miffy dingo sevilla

So unfortunately Javier Bardem was nowhere to be seen but Benjamin and I still attempted our own version of Vicky Cristina Barcelona on a trip to Spain last weekend: Miffy Dingo Sevilla. Benjamin a.k.a Dingo had been in Milan for his annual design fair so it was the perfect chance for us to catch up while both in Europe, the last time we’d seen each other being in Sydney three summers ago. Meanwhile it was perfect timing for me too, having gone through a stressful job interview process during the days before, and that directly after being dumped by the apparently too-good-to-be-true new man in spectacularly awful fashion. I was very ready for distraction.

The combination of Benjamin and I on holidays equals a near total lack of planning – in a good way – leaving just a vague sense of where and what might be fun. Things will sort themselves out, we reason to each other. On this occasion, however, this also meant that we ended up missing out on a few of the key things we had wanted to do. Turns out the weekend we chose to go to Seville was the busiest of the year – tourists and locals flood into the city for the annual feria which as far as we could tell involves a weekend of nonstop bullfights, lots of people parading around in flamenco outfits and riding decorated horse-drawn carts. All very camp, really. So basically all of the trains in and out of Seville were booked up, and for some reason we had booked flights into Madrid. I’m sure there was a logical reason at the time we booked, two months before, but neither of us could now remember what it was. But we had a hotel booked in Seville the same night as flying in to Madrid, so we had to get down there. The night before flying – having gotten home from the day-long job interview process, desperate to unwind with a swim and a quiet beer or three – turned into a mad scramble to find a train, a flight or a car from Madrid to Seville. Benjamin was already in Madrid; we got on skype to make the new plans, but the internet kept cutting out, and then his hotel had a total power failure. In the meantime I rented us a car, putting aside my anxiety about having to drive manual transmission (which I never learned to do properly and hadn’t done for ten years) and on the right-hand side of the road for the first time ever.

Suffice to say I managed both surprisingly well. Aside from a lot of nervous groaning from Benjamin as I veered dangerously close to road barriers a few times, and then completely misjudging the width of the car on another occasion and ramming the curb, we and the car survived intact. (Looks like I wasn’t charged for the destroyed hub-cap.) Sure, it took us from 8pm until 11pm to find our hotel, drive to within walking distance of it, unload, navigate through the labyrinth of inner Seville back to the car drop-off point, try to refill the petrol tank with a faulty pump, find a way to actually drive into to the car drop-off compound, get the keys to the rental car office, and then get a taxi back to the hotel. But we made it. Thank god everyone seems to eat dinner at 11pm in Spain because adrenaline alone is not, needless to say, enough to satisfy my crazy metabolism.

After the hijinx of the first day getting to Seville, the rest of the weekend was quite tame. Structuring each day around the conventional four or five meals plus alcohol was no challenge, and we had some great food and discovered the local pleasure of a small bottle of fino with tapas at sunset. Seville’s mish-mash cathedral and the Moorish palace the Alcazar were highlights, and just as well given we couldn’t get to Cordoba to see the Mezquita as was the original plan. We also missed out on going to a bullfight, although we did watch one on TV in a bar which we knew screened them (we actually went back to see the cute, semi-flirty-semi-coy barman, truth be known). I had been ambivalent about whether I could pay money for, let alone sit through and watch the calculated cruelty of a bullfight; by the time I agreed to go, we couldn’t get a ticket for a reasonable price. Instead we did what Benjamin and I do best: we took refuge in the sunny atrium of a fancy hotel for a lazy lunch and helped ourselves to the endless supply of champagne for several hours. Even if Javier Bardem had turned up to compete for our attentions, Seville never looked better.

six months in paris

It's taken nearly six months and a couple of false starts but it's time to resurrect mifflog. I think after settling into a routine after the first month or so in Paris, I didn't think I had much of interest to talk about. Perhaps I don't - but I'm going to report it anyway.

One of the lovely paradoxes of living in a new country is that I’m getting to know a lot more people from home. I can’t count the number of people from Sydney who I have gotten to know better in Paris – or last year in New York – than I probably ever would have in Sydney. Being away seems to make both me and them make more of an effort to get in touch. On Saturday, I farewelled Uri who’d been here in Paris for almost six weeks, four of those with his wife Adelle. I’ve known Uri for years, since I worked at Ariel and he was a frequent night-time customer – but at a remove, mostly as a friend of a friend. How wonderful, then, to have the two of them living around the corner, becoming a short-term but significant part of my Paris life, and discovering together new and out of the ordinary things in the city. As has often happened with visitors, they inspired me to get out and explore more; there is so much more to Paris than my neighbourhood, and I need to break through the bubble that is so easy to erect.

Uri was in town just long enough to be part of my birthday/six months in Paris celebration, although sadly without Adelle who was already back in Sydney. I had had a vague sense of anxiety about attempting to bring together basically everybody I know in Paris – and in my apartment. It paid off; I really should get over that kind of anxiety. Apart from having a really fun night, hosting about twenty-five people – most of whom I didn’t know a year ago – showed me how integrated in Paris I have become. Knowing this, I feel rewarded for persevering through all of the insane little administrative trials that living here throws at you and frequent moments of feeling socially isolated in a place where meeting Parisians just seems really hard. Another lovely part of my birthday was that Mark B came over for the weekend from his new home in London. Needless to say, we managed to create a fair amount of havoc, as is our custom. Paris is not the most exciting place for a variety of gay nightlife, it has to be said, but showing Mark most of the main options over the three nights of the weekend reminded me that silly nonsense can be had anywhere.

under surveillance

One of the things I love about my apartment in Paris is I get to spend so much time in it. All of my classes are in the late afternoon or evening so I tend to spend the day at home preparing or doing other stuff. And because I'm on the first floor overlooking the street, there is always lots of interesting people and things in the street to peer at. In fact, it was while spying on a handsome many trying on jackets in the zhoozhy menswear store opposite that I had the inspired flash to set Hitchcock's Rear Window for one my classes. The effect of this film is even more present when the concert pianist in the apartment somewhere across the street starts playing, filling the street with beautiful music to drift in and out of. I can only hope, like Hitchcock's apartment-bound voyeur, to witness a neighbour disposing of his wife's body, and I dream of having Grace Kelly visit me nightly in 1950s couture.

One event in my street that did get me all hot under the collar recently was the emergency arrival of not one but two firetrucks at the building directly opposite. My street is quite small so this dominated the street for a good half hour, and my apartment's front windows are quite large so I barely even have to get up from the dining table where I work to get a full view of the action. Obviously, there's some particular fascination among gay men for firemen (to state the obvious), and unlike most things I don't especially feel the need to unpack this. Rather, I'm happy to go along with it; I suspect I may not like what I reveal if I dig too deep into homoerotic desire for dominant masculine types. But whatever. The Paris firemen, however, are a whole new world of homoerotic potential. The other day, I saw a bunch of them outside the fire station near my work, running around in teeny-tiny red shorts. I tried not to stare (and I was off to give a class, by delicious coincidence, in gender and spectatorship). So when two truckloads of them appeared on my screen (I mean, through my front windows), I was moved to actually get up from the table, stand at the window and gawk. Then I tried the angle from the bedroom window. I even took photos. No red shorts, just lots of beautiful shiny silver helmets with tantalising hints of handsome man underneath. Who cares if they're the same tired old version of dominant masculinity as anywhere else? They're French!

Something else that happened this week, however, took the shine off my building and became an annoying, distracting little saga. Trying to describe it now in words makes it sound all the more petty and ridiculous, but it was enough at the time to make me forget all about a student consultation I had scheduled. In short, someone in my building took me on in the Battle of the Sticky Letterbox Labels. Even though I've been here for over three weeks, I don't yet have my name on the letterbox. We put up a temporary label when I first moved in, but it had been ripped off by the next day. At least one important item had arrived safely, so I figured there was no urgency. Plus my friend who owns the apartment said he would deal with it. Then my conseiller at the bank called (everyone gets assigned one, and you can't open an account without going through an interview procedure with them) to say the letter advising my card was ready had been returned because my name was not on the letterbox. Now there was some urgency. I went down and attached a new label. Within an hour it was gone. I attached another, hoping the postie hadn't come in that time with my bank letter. This one, too, was ripped off by the end of the afternoon. And then once more for good measure. Who would do that?, I wondered. What kind of mean spirit takes the minor visual blot of a hand-written sticky label on someone else's letterbox above that person's potential inconvenience? Where they lurking around the corner waiting for fresh labels to rip off? And what were they doing with their time, if that was the case? Get a life! I emailed my friend/landlord to try to speed up the official name plaque, and he sent an impeccably polite email to his neighbours introducing me and asking for their indulgence of my temporary name label, "nuisance visuelle" though it were. At last check, the latest sticky label still remains. And I did receive some mail, just not what the bank woman called about. I really hope I don't have to speak to her about it again. Understanding only about 80% of her French, combines with a general discomfort with banking to make me feel like a child. Enough to make me stay in the safety of my apartment all day and spy on the neighbhours.

paris, kafka style

Moving back to Paris has not been without its inconveniences. Generally speaking, it's pretty fantastic just being here again, and I am really excited about the apartment I've scored - spacious, beautifully furnished, great art, in the middle of everything, stylish gay men literally parading down the street outside my windows, that sort of thing. But starting two new jobs and having to do various moving stuff has brought enormous piles of administration. Just when I thought I was over most hurdles, I had to undertake what must count as one of the strangest and most bafflingly complicated experiences. Allow me to explain in some detail.

Flying back from Sydney to Paris on Malaysia Airlines, one is restricted to 20 kg of luggage. Even though I had left quite a lot of stuff with friends to mind in Paris, I still had two big pieces of luggage to take back. Excess baggage fees were outrageous so at the suggestion of the airline I paid for my second piece of luggage to be sent through a separate cargo service. I would simply have to collect it on a nominated day from the airport in Paris. Easy, right? No fucking way. The nominated day arrived and I called to find that my luggage had arrived. They gave me the address - somewhere in the freight zone of Charles de Gaulle airport. But not anywhere actually near the terminals where you might expect to collect luggage sent via a passenger airline. Instead, I had to catch a bus from the terminal which meandered around the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of the airport, through a semi-industrial zone of warehouses, offices and vacant land. And if you want to see racial segregation alive and well in the Western world, take a bus with airport cargo employees in Paris. Now I know where Paris's African and Indian population goes to work.

Fifteen minutes into the bus ride, we get to where I have get off. I was told I could then easily walk to the correct cargo zone from here. This was true, but in this case "easy" meant walking for ten minutes on the side of an isolated road in what for all I know could have been rural Poland, with trucks screaming past, towards what I could only hope would make itself known as my cargo service. Three other things to add at this point: I remembered my luggage did not have wheels, weighed 17 kg, and that I would have to carry it back to the bus stop; I was already late to meet Leigh who had just flown in and I had no idea how long this would take; and, of course, it was starting to rain. I found the right office and all seemed to be going well when it turned out that I had to pay again - for the processing of the delivery at this end. Two hundred odd dollars to send and about eighty-five euros to collect. By now, paying hundreds of dollars for excess baggage was starting to feel like the better option. With the paperwork in order, I was then sent to another office for customs clearance, this time upstairs from a warehouse and down a dingy wood-panelled corridor where the people at the next counter were arguing with customs staff through the glass partition about having to pay to process whatever foodstuffs they had sent. "We thought this was going to be the cheaper option", the woman complained in French. You and me both, lady. Now with my customs form signed, I was sent back to the first office where I hoped I would be given my luggage and I could commence the wet trek back to the bus stop. Round the corner, second counter on the left, were the directions instead. Eventually someone here looked at my paperwork and sent me through another door where I was now in the warehouse itself. I gave my papers to one of the men and he whizzed off on a forklift to find my luggage. Anyone would think I had shipped a container of rare birds or building materials or nuclear weapons or something; I felt completely out of place, in so many ways. But finally, several minutes later, the forklift whizzed back from the depths of the warehouse bearing my very modest and very insignificant looking piece of luggage. I lugged it over my shoulder and stumbled the hell out of there, mumbling and cursing into the light rain the whole walk back to the bus stop where once again I was joined by various people of colour for the circuitous route back to the airport train station. I had kept Leigh waiting close to two hours, but he was too excited to be in Paris (or the outskirts of it) to be annoyed. The train trip back into the city, however, more than tested our patience, not to mention physical endurance. For the sake of brevity, I'll just say it was unbearably overcrowded with Friday night commuters, really long and really slow and infernally hot.

Not my best day in Paris, but beer never went down so well once we made it back to the Marais, where everything and everyone is so gorgeous that I have all but erased the whole tedious saga.

I ♥ KBH

Here are some sweeping statements about Copenhagen, all of which are probably entirely untrue and more about my willingness to buy into cultural stereotypes of Scandinavians:

1. Everyone in Copenhagen is gorgeous. I have been continuously agog at the constant flow of beautiful, healthy-looking blond people. Everyone is well-dressed in a clean-cut-with-a-funky-edge kind of way. Young Copenhagen men have good hair.

2. Everyone in Copenhagen is under 40, even the people over 60 who seem to keep fit by riding bikes everywhere.

3. Everyone in Copenhagen rides a bike. After a fabulous afternoon (and a boozy night) getting round easily and efficiently on a bike, I can understand why. This is a city that respects cycling and cyclists. Cycling all the time keeps everyone fit and gorgeous (see points 1 and 2).

4. Everyone in Copenhagen is pregnant or has a baby. There is a serious baby boom going on. Pregnant Danish women are all gorgeous and ride bikes, and gorgeous young parents ride their gorgeous young children around in box-carts attached to the front of bikes.

5. Everything is well designed and stylish – hotels, cafes, bars, the metro. The influence of mid 20^th century Danish design is everywhere. I even rode past a McDonalds with armchairs by furniture guru Arne Jacobsen.

Needless to say, my stay in Copenhagen has featured a number of visits to bars, which were fun in a fairly standard international-gay kind of way, except for the very special Café Intime – a tiny, over-decorated old piano bar. On arrival, a strong smell of 1970s perfume (Paco Rabanne?) mixed with cigarette smoke dominated. This may have been connected to the drunk 50-something straight couple at the next table spilling their drinks, or the hilarious, very happy and very drunk 50-something woman propping up the bar, haranguing the barman, and trying to sing along to the old-time French chansons playing on the stereo. At 10pm, an absurdly talented young guy started playing the piano and singing, hovered over by the drunk woman trying to find a rhythm. He too ignored her, but she seemed to be having a ball. Meanwhile, a couple of groups of 20-something hipsters turned up. In a place where the dark red walls are lined with mismatched plates and pictures and where miscellaneous bric-a-brac goes to die (including a faux-Grecian statue wearing a pink lei and a silver bead choker), everyone and everything fits in. I, on the other hand, felt oddly exposed; I finished my beer and made a quiet exit. It was, however, something of a highlight.

intangible outcomes

Three days left in Paris and once again I'm pondering where time goes and what I get up to all day. It's not like I've been doing very much work, having imagined I would use the six weeks here to finish the introduction to my book - at the very least. Nup. So what have I been getting up to all this time? Here are some highlights...

I've had visitors to entertain. Dave caught the train over from London for the weekend and we had a fantastic time eating, drinking, wandering, going to the Musée d'Orsay and Notre Dame. The first night, I took him to a cute little restaurant near Montmartre that Ro and co had taken me to, only to discover it was the very same place he'd been to randomly and loved on a previous trip. Having a visitor to show round made me feel much more connected to being here and reminded me of how much I love it. I've had such wonderful welcomes from a number of my friends here so it was lovely to share the love with my visitors. And there's nothing better than feeling like a local. As soon as Dave got back on the Eurostar, Andrew from Sydney turned up and so he and I launched into a somewhat different three nights of bar-hopping and a little naughtiness, plus some great meals with a couple of my Paris friends.

Just before these visits last week, I caught the train down to Avignon where I joined Tina and Renaud and some of their friends for a few days in the Provence countryside, which was just perfect. Apart from fabulous meals and conversation at the house, we had a couple of outings to some beautiful local places including the amazingly pretty stuck-on-a-hillside villages of Roussillon and Gordes, a Medieval monastery surrounded by lavender fields, and the Roman Pont du Gard outside of Avignon. All of this was well worth the expense of the last-minute train fare and the disaster at the station in Paris where crowds and inefficiency caused me to miss my train and almost storm home in a funk without going.

Otherwise, it's just been a continuous round of early evening apéritifs, late night meals, meeting all kinds of interesting people, going to bars and clubs and stumbling home late, shopping and promenading, some great exhibitions like the amazing Valentino retrospective today with Tina, a little bit of writing, and two positive work meetings which should yield some teaching for me to come back for in September. And so as the five-month odyssey comes close to its end, I may not have achieved quite the career goals that I was hoping for, but I've sure achieved enrichment and have tested out the benefits of letting myself have some of the experiences I spent years denying myself. Who wants a career anyway?

the new new york?

Three weeks in, three to go, and Paris is just fantastic. I don't know exactly what has changed since the previous times I was here (probably me, actually, and especially post-New York) but I finally feel like I've connected with the city in a way that was always a little lacking. Having an instant social group in the form of Ro and her lovely friends was the perfect way to begin my stay; now Ro has gone back to Sydney, I'm left a bit more to my own devices. I've oriented myself to getting around the city and I've established a list of favourite places to eat and drink and shop and party, so now I need to focus on getting into a solid writing routine for the next three weeks. I've also made a few promising work connections and have a couple of meetings set up at American universities here. In short, everything is looking good for me to come back in September to stay long term!

As soon as Ro left, my good NYC friend Kevin turned up. He's in Geneva for work and decided to catch the train over to Paris for the weekend, so it was really fun to have another person to do stuff with. I showed him some bars on Friday night, which was a lot of fun, and we did a bit of sight-seeing on Saturday afternoon. Yesterday around the city was the Fête de la musique. I met up with a new friend Tony in the late afternoon in the Marais where the whole neighbourhood turned into one big street party, hundreds and hundreds people spilling out of the bars, drinking beer and dancing to the pumping music. So much fun. I even ran into a guy I know from Sydney, so our groups joined forces. Kevin, one of the Sydney boys and I ended up at the big pumping nightclub Les bains douches that I discovered last weekend - turns out the guy I'm subletting my apartment from does the club's press so he very kindly put my name on the door, saving me and my friends a whopping 20 euros and making me feel like a well-connected local.

The Marais itself is a big highlight of being here, especially in the early evenings when it's still warm and light and everyone comes out to stroll the streets or to spectate from footpath cafes over drinks. It's one big fabulous perve-fest for the gays. It would be great if I were staying a little closer but pretty obviously it's big money and nothing was available anyway. But my little place is great too. My other new favourite area is around the Canal St Martin where I found a few cute little streets with some great cafes and shops.

So apart from getting back into work, plans for the next couple of weeks include meeting up with some friends of friends, maybe taking a train up to Amsterdam for a weekend, hopefully having a visit from Dave who's now living in London, and catching a few more great exhibitions. There's no shortage of amazing things to do and see all the time. And next weekend, the gorgeous man I met a couple of weekends ago will be back in town and has promised to call me. Can't wait!