Oh dear...

I´ve been travelling for quite a while since I last posted. Bit of an issue. Anyway, I´ll see what I can do about catching you all up. First of all, the Fusion festival was incredible. Out in the middle of nowhere north of Berlin, this five-day festival is ridiculously cheap (€55 for the whole festival, including camping) and involves the largest assembly of hippies, punks, goths and freaks I have ever seen. It was actually eventually so normal to see peple dressed up that walking past someone dressed in a Pikachu outfit, or entirely in purple, wouldn´t cause me to bat an eyelid. It was huge, with about 20 stages, scattered around an old Soviet airfield filled with fighter jet hangars covered in grass and street art. All the food was vegan or vegetarian, and everyone I met there (mainly the people I camped near) were incredibly nice. ne of the hangars had been converted into a workshop space, where you could learn things like slackrope walking, juggling (I can almost comfortably juggle three clubs now), capoeira, tango and trapeze (definitely not my forte, although I managed to get ON the bar, which was an achievement). I hung around there quite abit during the day, and at night one of my favourite places was the Firespace, where jugglers and other fire artists performed, sometimes as many as eight in the ring at one time. Their abilities were absolutely mesmerising - one of my (and the crowd´s) favourites was a guy performing with a length of rope with a fireball on each end,which he could use like a baton, or throw, making it slack, or send in two different directions at the same time. Most of the music was techno, (ridiculously loud as well, a lot of the kids ran round sporting big noise-blocking headphones to protect their ears) but I managed to see quite a lot of awesome gypsy music, which was my favourite. And I discovered a face- and bodypainter there, who was doing UV light painting during the night, and who I watched for hours over the days of the festival. I eventually knew him as Wolf Reicherter, world-reknowned UV light painter, and the creator of BodyMagic, and he eventually helped me a lot to get to know other painters later on at the World Bodypainting Festival.

Anyway, after Fusion I headed off to Prague, Budapest, and Zagreb, all similar cities, but with their own peculiar characteristics. Prague was quite touristy; one of the highlights for me was watching all the other tourists watch the show put on by the Astronomical Clock, which always disappoints, and watching them burst into laughter when it finished, with a kind of incredulous `Is that it?´ look on their faces. But I spent a bit of time painting in the Jewish Quarter (and got very sick of smazeny syr, the only vegetarian dish in the national repertoire, which is basically breaded fried cheese.) and discovered that you could see pretty much the whole city from the hill behind my hostel. And I stayed in probably the best hostel to date, Hostel Marabou. Very friendly and welcoming, with a beautiful view out of the bedroom windows and a well stocked kitchen, free internet and an interesting, halloween-style basement. I met so many other travellers there, I felt like I knew pretty much everyone in the hostel.

But I moved on to Budapest, which had a very similar feel to Prague, minus some of the ´architectural overachievement´ (a Lonely Planet phrase I think perfectly describes Prague) and with a completely incomphrehensible tongue. So getting a new phone there (after weeks of procrastination) proved to be very interesting. I went to some Turkish baths while I was there, and enjoyed it a lot. And went to the Hungarian National Art Gallery. And in case you´re wondering, it isn´t really worth seeing. Very small, with a handful of Baroque and Renaissance paintings and heaps of mediocre religous works (they weren´t mediocre because they were religious, I think that was just the only thing the Hungarians could think of to paint about). But it is in Budapest Castle, which is, while somehwat of a tourist trap, still very beautiful and worth a visit.

Then I headed off to Zagreb on my way to the World Bodypainting Festival. An internet-related stuff-up and a very inflexible receptionist meant I ended up staying there for 4 nights, which most people had told me was more than enough. But Zagreb ended up being one of my favourite cities, with a beautiful Catholic-village feel to it, and some of the most amazing fresh food markets I have been to anywhere in the world. Picture dozens of red umbrellas set up over trestle tables upon which fruits and vegetables are piled like at a swap meet. Not only lettuce and pumpkins, but striped and purple tomatoes, many different kinds of mushrooms, fresh white cheeses, fig honey, more types of green leafy vegetables than I have seen anywhere else, and all of these being sold by Catholic widows in their black mourning dresses and headscarves, or mothers with their sons and daughters, not bored kids hiding under tables, but active little sellers hawking what they honestly believe is the best produce. And not a trace of English in the air. I felt like I had wandered back in time. And I went to mass at the local Cathedral on the Sunday, and it was packed, with families, older widows and widowers, and young couples. Religion is not dead in Croatia, far from it. And twice while I was there I got stopped by evangelists, which hasn´t happened in any other cities (although one was an American born-again Christian on an exchange-type trip, who didn´t speak a word of Croatian). I spent a long time just wandering the old winding streets in Zagreb, people-watching. It is a very beautiful city, not very touristy at all, and very relaxed.

I left Zagreb, heading for Seeboden, in Carinthia, Austria, via Ljubljana in Slovenia. I´d heard many things about Ljubljana, many of them along the lines of ´You don´t need more than a few hours there´. And in some respects they were right. It is a pocket sized, beautiful city, that you can walk around in a few hours, which I did. I went up to Ljubljana Castle and had a look around - a lot was still beng renovated. There isn´t much to see in Ljubljana that you can´t see in other cities, but it does have quite an intelligent, international feel, being one of the original members of the EU and the first country to adopt the euro., Anyway, I headed on to Seeboden, which is by a lake called the Millstaetter See, and one of the first things you notice about this town is it´s a tiny, obscure place to hold the biggest bodypainting event in the world (which is evidently the biggest thing that happens in Millstaetter See or anywhere in Carinthia). But its a place that is instantly recognisable for face and bodypainters. ´My dream is to go to Seeboden´ `I´ll see you in Seeboden then?´. And the place is very used to hosting the festival. Magnificently organised by local Alex Barendregt and his Australian wife (and presenter on Bodypaint City TV) Karala Barendregt, signs of the festival everywhere in Seeboden. Posters everywhere, painted mannequins on hotel balconies and in the middle of the main roundabout, and a tourist office, that is not very big, but completely dedicated t making sure participants in the festival know where they´re going, what´s happening when and how to get to and from the festival.

I stayed with Wolf, his assistant Shaun (and his dog Merlin, who has the biggest blue eyes you can imagine), and their Dutch friends Danni and Mirte (can´t spell it properly, although he explained it to me a million times) in a beautiful apartment a 5 min walk from the Highschool where the workshops were being held and a 15 min walk from the festival grounds (through cow and wheat fields!). This meant the average conversation was being conducted in at least two, generally three languages (I was the only one who didn´t speak German, but all of them spoke perfect English). I did two workshops with a Belgian facepainter called Michael from Fantasy Worldwide, who brought his two gorgeous kids with him (who only spoke Dutch, although I had many interesting conversations with them) as models to work on, and I walked around for two days with a monster face, or a vampire face, and learnt heaps of new techniques and ideas. On the Wednesday night was a party called the BodyCircus, which I knew about and assumed I couldn´t go to (You have to have a costume and/or bodypaint). But, after a detour to watch the world airbrush champ paint at a gallery in a nearby town, some of my classmates and I decided to make some costumes so we could go. We must have looked strange running around picking vines and wrapping them around ourselves, and we spent a good hour looking for some paints to use, but we were finally ready to go. And I am very glad we did. It was a fantasy ball in the local castle (because, like any good Austrian town, it has its own castle, complete with torture museum), with fire torches, UV lights and a contortionist. It was amazing.

But the actual main days of the festival were incredible too. 200 artists from 40 countries compete in different categories, and I spent hours just wandering around and watching the best at their art. I got to know quite a few of them as well, like Alex Hansen, the afor-mentioned airbrush genius, and his models Jay and Abby, and Yolanda Bartram, an amazing New Zealander artist (closest thing i could find to an Aussie, apart from Karala) who specialises in prosthetics and trned Jay into a monster more realistic than many I´ve seen in films (she did work on LOTR though). And of course Wolf, who came second in the UV competition with a new, 3D style of UV painting. The thing I noticed the most about all of them was their willingness to help newbies, and each other, and to answer my questions and tell me as much as they could about the industry and the art, and I am really grateful for that. The afterparty on the final day was amazing too; let me just say that there was a lot of paint involved, and most of my clothes have at least a little bit of paint on them now. I am so grateful to all the painters, models, photographers and organisers that I met at the festival that took the time to talk to some random Australian girl who´s just starting out as a facepainter, like Craig Tracy, who runs a New Orleans-based bodypainting gallery (the first in the world) who taught me a lot about the business of bodypainting, all the painters who I just watched, or who I had long conversations about what makes a good artwork(good ideas for competing as I plan to get together the money and go back next year!), and of course Wolf for taking the crazy Australian backpacker under his wing and teaching me it IS an art, not just a business, amongst many other things.

Anyway, as much as I would´ve like to stay there forever, I did have to leave, and flew to Dublin to meet Kim, an Irish girl I met whilst in Amsterdam. I´ll admit. I didn´t see that much of Dublin. I spent a lot of time on her couch watching movies (also dyed my hair a colour that stretches the definiton of red immensely) and can now say I´ve seen a lot more of the must-see movies than I had when I started - Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, Edward Scissorhands, American Pie amongst others. We had a great time and she did show me around her city (when she could; it rains several times a day in Dublin). And yesterday I left (I was very sad to leave, it was great to be there and I really enjoyed spending time with Kim) at 5:30am, took a bus to the airport, then two planes, another bus to the tran station, then three trains, and crashed at my hostel in Vienna at 10pm. That was my most intense day of travel so far. And I fly out of Vienna this afternoon to Bangkok. Crazy amount of travel much? Anyway, if there is internet available I will be blogging in the next two weeks, in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, before I head off to India.