6.46pm, Tuesday May 12 ....pickpocketed already?

Today I sat in a cafe with a blue and pink pastel ceiling, where I was served four different little biscuits with my $6 peso cup of tea. The cafe is in the Recoleta Cultural Centre. I was too tired to write. I certainly couldn´t keep up with Sartre, so I read Sarton, but only for a bit. After finishing my tea I lay down on a concrete bench in the gallery´s courtyard, next to a fountain. I listened to the falling water and pretended to doze.

I enjoyed very much the art at the RCC, new works - a retrospective of a project using cigarette vending machines to display small works by a variety of emerging artists; an exhibit of large resin and glass objects inspired by natural forms but also with an element of the built and technological - large objects, for example giant open pod-like structures - made of shattered glass; giant colour photographs of people at various South American beaches; comics, titled Tesorito, about a mother and her two children, one a baby.

The centre was originally part of a convent and the exhibits were housed in narrow rooms off a central hall, as was the cafe. I´ve never quite seen a gallery like it and it was unusually lax on security guards.

Before visiting the gallery I spent a lot of time walking around the Recoleta Cemetary, a miniature old city of mausoleums for the rich and important. I´ve never seen its like. Inside the mausoleums were shiny wooden coffins, Jesus wall statues, vases, glasses, dishes, flowers, portraits. Some were intricately cobwebbed, others losing sprays of plaster or offering loose planks of wood. Outside of Eva Peron´s family mausolem was a hill of flowers. There were many wandering cats in the cemetary, several peacefully lying under a small tree near a marble bench. I spent a couple of hours wandering around, lost in the plethora of lanes.


Recoleta Cemetery

Today I ate bread stuffed with cheese, olives, tomato and pesto, bought off a stallholder in front of the Recoleta church. I also lost something like $30 to $40 pesos. I may have been pickpocketed but I just as likely missed my purse when putting my money away. Sigh... that´s a fair chunk of pesos, though not that much Australian dollars.

Next, I must tell of the marble cathedral.

Tuesday continued

W and I passed a cardboard box collector this morning. Cardboard is often what garbage vandals are after and cardboard is a roaring trade. Ah, I see another customer (in the cafe, in case you have forgotten where I am), a dignified woman in red and black also with a plate of three things, so maybe I am not as greedy as I thought.

I am proud of my Spanish speaking. I obviously looked confused as I looked at the open shelves of bakery delights to the side of the shop and the boy behind the counter offered me a plastic basket and tongs. I said, ´¿Como aquí?´and the boy motioned to me to take a table!

It is a chilly morning but the sun is showing itself. Buenos Aires is not beautiful. There are dramatic old buildings in this area, but they are offset by the greyness of the narrow streets. Haedo may be beloved but its houses are hodgepodge and odd, its apartment buildings boxes, though boxes with nice wooden slat shutters. It is like no city I´ve ever seen and I cannot describe adequately the way the houses look: they defintiely don´t give the usual impression of walkway, door, windows on either side. Some are two-storied with balconies...

Yesterday, when I said I was invigorated by the city, W countered that it is tiring always having to watch your bag and worrying about pickpocketing and, of course, actually being pickpocketed or robbed. That pulled me up. I romanticise big cities but I do reckon constantly being anxious on the streets and suffering purse-snatchings would wear thin.

I shall give in and eat the roll - while I delve back into Sartre.

I will skip more flight writing so you can get to the good stuff

Monday, May 11, 9.55pm ....dead-to-the-bone tired

I jot down notes only, as I am tired beyond words. The bus ride from Buenos Aires airport was amazing. BA is an enormous grubby city strewn with trash and full of ugly architecture. It has been a grey day and the city´s people dress without flair. I love it. There is a distinct absence of blondes and rake-thin girls. People here aren´t that thin. I love it. Already on the bus I was thinking of moving to a big city again. I love it, the grand scale of it, the evidence of people in their masses, in their everyday squalor that I find so....invigorating.

I spent the late afternoon talking to W and her sister in their funky office (turquoise blue walls, fairy lights, a leg in a neon green stocking stuck to the wall) on Ave. Ayacucho. W made a lovely dinner of rice and fried eggplant patties topped with a chunky tomato sauce. Very lovely.

To bed!

from now this blog becomes The South America Diaries!

Monday, 11 May, 3.43am ...it begins

Ahhh, so I begin what promises to be many scatteed hours of waiting over the course of these travels. I have taken a taxi to the Skybus for my Melbourne to Sydney flight. There are now fourteen minutes to wait. Four men in dark clothes ramble the cement hall, dragging their suitcases.

I am calming down now, my anxiety turning towards excitement. In the taxi, my travel worry turned towards home, concern about A, M, Y and the flat. There is nothing to worry about, but still I turn things around in my mind.

The bus has come!

6.59am

Oh, the clouds - I´ve written of them before. I fly over a sea of roiling cloud and the wrinkled-bedsheet mountains of trees emerge. Before, farm spreading to the horizon where the sun layed down a thin pink line that is now a bleeding hazy glow. Perhaps one day it will cease to amaze me when I fly how uninhabited this earth of our is. There were brown plains of houseless farms and now green swathes of fertility. From Melbourne to Canberra it is also checkerboards of farm and rolling hills of trees.

I began May Sarton´s Journal of a Solitude. She writes ´I hardly ever sit still without being haunted by the ¨undone¨ and the unsent´. Yes! Exactly. Oh and out the window the most amazing poofs of cotton-candy clouds, dense balls of feather blowing forwards. Amazing. As far as the eye can see again, but the pink line is gone. Instead a lone puff of mountain a little higher than the rest, a cotton ball hill on the horizon.

We are disappearing into the clouds and the shiny ocean emerges, lit monotone by a bright ball sun. To read, to look out the window, to read, to look out the window, to read, to look out the window... The window is best in a plane.

The piercing screams of the ubiquitous unhappy baby tormented by painful ears is the soundtrack to the stretch and curl of Sydney´s coastline, so, so green and lush with scrub, until the city emerges, islandy and archipelagoish, all protruding boxes of various heights. I can see the seaweed under the water - to the ocean floor from the plane in the sky. As we land we pass boats - big ones and little ones - and we touch down and roll so fast.

The end, flight 1.

Cafe # 35: Cafe Kazari

Date: Saturday, 31 January 2009, 3.30pm
Location: 450 Malvern Rd., Prahran
Coffee: $3.50 (fairtrade), latte, okay

I didn't expect to be writing a cafe diary so I have only a small piece of scrap paper found at the bottom of the front pocket of my backpack to work with. The cafe deserves an entry. I'm on Malvern Rd, trying to find a large and excellently stocked op shop that I found Balaclava way with M and mom, when she was here. I need some summer shirts and a bedsheet and I long for a good summer dress or two. I have one perfect one but can't wear that everyday. I think the shop is on Malvern around the Chapel St area, but I haven't quite made it there yet as I've come by Glenferrie Rd tram. It's nice to be in another area; usually I am on Lygon/Smith Sts on the weekends.

This cafe is in the back of a gallery. It's a Japanese cafe. I'm having a red bean, floury decorated deserty thing - a red ball wrapped in green. There is a verandah but I'm inside on a not very comfortable but pretty and long 'Chinese lacquered elm high backed bench' ($3,950) with earth-tone cusions, leaning over a big, white glass-topped table. I am looking at a sweet big painting of two white-pinkish hairless heads in a small white boat on an all black sea, playing black flutes to a sliver moon.

The orange-flavoured water is lovely. There is old-time jazz playing in the background and a loud hum of refrigerator. A lovely, open and calm space of expensive art and craft.



Afterword: I never did find the op-shop I was looking for, but I did find a much smaller one on Chapel St in Windsor where I bought 4 skirts and 4 shirts - a veritable motherlode given the propensity for op-shop clothes to either not fit or look terrible on me.

Cafe #34: Botanica Flowers/Lofts Art

Date: Sunday, 28 September 2008, 3.30pm
Location: Bay Street, Near New St., Brighton
Coffee: $3.00, skinny latte, weak

I haven't written a diary entry in so long I thought perhaps I had given up. But this is such a perfect cafe (except for very ordinary coffee), I had to write. Today is exactly what a Sunday should be like. I woke up at 10.15, began reading Ulysees, but was interrupted by a phone call from S. I booked my flights to Canberra for his birthday party, chatted briefly with A1, put on a short skirt and ventured out to the beach around 1.00pm.

I haven't made it to the water yet. When I got to Platform 2 at Richmond Station the Sandringham train was pulling away and the next one wasn't due for 17 minutes. Rather than wait, I got on the Frankston train. I decided to get off at Bentleigh, the last stop in Zone 1. I figured a long walk to the beach would be just fine. And it is! Bentleigh has a nice strip of shops with many $2 shops, a few fruit shops and lots of bakeries, and a Glicks. I hadn't intended to get lunch - I'm supposed to be dieting - but I couldn't resist a bagel. I got an everything bagel with eggplant and olive dip.

I walked through Bentleigh - a wealthy-looking suburb that began to resemble Canberra as I got farther from the shops and surrounding early-20th-century Melbourne-style brick houses. North Brighton shops are very cute, though all closed on a Sunday afternoon - posher, but funky posh, I think. Will have to come back.

The cafe I am currently sitting in has a room of candles, cards, flowers and assorted gifty things, a cafe with a few white tables, and a few art gallery rooms with walls covered in canvases painted in various styles. The floors are terracotta tiles and I am sitting in front of a bay window where I can examine the big backsides of two black-haired female wooden sculptures; a modern painting of a lily; a bright-coloured painting of a girl with cleavage; a European wasp-eating plant and a big terracotta pot of fake ivy and spider plants. The sun is brightening my table and two different CDs are playing, one in each of the other parts of the shop, the paintings in front, flowers behind me.

This is the first time I've had one of my day trips since finishing my thesis. Now that I'll be working, spending weekends with J and entertaining my mother, I don't expect to get these sorts of Sundays very often. I am supposed to be working on a paper for the post-grad colloquium but I haven't begun yet. Maybe at the beach I'll finally crack Badiou open.

On that note, I shall leave this blog as the note of an afternoon and get myself to the beach before the sun goes down.

Cafe #33: Holy Bread

Date: Sunday, 9 March, 2008, 11.00pm
Location: Pier Street, Altona

It has been a long day. I didn't wake up until 10.30, but today was the day to take my last Zone 2 train trip on my last monthly ticket left over from my yearly replacements, which Connex obligingly replaced with both zones even though my yearly was only Zone 1.

I decided to go to Werribee, the end of the line, near Port Philip Bay. The map in my 'pocket' UBD shows national park wetlands. When I got to Werribee, it turned out the bus I was planning to take to the wetlands doesn't run on Sundays, but after some pressing the driver suggested I walk to Werribee Park, where there is an open-range zoo and a mansion. He said he though it would be a 20-minute walk. It turns out the area is also home to the Victorian Natural Rose Garden and Shadowfax Winery and it takes more like an hour to walk to the park from the train.
So, yes, it was a very long walk, and hot, and while still getting there I was wondering if I'd be game to ask someone for a ride back. The mansion is beautiful. It is in the process of being restored and the library and drawing room, main bedroom (downstairs), the enormous kitchen and pantry, a couple of bedroom suites upstairs and the balconies were open for inspection. The hall-entranceway mosaic floor is very beautiful and the upstairs hall is a wood-floored salon/ballroom. A small ballroom. The mansion apparently had 19 bedrooms. It was bought in the 1920s and turned into a seminary, then bought back by the city for restoration. The original mansion is enormous and the Catholics built a whole 'nother mansion - an extension - which now serves as a Sofitel Hotel and Spa. The many areas of grounds include a farm and homestead, a patterned garden in front of the mansion, a pond and grotto, many swathes of green grass and pondy paths, a sculpture walk and river and forest trails. Everywhere people are allowed to picnic and play, which is very un-American. It is a very beautiful and impressive place and I'd love to go back - with companions and a car or bike.

I had a lovely honeycomb and chocolate slice at the mansion cafe that tasted just as chocolately and rich as it looked. By the time I got to the mansion I was starving. It's been a beautiful day. Hot but totally bearable and sunny and beautiful.

After exploring the mansion grounds and very much enjoying the sculpture, I took my tired feet to the massive rose garden, wth international varieties of roses. The garden wa designed in a 5-petal pattern, complete with a 'stem' path and small circular 'leaf' garden. Not that I noticed this pattern while walking thouhgh - I saw it on the map. Some of the roses smelled lovely , but I was too tired to enjoy the garden lesiurely. I started back for the train stations around 6.00 and kept hoping that someone in the fairly constant stream of cars might offer me a ride, but no.

Then, around 7.00, when I was still nowhere near the train station I got bit, once on each leg, by a dog. I was walking on a dirt road by a fallow field on the side of the road. The road to Werribee park has no pedestrian pathway and I thought it would be safer and more pleasant to walk away from the road. I had walked on the dirt road on the way to the park but as I was leaving the dirt to go back to the bitumen a dog came silently out of nowhere. It didn't bark, just trundled up, bit me and trundled off. Fortunately there were men at the house the field belongs to and I said, 'Excuse me, your dog just bit me, could you help me clean myself up?'

This is as far as I got with the blog at the cafe. I wrote notes about the cafe: 'Big open space, concrete floor, flat stone-piled pillars in the front. A brown couch facing outdoors, a couple more couches inside, poor service.'

I remember waiting almost an hour for my glass of red. I was about to leave when the young boy finally brought it to me.

The dog bite had a lasting impact. Aside from the ugly scars on my leg, I am now a bit hesitant when dogs run up to me. I never had any fear of them before. The man who owned the dogs was very unpleasant to me. He thought I was going to sue. Of course, I was polite and conciliatory to him, though a little annoyed when I explained that I wasn't going to sue him I just wanted my leg cleaned up. I wish I'd grow out of this misplaced niceness.

His father was much nicer and offered me a towel and a hose while we waited for his son to get disinfectant and bandaids. The old man drove me to the train station. I think he was Italian. He had a thick accent, but cannot remember now for sure where he said he was from.

The bites themselves didn't really hurt that much. More messy than anything. I was just profoundly sad at being so alone.

I was still bleeding a lot while sitting on the train so decided to disembark at the beach. I figured all that salt water would be a good disenfectant, and after such a stressful time I deserved an ocean.

I texted J, who advised that I should be fine and needn't go to the hospital.

A was lovely when I got home. She took pictures of my very black and blue and swollen calf and doused me lovingly with a disinfectant solution. She was the best substitute for Mom I could have had.

E wanted me to find out about justice and the law and whether the dog could be put down.
I did finally call the local council and a woman told me that if you trespass on somebody's property a dog can legally kill you.

I did get a tetanus shot in the end.