Clay

I got to do some work in clay today. It's smooth and soft and wet and when you run your hands along it, it's so sensuous, like flesh.

We are supposed to be making a basic figure to use when making a plaster cast for concrete. I got sidetracked by making a woman's head, stroking her shoulders, forming her breasts and buttocks. But it was impractical as a start for a concrete mold -- too detailed and the wrong sort of shape.

I ended up with something much simpler (though not nearly as enjoyable to make). I think on one side it looks like someone kneeling and looking down and from the other someone standing and looking up -- economical, two for the price of one. After we make the plaster cast and pour the concrete, the idea is that we paint faces etc on it and put it out in the garden, I suppose.

Swedish Coffee

Photo courtesy of www.discountcoffee.com

According to the couple I'm staying with:

The Swedes are the biggest drinkers of coffee per capita in the world. Finland is second. And they have their own special way of making and drinking the coffee. First you bring a pot of water to the boil, then you add ground coffee beans (lots -- the Swedes like a STRONG coffee. They pooh-pooh the strength of Italian coffee), let it boil for five minutes and then sit so the grounds settle at the bottom. Then the coffee is poured into a cup WITH A SAUCER and served. The drinker takes a sugar cube between their teeth, pours the hot coffee into the saucer to cool it down a bit and drinks it from the saucer with the sugur still in their mouth.

I don't like coffee, but this sounds just crazy enough to be kinda fun!

Sweets in Europe

So today my task was to cut wood. I got to use a special woodcutting machine, so it's not nearly so dickensian as it seems on a first hearing. There was no axe involved, just me to-ing and fro-ing from a pile of uncut wood and pressing a button on the machine, then making a pile of my own, freshly cut wood. Despite all my best efforts, I couldn't engineer an avalanche of uncut wood by plucking a strategic piece from the pile.

The inside of the wood (I think it was birch trees, or at least, used to be) looked like honeycomb. I miss the lollies in Australia. European confectionary (not chocolate, but sweets) is insufficient at best. Oh for Chicos, sour coke bottles, and various things made by the Natural Confectionary Company!

Mermaid

This is the first vaguely creative thing I've done in over 6 months -- something where I'm actually making something up as opposed to trying to reproduce something that already exists. I think the creativity is because I'm having a shitty week. It's not lost on me that I generally only produce when I'm miserable. I wonder if I'd prefer to be barren but consistently happy?

People I Don't Like

I don't actively dislike many people. Sure, there are PLENTY of people I'm more or less indifferent to, and that may SEEM like dislike, but it's not. It's not even in the same multiverse. When I dislike someone, I feel a visceral reaction, I'm nauseated by their presence, everything they say or do is offensive, I can't bear to look at them directly and I want to leave the vicinity immediately. It doesn't happen very often, which is why it always used to perplex me so much on the rare occasions I experienced it.

It's happened often enough now for me to recognise the cause of the symptoms, but now the dilemma is, what do I do? I'm not tactful or dishonest enough to just pretend to like them. Compared to how I normally interact with people, mere civility seems like aloofness, plus it still means I have to BE around them and contend with the bile rising in my throat at their presence.

But there will always be some poor soul out there whose guts I hate, and it seems like I should have a plan for how to deal with it. Besides my current strategies, which are pretending that I really enjoy 24 hour solitude or severing all contact with them.

Maybe I'm being unrealistic. Maybe there's a reason I feel so strongly repulsed by someone I dislike and maybe my current strategies are sufficient. Maybe it's asking too much for everyone to get along all the time.

Small talk

Very small talk. It's bland and repetitive and utterly uninteresting. Don't make small talk with me. It only shows me how unimaginative and banal you are.

Well...

what would it take for me to stay in one place for more than a fortnight and not get bored, restless, whatever? Sometimes it doesn't even take a fortnight. It's so utterly inconceivable how I ever managed to do it so frequently in the past. Stay in one place, that is. I used to be the queen of staying in once place, I didn't even like going away on holiday.

As much as I loathe the banality of it all, maybe it would be (shudder) lurve. Or maybe love would just postpone the inevitable. This line of thought is pointless anyway because I don't even know where I'll be in three months. It's impossible to build any kind of stable relationship when you are in unstable circumstances without a great deal of risk. And how much would I be willing to risk? How much is anyone ever willing to risk?

It's a head scratcher, that's for sure.

Midsummer Celebrations

Well, traditionally the Swedes spend midsummer skipping about the maypole, listnening to folk music, eating the first pickled herring, sour cream, new potatoes and strawberries of the year and apparently there's some sort of frog dance. However, given that it's been raining all the long weekend (not full on rain, but a weak and yet somehow determined sort of drizzle, like a wishy-washy, pissant, little bureaucrat who has impounded your car) I've seen none of that. Mostly I've just seen the inside of the house. I got so desperate with cabin fever that I went out for a walk in the rain yesterday. Yep. Got pretty rained on.

Creationists

I've got my rant on today.

Creationists. Man these guys piss me off! They try to use the logic of empirical science to reason that God created the universe, but the way they use said logic is so flawed!

Like saying that the world and life on it is so complex, that it can't be a mere accident that it was created. Well of course it's not an accident! Organisms evolve and if the change is well suited to the environment at the time, then the organism lives for long enough to reproduce and pass on that change. It's not at all random or chance, it's natural selection.

And I don't know about the infinite wisdom or power or knowledge of god -- I won't even pretend to. But 6 billion years is a LONG period of time. I don't even really know what my life will be like in a year's time, so 6 billion years is close enough to infinity for me to accept that a vastly complex ecosystem can be acheived through myriad small changes.

Plus, when we look at the world around us, we're essentially looking at a world of (for want of a better word) winners -- plants and animals with traits that are successful in this environment. Of course everthing seems sublime if you only ever take note of the successes, but that's taking an unbalanced view of things. If we take into account all the evolutions that were unsuccessful or the species that became extinct because they didn't adapt to a changing environment, does everything seem instataneously perfectly and wrought by the hand of a god? (Or did god make mistakes with those organisms?)

The only thing that creationists have over scientists is faith, the belief in something where there is no evidence for that belief. You can't argue logically with faith, that's it's very nature. It's therefore pointless to argue with someone who believes that a god made the world, because no matter how logically structured the arguments are, faith is meant to exist without evidence and flying in the face of logic.

But by the same token, I think it's reasonable for the faithful to accept that to the scientifically minded, there's no evidence of god and therefore no reason to believe in his/her/its existence, beyond a wistful need perhaps to lessen one's own responsibility in the grand scheme of things.

By the way, existence of this universe (and us in it) is not evidence of a god. It's perhaps evidence of how particles interact with each other to form atoms into molecules and into larger structures and organisms.

I neither believe nor disbelieve in a god. At best, I wonder if there is a one.

And the only thing worse than a creationist is someone who promotes intelligent design. I mean, those guys are supposed to be trained scientists.

The Stones Baby!!

Photo courtesy of www.iorr.org

I like the Stones. They're not my favourite band of all time, but they have some pretty cool stuff and, come on, they're music history.

I originally thought tickets to a concert of the Stones European tour cost upward of $600AUD -- however, eventually realised that I was only looking at UK sites for prices (accursed pounds). However, I've found that prices approach something like being reasonable (ranging from $60 - $250) after scouting some other countries, so maybe I might end up going to see music history...

Charlottenberg

Charlottenberg is in Sweden, has a population of about 5000 people, is about 2 hours from the Oslo in Norway and quite close to the border between the two countries. The town centre isn't too much to look at -- a main street of mostly closed or closing down store fronts and a handful of very large shopping centres further out (the difference in prices between Sweden and Norwar vary greatly on some products, and malls of Charlottenberg capitalise on this). However, the place I'm staying at is about 5km from town, out in the country where there are a lot of flowers, fields, trees and the cottages, painted rust red or the roofs insulated with growing grass that are so typical of Sweden. It's pretty.

Norra Mon

Well, here I am in Sweden [again]! I'm staying in a town called Charlottenberg, at a place called Norra Mon, which is an art gallery that also doubles as a bed and breakfast every now and again. It's run by Hans and Brigitta Öhman, who eventually plan to have the complex turned into a full time, full-on gallery with exhibition spaces, studios, art courses and workshops.

As they are in the beginning stages of setting up the place, there's stacks to do and not many customers about. I mowed the lawn yesterday and spent most of this morning doing other gardeny type things. During my own time so far I've invaded their piano and gone for a couple of nice long walks in the country side. There's a riding school next door to us, so this afternoon I had a look at the various horses grazing in the fields. They're such big animals but have such small mouths! Eating seems to be a very long process.

Granada

This is the view from my hostel. I've been looking at it quite a lot this past week. Those are the Sierras way in the back, tipped with snow. At noon, multiple bells sound out a melody that echoes across the city. Not that it's been all contemplative, roof top gazing and soul searching. The hostel attracts quite a friendly and sociable bunch, so I've managed to visit various tapas establishments, the beach, a flamenco show and so on. Of course the Alhambra is rather stunning. And the other day, there was a naked demonstration on bike, protesting the use of petrol, which was quite amusing.

Lisboa

Well it's hard not to get a bit of a soft spot for Lisbon when you can see gorgeous colonial buildings gently decaying in the old part of town and then the next moment descend into their underground metro, which is a transport system that looks like it's from the not-too-distant-future (oh, wait, that's *now*). Met a fellow Aussie yesterday and managed to see most of the big sights by the end of the day -- how's that for efficient! As a result I now have a couple of days to chill out and discover little interesting things, like this free internet kiosk at the Oriente train station!

Post script: The most bizarre thing to happen to us that day was taking a taxi to what we thought was a botanical park, but ending up at a hunting lodge instead! That head down there is real. It was quite a task to convince them (in our very limited Spanish, made even more difficult by the fact that in Portugal they speak Portuguese!!) that we *weren't* interested in hunting! [No quisiera ... hunting?]

Barcelona & Montserrat

Great architecture. Gaudi is just amazing.

It's been really chill. Which is great when you arrive and can relax after travelling for 5 days straight, but crap if you want to buy a train ticket. I waited for 2 hours today at the train station to get my ticket organised for tomorrow's journey to Lisbon.

On the up side, spent the rest of the day at the monastary at Montserrat, which was quite nice as far as monastaries go, but its location was just stunning. Yeah.

Prague Post Script

How hilarious! I'm front page news in a local Czech newspaper simply because I'm Australian and I went to a wine tasting festival at the invitation of a friend of a friend. The chardonnay in question was pretty damn yummy and I got nicely toasty that afternoon. Great stuff!



Translation courtesy of Mirek

SHE LIKED CHARDONNAY. Field day of family - owned local wineries of Microregion Porta Bohemica in Velke Zernoseky. Visitor from the farthest country was Eugenie Ong - Australia. She took a fancy to Pavel Bulins (Usti nad Labem city) Chardonnay.