Tag Archives: travel

Robert Dessaix: Arabesques

It often strikes me anew how many of my favourite artists are men on the fringes of gayness, men who are not heterosexual, but are not quite at home in whatever we might call the ‘gay world’, the however-much-coherent culture it is. These men have followed me through my life, right from the start: Morrissey, Michael Stipe, and finally Robert Dessaix. I’m not sure, not yet sure, if it’s a personal affinity I feel, or if their profound non-belonging, queerness about as fundamental as it can get, has sharpened both their sensibility and their minds, and made them able to accurately perceive the complexity of, and judge with understanding, both the world and themselves.

In any case, Robert Dessaix is perhaps my favourite Australian writer (speaking empirically, I enjoy Dessaix’s writing often and much). Reading Arabesques in parallel with a scholarly history of the Arab world is a great pleasure, because the shortcomings of each book cancel each other out. Whereas one provides clear facts ad dull nauseam, the light and self-centred (and West-centred) musings of the other are the easiest to enjoy when you, as a reader, feel confidently knowledgeable about the places and people he encounters to enjoy your read dialogically.

When I read Dessaix, I often find many quotes to quote, of both kinds: sometimes I feel like Dessaix says things I think and feel, and sometimes I feel Dessaix is being told things I would like many (Australian) people to know and understand better. In particular, I felt great relief when Dessaix was prepared to dissect the Protestant nature of his own culture. It is one of those aspects of Australia I find most infuriatingly, bafflingly, indefensibly horrible, and so much of it comes from its own extremism (if there is one great notion that Protestant Christian culture has no grasp of, it is the concept of balance or moderation, and the best way to understand this is to observe people’s eating habits). They are good quotes for a Saturday afternoon, and I type quickly, so here they are:

1. on happiness

‘You Westerners,’ Yacoub said with his usual elegant weariness, ‘seem fixated on the idea of happiness. You chase after it everywhere, yet you never seem to catch hold of it. I understand pleasure, comfort, beauty, passion, peace, love…’
‘You? Love?’ Zaïda was open-mouther. A drop of violet ice-cream trickled down her chin.
‘…but I don’t understand what you mean by “happiness”.’
‘I can tell you,’ I said, trying to head Zaïda off before she made a fool of herself. This was the woman who had once rung her lover to thank him for a bouquet of white roses he’d sent her for her birthday and eaten them, petal by petal, while they exchanged honeyed nothings across the Atlantic.
‘Camus came up with the perfect definition.’
‘Camus!’ Zaïda looked puzzled. ‘But he committed suicide.’
‘What’s that got to do with it? Clamence in The Fall says: “I took pleasure in my own nature, and we all know that that’s what happiness. is.”
‘That’s a rather self-satisfied, self-serving notion of happiness, don’t you think?’ I hadn’t supposed that Miriam would give in without a tussle. ‘What about…’
‘Feeding the hungry? Helping the blind to cross the street? I’m not talking about the morality of it, I’m just saying that that’s what we Westerners, as Yacoub calls us, want in order to be happy: the right to take pleasure in our own nature as we see fit.’
‘Whereas we Orientals only want the right to take pleasure in God’s.’ Yacoub smiled one of his smiles.
‘But you don’t believe in God – you told me so yourself in Blidah.’
‘No, I don’t believe in God, and I’m not an atheist.’

2. on protestantism

…surely there are two kinds of forgetting: one is forever and the other is a momentary frenzy. Well, the frenzy might last a month or even a few years, but it doesn’t blot out memory for good. IT’s just taking your hidden self out for an airing.
‘Even some Buddhist monks,’ I said to Daniel, as we walked back to the car, ‘have days of divine madness. It keeps them sane. They take up with loose women and go on drunken rampages.’
‘Yes, it’s called “Crazy Wisdom”. It’s Tibetan’ How annoying that he should know that. ‘And it’s not about “keeping sane”, it’s about flux. It’s about taming instead of clinging, and then letting go. I have the feeling that your Gide may have been too Protestant to believe in flux. He probably believed in virtue and sin.’ I think he partly meant me. But he had a point: Protestants are particularly given to dualities such as sin and virtue, belief and unbelief, spirit and matter. It’s one thing or the other with us. Catholics, on the other hand, have ways of striking a bargain with God. Flux is something they understand.

(There follows a 10-or-20-page discussion of being a Protestant heathen, of Catholic comfort versus Protestant austerity, of Protestantism leading naturally to atheism, etc – but which I am too lazy to reproduce here.)

3. on travel

‘When the absurdity of my life begins to nauseate me, I don’t commit suicide, you see, as Camus did, I travel.’
‘How could being in Algeria make your life less absurd? If life is nauseatingly absurd anywhere in this world, it’s in Algeria.’
‘It doesn’t make life any less absurd, but for a few days, a week, a month, it can make mine seem worth living. I can take pleasure there in my own nature.’ This sounded less flippant than Gide’s observation about places where he found himself interesting – but it amounted to much the same thing, I suppose. ‘In a way I can’t at home – or at any rate not often.’
‘Like Gide, do you mean? Les petits musiciens?’
‘Yes and no, actually. Travel is an art, it seems to me, just like painting or writing a novel, it crystallises things. It crystallises me. Whenever I feel that I’m on the point of disappearing, dissolving into a thousand selves – and that happens when you don’t feel you have a single source – I make art. I tell myself a story, I tell others a story, and I travel. And tell stories about my travels. I crystallise anew. (…) I make art – and travel – both to remember and to forget. Like a crystal, you see – both solid and translucent at the same time.’
‘To remember and forget what, precisely?’
‘To remember who I’ve been and also who I wanted to be, to write a new script and act it out without shame. To find my source.’
‘That sounds like God again. And does it work?’
‘No, of course not, but that’s no reason to stay at home. But I also travel – and write – to forget, to sink into the river of unmindfulness, to be utterly transparent, crystal-clear, to just be.’
‘And does that work?’
‘For a day or two, if I’m lucky.’

4. on how Australians perceive Europeans

Yacoub spoke with his accustomed world-weariness tinged with mischief and, as usual, he was annoyingly difficult to read.

Tagged ,

But how can you write?

My week in Chefchaouen is full of these snapshots, vivid in colour and deeply etched in my mind. But none is as close to the surface as that moment when I opened my eyes to a group of children, staring at me with total discombobulation. I smiled slowly and the eldest came forward.

“What are you doing?” He asked in French

“I’m writing.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to remember.”

“Why?”

“Because I think your town is beautiful, and I want to capture that beauty so I don’t lose any of it later.”

“But how are you writing?” he asked, more forcefully this time.

“Pardon me?”

“How…” he said gesturing to my notebook impatiently, “HOW?”

Impasse. I wasn’t sure what he was asking me. Was it a permission problem or a question about what I planned to do with those words? I closed the notebook carefully, not wanting to lose the memories I had already jotted down. The children all stared at me, foreheads knotted, until a smaller girl came to the front and plopped down in front of me on the stoop, staring up at my face with wide eyes. She took my pen and mimicked what I was doing, then stopped and stared up at me for approval. I gave her a hug, still concerned that I had somehow offended my impromptu hosts.

“How?” He asked again, more softly.

A man walked by, slowing down when he saw the kids surrounding me and pausing entirely when he caught a glimpse of my baffled state. He spoke with the eldest in Arabic, and then he said what stuck with me ever since:

“Often, the women here cannot write. They think you are in your teens, and they want to know why you, as a woman, can write but many of the women here cannot.”

from Vivid Memories in Chefchaouen, Morocco, by Jodi of Legal Nomads.

Tagged

At home in travel – Dancehouse Diary

Corto Maltese by Norwood, a very talented artist whose work you can admire here.

A short message from a Berlin dancer reminded me that I wrote an essay for Dancehouse Diary, a publication for Dancehouse, independent dance’s home in Melbourne, earlier this year. It was one of the very last bits of work I did before leaving, it got published just after I left, and, in the general confusion of intercontinental travel, I never saw it in print, and completely forgot about it.

But here it is now, reprinted under the break. It’s about travel, a topic very close both to my heart and to my scholarship. Reading my own writing from the past, articles I have completely forgotten about, always feels like reading someone else’s writing, and this one, read from a distance of 6 months, touched me in a strange way. I hope you will also enjoy it.

Continue reading

Tagged

Rijeka, or on the meanings of architecture

Whoever is regularly in my vicinity, gets a certain amount of lecturing on how beauty is a function of proportion, not decoration. The building above is a fine example of what I mean by that, proportion, but it is also something else, something entirely more.

Being in Europe, and low-cost flights also being in Europe, it has now become possible for me to do the unthinkable-in-Australia: to fly back to my hometown for a two-day roam-around. And once I was there, it dawned on me immediately (it exploded upon me, even) that I need to do this more, that I need to do it regularly, because having access to Rijeka I have access to my own history. Those two days left me feeling grounded in a way indescribable: they have made me remember where I come from. Losing the sense of my own history is inevitable when I live in Melbourne, Australia, because Australia is the end of the world, far far away from Rijeka. But it takes so little, a few days, a few thorough walks through my hometown – because Rijeka is a distinct place. Very, very distinct.

I have had the good luck to live in some very particular cities: Rijeka; Venice; Berlin. Melbourne was the only place I lived in that could in any way be called normal, a city from which one can extrapolate conclusions that apply to one or more other places as well. But I come from Rijeka; and I don’t come from Venice, Melbourne, or Berlin. Generations of my family have lived in and around Rijeka, but that in and of itself means nothing – Rijeka is a distinct place, as I say. It marks you far faster. It is enough to arrive, get off the bus or train or car, and start walking up and down its steep streets and stairs, and it is as if I suddenly remember how to walk again. It is in this act of walking, in the distinct rhythm of steps that shapes one’s life in a place, and life-in-a-place always being life itself, that I remember who I am (where I have been walking, why I set off). Six years on another continent mean nothing. I have never felt like a stranger in Rijeka. I cannot imagine the number of years I would have to spend in another place (and I have, so far, spent 10 outside Rijeka) before I stopped being from Rijeka and became from somewhere else. Nothing like K, who stops being from Brisbane every so often and becomes from Melbourne – whether because of personal identification, for simplification purposes, or simply because of time invested elsewhere. The city of Rijeka, with its history, geography and culture, is like no other, and my own being-like-no-other starts sitting better within me the moment I start climbing its rocks and jumping over its creeks, cutting rubber soles of my trainers on the shards of limestone, running down its hills through private gardens and along historical staircases.

Rijeka was a part of six different countries only in the past 100 years or so, including a period of 18 months it spent as a self-governed, pirate-anarchist city-state. It has its own dialect, its two winds (bura, the northern mountain wind, bringing cold and dry weather, and jugo, the warm and humid sea wind); its karst landscape, with soft and poround limestone forming tall mountains and deep canyons; and its culture of extreme tolerance to difference, focus on one’s own affairs, and frankness which would be brutal, if it wasn’t so non-malicious.

The living landscape of Rijeka is one half Mediterranean urbanity, tight stone towns ranging from sizeable to small, built by the sea, between cliffs and gullies, connected with medieval roads that were even then a feat of engineering; and one half complete and utter wilderness, forests and mountain tops and islands and the Adriatic Sea. When our bus stops on the side of the road cutting through makija (or maquis, as it tends to be known in English, the low Mediterranean forest), to drop off a frail old woman seemingly in the middle of nowhere, on a cliff, K is incredulous and concerned. Where is the lady going? I point to the town at the bottom of the hill, hundreds of metres below us, by the sea. But how is she going to get there? There will be a road or a staircase, I say, but K’s good Australian heart is not at peace until he really sees the road, going down the hill at an angle of a ski slope.

This is a cityscape without suburbs. A city can sprawl unchecked and unplanned only on relatively flat land – not when urban growth requires feats of engineering. Among the many distinct topographical formations of the karst landscape, not one is flat. There are 200,000 people living in Rijeka, but one can start walking from the national theatre, with its opera ensemble, ballet ensemble and orchestra, and arrive to the forests in 15 minutes.

It is a city without suburbs. What looks like suburbs, technically is just a lot of edge: city here, nature there. The insistence of Melburnians of all kinds that they are ‘just a suburban boy/girl/family’ is something I cannot relate to, because to me all suburbs look and feel like pitiful wasteland of both nature and culture, and Rijeka has never had any. In our teenage years, we have been known to go hiking on the hills outside the city for hours, then bush-bash our way down the hill and proceed straight to a punk concert or theatre performance. To have to walk, on flat suburban wasteland of houses and petrol stations, for 30 minutes just to get a carton of milk, is to me a personal, non-generalisable tragedy – not so much because it clashes with my values, but because it confuses my sense of walking.

+++

But I wanted to talk about something else – about architecture and beauty.

We walked up and down hills, through the city centre, and arrived at this building, the so-called Mali neboder, ‘Little Skyscraper’. With its 10 1/2 storeys it is hardly a skyscraper, but it was a tall building when it was built, and so the name stuck. I am generally a fan of early modernism in architecture, buildings built not in cookie-cutter repetition, but as thought-through one-offs. The promise of modernism exists in them still: buildings as a promise of the more efficient future, signals for how to make things rationally and intelligently, lighthouses of technological enlightenment, of engineering which makes life better for everyone.

There are many such buildings in Rijeka. They fit in with the Mediterranean sense of beauty (on which hopefully more later), they are unadorned and simple and truthful to their materials. ‘Mali neboder’ is a building made for its location: it respects the curvilinear street and the slope of the hill it sits on; its balconies open up to the view of the bay and the city centre; its colours are muted, and its windows have (FFS) the kind of blinds that buildings in hot climates need. It is a good building in every sense of the word: high-quality, honest, unpretentious, sensitive to the environment, modest. It did not demand changes of context – it was designed to slot in nicely, and yet it has a beauty of form that is distinct, unrepeatable. It is just that bit higher than other buildings on the street to say, hey, this is what human species can do now, let’s discuss where to go from here!. It neither pretends to come from a time before industry, not does it insist on ignoring the entire city before its time. It doesn’t pretend to be in Paris or New York. It simply makes as much New York on that corner as Rijeka can honestly work with. The story goes that the owner built it as tall as he could sell apartments: the building was finished when the market demand ran dry.

Stendhal said nicely: “Beauty is the promise of happiness.” The promise of this building, in 1939, was of a future that would be different, and perhaps better, without pretending to forget the past. There are many such buildings in Rijeka, and there has never been any discontent with modernist architecture there. The people of Rijeka never blew up any buildings on the grounds of ugliness. Today, they don’t build medieval-looking houses for a comfortable fantasy of a better past. It is an honesty which could be brutal, if it wasn’t so non-malicious.

Tagged ,

Changing

New York can do that to you," he says, smiling. "You come here to change the world but you end up changing yourself."

via Michael Stipe: I often find myself at a loss for words – interview | Music | The Observer.

Tagged

Stray cats of Malaysia

20120301-023826.jpg

The kittens of St Paul’s Church in Melaka were two; both completely black, tiny and underfed. Stroking them, I could feel all of their little ribs. They were both very still. One looked asleep on its feet, perhaps enjoying the cuddle, perhaps about to die.

One never sees abandoned kittens on Australian streets, and is thus spared from having to think too often about the cruel, simple indifference of the universe in the face of life (what is there to do? Take all stray cats home, the whole billion of them?).

Stroking the little thing, I started wondering about whether cats have emotional responses in any way analogue to humans. Does a stray cat, when cuddled, feel anything like, any feline equivalent of, the frightened and blissful warmth of rare intimacy? Does it enjoy it as a special treat, without planning to get used to it, for experience tells it all intimacy is short-lived, its promise of security ultimately deceiving? Cats don’t think, of course, but they too learn from experience. Does a cat also find a bittersweet, lonely joy, or at least some sort of existential contentment, in total freedom? Stuff like that.

Tagged ,

Moving houses of Queensland

A Queensland house is called a Queenslander.

According to my boyfriend, Queensland houses, timber-framed and built on stilts, can be moved as desired. It is not unusual for whole houses to be moved. They can be pushed forward, pulled back, or raised up if they sink, or to be built in underneath.

There are special cranes to move it, although more often there are special trucks, with big arms that come out of the side, to lift up one side of the house. That way, the stilts can be replaced one side at a time. This is called ‘restumping’.

It is not unusual on a freeway to get stuck behind a house. Or half a house, because sometimes they get cut into two pieces to fit on the truck.

Boyfriend maintains that none of this is unusual. He once lived in a house that got lifted with such a special truck, because it was sinking into the ground.

Tagged , , , ,

Bangkok, day #3

From my travel diary – written on 14 June, 2011.

Again it happens: I am strolling through town, happy and without a worry in the world, and everywhere around me blonde tourists in states of distress, looking at maps, asking for directions. I know where I’m going, they are completely lost.

It occurs to me, finally, that it’s the strolling that makes the difference. I’m wandering, not trying to get anywhere, which is why I’m not lost. But the more I think about it, the more it seems that the two go together in a much more fundamental way – that city-as-surface is a city that requires strolling, and that city-as-lines requires purposeful travel. There is no way to wander through a city built around linear streets (Australian, British, and I imagine American cities) – you cannot take any random corners, quite simply, because immediately you’re off the main line, and into suburbia. In their dense centres to a certain point you can, but even then the excitement is mainly in linear or transversal movement (arcades, lanes) – in getting from A to B, on a large scale. On the other hand, a city which is a dense mesh of small streets, courts and squares, like Bangkok or Venice or Split, is a city where you can circle the same area for a long time before you have to repeat a stretch. In other words, wandering is not only the best way to experience such an urban fabric; it’s also the best way to get to know it. Once you’ve walked all the streets and made as many connections as possible, you know your area. You have learned it.

If I extrapolate from this, it makes sense that Americans/Australians/the British have such trouble strolling, wandering, or whenever they have to meander unpurposefully (trust me, they do). Where would they learn, if their cities guide them into another kind of movement, linear, and away from unstructured and into purposeful travel?

On another note, today I covered the last kind of public transport: motorcycle taxi. I went from Victory Monument to Rajadamnern, to see muay thai, crossing some enormous roads at acute angles, and wiggling between cars at formidable speed. Since I’m shaky even on a bike, it was a terrifying experience, and I did have a lot of time to consider my habit of not getting travel insurance. On the other hand, I generally live my life according to the rule that you can do anything, however risky, regardless of how unskilled or untrained you are, and you should be safe as long as you do it in a super-cautious way. I gripped myself onto my driver, and of course I was fine. Even jumping over potholes and having to circumvent the yellow shirts’ protest, which has been going for at least 24 hours straight.

Muay thai was extraordinary, although I saw no blood and no KOs. (I was hoping for both.) The skill, the kicks in the face, the elastic bodies of very young men. At first I thought about the possible similarities between watching this particularly violent kind of boxing and, say, gang rape, but then I realised that, for most people attending, the interest was in the betting, not in the fighting.

Today it rained furiously. The old town has very European proportions and, with steel shopfront grilles and very narrow cracked footpaths, feels even more like Lisbon.

Tagged

Bangkok, day #2

From my travel diary – written on June 13, 2011.

Today was the luxe day, if yesterday was the day of public transport.

Siam Square, three large malls knitted around the Skytrain, and some of the most luxurious hectares of mallness I have seen in my life. If yesterday was all about Croatia and coastalness, today is about a certain kind of capitalism.

I was going to see muay thai, but changed my mind and went to the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, because it wouldn’t have been open tomorrow. It was excellent. Thai art is meant to be very good, and the Centre was certainly fantastic. It’s decked out as a sort of arts mall, with individual small spaces given over to individual businesses or artists (galleries, art projects), which is a novel idea in my book, and a great one on top. Of course, there is a cart making coffee, right there on the fourth floor, and an art project in the shape of a cakery and ice-cream parlour. There were little children running everywhere, and a wrap-around mural. Sittichai’s exhibit for the Tourist Festival, a celebration of traditional Thai ceramics, was organised as a small garden, with pop music blaring, and pots and clay statues neatly arranged among the plants. One of the exhibits, a set of rectangular zebras, was meant to be sat on. Kids again, everywhere. What I like about this (and I like it a lot) is that fun is integral to the way art is arranged in Thailand, but in a way that’s natural, rather than designed to ‘develop audience’ – you can tell from the way it is uncoordinated, not unified in design. Pop music and zebra benches. You can tell from the way children run around all that Art and Culture. It’s an approach that Croatia won’t understand in a million years, us with our sour seriousness when confronted with things cultural. But I have left Croatia too early to be infected with this particular sourness, so I ate a green grass conceptual brownie and then wandered around malls for a whole evening.

I have put away my Dubravka Ugresic, and returned to the second book on my list, which is Said’s Orientalism: it is more relevant right now.

There is something incredibly exciting about this 3-D urbanism here: it seems to be an assemblage of the following: multi-storey shopping malls, elevated public transport, overhead pedestrian walkways (necessary to traverse gigantic roads), and a culture of stalls (by which I mean, simply, that I cannot imagine that it takes a lot of bureaucratic endeavour to put up a stall on the side of the road here). It is immensely exciting. It creates volume of public space, rather than lines thereof, but in a way that only, really, multiplies vertically what already exists at street level, which is a sort of surface of commercial activity, rather than line.

Barrie Shelton, in his book Learning from the Japanese City, suggests that the entire urbanism of Japan is radically different from the Western urbanism because of the difference in their writing systems, and that one understands composition through area, whereas the other builds it through line. I see what he means, and it indeed applies to Bangkok, too. But it troubles me because of its strong orientalism, because the forceful dichotomy seems to create huge and incorrect generalisations on both Asia and Europe.

The medieval European city certainly works as commercial surface, rather than a set of lines, as do most Mediterranean cities in all periods. I’ve found it very difficult, and counter-intuitive, to arrange my spatial orientation in lines – and I’ve encountered this problem both in Anglo-Saxon cities and in Central Europe (Zagreb, for example). Certainly, a system of rectilinear streets and regular-sized blocks is more logical, in the sense that it’s easier to transpose into another, separate system (a spreadsheet, a map), but what an area-based orientation loses in translatability, it gains in feeling. It’s much easier to feel your way through an area that is somewhat uniformly organised, than it is in an urban fabric where being two streets down from where you’re supposed to be gives you completely different urban character. I am convinced that all these places are congruent in quite a simple way, that there is no particular East-West dichotomy here. How else to explain the fact that, on my first day alone in Bangkok, I’ve been walking around at perfect ease without a map, something that I’m still unable to do in London, despite having been there 5-6 times? In London (or Melbourne, or Zagreb), the uniformity of the street stretches too far for me, and the fact that the same district, traversed two streets further north or south, will be a completely different place, just unnerves me. Bangkok is easy: the suburbs are sequences of turns, the centre traversable and composite.

This morning, the local canal flooded, and it drenched our shoes, which we left outside the door on the patio. It’s alright – Venice was the same. ‘Bang’, says Sittichai, means floodplain. Many districts of Bangkok have it in their names: our suburb, for example, Bang Na.

On the Skytrain to the city, in wet shoes, I see my first foreigners, traceable back almost to their local council. The skinny blonde woman dressed in extremely plain beige and black, who looks like she never had satisfactory sex in her life, is as clearly North-American as the blonde girl in bright pink dress with inappropriate cleavage is from the Gold Coast. Then there are men in khaki shorts and backpacks, Anglos trying to look incredibly purposeful when all they’re going to be doing for the day is stroll around town. That annoying, joyless work ethic which ruins their holidays, and is not dissimilar from the impulse to establish an outpost of the empire once you’re here, just to be seen doing something.

On the main tourist road, where I sit to watch the tourists and drink Singha, a French couple is having a furious argument; to be precise, the woman is pouring a barrage of small-sounding reprimands at her noodle-munching boyfriend; the intimacy is all of a sexual relationship. I have never travelled in company, and I see no reason to start now. The day is beautiful. It seems Bangkok attracts two kinds of tourists: single older men, and couples. They easily form larger, homogeneous groups. Harem pants and henna tattoos. I wonder what a couple could argue about on such a fine Sunday. I wonder why people travel to Thailand. There are no single white women except me visible in all of Bangkok. I wonder who drags the couples here: the man or the woman?

Today I am hugely reminded of Lisbon, and I spend the day trying to figure out whether it’s something simple, like being in a foreign place that’s warmer than home. To some extent it certainly is. (I realise I’m an aspirational tourist, always going to more expensive, more developed places, and those tend to have a cooler climate.) But there are other, small things: the malls, the reliance on taxis, the super-modern train. The infrastructure. Both places manifest an absence of mid-scale infrastructure: there is the public and XXL, and the private and XXS. Enormous roads, malls and public transport projects; tiny stalls, taxis, restaurants. In between, nothing. The airport is beautiful but dysfunctional, pure architecture, clearly built with one decision-maker only. This absence of the middle scale, which seems to have generated the 3-D vibrancy (the stalls and the malls), seems to stand for long-term centralised rule, or only a short history of participatory democracy, or a totalitarian history. There is no linear progression through scales, which would be gradual empowerment of the middle class made tangible, visible. In a sense, there is no difference in landscape effect between the top-down droppings of dams and highways in communism, and malls in capitalism.

I am enjoying myself beyond all expectations, here. I’ve found young Bangkokian designers, and hip hairdressers (who gave me an Asian haircut: same as before, but more angular and more hairsprayed). There’s a Kinokuniya and a Muji. In the luxe malls, I’ve finally found those kids who come to study in Australia, and their parents. The wealthy, wealthy ones. I keep thinking that Carl would like it here – the combination of unruliness and fine design. I certainly like the promise of exciting work and exciting play. I wonder if the young Thais are already at the point where they get passionate about and protective of their vernacular culture (stalls, tuktuks, chaos), enjoying it while already irretrievably not part of it anymore. I see that in both Croatia and Portugal, a mythologisation of the country’s own present-receding-into-past, and it seems to me like a clear sign of something dying. But meanwhile, it’s like an entire country undergoing gentrification, and all things gentrifying are magnificently vibrant.

One thing I haven’t mentioned: the money confuses me. Not so much the conversion rate, not in absolute terms, but conversion in relative terms. The differences between prices are staggering. A skewer of something from a stall might be 10 baht; a dish in a restaurant might be 200 baht. A taxi ride is about 100 baht, which if you bother to read the reports on gogreentaxisltd.co.uk, is one of the lowest average fares in the world! But a leg wax was 500, my haircut was 500, too; but an ordinary top at Muji was over 2,000 baht. My breakfast yoghurt is 16 baht. A simple bus ticket costs 24 baht. But a ferry ride was 3,5 baht only (up until that moment I didn’t even know that bahts have cents). The spread is huge. Clearly, the range between the rich and the poor here is enormous, but it doesn’t feel polarised, I cannot locate the dividing line.

And the way they smile, even the beggars, to the point where it’s hard to take their pleas for money seriously. At 7pm, a boy was sitting on the stairs to the Skytrain, with a plastic cup. It was hard to tell whether he was begging, or just having a great time.

My taxi driver today at first seemed blind: he seemed to be feeling for things before he found them. But he drove well, and I was happy to assume he had a very acute sixth sense. But then I noticed a pattern in his movements (very quick sequence of rubbing his knee, patting his belly or scratching his crotch, tapping the gear stick, then gently banging on the taximeter twice), and I assumed instead a magic ritual, sn incantation. The only form of transport I am yet to try is motorcycle taxi. Sittichai said it’s not so safe. ‘And besides, it would look inappropriate. Your skirt is too short.’ Two limitations on me due to unwomanliness and decorum. Bless him.

Tagged

Bangkok, day #1

From my travel diary, 12 June 2011.

It is on days like today that I return to the long-standing question of whether I’m royally fucking myself over by living in Australia.

The very edge of Bangkok, so far from the centre it is almost in another province; the edge of the centre of Melbourne, the near-edge, 15-minute walk to the central train station. That edge of Bangkok at 6am is more lively than that near-centre of Melbourne at noon. But, not to be all negative all the time: the near-centre of Melbourne noon is more lively than the edge of Bangkok at midnight. By a small margin.

The taxis are bright pink, orange, blue, green and multicolour, 7-Elevens come by the thousands, and the city has 12 million souls, but can still be traversed, edge to edge, on wonky public transport, changing three times, in under an hour. Balconies everywhere (I love balconies). The city functions as trees of streets rather than districts – you find your big street, the smaller street that branches off, the tiny street that branches off, the house. Big streets are all infrastructure, elevated, wide, with pedestrian walkways, but there is no way to kill this city by quartering.

I have been on seven modes of moveable transport today, and notable infrastructure included pedestrian bridges, multi-storeys shopping malls connecting parts of the city at multiple levels, and covered market streets. The modes of transport: taxi, rickety bus, small shuttle bus, ‘local bus’ (which is a derelict rickety bus), provincial bus (which is a mini-truck with two benches in the back), ferry, and tuk tuk (which is a vespa for four with an awning). One of the buses, I forget which, had fans attached to the ceiling for air-conditioning. They all had doors open to maximise breeze, except the truck-bus, which was all open and people would run and jump on.

I sit here, in this big beautiful city, a city which is all shonky, all makeshift, but is essentially a good, functioning city – the way most of Melbourne is not a good, functioning city – and I feel at ease and I feel at home. Walking down these suburban alleys at midnight, dodging scooters, boys painting walls, girls frying meat, kids playing, I am relaxed, and calmly happy, and this sense of ease is as unpremeditated and spontaneous as the way in which, standing in outer suburban Melbourne, I automatically feel distressed and unhappy. This feels familiar and known.

Thailand is like some sort of Croatia for South-East Asia: tourism, water, cracked sidewalks, people who smile. Everything comes in a way I would expect it to come to me on the Croatian coast, only in unintelligible script. Parent coo and mock their children; babies too small to have friends (because independence comes with friends) roam around trying to break stuff and kill themselves; older children play outrageously late and outrageously loudly; women in their thirties wear denim shorts; chairs in good restaurants are made of plastic; we walk through traffic. In the evening, women are sitting on the floor outside their houses chatting. Backyards are at the front, and paved over. Plastic buckets everywhere. Faint smell of stale water wherever you go, like in Venice. And the best restaurant outside town is in the same kind of rotting modernist seaside building as they would be in Croatia; and the personnel consists mostly of teenagers, as it would in Croatia; and the teenagers hang around while they’re finishing work, in big groups, girls rolling eyes at boys in a loving manner. It’s all so stupidly close to my last summer of high school, spent doing work experience in a crummy coastal hotel with a bunch of kids and barely any supervision, leading to the same combination of underpayment, dilligence, and flirting, that the kids were displaying tonight.

I have the same vortex of immediate recognition when I see images of Israel (again: only in unintelligible script), like a thin thread of Mediterraneanness, or at least coastalness (Sydney does the same, if not too inland), that makes us all mutually intelligible to each other, and I know with the blind conviction of someone not-entirely-sane that I could live here, and I could be happy here. Even without speaking the language. When these people heartily laugh at me for being a foreigner and not understanding their language, when they sing songs with their four-year-old daughters in restaurants, when I see a pink-collared teenager running hands through her mall co-worker’s hair while she is serving a customer without any sense of impropriety, or when I walk through the end of the night at the big hall of the seaside restaurant, and the band performs on a synthesiser, the girl sings slightly off-key, and on the dance floor there is only a young woman with an elderly man (but everyone applauds at the end) – I understand these people. They make sense to me.

And then I start wondering again about whether I’m just undermining my own happiness by staying in Australia, for no reason good enough, nothing but habit and indecisiveness. In a real, genuine way, in which I am asking this question all the time. My being in Australia often amounts to a kind of waiting for it to become really enjoyable. Keeping tabs (like someone else I knows does, of dinners served versus dinners received). Cutting my expectations down always slightly more finely. Having to discard yet another boyfriend because, when I thought I had found someone with a sense of Mediterranean easy-going joie-de-vivre, I had actually gotten myself an irresponsible lunatic (who usually takes himself way too seriously). That kind of stop-start. Stop-start.

It is only a little past 10pm here, and I will now change into my own short denim shorts, and go for a stroll around the neighbourhood, to find a snack, sit on the footpath, and make friends with someone who doesn’t speak English.

Tagged