I Remember

I started the Crappy Menial Job yesterday, but today am at home a wheezing, coughing mess (I called my sister at 7:30 this morning to tell her I had a "ninja star stuck in my throat"). I suspect that I can blame my current state on the miracle that was getting sick not once in my eight-or-so weeks of hard-core time zone, season and climate displacement. So, on one hand, thank you body for not getting sick while I was travelling! On the other hand, bleh, I'm sick now and it sucks.

Working nine hours of menial retail crap is just the inspiration I need, apparently, to get my resume in shiny, perfect order- see Ali come home from her first day of work to spend the next four hours resume-writing! I am determined that my resume is going to be just the most fabulously impressive thing around, and it is going to get me quick-smart out of Christmas retail hell.

Coming home has been all the good and wierd and complicated I had anticipated. It's fun being back in my life, only without all the unending angst my life entailed this time last year. To hang out at the Slox having a trashy old time without once feeling overwhelmed by the too-many-years of too-much-drama! The Phoenix, shiny and new again, same filthy vibe (thank deities they didn't chuck out the dentist's chair). King St on its relentless march to gentrification, my favourite op-shop gone but the posters, graffiti, hot feral girls still there. Sexy women who made me quake in my shoes last year- still sexy, but the shyness is less crippling or gone altogether.

Then again, of course there's drama. Can't move in such vivid, passionate groups & scenes without expecting drama, I suppose. It's the necessary toll for this joy I feel at being lifted up by the years worth of knowledge and history of each other. But at least for now, my optimism far outweighs my fear of old drama, and so far that's enough to conquer it.

I have 'visitation rights' to my stuff being stored in various houses around. I'm astounded at the volume of clothes, which I shouldn't be since I own them all, and must have worn them once, but oh my goodness who in the world needs seventy four tank tops, not including strapless, halter-neck or open-backed? I guess I've been more of a frugal femme while travelling (what is the point of acquiring so much only to leave it behind?) so this excess is unfamiliar. My collection of cocktail dresses. Ballgowns on a separate rack. Costume pieces over here (showgirl skirts, wings, Queen of Hearts gown, tutus, hotpants and legwarmers). So many mini-skirts (absent from my San Francisco wardrobe, since it never warms up enough there). My summer frocks! My swing-skirt tutu dress! My endless pairs of black high heels!

Especially unfamiliar since so much of that wardrobe was acquired through bargain-hunting, op-shopping, trading, and learning how to alter clothes. Somehow I'd forgotten that sort of resourcefulness, that an endless wardrobe does not require an endless budget. It's fun to learn it all again. I'm excited about the prospect of a room, space for it all, to get familiar once again.

Sydney; the fantasy

I wrote this stuff sitting at a bus stop an hour or so ago, waiting for the morning bus after a night of gleeful partying:

The city is so fucking beautiful right now. Early early morning, peach-streaked clouds against pure blue sky. I'm so in love with this, with here. "Home", as in here, right now.

Been out at the parties and clubs. The generosity of strangers, the music, the faces, the bodies. My elation is extreme.

I feel suddenly so raw and sexy. I catch glimpses of myself through other people's words and actions, and am so surprised by what I find. I'm home, it's a different place to the one I left, and I'm a different 'me' within it.

I hadn't been feeling sexy for a long time. It seems like something I'd notice the absence of, but I didn't. Too busy needing my body to be functional, a working thing while I was travelling, and my personality projected into the tiny little box called 'traveller'. But I'm home and I feel sexy again. It feels good.

I went out in my knee-length pleated skirt, but I wore really cute (ruffled, lacy) knickers 'just in case'. A girl never knows when it might come in handy to be wearing gorgeous underwear, you see, and I'm so glad I did. Once I got into the dancing, I slipped the skirt off, and danced in knee-high boots and knickers. Ass and hips doing the moving, thighs for punctuation, hands and torso just an afterthought. A smile connected straight down my spine to my tail-bone. What a physically extravagant night!

Things progress beyond that world as well. I have a job, an awful, low-paid menial job, but something to buy me food & beer until I find something better. I don't think I've ever found something so quickly upon deciding to look for employment.

Home

I'm home. Well, I'm in Sydney. I'm staying at my parents house, which in no way actually feels like 'home', but Sydney, ah, Sydney feels like home. You should have seen me bouncing in my seat all the way from Bangkok. My huge smiles to anyone who glanced at me. The little dance I did when I first heard the broad, ocker drawl of a Qantas employee speaking over the planes sound system.

My brother is so tall, my sister has a new piercing, my dad gave up smoking, my mum was wearing earrings (and lipstick? Impossible!). Too much to take in. And then so much more when I get to go into the city to see my people.

Don't know what happens now. My forward vision faded off into static after "get off plane in Sydney". It's clearing up, pixel by pixel, but slowly.

That whooshing sound

I get on a plane tonight to leave Samui, and early tomorrow morning to leave Thailand (and head HOME! Hurrah!). I'm pretty conflicted about whether to get a hotel room or not. I'd get barely a few hours sleep anyway, and it would cost money and be hassle-full getting to and from the airport. I seem to have learnt the knack of making eight hours in an airport disappear, thank goodness. My original plan was to keep my beach-front shack for another night so I could nap there in the afternoon, and buy a trashy, substantial book to read in the airport, then sleep all the way home (I'm pretty good at that). Good plan. But then this thing happened. This thing with waves.

I woke up early yesterday morning to the sounds of wind screaming through my windows, heavy rain falling on the iron roof and waves hurling themselves at the beach, not particularly far from where I slept. The waves had definitely come closer than the six feet away they had been at the last high tide- now they were, perhaps, three feet away. Slightly creeped out, I put all my belongings up on the bed, found my umbrella, and departed.

Coming in that evening I could see the wave marks that came no higher than they had when I left. Relief! My fear of my cabin being flooded, and me having to fight waves to get out, and all my clothes & books being destroyed, abated a little. Now I was just worried about being terrorised by bugs driven inside by the rain.

Except that when I woke up this morning and opened the door, the waves were around the bottom of the three steps to my cabin. Holy fuck. This did not seem like a normal occurance, like something that routinely happens to these beachfront cabins (and the fools who rent them), because I could see plants that grow only above the tide line now completely submerged.

That whooshing sound was me GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF THERE. I shoved my belongings into my bags, and waded out through ankle-deep water to the slightly higher ground behind my cabin. Pretty sure that the tide was still not fully high, I left my stuff a good, safe distance from the water (swirling and rushing beneath the pilons holding up the cabin) and ran to tell Reception that I was leaving on account of the waves.

The woman at Reception came to look at the water (higher still, well over the second step now). Her alarmed voice brought the other resort employees to look, and as I left I could hear them murmuring plans to offer alternative rooms to the people still left in the cabins along the beach. As I walked along the main road I could see that many other beachfront resorts were in a similar situation, water swirling around up to the floor level of their beach front rooms.

Beaches move, I know this from highschool geography. Sand is not static, it flows with the current, tide, and wind down to the next beach. When things are built in the way of the sand flow, it will bank up on one side and vanish on the other. Sometimes there doesn't even need to be human intervention. Sometimes beaches just vanish or appear. Which makes it, now that I think about it, an exceptionally bad idea to build right out over the sand. It was probably just bad luck that the storm raised the waves so much, but if I were a property investor wanting to build on Samui, I'd avoid the absolute beach front altogether.

Boat Trip

Pictures for All!

I went back and added pictures to almost every post about or from Berlin. Of course, since I didn't buy the new camera until a few days before I left, the posts and the pictures are not necessarily related.

Anyway, I don't hate my new camera. I was still getting used to it in the Berlin pictures. Some of my Thailand pictures are much nicer. I'll add them here when I find a net cafe that will let me pull them off the camera.

Wound up hanging out in a bar in Lamai all night talking to German ex-pats (the bar owner and a dive instructor, burly sunburnt Europeans both). Confirming to myself once more that there is no danger of me absconding to Thailand. This is a heterosexual paradise. Nice place for a holiday, but there is no way I belong here. The ladyboys dancing on the bar a few doors down don't change that.

Quite a few pictures here.

Shaken, browned

At this rate I'm going to come home looking like one of those backpacker-style girls who wander the streets of Newtown in their sling bags and "fisherman pants" and artfully mussed hair. A piece of shell jewelry to complete the look. Apparently my European winter clothes (and my San Francisco anytime clothes) are no good for Thailand in November, so shopping (the horror!) is a necessity. I am already wearing far more cheesecloth & cotton than I would ever normally admit to, and carrying a 'rustic' blue sling bag. Oh well, I think, it's big enough for a towel- at least I can take it to the Coogee Women's Pool when I get home.

Inevitable sunburn. I am religious with the hat, sunscreen and shade, but it just can't be helped (spent all day on a boat). More perplexing than the sunburn is the browning. I never go brown. Beneath my freckles, that is. But I am. I almost don't recognise myself.

In the bathroom off my little shack (a beachside shack of my very own! At least until Sunday) there is a translucent green gecko that sings. At first I thought it was a bird on the roof, and then 'no, what bird would sing at this hour?'. And lo, I am told it is the gecko. I'm fairly sure I've never met a singing lizard before. Every time it squeaks out, I wander into the bathroom and reply ("yes, I quite agree. She did? No!"). It stares at me out of it's perfectly round, reflective eyes. I think we have quite the relationship going.

I had a moment of almost crippling guilt today as I was swept up in the crowd of the kayaking tour along to an elephant "sanctuary" where a baby elephant (from the mainland, one and half years old, too young to be away from it's mother!) was chained to a tree by it's foot. Maybe in this part of the world it's necessary to make the elephants work for their food by entertaining the tourists, and maybe it's culturally inappropriate Western guilt that made me cry (I don't care if you torture the animals, just don't make me watch) and maybe it's a bigger issue than I can get my mind around, but it shook me up.

Paradise (Samui)

Now with pictures actually taken by me!

Oh my (random deity) this is the most beautiful place I have ever been. Or at least, right up there. Up there with standing on Land's End in Zimbabwe staring at lightning hundreds of miles away, or looking out to Mt Fuji across a lake, or the view from the top of that waterfall in Yosemite. It is just so fucking gorgeous. I can't believe that somewhere like this is allowed to exist, and that I am allowed to be here. The (first) image, while not taken by me, could have been. My room opens directly onto the beach, so that at high tide the water is all of six feet from my door. The palm trees, the beautiful rock formations, the mountains rising in the background. All true. Oh my.

This is totally worth the crazy amount of transit and the wierdness with the hotels (I am not staying at the one I had booked, but I don't need to go into that story now). Tomorrow I'm going snorkelling. This afternoon I believe I'll have an aloe vera massage to soothe the sunburn that is still invisible, but I can feel creeping up my back.

I got the sunburn riding down here to the main town on the back of one of the rickety little motorcycles that flit like fireflies around the island. Death-defying and scenic all in one! I like that the roads have big signs in Thai & English: "Please remember to drive on the LEFT SIDE". Yes, in fact, the traffic does need reminding of that.

Berlin-Amsterdam-Bangkok

There comes a point after days in transit, when real luxury (shower, bed, food) is still hours away, that all that is required to make me happy is a toothbrush, clean underwear, clean socks and a real, flushing toilet that is not located on an airplane. So although having been in transit since 5am Tuesday is really starting to wear on me, I am happy, because I have clean socks, clean underwear and clean teeth (and am surrounded by the luxury of real plumbing). Never again will I underestimate the power of those things in returning me to a somewhat human, functioning state.

So hi! I've been in transit since 5am yesterday! Feels like longer, what with having only caught fragments of sleep in cattle class seats, and a few moments where I nodded off on a bench in Amsterdam. On the flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok (the most recent flight. I think. Too many flights in too few days!) I was jammed in next to one of those men who, although not large, took up far more than his fair share of space- my arm rest, my foot space, and a fair amount of my seat cushion were consumed by his amazing powers of expansion. I think I actually kicked him and hissed several times during the torturous night, to no avail. Never again will I take the joy of a benign neighbour for granted!

I went to Amsterdam for the day. Why did I do that? No idea. But I did. Pretty place, shame about all the stoned tourists. I got on one of the canal boat tours and slept through the entire thing. An hour and a half of uninterrupted sleep was totally worth the ticket price.

And now I'm in Thailand, and I have no freakin' money. Somehow the drain of it from my wallet is unstoppable, even when I am actively trying to prevent it. I blame Amsterdam, mostly, where it costs money just to walk down the street. Thanks to the remarkable generosity of my friends, this does not seem to be a problem right now, so don't worry about me starving over here.

Bangkok airport is full of immaculately made up girls in traditional (?) dress, with long delicate nails, brocade outfits, headdresses and all. When they see the clumsy Australian girl stumbling over her backpack, they glide over, lift it all with perfect elegance, and make me feel remarkably stupid.

You should see my smile when I think about going home. Five days!

Uh-oh

I'm coming precipitously close to running out of money. It's quite scary. I leave for Thailand on Tuesday, and I'm hoping that the exchange rate is really really good, because otherwise I'm stuck.

It's largely my own fault, though. I bought a camera. I just couldn't cope with the idea of having no pictures of my stay in Berlin. That would be as awful as realising years later that I had no photos of a particular treasured lover. Berlin and me, this is a love affair, and I need the pictures to remind me.

By the canal

• I bought a new bag


• I went to see Franz Ferdinand*


• I moved out of my hostel, into a little studio apartment owned by some sweet dykes who live by a canal in a pretty, leafy-yet-central suburb. One of them is American, the other is German, and both are lovely. The studio has it's own entrance, kitchenette and bathroom, and I just can't get over how much nicer it is than the (fucking) hostel. Hurrah for the kindness of almost-strangers!

*At the concert, Franz Ferdinand were doing that predictable "save one of the big hits for the encore" thing, which was fine, but for a period as the crowd was clapping and cheering to get them back onstage, the chant went up: Burn this city! Burn this city! Burn this city!. Of course it's a reference to This Fire, the song yet to be sung, but it gave me the chills all the same. Something to do with current events, I suppose.

More, more, more!

To set the scene: it's past 11 on a Monday night. The bar is packed, full of dykes and a smattering of trans guys. The music is great, 'eclectic', more for talking than dancing. I am curled right up against a burly, handsome, trans butch, fluttering my eyelashes and giggling at every other sentence. A song with a "cha cha cha" rhythm starts, and he asks me to dance, and we do, taking up the entire little dance floor. I catch on pretty quickly- he leads well- and soon he's spinning me round and catching me again in time to pick up the steps on the beat. Laugh and giggle and laugh some more.

He's one of the people I met at the play party the night before, and we have gravitated once more to one another. At past 1am (the bar still packed- do these people not have to work?) we are on a sofa, making quiet noises about possibly leaving, but we turn to look at each other, and somehow that translates to kissing, which we do for, possibly, the next hour.

And do you know? This bar is usually a gay sex club, so the downstairs is a dark room with plenty of nooks and crannies to take advantage of. So down the stairs we go, and begin taking enthusiastic advantage of the facilities. After we start other couples and triads form around us, a soundscape of fucking and moaning and slapping sounds.

Next time I see a clock, it's 5am, and I'm curled up and purring in someone's lap, having my ears scratched and being called a good kitty. But my body is giving out to exhaustion, so I fumble back into my clothes and the handsome trans guy walks me to the train station (it's so late the trains have started running again). The sun is rising by the time I make it back to my hostel, and I get a raised eyebrow from the guy at the front desk. It's nearly six am on a Tuesday morning.

To my knowledge there are no more sex parties for dykes-and-associated-creatures in the next few days, so I will probably resume my touristing activities once more. But so far- colour me completely fucking impressed. Doc, in SF, hypothesised that I would disappear into Thailand and never be heard from again. I still can't see that happening, but Berlin? Berlin could keep me awhile.

Wandering blind through Berlin at night

Sometimes it takes me good places. On Friday night, for instance, I wound up in a warehouse by a river dancing like a demon to Miss Kittin, who was doing something amazing with a little genre called electroclash. Getting to the venue necessitated a long wait on a dark dirt path that I wouldn't even have found if it wasn't for the queue of people. Inside was an echoing concrete space filled with wierdly obnoxious Berlin clubbers- it took us (my hostel friend and I) a little while to figure out what was so awkward about them. She proposed that it was because they were all dancing from their upper three chakras, all elbows and shoulders, while we were trying to dance with the lower three- hips, ass, thighs. I was more of the opinion that they were just young and straight and not aware of personal space etiquette. Either way, far too many hands flung wildly outward made for a hazardous dance floor, but the joy of the music was enough to negate the risk. My spot on the dance floor had a perfect view of the decks, and it was fun to glance over every now and then to see the (extremely sexy) DJ rocking out to her set (cheeky grin and fist pounding at the air, who does that remind us of?). Made me kind of wistful and happy to be going back home, to where my other favourite sexy-girl DJs do their thing.

Last night I went out to look at the lesbians, at their local place of congregation. A good deal of looking was done, me at them and them at me, and even some friendly conversation and circumspect flirting. The music was predictably dyke-club awful (like listening to the Imperial jukebox on random, with a handful of German pop thrown in), but the dance floor was enthusiastic and fun once I resigned myself to the music. I stayed out far later than I was aware of, and am surprised that I even made it out of bed before midday today. It's really nice being in a city where the bars don't close at two, and having the chance to actually get carried away with the night.

It's still the weekend, so I have edited to add this:
So I went to a play party last night that I heard about through some quiet channels, with the usual fear of going somewhere alone in an unfamiliar place. In the crowd of dykes and transguys in black leather pants, I was conspicuous in ruffled knickers, suspenders, fishnets, my corset, and boots. Not in a bad way, though- the crowd was remarkably friendly, relaxed, quite willing to approach me. And imagine my surprise when I was actually approached for play! By a veritable horde (tribe? Family?) of awesomely sexy dykes-and-related-creatures. Oh my. This never happens! Except it did, and play we did, hot and fierce and sexy, powering through the language barrier with enthusiasm and delight. For privacy reasons I can go into no more detail than that, but if you could see the "I got laid, but good!" grin on my face all day, you'd get it.

Have I mentioned how much I love Berlin yet? I fucking LOVE Berlin.

Berlin: Art; Beer; Pommes mit Ketchup

Art and art and more art. It's an abbreviated classical education coming through my eyeballs. Victorious Amor, the boy above, is in the Gemaldgalerie, in company of a mind-boggling array of painted canvases and wood panels- from 12th Century altar-pieces to 19th Century Flemish portraiture. I can't move about these places with any kind of sense or knowledge of time, but just drift boggle-eyed from fascination to fascination. And this is where it is so lovely to travel alone, to be able to indulge completely in my own whims, to spend hours in the one room if I want to.

Nefertiti made me cry, Ishtar's Gate left me breathless, and I couldn't help but laugh at some of the sculptures in the Altes Nationalgalerie (it's amazing that marble can look as light and curved as the fold in a dress, or as soft and warm as a baby's fat arm).

There's still all the modern art to see, but my brain needs a break after that three-day feast of the classics. Nevertheless I managed to squeeze the Private Picasso exhition in yesterday morning (I was suitably impressed).

Today, for something different, I went to the Turkish Market, and watched scrums of head-scarved ladies raiding tables of bargains, and a tiny little princess in full puff-sleeved, hoop-skirted glory racing between adult legs to show papa her new dress. I bought a big bag of olives, cheese and flat bread for dinner, and sticky baklava for a snack.

Some things about Berlin:

• Dogs. Everywhere. On the trains, in the restaurants, in the shopping malls.
• Smoking. Everywhere. Indoors, outdoors, everywhere.
• Bicycles. Whole lanes of them in peak-hour, and long racks with hundreds chained up outside the U-Bahn stations.
• Cheap beer, expensive everything else.
• Little hat man on the traffic lights is the way I tell whether I'm in old East, or West Berlin.
• Lots of people stare at me as though I am the wierdest or most interesting thing ever. Not sure why this is, as Berliners are themselves pretty wierd and interesting people.

That's all for now. Still no camera, but I am getting on with it.

Sad Story (now with pictures!)

I would entertain you with pictures of my travels but there are none. My camera is gone. Lost or stolen or misplaced. I would believe it was my clumsiness, that it is lost, except that... for once I am actually certain that I didn't take it out of my bag, not to look at it or use it, between when I last had it and when I noticed it gone. And it was in the cloakrooms of many, many museums and galleries between those two times- not all of them, I am now aware, necessarily the most trustworthy.

Not for the value of the camera, but for the photographs of all my travelling so far, I'm heartbroken. If I think about it too much I'll cry again. All my East Coast pictures, all my New York pictures, all my Berlin pictures. I had put the photos transferred off my camera while travelling onto a USB key which was, stupidly, stored in my camera case as well.

So. All gone.

Something like this, and the expensive broken window before I left San Francisco, and I am feeling so clumsy and stupid, like I am costing myself a lot of pointless money, stumbling blindly through my pitifully small pool of resources. It's an awful way to feel, so I've been doing the only thing there is to do, which is to keep on going with the travelling and keep my mind stubbornly away from dwelling on the loss.

I still have a wavering little bit of hope that a museum will call back (I have, of course, called them all) and say, oh yes, a camera just like mine has been handed in- can I come and pick it up?

But it's not much.

So I will tell you all the exciting, cheerful parts of the travel stories later, when the loss of my prized possession (not a fancy camera, but my camera) is not so far at the front of my mind.

Edited much later to add pictures of Berlin: