xkristianx

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 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!

In hotel. Awful flight. All is well.

If I wasn't such a tough guy, I'd be pooping myself right now. Instead I'm just nervous which is clearly a far better state to be in. Particularly at work.

This trip was dreamt up shortly after I returned from my solo roadtrip in the US Southwest. It was my first overseas adventure and it was wonderful. The alone thing was a blessing and a curse, there's the depth of emotion you experience when alone on one hand, but on the other there's something that's lost when an experience isn't shared. I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon, which was more grand than you could possibly imagine, and if it weren't for the couple of strangers climbing over safety fences with whom one naturally shares expressions of awe [knowing looks, shared exclaimations] I would have found the entire thing underwhelming in some manner. Grand, but underwhelming. Anyway, the roadtrip was all about getting to grips with myself. It kind oif worked, kind of didn't, but it was super either way. Which has nothing really to do with this new trip.

This trip is all about shared experience. If memory serves me well, it came up at some point during a conversation about the mutual dissatisfaction that Frances and I were experiencing. It wasn't with each other, or where we lived, or necessarily our jobs... we just didn't seem to be getting around to doing the things we really felt the need to do. So after much moaning about this we suddenly decided enough was enough and began to take whatever steps were necessary to get ourselves heading in the right direction. The first step is this trip. It's not a solution, but hopefully it'll be a circuit breaker, crack some skulls and get us the confidence and freedom and experience we do need to get down to the business of doing the things need we do.