Real estate websites

I've started doing it again - started researching real estate elsewhere, as I was doing so frequently in Brussels for L---. Germany, Catalonia and southern Italy to be exact. You've heard all my cultural problems with Australia and they don't need repeating; personally I'm as bored of them as I am by Australians at this point. What has really turned my head lately and got me combing over Art Nouveau penthouses in Berlin and 16th century palace rooms in Naples and sea views in Barcelona and whatnot is the financial angle.

I've been on and on about how expensive Australia is compared with everywhere else (besides Singapore, but Singapore has an excuse!) but somehow it's only in the last week that it's fully sunk in that if our plans work out and if there are no major shifts in global economic trends (two pretty big ifs, no doubt), in five or six years we'll be quite wealthy by European standards but still banging along in the worried section of the middle class by Australian standards.

And if our plans don't work out and unless there's a major shift in international economic trends (two, frankly, even bigger ifs; I think I'd be pretty hard for my firm to dispense with; the F-word's qualifications, which I doubt anybody else in a two-hour radius is shopping around, are getting him a lot of casual teaching work; and call me a blinkered economist but my professional research isn't really indicating that things are going to stop being as they are for a good few years in many respects) we simply won't be able to afford to live here.

In short, this place, which I had been planning to make our home forever, seems to be our Dubai. Luckily it's a Dubai crawling with intense natural beauty, even if that natural beauty is frequently scarred by open pit mining astonishingly close to where people live; and it's a Dubai where we won't get arrested or have our passports taken away for fucking on one of the splendid beaches or for having a drink with friends. And it's a Dubai where I have a massive garden and mature fruit trees and a year-round growing season. It's a pretty fucking phenomenal Dubai, in short. But a Dubai it is.

There is one final massive fucking variable in the mix, of course, and that is what will happen to our brains when we make babies, and I can't think of how I'm going to be when that happens. I can already see pluses and minuses: I don't want them growing up monolingual, with no second-language education, as they would here. In the Australian cities we could get them into a good language programme, but we can't afford to live in an Australian city - it would be madness to choose to live somewhere as expensive as even Brisbane (the cheapest) when we have the option of moving back to Europe; in Brisbane we could only afford to live in a high-rise or a cookie cutter suburb as effectively isolated in some ways as L--- and a fuckload uglier and colder; in Europe we could afford a house with a garden in a city.

But one of the reasons I left Europe is because I don't want my children growing up learning everything by rote and being left with the terrible synthetic abilities of your typical Italian or French person. So now I'm researching broader European pedagogy too . . . but really, I'll have no idea what's going on with how I feel about where I want to raise children until I have the children, and get to know them.

And then there's my family, of course. Taking children to visit them from Europe will be pricey . . . taking children to visit them from Australia, once they pass the magic sit-in-my-lap age, will be the cost of a new car. That might be the deal breaker, especially since I can't stand the F-word's extended family, except for a few lovely exceptions, and neither can the F-word, he's discovered.

And sometimes I reckon I'm just a malcontent who has decided her itchy feet aren't a problem. And you know what, I'm alright with that. And I think so far we've turned that handicap into an asset. Every move I've made since ditching North Bay in disgust fourteen years ago has worked out for me in some 'practical' sense that I've inherited from all those British bankers and lawyers in my gene pool, who would never have allowed me to swan off to check out in Nepal with all the Israeli draft dodgers, or to join a cult in India, and who forced me into grad school in Paris when I decided to just hang around there screwing Bluebeard - no grand-daughter, etc., of theirs was going to be some lady-gigolo clinging to a rich Swiss guy, idly watching her developmental years pass her by. In short, all of this globe trotting might just be me. It might just be who I am; and possibly, psychologically speaking, I'm not looking for a "forever" home, but just want to keep exploring, like the farfallone men in my Italian gene pool. I might just be a person who doesn't have the mental equipment to settle down in the same place for sixty years.

And thank god, I'm with a man with the same tendencies. The F-word's moves have also been practical and smart as well as, you know, artsy-fartsy, and his chronically itchy feet are itching once more. I think if we can figure out how to extend that practicality to take our children's needs into account, we can do a good job of whatever we do.

Anyways, we're talking YEARS before we move, if the plans work out. So I really need to stop looking at real estate sites all the damn time. Itchy feet are fine but enjoying the present for the present is even finer.

Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland

You know, I honestly think I'm going to miss Germany more than Belgium. Seems strange but of course it's not strange at all, as Germany has been nothing but the scene of a series of pleasant holidays, undemanding, over-subsidized conferences and escapist weekends, all healthily soaked in reinheitsgebot beer. Whereas Belgium has been the scene of all of my travails and an embarassing abundance of incidences of alcohol poisoning as I kept refusing to understand the sugary, extremely strong beer was not intended to be drunk in the sort of quantities I'd previously considered satisfying. And we've been going to what is apparently one of the least charming bits of Germany at that - Dusseldorf - a sterile yuppie town, they say. Well, maybe considering how damn filthy Brussels is, the sterility was more welcome than it otherwise would have been.

We went to Dusseldorf last weekend - probably for the last time, as our friends there are likely to move to Brazil before the F-word and I can afford jaunts back to Europe, and when we make a jaunt back to Germany no doubt we'll prioritize and spend our time somewhere awesome like Berlin. That makes me a little sad. There are lots of nice things about yuppie towns, one of which is the fucking awesome international richness of their cuisine, and when those yuppie towns are in Germany there's the pleasant corollary of them not being overpriced. We had tapas and it was grand but we could have had any number of other things there and it would have been grand. Mind you the food in Berlin is fucking awesome too.

We also went to the track, which got old - I'd been expecting the vast and delicious buffets they offer in North American racetracks to keep the punters in - and we went to a couple of open air concerts in the Hofgarten, the memorable one of which was Oquestrada, a nice Portuguese band with a lot of flavours. You can listen here.

Not much else that's fit for print today. We saw Wolfman last night, a film I'd been excited about seeing. I know I don't read entertainment magazines or anything but I'm really shocked I hadn't heard about how bad it was. Not just garden variety bad, either, it was really atrocious. I've never borne witness to such a revolting waste of a big budget, fantastic acting talent, and concept, via an excruciatingly poor script and really indifferent direction. And what makes me angriest, I think, despite all the love I've got for Benecio del Toro, Hugo Weaving and good scripts, is the waste of a concept. I mean, fucking werewolves, they're awesome. And now that that turkey has came out and been all shitty, nobody's going to make another big-budget werewolf movie for a decade or two. Fuck.

Mistress La Spliffe comes out of the closet

We went on holiday in Munich and it was lovely. Germany is so fucking under-rated as a tourist destination, with all their awesome food and beer and relative niceness. And Munich itself was special. There were a few things that moved me to tears there:

The Barberini Faun: I couldn't believe it when I saw it, from its cuticles to its beginning-of-Jim-Morrison-bloat face. Such an excruciatingly beautiful thing. I've read commentary calling it homoerotic because of the vulnerability and beauty of its pose. Well, if that's the case, call the Westboro Baptists to picket me, because apparently I'm gay. I am totally gay for this statue. Oh wait, I'm a heterosexual woman and art history commentators haven't figured out women like looking at beautiful, vulnerable men. I mean holy fuck, we are 52% of the population and 90% of us like fucking men, just possibly a sculpture of a beautiful vulnerable man might possibly be hetero-erotic as well, especially considering the history of women involved in the worship of Dionysus. And I'm not the only woman who's geeked on this stature. Look at the Leni Reifenwhatever photo of it:



Raphael's Tempi Madonna: Look at that lovely cuddle she's giving him - that mother-nuzzle, those protective hands. Oh Mary, poor Mary. Having to see your baby on a cross. That super-blows. Mary - the Catholics have used the shit out of her. If the Protestants had said she was kosher (ie intercessionary), even if the saints weren't, we wouldn't have a sub-section of the international population who could go around kiddie-fiddling without anyone consulting the police now.

Jolly jolly jolliness

What a weekend. I got a sunburn and, I believe, a cure for hay fever (a combination of prayer, probiotics, and stinging nettle supplements). Yesterday we rode our bikes down the Rhine to a set of allotments - and German allotments rock, by the way, they're not just gardens; they have huts and roses and barbecues - they're right Lebensraum. Okay, I've got to stop writing things like that. For this morning at least. Anyways, we rode our bikes along the Rhine, and the trees were fucking like bunnies. There was so much pollen in the air that it looked like a flurry. I'm not exaggerating at all. It looked like a big flurry and it was all actually going up my nose, and I was basically okay. Thank god, because there were lots of lovely things to drink, making antihistamines quite out of the question.

Oh, and yeah. Back to Mistress La Spliffe again. I'm just not a one to not get high. Especially when my reason for not getting high is to punish myself for not joining the epically polluting car-driving class fast enough, on a continent where nobody needs a car unless they have children, and even then it's debatable. I'll push myself, of course, but it was already a moral compromise to start using one of those beastly (if fun) things, and I'm not going to not get high for a moral compromise. Particularly when I really, really want to get high.

Back to the money factory.

The Red Dragon will TGV on out

I have forsworn my rights to a long weekend, the long weekend most of Europe has at the moment in honour of a resurrected Jesus flying up to heaven after hanging around here for awhile, in favour of taking some four weeks of vacation this summer and still managing to have something like a Christmas holiday at the end of the year. And the F-word has been refused his 'bridge day' (a day off school and public sector workers are often given to make up a really substantial weekend when a stat holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday) so in any case it wouldn't have been a proper long weekend en couple. Nonetheless we're off to Düsseldorf again this aft. I'm very fond of his friends there. And oh, the beer, the beerhalls. Oh. And as you may have been able to tell from yesterday's post, I'm in quite desperate fucking need of a break from this place.

Speaking of, I've found a new blog I like attached to the local expat magazine, which I don't like. The great thing about Only in Belgium is it manages to find a stupid stat or story about this place more or less every day. And they're never a surprise. Just a "well, yeah."

Oh well. Accentuate the positive. The beer, the beerhalls. And the Rhine. Lovely big river, and we will sit next to it and drink beer if the weather holds. One of my problems with Brussels is there's no water, just the sewage river that's been buried. Initially that was distressing because of the gross sewage factor and because not having a river, lake or coast to the city made it difficult to orient myself; now that I'm oriented it's more a question of there being no relief to my mind; no water to stare at to relax a little bit. And somehow a city without water seems dirty to me. But having such a thought in relationship to thinking about the Rhine, however tenuously, calls up Coleridge's poem about a different, more 'romantic' time when Cologne (the city we'll TGV to before taking a local to the nearby Düsseldorf) and North Rhine Westphalia was not as clean as one notes these days:

In Kohln, a town of monks and bones,
And pavements fang'd with murderous stones
And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches;
I counted two and seventy stenches,
All well defined, and several stinks!
Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks,
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, Nymphs, what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

I love me some Coleridge. It's personal, because his poems started plucking strong chords with me when I was very young, so I really do love him. Back in the days I used to vary my inebriations more I would wake up, lie in bed, and quite often the first line that presented itself to my pained consciousness was a thousand thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I, and it was somehow as though Coleridge was chiding me. In my imagination, he's a chubbier Nick Cave. About 40 years old. And fucks like a beast.

Can you imagine, if there is an afterlife in which we retain our consciousnesses more or less as we understand our consciousnesses, how strange and ghostly it must be for the souls of the dead to see how the living create new imaginings of them? And not being able to clear up any public misunderstandings by going on Oprah. Not being able to clean up your image by starting an NGO. Not being offered career-resurrecting film roles by Quentin Tarantino. Not being able to grow old or fat or graceless or to make bad facial-hair-type decisions so that people stop being interested in you sexually. And still, everybody having all these strange ideas and emotions about you, these strange constructions of you. How weird.