Before I go any further, I just want to warn you that this post is all about the weather (I must not forget my Canadian roots).

Turns out I am a wimp. Turns out the weather affects me far more than I ever thought or admitted. I will not weather the weather and I will fly to Barcelona if I have to.

After an unnaturally long and hot summer (for a Canadian), including a standout night of42-degree hell, I decided to skip to Europe instead of subjecting my sweaty, exhausted, dusty self to more humid heat.

The European chapter started off so perfectly, my luck was bound to run out. I met up with my brother and went to a beach dance party in Croatia, we went swimming in a (albeit freezing) waterfall in Bosnia, and went out at night in t-shirts in Belgrade. But then I arrived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, to grey skies that would follow me for what seemed like weeks (in reality: 12 days).

In Slovenia, I met my Tasmanian friend Jeremy and greeted him with cold and rain (to remind him of home?). We still managed to enjoy a mucky visit to Ljubljana castle and walking in the city in the rain (deluge).

Soaking it all in, Ljubljana.

Ok, we did have one perfect, beautiful day in Slovenia, when we visited this perfect, beautiful gorge near Bled.

But then it was 8 degrees in Bled, Vienna was windy and rainy and my feet never quite dried (sorry to the people in the cinema watching The Hangover 3 who didn’t want my wet socks hanging off the back of the plush seats), and when we crossed into the Czech Republic, it was flooded. Beautiful and interesting and amazing, but flooded.

Cleaning up in the rain, Vienna.

I wonder what Jesse and Celine would have done in Vienna had it been rainy and cold.

Tourists, the only ones out in this weather. Vienna.

And then it rained. And the river busted its banks. Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic.

When we got to Prague, we got a bit, em, lost. For 2 hours. With wet feet (hello, worst blisters in the history of life!) and soaked backpacks (we thought they were safe stowed under the bus!). After a day of cold and wet and being lost and frustrated and very very hungry, we finally found our hostel, took all the stuff out of our bags to hang them to dry, and went to the local restaurant-bar.

I haven’t ever been so happy (wine on an empty stomach?) to sit in a smoke-filled room waiting for a plate of meat to arrive. It was warm. It was funny. Every single person was smoking. At the table next to us sat five or six old men playing  cards in their patterned knit sweaters. Smoking and drinking beer. The bad day ended with giggles and alcohol and barely any veggies. The lesson here: this too shall pass. But mostly: don’t trust Google maps’ directions in the Czech Republic.

The river rose and rose in Prague. Everything was flooded. Everything was closed. But it stopped raining! Czech out those blue skies!

The boardwalk in Prague, under water.

The plan was to keep going north, through Poland, as I have a writing residency arranged in Denmark, and it makes geographical sense (and I want to go to Poland). Instead, I booked a not-so-cheap-but-screw-it flight to Barcelona.

When I got to the Prague airport, the destination screen indicated the weather next to each city. Everywhere was sunny. Including Warsaw. 25 degrees and sunny. Everywhere had a little sun. Except Barcelona. Hilarious! (Not hilarious.) I started questioning my choices, my life, my decision to leave Jeremy for a potentially-false promise of sunshine. But then I remembered that no: this choice is the right choice because it’s the one I made. This is where I was supposed to be. Thank you, Robin Esrock for this.

And when I landed and it was hot and the sky was blue without the slightest sign of a cloud, I knew, yes, this is where I was supposed to be.

Self portrait at the beach in Barcelona.

I feel good in Spain, except that I constantly feel bad not knowing Catalán and my Castillano is pretty rusty to begin with. But after a week, though I haven’t remembered any of the past tense, I may well have adopted a hint of the (affected?) th th th of the Barthelonan accent. To get there without going too far, I just pretend I’m Liv Tyler with her pout and lispy speech. And I leave the ‘s’ (or ‘th’) off the “gracias” in the hopes it sounds a bit Catalán.

Barcelona is colourful. It’s hot. It’s lively, but it really comes alive after 11pm. And it only rained once.

I’ve had days where a simple A to B route became anything but simple. Train delays, flights that land in St John when you think you’re going St John’s (sorry, Amanda, couldn’t help it), wallets getting stolen, bus stations not existing where you thought they were…

But then there are those times where everything falls into place. I thought visiting Plitvice Lakes National Park would be a pain. A pain I was ready to endure, because it was meant to be a magical place, but still. Annoying to get to, expensive to stay near. Do we need a car?

But then it all worked out. A bus from Zagreb left us right at the entrance to the park, there were huge lockers for our packs and a walk that took us everywhere we wanted to go, long enough to fill the day, short enough to get us back to bus stop to meet the last coach to Zadar.

And with the logistics out of the way (and a back-up plan of spending all our money on a room in the area if we missed the bus), we were free to enjoy one of the most beautiful (and easy) walks that probably exists (my brother claims Krka is even cooler, if you can believe it).

Also, it didn’t rain, it wasn’t too hot, and we had delicious apples in our bags.

First glimpses of waterfalls on our walk.

I had a jigsaw puzzle sort of like this.

Some reeds. It’s not ALL waterfalls, you know.

The water was ridiculously clear and blue-green.

So beautiful you want to eat it.

Our trusty boardwalk. You couldn’t always trust it. Sometimes there was a lot of muck.

We got into Zadar in time for a beautiful sunset thanks to a minivan driver who poached us and 5 other people waiting for the bus. He just flew down the empty highway. The drive was one of the most beautiful of my life- so beautiful I didn’t take any photos. But there was a huge blue sky, fluorescent green hills, and water that reflected everything back like a perfect mirror.

First of all, I am ashamed to say that after all the war stories I heard in Croatia and Bosnia, I developed a funny feeling towards (against?) Serbia. Shows how easy it is to succumb to idiotic prejudice. Plus, we’d heard Belgrade was good only for its nightlife, but was otherwise just ugly blocks of concrete.

Don’t listen to people. People can be wrong or blind. Or just have different opinions.

Belgrade may be a big city, but it is beautiful (its National Theatre is stunning, at least from the outside. I never actually ended up seeing that Anouilh play in Serbian…) and has a very very cool vibe.

I don’t really know where to start (getting a history lesson from the receptionist? watching the girls in impossibly high heels stumble down the cobbled streets?), so I’ll just show you some photos I took of the big church everyone kept telling us to go see (“But the inside isn’t finished,” they’d add apologetically). And it is a big church and the inside was not finished. But the inside was what I spent ages looking at, wrapped in plastic sheets like a Christo.

Cathedral of Saint Sava, the biggest Orthodox church in the world, apparently. Still working on the inside. And not actually a cathedral.

Inside.

A wall on the main tourist drag of the old town, Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“Tell your friends to come to Bosnia because of the people, the food, the beautiful nature. Not the war”, Haris insisted as we said goodbye after his tour of Sarajevo.

And it’s true. The people are the warmest I have met, the food is so very full of meat, and the nature is beautiful (check out this waterfall, for instance). But there’s no denying that there are tangible remnants of the war here.

On a sunny afternoon in Mostar, we found the snipers’ nest. Of what was built to be a bank, there remains an empty shell of a concrete building, littered with broken glass.

While my brother and fellow-hosteller climbed the scary no-banister stairs to the no-walls storeys high up and collected a few empty bullet casings, I stayed safely at ground level, watching my step. Evidently, this is not only the place to come drink and break all your bottles, it’s also great to come shoot up and/or hook up. And paint on the walls.

In Sarajevo, they built a 4.5 million-dollar bobsled and luge track for the 1984 Olympics. During the war and the siege, it was used as a kind of trench for the Serbian army.

Now, it is damaged, abandoned, and covered in graffiti in the middle of the woods (don’t go ‘awandering- there are still landmines in there). It was very affecting. Some sort of metaphor, maybe. Surrounded by beauty, face to face with such a state-of-the-art track, destroyed.

I thought I’d take a little time out to invite any of you who are in Toronto to go check out the InspiraTO festival, starting May 30th.  It promises to be a very cool and original week of curated theatre. For the full schedule, tickets, and more information on the festival, please check out www.inspiratofestival.ca.

My short play will be presented in the RedShow programme. It’s called Carrots in the Toy Box and was written while in the middle of nowhere in New South Wales, which seems like a lifetime ago.

I wish I could be there and am sad to miss so many pieces by so many amazing people, but I’ll count on your honest reports to let me know how it goes!

Labour Day dance party at the beach, Split. It hasn’t been that hot or sunny since.

Having grown up with daily news of the Bosnian war, I was eager to see the country as it is, not as it is was in my head in 1994.

Although Mostar is a city still divided (and visibly so), the beauty we found in its streets, surroundings and people (greeted at a hostel with freshly-baked bread, homemade iced tea and a bunch of markers with which to draw? my idea of coming home), overshadowed the shelled out buildings and parks-turned-into-cemeteries-where-all-the-graves-date-from-1993.

Pocitelj, an ancient fortified town on the river Neretva.

Kravice Waterfalls. Pretty and pretty cold. Got funny looks for jumping in. But it was so blue! And sunny!

Coffee, done right: strong and muddy at the bottom. So as not to stir up sludge, just dip your sugar cube in the coffee, bite of a bit and then take a sip.

Beautiful Bosnia, view from high up.

After a couple of beautiful days in cozy, pretty, coffee-fuelled, bullet-marked Mostar, we took the train to Sarajevo. Sarajevo, a city that, in my mind, has carried heavy baggage.

We did learn lots about the siege and the genocide, but also about the 1984 Olympics, also about how the city is pretty and edgy and has a cool (but rainy) vibe.

Cafes line the streets and squares and people siat in them all day and night, drinking and smoking.

A street in the old part of the city, Sarajevo.

A street, seen from above (from a little café at the top of a hotel).

Girls smoking, Sarajevo.

They smoke a lot and everywhere. I’m almost used to it. What I’m not used to yet are cars driving on the right side of the street.

So after finding a cheap(ish) flight home from Bangalore via London (with a 3 month lay-over) and seeing on Facebook that my brother was on his way to Croatia, the plan was made.

Arriving at Heathrow was like arriving home. So familiar. I knew which over-priced sandwich to buy at Costa’s and where to catch the bus. I hopped on the cleanest, most high-tech coach I’ve ever seen and slept all the way to my friend‘s house in the type of village you’d imagine an English village to be.

Time enough for a catch up, hot shower (and brushing my teeth with tap water!), a chill in the cold Spring air, and then it was back to the bus in the middle of the night, off to another airport for another flight.

When I arrived in Split, Croatia, I ran into my brother on the street. We had pizza at a cafe in the sun and found out our hostel room had a disco ball.

I was going to like it here.

My brother dancing in our amazing hostel room.

Weirdly, I’ve been more successful in my non-mission of eating a burger in each place I visit (there will be a burger round-up in August).

After a failed attempt to see a play in Cambodia (on World Theatre Day of all days!) due to cloudy weather and nausea (thanks, malaria tablets!), I was keen to make up for it in India, a country with strong and vital theatrical traditions. So I saw two plays. Two! I win.

Man applying makeup.

Another man applying different makeup.

In Kochi, I got the chance to take a tourist’s peak into Kathakali, a type of classical dance-drama from the state of Kerala, at a lovely and air conditioned wooden theatre in the old city.

Usually very long (like, 8 hours), they cut and dumbed this one down for tourists, complete with a make-up application demonstration and a quick run-through of the gestures and their meanings. I read the synopsis in two languages and still couldn’t quite follow the plot and my mind wandered a bit.  But I got to see what I’d learned about in my World Theatre course in 2006 in action, so I felt pretty good about that. And the costumes were quite amazing.

In full costume, a type of demon boar.

The boar and the lady.

The main character, being egotistical (spoiler: at the end he’s enlightened and no longer full of ego).

And then, on my last day in India, I was treated to Gasha by the Indian Ensemble Theatre in the beautiful and sleek theatre space Rangashankara in Bangalore.

As the contemporary play was in Urdu, Hindi, and Kashmiri, all I understood that sometimes the two characters were at school (“If you concentrate, you will go far”) and that there was a dead dog at one point.

Though I was completely right on those two points, my friend explained everything to me afterwards and what I thought had been a joyful story of a friendship was quickly revealed to be about the horrors of the political conflicts in Kashmir.

I loved the use of the simple props and quick shift between characters by actors Bhat and Sandeep Shikhar. And the theatre itself made me feel so at home (Torontonians, it was very close to the Dance Theatre). But I guess with a play like this where accents and quick dialogue, it would make sense to understand at least one of the languages spoken…

Though I did see some spectacular lime green hot pants on the beach in Split today, there’s something about the colours in India.

Boy selling cotton candy on the beach in Pondicherry.

If you’re going to paint your shop or home, better make it pink, blue, green, and striking.

Street art in Kochi

Bougainvillea in Coorg

Creepy puppet doll people

Boat on a beach

Beach games in Mamallapuram

Watermelons: a tasty treat, a fancy feast

Pigments for sale in Mysore