"I've had a passion for world music for many years."I figured...

"I've had a passion for world music for many years."

I figured you might after Steinbeck and given you were busking in Townsville mall in the 80's. One of the most memorable performances I've seen was a busker doing Dylan in Cairns in '85. Simple but so freakishly good it overrides those 'Seatingticket-B2461' spectaculars. Kudos if you've read Solzhenistzyn, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and others. I guess that makes me birdbrained by comparison. I used to read novels but then they invented the internet. Reckon if he had the net, van Gogh wouldn't have written Theo one letter nor flicked a Prussian Blue.

I never went East until after the Wall came down. It was pretty ramshackle in '91 in Romania and Bulgaria, Hungary not so bad but kitsch in that Soviet styling and a realness that years of Soviet 'governance' and deprivation bestowed upon it. Yes, not good but a boon for an Aussie raised on pork chop and three veg and where diversity was galvanised iron or tile. First went to Poland in 95. Lots of small town/rural which for me was like walking into a dream even though they usually couldn't understand why. Had that dour ex-Soviet feel in the cities but the countryside and hamlets were trapped in a post-war time warp.

Going to Auschwitz back then was an interesting experience. No rules just go wherever you wanted. Being there in the snowy winter gloom, just two of us in the entire main camp where the worst of it took place plus just a few locals in the distance with their cars backed up filling their boots with the bricks from the chimney stack sentinels remaining after the rest of the barracks had long been burned or scavenged as well. Days like that impose themselves on you. Just you and the past. Alone with them in the stark minus 15C. If you don't grow from that, you're stunted.