steps

Milano/Milan was a fun place. I stayed with a couple of Bulgarian exchange students (Nadia and Desi), in their apartment. They also had another Australian (Kurt) couchsurfer who had come to Europe to do some bike training with his ultra fancy carbon fibre $8000 bike. I got the impression that Desi and Nadia's flat mate (who was in Austria for the entire I was there), was blisfully unaware that two Australian boys were occupying her room.

What I saw of Milan was minimal, but Nadia toured me around some of her favourite spots. She showed me around her adopted city and told me about Bulgaria and what it's like to be living in Italy. I met a few of her design friends, visited a design museum and discovered that Milano's version of buffet did not come anywhere near the culinary delights of Torino. There was probably better places to go for Buffet, but I'm going to get all generalist and review the entire city of Milan based on one bad experience. It's a much dirtier city than Torino/Turin, but there's more going on here. Kurt stuck mostly to himself during the days, and for some unknown reason took a side journey to Como, not to check out the gorgeous scenery (where they filmed some of the new Star Wars movies), but to buy a bag for his bike. On the last day, the girls took me to an exhibition a little way out of town that featured work from some of their design buddies. Some interesting stuff with some rather unpleasant surprise sprinklers in the old gardens outside.

I think Kurt's plans got messed up and he overstayed his welcome a little with the girls. There were some tense moments when rather than asking "hey, I'm stuck. Can I stay another night?" he said "I'm leaving tomorrow now". Having been in a similar situation in San Francisco (sorry Roxanna), Kurt's faux par was something I could relate to. When I left, I mad sure Kurt came with me and caught the same train to Zurich. On the fantastically beautiful scenery train ride up we swapped Australian slang.

bring your brollies

All I knew of Torino before I came here was the Olympics and the original Italian Job movie. Other than that, the city was a blank canvas. No expectation – no disappointment. I arrived at the central train station a little later than expected and met up with Catia, my first host for the city. On the walk back to her place, I find out she is from another part of Italy and is living in Torino, studying translation at the local university. After dumping my bags at her apartment, Catia took me for a walk around the local area, showing me the river and a castle some crazy rich guy built at a time when turrets and dungeons weren’t usually included in architecture drawings. Just outside the grounds of the castle, I was convinced that I saw the little dog with the manky paw Martine and I encountered in Prague and chased the owners across the park to ask them. No. There was something very unnerving about that Chihuahua whose paw looked like a windsock on a calm day and like to bite and bark everything around it. Within the castle walls it was if I had gone back in time to a primary school excursion to Sovereign Hill, a trip many Australian kids will tell you that's not even worth the permission slip. It was a faithful recreation, but being in Europe where plenty of this stuff exists for reals, I couldn’t help thinking what the point of it was. Soon after we left the castle, it began to rain, with giant raindrops soaking us to the bone. It was awesome. Thankfully Catia didn’t mind getting wet and we both walked through it, enjoying the fresh smell of rain on parched earth. The rain reminded me of something more suited to the tropics and the smell reminded me of when it rains in summer back at home. We get back to her flat and while dripping wet, I met her flatmates and the fat house cat. We changed and then went to a cool bar around the corner and met some more locals. There’s a bunch of food laid out on tables, but I assume it’s for a private function and don’t take any. We discuss the not so mundane topic of the weather with some of the others at bar amd all concur that humans have broken the earth.

The next day I spend exploring the city by myself, dropping into random clothing stores, record shops and art galleries and chatting to people. I climbed hills, checked out a bunch of churches and lapped up the warm weather in the many public spaces on offer (Which the locals use for alfresco dining, illegal parking and ice cream). There are archways all through the city (12kms of them), which are beautiful to walk through when the novelty of getting rained on wears off. Near to the University, I walk into a little clothing store called Psiche. I chat with Simona, the girl who runs the place for about 20 minutes about what I should do and see while here in Torino. She makes a little list for me and circles points of interest on the map. I make friends with Bruno, the store dog. The guy who supplies the T-shirts comes in and tells us that he spent a couple of years living in Australia. Soon after, the other guy, Maurizio, who runs the store turns up and we chat about t-shirts and travel. We had a pretty cool conversation, I take their photo and as I’m about to leave, they give me a free t-shirt. Torino is off to a good start.

Later, I meet up with Catia and she takes me to a buffet bar. Like the bar on the previous night, this one has food laid out on tables, but when I buy the drinks, the woman behind the bar instructs me in the ways of the locals: “grab a plate and enjoy as much as you like”. Torino buffet is the best deal in Europe I've found. Depending on how close you are to the touristy bits, you pay around 4 to 7 Euro for a drink (any drink), which gains you access to a huge variety of food that looks like it has just come out of your adopted Italian nanna’s kitchen. The variety and shear volume of food found in a buffet puts any of the Tapas found in the south of Spain to shame and easily makes for a complete meal. Allegedly Torino is the best place for buffet, with only a handful of other Italian cities recognising the practice with equal gusto. If I lived here, I would need to buy a bike.

Over the next couple of days, I take it easy. Still recovering from the intensity of touring with mum, I enjoyed the much needed chill time. I spend parts of my day writing, editing and photoshopping, walking around between cafes and using the flat's kitchen as my office. The stove at Catia’s place has three little Italian coffee makers loitering near by and I try coffee made in each one. My dormant addiction to strong coffee awakens. Here’s to headaches and lack of concentration without the black doctor. After wandering around, meeting people and exploring the city, I come to the conclusion that Torino is a thoroughly enjoyable place. It has a really colourful past, a great small town/big city feeling with an energetic yet humble vibe, is close to the snow during winter and has that beautiful European city thing I’ve grown to love over the last year. It would be a great place to live for a little while and the thought of stopping and teaching English makes another appearance. Hmmm.. Good food, cheap booze, a strong connection to the national affinity with motor sport, close proximity to the rest of Europe and girls who touch your arm when they talk to you - Doesn't make for the clearest of minds for making such decisions.

On Thursday, Catia had a mate from her home town coming to stay with her and helps me get to my next couch. We meet up with Guiliana and straight away I’m reminded of my good mate Jules back at home and the 80s music and pop culture references fly thick and fast. Guiliana has something to do with media sales to broadcasters and occasionally does work for the city helping to set up art exhibitions. After dumping my stuff, we go back to the centre, say goodbye to Catia and join a Couchsurfing meet up. I’ve gone to a couple of these while travelling, but as a traveller rather than a host (which usually makes up the majority of people at these events), I felt a bit out of place. A few other travellers and out of towners join the meeting and we exchange tips on the nearby towns of interest. I chat to a couple of people that seem to have joined CS to travel vicariously through the travellers they have come stay, and convince them that second hand travel (lounge chair couchsurfing if you will), never compares to the real deal. As I’ve said before, I like to inspire people to see the world, not make them jealous.

The next few days, Guiliana shows me around the city. On Friday we go to the National Film Museum, which is hosted inside the Mole (pronounced moul-ee). The building was supposed to be a synagogue, but half way through construction, the Jewish community ran out of money to keep going, and sold the uncompleted building to the city. At the time it was completed, it was the tallest building in the world, and still towers above most of Torino. The film museum is great, with the first floor dealing with the technical history of cinema. As Guiliana proudly pointed out the stuff she worked on, the museum begins with shadow puppets, moving in loose chronological order through POV animation, early photographic techniques, stereophotography and the introduction of film. It’s amazing what a bet between rich men about whether or not a horse has all four feet off the ground at one moment can achieve. There some funky old projectors, a tonne of stereophotography equipment, peep shows (of the PG & non-PG variety), samples of early films and enough English for the Anglophonic tourists to interact with and understand the exhibits. Once the first floor is done with, we went up to the next section, which is the gigantic space within the dome of the Mole. An exhibition of Ferrari in Films is currently showing and two big screens showing clips of Ferraris doing burnouts, wheelies and making people look cool hang from the walls. With some cheeky editing, Elvis looks like he's in The Fast and the Furious, Nicolas Cage is being chased by Will Smith and Fangio is racing against Magnum PI. The rest of the Ferrari exhibit lacked somewhat, with only pictures of famous rich people and their Ferraris lining the giant spiral walkway lining the walls of the dome. Instead of the posters showing each model of Ferrari, I would have like to have seen the model of Ferrari and a list of the movies it appeared in. Oh well. I was still happy with the petrol guzzling. The rest of the museum is made up of permanent exhibits paying tribute to different genres of films, with separate sections focusing on directors, filming technics and actors. Great interactive exhibits for the kids with plenty of memorabilia for the oldies. But the big highlight with visiting the Mole is the elevator to the top. Made of glass and suspended between a shaft made of cables rather than concrete, it seemed that the elevator’s occupants were being taken up by an alien ship for a bit of friendly probing. The ride up is great, with the detail swap between the floor and the ceiling a bit of a mind flip. Looking directly up the hole in the roof where the elevator is about to slip through, I think, “even though I know this fits through, I think we’re going to get stuck, the cable will snap, the elevator will fall and smash into a million pieces of glass, blood and metal”. It doesn’t and the view of the town is amazing. To think, this has been here for over 100 years.

On Saturday, Guiliana and I took the trolley up to the Basilica of Superga, where in 1949 a plane carrying the Torino soccer team, while flying back from Portugal crashed in heavy fog, killing everyone on board. Since 9 of the players from Torino were also a part of the national team, the whole country went into mourning. The museum system here is a little weird, with the only way to see the exhibits is by joining a guided tour in Italian. As Guilanna quietly translates important details to me, a couple of the oldies on the tour give us nasty glares. We break away from the main group (a hard thing to do when there are only 3 rooms), and take stuff in at our own pace. It’s clear that Guilianna knows her Italian history and I suggest that she should offer up her services and become a freelance tour guide for English speaking tourists. Alledgedly this is next to impossible in Italy as the requirements for setting up such a business make it difficult for smaller companies and individuals to do so. I say sod it and just accept cash.

Did you know the last Italian Pope (John Paul I), was only in office for 33 days, before being found by a nun, dead in his chambers of an unknown cause. He was in the midst of separating the Vatican banking system from the Italian system, which was going to financially fuck a bunch of influential catholic big wigs and a few mafia types. John Paul II (Pope - The sequel), got the position next and the whole banking kafuffle evaporated overnight, swept under the carpet in true Catholic style.

On my last day in Torino, I went out in the morning to check the Olympic area out and cross the big suspension pedestrian bridge near to Guilianna’s flat. But as soon as I reached the park it began pissing down with rain, and I spent the next 20 minutes taking cover in the hut at the top of kiddie slippery dip. After waiting a bit, I braved the run to a nearby café and enjoyed some tasty Fonzies. I got back to Guilianna’s place and then we drove into the centre and checked out the Egyptian museum. This place is fully stocked with mummies, treasure and is one of the few museums in the world to hold the entire contents of one complete tomb. Due to the sloppy work of other thieves; sorry archaeologists; the majority of tombs were only staked out for their valuable things like gold and treasure, and were usually robbed by those in the know a few months after the important person was buried. There were mummified cats, monkeys, crocodiles and 3,000 year old bread. Impressive collection, with the museum boasting that it is second only to the one in Cairo. I make a beef jerky joke, and we leave. Next on the list was the castle, full of artwork and old things collected by the city over time. Then the last thing we went to was the World War II museum, which houses many interactive exhibits, featuring people of Torino telling their story from the war. This by far was the best thing I saw the whole day, with the presentation and layout of the museum really impressing me.

Later Guilianna and I meet up again with Catia and we take Buffet at the cool bar that Catia took me to on my first night in town. I ask for a surprise from the bar tender (who is half French, super friendly and absolutely gorgeous), and I get this amazingly tasty and dangerously strong mixed berry daiquiri. We eat our fill of salads and lamb cutlets (another fantastic 6 Euro Torino feast), and then say goodbye to Catia. Guilianna and I grab Thank you for Smoking from the DVD store and laugh ourselves silly. Katie Holmes does surprisingly well in it. Perhaps that’s because she isn’t on screen for that long.

The next day I’m on a local train to Milano.

Italy vs Germany

I was planning on going to Berlin for the summer, but Italy's kinda cool. As I have no real plans between the end of next week and the first week of August, I'm open to suggestions about where to go for the next month.

Travelling without moving

Ok.. this is getting silly. Mum has taken off on her own adventure, there’s been another three countries, two weeks and 1,800kms between where I last wrote about, so I’m going to make this quick.

Cordoba
On the train from Granada to Cordoba, we met an American who had read my blog and we all agreed that thanks to the internet, the world is a much smaller place. The Kevin Bacon Experiment in full swing here ladies and germs. We got to Cordoba at around 7pm, and by that time the tourist office had shut and there was no little Spanish nonna corralling us on to a public bus to take us to a place to stay. I asked a girl waiting to point us in the direction of the centre and after walking to the part of town where there seemed to more hotels and cafes, I spotted some young backpackers and said to mum and Peck: “these guys look cheap and leaving somewhere. Let’s asked them where they stayed.” We did and they pointed us a little pension in a side street just off one of the main strips. Nice place. Mum still sounded like a broken Husqvarna chainsaw in need of repair, but I was too tired to care. In the morning we visited the Mezquita, which allowed visitors free entry at the ungodly hour of 8:30 to 9:30. This was a great time to visit the place, as there were hardly anyone in there and the photos from inside turned out great. At some point we lost Peck, and mum and I just wandered about the place marvelling at the architecture. Mum’s brain snapped a few times with the complexities and intricate nature of the Islamic designs and she became angry at the Christians for desecrating such a place. Mum and I pondered what the reaction of a Muslim visiting this place would be and how they would feel that their religions beautiful poetry and aesthetics have been polluted by plastering, idol nailed to trees and coke machines. I have a moment where I realise that after all the shit mum has been through, that she deserves this (and more), and I walk off to have a little tear to myself. Damn her dud boyfriend. He should have been here to enjoy this with her. Instead he’s totally content with his big screen TV, wanky wines, stinky cheeses, expecting mum to make him dinner when she gets home tired from work and footy on Friday nights. You might have guessed that I don’t approve of him. Dud. I plot to drag mum to the Greek Islands some day so she can have her Shirley Valentine moment.

After we finish walking around inside the Mezquita, we exit the building and find a group of Imams hanging out in the gardens, waiting to go in. Curiously I walk up to them and ask if anyone of them speak English. Initially I am greeted quite coldly, with some rather rude and suspicious looks. Eventually I find a guy who speaks English and I ask him what it is like to visit such a place as a Muslim. Having just walked out of the place in complete awe of the beauty myself, his “I find this place disgusting. They came in and took what was ours.” Not wanting to stir shit too much, I skipped my “but you guys stole it from the Romans” remark, opting for the more diplomatic “they left everything that was beautiful and took what was important”. This was the first time I got a smile from him, and his expression changed from “you’re just another white guy that thinks we are all terrorists” to “you understand”.

The rest of the day, mum and I wandered about the backstreets. I discover the best flavour of icecream I’ve ever had (Spanish Nata with roasted pine nuts), find a café that sells Tab (it still tastes like shit), and basically wander around soaking in the oldness. We found a few small alleyways that had banners hanging over the road, which mum could translate for me. One of them had a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem: Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera- which roughly translates to: You can cut all the flowers but you can never capture the Spring. This marks another special moment for the me and mum journey, as I would have walked past this and totally missed one of the most beautiful sentiments I’ve ever heard. I decide to acquire this as the perfect allegory for my photos from the past year. Later, we sit down at a café near to our pension and Peck wanders past and she joins us for coffee and we compares notes on our day. In the evening, mum takes the night off and us youngins go out for beer and tapas at a local bar. The guy behind the counter explains to me his love for AFL and presents us with an extra helping of fried anchovies as a reward for me being Australian. We then go hunting for more people and beer, and eventually find a stall in a park selling cooked snails with tasty spices. One cup of steamed snails and a beer – 3 Euro. The next morning, Peck heads for Sevilla early, while mum and I are stick around to explore a bit more of the city.

Sevilla
We get off the train from Cordoba and I go to the tourist info spot and sort out a Pension just near the Giralda Tower. We bus it in to the centre and walk to our new digs. Once we get sorted with our room, explosions sounding like cannon fire can be heard firing off in the distance. With my dog like predisposition of getting restless when bright lights and loud noises are about the place, I go for a quick scout around where we are staying while mum has a shower and gets ready. We hit the streets around 7pm and I show mum about the places I had just looked around. The loud bangs go off every couple of minutes, with mum and I instinctively ducking as if we had just come straight outta Compton. I convince mum to follow me towards the loud bangs, and we eventually find our way to the Guadalquivir river and a procession of beautifully dressed Spanish May festival revellers. We followed the procession through the street and there is a wonderful energy just being amongst it. From what I could tell, the tourist to local ratio was at a good level, which meant the pick pocket to mum ratio was at a level of which we could wander about separately. The parade lead us all around the old part of Sevilla and it reminded me a little bit of Friday night skating in Vienna, where you see the city under the guise of a magical experience, rather than on the top of one of those horrible red buses. We stopped at a nice little pub for wine and tapas, and ended up chatting with a small group of English speakers (UK, Sweden and I forget), who have been living in Spain for around seven years. I use this as another point to try and convince mum to live here in Spain for six months and work as a teacher. There is a brief moment where I catch a spark of interest in mum’s eye, but this fades quickly. If she wanted to, she could do it.

The next day, mum and I tour the huge gothic cathedral which was built next to the already standing Islamic Giralda Tower. This place is massive and mum’s head breaks again. The pillars remind me of the Sequoia trees I saw in California. We climb the tower to see Sevilla from where the call to prayer was made over 700 years ago. Inside the tower, there are ramps rather than stairs, as the caller would ride their horse to the top like and old school elevator. The view is amazing. We spend the afternoon and the next morning exploring the city and in the evening, we board the overnight train back to Barcelona so we can take the bus to Andorra.

Andorra
We arrive in Barcelona, and head to the bus station to take the bus up into the Pyrenees and to Andorra, the lovely little tax haven Europe has fostered over the years. The ride up was spectacular, with so many gorgeous little villages and monasteries hanging from the side of cliffs, with violent rock faces and snow capped mountains lining our view. The environment changes as we enter the valley where Andorra is hidden. It felt a bit like discovering the Eagle’s Nest. We arrive in Andorra la Vella in the afternoon and go to the tourism office to find a place to stay. They arm us with a map and a book, and we decide on a cheap place just off the main strip. When we get there, the stair well had the appearance of a crack house (sorry Luke, a crack home), and from behind a large pile of Styrofoam, a sketchy looking guy (who may or may not have been about to rob us), informs me that the place had been closed for some time. Mum and I go to a café, and use their phone to book into another place just up the road. We dump our bags and go grab some food. After food, we find that the town shuts down at around 9pm, and the excessive amounts of personal security devices for sale in the windows tells us that perhaps the street of Andorra la Vella after dark are possibly not the best place to be (really, it’s quite a safe place, but my Sketch-o-metre has been a little out of whack since Cuba). In the morning we discover the place is all about shopping and I convince mum to trade in her Qing Dynasty shoes for some practical walking shoes. We spend 40 minutes walking around the Andorran equivalent to Big W before I drag mum to an actual shoe store to buy something that may actually b good for her feet. Mum finds a pair of Timberlands that she likes and is surprised that the moment she puts them on, her feet can almost be heard singing thanks for her gift to them. Mum suggests we stick around Andorra for another day, but I say that it would be a crime against France to spend another day in such a vacuous hole. That said, I did find some funky kids spray painting cars for an exhibition at a car show, but when I asked what it was like to grow up in a place that is one big duty free store, they said it was shit. We jump a bus out of there and head for France.

Nice
We arrive in L'Hospitalet, and at the train station I persuade mum to take the overnight train to Nice, and use that as a base to see the surrounding sites, rather than trying to travel between all the small places each day. The train to Toulouse was ok, but the midnight train from Toulouse to Nice was thoroughly unpleasant. The train station was crawling with sketch (my Sketch-o-metre may be out of whack, but this was sketch), and I hide mum in the café – which we get kicked out of when they close at 11:30pm. We then get onto the train, but board the wrong carriage thanks to some badly marked signs. The carriage is full of drunk, shirtless French yobbos, and we need to pass by them to get to our carriage. Just as we get to the door to leave the carriage, a guy hooks up a pipe to the side and begins to pump out the piss and shit from the previous journeys ablutions. This being a sketchy train station, there is a rip in the hose and a fine spray of poo wee cocktail sprays across the our exit, preventing us from leaving. As if unaware of what was spraying against his legs and soaking into his socks, a conductor stood at the door and instructs us to get off. Mum rightly refuses and I kick up a fuss. Eventually they turn the pump off and we change carriages. I spend the next few hours laying semi awake, watching the sketchys float through the carriage, picking out people to rob while they sleep. Thankfully a guy playing a PSP in the next carriage attracted enough attention away from me and mum and I relax. We arrive in Nice, walk into the central part and find a place to stay. After the south of Spain, Nice has a really dirty, sour and plastic vibe. Street works all along the main road spoil any view of classic French architecture and the whole place fails to resolve as the classic south of France fairy tail ideal which I had built in my head.

That said, there are nice parts of Nice. The old town is gorgeous, the beach (while covered in rocks), was still pretty and the surrounding ports and 600 year old infrastructure. On the second day, mum stops her grumbling about rushing from Andorra to Nice, realising that if we had tried to travel between all the little places she had planned out that we would have spent more time travelling and less time seeing the place. Mum takes a day off and relaxes, doing some ironing and just pottering about the place. I go do some much needed laundry (the dreaded second day socks had turned into the unholy third day socks), and internet is lapped up on both sides. On day three we hire a little green Renault and drive around the surrounding hills. We check out the spectacular Tourettes-sur-loup, drive about the hills near to where Ronin was filmed and spend the afternoon at a perfumery in Grasse.

In the morning, I drive mum to the airport (after a couple of stressful ‘mum can’t read maps’ moments), and I get her to her plane to Ireland. Mum has since toured around the south of Ireland, and met up with my mate Clair who took her out for lunch and entertained mum while she was in Dublin. After the airport, I dropped the car back at the rental shop, and did some solo touring around Nice. As my Couchsurfing didn’t kick in until the next day, I found a hostel for the night and hung out with an American couple who were really lovely. The next day I toured around Eze, where I met a French-Canadian girl and on the bus I spotted a Finnish couple (Marimekko skirts are a dead giveaway), and we ended up hanging out all day and checking out another hanging off a cliff French village. Later, I met up with my French couchsurfing host, Alex, who I planned to stay with over the weekend. On Saturday we took the train to Monaco and hung out at the track, checking out the palace, castle and big church on the hill. This is the best setting for an F1 race, as it is the perfect allegory for the stupid excess that the pinnacle of motorsport represents. That said, there was some moments where I understood what it meant for a Muslim to take the pilgrimage to Mecca. Hmmm… Sacrilicious. To explain my reaction: I was brought up on a diet of Grand Prix (pronounced Grand Pricks), Bathurst, WRC, car chase movies, Gran Turismo and Evel Knievel retrospectives. Coming to Monaco made something in my blood tingle. Seeing that hairpin & walking through that tunnel and imagining the deafening scream of F1 cars fanging it towards the double 90 degree turns and the port side final sector clicked the faith switch in me. I know somewhere in the fuel starved future ahead of us, I will work with cars in some capacity.

The next day was Sunday – a day of rest.

On Monday, I said goodbye to Alex and headed for the train station, with the plan to head to Gap. When I got to the station, something about the words “Strike”, “Train” and “Today” casually hanging out together on a generic Times New Roman sheet of paper told me that I wasn't going anywhere in France. I had had a gutful of Nice, so I flipped a coin and after one of the prettiest train trips I've ever taken, I'm now in Torino, Italy.