Chapter 9: Six days in Italy

If you heard that loud 'thud' don't worry. It was only me hitting a wall. 

I arrived in Italy on day 38. My previous longest time away from home was in the US in 2015, when I was away for 23 days; it's fair to say that's one record that's going to get not so much broken as smashed, mashed and pulped. I didn't really get over-tired or jaded at all on that US trip, but I certainly did in Japan (22 days), where by the third week I was ready to come home. That was at least partly because Malcolm Turnbull - perhaps fearing my campaign skills - scheduled a double dissolution for the time I was away. It didn't take long before my competitiveness, fear of missing out and guilty conscience at not being there for the cause started to gnaw away at me, and undermine my enjoyment of the trip just a little. Thanks Malcolm.

None of that applies this time. I was just plain exhausted. Two pre-6AM starts for trains in the space of three days will do that, and the drunk Germans more than played their part too. I was running on vapours, and mistakes were starting to creep in - some just minor annoyances, and some major headaches.

I thought after getting off the Bernina Express that I was done with spectacular scenery, but no. The regional train that runs from Tirano to Milan spends a good half hour or so running down the length of Lake Como, an outrageously stunning place, with mountains rising up almost directly from the water, that was inexplicably off my radar entirely when I was planning this trip. I assume it's expensive to visit, as it's a playpen for the rich and famous: international lawyer Amal Clooney, for instance, has a house here with her husband, who is an actor. Unfortunately I was on the wrong side of a train with dirty windows, so I didn't get any decent photos.

I'd allowed a good six hours to get from Tirano to Genoa, where I was staying the night, because the connecting train from Tirano to Milan left only eight minutes after the Bernina Express was due in. So I rushed off the train, bidding adieu and happy fascism-resisting to my American friends, bought a ticket and literally forced the doors of the train back open so I could get on. Had I been 30 seconds later I would have been stuck in Tirano for two hours, by which point I would have already used up my allowance for Italy's famous train timeliness and efficiency.

As it happened, my train ran more or less to schedule, which left me with three hours to kill at Milan station. I made a beeline for McDonald's: between free toilets and free wifi Maccas amounts to a public utility in Europe, but not in Italy: the toilets were locked and, because I didn't possess a European phone number, the wifi wanted my credit card number to register instead. Very funny. If Italian McDonald's didn't want me to sit around in the dining area, mooching off their internet connection without eating anything then, well, they only had to say so.

So I moped about at Milan station with nothing to do, and discovered the first big mistake. I went to test my blood sugar level... and there was no testing kit in my day bag. It was either halfway back across the Alps on the Bernina Express, or somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Como en route to Tirano. Either way, my chances of getting it back were slim to none.

I knew the prospect of getting through 200 days without losing something as important as this was remote, so I have a spare kit, as well as a spare set of insulin pens. But because the chances of getting through another 162 days without losing something important are still pretty low, I've already got a replacement testing kit en route from Australia. Carelessness is expensive. Still, better that than the much more difficult to replace insulin pens. If I didn't have a testing kit I could still manage my diabetes for at least a little while by dead reckoning, but it's pretty hard to dead reckon insulin into your body without an injecting device.

I went to Genoa for two things - the Genoa Aquarium and, more importantly, the Cinque Terre. It's a short stretch of coastline - probably only 10km or so - along which are five villages that range from obnoxiously pretty to downright fantastical. Case in point, Vernazza:

There are walking trails that connect some or all of the villages, depending on where there have been recent rockslides that they haven't gotten around to fixing yet, and there are also trains that regularly run between them all. How it works is you buy a park pass - the entire coast is a national park - for €16, granting access to the villages and unlimited use of the trains. Or in my case, €32, because I fairly quickly lost my ticket and no amount of pointing out that I had a receipt would convince them to replace it. My choice was between sucking up my indignation, or leaving the Cinque Terre unexplored and wasting the day. I chose to explore.

I spent most of the afternoon hopping from town to town by train, having lunch in Riomaggiore, the furthest village from Genoa and then working my back towards Monterosso, the closest. I stopped in Coniglia for gelato: the more I exercise the more my beard becomes a greater impediment to eating ice cream than the diabetes. I decided to tackle one of the walking tracks, from Vernazza to Monterosso. There was far too much climbing involved - the track rises to almost exactly 200m above sea level - but whenever I questioned my sanity I only had to look out to my left.

Worth it. 

On the approach into Monterosso I came across an Italian farmer using ambush marketing - literally, you don't see him until it's too late - to sell his limoncello at the farm gate. This was, he promised me, much better than the limoncello I would get in the village below or in the city, which are full of chemicals. This was so authentic it wasn't just a drink, it medicine. When I asked what healing properties it had the answer was non-specific and all encompassing. This stuff was just good for me, and if I paid €3 I'd find out why.

I'm not sure how you're supposed to say no when a farmer takes you by surprise outside his farm with medicinal limoncello, so I bought the limoncello. I'd never tasted it before and, not being one for bitter tastes in general, it turns out that the stuff is horrible. But he was watching, a proud father sending his lemons out into the world, and so I of course drank every drop and declared, quite truthfully, that it was the best limoncello that I'd ever tasted.

That night at the hostel a winery manager from Adelaide and I provided a crash course in American cultural hegemony to our dorm mate, Darcy, a 65 year old, louder than life woman from Florida with no sense of boundaries and no comprehension of America's place in the world. Darcy spends three months of every year roaming about overseas: she's retired but her husband (he's eight years younger than her, she told me at least twice) still works, and I rather suspect he will keep working for as long as he gets three months of peace out of it each year. 

Despite spending so much of her time outside America, Darcy couldn't understand why people were interested in what Donald Trump was doing. Because he's the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and we're scared the demented old carrot cake will get us all blown up, we explained. Then the conversation expanded out into why the world is interested in what happens in America more broadly, and Darcy was shocked to learn that most of our most popular TV shows, movies and music are made in America. 'But why don't you all watch Australian movies instead?', she wanted to know. Fair question. 

It was hard to get her to stop talking, but I couldn't help liking her. Loud and oblivious, she was a bit of a caricature of an American tourist, except that she wasn't.  A genuinely curious woman, she is ploughing her way through a number of books on Trump and especially his relationship with Russia. He's up to something, but she just doesn't quite know what. And wouldn't we all like to know. I confess, though, to being a little taken aback when she saw me testing my blood sugar and promptly climbed the ladder up to my bunk. 'Err.. what are you doing?', I asked. "Watching", she replied. Rightio, then.

After a day spent around Genoa's old harbour - the Aquarium, followed by a blissful few hours lying in the sun by the water and trying not to fall asleep, I moved on to Renaissance Land. Theme parks are not usually my sort of thing, but this one is built directly on the site formerly occupied by the city of Florence, and it incorporates some of the original art and architecture from that city. So as far as theme parks go it's really quite good. I stayed for three nights.

I despised my hostel at first, with its rickety beds that made movement without disturbing other residents impossible, and what I initially took to be a heater broken in the 'on' position. But I eventually sorted that out, and everything was forgiven when I discovered the next morning that the free breakfast included scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs!

This was doubly exciting, because not only do hostel breakfasts rarely run to more than white bread, cereal and maybe orange juice, but I had also been cruelly, cruelly robbed of a scrambled eggs breakfast back in Antwerp. The hostel there didn't provide breakfast for free (though their German guests did, as it later turned out), so I had bought eggs and milk for Easter Sunday: I was going to have Easter eggs and it was going to be the most satisfying breakfast I'd had since two continents ago. 

It was only when I had set out my ingredients, gathered my utensils and greased the frying pan for this most eagerly-anticipated of breakfasts that I attempted to break my first egg, and learned that they sell pre-hard boiled eggs in Belgian supermarkets, instead of it being a normal country and only selling normal eggs. I was crushed - or far more than the egg was, at least. Not even the fact that my replacement breakfast came courtesy of German reparations was enough to cheer me up.

Long story short: I had scrambled eggs three days running, and it was close to the best thing about being in Renaissance Land.

After sticking around the hostel long enough for my weekly ritual football humiliation, I finally headed out for a walk around the theme park itself. And I realised very quickly that I was not going to enjoy myself here. Renaissance Land is incredibly popular, but the park is quite small: most of the attractions are very close to each other, so everybody is in more or less the same place, circling around in a constant maelstrom of impatient, frazzled tourists. 

One thing that comes with the territory in theme parks is overpriced food and drink, and Renaissance Land is no exception, I treated myself to a restaurant meal, where I thought I was paying €10 for a plate of pasta. Then I got stung a further €2 for a 'coperta': a fee for sitting down at a table to eat a meal that you can only sit down and eat at their tables. It's like sales tax in the US: just telling me the price I have to pay straight up would be much too simple. Later I went past a gelati shop that had a sign saying there was no charge for sitting outside. There weren't any tables or chairs outside, but they wanted me to know that I could sit on a footpath they didn't own without paying them money for the privilege. Very kind.

Another thing one finds in theme parks is, of course, overpriced souvenirs. Antique Tuscan etchings and watercolours can be made to order. You can buy the Duomo on a fridge magnet, a postcard, a jigsaw puzzle or a t-shirt. His and hers aprons feature Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Venus, respectively. If that's too impious for you, perhaps Papa Francesco is more your style:

I saw the queue for the Duomo, and mentally scrubbed it from the list. It wasn't just one queue: there's a line for tickets, then a line for the main part of the church, then a line for the baptistery, then a line for the dome. I wasn't going to spend the bulk of a day queuing to go in and out of church. It was a similar story at the Uffizi: I could have booked ahead for another €4, but I was ambivalent enough about going - I've seen my fill of Renaissance art for a while, and it was clearly going to be massively over-crowded - and in the end decided that I simply couldn't be bothered. 

The Ponte Vecchio - an old bridge with jewellery shops along both sides - was one big seething, amorphous mass of people walking up and down along a set of over-priced jewellery shops, trying to figure out why they were there. There's an evidently famous panini shop near here: I know this only because there was a line of over one hundred people waiting to buy a sandwich.

I just didn't have the energy for all of this. This is still the shoulder season. I can't fathom what high season is like, much less how people who actually live here cope.

So I had three days in Renaissance Land - otherwise known as Florence - and I did very little of the standard touristy stuff. I did go up to to the Piazzale Michelangelo, for a commanding view of the town centre:

I also checked out a couple of the slightly less trafficked museums. The Galileo Museum follows the scientific revolution, from the improvements in navigation technology that enabled Europeans to take over the world through to early experiments with electricity. It takes its name from the four telescopes it has that were made by Galileo himself. It's a small but interesting enough museum, and it was made all the more significant by the fact I visited the day after the March for Science. I was particularly taken by exhibits that were used to perform science experiments by scientist-entertainers at dinner parties in the 18th century. Science as a fashionable pastime, rather than as something scary to be pushed back against. Who'd have thought? I also went into the Palazzo Vecchio, which is now in its second stint as Florence's town hall, having served in between as the palace of the Medici dukes and as the Italian parliament. 

Apart from that, though, I let myself take a break - a holiday from my holiday - and do things I knew I'd enjoy, rather than things that I'd be doing only because they're the things one does in Florence. I bought a book, finished reading it and bought another one. And I played with the hostel's resident bear:

He really is a bear. His name is Kuma - Japanese for bear.

I don't regret visiting Florence at all: you have to go somewhere before you can decide if you like it or not. But, apart perhaps from in the dead of winter, I won't be going back. The place is overwhelmed and overwhelming, and the three days here validated my decision not to go to Venice, which would have been more expensive and, most likely, even more crowded. I guess I'm not much of a Renaissance man.

From Florence, then, it was time to head back north to Vienna, via overnight train. I slept moderately well on my last one, from Lisbon to Madrid, but this was a nightmare. I drew the short straw, which in this case meant having a bunk on the top level of the compartment, right up near the roof. So close to the roof that I hit my head every time I sat up. The pillow was about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, but thinner, and even if I were comfortable enough to sleep the bed (more of an ironing board, really) was so high, without a guard rail, that I feared I'd roll over and fall to my death. So in my defence, it's fair to say that I was still very far from well-rested when I opened my bag later that morning at the hostel, only to find that my insulin kit wasn't there.

Chapter 8: Four countries in six days

It's not as crazy as it sounds, I swear. Though it was pretty close.

One of the wonderful things about travelling - especially in hostels - is the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. I'm too introverted to go out to bars and 'meet the locals' - and in any case, going out with that specific intention feels too much like treating human beings as tourist attractions. 

How does one go about doing this? Walk up and ask 'are you a local? I need to find a local. Could you show me your driver's license to prove you live here, and then maybe pose for a selfie with me, so I can show everybody at home that I found a real, verified local? Yes. And hold the driver's license up for the camera. Thank you.' Chances are that any locals I do find and manage not to treat like a theme park character will either be someone I have too little in common with to talk about, or won't be able to speak English.

Fellow travellers, by contrast, can be relied upon to have one big thing in common, they can be found literally in the same room as you and, best of all for an autistic introvert, the introductory conversations write themselves. 'How long are you here in Antwerp? Have you been travelling long? What's Amsterdam like? I'm there in September. Oh, you're on your way to Paris next? Whatever you do, don't go to Versailles...'

The downside, though, is transience. You might cross paths with somebody for a day or two, really enjoy their company and imagine that, had you met them in Melbourne, they might become a good friend. But that's not how it works. Today's friends are tomorrow's supporting characters in a blog post. 

It's something I first experienced in Washington, and I still regret it. I'd been sharing a room with a Brazilian guy, and we got along very well despite some misunderstandings. He'd found a handwritten note on his bag with a room number and the passcode for the room. Flummoxed, he asked for my theory about what it meant. I gave my best interpretation - that somebody would really quite like him to visit them - and he rapidly left to test the hypothesis. A couple of days later I needed to cut a baggage tag off of my bag and asked if he had any scissors. A chill entered the room, before he sputtered that "Yes, I do, but she's in Brazil and she's 13 years old!"

Our fleeting friendship survived this minor kerfuffle, but the next day he was due to check out, and I didn't realise. I was on my way out the door, and when he said 'goodbye' I just said a hurried 'see you later' and went. When I got back his bed linen was gone, and he must have thought I was a really rude bastard. And maybe I am: less than two years later I can't remember his name. 

I don't remember the names of my first dorm-mates in Antwerp, either. They were three young Kiwi women, taking a short break from working in the UK. I made the ultimate faux pas by guessing they were Australian, so I saved face by insisting that I realised they were Kiwis but that New Zealand is actually just a rogue Australian state. But territorial disputes aside, we got along well - apart from a prolonged debate over whether the blankets were 'doonas' or 'duvets' - and the night was going smoothly until we agreed it was time to sleep, and tried to turn off the lights. 

We had three lights in the room and could only find two switches. We flicked every switch we could find, and tried pressing a little panel that looked like it might be a button. We looked in the bathroom and in the corridor outside the dorm and when that came to nothing we even moved the lockers along the wall to see if it was behind there. Nothing. It was after midnight - so Good Friday - before I conceded defeat and traipsed down to reception. "I know this is ironic, being Easter", I said, "but, uh, we really need help to find the light". Turns out it was on a motion sensor and the only thing we needed to do to turn it off was stop trying to turn it off. Yeah, we felt pretty stupid.

The three young Kiwi women, currently working in Britain, were replaced the next day by three more young women currently working in Britain. And again, I committed the ultimate faux pas by guessing they were American and asking where in the US they were from. "Ontario", they replied. Oops.

The Canadians and I bonded through shared adversity. The same night they checked in, a bucks party of Germans had arrived and, after going out and getting pissed came back at about 3:30. If they had made a little bit of noise as they got to sleep that'd be part of hostel life, but that wasn't enough for one of them. He wanted to talk to his mate but didn't know what room he was in so he just went from door to door, banging the doors and shouting for his friend. He was either unconscious or hated this guy as much as the rest of us did because he didn't answer, no matter how loud the idiot got. I went out and remonstrated twice, and warned that I wouldn't speak to him a third time but would complain to reception. 

It didn't come to that, because soon after he set off the fire alarms by smoking a joint in his room. I arrived at reception just in time to see the staff member taking a photo of a screen showing which room had set off the alarm, and about 20 seconds before one of the Germans came down, looking sheepish, and said "ah, well, isn't it a shame we can't tell what room it was in?" As I headed back to my room I asked "Do you reckon?", but didn't wait for a response. The manager told me the next morning that he had given them an option between being kicked out without a refund or having €500 charged to their credit card as a good behaviour bond, to be forfeited if there were any more complaints. Oh, and for good measure they would be paying for a breakfast for everybody in the hostel. 

You'd think that'd teach them some respect for others, out of self-interest if nothing else. But no. These guys were determined to be the least popular Germans to visit Belgium since at least 1945. 

At 3:30 the next morning, like clockwork, the same moron was banging on doors and shouting. Out I went yet again, politely advising him to shut the fuck up or I would make a complaint. I thought he might recognise that as a €500 shot across his bows, but it wasn't his credit card and apparently his selfishness extends to being willing to cost his friend a massive fine. When I asked him if he cared that others were trying to sleep, he responded that "no, this is a student hostel. We are students. Why did you stay here if you want to sleep?" Following my further chat with the manager they're now down the €500, plus *two* breakfasts for everybody in the hostel. Expensive bucks party. 

All of this was happening in Antwerp, which apart from Germans behaving badly is a delight. This is going to sound like the worst play for sympathy of all time, but travelling from city to city and from country to country is tough. Every new place has a new transport system to navigate, a new language to comprehend and new food options to find. There's a lot of hassle and petty irritations to overcome to make the most of wherever you are. So a place that is just *easy* is a luxury. And Antwerp is just easy. The entire centre of town is walkable. English is universal. Vegetarian options are plentiful, and they don't break the budget. Unlike Paris, it's just far enough off the standard tourist trail that nothing is crowded. And it even has tear-jerking public art:

I already miss my dog quite enough without your help, Antwerp.

I had really come here for the Antwerp Zoo, which is a textbook old classical European zoological garden, with heritage architecture, manicured lawns and tulip beds dotted among the enclosures. It also has a tree dressed as a hipster Groucho Marx:

I was here specifically to see a single animal: the last Eastern gorilla in captivity. She lives with a family of Western gorillas - the type we have in Australia - to keep her company but when she dies there will be no more of her kind in zoos. And because there is simply nowhere left in Africa that is safe for gorillas, with none in zoos her species - the third closest relative humans have - will almost certainly go extinct, and most likely in my lifetime. 

So going to see her was an important, but troubling thing. And when I saw a gaggle of Belgian parents doing absolutely nothing to stop a gaggle of Belgian children banging the glass next to her head, I couldn't restrain myself. "STOP", I shouted in my best scary-bearded-foreigner-who-isn't-afraid-to-discipline-other-people's-children voice. And they stopped. I'm not sure if the parents or children were most shocked, but the children stopped harassing the gorilla, and the parents failed to meet my eye. I stayed until they were gone.

Apart from another zoo trip I also visited the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which is housed in the former home of the (drum roll...) Plantin-Moretus family. They were the dominant printing house in Northern Europe for a couple of centuries and, despite the first Plantin's devout Catholicism, he wasn't above using pseudonyms so he could take commissions from both the Catholic and Protestant sides during the Reformation. 

Later that day, as I was wandering about with nowhere in particular to be, I saw two machine gun-toting police officers very gingerly inspecting a bag that had been left on a seat. The machine guns have been ubiquitous in every country I've visited so far, and the attack in Paris a couple of days after this explains why plainly enough. I watched them go about their work until I noticed that one had looked back at me repeatedly, and I twigged that I was a heavily bearded, relatively young man watching police officers checking out a suspicious package. I beat a quick retreat and, because I have one physical marker for instant profiling but not the other (dark skin) I wasn't followed, let alone stopped. But for a few seconds I had a window into the experiences of people who live under constant suspicion, and it was humbling. I haven't been unnerved by the machine guns everywhere, and that fact is white privilege in action. 

From Antwerp I needed to get to Switzerland. They're not obvious destinations to follow one after the other, but I couldn't tack Belgium on with, say, the Netherlands for visa management reasons, and when I was planning my itinerary there was an overnight train running from Brussels to Basel. So it would have been relatively simple until, only after I'd booked my extremely expensive train across the Alps, the night train was discontinued. Instead I would have to back-track to Paris, then head to Switzerland early the following morning. Then things got even more complicated because Easter Monday is a French holiday (though not Good Friday or Easter Sunday, for some reason), so the TGV train I had planned to get wasn't running. It took no fewer than three trains just to arrive in Basel two hours later. 

Thankfully it all went like Swiss clockwork, apart from the minor problem of a bottle of shampoo  rampaging though my bag. Shampoo all through my clothes. All through my more than 1000 diabetic test strips. All through the little stash of food I had accumulated. The only good news was that my electronics were all spared, and that my bag smells *wonderful*.  My first order of business when I got to the hostel in Zurich, then, was washing everything I had, minus a jumper I had worn on the train and my bathers, whilst de-shampooing 1000 test strips by hand (initially with wet wipes, until I realised that I was fighting soap with yet more soap). I must have made a great first impression on my new dorm mates.

My favourite was a Glaswegian nurse named Gemma, who was just coming to the end of her own five week circuit around Europe, having carefully avoided stepping foot into France because she can't abide French accents. I've never met a Scot who isn't fully convinced that Scotland is the best country in the world, or that it would be even better without England holding it back, and Gemma is no exception. She took great delight in getting Proclaimers songs stuck in my head, and even gave a spirited defence of haggis and black pudding.

I only had one full day in Zurich, where it costs approximately one body part sold on the black market each day to eat and sleep. A stamp is $3, a one way train fare costs $7 and the washing at my hostel was $15. When I told Gemma I'd found a vegetarian buffet with rice, roast potatoes and vegetables for only $17 she was impressed. Both of us had noticed, though, that there is no obvious underclass here, and according to Numbeo despite everything costing more, local purchasing power (loosely speaking, that's average income compared to average living costs) is actually higher here in Melbourne. Gemma looked it up and found that a McDonald's crew member can earn more than she does as a critical care nurse: without begrudging Zurich fast food workers their living wage, it's a pretty sad indictment on how poorly British (and Australian, for that matter) governments value the caring professions.

After Madrid I had thought the climate and I had a deal. It wouldn't try to freeze me to death and I wouldn't massively expand my carbon footprint as revenge. But no: when I got to Switzerland the forecast was for more snow, and I am considering what my proportional response should be. Drilling in the Arctic might just be a good idea after all.

I had come here to see possibly the world's best zoo, though, and because I only have so many marketable body parts (you can have my pancreas for free), chances are that it'll be many, many years before I'm back here. So out came both Portuguese jumpers and a steely resolve to stare death in the face. And... it wasn't too bad. I got snowed on a little, but not enough to prompt me to dash for cover: a brisk walk was enough. I even tempted fate enough in the late afternoon, when the sun briefly re-appeared, to go for a walk around the old city centre. Hiding other people's money for them must be lucrative, judging by the town's beauty, even if it is a touch sterile:

And I found some locals I had things in common with after all:

My final order of business for my short trip to Switzerland was the Alps. I knew I didn't have the physical - or financial - stamina for hiking through the mountains, but I wanted to at least see them, so I caught the Bernina Express. It's a decidedly non-express train through the Alps from Chur, south of Zurich, to Tirano, just across the Italian border. It takes four hours to cover just 122km, and I had to be up and out of the hostel before 6AM to make it.

It reaches a maximum height of 2,253m through the Bernina Pass: 25 metres higher than Mt Kosciusko and well above the tree line. I'd feared that the bad weather would leave me with an excellent view of fog and little else, but I saw plenty. And the run of cold spring weather ran in my favour for once, with no shortage of snow (on the right side of the window) to make it all just a touch spectacular and worth waking up at stupid o'clock for:

My company for the trip were Abby, an American woman currently living in Germany, and her elderly parents Charles and Priscilla, who were visiting from Iowa. I realised immediately that, as white Iowans in their seventies or so I was quite plausibly in the company of committed Trump voters, and I tried valiantly - so valiantly - to not think about it and definitely not to bring it up. I lasted about 10 minutes. When Abby mentioned she had been living overseas for 18 years I made an off-hand suggestion that she might want to make it 22, and to my relief - profound, profound relief - she agreed, as did her parents. They are both Professors Emeriti from Iowa State University, and Charles had administered Democratic caucuses for many years. 

When we arrived in Italy - 66 hours after leaving Belgium, via France and Switzerland - Charles gave his card and told me to get in contact if I want to go over for the caucus in 2020. Maybe they'll be just another group of today's friends and tomorrow's blog characters... but I might just take him up on it, too.

Chapter 7: A week and a bit in Paris

I think I'm living in some sort of sci-fi time dilation dimension something-or-other. It's 32 days since I left Australia, but it feels like three times longer. In those 32 days I've slept in 10 different beds in eight different cities in four different countries. I've been to 12 different zoos (mostly for only 3-4 hours each, they're not taking up *that* much of the trip), four art galleries, 10 World Heritage sites and... I dunno, maybe a dozen or so museums? Dubai feels like it was last year, Lisbon is a hazy memory and even Avignon, which I left barely a week ago, is receding off into the distance. Maybe the secret to a long life isn't living for more years, but simply having novel experiences every day. Hours become days, days become weeks and weeks become months. At this rate I'll be 40 before I get home. Or I will at least feel it.

A month - no, only a week - and a bit in Paris, then. A good start and nice weather are making an enormous difference to how much I enjoy a city, and in Paris I got both.

After checking into what I anticipated would be a four bed dorm, I unlocked the door and found four lockers, but only two beds and a private bathroom. Odd. Perhaps the four lockers indicated that it used to be a four bed dorm. Or perhaps they only have lockers in units of four. Either way, I wasn't going to argue, and the missing beds weren't even the strangest thing about my new home. That would be the elevator, which was about the width of a bookshelf, and was rated to carry a maximum of three people in what would have been uncomfortably close contact. If you haven't felt claustrophobic before, try riding a bookshelf up five floors, when every rattle and creak sounds alarmingly like the bookshelf is about get stuck.

After stepping out for a few minutes I came back and found not one, but two other people in my room. They had booked a private room for the two of them, but there'd been some mix-up. One was in with me, the other somewhere else. I could see a clear path to being shunted back to my rightful dorm, but by the time I came out of the shower, only one guy remained.

Rosie - yes, Rosie - is from New Jersey, is apparently quite open to suggestion, and has a habit of flying to places on a whim. He'd come to Paris because his friend told him he'd like France, and Paris was the only place in France he'd heard of. He's also been to Perth, because somebody had said that the world's most beautiful women were in Perth. I told him I'd never been there myself and asked if he had, in fact, found the world's most beautiful women there. Rosie confirmed there are many beautiful women in Perth, but admitted he would be disappointed if they really are the *most* beautiful in the world. So cop that, Perth.

When I left for my walk Rosie's mate was at reception, trying to sort out the question of their room. I overheard that there had been a mistake and, as much as I wanted to keep my head down and slink out I figured I'd prefer to sort it out then, rather than later. But no, apparently I was in the correct room: the mistake was elsewhere. I bolted from the building before I heard an 'oh, wait,'... and when I came back that evening Rosie was gone, his bed empty.

It went unfilled that night, and I dared to hope that I was, in fact, the dorm-mateless beneficiary of a mix up. I couldn't go and ask, of course, because that would prompt an investigation that could only end badly for me, so I waited it out. Thursday night came and went without a roommate. So did Friday and then Saturday, and with the two busiest nights out of the way I concluded I must be free and clear.

Alas, no. Pinky - yes, Rosie had been replaced by Pinky - showed up on Sunday night, just when I thought I was safe, and was there for the duration. She's a Thai woman working in Germany, and we got on well enough, I suppose, for an uninvited intruder and a first settler whose private room had been cruelly ripped from his grasp. I can't *really* complain though: I've now had a total of seven nights to myself without having paid for them. I could get used to it, except I mustn't: as I head into peak season the rooms are only going to get fuller.

As I did in Lisbon, after dumping my stuff at the hostel on the first day I went for a walk, and I think I'll try to make it my first activity in a new place whenever it's feasible. I can't control the weather, but I can at least influence my start, and walking about - just seeing what one might see - is an excellent way of settling in.

I decided to get the cliche out of the way first, so I walked to the Eiffel Tower. This is going to sound egocentric (in a travel blog? Really?) but there are some places that you understand, intellectually, are out there but that don't quite fully become real until you've been and verified their existence for yourself. It's a sense that I first had when I went to see the White House in Washington: the Eiffel Tower has never quite lived in my imagination in the same way that that benighted, besmirched building does, but it's a mythical thing anyway. Or at least it was. Now it's real. And also quite rusty.
From there I headed out to the Arc de Triomphe, where I couldn't approach too close because there was a wreath-laying ceremony involving unidentified but no doubt very important Very Important People. So I followed the Champs Elysee down to the Tuileries Garden, past the Louvre and on to Notre Dame. I'm surprised my knees let me get away with what I later calculated to be an 11km walk, but I'm glad they did. If they hadn't I might not have discovered a surprising, but admittedly logical souvenir gift from the City of Love:

Nor might I have found a candidate in the upcoming French election that I could truly get behind. I am hoping, without much enthusiasm, that Emmanuel Macron will win, largely because both major left candidates are much less likely of being able to hold out the fascists in a second round contest. But that's before I learned Jean Gentilhomme is running:

Je suis Charlie Gentilhomme.

My first full day had two agenda items. The first was the Menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes: the world's second oldest zoo in continuous operation, having opened in 1793. Its first animals came from the royal menagerie at Versailles, where their keeper saved them from being eaten by the mob by warning that they were more dangerous than they were tasty. As a child of the French Revolution the Jardin was the first explicitly 'public' zoo: it's not a particularly good one now, but with its history it was always going to make the cut.

Later that day I headed to the Musee d'Orsay. As much as I'm not the most artistically-minded of people I've always liked Impressionist painting, but it wasn't until I came to Europe that I could ever 'see' them properly. It's the light that makes the difference: it's not the same in Europe as in Australia. I don't know if it's one of the benefits of having an ozone layer but the light here is softer, gentler on the eyes. The vibrancy of the colour in Manet and Renoir paintings makes sense for the first time.

Day two was spent watching the Swans play Collingwood. Moving right along.

After another predominantly zoo day on the Saturday, Sunday was spent in and around the Latin Quarter. I started at the Pantheon; I gather it was a church at some point in its history, though it seems now to be very much a secular monument. To be buried in the Pantheon's crypt is just about the highest honour the French Republic will bestow upon its citizens. Voltaire is in there, as are Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Louis Braille, Marie Curie and Jean Moulin. The pantheon, indeed.

From there I returned to the Jardin des Plantes, which in addition to the Menagerie hosts a variety of museums, including not one but two devoted to dead animals. I made brief stops at both the Evolution Gallery, which hosts a variety of stuffed animals in somewhat psychedelic surroundings, including a giraffe that found its way to the top floor and couldn't get back down:

As well as the Paleontology Museum, which has a somewhat macabre way of displaying its specimens:

Later that day I went into Notre Dame, but my heart wasn't quite in it, having already gone to see churches in Lisbon, Madrid, Granada and Barcelona. It's a very nice cathedral, I'm sure, I'm just a little churched out. I only stayed for about 20 minutes.

Monday was a more gruelling Zoo day than most. Beauval Zoo has a reputation for being one of the best in Europe so I was always going to make an effort to see it. Unfortunately this effort involved waking up before 6AM to catch a bus to catch a train to catch a bus. The train went to the town of Blois, which is apparently pronounced 'Blow-ah'. French names and words have silent letters interspersed within them at seemingly random intervals, though I've learned to always drop the 's' from the end of a place name. 'Blow-ah', not Blois. 'Neeem', not Nimes. 'Aaarrlll', not Arles. 'Paris', not Paris. Ok. So the theory doesn't quite work.

Tuesday was one of the most eagerly anticipated and soul-crushingly disappointing days of the trip. I went out to the Palace of Versailles, having bought my tickets online in advance to avoid the queue. Except that I didn't avoid 'the' queue, only 'a' queue. I avoided the hour long wait to buy tickets, which snaked in and out of a building with a single corridor in and out that screamed 'death trap in a fire'. What I got instead was an enormous line to get into the Palace itself, that snaked up and down the courtyard outside the main entrance.

Three hours. Three. Hours. In full sun. Nowhere to sit. It's true that I could have been there a lot earlier - I had naively anticipated that my online ticket would negate the need to be there early in the morning, and I hadn't gotten home from Beauval until nearly midnight the night before. But whilst doing that would have left me not quite so thoroughly fed up with the whole thing by the time I got inside, I don't think I would have enjoyed the Palace more in any case. There were so many people inside that it felt like leaving the MCG along with an 80,000-strong crowd. The crush was overwhelming. Unbearable.

I only spent about 25 minutes inside - less than one for every euro I had wasted on this schemozzle - and retreated to the gardens. I just don't know how anybody enjoys that experience. The gardens are okay, but nothing to get excited about. The main feature are 'musical dancing fountains', though whilst there's about five of these on the map only one appears to operate at any one time. And when you boil it down it's just a speaker system and some sprinklers.

Avoid Versailles and go to a less famous, less trafficked palace instead. There will be less name recognition when you tell your friends, but you'll have a better time of it. I'd call it a victim of its own success, but that is letting the perpetrators off the hook. The Alhambra, in Granada, has timed tickets and sells out in advance. It means fewer people can visit, but those people have a rewarding time.
Versailles is clearly all about maximising revenue, quality experience be damned.

The next day was the last full one I had available. Versailles had made me question whether Paris' best known attractions were worth the hassle, but I was hardly going to come here and not go to the Louvre, so I put my courage to the sticking place and went. The earliest time available, however was 3:30 (this wasn't a problem because it's open late on Wednesdays) so before that I went to Les Invalides, which has a museum of French military history and Napoleon's tomb. The museum is decent without being spectacular: being a French war museum I expected to find lots of runners-up trophies, but they must keep them all out the back.

Napoleon's tomb is rather large for a rather small man:

Maybe he had Napoleon Syndrome.

At first I feared the Louvre would prove to be the same sort of more-hassle-than-it's worth experience as Versailles. My timed ticket required me to enter within a half-hour window, but getting in at all was a challenge. At the first entrance I tried I was told that I had to enter through the glass pyramid out the front, but when I went there I was told to go somewhere else and turn right. After going somewhere else and turning right I found another entrance, but this one was only supposed to be for groups. I tried and failed to find a staff member to confirm I had turned right at the correct somewhere else, so I just stayed there and hoped for the best.

I found myself in the midst of an Italian school group, and two of the teachers were having a running argument as we waited in line. One of the teenagers was able to translate for me that one wanted to let me in with them, whilst the other wanted to kick me out of the line and make me go somewhere else and turn left. I just stood there, unwilling to budge throughout the increasingly theatrical debate, until eventually my patron won and I was allowed to enter the Louvre as an honorary Italian school child.

I'm more of a Musee d'Orsay person, I think, than a Louvre person. Its painting collection had been fairly described to me as 'too many pictures of Jesus and fat babies', and I'd had my fill of this particular genre at the Prado. I enjoyed the classical sculptures immensely, though, and of course I had to do the obligatory thing and look at the Mona Lisa. Or, more accurately, look at the people looking at the Mona Lisa:

This is going to sound weird but I've always been quite creeped out by the Mona Lisa, with her smile that seems to know too much and eyes that always seem to be looking at me no matter from what angle I look at her. But I have done her a disservice. The eyes aren't following me: they're taking in the full, ridiculous spectacle before her. And the smile isn't from knowing my secrets: it shows that she's in on the joke. That this is all just a touch silly. I suspect many people who come to the Louvre really only come to take a photo of the Mona Lisa and go: there are signs directing people to her right from the entrance, and the room she's in has a direct exit through a Mona Lisa-themed gift shop.

I was joined for a last dinner in Paris by an elderly French man, who had been taught English by an Australian ex-girlfriend. He suggested that a French girlfriend might improve my own language skills, but only if I shaved off my beard first. From there the conversation segued to how the CIA will kill Donald Trump, because they had, after all, killed JFK, RFK *and* JFK Jr. I pointed out that Jr was only a magazine editor - not a politician - and the conversation unfortunately ended before we had firmly identified the CIA's motive for his death.

My final day was another footy day. Moving right along.

I'm now finishing writing this in bed number 11, in city number nine, in country number five. The (rail)road stretches out ahead, and Paris will recede into background memories - good, bad and Versailles - like all the rest. In a week it will be a month since I left. In a month, it will be a year.

Chapter 6: Three days in Provence

Airbnb is a wonderful way of pushing yourself to experience local culture and nightlife. I likely wouldn't have gone to the local Irish pub in Avignon, for instance, without staying in an Airbnb. However, this time I wasn't looking for a drink. I needed to use the bathroom, and my hosts were busy having sex in the bathtub. 

That inconvenience aside, my Airbnb accommodation was decent enough. I am not a fan of Airbnb, which has had the perverse effect of pushing locals out of affordable rental accommodation in many inner cities. It's a terrible outcome both for renters and ultimately tourists, too: a city that's too expensive to have citizens isn't a city anymore, it's a theme park version of itself. So I am preferring to stay in hostels wherever possible. They create jobs, they don't drive up rents and they tend to have enough bathrooms for... whatever it is you need to do in bathrooms. I only booked this place after the one moderately priced hostel in Avignon suddenly closed a couple of weeks ago.

Thankfully my hosts weren't landlords looking to make more out of tourists than they could out of tenants. They're penniless students trying to put themselves through theatre school with a mattress on the floor of their study, and I'm happy to be able to support that. Just don't tell the landlord - at one point I was asked to hide while they came to check a broken light fitting. 

We got on well enough, though I didn't quite fit into their circle. When I mentioned my interest in economics a chill entered the room, followed by a very cautious question about whether I meant 'alternative economics'. I chose to interpret this as an endorsement of social democracy over rampant neo-liberalism, and answered enthusiastically in the affirmative. 

A couple of days later I tiptoed into a discussion of the French election. They are passionate supporters of Jean-Luc Melanchon, a Sanders-esque candidate with no hope of winning. When I said that I would vote for Macron, out of fear that the second round could become a contest between Fillon and Le Pen, I asked what they would do if that came to pass. "Make Revolution in the streets", one said. Sounds like a plan.

While my Airbnb had its advantages - a wonderful location in the heart of town, a room to myself and a washing machine I didn't need to go into debt to use - I was glad to leave when my time was up. Although hostels lack privacy, the invasion of space is mutual. It's not my room, but it's not my dormmates' either. In the apartment I was always acutely aware that I was in another person's house, where they are perfectly entitled to have friends over at midnight, taking turns reading Voltaire aloud (yep, this is France), and where it's not really my place to ask them not to have sex in the bathtub.

Anyway. Avignon. I actually only spent one full day here, as I was using it as a base to visit a couple of different towns in the area. I would have liked a bit more time in Provence (who wouldn't?), but it's one of the places that ultimately got crunched by a day or two once it came time to properly plan my movements. The basic strategy was to have a light day in Avignon, a bigger day in Arles and a day in Nimes, when I would also try to get out to the Pont du Gard. 

Avignon is famous for two things. The Papal Palace - an enormous, dour slab of a building - and the Pont d'Avignon, which is half a bridge. The palace came to be here after a Frenchman was elected pope in the 1300s, and set about trying to ensure that his successors would be French too. Universal Catholic Church, indeed. As well as stacking the college of cardinals with fellow Frenchmen, Clement V moved the papal capital from Rome to Avignon to be close to his ally, the Kingdom of France, which was at the time a five minute walk away across the river. 

The next four popes also based themselves here before the capital returned to Rome, after which an Italian was elected again. The French, no doubt wandering what possessed them to ever go back, elected their own candidates (now officially anti-popes) who continued to rule at Avignon for another couple of decades. After that it was occupied by papal representatives for a few hundred years before being turned into a military barracks during the revolution. 

Soldiers are not the best conservators, so not a great deal is left of the paintings and other artwork about the place. But it was an interesting visit. I was particularly bemused by the former treasury room, where they have opened up one of the vaults under the floor for people to see where bullion was stored. It was full of treasure of a different kind in the form of money thrown in there by tourists: euros, pounds, US dollars and probably other currencies I didn't recognise. There were no signs encouraging donations or indicating that there was a purpose for doing this. What is it about holes in the ground (and pools of water too) that make people want to part with their cash?

The Pont d'Avignon is rather more enigmatic. It's the remains of a bridge across the River Rhone that, for reasons I didn't fully decipher, was stone on one half - the Avignon side - before becoming a wooden structure across the other half of the river. Stone, unsurprisingly, is a more durable material than wood so when a flood washed away the wooden bit, Avignon was left with a bridge to nowhere. I bet at that point they regretted not finishing it properly.

On day two I went in search of Romans and flamingoes. Not usually two things that would go together, but they do in Arles. It has a motley ensemble of Roman sites, as well as a high quality archaeology museum, for which you can get a combined ticket for only €11. The most conspicuous sites are the arena and theatre - both of which are still in use - but the ones that made the bigger impression were more subtle, and both quite eerie to visit.

The vaults built underneath the Forum - now completely built over - have been excavated. When I visited I was fortunate enough to be the only one there, which is probably what turned it into a memorable experience. When you enter you initially question why you did: it looks more or less like an abandoned storm water drain, complete with water dripping out of fissures in the concrete above. There are passages off the main corridor, some leading to dead ends, some to other passages and some to big holes that I only very narrowly avoided falling into. It's dark and dingy and an excellent scene for a Halloween party. But there are also broken pieces of Roman columns and stelae, and it's easy to imagine the echoes you hear actually date back 1800 years. 

The Alyscamps - the remains of a Roman cemetery that was painted by Van Gogh when he lived in Arles - had something similar. It's mostly a single avenue lined with (empty) stone sarcophagi: Roman cemeteries had to be built outside city walls so most towns had graves lined across the major roads into town. A later addition to this site is a church that is now abandoned. Walking through it, the acoustics - presumably designed for choral voices - make the cooing and flapping of the pigeons that have taken it over sound other-worldly and weirdly intimidating. Again, I had the place to myself, which helped the mood-setting immensely. 

Once done with Arles it was off to find the flamingoes. There's a colony that nests in the Camargue - the river delta just south of Arles that is mostly famous, for having white horses. I saw the horses - they're white, but otherwise they're just horses. Seeing flamingoes in the wild, however, was worth hopping on a bus for. The area where they live has been turned into a paid attraction with a bus to the gate, so it's not exactly going off the beaten track in search of wildlife, but it was certainly worthwhile. I even spotted a wild otter as a bonus. 

Things very nearly went awry, though, when my bus back to Arles didn't turn up. I had an increasingly anxious wait for an hour, imagining myself stuck in a swamp overnight, with mosquitoes carrying dengue, malaria, smallpox or who knows what, before the last bus of the day actually arrived. I'd misread the sign that said the bus I wanted only ran during summer, because of course people who live in the area want to catch a 7:30 bus throughout the year, but only want a 6:30 one for a few months. It meant my plans of a cheap home-cooked meal back in Avignon turned into an outrageously expensive curry in Arles, but as my bus headed back into town I was treated to one of those Provençal sunsets over the wheat fields that inspired Van Gogh. So all's well that ends well.

For day three I had planned a visit to the Pont du Gard, a spectacular bridge that was built as part of a Roman aqueduct, and which is still usable by cars 1800 years later. Say what you will about Roman bloodthirst, but they knew how to build things. Unfortunately, while a bus did run a couple of times a day from Avignon I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't work. The bus schedules were clumsily made so that my two choices were a very rushed visit, or getting the last bus of the day and spending hours there for no good purpose. And I was leery of trusting the last bus of the day after my scare in the Camargue, so I decided against it. 

Instead I went to Nimes (just over the border in Languedoc-Rousillon), which also has a smattering of Roman sites, including the the best-preserved temple anywhere and a very good amphitheatre, which like the one at Arles is still in use. Unfortunately they are both used for bullfights, which I guess is at least consistent with their historical heritage as places dedicated to the torture and slaughter of animals. Both sites have been contracted out to a private company to run tourism services, with predictably tacky results. The temple has been turned into a small cinema, playing a cringeworthy short film depicting the founding of Roman Nimes.  

I didn't spend as long as long in Provence as I might have liked: it's one of a couple of places that got crunched when it came time to sit down and finalise plans. And I know this sounds weird but I like France a lot more than I expected. In particular, I want to push back against an unwarranted calumny that French people are rude, and refuse to speak to you unless it's in French. As with everywhere else, I've had nothing but friendliness and a desire to help from nearly everybody I've met. Vive la France. 

Chapter 5: 1 day in Valencia, 4 days in Barcelona

The inevitable downturn. These were five days where plenty went right, and there was a lot that I enjoyed. But there were just enough things that went just slightly wrong to make it a difficult and draining leg of the trip.

It was partly self-inflicted. I've tried to avoid consecutive day-long stops wherever I can, but there are a couple of places where my choice is between that and giving up something I don't want to give up. Cordoba, which I wrote about in the previous post, and Valencia - home to perhaps the world's best aquarium - were the first such stops.

It started well enough. My first day European train from Cordoba to Valencia was luxurious, with an executive-style leather seat all to myself. 'Luxury' takes on a different meaning as a budget traveller, I guess. A room to yourself is either a guilt-inducing indulgence or an unexpected lottery win, depending on whether you paid for it. That seat was amazing.

Unfortunately this time I think I did pay for it. My earlyish-bird fare had felt a little steep at €30, and it took me until I found the rather more plebeian fittings of my train to Barcelona to realise that I must have bought a first class ticket to Valencia by mistake. I can live with the wasted money, but next time I book something in first class I hope I know to fully appreciate it. My descent back to the backpacker set en route to Barcelona was a reality check.

I arrived in Valencia at about 10:30PM, only to find once there that the subway line Google Maps had directed me to for my hostel wasn't operating. Wonderful. But this was the first of three times in 36 hours that random strangers went out of their way to intervene in crappy situations, and make my way through Spain easier just because they could.

A local Valencian woman saw my futile attempts to reconcile the train map with my Google map and, after expressing some bemusement that I'd washed up so far from home, told me to follow her. So I did, onto one train and then onto another, but only after she had raced through the inter-connecting station with me to show the way to my platform, in the opposite direction to the one she needed. She will have missed at least one train on her own line to do it.

The second was later that night at the hostel. I'd arrived not much before midnight and, desperate as I was to sleep, I was completely out of fresh clothes. So I paid the exorbitant fee for using the washing machine and dryer and calculated that I might just get to sleep before 1:30 if I was lucky.

I was very lucky. When I went to retrieve the clothes from the dryer I was accompanied by my dorm-mate, a German woman named Susan. She'd been waiting to use the dryer for much of the evening - I'd actually jumped in ahead of her when I set my load going, without realising it. So when I opened the dryer and found my stuff hadn't dried I was crestfallen: it was unambiguously Susan's turn, my bed time was slipping closer and closer to 3AM and I had both a zoo and aquarium to fit into the next day, which was feeling less and less likely to be possible.

Susan to the rescue. Despite having waited for hours to do her own load, she told me she'd run my stuff together with hers, and she'd leave them out in the room for me to collect in the morning. 'Go to bed', I was told. 'You look terrible'. Given how bad the dryer was I fear she had to do a second load after that one, to dry her own stuff fully, but sure enough my clothes were there for me in the morning. She was still asleep when I left, so I gave strict instructions to the other man in the room, as well as at reception, to pass on how grateful I was.

The third was the next morning in Barcelona. I'd arrived at the hostel after midnight and feeling miserable: my blood sugar has been trending lower, but something went wrong that night because it had soared to 20 on the train from Valencia (5-7 being the ideal range that I never seem to manage).

Running high feels a lot like a hangover, except I'm pretty sure I did nothing to deserve this one. So when I got to the hostel only to find their fridge was set too high for my insulin, and that they didn't have a freezer at all, it was more than I had the mental agility to deal with. I'd stay the night, I told them, but in the morning I'd need to move on. Please refund the rest of my money.

I jumped on booking.com and booked a room in a hostel just down the street, Hostal One, leaving a message that I was booking because I needed a functional fridge and freezer. Except when I walked to Hostal One in the morning I hadn't booked at Hostal One, but at One Hostel, another 10 minutes away. And when I found my way there I found they didn't have a fridge at all, let alone a freezer. Welcome to Barcelona, a city untouched by modern white goods.

The guy at this hostel would have been quite within his rights to tell me to take the room or leave it: in my haze of stress, exhaustion and hyperglycaemia I'd made a non-refundable booking. But instead he had not only cancelled the booking free of charge, but made some calls before I'd gotten there and had found me the closest hostel nearby that had what I needed. Just because he could. So if you're ever in Barcelona and don't need a fridge, please stay at One Hostel Sants. Not Hostal One.

If all of that was too long and you skipped ahead, that's fine. All I need you to read is this: if you get an opportunity, please be helpful to tourists. Help me to pay all these little kindnesses forward. Without those three people I would not have gotten much joy out of these few days at all.
I'd be lying if I said I liked the hostel-with-a-working-fridge, but I had a bag full of insulin that wasn't going to be able to wander around Barcelona indefinitely so I took it. Eight bed dorm. Signs for happy hour and ads for party buses everywhere. Great. As it happens the other guests mostly proved no louder here than anywhere else, though I twice had to ask *staff* to keep quiet.

One great thing about this hostel, other than its fridge, was that I made my first new friend along the trip. Sean is a North Dakotan who is about to start cycling - yes, pedalling a bicycle - from Barcelona to Lisbon. He's also a Swans supporter, having mentioned to me that he'd seen two minutes of AFL highlights and wanted to see more. So he watched the first half of our game against the Bulldogs, after agreeing to my terms and conditions that he would swear an oath of loyalty to the Swans and declare undying enmity to Hawthorn. Welcome to the club, mate.

(As an aside, Sean is also a suitably repentant Bernie Sanders-turned-Jill Stein voter, who tolerated my lecture about tactical voting remarkably well. Admittedly I may have been less tactful about it if Trump hadn't won North Dakota by 30 odd points)

Anyway. This is ostensibly a story about Barcelona, which I have now spent 16 paragraphs barely mentioning.

I didn't love it. I think that's partly a result of circumstances: when a chunk of your first day in a place is spent sorting out a logistical snafu, and you have a few other things go not quite to plan, it's difficult to totally divorce all that frustration from how you perceive the place itself. Partly, too, it's that most of Barcelona's big drawcards - modern and contemporary art, gastronomy and nightlife - don't quite align with what I'm looking for in a city. But I was warming to it by the time I had to leave. I think, like New York, it's a place I'm likely to enjoy more a second time. And that's not to suggest I didn't have a good first time here: I did.

On day one I did the obligatory Barcelona tourist thing and went to La Sagrada Familia, the gaudy Gaudi temple that's supposedly going to be finished in 2026, only 160 years or so after work started.
I had been ambivalent about going here, not least because when I was making notes about things to do and see along this trip I'd put this down as having a cost of €29; a bit too steep for a church. I had thought I might just look from the outside without going in, before finding that a 'basic' ticket was only €15. I'm very glad I decided to pay it.

To be honest I found the outside of the building to be interesting, but ugly: I guess that makes me an architectural Philistine. And the view was hopelessly compromised by those pestilential City Sightseeing buses parking outside every two minutes. The inside, though, more than exceeded my expectations. Churches aren't supposed to be this psychedelic:

And it's not usually Batman watching over from above, either:

If ever the Catholic Church wants to make an honest living in Barcelona it could do worse than hiring La Sagrada out for rave parties.

I had planned to double up on Gaudi with a visit to Park Guell afterwards. I hopped on the subway and got off at the station closest to it; again Google Maps neglected to mention that the route passed through the Himalayas. I've got to stop climbing mountains.

Alas, it was for naught: I'd been warned at the hostel to book my Sagrada ticket online but was told I could simply front at Park Guell and buy a ticket. When I got there at 6 - tired, footsore and perhaps ever so slightly cranky - I was told I'd have to wait 90 minutes to go in. I couldn't be bothered, and caught the bus back. I never did get around to trying to visit a second time.

Part of day two was spent at the zoo, which is surprisingly good, compensating for the bitter disappointment that was Madrid. The day was sunny and considerably warmer than had been forecast so once done there I went for a walk to go and see the Mediterranean. All of Barcelona had had the same idea: they have several kilometres of beach and all of it was packed.

At one end of the beach were four naked men, each seemingly there on their own. They were all walking up and down along the water, stopping frequently to turn and face the beach-goers around them. It was obvious they were there because they wanted to be seen, but the Barcelonans weren't going to give them the attention they were seeking: nobody was taking the slightest bit of notice except a giggling pair of British teenagers. There's apparently a clothing optional area at the opposite end of the beach, so there's no excuse for these guys choosing not to use it.

Day three was largely given over to watching the Swans game: another little thing that I couldn't control but that fed into the theme that nothing quite went right in Barcelona. After that, though, I went for a ramble through the Gothic Quarter, ultimately landing at a museum whose name I can't recall but was built over and around excavated ruins of Roman Barcino, Barcelona's first incarnation as a city.

I'm a bit of a Romanophile, and a long-ago vision of this trip - when it was still just a concept, rather than anything that could reasonably be called a plan - would have had me following the Mediterranean around in a bid to visit every country of the Roman Empire. Although the Arab Winter has put an end to that idea for the foreseeable future, I'll still be visiting plenty of Roman sites along the way. This one was only the remains of a couple of workshops, but I was transported back in time all the same. I always like to imagine explaining to the people who used such sites - in this case, laundry workers, winemakers and fishmongers - that 2000 years later people come to see where they worked and learn what they did for a living. It's a form of immortality.

Day four was foreshortened by a late afternoon train out of Barcelona, but I had time for one last thing. Park Guell was too far out of the way for a second attempt so I headed back to the Gothic Quarter to choose a museum. I had been leaning towards the Marine Museum - on Sean's recommendation - but it became a certainty when I emerged from the subway station opposite it to find it was raining.

You can take the boy out of Melbourne but you can't take... actually, you must be able to take Melbourne out of the boy. Less than three weeks away and I've forgotten the lesson of a lifetime: never go out without an umbrella. It was about ten seconds after I decided that the rain wasn't so bad, and that I'd walk through it after all, that it turned into the worst downpour I'd experienced since the great Madrid snowstorm of 2017. I was in the rain for perhaps 45 seconds and the bottom half of my trousers were soaked. I *hate* wearing wet clothes.

This is where the benefits of being in a city 16,000 kilometres from home, and that you're leaving in a couple of hours, become most apparent. After trying and failing to contort myself into a position on the bathroom vanity that would allow me to use the hand dryer to dry my pants, I gave up and rolled them up to halfway up my calves. And then walked around the Barcelona Marine Museum with all the self-assurance of somebody who knew he would never see any of the people around him ever again.

Next stop: Avignon. 'Merci', not 'gracias'. 'Bonjour', not 'hola'. I was just starting to get used to it too.