Scandinavian Skullduggery

Well, not quite. Maybe my ad lib title reflects my memories of visiting the Historik Museet today, looking at old viking swords and the loot won with them.
I´m in a quiet Stockholm suburb called Älta.

I love searching for the Swedish letters on the keyboard `ö´ , ´ä´, and my favourite ´å´ (pronounced ´awe´) Once again the immortal verdict of Vincent Vega comes to mind. They got the same shit over there they got here, but there it´s a little different. Just three extra letters. My old friend Johanna maintains one good reason for not taking her husbands name (Stål) is that it has a Swedish letter in it. ´Causes so much hassle when you are travelling´.

I have been learning a very specialised set of Swedish vocabulary The words I´ve learned, Johanna reminds me, aren´t very sophisticated or even useful. I can say ´hut´, ´doggy´, ´blanky´and not a lot else. You might have guessed - I have been spending quite a bit of time with her one year old.

I thought Norway would make me a bit homesick. It actually made me feel comfortable, it was so like New Zealand. Well, New Zealand at sixty degrees latitude with a very cute lilting language. Sweden seems more, well, developed. Stockholm (pictured below) is a real city, the kind that roars a bit; the mountains are all up north; and people are nationalistic without a sense of irony. (There are 30 or so specified days a year when traditionally you raise the Swedish flag on the, ahem, flagpole in your garden)

Image: Windowlicker (CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike Licence)

Nature is still incredibly close to hand. Just like Oslo, the forest starts before the city ends. Beautiful mixed forest of birch, pine and fir, smelling amazing, with a carpet of wild blueberries. Sprinkle liberally with small lakes and you have yourself a nice wee hinterland. I´m having a good time.

(Image: public domain)

Summer lovin...

Jaumes Meneses (Creative Commons AttributionSharealike licence)

Bags not sticking my finger in this baby.

Summer solstice and it is one of those days that seem to shout joyously at you ´you´re overseas, friend, and it is bloody weird over here´. From the copious windmills to the orange furry top hats on the tram, it was a very dutch time indeed.

image: Greg E (CreativeCommons Attribution-Non-commercial-Sharealike licence)

Mum and I are staying with Brian, a family friend, resident in an outlying suburb of the ´Dam. Together we drive to Harlingen along the giant dyke the dutch forged over a decade in the 20's and 30's. It´s a huge wall of rock, bricks, sand and now motorway that turned what was once a bay into a lake. (The original plan was to fill most of the bay in, but after a few polders, the locals valued their new lake more than the land that could be claimed from it.) ´With typical Dutch romanticism, they named it Afsluitdijk, which means the closing dyke´ Brian drily quips . We stop at Harlingen, the port where it seems most of Holland is leaving for the freisan islands, riding bikes loaded with several months worth of camping supplies strapped to any possible surface

Oh the bikes in the Netherlands! I could rave for hours. H.G. Wells said, ´When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race´ I´m the same, so in the Netherlands I am optimistic to the point of absurdity.

Image: Gen Gibson (creative commons attribution licence)

On the return trip to Amsterdam I follow the thinnest of leads concerning a gig by an up and coming soul band and we end up in the dormant satellite town of Monickedam looking for what I assumed was a little festival… Besloten Feest. After asking some locals and receiving some skewed glances, someone finally cracks the code for me… it is not Besloten Feest, but a besloten feest – a private party - one I wasn´t invited to and had little chance of finding. Luckily I have a good plan b, which is going to the city centre to watch the…

Hurdling the Language Barrier.

Comfortably back in a country where I can speak (almost) my mother tongue, where visiting the library provides an embarrasment of riches, I reflect a bit on the struggles and joys of learning French in France.

Bravo for the experience of going somewhere where you don't speak the language, and trying to learn from scratch. I'd love to write about this in French, but two months with little writing practice... I'd be here all night!

France, was in some ways an easy place to try my experiment. For one, not many people speak english, and even less like to. Lots of opportunity to practice speaking. Second, there is the abundance of French words (debut, hotel, sautee...) and phrases (de ja vu, haute cuisine, en passant...) that have passed into English. I learned quickly however that there are 'false friends' - 'Chef' for instance means not only the one who cooks, but any sort of boss, a 'crayon' denotes a pencil, and the 'curiosities' of an area can be major attractions.

The huge gulf between spelling and pronunciation also provides a barrier for the cold-start immersion learner. To try to hurdle it, I taught myself a few phonetical symbols to get my head around the French vowels and dipthongs.



Much to the delight of my friends, I could never master the 'r' sound. When I tried to imitate the strange growling gurgle of my teachers, I would usually end up sounding like I was trying to throw up. Some days I practiced the sound, but the motion of pulling my tounge downward inside my mouth caused me to feel nauseous!

Why do I like the language? Well, as popularly observed, there is the sexy, exotic sound to it, but that impression faded the more I learnt (perhaps it was because many of my early sentences were about dumping rotten grapes into a huge trailer). It seems like a powerful language, like Arabic, where one is capable of both the most soothing sounds and equally harsh guttural utterances.

Then there is the great French literature... I aspire to, but may never read Moliere, Apollonaire, Proudhon, Derrida (pictured), Focault, Rosseau... the list could go on and on. But at least I can say I can enjoy and understand the mighty Asterix in the language it was written in. Mais oui! Ah yes.>



It makes sense to me too, to 'miss out' the ends of words as the French do. In conversation, any ambiguous meaning can be sifted through other cues, and so shortening words is no real problem. In print, however, it makes sense to have the full word.

And I'm not sure whether it was just mon amis, the company I was with, but I learned many colourful phrases. To be egotistical is to have 'the melon', presumably for a head. To be really hungry is to have 'les croc', to have fangs, or 'le dalle', a stone block. Curiously, modern urban French slang involves switching the phonemes in certain words, an itbay like igpay atinlay. So 'bizarre' becomes 'zarrebi'.

Can I speak French now? Not really. Could I return to France and use my melange of French, hand signs and the odd stray word of Spanish to make myself understood about day to day matters, even make people laugh with me, not at me, and understand someone who speaks slowly and clearly? Yes. One thing I believe now is that communication depends on patience and creativity much more than simple language profiency. So why learn other languages at all? To be able to say "Ils sont fous ces romains"*, of course.


*These romans are crazy

Bonne Route

I am in a small town Lilande, on the Dordogne river.

Why? You may have read about my weariness of trains and my longing for the bike. Well, with my first income for several months on the cards (Tomas jacked me up with the sweet wine harvest job) I splashed out on a bike, and locks, and rad panniers that turn into a backpack and two bags.

And so I venture forth into Acquitaine, self contained, dodging the rain, feeling a little pain, (eating le pain, but that doesn't rhyme, I am discovering)

I'm intrigued by the prospect of the river valley turning into a gorge; much more so by the fact that this area is positively chokka with Neaderthal and Cro Magnon caves with their paintings and etchings and so forth. So I'm gonna go see them, of course. When I was little I dreamed about finding dinosaur footprints in hardened mud somewhere: this, I think, might be even more astounding.

On the other hand maybe I will feel like a man who has been a tourist for too long.




So far on the trip I have had two lovely encounters. One was a French couple inviting me into their house to watch the All Blacks vs Scotland, accompanied by sausage, bread, cheese, beer, then chickpeas, onions, barely cooked meat, wine, more bread, more cheese. Jaques was keen to practice his English "What do you think of the organisation of the cup?". Joele was more hardcore. "in my house," she said (in French), "you speak French". So I get frustrated and manage a few sentences an hour, but she teaches me a Moliere quote À vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire.

In Sante Foy de Grande I meet Matt, an English guy who is in the middle of a years stay at Plum Village, a Buddhist community founded by Thich Nat Hanh. Worldly and kind, he is a fascinating character. I hope I see him again, perhaps when he is travelling the world as a clown.

Salut!

I'm in Bordeaux, the city (by the way, if you are french, the region we call 'Bordeaux' is called 'Gironde') staying with the charming Tomas and Eloise, who I met in Cudillero in Espana.

I love learning French. I finally get to use my nasal twang for some real phonemes!

I have just spent a couple of hours writing up my late August travels. Tonight we will go to sit by the vast tidal Garonne (maybe I will see some more Coypu) and probably drink red wine and eat pain et fromage (bread and cheese). Voila!

On leaning.

With the others heading back to their lives in the UK, I decide to be a tourist in Italy for another week or so, before making my way East to Bordeaux, to see friends and cut grapes. First stop is the nearby Pisa. The tower is cool. The other tourists are spectacular. At any one time, I can see at least three different individuals taking what one blogger calls the Obligatory-Dorky-Hold-up-The-Tower Photo.

Tourist information differs as to when the lean first happened. The 'Rough Guide' states that the lean was detected within a few years of the commencement of building, back in the twelth century, resulting in a long hiatus. The official plaque attributes the hiatus to 'unkwnown reasons' and implies the lean only began much later. Wikipedia agrees in part with the Rough Guide, stating that the lean was first noticed in 1178, when the tower was only five years old with three of a final eight levels completed. When building recommenced a century later after Pisa-Genoan wars a century later, the lean was (over)compensated for and the tower started leaning the direction it does today. Needless to say, if you are in Pisa, it's worth a look. The other buildings in Piazza dei Miracoli or "Square of Miracles" aren't too shabby either.



After an hour trying to hitchike out of a slightly grimy Pisa I give up and take the next train south to Rome. On the train I meet a young Roman student with an egyptian background and accent. Our conversation consists of him listing the English writers he likes. The romantics, the Modernists. He quotes Eliot's 'Hollow Men' for me. He doesn't like Bertrand Russell. Too analytical.

Lists have served me well for crossing the language barrier. One doesn't need translation, let alone grammar when listing proper names. He takes an interest in the little Pema Chodron book I carry and I teach him a simple meditation technique. It is a surreal experience, zooming accross the plains towards a city that was founded before humans got to Aotearoa, meditating with a new friend in an otherwise empty carriage.

It's after 2200 when we get to Rome and I half-hope my buddy will offer me a place to stay. Nope. On my own again.

show you have a loving heart...

The double decker bus is nearing my stop on Hong Kong's Nathan Road in the Tsim Tsa Shui district of Mainland Hong Kong. I'm feeling a little trepidation. The last time I visited a city more foreign than Auckland was eleven years ago, and then I was under wings of the parental variety. (one pair of those set of wings managed to get themselves mugged, but that's another story).

The door hisses as it opens and immediately twenty or so faces, Chinese and Indian, are staring at me, they are shouting. My heart skips a beat. What could I have done wrong? I look again. They are holding up business card-sized bits of cardboard. Oh. They are business cards. They are asking me to patronise their guesthouses. Right-ho. Bewildered (the Kiwi version of hard sell is a slight raising of the eyebrows) I pick one (or did it pick me?) and stumble towards the auspiciously named "Fortunate Guesthouse" where Mr Lee and Ms Alice give me a cupboard complete with mildew, double bed and noisy airconditioning. I love it. And I move to the Chunkging Deluxe Hotel -bit cleaner -the next night.

The amusingly ironic part is that I had picked this particular complex of guesthouses because I thought I'd be arriving after midnight and it housed the one place I had found on the web with "24hr reception". I shouldn't have worried. I'm not sure if Tsim Tsa Shui ever sleeps, maybe it has a nap or something between 4:30 am and 5.

"What is Hong Kong like?" You ask someone who has been here almost exactly 24hrs. I want to come back and stay much longer. It is fascinating and it is pleasant. People are very polite and generous - offering me tailored suits and "copy watches" in the day time and hashish and "massages" in the night time. The hashish story is quite interesting. Permit me, gentle reader, to relate.

Jet-lagged and just plain tired, I can't help just popping out for a quick stroll and a midnight snack before bed. I haven't walked twenty paces before a scrawny guy dressed in black and a gangly guy with jeans and t-shirt are in my face, offering me drugs. I freak out a bit, and, despite what the internet says, quickly decide it's a bad idea to be out here this time of night. I spin on my heel and walk back into Chunking Mansions. (the aforementioned guesthouse complex - see the centre building in the picture) The gangly guy follows, which makes me more nervous. I shake him off and then the scrawny guy is back, this time actually showing me the dark-coloured pellet and something else in a bag. I tell ya, it's worse than Cuba St. He finally gets the message, and I try walking Nathan Rd again, the other direction. Gangly guy comes back and seems a little distressed. He keeps saying "Don't worry about that other guy" As soon as I mention him that I'm not going to tell anyone what happened his face relaxes and he moves off.
I eat some greasy noodles and egg and go to sleep.

But I wasn't joking about the politeness. Hawkers are hard-core on Nathan Rd because they are banned from most other tourist areas and possibly because begging is non-existent. People who serve you are helpful and warm, strangers strike up conversations on the train (he didn't invite me to the private club he bartends at though, dammit. Even the signs (so many signs) are polite.
"Climbing sculpture can be dangerous"

or even downright cutesy

"Show you have a loving heart: offer your seat to those in need" - seen on the train.

The signs are in English, as well as Chinese script; probably one of the most obvious signs of the country's history is the ubiquity of English, spoken and written. Only one or two people I have met can't understand any. Other than that, it feels like I imagine Asia should feel. Signs of the old Colonial history (Hong Kong technically left Britain merged with China in 1997) are sparse. In my experience they have been limited to: Lizzie's face on a few old coins; the British style cenotaph "to the glorious dead" in Hong Kong central; and, most hearteningly, a passion among some for cricket (but of course!). The train guy who talked to me played cricket and we had time to share an appreciation of Shane Warne's skills. Cricket. At least they didn''t throw out that baby with the bathwater.

More on (or even from) the delightful Hong Kong later.

Blessings on ya!