Slouching towards Bangkok to be born (via Berlin, Prague and London)

10.23pm, open mic night, Berlin. After a few standard acoustic guitar Indie wailers it’s time for some darkwave. A middle-aged man in an ill-fitting silver suit and a jumper. He plugs in his USB and the dissonant music washes out. Only he seems to keep his head above it, stalking the stage and navigating the arrhythmia with his guttural vocals. After an indefinitely long period of time the mercy rule is invoked. Another beer anyone?

Check point Charlie

As the musical disarray finished and the dog grew tired of chasing the cork that was being hurled around the bar for him, I met Rob and Morris. “So where are you from, Morris?”

“I’m a citizen of the world.”

In a black turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, just enough so as to reveal the encroaching tats creeping down his arms, he clearly aimed for an ex-con-Archer look. Balding, in a trench coat and sporting a van dyke, Rob had similar visions of toughness. “If I get in a fight, he’s got my back.”

Snowy Prague

I had the chance to meet again in Berlin Gizi and Alfie, a.k.a. Jizzo and Fonz from Sarajevo. Gizi thought it her duty to show me some authentic Berlin bars with her friend Nadine on a self-effacing pub crawl around Kreuzberg and via the alleged best hot chips in the vicinity. Served with hummus. 

Australia Day pre-drinks (and piss bottle)

Authentic Berlin bars are those which lack the pretentiousness that comes with trendiness—those which avoid the follies resultant from being swept up in a word benevolently offered to English by the Germans, zeitgeist.

In such bars when an old and corpulent man bent with age and life and with a silken silver mullet comes in offering his drawings for two euros, he is offered a beer, a cigarette and a place to sit, and in his time collects a few coins and might even sell a picture or two. Meanwhile, the place fills up around him with mismatched patrons and clouds of smoke. When the music hits a lull, the girl who has been notably enjoying and focused on it puts down her beer and goes up to help choose the next album to be played.

Alfie and her roommate Paula hosted me, and two other friends of hers, Anna and Daniel, to a conscientious vegetarian dinner before we decamped to the bar at which Gizi was working for discount beverages. Daniel is a graphic designer working on an elaborate book about trees which in Berlin—in true German style—are all individually numbered.



After spending the night before I was to leave watching Django Unchained at The International cinema, one apparently with a flavour of the old East and at which everyone rumbles into the unnumbered seats clutching bottles of beer and wine, I realised I hadn’t printed my bus ticket. So I hustled to Gizi’s bar to find a solution in a beer bottle. Thankfully the kindness of Germans extends to finishing their shift at 4am, waking at 6am, printing my ticket and then giving me directions on how to catch the two U-Bahn routes and bus required to make it to the bus depot in time for my 7am departure.

In Prague for the second time it was by some strange confluence of chance and the subconscious indicators that facilitate the semi-random picking of a hostel out of the endless options that I was at the same hostel at which I had stayed with Kip some three years or so prior. So I retraced our footsteps somewhat, reliving memories and revisiting the unceasing beauty of Prague, as well as a certain cathedral. All of this eventually became too much under the duress of dawdling tourists cramping my style, so I retired to a local eatery for some deep fried cheese and pork with three kinds of dumplings. Pretty much as listed, it is some rib-sticking food and all the more tasty for knowing how bad it is. Nursing the food induced euphoric semi-consciousness, I retired to the hostel’s satellite privileged TV to watch 6 hours of NFL. Bliss.

Snow-capped, Prague is even more picturesque. Through the lilting flurries I explored the New Town and for the first time had a chance to add my own input to Lennon’s Wall. At the hostel I met Daniel—an American living in Berlin, Alex—an Australian with a strange mutual friend, as well as Matt and Linda—a British-French couple. With such generous company the dangerously refreshing Czech brews were dispatched with abandon before Alex, Dan and I, along with Tomas the Argentinian, moseyed out to find something to do.

Sent to Harley’s for what promised to be “madness”, the craziest the night got was listening to our Argentinian friend’s tales of seducing both women and possible prostitutes, before the addling effects of marijuana and MDMA that coursed through his system caused him to sit back and complain of the elephants flying across the room.

For some days now I had been eyeing a roasted pork knee. Matt even remarked that he thought he recalled the first sentence he heard me speak to contain said animal joint. So Alex and I along with Dev—a British trader who’d quit it all to go travelling and volunteer, sought out some more traditional fare. Specifically the pork knee. Czech food is usually hearty, but weighing in at 1.4-1.8kg, the pork knee put to shame all comers. Nonetheless, it had its equal in my consuming pig lust.

Love from Prague

 Samuel the Portugese quad-lingual med student of three years and hostel bar degenerate of one sported a top-knot and promised to Alex, Dev and I a crazy night out. It was Wednesday—his payday and my last in Prague.

Suffice to say, come 9am we arrived back at the hostel having finished the night at a non-stop club where the refugees of the night slurred and stumbled and gyrated in defiance of the day with just enough time for me to shower and stuff most of my clothes into my bag before I followed Matt and Linda to the airport. As they went off to catch their flight to Lyon I negotiated the hour before I could check-in by passing out on a bench.

In one of the more unpleasant days of my travels I was then cramped into a Wizz Air seat too small for me to fit my legs behind, forcing me to swap so that I could extend them into the aisle whereupon I was woken from my dreamless unconscious by the attendants every time they wheeled by the trolley, only to pass out again within seconds before having the process repeated. Cold sweat and nausea.

Prague-crawling

 A two-hour bus ride to Victoria station and I was able to, after getting lost and having all my devices run out of power, find the casa of the one and only James “Burger” Roche, previously of MMU. Sainsbury’s pizza and beers the perfect way to wind down before I was soundly asleep on several couch cushions lined up on the floor into a makeshift bed.

The Burger, once a feature of my 4.30am Friday mornings where we would discuss various heady topics of worldly significance in the clarity of pre-dawn consciousness, as a white-collar man of means was to most appearances a reasonably well kept and shirt-wearing figure.

Having relocated to the UK to play rugby league in some new climes and more generally experience something different to the life fettered in Macquarie Fields, his appearance has changed somewhat. Now a man of casual physical labour, he met me with a beard of many weeks and in a tracksuit more worthy of a street slinking chav than the mighty Burger.

Pleasantly, his new found fondness for steel capped boots, carrying a spanner, and many layers of workmanly attire did little to disguise his unsavoury collection of bon mots and idioms that render his company most amusing.

1.4-1.8kg of pork knee

 My days in London were spent by and large preparing for the next two months in SE Asia, the process for which involved condensing my life into a much smaller bag for ease of transport and so I could store the trappings of my winter European life somewhere.

But there was also ‘Straya day with which to contend, and so the Burger and I arranged to meet up with our fellow deviant of Oktoberfest, Gaps, and slouched about the roof of Burger’s apartment block slugging beers and talking the usual rubbish. Gaps, at the robust height of maybe 5’9”, currently weighs 109kg and has the biggest upper body of any human I have seen in real life.

Next we entered the very appropriately named Inferno. Powered by atrocious music and with the worst kind of patron, with every bead of sweat that met my brow I was more and more aware of the parallels between this and divine punishment.

Man lunch with the disheveled Burger

So Burger and I left not long into the morning, ordering eight chicken wraps and eating them with surprising dignity in the back of a black cab as the driver rattled on inanely in a quintessential cabbie manner.

Blessed relief in the UK, although exclusively courtesy of the presence of the expat Australian and New Zealand community, is the availability of quality coffee. On this vital pillar of civil society was established the order of every morning. Fuelled by such sweet bean, on my last day in London before my flight the Burger and I had a celebratory lunch of manly meat at a Turkish restaurant. I had spent the morning discussing plans and booking a flight from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh city to meet Jess in a couple of weeks.

Little did I know that this footnote of my morning would turn out to be most significant as when I arrived at the airport with a one-way booking to Bangkok, the essentialness of my booking was emphasised by the man at the check-in desk as he requested to see booking evidence of my eventual departure before he’d allow me to check in.

The hostess said “Namaste” as I boarded the plane.

I didn’t recognise the side dishes to what I was eating.

The man next to me was both watching and enjoying a Bollywood movie.

In transit in Delhi I impatiently awaited the wet, warm air.

Sweden?

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didion, The White Album

Everywhere I travel people ask me the same question: "Why did you come here?" I've yet to provide a good answer.

Try as I might, I cannot come up with a coherent explanation for my desire to wander aimlessly through eastern and central Europe with no direction except that derived from a listless curiosity, restless feet, a skyscanner app, and access to a map of the world.

It was a Tuesday and my sister’s birthday and I was in Sweden, 200km west of Stockholm in the sleepy township of Palsboda, 20 minutes from Orebro. Leaving Krakow for Warsaw for a flight for which I arrived far too early, the baggage took more time to appear for claim than consciousness held me on the plane.

As Julius Caesar allegedly triumphed “Veni, vidi, vici,” the Swedish exclaim “Villa, Volvo, vovve.” House, Volvo, doggie. This is the Swedish dream. Oddly or admirably fixated on the notion of settling down, starting a family, and nesting against the winter cold, the Swedish life modus operandi is one that terrifies the traveling youth. Nonetheless, the impulse is such that staying with locals and meeting their families results in some truly awkward moments as they immediately survey you as a potential life-mate and factory of future progeny, when all you really want to do is pick up the USB internet plug.

Candy anyone?

Similarly, a lift to the nearest bus station can turn into a family-visit extravaganza as similarly en route is a party at which they are expected. So I found myself one chilly afternoon in Orebro’s most ecologically sustainable villa, one run exclusively by the raging elements of wind and sun. The house of the sister and one also home to Titus, a baby Swede with whom I briefly exchanged pleasantries, so naïve to the local tongue that I misunderstood the lyrical meanderings of a toddler for Swedish and kept looking around for a translation. Playing already with a plastic kitchenette set, the domestication starts early here.

Drinking peach ciders in the car driven by the brother, “Filip, do you want to come with us tonight?”

(In Swedish) “I don’t want to come with you, but I do want to come tonight.”

We pulled up at an apartment building behind an ICA, the local supermarket chain of this part of regional Sweden, or so I imagine. The snow had relented, but the chill was still penetrating. Five storeys of anxious stairs later it was another situation into which I had somehow appeared and for which I had no faculty to anticipate or process; no bearing upon which to base my comprehension. How I ended up here was beyond my ken, so the situation was out of grasp.

I like to think this is a good state of mind for travelling, functioning as if the world itself is born anew every minute before my blinking eyes.

The door opened to a shrieking blonde, a high table surrounded by stools seating three others and altogether too much alcohol for such. A white and cream one bedroom apartment with a commanding view of snow-capped Orebro. 

One fifth of the living space was taken up by a hair covered cat play-tower, the denizen of which prowled imperiously around it like the Emperor in his new clothes.

Shaved to a poodle, the once proud Hampus (pronounced Ham-puss) had been reduced to an irresistibly amusing plaything. Mewling with determination, he ignored the giggling with the appropriate aloofness for a cat of noble bearing.

Hampus

It was here I also met Magnus and Karin, two twenty-one year olds engaged and very much in tune with the villa Volvo, vovve philosophy.

Indeed, similarly important to the house, car and doggie is tacos. Tacos I hear you ask? In Sweden? Supermarkets have significant sections dedicated to the taco. Special cheese combinations, numerous wrap and shell varieties—all so that the Swedish nuclear family can gather about the TV on Friday night, watch Swedish Idol and consume those most delicious exports from south of the border, down Mexico way.

Similarly food-centric is the fika, a Swedish way of saying let’s have coffee, some eats, and a chat. I enjoyed a fika first in a sprawling mall, opting in this case for a semla with my coffee. A cream and marzipan filled donut type arrangement dusted liberally with icing sugar, the correct process for the eating of which requires consuming the daintily anointed lid before engaging more directly with the fat soaked sponge.

Fika was part of a crash course in Swedish culture, a journey that began in IKEA, a company of which the Swedish are proud of completely without irony. There is a certain sombre focus that one can observe as you follow the carefully guided path through flat-pack heaven when there purely for cultural purposes; the chin-stroking intensity of those pondering which aesthetics of an arm chair best reflect their personality, but which must also be practical enough to be the resting place of their buttocks for moons to come.

Hallowed land

At every supermarket there are walls of pick and mix candy. But for the real thing you must go to a candy store at which the geometric maze of plastic containers with numberless riffs of sugar and chocolate are tantalising but for once not terrifying, the dilemma of choice easily assuaged by ample use of the plastic scoop and a preparedness for excessive consumption all in the name of cultural exploration. Swedish candy is very salty.

Rashly booked cheap flights always come back to haunt. Flying out of Stockholm Skavsta at 7.20am when I was staying two hours’ worth of car ride away was not a solid plan. So the odyssey of my airport nostos involved two buses, three sandwiches composed on a bus station bench (as I danced deliriously to tunes mainlined to my brain through sheer volume in order to pretend that I wasn’t stuck outside in -3 degrees plus wind chill for another half hour) and a pleasant night’s rest on four curiously curved chairs in the Stockholm Skavsta airport café as the floor buffer hummed tunelessly around me.

Bus stop dinner

Lying under the yellow halogen I pondered the disparity of ergonomic comfort for the backside and the back, a difference ironically underscored by the zeugmatic similarity of lettering. Thoughts that seemed coherent if not faintly witty but on a reflection my brain was incapable of making, most certainly not.

The fitful waking of paranoia and I’d grasp at my bag like a child reaching for its mother, my means of continued survival all in one stained place.

In that interzone of cognitive function I boarded the plane, passed out, and woke up in Berlin.

Tales from two cities

After six days in Krakow I was a broken man. Arriving there before I had planned, staying for longer than planned, and drinking much more than I planned.

In a way, however, I can pretend to have cause for this excess; demons to exorcise through the twin exhausts of booze and mindless dancing in Polish clubs.

Like so many, I was running from something.

As a reflection of all the circumstances that could befall one and imperil their existence, it was a self-inflicted and minimal plight, but in the narrow scheme of hedonistic pleasure that defines backpacking, it seemed harsh and brutal.

I had come to Warsaw with high hopes. I was to be couchsurfing and hanging out with locals for both a house party and New Year’s Eve. It promised to be authentic and entertaining. At least, so I hoped.

Thanks, Mr. Wedel

Kasia, my couchsurfing host, met me at the train station. At her apartment I met her housemates who only spoke Polish, and we went to the Old Town to see the Christmas lights. Sponsored by the Willy Wonka of Poland, a Mr. Wedel, they were really quite spectacular.

To celebrate the waning festivities we had a beer before moving to a communist style bar. A resurgent trend in Warsaw, these establishments offer cheap liquor and cheap food, with standing room only for the many swaying patrons, breath heavy with vodka, white sausage and pickled herring.

The next day we did a bit of a tourist loop around the city, heading up the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science for a panorama of the city. In one park there were some people ice fishing. Keen for a closer look I tentatively wandered out onto the ice, only to have it start cracking in the middle of the lake. With as cautious a step one can have in a frenzied panic, I hustled back to the shore.

That night was a houseparty that Kasia had been talking up all day. Run by some sort of clique of multinationals and with an allegedly exclusive list of people who were routinely invited to these gatherings.

Ice fishers

Ultimately, it was a fairly standard house party, if done in the Polish style. In Poland everyone brings not only booze, but food to a party. As a result there is quite an opulent buffet, as well as an array of bottles from which one can pick and choose. Held at the apartment of a lady called Marta, also present were four German gentlemen who had met Marta in the supermarket earlier that day, asking her where the salt and pepper were.

Not only were they invited to the shindig, as it was the birthday of one of them, we all paused at one moment to sing happy birthday in Polish. There was some limboing, some questioning of why on earth I was in Poland, a fair bit of drinking, and eventually we left.

It soon became apparent that Kasia was unimpressed with me. “I don’t like you anymore,” was the repeated refrain on the frosty walk home. Maybe she misunderstood the principals of the guest-host dynamic, but it seemed she wanted dibs on my attention. Talking to other people, particularly women, seemed to have caused some distress and a sense of betrayal.

View from the Palace of Culture and Science

The next day she apologised, but for mine it was too weird to stay anymore. There was an unpleasant tension that to be honest, I really didn’t need. Leaving after an awkward farewell, I felt immensely relieved, but I was faced with the fact that it was the day before NYE and I had nowhere to stay. The other issue was that Kasia had been in charge of my NYE celebrations, but obviously that had gone to poo.

Fireworks, anyone?

Thankfully, there were a few hostel beds unoccupied across the city, even if I did have to trek some distance out of town to get to them. Even more fortunately, at the house party I’d met Ewa, who offered to let me hang out with her and her friends on NYE after hearing of my fate. Oddly enough, it was with her that I’d discussed the curious dynamic of couchsurfing and what people expected from it while at the party.

Drunk skiing

My new hostel was in the Prague district, what I had repeatedly seen referred to as ‘the real Warsaw’. It had an enormous flea market outside of it full of cheap and suspicious items. Given NYE loomed, a good percentage of the stalls were selling fireworks. So it was that I was awoken from my pre-NYE nap by what my sleep-addled brain confused for gun fire, before I realised it was the letting off of fireworks. This was unrelenting from the early afternoon until well into the wee hours of the morning.

Speaking of the wee hours of the morning, I spent my NYE at a tiny club in Goclaw that was in the middle of nowhere—even further from the city centre than my hostel. It was full of old friends of Ewa and her brother, “wealthy French kids living it up in a cheap city.”

The only male there not wearing a shirt or suit, I was unconcerned as I focused my attentions on the open bar. Apparently my attentions were too avid, however, as I awoke the next morning in my hostel bed with little-to-no recollection of the night after we’d huddled outside as midnight struck and spun drunkenly eyeing the fireworks scattered across the sky.

Just plain drunk

Miserably hungover, I decided that New Year’s Day would see me out of Warsaw. So addled was I by the residual alcohol that I was unable to work out how to move from the metro station to the main train station, some 100m away, for a good quarter of an hour. As a result of this confusion and sweaty after an unsightly run with my backpack on, I missed the train I had intended to catch. I eventually booked a train an hour later and at last had means of transport away from a confusing few days.

Krakow couldn’t be more different from Warsaw. Warsaw is basically a new and modern city, the old town very small and that which remains, quite renovated. It was the victim of some rather nasty German occupation, and broadly destroyed after the Warsaw Uprising, a 63 day rebellion by Polish insurgents during WWII after which Hitler swore to tear down the city even more completely.

Krakow, on the other hand, was chosen as a sort of German base. With the main cathedral, St. Mary’s, having had its rather opulent altar sculpted by a German and the city’s beauty renowned,  it was spared the destruction the Warsaw faced and is thus far more pleasing to the eye.

Additionally, it was once the capital of Poland and thus benefitted from having some money invested in it in the past, but with the honours of the capital moving to Warsaw, it has been spared the ugly signs of commercialism and central business that go hand in hand with being a capital city. Instead it exists quite charmingly with a large student population, which comprises around 20% of its occupants.

Auschwitz 

Slightly dubious, but acting on the recommendation of someone I’d met in Estonia, I checked into Greg and Tom’s Party Hostel, bracing myself for something potentially irritating. I was met by a bunch of built English dudes who turned out to be marines, all drinking heavily and keen for another night of savage excess.

Embarking on the pub crawl that evening I bore witness to some terrible things. One of the English lads, Adam, was so ruined before we left the hostel that he’d pass out at every pub we went to within minutes of arriving. He was thus ferried from port to port across the shoulders of one of his mates. Previously he had been so drunk he had fallen flat on his face and thus sported only half of a chipped front tooth which he would bare, loose lipped, in one of his few and scattered moments of consciousness. Another of the marines, James, was something of a martial arts expert, and after a few drinks took to showing off his kicks and rolling around in the street grappling with whoever would join. Another’s official job title was helicopter sniper. 

Salt church

There were four Americans out with us, too. Two of them, brothers, were clearly unprepared for the sort of drinking that ensued, with one of them disappearing after vomiting all over himself in one the bars. The other two had rescheduled their flights for another night out with the British guys, so that should give you some indication of their bearing and conduct. Scrotums were licked, vomit was spewed, arses were bared, glasses were broken; dignity scattered to the winds.

So was established the theme of my time in Krakow; boozy excess followed by attempting to function the next day.

At 8am one morning one of the guys who worked at the hostel, Adrian, took me and three others skiing. Claiming it was only a 20 minute drive, I had no idea what to expect given I couldn’t see any snowy peaks on the horizon. For about 20 euros we were getting door to door service in his little car in which he perpetually blasted dance tunes, equipment hire, and 2 hours on the slopes.

Stones placed at ruins of a gas chamber. Stones are permanent, flowers fleeting

Slopes, however, is a rather grand word for the two, short rides that comprised this snowfield, but by no means did that diminish the fun. Still drunk from the night before and with no quality skiing attire, it was in jeans and fingerless gloves that I brazenly defied the elements, elegantly carving up the powder with only one humiliating spill.

More harrowing was the visit I undertook to Auschwitz. Having already been to a concentration camp in Serbia I thought I’d be prepared for the experience, but there isn’t much that can compare or prepare you for a place where millions have died. Indeed, it is only in visiting Auschwitz that the reality of the scope of the attempted genocide sets in. Putting a real location to the atrocities and seeing the remnants of where they bore out is something that chills to the core.

Most confronting were the Nazi-plundered relics of those killed. In one room in the museum there is a 15 metre long glass case heaped full of hair that was harvested from the bodies of the women killed in the gas chambers and then woven into material. As I left the room a man leading his daughter, seeing my face, pulled her back at the threshold and walked off in another direction.

Pierogi

Similarly, the cases of shoes, some baby sized, provide truly haunting relics of brutality left not so far in the past.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the camp where so many of the prisoners were housed and gassed, with areas marked on the map where the ashes of the incinerated bodies were scattered. The gas chambers themselves were demolished by the Nazis in an attempt to mask their actions, but enough remains to ably unsettle. What struck me was how small the gas chambers were, the processing of people through them and the incinerators in order to kill the vast number the camp claimed must have been a constant process.

Almost as macabre were the actions of some of the tourists. Posing with big smiles for a happy-snap at the end of the railway that was where the prisoners were dropped off before sorting—the weak straight to the chambers, the able-bodied to be processed and forced into labour—or in the restored gas chamber, showing no small lack of awareness of where they were or the appropriate behaviour for such a place.

The spectre of death looms over much of Poland once you touch upon its history. In Krakow’s Jewish ghetto there is a square where people were routinely gathered and killed by the Nazis, the monument now standing there scattered chairs, reflecting the way in which those brought there to wait—sometimes for hours—would bring chairs, and the empty chairs left by those who would never come back.

No man left behind

I also visited the salt mines in Krakow. Enormous and polished to a sheen by many feet before mine, it was a curious experience. Like nothing I have seen or will again, vast underground salt-chambers filled with salt-carved statues and chapels.

Staying at the hostel as I did for six nights, and with boozy festivities rendering all those staying there closely bonded through shared excess, it was sad to have to leave. One of the girls working there who ran many nights out, Dominika, became somewhat of a debauchery facilitator and partner in dance floor crimes. Fuelled by free bottles of vodka she could get at the bars, one fateful night I blew out the crotch of my favourite jeans as I was getting low. I also became chums with a lad from America, Dazza, with whom I’d pretend—for no explicable reason—to be brothers on nights out.

I also had the pleasure of dining on many Polish specialties, pierogis—dumplings, fried potato pancakes with goulash, beetroot soup, Zurek—a soup of eggs, sausage and rye meal, and paczek—fried donuts that can be either sugar coated and stuffed with jam, or much to my dismay, deep fried and stuffed with sour cabbage. Additionally, Krakow has now emerged as leader on my rankings of cities by kebab quality.

So yeah, Poland was an experience. Creepy, harrowing, curious, exhausting, fun.