Kristian and Frances

Dear Friends,

The moment I got onto the plane from Paris to Madrid, I knew Spain was going to be different. Firstly, the people are all beautiful here. While France has this mythology of being a place of beautiful and sophisticated people, I found it to be untrue. People dressed down and daudy in Paris, except for one or two.

In Spain, so far everyone dresses with style. The young people are confident, attractive and full of energy. The old people all seem quite the opposite! It seems there are no young and uglies here.

My experience of Madrid consisted of a air terminal, a faux up-market hotel and many miles of underground metro. I don´t know if it was just the part we were in or not, but the whole place seemed fresh and clean.

We´re in Cordoba now, after a high speed train ride from Madrid. Cordoba is wonderful, it is swamped with tourists, mainly Spanish, but tourists nonetheless. Despite this it is wonderful. The old town is like nothing I could imagine!

And everything is so cheap, unlike in Paris where we were over budget every day, in Cordoba we´ve balanced the budget in one day. 9 Euros purchased us a veritable feast for dinner, with wine and chocolate and breakfast for the next day.

Umm, have to cut this short!

Bye!

We went into a burger king in Cordoba last night (they don´t have a vegeburger so it was no use to us) and there´s a burger called the Frances. I think that´s because it´s meant to be French style. My name means French in Spain.

We arrived in Spain the night before last, at midnight, in the rain. We´d spent the day in the Jardin de Tiuleries minding bags after we checked out of our hotel, and ate sugar crepes.

We finally got to sleep at 1.30am, in a big ugly hotel in Madrid near the airport. In the morning we were relieved to find it cold and rainy, because the heat in Paris had frankly been too much for us. We didn´t end up seeing much more of Madrid than the inside of railway stations and trains, but what wonderful railway stations and trains they were! So much for the stereotype of Spaniards being inefficient. We liked it in Spain. Everyone is beautiful and happy, the kids are cool, and it seems to be a very prosperous and happy place. The train journey to Cordoba was very beautiful, I got tears in my eyes looking out the window at all the rolling mountains and rolling clouds and little buildings that looked like castles and towns with statues looking over them. Kristian claimed it was just like California.

And so we got to Cordoba in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, and by the time we arrived it was sunshiney and hot again. Cordoba seems like a place that belongs in the sun, it is all the right colours for a bright day, all mosaic blues and grey white patterned cobblestones and yellows and red flowers. Even the pigeons/doves are white and grey and bright. People are very talkative here, which is wonderful except that we don´t understand them. At least French I could vaguely understand even if I couldn´t speak it very well. Spanish is a mystery to me.

I have been taking a lot of photographs of Cordoba, it´s the kind of place where you can´t put away your camera or you´ll just have to take it out again. It´s got a lot of very quaint little alleyways, but the bits that interest me the most are the broken bits, the crumbling walls and windows through which you can see the sky.

We arrived in Paris at about 6:30am and managed to drag ourselves to our hotel with relative ease.

By the end of the day I hated Paris, because Paris was too big and too hot. And mostly crappy.

That impression was mainly due to walking in a hot afternoon in the wrong part of town. Who would have thought Paris could be so ugly! It can be ugly!

The first full day was much better! We took a hop-on-hop-off day cruise down the Seine and saw the associated sites. Notre Dame, Lourve, Eiffel Tower and so on. Lunch was bread and cheese. Dinner was a few pieces of fruit. Our budget doesn't allow for much more when we have to pay entrance fees etc. Today was much better however, with few fees, other than the CATACOMBS OF PARIS. Which is like an underground cemetary where they not only forgot to cover up the bones, but took the time to make pretty patterns with them.

This is the bottom of the Eiffel tower, and our adventure mascots; Bruiser and Thing-That-We-Don't-Know-What-It-Is. We call him Bruiser because he standard pose is some kind of Kung-Fu Ninja Combat Stance.

Part of the Catacombs, 1.7kms of bone walls. Wonderful stuffs.

Frances with Eiffel Tower.

Archy thing at the Lourve. I'm not taking this seriously enough. My French is Le'Suck and I always forgot to use French. I may blaze a travel of awesome when asking for a ticket or a coke, but then say "please" or "thank you" instead of the appropriate French things.

The Kids at the Lourve. We didn't go in. I have no interest in the buildings and the Arts within so much as the functioning of the city from a more organic aspect - the fleshy humans doing their business and how they move about these grand old citadels. I've seen nothing like it before and yet somehow I get the same sense of "Lack of Awe" which I feel I should be experiencing, as I felt when I stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon. As I said about the canyon, you've seen the site so frequently in the modern life that once you see it in the flesh it is just another image.

People do a lot by the river. It's a wonderful place and I'm suitably impressed. This person is having lunch, as many people do. Others sun bath, others read and stroll or make out with their lover. I'm impressed that the French for boyfriend/girlfriend is "little friend". How cute.

The beggars here, who all seem to be romany, are exceptionally persistent but equally polite. Maybe it's only that I've been here a few days, but unlike American or Australian beggars, you don't get told to Fuck Off if you refuse to give change. They'll ask and ask and follow you if need be, but never be rude. I need to find out more about these people, because I'm sure to encounter them further on in our travels and I'd like to know who they are, and why they are at the bottom end of the shit heap of society.

Don't try to walk from the Lourve to the Arc De Triommmpppppfff. I love saying De Triommmmpft. Just because you can see it, doesn't mean you can walk it. You can walk it, but like me, by the time you get to the Arc you're so over it that you look up and then walk away. Satisfied that you've done your duty as a tourist and wholly eager to just get to bed.

Speaking of getting to bed, a moment of panic rushed through us as our hotel doors failed to open, the external doors, our after-hours access key seemed to fail. After much jiggling it relented and allowed us to stop having heart attacks and to go to bed. Reminds me of the time F and I were in Canberra and our after hours access key failed for some time. Suxors to the Maxors.

I have to keep reminding myself I'm on a holiday. There's no need or point in destroying my soul, shoes and bones just to see those "Points of Interest", because my point of interest is to be taking a break from the rushed life. At the moment I'm wheeling from pure delight to grumpy angst. But that's me generally, so who knows!

So we're in Paris, I'm writing this in hotel room in the Latin Quarter, on the fourth storey. It's cheap and clean and looks onto an intersection, so we sleep and wake up to a soundtrack of buzzing lawnmower scooters and motorbikes. Although every time I climb the stairs I feel like I may slip on the polished wood and fall to the bottom, I really like this hotel. It reminds me of the hotels that people like George Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London) stayed in back in those days, scrounging for a meal and scribbling at tiny desks. We're kind of scrounging for meals, since Paris is kind of expensive and we're on a pretty tiny budget. We have a little faux balcony and big open window, which lets in heaps of light, and our view is lovely.

I love travel food, which always seems to end up being 1) bread, 2) cheese, 3) chocolate and 4) orange juice. Especially if you're a vegetarian. Although we just had awesome vegetarian kebabs for lunch.

The thing I like the most about Paris so far is that there are so many places to just sit and be. I'm not necessarily talking about cafes, but the parks and other public places that seem situated to provide the best vantage points of other people and buildings and things going on, and people don't seem at all concerned about being watched going about their business.

On our first day here we were feeling pretty awful from the flight (I had only about 2 or 3 hours sleep the whole time) but we stumbled across a street market and decided to go there and buy bread, cheese, (what did I say?) olives and strawberries. This was our first time trying out our limited French, with pretty mixed results. I was okay at reciting small phrases in heavily accented French, but the moment my conversant would try to confirm, I'd respond in English. Still, everyone was very friendly and happy. After making our purchases (I tried to talk the others into a 2 euro bottle of Cab Sauv' - how bad could it be - but this was vetoed due to lack of corkscrew). We went to the nearest park and ate our purchases.

Yesterday we went to the Eiffel Tower, took a boat ride on the Seine to Notre Dame, another boat ride to the Louvre and Champs Elysees/Arc de Triomphe. A lot of walking, great photos, much fun. It's really incredibly hot here right now. It's been 24 degrees or more every day we've been here, and the sun is pretty ferocious.

Today Mum went to Versailles and me and Kristian have been relaxing in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Before mum went off though we went to see the Catacombes of Paris, which is a vast underground ossuary. Nearly killed ourselves walking back up the spiral staircase to the real world again (87 steps, no landings), but it was really spooky and strange to be in a place that housed the bones of millions of people underground.

In hotel. Awful flight. All is well.