2004 °   Early in the morning 5am. Made myself a hot drink. I just came back from (in reverse chrono): Zurich, Luzern, Davos, Arosa, Chur, Bregenz, Basel, Ronchamp, La Tourette, Lyon, Marseille, Montserrat, Barcelona, Granada, Sevilla, Merida, Lisbon, Porto, Santiago de Compostela, Segovia, Colmenarejo, Madrid, Bilbao, San Sebastian and lastly, Paris. Haven't got down to talking about it. Should I list out everything that I saw?

Been almost 24 hours since I landed in KL yesterday morning for transit. Now I am back, facing a computer that looks brand new because I haven't used a 1024 x 768 for - not a very long time - just a day less than six weeks. The cost of surfing the net on cable connection is S$58.80 per month. If I use only 5 hours a day, then it costs 4 cents per hour to stay on the line. The rate of use (per hour) in France is 4€ (S$8); in Spain it is between one and 2€; in Switzerland, it costs 10 Sfr, which is S$13. So I didn't check my mailbox for the last two weeks, and spent time biting baguettes, munching cereals or just doing digestive biscuits.

Paninis are conceptually bocadillos, which are conceptually baguettes. I’m not a bread expert, so all tough bread tastes the same to me. it was intriguing to see the fantastic list of food offered on the restaurant carte only to know that the various menu items refer simply to different infills for the same hard baguette shell. Ah.. My teeth.

So we were in San Sebastian and we were lucky to find an English menu. However, we suspect the menu was created by some kind bilingual soul who came and go and never taught the bar lady what the English words meant. Fortunately the items are listed in tally with the Spanish one on the flip side, and so we had raciones (portions) of calamares (calamari), albondigas (meatballs), and each of us had a bocadillo - and I took vegetal ('ve-girl-tile'), which is vegetarian. So spanish isn't too difficult to figure, huh! We should be glad the menu is not in Euskara (native Basque tongue).

Subsequently we were fluent with more variations like tortilla and jamon y queso and patatas, and soo zhow chow fan and chop suey and, the most quantity-for-money food: Doner kebab and sandwich Greg (probably meant the same), where fries are endless and there is so much meat.

Gelado, gaufre, crepe, churros, brezels and a whole lot of pastry (authentic Portuguese tarts!) are fantastic weight-losers... they clear the euro coins pretty swiftly, so our pockets are lighter and we feel poorer.

And Lorraine you are one expensive snack. As a matter of quiche.

Then there is tapas. Small servings, like snacks, in great abundance and variety, all over the counter so you just grab and eat and hold on to the sticks for payment later. Goes with cerveza - that's beer - or any other drinks, of which sangria is definitely a better option than la Alhambra.

And sigh, people keep drinking. At Granada there were more tapas - not fantastic at all, and we were having Mexican tapas in the form of nachos. Hmm. And drinking Catalunya red vino which is quite a puke - perhaps because it was cheap. We had a Tokyo friend with us for those two nights in Granada. Shall we go Tokyo? Can we visit you? At the Barcelona forum we were filling up this lucky draw postcards where we stand to win a sponsored trip to Aichi next year for the Japan Expo 2005. If there weren't so many people at the forum, we would have unleashed our true Singaporeanness by plundering the whole stack on the tray and fill up 50 cards each.

Talk about meeting new friends. On the train from Lisbon to Merida (transfer at Caceres) the four of us were placed on aisle seats so each of us had a stranger beside us. the seats were all empty except one when we went up - apparently we were early, by almost an hour, taking cue that we shouldn't be too complacent with timings after a close shave in Paris. That was a Korean girl. Oh well, since it's a she, we gentlemanly let YX (our only she) to sit beside her. They seem to kick off quite readily, and soon they were talking about bread and only bread and all the fantastic Asian cuisines they both knew which can only be imagined about during this trip. She was alone and had travelled for two months at that point in time.

Next comes a wine expert guy who looks a little older than us, sat beside Darren and start chatting with him, telling him about how to select vino. Fantastic.

Next comes Matthew’s partner for the night - a Jap girl! ok, and they started talking and i can hear matt giving inspirational architectural lectures on the buildings he had studied, or should I say, examined in precise details, as part of his journey's entree, aperitif, main course, desserts and coffee, or should I just say, the whole point of why he was travelling to that part of the world.

And of course, my partner. No lady luck. I thought he was Spanish. It took a very long time before I realise he was trying to tell me he is Brasilian, because he can only speak Brasilian, Portuguese and Spanish but very little English. so after two hours or more of talking in two different languages, assisted by pen and paper, illustrations, the Spanish language glossary pages of lonely planet as well as a hell lot of mime acting, gesturing and body language, this is what I summarised:

He is 29 years old;
He is an insurance agent (imagine trying to explain that in drawings and body language!);
He is a puppet show performer in Sunday schools and road shows;
He is doing his part time degree in theology on night classes, in which he is in the first year and he still have 3 more to go;
He is putting up a VCD production on his puppetry act, followed by a DVD version;
His name is Christian.

He kept the piece of paper we were scribbling words and pictures on, the only evidence left of our guessing game. "communicación," he stressed, "is importante." we looked at each other's digital camera previews to see what we have been seeing for the past two days. His photos were all on the street performers and people and life in Lisbon; and mine were all humanless buildings and Calatravas.

That got me thinking.

That was one friend. We left each other no contacts, so that was that, a short nice one.

At Ronchamp we were on the same track with this Korean guy - who's graduated with an architecture degree from Seoul, and who don't intend to go home for a year. Not much was said. the only reminder that thousands and thousands of architectural students and practitioners and lovers have come to smell le Corbusier's Chapelle was demonstrated on the walls of the pathetic train stop of Ronchamp, in the direction of Belfort (just a concrete shelter), adorned with scribblings of languages all over the world, and a story that goes:

Nick was waiting at the station when he realised he couldn't find his pencil, which he left in Notre Dame. So he ran all the way up the hill to the chapel and yet he couldn't find it! So he ran all the way back down to the station, and he missed his train! So Nick was stuck! And all who came knows that there are only two trains each day on the Belfort-Ronchamp track, and that the trail uphill is long and long and just long. Which was why we called a cab, ha!

Received an email while in Madrid: "remember to try bull's testicles - a delicacy! Though they might just serve matador's balls...!"

Strange. Now that I am back, I wonder why I felt like coming home so eagerly. It wasn't the food.

Maybe because Switzerland kept raining. And everywhere is grey. In Zurich, one can walk blindfolded and hit towards any building and be sure that it’s either a Credit Suisse or UBS. Zurich is so rich.

Grey days. The first one was at La Tourette. The Couvent was splendid. It was recognisably Corbusien. The grass was green, sky was blue - the kind that is so well-balanced you don't need to retouch the colour levels - but our mood was heavy during our expensive lunch in the refectoire. That was because two days ago, Darren left his x-drive back in Marseille - and we only found out last night. The device contained thousands of photos which documented all our sightings over the past four weeks. If it's gone, we'll all be sad. so with our fabulous 10-months' intern experience in project administration we arrange with the courier UPS to pick up the parcel, deliver it to us in another city, wrote a fax to the hotel where we left the drive, and settle the payment by card; all these via our roaming mobiles billed on an overseas rate. We received our parcel the next morning in Lyon.

From Bregenz to Chur via St Margarethen, snow-capped mountains line both sides of the track. Staring from the window, I see both the mountains on this side as well as the reflected view of the mountains on the other side, like two motion films screened one on top of the other, interacting with the motionless audience stagnant in a movie theatre shaped like a tube. A lone car sails on the road running parallel to the rail track, moving at almost similar speed. The road diverges away from the train, and it seems as though the car had been stationary all along while the rest of the world glides frictionlessly beneath its wheels. The car diminishes as the train moves further off - am I watching this myself or is it a skilful zoom through a camera? Feels like I am watching some car commercial.

Is this a mediatheque of some sort? at least there is more media than Dominique Perrault's Mediatheque in Venissieux.

By the time we reached Chur, it was 7.30pm. The day was bright - sun sets pretty late this time of the year. but the station info office was closed, the toilets were closed, the tourist office was closed, even the hostel we called was fully booked. we got a hotel list from the billet office and made several calls before we desperately agreed to one at the ski resort of Arosa, some 1800m high, which is an hour's train ride from Chur, for 44 francs each. resigning to fate, we boarded the Ratische Bahn, which climbed the slopes at a surreal speed. after a series of tunnels and bridges over white waters, the magical reality of Arosa began working on us in the twilight - rocks, large rocks, very large rocks; rivers, streams, very clear waters, magnificent waterfalls; conifers, very tall conifers, gigantic and enormous conifers, millions of it; green grass, so green even in the slowly dimming daylight, and so fine, like carpet; cows, they look like cows! Pylons, arch bridges... and Swiss chalets! Small wooden cottages dot the whole landscape now surrounded by floating clouds. As soon as we reached the Arosa station we were still busy snapping, and the small ski village is just so beautiful. The station stood beside the lake, surrounded by snow-capped mountains all round. The pension owner came and drove us to our house for the night... and right, we got an authentic chalet some altitude from the lake! At that point, we never expect we would be getting this. If we had been eyeing solely on architecture all these time, we would have missed out a great deal of the better things in life.

That night we walked down to the lake again in vapour-breath cold and extra clothing for an expensive dinner at the cheapest pizzeria available, where two pizzas and two shares of cheese fondue cost a hefty 100 Sfr, and the waiter thought we under-ordered because that didn't seem enough for five mouths, in his opinion. But we were very full. Before our food came, fireworks start to go off from across the lake - it was like a mini national day on this little cold ski village! Fantastic... there were like only twenty-odd people gathered on this side watching the display of lights. Soon after the explosions a couple stepped onto a floating platform on the lake for their solemnisation. How cold! How warm! How better a way to get married! How absolutely lovely.

This marriage couldn't have been earlier - fireworks would have set off avalanches in winter. And it isn't that piercingly cold now.

The fondue had too much wine. Bitter - we couldn't get used.

Drizzling night. We made our way back up the slopes to the chalet. My socks were wet. As we entered the chalet, we could smell the home-baked bread that the owner was preparing for breakfast next day. Seriously, he bakes the bread himself. I was inclined to believe that the cheese was home-made, too.

It wasn't the ski season, obviously, but the house was designed to endure the cold. Toilet floors were carpeted; even the toilet seat cover had a fur jacket that keeps the seat warm when not in use. There’s a rocking chair and a balcony and a little narrow plank that connects from the tree outside to the window of a room that belongs to the owner. Its for his cat.

We had breakfast with a view of the mountains the next morning, with the bread he baked and cheese with triangular profile and circular holes - pretty much the kind eaten by mice in cartoons. Or blame it on the Australian version flat cheddar packaged slices that defined my perception of cheese all these while. We left the chalet and returned to Chur via the same slow mountain train again, and this time, we were ready for the right angles to snap. Arosa was rejuvenating.

The other rejuvenation was at Therme Vals - the Zumthor bath. other than the nice interior all done in stone and slit skylights on the ceilings, and swimming from one open pool into another tall and tightly enclosed chamber, or soaking ourselves in fragance waters where petals float, or doing herbal aromatic sauna that reeks metholatum, the ultimate therapy was still boiling your skin in the scorching 42°C spa for a few minutes, followed by a freezing dip in the 14°C pool just across. The contrasting extremes was doing something to the skin, apparently, because it felt funny the rest of the day. maybe too many nerve cells were killed. The landscape of Vals was captivating and meaningful to the whole experience.

Madrid and Barcelona, on the other hand, had a different kind of energy that kept us alive. other than the royal wedding and the paparazzi outside the real Palacio of Madrid, and the crowd and shopping streets at sol, it was Ventas, the plaza de Toros, the bullfighting ring stadium that holds over 20,000 people at any one time, the second largest ring after the one in Mexican city, where we watched four out of six artful acts of tauromachy before we were both saddened by the brutal mania as well as bored by the lack of creative manoeuvres, and probably also because the sun was blinding us (no wonder our andanada tickets were the cheapest!) that we decided to leave the ring before the crowd swarms the metro and stain it with matador's blood or bull gore. I can sort of wonder how loud and powerful the Colosseum used to be for the Romans long ago.

The tickets to the Barcelona forum had H&dM's pizza slice with pot-holes and leper-textured skin as its main graphic - however, the fact that they are selling the building's water-filled roof seemed stupid because the roof is not accessible and there's no way anyone in the forum can see that bird's eye perspective. Furthering the stupidity is the closure of the pizza-slice's main event halls. visitors literally bypass H&dM's work because it houses mostly nothing, has gates that are perpetually closed for the whole season of the forum, and, if there's any purposeful act of architectural pilgrimage that we can pay homage with, it would be to wander beneath the huge chunk of orangepeel ceilings, draw near towards strategic spots of skylights, point the camera skyward, snap, and drag your feet to the next bright spot in the deep shades of the wrinkled volume and wonder how interestingly different your next shot will be from your first one. Talk about social engagement. If dead space was a consequence planned all along, like the Parc de la Villette, where nothing permanent holds true and transition and non-event is as purposeful as ongoing events, then well done, I can feel it score brilliance.

The contents of the forum scored brilliance though. Media exhibitions like "voices", "city of corners" and "habitat" was jaw-drop! When you have a thesis of information that you want to put across as a creative message, do you put up an A1 board with big and small fonts and some fancy parti and renderings, or go for the effect that speaks of the contents without having to read it? I was glad to be in there, feeding on the messages coming through. Video, models, synchronised 3d display and good use of background sound... the word is media. Flat boards are so archaic. Archaic, archaic, archaic.

We also went to Enric Miralles' archery range and Igualada cemetery. He’s good. Was, I mean. but I wonder if archery spectators during the 1992 Olympics actually complained of the lack of good seating area, since cheering is an essential component of the game, and could it be his design that caused a spatial constraint, leading to a change of the Olympics round format to solely 70m range from that year onwards? Just kidding.

Igualada was not an easy cemetery to locate. When we were there, we paid Miralles a visit.

Just saw sernhong online, in Mumbai. His nick reads: "stuck at Cochin... train delay for 8 HOURS".

Sounds like very uncomfortable thrill.

And he just told me his crowded train ride spanned 30 hours.

Wow. How did they do it?

Back to the Europe trip - what else... oh, some pickpocket tried to pull out my wallet at a metro station in Barcelona, hours before we head for Montserrat. There were two of them - one stood in front of me on the escalator who tried to jam my way up. Getting blocked, the next one standing behind me pressed forward and slipped his hand into my back pocket. Unfortunately for him, I grabbed my pocket in time to stop him. And they walked away.

And I do remember the street musicians on the Parisian metro. And the portrait artist whose 2-hours work was rejected by the lady he was drawing, just outside centre Pompidou. Ya... oh well.

Didn't manage to catch the fake road signs in Lyon, but we did saw a Terra Vista do Céu (Earth From Above, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand) in Lisbon, an outdoor photo exhibition on Praça do Commercio. The most well-branded system seen on the trip is the Bilbao metro, whose stations are designed by foster, with a glaring orange signage and a rather consistent web presence in the same signature. Didn’t find NL Architect's Mandarina Duck store in Paris, though we did saw one franchise. The last things we did before flying home was watch "Harry Potter 3" (we had "Troy" in Lisbon), look at watches and buy Swiss army knives, either the original one or the genuine one. So there, 29 train rides, countless metros, buses and trams, 24 maps and 33 postcards, and over 40 nights of sleeping on the wrong side of the globe, and I can't decide what to do next.

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