veeko in madrido

sitting in hostal one puerta del sol, sipping me agua and listening to ´roooxanne, you don´t have to sell your body to the niiiight´ (before was eddie vedder. fun times). the lovely weekend is nearly over, just waiting (in air conditioning) for fifteen minutes until beginning the journey to the airport and home to zurge… eeee! smeagol and i had a lovely time, my friends ana and carmen took us out friday and saturday night to crazy local bars, you know the ones you find after walking down numerous creepy dark alleys, through a nondescript door, up six floors in a four person elevator, and out onto a bustling roof where waiters are rushing around with chairs dangerously close to people´s heads… and then another place the next night called the mushroom house, a tiny room of painted stone with fake mushrooms growing out of the walls and a random window of stained glass…. oh, and wedged in the middle of the tables was an electric keyboard and crazy hairy man eeking out enough cheese to cover all of madrid. there we met their friend victoria and her friends - she is an incredible singer, even after several jugs of sangria. i´ll post the video soon, she sang Volver, guantanamera, others i don´t remember. i waswedged in between the back of the pianist and her - kept thinking ´how did i get here?´ and shooting smeags looks of ´…seriously?´

went on a day trip today to toledo with Leslie, an amurrc´n from the hostel. we didn´t have too long to spend there but had fun wandering the alleyways, and then took a punch-me-i´m-a-tourist tour on a tram-train .. thing. which was actually a good idea, because we didn´t have time to walk through the whole city centre, and the tour provided historic facts and legends about the different sights…and a nice breeze. i loved that the archicture has been influenced by christians, jews, and muslims - so cool.

being here really makes me miss that feeling of the kind of travel grime you accumulate after so many different buses and trains and dust. tim calls it getting back on the horse, the same feeling you get when traveling by motorcycle. well, minus the bike. but still, traveling with a load. but i also really miss canada - lemonade and theoretical talks on the deck, and lying on the hammock, and windsurfing and friends and love and family… glad i´m going back to switzerland first! i miss zurge too, hee. kind of glad that i nver ended up finding a job there. so blessed! time for endless airport wank…

 

madrid gets a vickick

made it! i was nervous last night about traveling on my own, but now i´m back on my feet and actually DOing it i remember how wonderful it feels! i actually enjoyed getting up at 4am, waiting for the train in the pre-dawn light is such a crazy feeling (though i feel for the poor buggers who do it every day). i managed to get a seat on the plane next to 2 empties (was supposed to have the aisle seat) so i slept for a bit, and then fandangled my way through the metro system and found puerta del sol, which is under construction. from there the directions to the hostel were “exit metro at cdsfasldkj exit, turn 180 degrees, see neon blue sign saying petit trepe, walk through to calle jaroeijf…. yeah… it´s the middle of the day, there´s constructiony tarps all up the sides of most of the buildings in the square, no neon to be seen…. two minutes and two scoops of ice cream later, i felt muuuch better, and proceeded to wander at random until i found the street i was looking for. the hostel is actually on Calle de Victoria, so it was meant to be. and what a nice place! so homey - there´s a loungey bit with a tv and dvds, a reeeally posh bathroom, free internet on their computers, a little kitchennette bit (and i had the sense to copy down some addresses of markets). staying in a 4-bed dorm, off a side street by the big main square, surprisingly quiet (first floor up). wooden floors, clean sheets, comfy bunks, happy veeks! sooo good…. i had forgotten the feeling of being in a completely foreign world and the total freedom of it.
 
one odd thing though, i slept on my left side during the flight and when i sat up for the beginning of the descent found a very sharp pain in my left ear. it wasn´t popping properly and the pain was building, i tried everything i knew to make it go. i don´t think it was full of water or earwax. eventually the pain began to go away. it´s gone now, but i´m more than half deaf in that ear. hoping it´s not permanent damage???? (eep?)
time for further exploration (after crashing for two hours, didn´t get much sleep last night, true style), and then meeting Ana at 630. the whole reason for visiting madrid specifically is that Ana and Carmen (natives) did an exchange to U of G last year and stayed in my flat. obviously i´m going to visit when offered… and meaghan ross comes tomorrow, just in time for gay pride! (suckaaaa raz - but i wish you were here)
wish me luck! and send prayer… lots of love,
vic
 

crazy dream 7/7

why i woke up sweating:

it had become increasingly more obvious that we were trapped in this place, though the fear had spread slowly because of its immense size and twisty grand hallways. at first we tried to hide everywhere. there were officials in uniform marching about at random, but as if they were guarding a treasure, not moving objects, not human beings. then the tickets started to get handed out. a girl crouching under a staircase was suddenly handed a blue ticket, an airline ticket, and then the officials beckoned her to follow and she did, meekly. she was led away and the spot under that staircase became vacant. there was ample suspicion. but then the blue tickets became more frequent, it was as if they didn’t want us there anymore, had no reason to keep us; which we believed. girls and women crammed into the high places, everyone still in their nightgowns, calling out and reaching for the tickets as they went by. the joyous look on the faces of recipients created such a deep yearning for those small slips of paper.

finally i was given one, a blue ticket. i followed my official away from the tense crowd and through a series of corridors, some of which i had already explored in the night. but they all looked the same, high ceilings, white walls, wooden parapets running up and down. torches on the walls and stark white light from nowhere.  stained glass in some places, people had congregated under these at first, praying. but the light behind each  pane was fixed, not daylight. there were no other windows. this was some kind of prison.

i was led through a large wooden door and told to stand on the other side at the foot of a small flight of steps. at the top was another door, looking much more like the kind in an old house. one official stayed to watch me through his globular black goggles while the rest marched away down the hall. something was happening at the top of the stairs, behind that door, but i couldn’t tell what. i asked the officer what was in that room and was told it was for medical examinations. i believed this for thirteen seconds before he said without warning, ‘Go. It is your turn.’

“What kind of examination?” I tried to keep watching him but I was already moving up the stairs. i pushed the door open into a dark room, in which i knew someone was sitting very still. the door closed behind me and i felt eyes on me as i tried to adjust my own sight.

“Come in,” came an older man’s voice. there was a sweet smell in the air, as if everyone had just eaten a particularly nice apple. as soon as i moved forward an inch i began to feel better. the man asked me my name, and other details, and scratched them down on his pad of paper. we were in a small room, with chests of drawers pushed against the walls to make more room, and a bay window at the far end from the door. it was stuffy and warm, but i realized that the ceiling was back to standard size and accounted it to this. the curtains were drawn and the only light in the room came from distant sodium glare through the drapes. as my eyes adjusted and my body accepted the space i discovered the other person in the room. whoever he was, this silent being, he was sitting against the windows so that i could only see his outline, which was very large and a bit triangular, his head making the tip of two sides angled way out. he did not move, and as far as i knew, did not blink.

i became giddy in the sweet air, relaxing all my fears and chatting away to the man on the wooden chair with the pad of paper. he would mutter things in response to my natterings, some of which i heard and retorted to, which seemed to impress him, and he made more notes. ‘Very heady’ he muttered once as he wrote, to which i said ‘Yes, but only because of this air, it’s made me giddy,’ which i must have worked out but didn’t fully understand even as i spoke it, ‘Really i don’t usually talk this much. my favourite thing is to climb trees. i just run straight up them. well, not run, more of a climb really, but you get the image.’

he told me they were building a new city, an entire new world. everyone had to make sacrifices to shed the old faults, and that after the transition was finished we would be new beings, fresh and whole and unblemished. this sounded ok to me. but then he said “you have to be reborn”.

“Reborn?”

“Yes. That is why i am writing down different things that make you uniquely you, so that you’ll be the same person on the other side.”

I thought about this for a minute. then i said, “could i have a tail? like a monkey? because that would make climbing trees a lot easier, you know.”

The man thought, and smiled, and made a note. Then he closed the pad and turned towards the figure against the orange light of the window and said, “it’s time.”

i was beckoned forward and told to sit on the floor in a small round spot, near the feet of the massive, unshifting thing. in the shadow i couldn’t tell what he was, whether he was blue or had seven eyes or a scaly back. i could hear his breathing now that the scratching of the pen had stopped, ragged and shallow. he picked up two pipes beside him out of the shadows, which looked like they belonged to some large smoking mechanism. then he moved one end to his mouth and put the other at my thigh and began to suck in. “ow!” i said, and pulled away as far as i could, which wasn’t a very effective amount, given my enclosure. the gargantuan thing made a sound, a laughing sound, which rumbled through the floorboards and up my spine. the man with the pad of paper chuckled too, and crossed the width of the room to a large machine i had taken for stacked furniture. he pulled knobs and twisted latches, pressing buttons until it whirred into life. satisfied, he angled something toward me and returned to his chair.

“What is it?” I asked, good feelings gone.

“A radiation machine. we have to nuke you before you can be reborn.”

“WHAT?”

“You’ll be regenerated inside Scallag’s belly,” said the man, pointing to the thing by the window. “First you need nuking, and then he will slurp you through those pipes. the radiation will make you reform more quickly so he can birth you very soon. Just relax…”

At this point i began to struggle. i hadn’t realized that i was sitting in a snug bowl, with sides now gripping me, unbreaking. i looked at the machine, it’s ugly head pointed towards me. the noise of it changed from a whirring to a deep chug, chug, and a whine. i was stuck. the more i struggled the tighter the bowl gripped me, my knees against my chest, arms around my knees. i looked from the machine to the man, and back again. i didnt’ look at the creature whose feet i sat near. i did not want to know what sort of thing it was. i wanted the old man to take pity on me, to let me go and send me to a real airport where i could use my blue ticket and go far, far away. i began to cry.

“don’t worry, it won’t hurt. it won’t take long. look at me, look over here. here, look out the window,” and he pulled back part of the curtain. the bottom ledge of the window was very low, and i could just see the array of city night lights twinkling a long way away. from the corner of my eye i saw the side of the looming mass illuminated, and looked away. i had glimpsed rolls of grey flubber, dotted with small spikes and spineties. i began to feel something in my stomach, a feeling like i was being liquidated from the inside out. i turned back to the man, panicked, and he told me to sing. so i sang. i looked out the window, through that small corner he held open, and sang myself out. the last thing i remember hearing was the hungry slurp of the pipes…

fact of the day: all tissue boxes should have to colour the second last tissue a bright colour, so that you know the end is coming.

 

“hiking” lo carno

there’s not much better than staying at a sound therapy clinic built in 1080AD by Romans, etched into the side of a mountain, made entirely of stone, and owned by a lover of good wine and food. rooms full of gongs, floors covered in sound bowls, instruments from iran, tibet, india… except setting out the next morning with a pack twice as light as the south africans you’re traveling with (a little scary, until the discovery that the difference was made up of bottles of wine, coffee makers…). the first bit up was lovely, bathed in sunshine, we passed cows and goats grazing, and then some serious up, into snow territory up. my feet (in tennis shoes) started to winge a bit, but i still felt like i’d never have to eat again. the tiny lake we meant to have lunch at, and maybe a swim, was still frozen. the up got a lot more serious and then turned into steep down, which was tricky because of the stream flowing underneath the snow, hollowing it out. apparently we’d been told the snow was all melted. still, we made it to the hut with only scrapes and wet feet. hut = stone thing a million miles from everywhere, nearly impossible to find with gps and maps and altitude readers when snow and landslides have obliterated any path. by the time we found it everything was beginning to look like a roof or a wall, mirages in the mountains! though i think stranger was waking up and finding that the mist had made islands out of the mountains in all directions, so it looked like we were on a moving massive lump that might collide with other lumps like the goop in lava lamps. the way back the next day involved a lot less snow and a lot more glacial streams cutting out huge chunks of the path. but there was a path! extra win. we made it around and down, and walked along a road beside a river back to the nearest village with a bus stop. 8 of us in total  - t&d, bjorn and hester, lauren and ignatius, ian (all south african), et moi. it was a pretty couply few days, but full of mountain silence and jokes about “you know, we’ll get up at 2:30, and do a loop of these two peaks before breakfast, ya?” and “it’s ok, my leg, it’s just broken in a couple of places”. Bardo’s two children Tenzin and Sangay came with us on the walk back to Locarno to the trains on Monday, and we stopped at a glacial river (where we jumped into 6 degree crystal clear water). Bardo(?) gave me contact info for a guy in Basel who knows people in India (I still want to go; he had taplas!), and a cassette tape. he claims haydn’s concierto for cello #1 is the most peace inspiring piece of music. he had a tapestry on the wall from egypt covered in arabic, the 99 names of Allah (the 100th is unspeakable), and would start something important with “you must know this…” in his heavy german accent. he sings in overtones, reaching 36 different tones while most monks only do 4. he was bursting with knowledge one might find in dreams or an ondaatje novel - for example, in Bhutan, if a child is sick it is taken to the Lama and the doctor, and sometimes it is decided that he or she has the wrong name - you give a child the wrong name, obviously it gets sick. so you change the name and maybe he/she gets better. there are maybe 20-30 names that are the most powerful; a different way of thinking from the western ‘let’s be as unique as possible’ approach. there was so much more, i wish i could have written it all down…

and now we are back, home to whizzing cars and showers and computers… i can see why some people work purely to support that lifestyle every weekend.

 

everything comes in tubes

it is 33 degrees out and snowing pollen… the parks look funny though, the grass is covered with little fluff balls. i don’t yet have a job, but there are still places to apply. for now i’m enjoying such luxuries as not working, including stealing timmo’s music, sitting in the sun, learning to count to ten in german, reading books (”She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep wiht a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.” –Ondaatje)… i haven’t explored much of zurich beyond routes to the lake that i’m familiar with and straight roads from there - for some reason i find it much easier to get lost here than other places.

last weekend i met turkish space engineers through a friend of tim….apparently if your IQ is a number i can’t count to, this is the place for you. one of them introduced me to paragliding - running down/jumping off a mountain. !!?!?? eleventy one times more better than jumping out of a plane or off a bridge. i’m hoping to be productive, even if i don’t manage to run off any cliffs. it’s nice to finally have time to do simple things like making music, even if it’s a million degrees… i am at that stage in tanning where in the creases of my knuckles the skin is still pinky/white, so i look good n’ dirty :o). just need to find someone to pay me to wash their dishes a few nights a week so i don’t get that knotted feeling every time i double take and see that yes, that is in fact the sale price. time to turn up m ward and eat some frozen raspberries before biking my course waiver forms over to microsoft for faxing…

 

being in europe solidifies my appreciation for what architecture can offer, which reminds me today of how much of a family can seep into walls and creaks in floors and cupboard handles. i know i put a lot on things like that, little things, i guess i’m sentimental. just thinking about how much love has circulated at the house i was born in, and the memories stacked in every room… i really hope i don’t lose too many of them when i no longer have the geography of it all as cues. i really want to invest in a video camera.

what is important about the small things i do that i don’t share has changed, which i realize only once in a while. if i take a series of photographs of different door knobs, or witness someone else’s life changing from my window… relevance shifts when i remember that i will forget. and then again when i do remember much later, just for a moment, like a piece of a dream. and i don’t think i can pinpoint it anywhere near exactly so… i’ve forgotten my point… i’m grateful for what i haven’t lost. so often, always, on a beautiful day, i walk in the rain or in the sunshine and am happy to just be walking, to have the sky to smile up to and the people i love to think about. but sometimes i wonder how many times i come to the same small realization as i am there walking, thinking it’s for the first time, and how then can i ever grow? i circle back to this question often, sometimes with a satisfactory answer.

did i mention that i easy-tab’d the Globe theatre last week? yeeeahh…. mid-serenade in the opening act of R&J a battery died and i bent down to get a new one… couldn’t resist. (hearing aid batts come attached to a little sticky “easy tab” for decrepids to fumble with as they swap dead for new. aka instant fun in sticker form.)

time for sleep….on the most fantastic pillows ever created… thinking of restarting a dream diary, since i’ve been unable to remember some really good ones lately (you know, when you remember it being epic, but not how…?) zurich is amazing. the trees are like mountains. wisteria grows wild everywhere. i’m going to be so pissed if they suddenly invent teleportation when i’m 93 and people can just pop to wherever they please… there’s so much that i wish i could share with everyone.

night!!

 

zurge

i’ve arrived… it’s been a long, airportful day, but i’m here and whole! sitting on my bed listening to the whirring technology around me and the cars outside - it’s hotter at 10pm here than it is at midday in London. the traffic noise reminds me of guelph, which seems strange, since i was here first. i guess i was there longer. can’t say i’ll miss that townhouse…especially not when i have bay windows to look forward to…. Daneille made a wicked supper (but i had bloated airplane tum, even from a short flight) and we watched I Am Sam. tomorrow life here begins! for now i’m sittin waiting for this warmth to turn into sleepiness, or for someone to go on chat. 6 hours is the most stupid time difference. but it’s so nice to have warm feets!

 

just home from my first ever baby phoebe visit! so CUTE!! and so smart, i don’t think i’ve met a 4-month old so with it before. obviously. she’s lovely though, we went for a walk around the park where i realized that the reason i wasn’t getting any disdainful looks for being a young mum was because it’s so normal here…hemhem, i mean, because people are so much nicer… and then a lovely supper with chris and kate and back to beckenham to settle in for the evenink. - where i now feel just like i did at age.. 7? 8? 9? who knows… i was biking back from the corner store and i met mum in her car. i had gone for sugary sweets, naturally, and she made me show her what was in the bag on my handle bars, and then had a screaming fit at me because i had bought so much. what i was never able to explain was that she had actually caught me when i had bought at least twice as much as usual, i think because i was going to spend the night at a friends and was preparing, or something like that. anway, the feeling now is that smugglerish feeling - the one i had before meeting mum… like i’ve gotten away with a prize - aka i realized i’m in chocolateland and not abusing it nearly as much i should be, so i ran down the road and have come back with smarties and buttons and maltesers :o). so i’m all set for a film (from meg’s vast collection) and then bed. the phoebster has injections tomorrow, so auntie vic will have to cheer her up after - which would be a much easier task if she was able to eat chocolate…

 

londonnn

i’ve arrived….heck i arrived days ago, what am i talking about. but if you expect me to remember an exact number of exact days then you should reconsider how well you know me. i’m in beckenham, sitting on my bed in the spare (blue) room with my stuff already spilling all over the floor. which may not be such a wise idea considering the visits from furry 8-legged friends… i shall be the first to transport avian-swiney-spidery-flu from gatwick to zurich… DUN DUN DUNNnnn..

i still haven’t adjusted to the time change, which is odd since i had a really nice night flight over and actually slept for a bit. but here i am blogging at…6pm cdn time.. haven’t changed the computer yet, maybe that’s my problem. or the lovely lie-ins. i still don’t understand why i have such a bad time the first few days i arrive. i don’t think it’s the jetlag, i think it has more to do with being here on my own and having to adjust to that. :o( poor vic blah blah.. i know i’m still very lucky.

visited most of my favourite places already, and have been enjoying the smells and sounds like finding an old lost teddy bear. met with hannah and uncle bob (and his navy mates) for supper at an indian place, which was very nice. baby amber is very sweet with big blue eyes, and i get to meet phoebe tomorrow, with luck! went to church tonight with meg, where we listened to a polish symphony while watching holocaust images and then chatted about it, but never really got to the point of why god allows suffering. i was a little miffed. still, pam&steve and helen&hugh send love and seem well.

i guess what i need to do is give in to the fact that my plan of not having a plan when i arrive here just doesn’t work. i leave it too late to send snail mail to family who don’t have internet and then figure i’ll just call everyone when i arrive and fit into their schedule, rather than imposing myself into their busy lives. which is how i end up bored and lonely and wandering around familiar (and amazing) sights. coming before uni here is out doesn’t help much. still, i’m on holiday, i made medium-good tofuey pasta tonight at mum’s suggestion, and i have the whole of the internet to complain to. and romeo&juliet is playing at the globe all week for a fiver…. which at the moment just keeps reminding me that i didn’t get into the stratford semester at school, but hopefully i’ll get over it soon. i haven’t missed the boat entirely but they’re going to have a really great class this year, wish i was doing it with friends.

for some reason yesterday i picked up an application form at my favourite little shop called tribu in camden, they were hiring and i picked one up as i was asking about the music they were playing. who knows, maybe the airports will shut down around the pandemic and i’ll be forced to work next to the best market for fried delicacies this side of the moon..

and it looks like i won’t be able to get a hang drum after all! still going to go to bern though, if i get the chance. they’re basically impossible to get second hand on the internet because they sell so fast, but i don’t think there’s any harm in visiting the workshop. flying out on the 12th! can’t wait :o)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_(musical_instrument)