I think, at the beginning of my last week before returning to Melbourne, I have been overcome by a little homesickness. Beautiful as it is here in Hanoi, I can't help but think about the fact that I'll get home at the very end of Winter, after the summer I've encountered everywhere else. I was in Cologne at the beginning of the heat wave there, and it was sweltering. Arriving in Hanoi, it was a different kind of heat - but one that left me feeling just as tired. Having a nice lazy time here, wandering around and around in the old quarter, visiting museums and galleries, and sitting in cafes, reading. Great coffee here, I'm glad to say.
Don't quite know what to write - I feel like my trip has turned to list-making. What I want to read when I get home, things I want to buy for people, the things left that I still have to see before getting on that plane, the songs I want to listen to when I get back and don't have to rely on headphones anymore. Movies I want to see and conversations I want to have. All the places in Melbourne I'm longing to visit again.
Before I left Denmark I went to Skagen, and walked off the northern end of Denmark - I walked into the water at the point where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea crash together, so that the one broke over my left leg, and the other broke over my right leg. I felt, standing there, that I was witnessing some endless war between the two bodies of water to gain ground, and imagined somehow that the seas were like bickering gods, never really gaining ground, but never content to give up the argument.
I also went to Silkeborg to see the Tollund Man - the original of my interest in Denmark's bog people. It is only his head that is the original - the body is a replica, as it was never preserved properly. There is something strange in see a human body turned to leather, to still see the open pores in the faces.
I spent a night on another bus, getting from Denmark to Cologne, with a change of buses at Hamburg. Arrived in Cologne at about 2 in the afternoon, and after dropping off my bags immediately went to the Cathedral and to the Ludwis Museum, the reason I decided to spend a night in Cologne. Moved among many more pieces of art that I'd had a craving to see. Especially the Rauschenberg's and the photography collection. It has been strange, though, in all the galleries I've visited, to never see any Australian art. I remember taking an Art History subject in twentieth century art, there were a number of exchange students enrolled in the course. When we got to Sidney Nolan they were puzzled by his inclusion, having never heard of him. So strange finding myself everywhere, and being from a forgotten place. I'm looking forward to a trip out to Heide when I get back, and to wandering among the Joy Hester's and the Charles Blackman's (particular favourites) among others.
Hanoi is crazy beautiful. I've been riding around on the back of a lot of motorbikes, because it's the easiest way to get around when things are too far for walking. Of course, wears helmets and there are hardly any traffic lights around the place. Everyone turns in every direction at once - gorgeous chaos!
I have been spending a lot of time at the Temple of Literature - today I visited it for the third time, sitting there to finsih reading Dante's Inferno, the wonderful Hollander translation. I've been reading it in English first, and then in the Italian - trying to learn more about Italian. I read Mrs Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte a few days ago, and was struck by the way Emily and Charlotte learned French in Brussels - by how the Professor read them pieces of French prose so they could learn the style of good French, before they even had a good grounding in the grammar. Strange to think of them listening to the rhythms of this foreign tongue like that, Emily in her defiantly outmoded fashions. I also read Paradise Lost this last week - somehow a week for diving deep into the central texts of literature again. I don't know what will come next.
I'm hoping to make it out to the Museum of Ethnology tomorrow, and to see the water puppets another night this week. I've also made friends with a shop keeper here, and she has invited me to visit her home this week, and meet her family, which I am very much looking forward to. And in between - more reading and relaxing and thinking, before turning my footsteps home.
Hanoi
Sunday, August 03, 2003
I've had another week of adventuring since leaving Krakow - I stayed overnight on the Baltic coast in Poland and then took the ferry across to Copenhagen. Now I'm in Århus, and this afternoon I took the bus no. 6 out to the Moesgård Museum of Prehistory where a long awaited meeting with the Grauballe man took place. It makes me want to track down a copy of P.V. Glob's "The Bog People" even more.
Denmark is beautiful - everything is so clean, people so friendly, and I've waited a long time to see the prehistory artefacts both here in Århus and in Copenhagen. I managed to get to the museum in Copenhagen the same morning I arrived in Denmark, after an overnight ferry trip which found me sleeping in a chair and later on the floor because I didn't have the money to pay for a cabin, and didn't really need one anyway. Iøve found my ability to sleep almost anywhere is becoming more and more pronounced - others appear quite jealous when they emerge from a bad nights sleep due to the traffic noise and I ask, "Oh, were there cars?". I'd been a little sick leaving Poland - a boring cold, fever etc - and so my day of getting up to the coast, then not being able to find accommodation there and eventually staying in a small town 15km away (which was lovely) ended up being an adventure, followed the next day by the adventure of getting to the ferry terminal and then sleeping anywhere I could find space to spread out!
I went to Elsinore, to the art museum Louisiana and Karen Blixen's home, now a museum and national parkland for birds. I also ventured into Tivoli where I heard the Kronos quartet play. Before all the musicians start cursing my very name, I have to say the concert was a bit of a letdown (though I can't complain too much, as I'd managed to get a VERY cheap ticket). The program mostly consisted of arrangements of the work of Mexican - composers. Except there wasn't a lot to the music, or the arrangements. A lot of the pieces were accompanied by an electronic backing, that seemed to be there only because the logistics of transporting the live players was too difficult. The pieces themselves didn't make a very sophisticated use of Mexican or European musical materials, though they were referred to in cliched ways. I was sitting next to Chris, a boy I met at the concert who is currently studying composition as a postgrad student in the UK, and after the first half of the program was over, all I could do was turn to him and say "That was all a bit kitsch." And no, it wasn't kitsch in a good way. The second half of the program, a single piece by a Finnish composer, was much more interesting, and I don't have a bad thing to say about that. They also gave, for an encore, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix's rendering of the American anthem at woodstock. I won't say much about it but that it was kitsch - in a good way. At least, it made me smile and not cringe!
I've been reading Karen Blixen since getting here. (I also stayed up till 3am one night last week reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Like so many other books I've read while I've been away, I was so grateful so open this one up and find so much in it, that it's quality hadn't been exaggerated. I read "Out of Africa", mostly in a gorgeous park in Copenhagen near my hostel. Am now reading Judith Thurman's biography of her, "Isak Dinesen". Should last me most of the week, as, like her biography of Colette, it's a rather hefty volume!
Getting home is growing closer - possibly closer than previously planned, as I'm thinking of changing my flight to arrive home a week or two earlier, so I can start working and putting things together in earnest. I've got so much to go through, to think about, and Iøm very eager to start! But I've still got my trip to Hanoi, and tonight I've got to try to track down a few days accommodation in Cologne. We'll see how I manage.
Denmark is beautiful - everything is so clean, people so friendly, and I've waited a long time to see the prehistory artefacts both here in Århus and in Copenhagen. I managed to get to the museum in Copenhagen the same morning I arrived in Denmark, after an overnight ferry trip which found me sleeping in a chair and later on the floor because I didn't have the money to pay for a cabin, and didn't really need one anyway. Iøve found my ability to sleep almost anywhere is becoming more and more pronounced - others appear quite jealous when they emerge from a bad nights sleep due to the traffic noise and I ask, "Oh, were there cars?". I'd been a little sick leaving Poland - a boring cold, fever etc - and so my day of getting up to the coast, then not being able to find accommodation there and eventually staying in a small town 15km away (which was lovely) ended up being an adventure, followed the next day by the adventure of getting to the ferry terminal and then sleeping anywhere I could find space to spread out!
I went to Elsinore, to the art museum Louisiana and Karen Blixen's home, now a museum and national parkland for birds. I also ventured into Tivoli where I heard the Kronos quartet play. Before all the musicians start cursing my very name, I have to say the concert was a bit of a letdown (though I can't complain too much, as I'd managed to get a VERY cheap ticket). The program mostly consisted of arrangements of the work of Mexican - composers. Except there wasn't a lot to the music, or the arrangements. A lot of the pieces were accompanied by an electronic backing, that seemed to be there only because the logistics of transporting the live players was too difficult. The pieces themselves didn't make a very sophisticated use of Mexican or European musical materials, though they were referred to in cliched ways. I was sitting next to Chris, a boy I met at the concert who is currently studying composition as a postgrad student in the UK, and after the first half of the program was over, all I could do was turn to him and say "That was all a bit kitsch." And no, it wasn't kitsch in a good way. The second half of the program, a single piece by a Finnish composer, was much more interesting, and I don't have a bad thing to say about that. They also gave, for an encore, a tribute to Jimi Hendrix's rendering of the American anthem at woodstock. I won't say much about it but that it was kitsch - in a good way. At least, it made me smile and not cringe!
I've been reading Karen Blixen since getting here. (I also stayed up till 3am one night last week reading Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Like so many other books I've read while I've been away, I was so grateful so open this one up and find so much in it, that it's quality hadn't been exaggerated. I read "Out of Africa", mostly in a gorgeous park in Copenhagen near my hostel. Am now reading Judith Thurman's biography of her, "Isak Dinesen". Should last me most of the week, as, like her biography of Colette, it's a rather hefty volume!
Getting home is growing closer - possibly closer than previously planned, as I'm thinking of changing my flight to arrive home a week or two earlier, so I can start working and putting things together in earnest. I've got so much to go through, to think about, and Iøm very eager to start! But I've still got my trip to Hanoi, and tonight I've got to try to track down a few days accommodation in Cologne. We'll see how I manage.
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