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.

The science of siesta

I can remember as a kid, laying awake in my bunk bed thinking “wow, even through these double brick walls, I can still hear dad snoring”.

It wasn’t dad.

This is the first time since I was a baby that I’ve shared a room with my mum, and to use the words of my sister: she snores like a warthog. We’re talking surgery required at the nearest hospital degree of snoring. I’m quite a light sleeper, so if someone (anyone), has woken me up with their “rub it in your face, I’m getting better night’s sleep than you” snoring, I crack the shits and wake them up. I remember on a bus trip to Melbourne (I think it was for the Radiohead concert that never materialised), Jules was asleep next to me and across the isle an older guy would sporadically burst into ear-splitting fits of snoring. Despite the super comfortable bus seating and my rolled up jacket pillow, I was having a hard time sleeping. Around the Nhill point of the journey, just as the rumble of the road was lulling me off to a world where road lines are the staple diet of buses, another eruption of snoring fires off over the demilitarized zone of the isle. As this had been a running theme all night, Jules starts to giggle at both the guy and my pissed reaction. That was it. My sleepless fury had peaked and something violent snapped inside of me. In an action I’ve never been able to repeat since, I gripped the sleeve of my jacket, whipped it out from under my head, snapped it directly on the offending nose and returned it to it's previous pillow state under my head in one frog tongue like action. The snoring guy woke up startled as Jules and I tried to keep our laughing to ourselves.

Sleep in the same room as me and snoring wont be tolerated. I've been told that I snore softly, and that it is a gentle sound that inspires sleep in those around me rather than urgent midnight calls to an ENT doctor. I have, however, dismissed this as lies. I’ve never heard myself snore.

After a sleepless night and a day of walking and planning, we head for the train station to sort out the tickets for the next day train journey to Granada. This turned into a marathon effort thanks to the 3 people serving and the 200 people waiting. We grabbed our ticket (464), look up at the big red numbers (227), and find a corner to dig into. Queues are a war of attrition. Patience is tested. Fortitude is rewarded. It felt a bit like the scene in Beetlejuice, where he’s in a waiting room and is given a ridiculously high number compared to the “Now Serving” display. In the time we sat there, we watched several backpackers fade from the wait time and waddle off (possibly to become street performers), a couple having a bit of a tiff in the next row of seats (amazing what you can pick up from body language alone), and flirted with the idea of getting a Eurail pass but could only find details about it in Spanish. European train stations are fun place to just sit and watch. The silent games you can play as people pass are always amusing. Guess the Nationality is fun. Canadians are always piss easy to pick, thanks to their mandatory “I am not a fucking American” Canadian flag sewn to their packs. Germanic types north of Bavaria do that sandal sock thing, which only occurs elsewhere in bearded, outdoor loving year 9 English teachers from Australia. Aussies have this swagger that comes from either thinking they own the place or walking all day in shorts and thongs. Americans talk loudly. Eastern Europeans, thanks to James Bond movies and a rough night on a train, always have that look that they will stab you in your sleep. Japanese backpackers rarely travel with company, are very quite and either carry the contents of their shoebox apartment back at home, or just a magical Mary Poppins bag that is light as feather but has everything they need for 3 years of travel.

If your thinking of trying this experiment in Adelaide. Forget it. Our national train station, for some ungodly reason, is not part of the central station, was designed with Neo-Brutal Soviet apartment blocks in mind and is no where near anything interesting (unless you find surprise sex in the parklands and Bunnings interesting). I hear the new bus station is taking shape, but all you’re going to see is backpackers getting off, dropping their bags at some hostel on Flinders street or jumping the tram to a Glenelg backpackers. If you’re lucky enough to catch them the next day as they cram onto the Firefly to Uluru, you see them ticking off Adelaide in their little travel book as done and dusted. Go on, walk up and ask someone who looks like a traveller and ask what they are looking for and what they’ve seen. If you got the time, show them your favourite part of the Botanic Gardens, take them to Vegos and loving it, educate them on the joy that is Coopers, show them the basement at Bigstar, sit on the upstairs seats at Cibo that overlook the Frome Road - Rundle Street intersection. Do your home town proud kids, sign up for couchsurfing and show some random foreigners around. Just before I left, I had a couple of German girls stay with me. Rather than doing the cookie cutter Rick Steve’s adventure they had planed, Pip and I took them out to see a band play at the Grace Emily, entertained them with tales of Adelaide's dark past and fed their hangovers with a tasty Store breakfast and a pie and ice coffee at the St Peters 7th Avenue bakery. Is that a hint of home sickness peaking through? Eee gads.

Ok.. Where was I.. Ah. Barcelona Train Station.

After a day of walking about Barcelona checking off the odd thing here and there that we had missed in the first two days, we return to the Australian themed pension (home to revelations in the field of snoring and a family who immigrated to Australia back in the 50s and then immigrated back to Spain in the 80s), collect our bags and head for the train station. The cabins are separated by gender, and mum gets to inflict her nose on a group of strange women, one of which has a body odour akin to Austrian chess – it smells like a Brunswick taxi driver’s beaded seat massager, but there’s something about that makes you think it would go great with wine and crackers. I get to share it with a guy who has one of those fold up bikes stuffed in his bag; another guy who when he talks, little beads of blood-laced spit form at the corners of his mouth; and a guy who enjoyed testing out all his ringtones on his phone at 3am in the morning.

I must say at this point, mum is doing surprisingly well with keeping up the pace. Sure, there are some moments where the realisation that perhaps bringing a better pair of shoes or that maybe white pants aren’t the best for travel or hanging your wet washing in the train cabin for overnight drying is possibly a bad idea. But all in all, she’s managed to keep up with the early mornings and frantic see everything we can in the short time we have schedule.

I get my best night’s sleep overnight train trips, with the gentle tick tick noises and slight movement provided my favourite variety of nocturnal rest. I get a similar night’s sleep when there’s a fan switched on in my bedroom, which I think has to do with white noise and rhythmic movement. I wake up to find mum excitedly snapping photos out the window of the Southern Spanish country side, which looks a bit more like home than I expected. Cheese lady has since developed a more pungent smell (suited to being served with morphine and a straight jacket), my blood-spit guy has left his complementary toothbrush on my cabin’s sink (imagine a shoe polisher releasing years of built up tension with the only weapon he has at hand), and for some reason I’ve woken up with a look that would make your nanna clutch a little more tightly to her bag if we passed each other on the street.

At the station, we meet two individual travellers (Peck and Yuri), who, because they are both Asian, us whiteys think they are travelling together. Singaporean Peck is on her in between jobs three week European adventure and Japanese Yuri is on a quiet and humble year long world odyssey (Mary Poppins if you're wondering). An old Spanish woman spots us and through our broken Spanish and her non-existent English we broker a deal to stay at her pension, with an alleged bus ride to her place. This bus turns out to be a public bus, but her pension is right near everything pretty and was super chilled. From the window, snow capped mountains backdrop a 17th century church and surrounding Moorish influenced town buildings. The alley below is quiet and lead onto a small square of cafes, restaurants and tourist info boxes. We dumped our stuff, showered and headed out for the day. The nearby tourist box provided us with maps and an idea of what to see, and we wandered about the back street bazaars, marvelling at the colourful silks, dangly pokey-outy eye thingos and trinkets ready made for breakage in your bag on transit home. Mum was having issues with her knees and we called past a chemist to grab some braces. We decided to head north along the river and up the hill to check out the Alhambra from a different vantage point. Along the way, we stopped to watch a painter do his thing in a public square. In his sights was a girl quietly sitting and writing in her journal. Something about her said English speaking and we start chatting to her. Jordan, an American girl over here studying Spanish, was so happy to meet up with some fellow English speakers, spent the rest of the day with us, guiding us through the back streets and showing us some of her favourite little hidden spots on the hill. I think she wants to adopt my mum. Jordan invites us to a flamenco dance performance later that night and after dinner, we meet up with her again. Set in the bunker like cellar of a building built in 1600 and something, the flamenco was cool to watch, with an old guy in his 70s belting out some of the most passionate and powerful singing I’ve heard out of anyone. After it finishes, a reggae and funk dj starts spinning tunes and we have some drinks and dance. Mum looked like she was having fun all night.

The next day we tour the Alhambra. Yuri is headed to Morocco, her time is limited in Granada and she doesn’t join us. We get up early to catch the lighter crowds and find that every other tourist in town have also taken this option. After queuing for about 40 minutes, we are let into this amazing place, which had a similar feel to it as some of the Turkish influenced places I visited in Hungary. Wonderfully ornate wall carvings, elaborate ceilings and infinitely complex mathematical patterns overloaded my eyes. The drabness of the Charles the V Christian architecture when contrasted against the ornate visual orgy of the Islamic architecture emphasises the sacrilege that occurred here. Mum gets emotional a few times and this warms my heart.

Afterwards, Peck, mum and I go have lunch, rest a bit and then jump a three hour train to Cordoba.

Gold, Frankincense and Pigeon

I arrived in Barcelona a day earlier than mum so I could get my bearings, suss out if our welcoming host was a psycho and make mum's arrival as easy as possible. The plan was to stay with a couchsurfer for the first couple of days and then switch to a hotel or pension (the mezzanine of accommodation between hostel and hotel - sort of like the casa particulars in Cuba, but with less I may get stabbed in my sleep feeling). When I arrived in Barcelona, I didn’t get the same buzz I normally got when I touched down in a new country. Sure the place has karaoke singing, abuse yelling taxi drivers, but it felt more like I was going somewhere for a conference or a business meeting than an extension of my travels. The next couple of weeks with mum were an unknown to me and I was a little nervous about how things between us were going to pan out. I hopped on th airport bus, made my way into town, met up with Pauletta, worked out what to see while in town and made sure the airport bus was a simple connecting journey rather than a Broadway stage production. Over a beer and paella, Pauletta prepared me for the journey ahead. I put myself into super tourer mode, pulled all the experiences from transit from the past year and focused them on making mum’s trip an easy one. I worked out an easy walking tour around the nearby area so that when mum arrived after her 30+ hour flight, we could tackle her jetlag without really challenging her physically. All that was left in the equation was mum.

The day arrives and I head out to the airport to greet mum. I’ve got times and plane numbers written down and discover her plane is delayed by 40 minutes. This gives me time to grab some bus tickets back into town, have a little food and make a sign saying “Mum” to hold up at the arrival gates. The time comes and I squeeze into a choice position right in front of the gates so the first thing mum would see is me and the sign. There’s the usual delay of baggage collection and eventually cases start coming out of the gates with her flight number written on them. Ten minutes passes. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. Hmmm.. where the hell is mum? Maybe she missed her connecting flight. I go over to an internet kiosk and quickly check my email to see if she’s sent me a mail. No mail. I send her an email asking where she is. I then hang out in front of the gate again. No mum. An hour after the plane touched down I still can’t see her anywhere. I venture over to the front desk for the airline she flew with and ask them if they can tell me if she was on the flight. They tell me due to privacy laws they can’t. I tell them that it’s my mum who is in Europe for the first time, show them the sign I made and give them my best desperate face. The woman behind the glass exchanges a look with her colleague, asks me to write my mum’s last name on a piece of paper, takes the paper and presses a finger to her lips. After a few seconds on her computer, she points to her name badge. THERESA and nods. Mum was on the flight. So where the fuck did she get to. I walk back to the gates and mingle a bit more, fidgeting with my camera I had planned to use to capture the moment she walked through the gates. Then a horrid thought crosses my mind. Maybe she doesn’t know to come out the gates and is standing by the luggage carousel waiting for me to pick her up. This is only 30 metres from where I was standing, but there's big red lines painted on the ground between me and the gates, with DO NOT ENTER clearly marked in several languages on the automatic doors leading to the baggage collection area. I try and steal a glimpse here and there. No good. Unless I go through the gates, I can’t test my theory. I pick my moment and just as a group of Japanese tourists come through the gates and a guy is being taken off in handcuffs in the other direction I slip through the gates and into the restricted zone. Within five seconds I find mum wandering around in a confused daze, looking stressed and worried. I suppress my frustration and wrap my arms around her, saying she's a silly sausage for not going through the doors. We go through the white, speak English express line in customs and jump on the bus headed for downtown Barcelona.

We’re off to a good start.

On the way back into town, I point out a few things I spotted on my first day and tell her about the next couple of days. Mum is tired from the 32 hour commute and a little dazzled at the busyness of Barcelona. We get to our stop and take a metro back to the flat, meet up with Pauletta and sit. It’s been a long way for mum and we take things slowly. My pace of travel needs to be hedged back so that she can keep up. Mum has a shower and understands why she must stay up until her normal bed time, but the lack of decent sleep on the plane means she’s been mostly awake for the last 45 hours and it shows. We wander around the back street markets, take coffee at a café, stumble on a couple of street performers and mum passively soaks in her new surrounds within the confines of her jetlag induced concussion. Churches, buildings and houses older than the European history of our home country floor mum and I stand back, watching her rural Victorian perception of the world be blown apart by the history surrounding her on all flanks. Sure mum knows her European history, but books, TV shows and university lectures can’t compare to the experience of actually being there. Our wandering through the back streets of the old part of Barcelona suits mum's current mental state. She loves taking photos of graffiti. Not sure why, but every piece we come across she stops and snaps a few shots. Check out her flickr site and you’ll see plenty of graffiti she sees during her day. I guess when you live out in Salisbury, the shelter at the local bus stop is as close as you’ll get to a gallery. Some of the Spanish work is really ornate, with that look that you only get with the European brand of artistic vandalism. We stumble onto some markets I had found the day before, and with their likeness to the Central Markets, mum feels a bit more at ease. We check out the main tourist strip, but to my relief this doesn't appeal to mum. Later, we grab a beer and mum hits the wall at around 9pm. Rest at last.

Over the next couple of days, we toured around more of the old city, checked out some Gaudi buildings and did some much needed planning for our onward journey. The Gaudi Cathedral didn't do it for me. Sure it's different, but to me it just looks like a gigantic pile of gothic-styled bat guano. Give me Hundertwasser anytime. There were some tense moments where the gap between my pace and mum's had to shift on both sides. But eventually after telling each other to pull our heads in, the painful gap between reality and expectation is crossed and there is a truce. Our visit to the Catalaunian Art Museum was a fab experience. The buliding and view is worth the walk up the stairs, as long as you can prevent your mum getting abducted by the gypsies on the way. We grab our tickets and just as we go to look at the art, a small orchestra of wind instruments is preparing itself to start in a nearby hall. We follow them in and take our seats in a room fit for a 16th century king's dance party and the show begins. Still tired and overwhelmed by the experience that is Barcelona, the music touches mum and she begins to weep at the majesty of it all. I lean over and whisper "Just think. Every moment of every day of your life, something this beautiful is happening in the world. I wish I could give you what I've seen over the past year and a half." The rest of the day was full of these little moments as this was mum's first European art gallery. And even though a handful of the works inside carried big names, it was the shear size of the collection that blew mum's mind. After the gallery, we wandered around the surrounding gardens and also checked out the 1992 Olympics site, which is a quick walk from the Museum. Impressive looking monument thingo with the stadium's cafe showing the Monaco Grand Prix on the telly. I bought a hotdog, mum bought a beer and we chatted about the day's arty adventures to the backdrop of screaming F1 cars.

I've always wanted to see another person's Shibuya moment. You know those times when you wish you had a photo of yourself gaping stupidly at the miscellaneous grandeur before you? In 2005, I walked out of the Shibuya metro station in Tokyo, soaked in the view before me and my head promptly melted away. A true Kodak moment. But watching mum bounce between paintings and sculptures (many with dates proceeding white settlement in Australia), and seeing her sweet sentimental soul soak up a thousand years of history had a more sustained quality to it than a Japanese 23rd century culture shock.

This trip is going to be fun.

When I was a young boy...

If you know me at all, it might come as a surprise that I am currently travelling with someone I’ve quite often described as the most annoying person in my life. But a moment on the flight over to Cuba changed all that.

As I looked out at the lights of Miami on the horizon, Pioneer by the Split Enz played on my MP3 player and it suddenly dawned on me: My mum is cool. I thought about it more and the realisation started to seep into every part of my being. My mum is responsible for my love of music, art, culture and a curiosity about the world that has lead to this crazy year of travel. When I was a kid, mum would take me into the then 5MMM and sit me in the studio while she did her radio program. I was dragged along to performances by U2, Dire Straights, Crowded House, Hoodoo Gurus and countless Adelaide pub bands. Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeplin ...... were all regulars on the stereo, something some of my friends parents didn't even have. Mum was on Sale of the Century back when Tony Barber and Alice Platt were in charge of things and won a pair of electric scooters (Although, she still refuses to show me the tape). My lefty sensibilities were drummed into me from an early age with “Bring Back Gough”, “NO DAMS” and “Nuclear Free Zone” badges stuck to the fridge. I was the little kid at anti war / nuclear / something-not-quite-socialist-enough demonstrations, which generated a healthy dose of cynicism towards the government and all things in charge. I was at the “This is not a fucking test transmission” launch of Triple J in Rymal Park. When I turned 14, it seemed perfectly natural for me to start doing Rock n Roll High School, with the 3D Radio veterans of the time already knowing who I was. “How’s your mum?” they would ask. While going through a marriage breakup and dealing with a troublesome son, she held down a job and managed to finish off a uni degree at Flinders, majoring in film, Latin American history and language.

All of this welled up inside of me and I began to cry. I'm such a sook these days, but really I got quite emotional. Regardless of all the shit that has happened and how frustrated I get with her at times, she’s still a pretty cool lady. And she’s my mum. A plan formed in my head. I would go to Cuba then travel to Central America and work my way down to Argentina where I would meet mum and travel about South America for a month or so, allowing her to soak in the culture she studied and the language she loves.

Then I got mugged in Havana and lost my nerve to travel.

I still knew that travel with mum would be a great idea, but the idea of doing it in another sketchy country was really daunting. I was missing home and the last thing I could think of doing was Sheparding my mum through dodgy little villages and cramming onto stinky, falling apart buses. But I had already seeded the idea of travel in mum’s head and I didn’t want to let her down. Combined with wanting to get back to Europe for Eurovision and summer in Berlin, I figured Spain was a good compromise. A plan formed and flights were booked.

I was going travelling with my mum. My sister said I was crazy. I agreed.

Getaway in Stockholm

At about 7am I get up and Thomas and I grab a quick bite to eat in the crew’s galley. From what’s on offer, the range is healthy enough to prevent scurvy and varied enough to avoid cabin fever for those working on the boat. After eating I go out on deck and watch the Swedish Archipelago pass by. Truly beautiful stuff. Reminded me a bit of the Hawkesbury River area near Newcastle. I meet Joakim (a photographer from the Swedish national broadcaster), and we exchange the usual Nikon vs Canon jibes with one another, like snowboarders and skiers would on a chairlift. Aside from his Nikon infraction, he’s quite a nice guy. I tell him that’s it ok, and that even some of best friends are Nikon users. After the ferry ride into Shanghai last year I made up my mind that the best way to arrive in a port city is by boat, to see the place as people have been seeing it for centuries. Stockholm certainly falls under the must be seen for the first time by boat category. As the city starts to come into view, Joakin gives me a guided a by finger tour of the place, and I occasionally confuse 17th Century churches with fun park attractions, a huge sports dome for a gas container and a communications tower for a Soviet fashioned evil genius’ not so secret military fortress. The little islands we pass have quaint red painted shacks and pretty mini-forests and petite jettys for docking one’s pleasure craft on. We begin to pass old customs houses and shipping warehouses that were built before Dirk Harthog smelt a wattle and after rounding a bend, the city reveals itself. Beautiful old buildings line the shore, sail boats dot the harbour and brides join the small islands together. Church steeples, clock towers, rock faces – awesome.

I go below deck and rejoin Thomas. We meet Monika again and we grab another bite to eat. I then return to the cabin to collect my stuff, while Thomas goes on a staff discount scout of the duty free store, later returning with the gift of chocolate from Monika, a gift that keeps on giving. We abandon ship and walk into the centre to grab a grab a coffee and get a quick orientation of the place. Emails are checked and plans for Sweden and the future are discussed. After a couple of hours, I say goodbye to Thomas and write a few emails and contact my host. I have some time to kill before finding my place, dump my bag with a kind café owner and do a little exploring by foot around the old town. Little cobblestone alleyways lead you to other cobblestone alleyways in a dizzy maze-like old school mess. Colonel Light and Escher would have a tiff and then spend the day walking around in silence if they came here for their honeymoon.

My host is a Chinese exchange student who has been studying here in Sweden for the last year or so. He lives in Rinkeby (pronounced Rink-a-boo), an area unofficially used for years by the Swedes to house all the immigrants in one convenient spot. 50 years ago you would have found only Finnish people there. Now the place resembles Sydney Road in Melbourne, with people from the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. South America all living together in the one spot. Rinkeby is a fairly unique place, as there are the children of immigrants here that are in their late teens that have not learnt Swedish and keep pretty much to the small communities created by their fellow countrymen. Rinkeby-Swedish, a dialect which has been born from these conditions, is now spoken by 8% of the Swedish population. I’m no cunning linguist, but hasn’t this been the way new languages have formed since our caveman like relatives started blabbering a few million years ago? People move, new mother tongues are born.

Anyhoo..

The next day I rented a bike and rode everywhere that little guy would take me. I got a closer look at my evil genius’ not-so secret base, the fun park church, but missed out on the stadium-sized gas tank. I listened to the radio all day, bouncing between Swedish talkback and 80s flashback. I rode through a field full of lush green grass to the Eurhythmics’ Sweet Dreams; caught up on my Germanic language through an interview with Tim Burton; got busted singing Prince’s Kiss near the shore opposite the fun park by a couple of surly looking old Finnish fisherman (say hat 10 times fast); and there was a brief moment during Huey Lewis and The News’ The Power of Love where I hung onto the car I was riding beside. This moment was one that will treasure for the rest of my life.

I didn’t do my usual thing where I take an infamous car run and track it around the streets, but the Mabo of it was there. I did find a public bike pump and was disappointed that my tyres had ample pressure. The city itself reminded me a bit of St Petersburg, with the ornate old buildings set along water and less gypsies picking people’s pockets on pedestrian crossings along Nevsky Prospekt.

I didn’t really do much in the city other than ride around, hang out in cafes and frolic in the lush green grass of the outlying fields. I did meet a guy with a really nicely restored 1962 Volvo and complemented him on his Swedish pride. I had my first shot at playing a Playstation 3. Meh. Sure it has gorgeous graphics, but really not that much of an extension on game play in the same way the Wii is. A car game is still a car game, even when you can see the cars around you reflected in the virtual paintwork. On the subject of cars, I was surprised at the amount of classic American cars floating about the place. And in general, there were a greater number of flashier cars quite willing to run me over on my bike. This would be a good time to make a quick comment of the distinction between Swedes and Finns. I’ve found, and this is only my superficial impression, that Finnish culture and in general the people are a humble lot, keeping success, riches and achievement close to their hearts. One of the reasons I was so weirded out by seeing the 5 or so Hummers driving around Helsinki while I was there is that it didn’t match the idea of a Finn I had built up in my head. The Hummer to small city ratio was out of whack. But if you really want to put your Hummer/Small town ratio out of whack, visit Port Lincoln some time.

The trip back to Helsinki wasn’t as eventful as the trip over, but I did meet a group of teachers who I shared some fairly insightful conversations with about Finnish culture, living in Finland and even becoming a Finnish citizen. Kevin, one of the teachers, had come to Finland on exchange from Chicago back in 1984(?) when he was 15. A baptism of fire would be the best way to describe his experience. Don’t speak the language, don’t eat the food. Simple. Since then he’s become fluent in the language and has also spent time on a collection of southern Japanese islands teaching English between hopping between islands to attend all the different schools. A really interesting character and after we got into port, he and I went and had some lunch together. Over a coffee, I put to him my observation that there was something about the Finnish approach to respect and humbleness within the culture that reminded me of Japan. He agreed and articulated my anthropological ramblings in a much clearer way (which has since left me), but I’m glad to have found someone else that has an affinity and appreciation for both cultures. If anyone reading this is visiting the place, I thoroughly recommend meeting Kevin for a drink sometime.

Back in Helsinki, I stayed with Laila (another couchsurfer), who’s great fun to hang out with and can drink anyone under the table and through the floor if put to the challenge. Her obsession with Donald Duck comics, toasted Corinthian Piroshki and red wine made for another fun person hang with. I spent my last day in Helsinki with Maja (a journalist friend of Sofia), who showed me around the lakes and encouraged me to wear short shorts to go swimming in the freezing water. We took photos and now that May is about to tick over into June, there was plenty of falling asleep on the 'beach', soaking up the non-lethal sun to warm up with afterwards. Another great person to catch up with if I'm ever back in Finland.

Early next morning I was on a plane.
I saw The Alps from the air.
Now I’m in Barcelona.
With my mum.
Oh Lordi.