It's not you, it's me...

Firstly, I must apologise, Austria was possibly the worst place (or the wurst place - ey??) to just totally abandon blogging. It might have given the impression that I was kidnapped by Austrians and being held in their cellar. And while I had so much fun in Vienna that I begged my friends in Vienna to do just that, they declined and suggested I find some legitimate way to get back to Vienna and stay for a decent period of time, which I am looking in to.

So, after Vienna I went to London, New York, Boston, upstate New York, Orange County and Honolulu. There were ups, there were downs, I came home with a tan, it was all so long ago now that the thought 'I really need a holiday' pops into my head not infrequently.

Anyway, this blog's number 1 fan (hi Mum!) wanted to know why I hadn't blogged in a while and I've been thinking about it a bit and I've come to two conclusions.

Number 1 is that I'm a little bit over always thinking about how my bipolar stuff is intersecting with my life stuff, particularly now that my life stuff is getting a lot more play than my bipolar stuff. I'm back to doing normal things like catching up with friends and plucking my eyebrows and thinking about dating and wondering if I should change jobs. And sure, my bipolar stuff still influences the life stuff in a big way but I feel like I'm really more concerned with dealing with my life stuff and really, that's all kind of boring because you're all already doing that stuff yourselves so there doesn't seem much point in me telling you about it!

Number 2 is that I have legitimately started writing words for purposes other than this blog and shopping lists. I'm writing a book in fact. I think it would fall into the category of creative non-fiction, although I'm having a whale of a time with the embellishing (which an author of memoirs at the Melbourne Writers Festival gave the green light on, so I feel a lot more okay about doing it now.)

I'm enjoying writing creatively again and if I get the chance to sit down and write that's what I want to be writing. Both those reasons are actually great reasons for this blog to fizzle out, or at least take a sabbatical, but I thought I should let you know.

I also thought that since you've been kind enough to read my babble over the years I would treat you to a little taste of what I am writing. It's still at first draft stage so please do what I do and just assume it will have to get better somehow. Anyway, this is one of the opening passages to my book. I hope you enjoy it and if it's the last thing of mine that you read, well thank you all the same for reading my words and for sticking by me through sickness and in health.

Love Katie

"Sometimes when I’m around colleagues or friends of friends and I feel the conversation wheeling around to anything that might connect to that episode, and I can always feel it coming by the way my heart makes a violent leap into my throat before plummeting to my bowels with the force of a cartoon anvil, I tell the story about coming home one evening to find my driveway on fire. It’s what I consider a boundary story, one of the ones that anyone may hear and feel like they’re getting a peak into my inner life and the trouble they have heard hangs around me. Meanwhile I can tell it and maintain my good humour. Sometimes if that story goes down well I follow it up with a story from the same apartment when the police had been called out to a domestic dispute at the block of flats next door.

I was standing on my balcony, which is what I called the concrete between my apartment and the balustrade; it was in fact a communal walkway, though one only frequented by me and the neighbour to my right, ours being the apartments furthest back from the street. I watched as a beaten up, old Holden Commodore turned the corner into my street. It stopped, the driver seeing the cop car. Then it started to back up. I wondered if it was a paranoid ice dealer who was trying to back away quickly, the way one does when they inadvertently enter a room to just hear the snippet of a sentence that could only be about them self.

However The Commodore was not making a hasty retreat. No, once the Commodore had backed up about twenty-five metres, the sound of rusted parts scraping and a fan belt in need of palliative care squealing, then the Commodore sped forth, ramming into the police car. The Commodore reversed again, only a few metres this time and slowly. It waited a moment. Then it took another run at the police car but this time giving it not more than a gentle nudge, the way you might poke an animal with a stick after bludgeoning it with a club, just to check it's actually dead.

Then for my encore I casually mention that a man was shot outside my apartment in Brooklyn, a great way to bring to the conversation for anyone who didn’t already know, the fact that I once lived in New York. And a shooting in Brooklyn is so dramatic and so foreign to us here in Melbourne that instantly by comparison the goings on at the Footscray apartment seem minor, trivial, un-noteworthy, laughable, insignificant, minimal, small-fry. Just unimportant! (Which of course they weren’t since all of the bad stuff that happened is connected to that geographical location and came, subsequent, if not partly consequently, of those events.)

Somebody then usually remarks something along the lines of, 'So you lived in New York? How was that?'

And I say, ‘Indescribable!’ Because honestly, even I, who love words and take great satisfaction in turning them into smartly turned out phrases can’t find the right ones to answer that question succinctly.

What I will never mention, not to them, not to a person who is barely an acquaintance, is the night somebody stood at the door of my Footscray apartment and smashed every one of my pot plants. That they then violently shook the door to see if it would come off its shoddily attached hinges and when it wouldn't how they cracked a full dozen eggs on the outside of the door. I won't mention that somebody dismantled my chained up bike, that they didn't actually steal any of the parts, they just scattered them down the street, despite there being two other bikes within a metre of mine of equal worth that were not chained up at the time. I don't mention that first it was a tea towel, then two t-shirts and then one day all my underwear that went missing from the apartment block's communal washing line until I took to draping all my wet clothes across a clothes dryer or the backs of chairs inside my apartment, unable to afford any further pilferings from my few possessions.
And the mail. I won't talk about that. About the book ordered online that never came, about the power being cut off because the bill which hadn't arrived hadn't been paid, about the nonappearance of even one letter from my most faithful correspondent, the bank. The total absence of anything in my letter box. I considered removing the 'No Junk Mail' plaque just to yield a sense of satisfaction when opening the metal hatch. But who knows, perhaps the glossy catalogues full of pictures of half-price margarine and cheaply printed A5 flyers for gutter cleaners would not be there either, even though they spewed forth from every neighbouring letterbox in damp and decaying piles.

I won’t talk about those things. And of course, I won’t talk about the episode."

Eating adventures in Austria

After a busy and stressful start to my holiday Vienna has been a welcome change of pace.

I think it has helped that I'm staying with well-traveled locals who have been able to guide me as to such things as whether to pay the 16 e admission to various museums and encouraged me to just take strolls to soak up the architecture or sit in coffee houses and people watch.

This is just the sort of holiday I have been needing. I feel like I'm slowing down to a pace where I can take a great big exhale and stop worrying about not doing my holiday right. I've even had a few pyjama days watching TV shows or TED talks on the couch with my friends, sipping on the never ending supply of coffee or tea on offer to me here.

And the food! Oh my god! In just the last couple of days alone I have eaten langos, which is a fried, bready dough covered in garlic, sour cream and cheese. We had food delivered from a schnitzel restaurant the other night and my dinner was half a chicken coated in schnitzel crumbs and fried. How have I not known that such things existed until now? There's also been an array of cheeses, dips, meats, bread, snacks, chocolate, candy, pastries and wine.

I haven't taken many photos since I got here. Partially because I'm usually so caught up in an involved conversation with one of my friends or shoving some new culinary delight in my face at any given moment but also because I feel like I've slid backwards on my thinking that I need to play sightseeing bingo and get a snap to prove I've made it to every sight in this city. I know what I've experienced here and I don't think it could be photographed effectively. I sometimes think that all my memories of travel are falsely constructed around images I have photographed. I'm smiling in the pictures so I remember being happy. There's nothing wrong with that I suppose but I guess I'm just hoping that in the absence of one dimensional images I might remember some more multidimensional memories.

Anyway, I must hurry off, We're planning on attending Genuss Festival today, a free culinary festival in Stadtpark. Perhaps I'll write again before I leave Austria, if  not you'll hear from me next in London or New York.

Czech Republic

(Due to fast typing on an English keyboard I have left off the many haceks and accents that accompany the letters of many Czech words. Really crap of me but it takes forever to find those shortcuts.)

I left Paris a little sore and tired and I hoped that I would have some rest in the Czech Republic but no such luck. Instead of rest though I did have a lot of beer and wine and sometimes that made me feel even better than rest might have. Other times I wasn’t quite so sure it was doing the trick.

Prague was cold and wet when I arrived but that did not deter my uncle from showing me around the graveyard and walls of Vysehrad. With sopping feet and a frozen nose we sought shelter and sustenance at Café Slavia, a grand, old, art deco restaurant facing out to the river. Czech cuisine seems to consist of pieces of meat in a creamy sauce with dumplings or potatoes. I think that when I was in Prague 12 years ago it was high summer so warm, creamy sauces were unappetising but looking out to Prague Castle and Karluv Most through the rain on a cold day a warm, creamy sauce was exactly what I needed. Along with wine. Now, I gave up smoking last year and I pretty much gave up drunk smoking early this year but there is something about being on holidays and being in Europe that just makes smoking seem, not just appealing, but somehow right! And in the Czech Republic you can still smoke inside not just bars, but restaurants. I don’t think I’ve done anything in recent years that has felt quite so taboo as lighting up a cigarette at a table inside with people eating nearby.

After one broken down bus outside of Zlicin, my uncle Michael and I got on a functioning bus to Zatec. Michael gave me a grand tour of the town although I made rather quite the poor tourist; my back by this stage was in spasms and sending shooting pain from my right hip to the second little toe on that foot. We had lunch at a café new to Zatec that serves organic food. Between my uncle speaking a little Czech, me speaking a little German and the waiter speaking just a little German and English we worked out that on the menu that day was Thai food. Now I can’t say it rivalled some of the Thai food I’ve had in Melbourne but it was very nice and my uncle told me later that the café has an initiative to employ a percentage of people with disabilities so I was glad that we ate there.

In the evening my uncle was keen to introduce me to his good friends, the people who had first invited him to the Czech Republic 13 years earlier. So I went to their house where I was offered food. I was about to say no, feeling like I didn’t want to impose and make them go to any trouble but then I wondered if perhaps refusing would in fact be construed as rude. I am so glad I said yes. Delicious soup with dumplings, potatoes with bacon and cabbage and frozen strawberries for dessert. Again food that might have been a bit heavy in warmer months but on a cold April night, just perfect. We stayed late, drinking wine and playing a game of Go Fish with the two young boys. When we were preparing to leave we were asked to come back the following night for more food. This time I didn’t even hesitate to think if I was imposing and said a very enthusiastic ‘yes’.

We stopped in at Michael’s favourite bar for a nightcap and it was quite a funny little place. It has an entirely wooden interior, there are American number plates hanging off the wall, lines of gold (plastic) trophies on a high shelf and MTV blaring from two TVs. It felt very much like somebody had decided to open a cool, American sport bar in Eastern Europe, which I suppose is exactly what did happen.

The hotel I was staying at, U Hada, overlooks the town square and I had a very comfortable room there. There was a buffet breakfast included which had on offer crusty bread rolls, these sausages which were a lot more like frankfurts than chipolatas and mustard and cheese… so yes, basically I had a hot dog for breakfast. Accompanying that was an orange drink I took to be juice. Nope, syrupy cordial. So after that when I realized there was a basket of pastries, including a very donut looking type thing, I thought that I should round out my unhealthy breakfast with one of those.

Michael showed me around more of the town; the old synagogue, the art gallery and the beer and hops museum. We stopped to sample one beer from the brewery there before making our way back to the town square where we had the great fortune to find that one of the local schools was having there school dance concert. There were some quite unique numbers; boys in elaborately decorated hosen dancing with axes, girls in checked shirts, hats and mid-calf, white, lace-up boots twirling and tossing batons. Then there were the dances that must be almost universal. Tiny tots doing the chicken dance between distractedly waving to their parents in the audience. There was also the hokey-pokey and the Macarena. And then there was a group of nine or ten year old girls in head to toe pink who danced to Bang Bang by Jessie J and Ariana Grande. There was plenty of out of time shoulder shimmying, hair flicking and popping. It breaks my heart to see girls that young trying to dance sexily, emulating their pop icons. Too young girls learn that being sexy is paramount, that dancing in certain ways drives men wild, that their bodies send powerful messages. What we don’t teach them is that they can’t actually control that power ninety-nine percent of the time. Once you’ve shaken your butt the power goes to other people to decide that you are a type of person or that you are deserving of certain behavior. Or if you decide to stop shaking your butt then you’re accused of being another type of person and you’re deserving of a certain type of behavior. Girls and young women need to learn that it’s ok to be sexual but they need not be primarily sexual. And they also need to be able to insist on when they’re not being sexual and that needs to be observed and respected. Sorry, this paragraph has turned into an issue of ‘Lessons I wish I’d learnt when I was younger’.

In the evening we met another one of Michael’s friends in a café reputed to have very good ice-cream. I’ve never really considered the combination of drinking red wine and eating ice-cream but I’m glad I was open to the idea. We then went to our dinner engagement where I was treated to the best homemade potato pancakes. I don’t want to know how much oil or butter it takes to make them that good but if it shaved a month off my life I’ll still say it was worth it.

The following morning we said ‘Ahoy’ to Zatec (which actually means hello or goodbye – in this instance it was goodbye) and caught the bus back to Prague. We hit the streets again, this time in much more clement weather and wandered across the Karluv Most (Charles Bridge) and around to Kampa, a little parkland on the river where were meeting some more of Michael’s friends for a celebration called Carodenijce, which means something like the burning of the witches. From what I gleaned it was traditionally a pagan celebration where homes were swept with brooms and the brooms were then burnt to ward off bad spirits. Over time the connection between witched and brooms emerged and so now they ceremoniously burn straw witches on a bonfire.

For the celebration at Kampa there were quite extraordinary festivities afoot. When we first arrived there were mounted police playing a soccer match with their horses, there was a hand-cranked merry-go-round, a shooting range with wooden crossbows, every type of sausage you might imagine on sale, beer tents and a stage with a brass band playing. I met a number of new people, many of whom by the end of the night were pledging to assist me in permanently relocating to Prague. I drank, oh, just so much cheap, delicious beer and roasted a sausage over a bonfire.

There was a procession to the central bonfire with a straw witch being carried aloft. There were many women, young and old, dressed as witches and I was advised that more than a few of them are actually very serious about being real witches (followers of Wicca I would believe rather than graduates of Hogwarts) and this is the time of year when they proudly display who they are.

The crowd was enormous to see the witch being burnt. From our spot at the back of the crowd we were mostly witness to a lot of smoke and a partially obscured glimpse at the witches head. As the night wore on there was a change of bands. A Blues Brothers cover band provided the soundtrack to the latter part of the evening. It was after 11pm when we left at which time there were still almost as many children as there were adults running amok.

We stopped at Café Slavia for a nightcap and back at the hotel I fell into bed, barely remembering my head touching the pillow.

Today Michael and I took a walk through the Jewish Quarter before meeting some of his friends (and I suppose my new friends) for lunch at another superb restaurant, The Louvre. Pork and potatoes in an asparagus cream sauce washed down with my last Czech beer (for now).

And now I’m typing this on the train to Vienna. I had a wild panic at the train station because they didn’t have a desk for the ticket company I had bought my ticket from. Despite the instructions in the email saying I could collect my actual ticket at the train station it turned out that was not the case. In the end I had to stand on the threshold of a Burger King to use their free wifi and download the ticket app as the announcement was being made to board the train. It was only a minute or so after the train had departed that the app finally downloaded on my global roaming (so my guess is that free app cost me $5 dollars in international 3G charges) and I was able to show my ticket to the conductor when she came through a minute later.

I might sign of now and perhaps go and treat myself to a coffee in the dining car and appreciate some of the scenery. Next installment will be from Vienna.

I love it, but I hate it too. But seriously I love it. (But seriously, I hate it too a bit.)

Prepare to detest me in 3, 2, 1... Now; I'm on holidays in Paris and I'm miserable.

I wish I wasn't. Really, truly, honest. In fact, I rather blame my concerted efforts not to be miserable in Paris for my misery. You see after my day 1 trek I was feeling incredibly tired and a little bit fragile in a wanting to just curl up and watch sitcoms kind of way. I told myself that perhaps I would just take it easy on my 2nd day. I even considered going to a cinema to watch The Avengers movie.

But then I kicked myself and said, 'Katie, you're in Paris. You may never be again. Go do extraordinary Parisian stuff.' And then I thought to myself that The Louvre was going to be open late that night so I thought it would be a good day to buy my 2 day Museum Pass.

After purchasing my Museum Pass I looked over all of the places that it gave me entry to and I revised my plan for what I would use it for, adding 2 or 3 more places to my list with my Go Paris! attitude.

It seemed simple enough too, I just needed to walk pretty much the exact way I had the day before down to The Seine and cross over to Ile de la Cite and I would be at The Conciergerie. Well, my funny little broken internal compass from the day before was still spinning madly and I ended up wandering the 9th arrondissement. Finally, deciding that walking wasn't going to plan I decided to catch the Metro. I had to get off at Chatelet but I took the wrong exit and ended up walking about a mile underground and then exiting through the Les Halles exit. So now I was unknowingly heading north again. I recognised the Musee des Arts et Metiers and turned myself around again and finally crossed the Seine.

There was no queue at all to get in to The Conciergerie so I strolled in and wandered around the vaults. I saw the recreation of Marie Antoinette in prayer in the recreation of what might have been her chamber but was probably in fact a bathroom. Once I found myself snooping around the gift shop I knew it was time to go so I checked my map and headed out with the intentions of going to Sainte-Chapelle next.

This is how you get from Conciergerie to Sainte-Chapelle:

I walked for 20 minutes and found myself at the back of Notre Dame. I thought I could mess with my already bungled schedule a little and walked through the cathedral, stopping to light a candle for Joan of Arc (not really a huge fan of her attitude towards religious wars but feel I've got to get behind any other strong willed women who hear voices.)

After that I noticed that my museum pass also gave me entry to the Tours (towers) Notre Dame. I saw the line and it was about as long as the one in to the cathedral had been and I'd only waited 15 or so minutes for that so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

It was about a 45 minute wait throughout which I had to endure the sickening displays of affection of an American couple in front of me, obviously honeymooning.

Nevertheless, I waited and finally it was my turn to climb up 400 steps. Amazingly, I didn't die. I felt like I was going to around step 370, but I actually didn't die. Or throw a tantrum and sit down on a step and refuse to move.

The view from the top was breathtaking and I was glad I had made it but they hold the group up the top for quite a while, which is great if you are really into photography or you and your friends or loved ones want to take repeated photos of each other in front of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Or if like the American honeymooners, you want to grind up against one another on the wall of a cathedral. But I didn't fit into any of those categories and I really needed to find les toilettes.  By the time they let us down I was busting. I thought that surely near such major sites there must be public toilets but I couldn't see any. I wandered Ile de la Cite hopefully but I couldn't find anything that might relieve me.

I walked back to the Right Bank and thought I'd make my way towards the Louvre or the Jardin des Tuileries where I thought there must be toilets. I'm not sure exactly how I did this but somehow I walked past the Louvre building and ended up in a construction site. Fortunately I found a map and it showed me where the nearest public toilet was. When it came into sight I nearly wept with joy but when I got to the automated door the light was on to indicate it was occupied.

I was on the verge of passing out from bladder pain when the door opened and a middle aged man stepped out. I moved towards the door but he stopped me and pointed to the lights on the door. Evidently there was a cleaning cycle that runs between each use so the door slid shut again and I had to wait a further 3 excruciating minutes with the sound of sloshing water assailing me.

Once relieved I realised I was famished, which was unsurprising as it was almost 2pm. By sheer luck I stumbled past Patisserie Gosselin and picked up une tomate et fromage quiche et un beignet chocolat. I took them with me towards what I now realised was the Louvre. I hoped there would be a lovely patch of grass for me to rest upon while I took my repast but I could only find a dusty forecourt. I perched on a baking hot step and ate my quiche and began to eat my beignet. It was delicious but in the glare of the sun I just found that I wasn't particularly hungry. Certain I would not be able to take food into a museum I tossed away half of it.

It occurred to me that Musee de L'Orangerie was nearby and I might be better to go there first since the Louvre was open late. I checked my map and sure enough it was very nearby. It was at the end of that luscious cool garden I had been sitting approximately 250 metres away from.

I wandered through Jardin des Tuileries and found Musee de L'Orangerie. The Monets are simply breathtaking and I took a while to sit and reflect upon them.

I then wandered back past the trampolines and the carousel to the Louvre and opened up my Louvre audioguide app. It was for The Masterpieces tour. The guide provides commentary and directions through the halls of the museum. I'm not sure what happened but I got lost just past the Venus de Milo. I tried going back but I found myself in unfamiliar halls so in the end I just followed the exit signs until I made my way back to the main foyer and started again. This time I followed the directions properly and worked out that I'd been turned around by the directions into the Salle des  Caryatides. They tell you to stand behind the statue of a man putting his sandal back on and I assumed I was in the wrong place because all you can see is a shiny, marble butt. Turns out they want you to look at the shiny, marble butt.

I ambled on and found myself in the room of the Mona Lisa. The crowds were immense and it was difficult to look past the crowd as most of the crowd members had their arms in the air with a phone or selfie stick extending from that arm. And their faces were distracting, because you see they weren't facing the Mona Lisa, no, they were facing away from it so they could get a selfie with it.

I politely pushed to the front and stood for a moment looking at the expression playing upon her face. But it wasn't very pleasant as the selfie takers were facing away from me so couldn't see when they were about to back in to me or elbow me in the back of the head. I made my way onwards to the Salle Rouges and I was marveling at the Coronation of Napoleon, a painting that has a surface area larger than my apartment when a museum attendant made an announcement about '... fermeture quinze.' I approached her and said 'Mais neuf le vendredi?' and she replied, 'Yes madam, but it is Thursday.'

So that was the end of my excursion to the Louvre.

As the museum attendant pointed out, it was Thursday so that meant that the Musee D'Orsay was open until 9pm. I successfully crossed The Seine this time and wound my way through the galleries of the museum. I knew that the Musee D'Orsay had an impressive collection of Impressionists work but I wasn't prepared when on the top floor I turned a corner and there was L'Absinthe by Edgar Degas.

I love this painting. The despondency on the women's face speaks to me of so many times in my life. I was standing in front of it for I don't know how long, tears streaming down my face when a woman bumped me out of the way so she could take a selfie in front of it. Suddenly I felt inconsolable. I wanted everyone to go away and let me cry in front of the paintings. But that's actually not what happens at museums.

Mum had told me about the cafe at the Musee D'Orsay behind the old clock face. I needed to sit down. I needed a glass of wine. The waitress showed me towards a table tucked away behind the kitchen. She seemed somewhat surprised when I agreeably sat down. I realised afterwards as I watched people enter that everybody asks to sit by the clock face. I didn't mind being away from it. It meant I was away from everybody else.

While I was sitting down I realised how sore and tired my feet were. It was unsurprising really but it meant that when it was time to get back up on my feet the weight of them was painful.

As I was leaving the museum I tried to think of what to do next. My feet were saying 'go back to the hostel' but my head said 'you won't get a chance to sleep for hours yet while all the wild young things are partying.'

I crossed back to the Right Bank and saw a sign pointing me towards Champs Elysees. It seemed like the right time of evening to go up the Arc de Triomphe so I set off in that general direction. My feet were killing me though. I looked at my map and saw that I was near Concorde metro station. I knew there was a metro station right underneath the Arc de Triomphe so I made that my plan. For once I marched in the right direction only to get to the entrance of Concorde metro to find that it is closed for renovations at present.

I looked up at the great Arc and it really didn't seem too far away so I started trudging down the Champs Elysees. Turns out it's a 35 minute walk. The Velo tuk tuk drivers who earlier couldn't leave me alone were now cruising by inattentively. I thought about hailing one of them but I feared that if they saw how desperate I was for the ride the prices would suddenly attract a high premium and I would be out 50 euro for a 5 minute ride.

I made it to the bottom of the Arc after crossing beneath it twice without seeing the entrance. I didn't think I could take any more stairs but I thought I'd come that far so I started the climb. Just when I thought I'd made it there was another staircase and when I got to the top of that there was a sign pointing to the lifts. I said a secular prayer and turned the corner only to find an out of order sign on the lifts. As I made that final ascent I played out a narrative in my mind that it had been painful and horrific and I'd almost given up but then I got to the top and it was all worth it. Let's just say that's what happened. Let's just say that I was so blown away that I forgot my pain. That there weren't 700 or so other tourists up there pushing and jostling. Let's say that I didn't start crying for the second time that day only from pain and exhaustion.

It was almost midnight by the time I got back to the hostel. I got into my pyjamas and fell in to bed. I was just drifting off when I heard an alarm tone coming from underneath my bed. I realised that in flight or when I'd been moving things around in my bag that I'd turned on the alarm on my travel alarm clock. I scrambled around in the dark trying to find it to turn it off. I felt like the worst dorm mate ever for having a ringing alarm go off in the middle of the night.

The next morning I had to take my bags from the hostel near Gare du Nord to the apartment I'm staying in near the Latin Quarter. With the walks to and from the metro stations and the change at Chatelet Les Halles actually involving a 9 minute walk I walked around on my exhausted feet with 35 kg of baggage for about 40 minutes. When I finally took my pack off my back at the apartment I felt stabs of pain in my lower back.

I didn't know what to do. I was in so much pain but I also had plans for all of those places left to visit on the Museum Pass. I stupidly put my pain down to tiredness and told myself I'd be alright as long as I just caught the metro everywhere and avoided too much walking. Easier said than done because in my pained, addled state my sense of direction worsened. After visiting the Rodin Museum I tried to walk back in the direction I had came and found myself instead 30 minutes later underneath the Eiffel Tower but still unable to locate myself on a map. And again it was nearly 3pm and I hadn't eaten lunch. In a street near the Eiffel Tower I found a very sweet looking bakery where they microwaved me a Croque Monsieur made with Wondersoft bread and served me a 5 euro stale plum tart. I was so disappointed. Mostly in myself for not being able to find a good bakery.

After failing to read the metro map correctly and catching the train the wrong way I eventually made it to the Picasso Museum and the Centre Pompadou. I'm really sorry Messrs Picasso, Kandinsky, Koons et al but I didn't really take great notice of your artwork. I was just in too much pain.

I'm trying to revise my plans for the rest of the time here so that it doesn't involve walking of any sort but that's actually impossible. Perhaps I should just blow my remaining cash on a pass for one of those get on get off open topped tourist buses but just ride around all day and never get off. I have a ticket to see Juliette Binoche in a production of Antigone at Theatre de la Ville for tonight (Saturday) which should be manageable but my plan for the day was to visit a flea market and also take a stroll through the 5th arrondissement. I honestly don't think I can do either of those things. I'm scared that if I even try to leave the apartment that I'll get lost and end up wandering for hours and my pain and disorientation will only worsen.

So you see I'm miserable in Paris and I don't know what to do.

Ups and Downs Katie Goes Away

Regular readers of my irregular blog post might have picked up that I like blog post titles that have layered meanings. This one I’m particularly proud of as it could refer to the fact that my blog has essentially ceased to be due to neglect. Or it could be that I don’t feel so much like Ups and Downs Katie these days. The past eight (?) nine (?) months have seen me on a fairly even keel. I’m still prone to maudlin outbursts and the occasional full scale tantrum. I cried while listening to a Taylor Swift song very recently too but I’m beginning to suspect that these things might actually be the guts of my personality and no amount of lithium or mild, medically supervised head trauma is going to get rid of them. Mores the pity.

And the third, and my most favourite, meaning is that I have literally gone away. I am typing this from Shanghai Pudong airport where I’m waiting for my flight to Paris.

I was in hospital last week for some maintenance TMS and a good once over to make sure I was right to travel and one of the nurses suggested I chronicle my journey, both as a means of recording my tales for posterity but also so that perhaps if my mood does start to veer off we might have some clues to what preceded it and how things could perhaps be remedied e.g. “April 27^th Paris, stayed out until 5am drinking and smoking heroin with some skinheads who also happened to be experts at negging and believed mental illness was just people showing off to get attention. Just realized I haven’t eaten in 3 days. Not feeling crash hot today.” Remedy for that would be bed rest and confiscation of funds once leafy green vegetables and restorative broths have been purchased.

I was going to just write in my actual travel journal but to be honest these days I’m really slack at finishing writing anything I start writing by hand. I’ll be in the middle of artful prose and then lose interest and the rest of the page is given over to doodles of cats (they’re the only thing I can draw), shopping lists and attempts to rewrite the lyrics to catchy pop songs so that they’re not so laden with internalized misogyny and I can sing my own version to myself (once I crack Bang Bang by Jessie J I will post the new lyrics for you to see.)

OK, so if I’m going to be candid about how I’m traveling I should start now. I’m feeling pretty crap.

I left Melbourne with what felt like the fixings of a cold brewing and while it hasn’t come to fruition my overall wellness has not been improved by 10 hours in a tin box. I am well past the stage of believing there is anything luxurious about air travel but this flight from Melbourne to Shanghai was bad. There was the usual crap food, crap seats ordeal but I was also unfortunately surrounded by people who in no way felt the need to be shy about their body functions. I had a woman actually coughing on me from one side so I scrunched myself to the other edge of my seat. I had a centre aisle seat but on the aisle across from me there was a man who snorted and hocked up god knows what, he must have gotten to vital organs by the end of the flight, at regular intervals and then spat it into either the airsick bag or after the meal had been served, a clear plastic cup. Mmm…

So I spent much of the flight reviling and shuddering and trying to block out the noise of coughing and spluttering on one side and hocking and spitting on the other. It made for a pretty tense flight and I had already been pretty tense when I boarded. On top of the usual pre-travel anxieties I got stuck literally but fortunately not figuratively in the middle of an argument in Customs. The lines were immense and a number of people were muttering about whether they’d miss their flight. Then a group of young people from the back of the line pushed their way forward, unclipping the retractable barriers as they snaked their way to the front. They went past me but I assumed that one of the customs officials must have told them to do this but when they cut in front of a couple who had been craning their necks and anxiously checking the time the guy stopped them and asked what they were doing. They said they thought they were going to miss their flight and he replied, quite rightly, that many people in line were in the same situation. They kept moving forward and the guy called out to the people in front, ‘Oy, stop them, they’re queue jumpers!’ Now what I haven’t mentioned is that this group of young people were almost certainly all Muslim, four of the young women were wearing headscarves. As soon as people heard ‘queue jumping’ and saw Muslims it was an open invitation it seemed for the more racist amongst the horde to start calling out such helpful things as ‘Go back to where you came from’ and ‘You should all be deported’ and the ever so helpful in a secure airport area, ‘Terrorists!’

The staff responded pretty quickly to restore order but there was a moment in there of absolute dread that my holiday was going to be over before it started due to a race riot or suspected terror plot based on the inappropriate outburst of a yobbo.

So, I’m in Paris now. By the time I was due to board my flight in Shanghai I was so exhausted that things weren’t making sense. I asked a flight attendant a question and then I thought she was laughing at me. She wasn’t. She was a cardboard cut-out. I left my passport, medications and laptop in the box at the security clearance and when I finally made it on to the flight I forgot that you’re not supposed to clap when the flight attendants finish their safety demonstration. Even if they are really good. Just don’t do it, they treat you really weird all flight.

But all that is done. I scored a new PB of 8.5 hours of sleep on an airplane and arrived in Paris, well still fairly rooted but perhaps not the danger to myself that I was at Pudong Airport.

I read that the best things to do to kick your body into a new time zone are to move your body heaps during the day and get as much morning sun as possible. So I walked the streets of Paris from 8am – 6pm. I walked from Gare du Nord to Marche Saint-Quentin for some pastries and coffee and to ogle the cheese, past Gare de l’Est, past the Metiers Art Museum and le Centre Pompidou to the Viaduc des Arts and the Promenade Plantée and Marche Place d’Aligre and back along the Promenade Plantée past Monument a la Republique (I forgot to put this on the map, but I also then got very lost looking for the Picasso Museum which was only going to be open for 1 hour by the time I found it so I didn’t go in) and then along Canal Saint Martin to this hipster haven bar/second hand trader/ DJ venue/ museum of African culture called Le Comptoir General. Then I was going to walk all the way back to the hostel but I couldn’t work out which way to go so I caught the Metro and it turned out I was only two stops away.

Usually I think I have a fairly good sense of direction. Today, I was useless. I would look at a map and get a simple route clear in my head like turn left then take the third right but after fifteen minutes I would look at the map and I’d realize I’d walked in entirely the wrong direction. Even with the map in front of me and a sign posted intersection in front of me I’d take the wrong turns. So I hadn’t really intended to walk to any of those places but that’s where today’s wandering led. And no wonder my feet are sore if I walked, I’d say at least 13 kilometers!

I had un délicieux croissant au beurre et une centaine de grammes de fromage. And then I kept seeing windows with more pastries and chocolates and meringues and other things that I don’t even know the name of but they looked sweet and potentially creamy. And I walked past pizza places and pommes frites and I didn’t feel like them either. So in the end for lunch I had some fresh baby radishes, cheese, baguette and ham and some strawberries. I had a snack of yoghurt in the afternoon. And for dinner I ate the rest of my radishes with a green salad and tuna.

Doctors tell me occasionally (only occasionally – it would probably be more often if they thought I’d listen) that I should eat less fried chicken and more vegetables and get more exercise. I think I’ve found the answer Doc! Just write me up a prescription for living in Paris.

Having said that tomorrow is a new day. And while I fully intend for there to be lots of walking and maybe even a bike ride there will probably also be some new pastry I will immediately need to eat four more of. And cheese. There will always be cheese in my life.

Now I’m nestled into my dorm room bunk bed. My roommates seem nice. I’m adding the words ‘like’ and ‘totally’ into more sentences in the hopes that they won’t realize I’m a million years older than them. I may still earn their disdain with a remarkable effort of snoring throughout the night.

I’ll try to post again soon and often after that, although knowing me that could mean it will go either way. And I will add some photos once I can find the cord that connects my camera to my laptop (I have taken some Mum!)

And new candid statement on how I'm feeling: tired but good.

Jetlagged but happy

Crappy New Year

See what I did there with the title of the post? How have I not won a Pulitzer?

Well had I had the time, internet connectivity and foresight to post in the few days before Christmas, you might have had some insight into my tone and writing style when I'm genuinely happy.

Reasons I was happy;

• Application to rent the most beautiful little one bedroom apartment on the Brunswick/Coburg border was approved!
• Bit the bullet and decided to go to Europe and the US for a lovely little jaunt beginning in April and ending in June. Visited a travel agent who quoted me $4800 for flights, used my mad online flight searching skills (I used Skyscanner) and got all my flights for just under $2300.
• I'd had a crappy stay in hospital for maintenance TMS but in the last two days two nurses on two separate occasions tried to give me the wrong medication. Definitely a bad thing but I felt suddenly empowered because there was something concrete I could legitimately make a formal complaint about and perhaps get some of my other concerns heard.
• The money from my four years of tax returns finally all came through. And money can buy you happiness. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise,

So what happened?

• Well, the money kind of all disappeared on flights, bond, rent, furnishings for the apartment and Christmas. All gone.
• Moving into my beautiful dream home turned out to have a few little nightmarish qualities. Please learn from my mistakes and never, ever move just before Christmas. I spent days without power, the internet has only just been connected and when you realise that your real estate agent has given you the wrong key he is not around for you to talk to. Also a number of the lights didn't work once the power was turned on and they had expensive, difficult to replace globes. And then finally, I don't know whether this stuff happens to other people but they just never talk about it, but the lock on my front door fell off. On New Years Day. When even the 24 hour 7 day a week 365 days of the year locksmith wasn't answering his phone. Seriously, how am I the only person who has things like locks falling off doors and driveways catching on fire happen? And I wouldn't have been so concerned about the lock falling off since the building itself is pretty secure but my new neighbours turn out to be sketchy as fuck! I couldn't work out who actually lived there for the first week or two because so many people were coming and going at all times of day or night. I've finally worked out it's two guys living there (probably not a couple or the counterstereotype of what a gay couple is) and they like to listen to the races all day long while competing to see how many f-bombs they can drop in a single sentence. 
• I drank a lot of champagne on Christmas day which perhaps wasn't advisable since I was kind of tired and overwrought from the stress and lack of sleep from moving so rather than sensibly going home after drinking champagne for six hours straight I went to a party and drank even more and then ended up having some rather unpleasant social encounters. I won't go into it but it kind of put me off parties, drinking, myself and people, particularly those of the opposite sex.
• So then I spent New Years Eve on a couch with a cat watching a documentary about happiness that SBS had obviously programmed so that people in my situation wouldn't top themselves. 
• The complaint I made about the nurses attempting to administer the wrong medication has had zero response which now just has me feeling insecure about ever going back into hospital.
• And I could have endured it all because I kept thinking to myself 'I'm going to Vienna! I'm going to New York! I'm going to see my dear friends!' but then my bastard government introduced some snaky new legislation which came into effect January 1st saying that recipients of certain government payments could not leave the country for more than four weeks in a twelve month period without having their payments cut off. And because I'd been an online travel scouting genius I had booked almost exclusively non-exchangeable, non-refundable flights. So I have a couple of options; 1) Go. Fuck the government. Hope they don't notice and be prepared to have my payments cut off which would definitely put me in further financial jeopardy. 2) Don't go. Forget all the money I've spent on non-refundable flights. Stay in Melbourne, be miserable. Other people keep putting forth another idea, 'Change the flights you can and just buy new ones', which is a lovely idea if the first dot point wasn't in place. I have no further money. It's gone.

So now I've kind of just given up on pretty much everything. I'm house sitting in the suburbs for my parents which means I'm trapped far from everything with dial up speed internet and too much readily available junk food. I've been wearing the same pyjamas day and night for the last three days. I'm kind of half-watching Doctor Zhivago in the same way I kind of half-watched The Crimson Pirate before this and I'm sure I'll continue to half-watch some crap on the telly until it's nothing but infomercials. I also have a UTI which I'm kind of using as a justification for the pyjamas, couch and tell lifestyle.

It's weird though, in giving up I think I've avoided going down the other path I usually go down which is caring too much and falling into a depressive pit. I'm intellectually aware that the things that have happened haven't happened to me. They're not the ammunition of the universe vs. Katie war. These things have just happened. Unfortunately all around the same time. But I kind of like holding onto the idea that something really is trying to break me. It means when a mug breaks or my Android tablet I got second-hand for Christmas breaks (both happened today - whatevs) I have a moment of ire and then I decide I don't care. It's like I'm flipping the universe the bird and telling it it can't break me because I don't care.

Of course I'm going to have to start caring again at some point. I don't think my pink babushka doll pyjamas or stringy bed hair would go down well at work. And I suppose I will eventually want to eat something other than mince pies and corn chips. Eventually. 

And then who knows what happens next.