphic design and wait for it, was the middle child between two sisters. One word: Freud. And I’m not gonna lie if he’d had a plane, looked like Jarvier Bardem, was a bohemian artist and propositioned us straight up maybe I would now have to drink if a threesome came up in a game of never-have-I-ever. BUT, he was none of these things so our response to his second advance was, ‘you’re going to have to do a lot better than Heineken and Marie Antoinette’. Shortly after which we left, as the room was well and truly bathed in morning sun and since his initial veiled intention had become clear the conversation had become curiously repetitive until the curiosity into the minds of men wore off and we left.
It was surreal roaming the streets to get home after such an evening, for a short while we were accompanied by a Scottish boy and nearly went for a beer but thankfully kept walking and finally at 7am (5hrs after ignoring the 2am warning) fell into a long overdue slumber.
Saturday saw us scattered and hungover, perpetually and unwittingly stumbling upon Catalan culture as if to continually remind us of Mr Catalan from the night before. Its amazing in Barcelona, you can leave the house to get a key cut and stumble upon 4 girls dressed as gouls tapdancing to thriller while a jumping castle is erected in the middle of the street and market stalls pop up offering empanadas and emerald rings. Later that night you leave the house in search of dinner and walk amongst an army of Barcelona football jerseys, and are forced to squeeze through crowds of people spewing onto the street and midway through the squeeze get swallowed up in the euphoria of a home goal and deafened by a chorus of Messiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. You continue on your way and stop to have a dance with a different crowd of crazy, carefree Catalans to the tunes of a 7 piece band fronted by a singer sporting a sweaty mullet and the contagious hip thrusting moves of the 80s.
Sunday was a day of rest, reflection and recuperation.
Ahh the land of Catalunya, or Cataland as I affectionately call it, such a special place….

xXx

Hello my little carrot tops,
As I type my fingers are a flash of tan across the keyboard as I just got back from sunning myself in the land of Maltesers. It’s a magical land, with a crispy centre and a creamy coating, full of sensible shoes and simple pleasures. Maria and I set out on our trip at 3 in the morning after having made the decision it would be best to drink ourselves into a coma thus missing the 1.5hr bus-ride to Girona airport and subsequent flight to Malta. For me this plan went swimmingly, albeit solo as Maria got caught skyping until it was time to leave thus missing the many virtues of alcoholic slumber. We then spent 2hrs enjoying the delights of an airport at 5am, and boy did we delight! After dutifully polishing off one of the airports recommended pastries and indulging in the social commentary of people watching we boarded our flight and crossed an ocean leaving Barcelona for a week of sunshine and happiness.
On arrival we instinctively sought out the bus system that would take us to Valetta, the capital city (I use the term “instinctively” loosly as the buses are bright yellow and usually with some sort of religious sentiment spread across the windshield – we were lucky enough to get “the power of love” bus, together with stuffed toys hanging from the ceiling). On arrival we ventured through the bus station, stealthily avoiding the many sellers of delicious Maltese breads and pastries in search of breakfast. We obediently followed the signs directing us to “the Malta experience” where 5 men sat beneath the sign talking about stuff, something we found to be the Malta experience everywhere we went. A sign invited us in, to have a full English breakfast for 2 euros 50, naturally we were persuaded. My chair broke, it was awkward, a graceful fall, but awkward nonetheless. We spent the morning walking around the city trying to blend in with our cameras slung round our necks. We went to the markets I bought a scarf and a tea-towel. What?! Its for my nan K. After haggling the price for a horse ride down by 5euros we triumphantly set fourth on our requisite tourist indulgence (only to later find out by our couchsurfing hosts we had been ripped off by 15euros). Tired from all that sitting we went and sat, to drink wine. and beer. and wine. in an excavated café that took us 15minutes to find as it was a tunnel in the rockface.
After having exhausted our people watching commentary we ventured onwards, to Spinola Bay where our couchsurfing hosts lived. This little bay was so cute, as with all of Malta it looked half finished and still under construction but this just added to the charm of the place. It was like a little fisherman’s bay with tiny little colourful boats and water that tried to fit in and be as blue as the boats. My outfit coordinated perfectly with the boats and the blue and yellow phonebooths. As it was only 3oclock and she couldn’t meet us until 530 we did some lying as we had done enough sitting for the day. I went swimming, it was cold yet delightfully refreshing. After meeting up with Laura (probably a little too excitedly as it had been a long day and we were a little emotional) we shopped for food and cooked a feast – chicken, mushroom and pesto pasta. SO good. Their house had a terrace looking down into a jungle of what I thought was weeds until I looked closer one morning and saw a little old man collecting beans, bag full and slung over back he walked back to his tiny house (that I had previously thought a ruin).
We spent the next day in Sliema organising a boat trip to Gozo and Blue Lagoon and the rest of the day at Golden Bay receiving as many cancer rays as the sun would allow. In order to organise said boat trip we had to bargain along the strip to find the best deal, each time we went to a new person they told us stories of their competitors to deter us, apparently we were among thieves, liars, cheats and pedephiles. Lovely. That night we watched the fireworks from a boat, made friends with two Dutch boys (of indiscernible age from anywhere between 16 and 22) who had missed their boat and spent the whole trip contemplating swimming the length to get to it, finally calling a family over in their tiny boat and asking for a lift. They left us a full bottle of Amaretto. Win! With them gone, we were left talking to the salty old sea captain Nick, whom we chatted to safe in the knowledge he was more than triple our age, naively we accepted free wine and food and a lift home and in our drunken euphoria accepted his offer to take us round the island on his boat thus giving him our number. It wasn’t until the next morning we realised his impure intentions as we remembered the conversation following his offer: us, “how much will it cost?” him, “Oh you can afford it ”. Nothing is for free my friends. We then got creepy texts with devil smileys and at our refusal “I’m too old for you anyways”, ya think?! We thus realised the error of our ways and vowed never to talk to sweet old men again.
The next day we were picked up at 8am to go on the boat trip to Gozo and Blue Lagoon where we made friends with a sweet old man on the bus. We ferried across and bussed around Gozo looking at cultural shit like churches and stuff. Our bus driver was about 4ft. We ordered a bottle of wine for lunch and rabbit stew, we sat with our wine and our shawls being middle aged having a lovely conversation with a 60 year old British couple. I complimented her bright pink lipstick, half in jest – she gave it to me, I wore it, I was a vision as you can imagine. Then we got a speed boat to Blue Lagoon and I went all gilligans island on that shit exploring the cliffs and swimming and playing like a small child while Maria sunbaked like a 22year old. That night we had a dinner of maltese cheese, anchovy stuffed olives, prosciutto, maltese bread, and bean dip. Win.
The night we had gone to the fireworks and charmed quick nick we had also come home to a house full of frenchies (and swedes and a Norwegian), and somehow invited ourselves to a party at the Norwegians. So the next night we went to said “party” with Laura and Tibo. The “party” theme was western but pretty much an excuse for this Norwegian guy to dress as a sherrif and serve drinks from his tequila belt (I’m not gonna lie, it was actually pretty cool, the belt I mean). When Tibo pulled us aside and said “this is really boring” we agreed and left shortly after.
The next day we went to The Blue Grotto, but it was stormy and overcast so we couldn’t explore the caves and crevices on the colourful boats. Fail. That night we made an awesome soy chicken stir-fry and afterwards Tibo and Laura drove us to Mdina, the walled city. It was amazing! Only residents can drive cars in and there’s no horns allowed. It was a really cloudy night and as we walked through the tiny deserted streets it felt like we were walking through ghosts, the residents shushed me from their windows. It was awkward. We went to a winebar with a view of the whole of Malta. We ate cake and drank wine. Win! After that we drove into Sliema again to continue drinking. We walked along the water to get to this little shisha-bar where the water was literally lapping at the edges. We sat on colourful, hippie[dirty and possibly lice-ridden] rugs and drank cider and listened to the sweet sounds of the ocean, well I imagine that’s what we would have heard had they not been playing ounce ounce electro. Oh yeah and these random guys asked us to take a picture of them with OUR cameras, they practically insisted. That weird right? Its weird!
So this last day was the best weather of the whole trip, our skin was just recovering and BAM we fried the shit out of it again. We decided to go to this cute lil place for brunch. We were so seduced by their business philosophy which was all peace love and brown rice that we completely forgave them their shitty shitty service, (going back for cheese and cocktails that evening we could NOT forgive them the mojito – fail). We ordered orange juice and they were so excited about their fresh produce they pulled me aside and explained in frenzied enthusiasm that the oranges had JUST been picked less that half an hour ago and they STILL had dew on them!!!!! His smile was so sweet and expectant, I felt compelled to engage in the excitement of it all. (The juice was a total win ps.) After breaky we had to get a bus to Golden Bay where we would walk along the limestone cliffs and explore the nudist gay beaches. In the excitement of it all we forgot the bus number and after cursing maltas bus system realised it was entirely our fault and sulked until the right bus arrived after having waited 45mins and even completed a survey (did you know Malta is an up and coming medical destination – huh.) So here we are at golden beach on our way to be all Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (I was Tom obviously) and we unwittingly stumbled across the hottest gardener ever, like, ever, like you know that sex and the city epi…well he was hot. But maybe we had been so scarred by our experience with Nick any guy was a win? These beaches were ah-mazing! The water was blue and speckled with snorkelers (I know they don’t count as nature but they kind of make it feel like a holiday ad campaign, you know?) and there were rocks and crevices and naked men and crev…well anyways it was definitely hmm how you say, inspiring.
The next morning we said goodbye to our beyond lovely hosts and flew far away from the land of Maltesers, within seconds the island had been reduced to a speck in the ocean. Amazing!
And that my friends is why Maltesers are awesome. Good talk.
xx

Hey you...you, little, orange...juices?

So it has been requested I describe in excruciating detail the ambience and aesthetics of the pubs and clubs of Barcelona. So I’ll start with my local, Gato Negro which means the black cat (insert evil music). Its like left over Christmas decorations in Jamaica in April. If that makes sense? There is a projection of green and red lazer dots on the walls and strobe Christmas lights strewn across the walls. There are three rooms, one to the left upon entrance which, is usually full and spewing out into the bar and the other is at the end of the bar and the other adjacent. A somewhat redundant wall separates the latter two sharing a window in between with a Jamaican style blind thing with a picture of three women playing bongos which as the night progresses and the alcohol enters vains they become nuanced with phallic intent rather than the three innocent women playing their bongos. The toilet is shared between male and female patrons and usually blocked up as with most toilets in Barcelona. The beers are 1euro, which I may have mentioned in a previous post but the secret word is Voll Damm as it means you get the strong beer as oppose to the regular if you don’t specify. The air is thick with smoke smelling suspiciously of weed and there’s usually a couple sitting in the corner having sex, well who may as well be having sex. Stay tuned for electric bar bow bow bowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

XxX