Panic and peace

Well, our epic Amtrak journey started off in a most unsettling manner. We left our little hostel early in the morning after a cosy day of playing chequers, drinking Montana boutique beer and feasting on huckleberry pie. But amid all this fun, I’d somehow managed to lose our tickets. Slightly worried but confident in the ability of modern ticketing systems to re-issue them without the world coming to a halt, we set off for the station with a spring in our steps.

But on our arrival we were told by the grim-faced attendants that tickets could not be re-issued and if they were indeed lost, the only way out of East Glacier was to buy them all again, all $750 of them. And the train was leaving in 20 minutes.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more ashen-faced, and that’s saying something for a pasty-skinned creature like myself. After turning our bags inside out, Leah and I sprinted the 2kms back to the hostel to turn that inside out too. We eventually found them hidden down the back and around the corner of a sofa. After sprinting back (well, Leah was sprinting, I was shuffling along gasping for air/praying for forgiveness) we found out that the train was late anyway, so the day was saved. A little later we schlepped our bags onboard the train and our adventure had begun.

It sounds a little strange but taking a train across a third of the breadth of the States was incredibly enjoyable. We sped past ghost cities and abandoned houses, across big-sky prairies and misty pine forests, past hundreds of towns with spherical water-tanks with their names painted on them, rising up above the streets like grounded UFO’s.  

Onboard, things were just as eclectic. We shared a row with a grizzled old farming man in denim overalls who barely spoke and clearly preferred to grin. An Indian guy with an entourage of animal fur and feathers gave educational talks in the lounge car and played his hand-made flutes. The Amish people spent hours on a thrilling game called “10,000” – as Leah discovered, the winner is the first person to reach 10,000 by rolling the dice and adding up the numbers. We tried a few times to find Wifi as we rolled through the larger towns, but the only signal we picked up was from a server called “Don’t Fucking Touch It”.

Our destination was Minneapolis and we were booked in for our first couch-surfing experience as a family – staying with two college guys, Kevin and Nick. It was also their first couch-surfing experience, and I think that we are all definitely converts now. Nick spent a lot of time showing us around, and his company was fantastic. We did a whole raft of fun things with him, including seeing theatre at the Minneapolis Fringe (does every town have a fringe these days?) and Bat for Lashes at the Varsity and going tenpin bowling at an organic-vegetarian restaurant.

 On the last night Kevin and Nick and his cousin Briana took us out on the town to Prince’s old club and other riotous places. This is where we learnt about a technique called “baby-birding”: when you feed an under-ager alcohol by taking it in your mouth and, when pretending to kiss them, spitting it into theirs. Not particularly tasty, but apparently necessary when alcohol laws are so strict.

Minneapolis is a great city and this was a complete surprise to me – it’s so much better than what it appeared as viewed from the airport two weeks ago. There are mind-bending cafes, world-class op-shopping and, as Leah and Georgia discovered, punishing, pay-by-donation yoga. Nick and Kevin were generous hosts and we were sad to leave them. Bunking with a local makes a heck lot of difference to visiting a city.

Our next destination was going to be Iowa City, but after finding some incredibly cheap Greyhound tickets to Chicago and absolutely no other transport option that we could stomach going any other way, the decision was made. So here we are in Chicago, Illinois, home of Barack, Kanye, Jerry Springer and Oprah. Lollapalooza finished up last night and since then it’s been tricky finding hostel accommodation, or anyone to couch-surf at such short notice, so we’re staying in a proper 3 star hotel tonight. Hopefully we’ll be on a couch where we belong by tomorrow night. 

Canmore, do more, see more, be more.

Ever since I was a small girl, folk festivals have been an annual part of my life. Many holidays have been spent drinking hot mulled apple juice at the National, surviving the climatic extremes and wild partying of Woodford, and, when very young, waiting patiently, often for hours, for my parents outside the Guinness Tent at Port Fairy. Folk festivals are part of our family history. With this in mind, Mum proposed that we make the Canmore Folk Music Festival the destination for our week together, and we all agreed (with a fair amount of good-natured eye rolling).

Canmore is in the Canadian Rockies, just next door to Banff and an hour or so out of Calgary. And it’s one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. In Berlin I was dreaming about nature and wild open spaces - towards the end I was getting sick of seeing people and concrete and commerce every time I opened up my door. The Rockies are the complete opposite. Lush pine forests, aquamarine lakes, snow-capped mountains that tower above the town, horizons and sunsets, icy blue glaciers and a thrilling selection of North American mammals - you felt wholesome just breathing in the air. A stunning, if distracting, backdrop to a festival.

On the day we arrived, Canmore was strangely quiet. Mum was disappointed by the lack of buskers and bunting on the main street. But as the hours passed the town filled with middle aged couples in comfortable shoes and capris - the party had arrived! The actual festival targeted this bracket squarely, although there were a few small children, reluctant/embarrassed teenagers with the parents and a couple blissed-out hippies. The festival was also a dry event, news which was met with a collective groan from our family. And it was surprisingly touristy – when an enthusiastic performer exhorted “all those born in Canmore, raise your hands!” two stragglers up the back were the only ones who represented.

Even though “folk” hasn’t been my thing since I first tuned into Triple J and attending three days of it without a compelling reason isn’t something I’d usually consider, it provided a great environment to relax and spend time with my family. I had a great time sitting in the sun, dozing, chatting, reading, eating and occasionally passing judgment on lyrical quality or recent trends in baby-boomer fashion. We saw some good gigs and did some good dancing and gorged at the free pancake breakfast at the Senior Cits Hall. And it wasn’t all folk – on one night my sisters and I snuck away to the local establishment to watch Canadian Pub Rock in all its tight-panted, cowboy-themed finest.

But Mum and Dad weren’t just there for the bodhrans. They were also ambassadors for the Australian folk scene on a fact-finding and partnership-making mission. At first I laughed at Dad’s rotating selection of “Yackandandah Folk Festival” t-shirts, believing it the epitome of sartorial laziness. But I realized that they were actually the ultimate ice-breakers, starting conversations everywhere from the information booth to the Perogi queue. Due in no small part to his wardrobe, Dad wrangled the entire family VIP tickets. As the heavens opened up on the final evening, we stocked up on free coffee backstage, scoffed banana and peanut butter burritos and chatted with Canadian folk royalty.

It’s now Tuesday evening and we’ve left Canmore, Canada AND our parents behind. Leah, Georgia and I are embarking tomorrow on an epoch-defining Ginnivan Sisters Roadtrip Extraordinare starting from Minneapolis, following the Mississippi down to New Orleans and stopping in at a heckload of fun places on the way. Mum and Dad have graciously driven us down to East Glacier Park, Montana so that we can get onboard the Amtrak Train when it comes through first thing tomorrow morning. We will spend 20 hours on a train going through some of the most remote parts of the USA. We’re keeping an eye out for glaciers and moose. I’ll write when we make it to Minneapolis alive. 

Transit

I left Edinburgh on Sunday afternoon to undertake the most ambitious transit journey of my life to date. As the train sped through the Scottish countryside, I consulted my notebook, packed with confirmation numbers and flight times. My itinerary: train to London King’s Cross, 2 hour bus to Heathrow, overnight in Terminal 3, trans-Atlantic flight to Toronto and then on to New York, connecting flight to Minneapolis and then another connecting flight to my final destination: Calgary, Canada. Added to that, about 15 hours in stop-overs in terminals on the way. It looked crazy but it looked possible.

Things came unstuck at New York’s La Guardia. I arrived to a monsoonal downpour that evolved during the afternoon into a full-blown tempest which prevented all inward and outward traffic. Hallucinatory from my lack of sleep, I heard whispers around me of planes circling overhead being sent back to Pennsylvania to refuel and hurricane warnings to the south of Manhattan. My flight was eventually delayed for two and a half hours, meaning I’d miss my connecting flight from Minneapolis into the awaiting arms of my family. The desperation of the huddled masses was my own.

But things worked out okay. I got my ticket changed and the airline staff gave compensation vouchers. A generous stranger lent me his cell phone to make an expensive international call to the parents to let them know not to wait up for me. And once I got to Minneapolis I spent the night in a heavily discounted four-star hotel room with fresh fruit and about 10 pillows on the king-sized bed. By the time I got on the next flight to Calgary I was freshly showered, rested, coffeed, CNN-ed and in a much better frame of mind for a reunion.

Rather than erecting a shrine and pining for my return at home, my entire family have jumped on the bandwagon and left Australia behind. My sister Leah is spending the year studying and living the wild life at Berkeley. My other sister Georgia is heading to Buenos Aires in a few weeks to teach English at an orphanage. Mum and Dad have been travelling North America for the last two months as part of their “Gap year”, visiting old friends and West Wing icons. Now is the first time we’ve been together for the whole year, and the last time for the next six months.

When I finally made it through the gates in Calgary I was greeted by a sisterly hug attack that was so violent it had the security guards approaching, walkie-talkies armed. And with this auspicious greeting, so began my North America Family Adventure. I was a bit worried about fitting back within a family - about being a daughter and sister again, after five months as a free agent. But as I write from our hotel room, sipping on Alberta alcopops and watching crappy Canadian TV after a hard day of breathing fresh mountain air, things are great.

Gone

Lots and lots has happened since my last post. I guess the biggest thing is that technically, the name of this blog is now redundant. The Germany leg of my adventure is complete. I am now writing from within a doona on a couch in Edinburgh, Scotland.

For the next few days I’m staying in the apartment of my friend Murray. He’s out of town for most of the weekend but gave me the keys so I could have a free run of the place in his absence. From the window there’s a view of the castle, but I’m more impressed by what’s inside the apartment. It’s cosy and beautiful, full of paintings, posters, cactus and palm plants, Turkish rugs, stainless-steel pots and pans, an austere spirits collection and an enormous bookshelf stacked with titles. I feel spoilt being in such lovely surrounds.

Perhaps I’m feeling nostalgic for “things”. To get to Scotland I had to comply with Ryanair’s 15kg limit for checked-in luggage, and as I bought almost 30kg of miscellaneous from Australia it’s been a harsh few days of culling. I sold my books to the English Language bookshop. I stood on Hermannplatz with a handmade sign saying “Gitarre – 20 Euro” and offloaded it to a passer-by within minutes. I schlepped my winter clothes to a charity bin, along with the heels that I never once wore in five months and two of the three scarfs I ambitiously packed. A year of almost entirely summer makes for light travel.

The last week of Berlin has been very administrative. I happily passed all of my exams and the process of getting my subjects credited is now in the hands of the Student Administration/the Gods. But alongside my administrative to-do list was my Berlin to-do list, and sadly only one list got itself completed. Much to my dismay, I never made it to the top of the Fernsehturm or visited the Bundestag or made it into Berghaim. As a tourist, I am a failure. I don’t know where all my time went.

But last week was not all work – I still managed to make it to another German music festival. Melt is a blockbuster festival like Hurricane except it’s mostly electronic and held in a former iron mine. It’s got massive drilling machines that provide a very eerie backdrop and the mine itself is now a lake surrounding the camping grounds. Using Mitfargelegenheit, I hooked up a lift with a car full of German women and met up with my posse there.

Germany, and in particular Berlin, is famous for its love of techno music. You either learn to love it, people say, or you stay at home. With a willingness to put my prejudices behind me, I’ve been trying for the entire semester to get my head around it with the aim of perhaps enjoying it. But I’ve only managed to learn to tolerate it. I can’t understand how people can dance to a single sound or beat for five hours (and they swear it’s not drugs). But it’s indisputable that it sounds better after several vodka and oranges, and this, plus the company of my friends, is how I had a great time at Melt.

Perhaps my favourite moment of Melt was the morning after, when we awoke at midday after being steamed alive in the tent and wandered down to the lake for a swim. We did manage to somehow take a route that led us directly through a communal outdoor poo toilet, which was a bit of a dampener. But all was forgotten when we got to the banks of the lake and joined the others chilling out there, with some Eastern-European types playing some techno from their speakers and some naked guys cavorting around and a soft forgiving breeze.

Last week was also packed with goodbyes. Because I’m coming back to Europe in a few months and will see a lot of my friends again it wasn’t that teary, but just that kind of strange heart feeling when you know a time in your life is ending. There were so many goodbye beers and goodbye meals. This is probably a reflection of my hedonistic lifestyle, but it appears that food and beers have been my main areas of expenditure during Berlin. My wardrobe is stagnant, but my belly is full.

The last goodbye was last night at this wonderful place called Bar 25 on the Spree. It’s a famous outdoor club with a pit fire and a discoball and swings strung up from the tree. All my favourite people were there and it was perfect. I managed 2 hours sleep and then dragged my life down the steps and out of Berlin. The entire day has been a succession of happy and sad feelings. My eyes are bloodshot, my nerves are shot and my grammar is almost gone. Bed (even if it’s not my own) has never been more appealing.

One of my main aims of coming to Berlin (and this may sound a bit melodramatic) was to learn how to just live - to stop being so busy and eager to fill in all the spaces of my life with trivia. And I have led a simple life - my only commitment was university but apart from that, I had absolute freedom to do something or not do it.

And I have done some really good things. I’ve read books that I never had the patience for, I’ve started drawing and writing and playing guitar again, as well as running and yoga. I’ve gone from basically zero knowledge of German in March to reading German newspapers and conversing entirely in German at dinner parties. I’ve met many many great people who have made my time in Berlin (and hopefully onwards) happy. And the parties – oh, the parties!

But I’ve missed having direction in my life, something long term and meaningful. So much choice sometimes made me feel a little trapped. There is this strange lost feeling that quite a few people I’ve spoken to have experienced during their exchange. It’s not routine that we’re missing – it’s a solid surface to build the framework of a life on.

Three and a half more months on the road before I return back to Australia. What do you reckon, reading audience, should I go on with this blogging thing?

Abgeschlossen

After five and a half years, 24 grey hairs, a looming HECS debt and a crease between my eyebrows that I blame entirely on Corporations Law, my undergraduate degree is complete.

In Australia, half a decade is a long time for an education. But in Berlin, the word on the streets (i.e. statistically unverified information, most likely heard in a pub) is that the average graduation age is 30. There’s not that pressure to suit up and make something of your career by the time your wisdom teeth are through. Education is meant to be a long and winding road – you’re actively encouraged to take many jaunts into the bordering hedges/rosebushes along the way.

Apart from the, sigh, burden on the taxpayers, I can’t see anything wrong with this system. While it may take longer for students to “grow up” - tick the boxes on the way to adulthood (job, mortgage, partner, promotion, children, death etc) by the time they roll out the other end of the education system they’re certainly more rounded, with a clearer idea of what they want in the long term. I think this is what education should be about – less of this customer-orientated, short-sighted focus on exams, more emphasis on the education that lies outside the lecture theatre.

But my experience of the teaching in German universities has actually been pretty disappointing. There are many extenuating circumstances: I didn’t study any law classes in German, the subjects were all optional and results weren’t matters of life or death, and as they were all aimed at English-as-second-language crowd (Erasmus students and Germans needing certain credits) the reading was minimal and expectations low.

But the content was dry and poorly taught. One lecturer read his summarised notes from a legal commentary, heading by heading. Class participation from anyone other than native English speakers was rare. Mostly, there was no set textbook and scarcely any internet resources – if you missed a class, you could pretty much fail a quarter of the exam.

But I definitely have some souvenirs to take back to Australia. I’ve learnt the nuts and bolts of Jewish Law and could have a fair crack at interpreting the Midrash Halakah or the Talmud if required. I’ve come to terms with the centrality of the concept of “fundamental rights” which in Europe pervades every area of law and gives any mildly interested basket case a cause of action. I know the punchiest parts of the Hague and Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.

And if I’d stayed in Australia, I have no doubt that I would have had another stressful, boring and blinkered semester busting my ass over marks in boring and stressful law subjects. Even if it hasn’t been perfect, being here has been worth it just because of that.

Small change

In Berlin, there are lots of beggars, homeless people, crazies – all those people that belong to that category which doesn’t really have a politically correct title. And even if it did have a title it wouldn’t fit in Berlin, such is the nature of this genre-bending city that evades simple classification on a day-to-day basis.

Berliners-from-birth say that the ones in their Kieze are as familiar as the Post or the doner shop. And I’ve started to notice the reappearance of some in my life. There’s the crazy tree-bike man. Every Sunday he attaches half an elm to his bicycle and pedals it through the heart of town to Mauerpark. Here, he takes to the stage to dance along with the open-air karaoke, play games of hide-and-seek with thoroughly confused children, or simply ride his bike into the petrified crowd.

Then there’s the guy who boards my 7.30am train with me, staggers through to the middle of the carriage and strums his heart out on a battered guitar missing half its strings. It’s clear that he’s never played guitar before, doesn’t know any songs or lyrics, and has absolutely no sense of timing – it seems like it’s better than just flat out asking for money.

And the woman I saw today on Hermannplatz: wearing a sari, gold shoes and jewellery, wandering towards me with her arm outstretched, hand cupped - and a doll in her sling with a babybottle stickytaped to its plastic hands, masquerading as a real-life dependent.

I like noticing how the others – the ones with the homes and the jobs and the required medication – interact. Drinkers of all stripes leave their bottles on the sides of the rubbish bins, rather than putting them inside, so the people who collect them for the recycling deposit (pfand) don’t need to go picking through the scraps. There are commuters who, at the end of their journey, hand their not-quite-expired ticket to a man standing near the u-bahn entrance so he can onsell it for half the price and pocket the profit. Small, understated acts of consideration that make a big difference.

Red Right Hand

So a week has passed and I’m sitting in my new aesthetically pleasing, Scandinavian-influenced temporary room. Temperatures hit 30 degrees in Berlin today and everyone’s having a sook, but here inside lovely. My room overlooks our courtyard and the place is entirely silent except for the faint sounds of a woman singing soprano a few streets away. It’s rather moving, actually. As the Mayor Klaus Wowereit said, “Berlin is poor, but sexy”. The most beautiful things in Berlin come for free.

My exam angst has begun and my contact with the outside world, let alone correspondence with those living outside Berlin, has stuttered to a halt. So because I’ve got nothing really interesting to say about my life at the moment (which revolves entirely around the constitutional sovereignty of Afghanistan) I’m gonna tell you about my festival attending adventures.

So it’s summer in Europe. Finally, I’m on the same continent at the same time as the music festivals I’ve been dreaming of ever since I was a So Fresh/Smash Hits adolescent. Glastonbury, Roskilde, Sziget – überfestivals, with headliners the likes of which The Big Day Out has yet to see; with lineups so potent the sight of them makes your ears ache and your feet ska-dance around all on their own.

Germany’s version is the Hurricane festival: a 3-day, 70,000 people musical bloodbath held in a paddock somewhere to the north of Hamburg. To miss it would mean a lifetime of regret. So carrying a tent, gumboots and about eight litres of vodka, we made our way there to be a part of it.

We decided to travel in style so we took the ICE train there. ICE is the super-fast train which reaches speeds of 250km/h when it’s really fanging it. It also has an alarmingly high suit-to-casual-clothing ratio. I’ve mentioned before that Berlin is an exceedingly dressed-down city. There’s one square block in Mitte where you may occasionally spot a suit on her way to lunch, but that’s about it. On the ICE, we were the only non-suiters in a sea of cheerless commuters. Not exactly a good pre-festival atmosphere, but it didn’t matter to us. And it mattered even less on the return journey, after 4 days without showers and negligible sleep.

After arriving, finding a place and (embarrassingly, for the Australians) struggling to erect our tent for an hour or so, we went for a wander around the campsite. The campsite of Hurricane is vast. Kilometres across. Most people looked like they’d done it before – many campsites came complete with tarps grills, tables, chairs and musical equipment. There was an ever-threatening storm overhead. And there was an astounding number of men urinating in public. At all times of day and night, against anything at all (often just towards other people) and sometimes when the designated urinal was two metres away. By the end of the 4th day, the situation was toxic.

The festival itself was overwhelming. 70,000 attendees may be pushing the upper limits of feasible. And it was very commercial – you couldn’t look anywhere without seeing a sponsor’s logo. But it was great fun. I saw heaps of great music. I consumed obscene amounts of fat and sugar and met friendly Germans. I had my life turned upside down and inside out and my definition of joy exploded by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. We barely felt the rain (maybe thanks, in part, to the 8 litres vodka). And I had a great time with the people I went with, especially the Dutch – every jolly, always up for fun, fantastic festival companions.

I have less than a month left in Berlin. I had a list of things-to-do, but I’ve lost it somewhere in the move from my last address. What should I do, reading audience? Is there anything I’ve missed?