Nola

In my favourite part of my favourite book, Kerouac describes the jazz music scene in New Orleans.

Before I left, I had this picturesque idea of what it would be like.

I fantasised that there would be music overflowing from all the bars and onto the streets. I could almost hear brass and wind instruments in my sub-concious. Contagious music made by amazingly free spirited people littering the town.

I decided that I was going to buy a second hand saxophone (because my birthday wouldn’t be far away) so I could teach myself how to play through the winter.

I imagined myself carelessly passing through the city with my backpack. My rosy cheeks slightly red from the sun and my eyes are the heaviest they’ve been, but I’m the happy.

I’d written this idea down on a piece of paper and tucked it into my travel wallet.

Some days on the road I would take it out and read about everything I expected from New Orleans because everyday that passed, I grew closer to becoming that person.

Now, I’m actually here.

There is music everywhere!
People do dance on the streets and drink whisky and horribly alcoholic concoctions and everything is drums, brass and bass.

People know every word to anything by Curtis Mayfield and ‘Groove Tonight’ by Earth, Wind and Fire blasts live from Jazz Clubs and I’m standing on a bar top dancing with a man that plays the saxophone as though he’s just breathing.

But something’s not right.

When I was in Atlanta (I’ll share my experiences there soon), I stayed with a lovely couple I’d met while in Florence. They spoke about New Orleans a lot. Tosh was from Louisiana and Suzi had met him when they both attended Louisiana State University. I joked that they should just move there because both of their eyes lit up when they spoke about the city.

Suzi replied that she loved it and it was one of her favourite cities to visit but she’d never consider living there and that I “would understand soon enough.”

I think I expected New Orleans to still reflect the 1920’s home of Jazz that I read about in my year 11 History books or the 50's beat generation. 
While at first glance, it does and I did have an amazing time…

I didn’t expect the massive, very obvious divide in classes. 
Actually, I didn’t really expect it from America at all… at least not to the degree I've found it.

It makes me sad to see how people are treated because, as hard as I sometimes try not to, I love people. I love all people.

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
I really wish people understood this better because compassion is something that everyone deserves, independent of race.

I now understood why they wouldn’t live there. I’m sure that just bellow the surface bubbled a very dark New Orleans.

Where the performers play their instruments, not out of love but out of lust and they crave money because it feeds their addictions.

I was particularly grateful to have met a girl from Victoria at the hostel. She was a music student and talked about a man called Jon Cleary. On the second night we were there, we ventured far from Bourbon and Frenchmen street and went to a small run down Jazz bar, miles from the city centre.

It was a part of town that wasn’t known for its creature comforts or safety, (something we learnt after fire ants attacked us).

Jon wore old faded jeans, a navy blue floppy hat that hid his large red ears and an oversized grey jumper. It looked like his mother had forced him to buy clothes three sizes to big so he could grown into them… which was particularity bazar considering he was well into his fifties.

When Jon sat down at that piano and when his voice rang of pain and heart ache while he begged his love not to leave him. His feet stomping the ground to create an addictive pulsating beat.

I could feel every inch of sorrow and pain that my heart has ever experienced.
I could feel all the sadness and grief that I’ve ever witnessed. 

When he flung his head back and held that note perfectly, my eyes watered and I smiled.

As my soul melted, I thought that perhaps what I had dreamed of New Orleans was still real.

Maybe not everything here died when the dollar learnt not just to speak, but to scream, turning the American dream shallow behind white picket fences.

I'm not sure what I expected to find in New Orleans but I don't think I've found it just yet and I might not by simply hopping from city to city.

Roderick Nash wrote; 

“wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works… it’s an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul.”

I own a Winter coat!

THIS winter coat which makes me not shiver anymore.

Right at this very second, I'm sitting uncomfortably on some cold metal chairs, that I'm sure used to be red, at a Grey Hound terminal in Richmond, Virginia.

It's 5:25am.

I'm doing surprisingly well with this fact.

I'm in the middle of a 16 hour commute from New York to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Nearly two weeks ago, I left Isaac in Vegas to make my way to Philadelphia. While I do love that R. Kelly's remix to Ignition is still in California's Top 40, I wanted to go back to the East Coast because I missed so much. I'm almost certain Isaac wasn't ready to go home.
I was very happy our rolls weren't reversed.

Everyday I'm away, I hear about some illustrious distant land somewhere that promises me something glorious and I want nothing more than to make my way there and take it.

At the moment I'm pretty set on making my way to Alaska with someone amazing after the ski season. I have to be careful because wanting everything is very similar to wanting nothing.

I hope Isaac makes it back over here at some point because someone needs to ensure I get into a healthy amount of trouble.

Philadelphia is a great town and I stayed at a really friendly hostel where I met some fantastic people. Everyone that actually lives there has some kind of strange emotional hang up that they're only too keen to tell you about, given the right amount of liquor. I won't go into detail but the story ends with us fleeing from a girl that owned just far too many cats.

Philly is also the most liberated place in the world!! I say this because while I was there, I visited the constitution center...
located in Independence Mall,
on Independence Ave,
oposite Independence Park,
where the Liberty Bell lives.

I wish I was making this up.

I was in Philadelphia to meet up with Dan, my other more stylish and responsible half and to lick the Liberty Bell.

As it turns out, American takes the protection of its national artefacts rather seriously.

Even if I did make it past the aligator infested moat, used my limited contortion skills to navigate my way through the maze of lazer death beams and answered the Liberty Bell's guard trolls three riddles correctly, I'm sure I would have been shot by security before I could taste delicious liberty.

Also Dan just out right refused to take the photo in fear of becoming my neighbour in an immigration jail. 

I was pleased that we managed to make it to a Philly Roller Girls roller derby match because girls on skates beating each other up... yes please.

After Philly, we took a short bus ride to Washington DC to chase a band and play Drag Bingo. 

Oh and the Smithsonian and monuments and blah blah.

I look mildly insane because all I did in DC was take photos of trees and jump around in leaves and kick them about. Someone said to me, "it's like you've never seen fall before!" I assured them that that's exactly what it's like because I have never experienced fall before. 

While I was lucky to miss out on the effects of Hurricane Sandy, Daniel wasn't and it had cut into the time he had put aside for New York.
I very happily suggested that we should go back there. Not so I can see the friends I miss too much already, eat bagels at my favourite cafe' in Bushwick or go ice-skating and see 5th Ave's Christmas decorations but... you know... for him.

I won't talk about New York... again... but I'm going to move there so I can marry the bartender of my dreams but for now, I had to start make my way South.

I do like that you experience places differently depending on who your with. I like that the other persons perspective rubs off on me. It forces me to look at things differently and sometimes it teaches me patience and I'm certain it's teaching Dan tolerance... if he had room to learn any more.

We've come up with this very delicate, very scientific way of deciding where we go next. We throw the names of all the cities we think we'd like to go to into my bandana and pull somewhere out. In doing this, we agree on one rule.

Whatever the bandana says. Goes. 

So, there, that's how we ended up heading South on a bus to North Carolina and how I've ended up listening to Jinja Safari, while I watch the sun rise over the Virginia country side with my best friend of ten years.

3 Months On

I recently did an interview for someone awesome. It was for a uni assignment about the concept of home. 

She’s an Arts major… be kind.

Anyway it reminded me of this time when I was a kid.

I had just turned six and we’d not so long ago moved from Bali back to Perth. I think it was particularly hard for me at the time but I don’t remember why. I just remember I wasn’t really adjusting.

I would just keep threatening to run away from home in "classic Blinky Bill" style.

I know now that it probably really hurt my mum but she managed to put an end to it pretty quickly. I think it must have been the third or fourth day that a head strong, six year old me, swore I was leaving.

So she very casually lent down, looked me in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry you don’t feel happy here. I love you, I’ll always love you and you’ll always have a home here but you should find somewhere that makes you happy and a family that can do that for you.”

Then she walked me to the front door, shoved me outside and closed it behind me.

I didn’t even make it past the letterbox before I burst into tears and was begging to come home.

I remember she opened the door and just laughed, smiled and welcomed me back.

I never threatened to run away again. Well at least before this trip anyway.

I’ve been gone for almost three months now.
Yeah, I know. It feels like FOREVER ago that I left that tiny Perth airport. 

Although I’ve tried, how can I even begin to explain to you all the things that have happened to me in that time.

All the people I’ve met, everything I’ve experienced and all the things that still lie ahead of me. I can’t accurately summarize it.

How can I possibly explain how it feels to see the Grand Canyon with your own eyes? Or to stand on the top of the Empire State Building or to ride past a pirate ship in San Diego or run through crowds in Mexico City or to see Vegas rise up out of the desert?

Some days I look at my backpack and wish I'd left all of it behind because all it does is slow me down when I’m trying to run for the bus or train or plane. When I was packing, I couldn't bare the thought of leaving any of it behind. 

It was the feeling I got, when I found a clearing in the shrubbery that surrounds the canyon and stood on the edge of that cliff. When my legs trembled ever so slightly and my lungs stung, it making it hard to breath at that altitude.

When you see that Canyon stretch out in front of you for miles and miles and feel that warm desert breeze on your face.

It's THAT feeling that makes you never want to care about Facebook or your smart phone or the balance of your bank account because none of it is a measure of who you are.

You've been gifted this opportunity to feel your heart pounding in your chest and adrenaline coursing through your veins.

I understand all too well what Christopher McCandless meant when he wrote “you are wrong if you think happiness radiates only from interpersonal relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience.
We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

That's why I travel. That's the reason why I left, because I let myself become too concerned with others and all the bullshit you fill your life with. 

Because there's nothing like looking in a rear view mirror and watching the city slowly disappear.

Even though I’m excited for the day that I eventually do come home and to show off the new person I’ve become, I’ve still got so far to go. 

For now I've got nothing to do but to turn up The Shins on my iPod and board that next anything to take me somewhere.

The Truth about New York, New York

Frank Sinatra probably would have made it here a lot quicker had he had just one other thing, an Australian accent.

If I was a little stronger minded I probably wouldn't have let this city seduce me as easily as it did but like Kerouac, I chase from one falling star to the next and have nothing to offer anyone but my own confusion.

Also, I'm delighted to find out that all of my stupid charm and quirks work on a Americans and I even make friends on the subway. I honestly haven't experienced anything like this place before.

How I feel about New York scares me because in the two and a bit weeks I've been there, I've been given the luxury of something I haven't had in a while. A routine and friends for longer then 24 hours.

I wake up, generally around noon, walk to Sparrow Cafe' on the corner, flirt hopelessly with the barrister. Eat a bagel with Scallion Cream Cheese (I'm not sure what Scallion is and frankly, I don't care because it's amazing).

Then something touristy.
Like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) so I can stare at Monet's work;

take a nap in Central Park;

catch a broadway show;

or hang out with these assholes and catch a comedy show;

I also know most peoples regulars names at my all time favourite bar where I have fantastic friends that rarely have me home sober and before 6am. It's same bar that my brother and his friends spent every night drinking back in the Summer of 2010.

I often abuse my Australian accent so I don't actually have to pay for things, which is also how I ended up seducing these NBC pages;

doing body shots in Philadelphia, scoring free $20 cocktails at a swanky underground New York bar and getting free sandwiches from a deli. 

I know.
I know.
I'm awesome.

It's dangerous spending too much time in a place like this because it makes you think of what your life would be like if I lived here.

So when Mike says things to me like, "If you need a place to stay? You can rent the room above the bar."

Or when Stephanie finishes laughing and says, "We'd be super best friends ever if you lived here!" and hastily agrees when I tell her she should marry me just so I can get a Green Card.

Or when Louis tells me that if I come back in the Summer, I could stay with him.

My imagination goes wild and I know that New York deserves so much more of my time. The fact that I'm not there now makes me sad. I think that maybe the possibility of me living here isn't that silly and it's not just some dream I conjured up when I was 13 anymore.

Plus, I didn't even decide on which Girls character I was and despite my greatest efforts of stalking Rockefeller Center I did not get to meet/marry Tina Fey.

Do you know how terrifying it is that I've travelled some 30,000kms but I've gone ahead and let myself indulge in a place so much that I can picture my entire life here. I had a similar experience with Sweden but both lives were so different and both places appealed to different sides of my personality.

My friend refers to the part of me that belongs in New York as 'the character Tara'. Which is understandable because my life is outlandish sometimes I don't even think I'm a real person.

It was a very, very hard place to leave. I'm currently working out how to get my ass back there but it's scary... I don't know if I'll have the strength to leave it again this time around.

So the truth about New York...?
The $1 street cart hotdogs really don't make you sick. Stop being a pussy and just go try one.

Barcelona, London, Me and NYC

At this very moment, I am watching my clothes tumble around at our local laundromat, praying that all the colours don't leak together and destroy my newly purchased 'Greendale Community College' shirt.
THIS one to be precise;

I do hate the fact that I have to waste time doing this but I've learnt by now that as a traveller and not a tourist, I cannot afford the luxury of doing something all the time. New York's very pricey.

So here are the highlights of all the great and terrible things that have happened (because lets face it, I've been super slack with this blog lately).

Barcelona;

As much as I loved Barcelona... I'm not at all sure how much it loved me in return.

While the food there is exceptional (I was curled up in pain some nights from over eating) and there's nothing comparable to having a man open up his wooden shutters and scream something in Spanish at you because you and four others are stumbling and slurring the lyrics to 'Hey Jude' at 4am,

                                                 

I was feeling the opposite of healthy.

Some might say, I was feeling unhealthy.

If you've travelled, you'll already know that nothing makes you home sick like being sick.

While my friends were soaking up the sun and drinking copious amounts of Sangria, I was in bed feeling sorry for myself and missing my dog.

I did flop around from place to place but I generally couldn't get into it.

                                                

As I've mentioned before, visiting doctors is my ultimate hate.
Not a fear.
Just a dislike.

Eventually, I got myself into a state where I couldn't ignore it anymore.
On our last day I broke out in a fever and my skin was angry, red, raised and agitated. I felt like I was going to die.

Like proper die. 

Dead.

Google said I had either contracted leprosy or was having a violent allergic reaction. 

While I mentally divided up all my Earthy possessions, we went to see a local doctor. She gasped when I lifted my shirt (an affect I have on many) to show her the rash was all over. She gave us directions to the hospital and just kept repeating vamonos.

I'm going to take some initiative here and assume vamonos is Spanish for awesome rack.

The doctor spoke fluent English and explained to me that there was no way of knowing exactly what I was allergic to and asked me if I'd eaten anything strange.

At this point, my mind played a montage of Isaac and I running around the Barcelona markets eating everything and anything we could get our hands on.
An hour long sampling of strange fruits and unidentifiable meats.

He continued to say that I needed a shot now, gave me a script for medication to stop the reaction if it happened again (which is how I got these pills;)

                                       

and recommended I keep a food diary (a great excuse to get my Asian on and photograph every plate that gets put down in front of me).

Now this next part is a little disturbing.

He took me into another room and was prepping a needle with his back turned to me. I sat on the bed, swinging my legs and exchanged some pleasant small talk.

"Now turn around," he said.
"Oh it's ok," I replied. "I'm not afraid of needles."
"Well that's good but you're still going to have to stand up and turn around." I hoped to god he wouldn't say what followed, "what cheek do you want it in?"

"Is... that needle... going in my face?"

AND that is the story of how the fifth European doctor saw my ass.

London;

London taught me that if you wind up at a 4 story trance club... sober... you're going to have a bad time.

Dan & I got 'move along' eyes at Madam Tussauds for violating Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie,

Jessica Alba,

and Beyonce,

amongst many more.

I had high tea, purchased this high quality magic kit to wow the pants off people,

laughed too long at THIS pun,

and made time for the one thing I ALWAYS have time for, dinosaur exhibits at Natural History Museums.

London was pretty cool but trying to do it in four days didn't let me see half the things I wanted to and the weather there makes me sad.

We left Dan in London, boarded a plane for the Big Apple and Rachel left us for Texas. 

While Isaac and I debated about going to Boston for a while, New York has just been too hard to leave. This place has been so good to me and I feel like it's exactly where I want to be.
No mobile phone, no place to be and all the time in the world to do whatever I want to.

I'll spend the next 17 days here in NYC. Living life like Kerouac, chasing from one falling star to another and having nothing to offer anyone but my own confusion. 

So that's a very long and vague version of what brings me here, staring at my washing, fighting a hangover and donating half my steak & cheese sandwich to Isaac because I'm the nicest guy alive.

I know that my time here has only just begun and I'm so excited and happy for all the things that are about to happen.

The Search for Enlightenment Part II

It was our fourth day in Barcelona. I walked home a little earlier than the others from a live Spanish guitar gig down because I wanted to get up early to visit Gaudi's 'Sagrada Familia'.

Gaudi's work first intrigued me when I was in Vienna. My Austrian friend Thomas would point his buildings out to me and they were amongst some of the most hideous things I'd ever seen and the Sagrada Familia was no exception.

I just had to see it from the inside with my very own eyes.

That morning, I left my hungover friends wallowing in self pity and arrived 10 minutes before it opened and about an hour after every other tourist in the city.

When the line for entry wrapped itself around the ENTIRE block, I was very close to calling it in and writing it off as a failure. I joined the back of the cue and waited 80 minutes to enter. It wasn't a total waste of time though and I enjoyed some lovely conversation about art with people around me.

Like most Australians, I'm not very religious.
I attended an Anglican high school but I just think the bible is a collection of fairytales for adults.
I feel like I've spent my entire life watching those around me pick and choose what they want from their religion, treating it as a buffet to condem others.

It strange when I got excited about a church of all places.

When you get closer to the building, you notice the 'chaotic mess' is actually a collection of the most beautiful sculptures you've ever seen. Gaudi's attention to detail, his obsession with combining the organic with the man made and the last 25 years of his life that he gave to this building, means that nothing in that church is there by coincidence.

For example;
There are two major biblical scenes sculpted here.

On the side, that faces sunrise, is the nativity scene. This side of the cathedral is beautiful and warm, a true celebration of life.
The opposite side, facing the sunset, is the resurrection of Jesus and his horrific death. It's angular, sharp and bare. It's almost like the church loses all of its body and stands only on clean bones.

Although it's moving, shocking and aww inspiring, it's not the outside that I'll forever remember.
It's how it felt to walk in that building. To see the red marble floors stretch out infront of you, the pillars which Gaudi modeled after trees that twist and branch off creating a forest like canopy. It's almost organic.

It's the stained glass windows illuminating the cathedral with colour that evoke so much emotion within you. Gaudi said that many architects make the mistake of just letting light pour into a cathedral. He wanted the lighting to be just right because too much light and not enough light are both blinding. I became embarrassed when I could feel my eyes misting up.

I don't know if there's a god.
I never before cared to find out if there was some omniscient Morgan Freeman like character that concerns themselves with my day to day trials and tribulations.
There's something about opening yourself to new cultures and experiences that's beginning to make me wonder if I'm far too closed minded.

While I'm not running off to join any cults, I am starting to respect the value that religion as a source of hope, instead of just hate.

Impulsiveness

When I was five years old, my brother played cricket at a nearby park. It was the most boring thing in the entire world to watch and I did not enjoy it in the slightest.

So one Saturday morning, my mum asked me if I wanted to go with her to pick him up. Naturally, being a head strong, stubborn five year old meant that I was not going to go and pick J up and that I wanted, instead, to watch the rest of the Rugrats in peace.

When I eloquently put this to my mother, by screaming and crying at her, she eventually gave in, knowing that she would be home in 5-10 minutes.

But you see.

This thing happens when I rush into decisions and I experienced my first dose of regret as my mum’s car pulled out of the drive way.

Regret.

Deep regret in my slightly too quiet house.

I don’t exactly remember what happened after but somewhere between regret, mormons knocking on my front door trying to coax me into taking a bible and my descent into total chaotic crying hysteria, my five year old self managed to dial ‘000’.

My mum arrived home to find the front of our house littered with police cars. She rushed inside, heart pounding and found me sitting happily on the couch showing some lovely police officers my coin collection.

Needless to say, I was forced to watch J’s cricket game every week for sometime after that while my mum consoled me.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s pretty much ingrained in my DNA to rush into things, to be stupidly impulsive and then regret my decisions in some kind of life hangover.

I’ve been travelling for nearly seven weeks now.

I’ve been to ten countries and about fifteen cities. I’ve travelled by plane, train, bus, bike and on the bare soles of my feet. I’ve slept in stations, airports, dorms, hotel rooms, couches, tents and everything in-between.

I’ll always remember the same feeling creeping up on me after I left my teary eyed mum at the departure gate as I boarded my first flight. I got that horrible heart sinking feeling where you know you’ve done something stupid.

Yeah...
Regret.
Apprehension.

It was at least three times scarier than the experience I had when I was five.

I think I’m starting to understand why it’s important to not necessarily be strong but to feel strong. “Sometimes you just need to measure yourself” because as hard as it was to leave everything, there hasn’t been a single day where I’ve regret my decision to board that first plane.

I’m just grateful I’m a little more courageous then I was when I was five.