I'm at Vienna airport using up the free internet and easy access to powerpoints. So far this trip has been a bunch of thrills. Latenesses, over-packings etc.

Not least among them: bumping into Björk and Mathew Barney at Basel airport. Björk sat next to me(!), dressed in the most rad japanese geisha come M.I.A colour scheme attire yet to bless an inter-continental flight. Chasing around her elfine daughter through the swiss chocolate aisles she even acknowleged my rather insistent knowing, buzzed glances with gracious (restrained) smiles and asked me if I knew there had been a delay.


We're acquaintances now.


Then I watched the sun set on Vienna and I almost forgot all the hot tears I shed on leaving my friends in Germany.

So many postcards have been foraged in this year that those not posted, must be hurridly thrust into books and sent in my BIG shipment. I do like the decontextualised, kitschy heights that they reach, all scattered together. Strange conversations they must have. This, embarrassingly, is a modest sample:

List means cunning in German. So in an act of sneaky insinuation and downright laziness- I roll out the week's adventures:


(El)Lor in Basel for Bosch - in the lovely Beyeler Fondation - a modernist space all glass and reflective waters that strangely merged with its surrounds - delicate hills and cornfields.

To Fribourg- my german city's swiss namesake- where we battled extreme exhaustion to the sounds of Fennesz and Dat politics. Our horror at the discovery that bad crowds plague the world over. How can you refuse to edge closer, when Dat politics bid you in excited french?

Then, Gruyere - to eat up all the local cliché food groups and wander through the ancient castle, with its bizarre collection of sci-fi art and severed hands to offset the otherwise movie-backdrop picturesque.

Freiburg - rained, poured and then some. So while I was lucky and got to see Jean Luc Nancy speak (!) - Ella didn't get to blackforest it. We had to make our own fun. Chiefly aided by Randy Newman's 'Short people'.

Colmar - Grünewald revisited. Jamfrenzy.


Leipzig - So hyped, so near Berlin, so not Berlin. But it grew on us slightly - as we began to run into theater groups performing in back alleys every which way, and see the various abandoned warehouses as potential art-spaces- a "Hinterhofkultur". Bach's glorious church, the ever-allusive passages through the city. The leafy flutes of the wedding-cake church that once held those secret resistance meetings heralding the fall of the wall.

MISSING BRIAN WILSON'S SET.


Dresden - returning there to firm up my 15 year old memories of a snowy new year's eve. The Zwinger in all its glory and grand art. Late admittance to the city museum's counterposing of east germans and contemporary russian art. Train pain.

We said a prolonged goodbye over kiddy- art supplies in garden cafe in Leipzig. My last extravagent overseas jaunt with australian beloveds before I return was only the run-up to Ella's voyaging.