A party hostel can really suck you in. There are good, wild times to be had at any given hostel but certain places really specialize in them. They have everything you need: good food, games and entertainment, fun guys, cute girls. And a full bar with a tab system. That part's dangerous.
At night these places are sheer craziness and during the day they provide a comprehensive survey of youthful human ruin. Half-naked men in wayfarer sunglasses passed out in the sun; bedraggled refugees from the previous night's cocaine bender drinking the shakes off; other cadres already back at it, taking whisky shots before noon.
My party hostel of choice in La Paz was Wild Rover, where the core of the Milhouse group from Buenos Aires was already assembled. I wouldn't see much of La Paz outside that hostel, which is a bit of a shame because the city has a certain chaotic charm to it and features beautiful views from almost anywhere in its Andean valley setting. But this crew was just too damn fun. I hardly knew them, at least in terms of length of acquaintance, and I already loved them. And hey, sometimes it's nice to lose yourself in a bar for a day or two. At least I like it. But when that day or two stretches into four or five it's time to flee.
The town of Sorata had been recommended to me by a girl I met back in Buenos Aires. It was little-known, small, and remote. A perfect escape. I crammed into a "collectivo," a minivan in which I was the only foreigner riding with 14 native Bolivians. Sorata lies in a valley and when we arrived at the road down the mountain we found a protest going on. I later learned that the mayor had been embezzling funds meant to restore the decrepit central plaza. The road was blocked to cars and the driver of the collectivo told me my only choice was to walk. I approached the occupied bridge. Aged campesinos with skin like creased brown paper stood shoulder to shoulder and would not let me pass. To come all this way jammed in that godforsaken van only to have to turn around would be one hell of a setback. But then a young guy at the end of the picket line motioned me over and let me through. Some of the old men shouted at me to stop but I just kept walking and didn't look back. Nobody came after me. The driver had told me it was fifteen minutes to town on foot. Forty-five minutes later I reached the main square and checked into a hotel.
The last day Kyle and I were in Buenos Aires there was an afternoon outing to an English pub to watch the Premiere League and play pool. We were joined - thirteen dudes that we were - by a Danish girl who had just arrived in BA. I'm not really into blondes myself but all the guys were drooling over her. She was admittedly very pretty and also turned out to be an awesome chick. I got quite the nerd-thrill when I learned her boyfriend lived in a Copenhagen apartment once inhabited by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. By the time I was in Sorata it had been a month since that day. I was writing inside a little cafe on the main square of this Bolivian backwater, nearly devoid of gringo tourists, when who should walk across the open door but this girl. I went out and flagged her down and she joined me for lunch. She'd come to Sorata to do a three-day trek up to a mountain glacier and was looking for someone to split the cost with. I was just planning on doing some day-hikes, no camping. But follow the beautiful European girl into adventure. I signed up.
We were joined by an English guy we met later that night, plus a local sherpa who acted as our guide. It was to be a very difficult climb, but still I did not acquit myself in the most heroic fashion. Especially the first day - there were times when every ten seconds I was bent over gasping for breath. (It was the altitude, guys.) But my performance improved as I acclimated and for the final ascent to the glacier on the third day I was right there with my companions. The scenery was breathtaking, of course, as was the feeling of accomplishment when we reached the top. It was hardest physical challenge I'd had since high school football practice, since August two-a-days. I was really glad I did it, but once was enough.
After Sorata we all went on together to Copacabana, a little town on the shore of Lake Titicaca. The lake is stunning - it's renown for its sunsets and on the clear day I was there it did not disappoint. The Englishman departed for Arequipa Peru and the girl and I were left alone. We went out for dinner and then played pool against two Argentines in a rock bar. It was all platonic.
That was it for Bolivia; I was on to Peru. As a parting gift protests shut down all the major roads in the country the morning I left, including my road to Peru, and I had to walk five miles with my backpack from the town to the border. But that's how it's solved, isn't it.
Late that night I would arrive in the ancient Inca capital of Cusco Peru.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Valparaiso
I was on the bus from Santiago to Valparaiso when I heard someone playing his ipod without headphones so we could all have the pleasure of hearing his music. I got up to ask the guy to turn it down. I spoke in English for some reason, probably because I was annoyed and didn't feel the responsibility to look up the Spanish expression. He didn't seem to understand and a girl seated across the aisle translated and he did turn it down after giving me some look.
I found myself next to him waiting for our luggage after the bus pulled in. Likely I was regretful about saying something that might have come off as rude to a local so maybe I apologized to him. Maybe I didn't though, I honestly don't remember. He looked at me.
"You wanna smoke a joint?"
"Yeah sure," I said.
"Ok, come with me."
I almost lost him. He got ahead of me and I had to jump up on a moving bus I saw him board. He was in his thirties, traveling with a woman that age or a bit older and her teenage kid. Through a mix of English and Spanish conversation I found out he lived in Santiago but was from Valparaiso originally and was here visiting. We went to their hostel and bought beer and drank it in their room. No weed was produced and I started wondering what was going on. Finally I asked him and he said he didn't have it and we'd have to go get it. Great. Whatever, I'd let it unfold. He had some errands to run first though.
After the hostel the four of us headed down to the street. My new acquaintance was carrying a duffel bag he had with him on the bus. We walked into a tienda off the main road. Dude made warm greetings to everyone in the store. He seemed to know everyone in Valparaiso. A fat lady behind the register appeared to be in charge and he heaved the bag up onto the counter in front of her and began to take from it all manner of store-bought goods, bottles of liquor and packaged meat and razorblades and cans of insecticide, to name a few. She questioned him on the price of various items and then they completed what business they were able to agree upon. He repeated this bit in several other stores until I finally asked him, in earnest, if there was some price difference in goods sold in Santiago versus Valparaiso from which he hoped to profit. That was naive. He then unashamedly pulled out some woman's credit card with which he'd bought the items.
He really wasn't a bad guy. He did force me to wait even longer after the fencing while he and his family went out to lunch in some disgusting restaurant but then finally we got a cab and were on our way. Valparaiso is on the Pacific Ocean but the land on which it was founded quickly rises up to surrounding hills and into these we drove. We went higher and higher and I was starting to worry. The property was getting shabbier, as it tends to in Latin American cities when you climb, and I had my ipad on me. Eventually the cab came to a stop at the end of a dirt alley that terminated at the edge of a cliff. I gave him twenty bucks and he ran inside a house. He came back five minutes later and got in the car and tossed me a handful of tightly-folded paper wads that contained maybe half a gram of shwag marijuana each. He'd bought some too and did the courtesy of rolling one for the ride down. The cab driver had nearly crashed head-on into a truck on the way up, while sober, so it made me nervous when we pulled over at a roadside vista and he smoked with us. But what the hell. And thus is the story behind the below picture:
When we got back into town he tried to fence the rest of the goods. Finally he led me back to his hostel and I collected my backpack. We said goodbye and I walked off toward my own accommodation. I got his number and told him I'd call him. I never did.
Neruda's house was a joy, and Valparaiso lived up to its vaunted reputation. I took some great pictures there, had some great walks. Now I was leaving the Southern Cone, and its relative wealth and development. Parts of Buenos Aires could be mistaken for Europe, parts of Santiago for a North American city. That wasn't going to happen where I was headed. I was going to Bolivia.
I found myself next to him waiting for our luggage after the bus pulled in. Likely I was regretful about saying something that might have come off as rude to a local so maybe I apologized to him. Maybe I didn't though, I honestly don't remember. He looked at me.
"You wanna smoke a joint?"
"Yeah sure," I said.
"Ok, come with me."
I almost lost him. He got ahead of me and I had to jump up on a moving bus I saw him board. He was in his thirties, traveling with a woman that age or a bit older and her teenage kid. Through a mix of English and Spanish conversation I found out he lived in Santiago but was from Valparaiso originally and was here visiting. We went to their hostel and bought beer and drank it in their room. No weed was produced and I started wondering what was going on. Finally I asked him and he said he didn't have it and we'd have to go get it. Great. Whatever, I'd let it unfold. He had some errands to run first though.
After the hostel the four of us headed down to the street. My new acquaintance was carrying a duffel bag he had with him on the bus. We walked into a tienda off the main road. Dude made warm greetings to everyone in the store. He seemed to know everyone in Valparaiso. A fat lady behind the register appeared to be in charge and he heaved the bag up onto the counter in front of her and began to take from it all manner of store-bought goods, bottles of liquor and packaged meat and razorblades and cans of insecticide, to name a few. She questioned him on the price of various items and then they completed what business they were able to agree upon. He repeated this bit in several other stores until I finally asked him, in earnest, if there was some price difference in goods sold in Santiago versus Valparaiso from which he hoped to profit. That was naive. He then unashamedly pulled out some woman's credit card with which he'd bought the items.
He really wasn't a bad guy. He did force me to wait even longer after the fencing while he and his family went out to lunch in some disgusting restaurant but then finally we got a cab and were on our way. Valparaiso is on the Pacific Ocean but the land on which it was founded quickly rises up to surrounding hills and into these we drove. We went higher and higher and I was starting to worry. The property was getting shabbier, as it tends to in Latin American cities when you climb, and I had my ipad on me. Eventually the cab came to a stop at the end of a dirt alley that terminated at the edge of a cliff. I gave him twenty bucks and he ran inside a house. He came back five minutes later and got in the car and tossed me a handful of tightly-folded paper wads that contained maybe half a gram of shwag marijuana each. He'd bought some too and did the courtesy of rolling one for the ride down. The cab driver had nearly crashed head-on into a truck on the way up, while sober, so it made me nervous when we pulled over at a roadside vista and he smoked with us. But what the hell. And thus is the story behind the below picture:
When we got back into town he tried to fence the rest of the goods. Finally he led me back to his hostel and I collected my backpack. We said goodbye and I walked off toward my own accommodation. I got his number and told him I'd call him. I never did.
Neruda's house was a joy, and Valparaiso lived up to its vaunted reputation. I took some great pictures there, had some great walks. Now I was leaving the Southern Cone, and its relative wealth and development. Parts of Buenos Aires could be mistaken for Europe, parts of Santiago for a North American city. That wasn't going to happen where I was headed. I was going to Bolivia.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Santiago de Chile
My only regret about Europe was that I didn't get outside more. I love cities, but even in Europe you get sick of them and have the need to go into nature. I saw plenty of beautiful country from the inside of buses and trains, but I could count on one hand the number of days, out of three months in Europe, that I spent outside one concrete jungle or another.
I consoled myself with the notion that South America was about outdoor tourism anyway and I would make up for it there. My first opportunity for this was in Mendoza, a charming city set at the foot of the Andes in Argentina's wine country. I went trekking, horseback riding, cycling; the whole bit. It was just a start, and I'd get further outside later. After this brief respite, though, it was back to the city.
That city would be Santiago, the capital of Chile that lies on the other side of the mountains from Mendoza. The bus ride there was the most scenic of my trip. The weather was sunny and mild in Mendoza but where I crossed the border high in the Andes it was snowing hard. About four hours after clearing customs I'd reached the capital.
The rap on Santiago is that it's sleepy and no great loss to skip. But I was to have one good night. I was drinking beer with a couple guys from Switzerland who were touring South America on motorcycles - and who were the greatest, nicest guys - when a local girl who worked there invited us to a party. She was studying to be an actress and it was some kind of theater fundraiser. We had nothing better to do so we followed her.
The setting was the first floor of a long, narrow house. It was an old building with high ceilings and worn crown moulding. In the front at a folding table students were selling beer and a mixed drink they put ice cream in. It was an ok scene, people milling about, smoking, talking in Spanish. The real show, though, was in the back.
Here was a large room with a concrete floor that could fit about a hundred people. There was a rudimentary stage set up in the back of the room and to the sides of the entrance bleachers that faced the stage. Up on it was a group of adult musicians playing traditional Chilean music. There were four men, some with instruments (an accordion was present), some who just sang. A sole woman playing a guitar. They all wore country clothes.
To the music they played a troupe of children danced. I guessed they ranged in age from 10 to 15 years old. The girls all wore the same white dress with a purple floral print and purple accents. The boys wore gaucho outfits, with wide black hats with neck cords and red tassels hanging from their waists. The boys wore spurs. The dancing was wonderful in its childish uncertainty and what a way, I thought, that some societies have for channeling the feelings that arrive at that age.
But in Chile despite a perhaps more wholesome upbringing kids still grow up weird. The music came to a close and the dancing children and their parents who'd been watching from the bleachers cleared out and who gets up there next but a young drag queen. The room went dark. He began (or should I say 'she'?) by lighting a cigarette and smoking it, or pretending to smoke it, way too fast, like she was out of breath and the smoke was air, to the point where she looked like she was about to vomit coughing. There then followed a monologue in Spanish that I couldn't understand but which got some good laughs and then a striptease dance.
After he/she finished a salsa band got up there and played for hours. We danced the night away. The two Swiss guys both pulled girls. I didn't feel like working. I'd be working the next night when I was supposed to meet up with a girl from Santiago who I'd met in Buenos Aires. Around this time I was feeling very lonely for a woman. I saw a cute hipster girl at the party, a local girl, who wore glasses. I watched her dance and finally I thought of something to say to her. She had a boyfriend, an American. "I guess I'm late," I said. She smiled honestly and sweetly and said, "but we can still talk!"
I had bad weather the rest of my time in Santiago and the girl I'd met in Buenos Aires cancelled on me. In one redemption I stumbled onto a dusty antiquarian bookstore where I found an old hardcover of T.S. Eliot's essays on poets. I sat down on the floor and read the one on Goethe.
I'd heard from everyone who had an opinion on Chile not to miss Valparaiso, a seaside city full of street art and a cultural hotbed. The poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda had a house there you could tour. That was my next stop.
I consoled myself with the notion that South America was about outdoor tourism anyway and I would make up for it there. My first opportunity for this was in Mendoza, a charming city set at the foot of the Andes in Argentina's wine country. I went trekking, horseback riding, cycling; the whole bit. It was just a start, and I'd get further outside later. After this brief respite, though, it was back to the city.
That city would be Santiago, the capital of Chile that lies on the other side of the mountains from Mendoza. The bus ride there was the most scenic of my trip. The weather was sunny and mild in Mendoza but where I crossed the border high in the Andes it was snowing hard. About four hours after clearing customs I'd reached the capital.
The rap on Santiago is that it's sleepy and no great loss to skip. But I was to have one good night. I was drinking beer with a couple guys from Switzerland who were touring South America on motorcycles - and who were the greatest, nicest guys - when a local girl who worked there invited us to a party. She was studying to be an actress and it was some kind of theater fundraiser. We had nothing better to do so we followed her.
The setting was the first floor of a long, narrow house. It was an old building with high ceilings and worn crown moulding. In the front at a folding table students were selling beer and a mixed drink they put ice cream in. It was an ok scene, people milling about, smoking, talking in Spanish. The real show, though, was in the back.
Here was a large room with a concrete floor that could fit about a hundred people. There was a rudimentary stage set up in the back of the room and to the sides of the entrance bleachers that faced the stage. Up on it was a group of adult musicians playing traditional Chilean music. There were four men, some with instruments (an accordion was present), some who just sang. A sole woman playing a guitar. They all wore country clothes.
To the music they played a troupe of children danced. I guessed they ranged in age from 10 to 15 years old. The girls all wore the same white dress with a purple floral print and purple accents. The boys wore gaucho outfits, with wide black hats with neck cords and red tassels hanging from their waists. The boys wore spurs. The dancing was wonderful in its childish uncertainty and what a way, I thought, that some societies have for channeling the feelings that arrive at that age.
But in Chile despite a perhaps more wholesome upbringing kids still grow up weird. The music came to a close and the dancing children and their parents who'd been watching from the bleachers cleared out and who gets up there next but a young drag queen. The room went dark. He began (or should I say 'she'?) by lighting a cigarette and smoking it, or pretending to smoke it, way too fast, like she was out of breath and the smoke was air, to the point where she looked like she was about to vomit coughing. There then followed a monologue in Spanish that I couldn't understand but which got some good laughs and then a striptease dance.
After he/she finished a salsa band got up there and played for hours. We danced the night away. The two Swiss guys both pulled girls. I didn't feel like working. I'd be working the next night when I was supposed to meet up with a girl from Santiago who I'd met in Buenos Aires. Around this time I was feeling very lonely for a woman. I saw a cute hipster girl at the party, a local girl, who wore glasses. I watched her dance and finally I thought of something to say to her. She had a boyfriend, an American. "I guess I'm late," I said. She smiled honestly and sweetly and said, "but we can still talk!"
I had bad weather the rest of my time in Santiago and the girl I'd met in Buenos Aires cancelled on me. In one redemption I stumbled onto a dusty antiquarian bookstore where I found an old hardcover of T.S. Eliot's essays on poets. I sat down on the floor and read the one on Goethe.
I'd heard from everyone who had an opinion on Chile not to miss Valparaiso, a seaside city full of street art and a cultural hotbed. The poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda had a house there you could tour. That was my next stop.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Money Problems: Buenos Aires
Given that we were engaged in a feverish debauch my friend and I did a reasonable job of seeing Buenos Aires. We checked out most of the notable districts, attended some cultural events, and even made an expedition to the childhood home of famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which we thought was a museum but turned out to be a regular home only featuring a commemorative plaque on the outside wall.
But we also spent a hell of alot of time drinking and recovering from that drinking, and that was time spent not seeing the city. As both a literary mecca, full of bookstores, and the most architecturally distinct city in South America Buenos Aires held a special allure for me, and I wasn't done with the place. So when Kyle left I moved to a quiet hostel away from the city center and set out to have another look. I toured the renown Recoleta cemetery, saw a tango show, had lunch with a Wall Street Journal correspondent. With just a day left in my stay it looked like I was going to have my cake in Buenos Aires and eat it too: an epic party and a quality tour. Then I got involved in something.
Though not known as a party hostel, the place I'd moved to in the tony Palermo neighborhood still offered the obligatory pub crawl a few times a week. I was on one of these, drinking in some bar when I started talking to a girl from Barcelona who lived in BA. Or rather, in hindsight, she started talking to me. She brought up some kind of currency exchange transaction she wanted me to do. Something about changing pesos into dollars and then back into pesos. Though I was half-drunk it still sounded fishy but she assured me it was perfectly safe, she did it all the time, etc. She said she'd pay me but what I wanted was the story.
"Ok, I'll do it," I said to her.
"Good! Tomorrow you call me and we go to the centro and do it."
"It's a plan. Just out of curiosity, how much money do you want me to change?"
"I don't know, like five thousand dollars?"
About three months before my arrival the government in Argentina forbid its citizens from purchasing US dollars. The dollar has long acted as a second currency in Argentina, due to historic instability in the value of the peso caused by government mismanagement. Thus people here covet the dollar, which they trust will hold its value. The new restriction, imposed in an effort to control the exchange rate, has only allowed the black market for dollars to further flourish. The official rate of exchange is something like 4.25 pesos for one dollar. On the street you can get over 6.
Foreigners, however, are not fully subject to the prohibition. Foreign tourists when arriving in Argentina can exchange their dollars for pesos at an official change-house. They then have the right to reverse that transaction and get their dollars back. That is, they have a way to obtain dollars that regular Argentines do not. In this loophole lie the scheme I would be accessory to. I would change pesos into dollars at the official rate and then give the dollars to the girl, who would change them back into pesos at the more favorable black market rate. They would make around 50% on their money.
I got in touch with the girl and gave her my name, passport number and date of entry into Argentina. We met up at my hostel and took the metro to the city center where the exchange houses are all located. We ducked into an alley and she produced a forged receipt stating I had received 20,000 pesos in exchange for dollars at a certain house. Then she handed me three wads of cash bound by rubber-bands that totaled that amount.
I walked into the office which looked like a small bank, with tellers at their windows. At first the woman I dealt with refused my document because it was dated differently than my entry into Argentina. Finally I got across to her that I had arrived one day but not changed money until three days later. She started the process. The period of time she had both my passport and the forged receipt behind the counter was a long five minutes. If she called me out then I was in serious trouble. I did my best fake space-out, trying to make it all look boring and routine and most importantly legitimate. On the inside I was sweating. At last she produced receipts for me to sign and when that was done she gave me my passport back and a ticket. I took the ticket to the next counter and was given fifty hundred-dollar bills and change. I counted the money and with it all there I walked out of the store.
I caught sight of my handler. She was watching me from the far street-corner. She hadn't taken her eyes off me for a moment. What if I had just stolen the money? Dived into a cab or run off. I thought about it. I crossed the street and walked up to her.
"Todo bien," I said and smiled a big smile I'd been hiding behind a stern face to make her nervous, for fun. She smiled back nervously and led me down the street. After we'd walked a little ways we stopped and I gave her the cash. She made a quick count and then peeled off one of the hundreds and handed it to me. My fee.
We went for a beer and while sitting there I asked her, "So you just hang around bars and look for foreigners like me to do this with?"
"Beats working in a restaurant," she said.
That afternoon I was on a bus west to Mendoza, the Andes, and Chile beyond.
But we also spent a hell of alot of time drinking and recovering from that drinking, and that was time spent not seeing the city. As both a literary mecca, full of bookstores, and the most architecturally distinct city in South America Buenos Aires held a special allure for me, and I wasn't done with the place. So when Kyle left I moved to a quiet hostel away from the city center and set out to have another look. I toured the renown Recoleta cemetery, saw a tango show, had lunch with a Wall Street Journal correspondent. With just a day left in my stay it looked like I was going to have my cake in Buenos Aires and eat it too: an epic party and a quality tour. Then I got involved in something.
Though not known as a party hostel, the place I'd moved to in the tony Palermo neighborhood still offered the obligatory pub crawl a few times a week. I was on one of these, drinking in some bar when I started talking to a girl from Barcelona who lived in BA. Or rather, in hindsight, she started talking to me. She brought up some kind of currency exchange transaction she wanted me to do. Something about changing pesos into dollars and then back into pesos. Though I was half-drunk it still sounded fishy but she assured me it was perfectly safe, she did it all the time, etc. She said she'd pay me but what I wanted was the story.
"Ok, I'll do it," I said to her.
"Good! Tomorrow you call me and we go to the centro and do it."
"It's a plan. Just out of curiosity, how much money do you want me to change?"
"I don't know, like five thousand dollars?"
About three months before my arrival the government in Argentina forbid its citizens from purchasing US dollars. The dollar has long acted as a second currency in Argentina, due to historic instability in the value of the peso caused by government mismanagement. Thus people here covet the dollar, which they trust will hold its value. The new restriction, imposed in an effort to control the exchange rate, has only allowed the black market for dollars to further flourish. The official rate of exchange is something like 4.25 pesos for one dollar. On the street you can get over 6.
Foreigners, however, are not fully subject to the prohibition. Foreign tourists when arriving in Argentina can exchange their dollars for pesos at an official change-house. They then have the right to reverse that transaction and get their dollars back. That is, they have a way to obtain dollars that regular Argentines do not. In this loophole lie the scheme I would be accessory to. I would change pesos into dollars at the official rate and then give the dollars to the girl, who would change them back into pesos at the more favorable black market rate. They would make around 50% on their money.
I got in touch with the girl and gave her my name, passport number and date of entry into Argentina. We met up at my hostel and took the metro to the city center where the exchange houses are all located. We ducked into an alley and she produced a forged receipt stating I had received 20,000 pesos in exchange for dollars at a certain house. Then she handed me three wads of cash bound by rubber-bands that totaled that amount.
I walked into the office which looked like a small bank, with tellers at their windows. At first the woman I dealt with refused my document because it was dated differently than my entry into Argentina. Finally I got across to her that I had arrived one day but not changed money until three days later. She started the process. The period of time she had both my passport and the forged receipt behind the counter was a long five minutes. If she called me out then I was in serious trouble. I did my best fake space-out, trying to make it all look boring and routine and most importantly legitimate. On the inside I was sweating. At last she produced receipts for me to sign and when that was done she gave me my passport back and a ticket. I took the ticket to the next counter and was given fifty hundred-dollar bills and change. I counted the money and with it all there I walked out of the store.
I caught sight of my handler. She was watching me from the far street-corner. She hadn't taken her eyes off me for a moment. What if I had just stolen the money? Dived into a cab or run off. I thought about it. I crossed the street and walked up to her.
"Todo bien," I said and smiled a big smile I'd been hiding behind a stern face to make her nervous, for fun. She smiled back nervously and led me down the street. After we'd walked a little ways we stopped and I gave her the cash. She made a quick count and then peeled off one of the hundreds and handed it to me. My fee.
We went for a beer and while sitting there I asked her, "So you just hang around bars and look for foreigners like me to do this with?"
"Beats working in a restaurant," she said.
That afternoon I was on a bus west to Mendoza, the Andes, and Chile beyond.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
A New Continent & An Old Friend
In college Kyle Weber was co-conspirator number one. If they put people in jail for consuming vast quantities of alcohol they'd have to separate us in prison or we'd just spend all day hatching new drinking crimes. Looking online I saw that Milhouse Avenue hostel, located in the center of Buenos Aires, seemed to be the main party spot and the best place to pick up where we always left off. We booked it.
The day I left Spain I saw the sun rise over the plains of Andalucia on a bus from Seville to Madrid and saw it rise again as my plane descended into Buenos Aires Argentina. The first thing I noticed was the change of season. Before this trip I'd only traveled abroad to Europe, which obviously has the same season as back home, and to the tropics, which have no season. Buenos Aires though, deep in the Southern Hemisphere, was the opposite of where I'd been. The oppressive heat of southern Spain was replaced by the cold air of early Spring. Pale winter sunlight on the august edifices, the monuments to faded glory.
I decided to walk the mile or two from where the airport shuttle dropped me off to the hostel. I already liked this town. It had a New York City vibe to it. Passing mile after mile of apartment buildings on the way from the airport I saw its massiveness and here in the center I could feel its density. There were people everywhere, many fashionable, absorbed in their appointments, errands, tasks. Their lives.
I was at the hostel maybe an hour when my friend walked in. We actually began with restraint - just two beers apiece over lunch in a literary cafe in the San Telmo neighborhood. We walked around, crashed a civic choir's concert, witnessed a youth street protest. Good, we agreed, to experience some culture before the debauch began in earnest.
By this point in my journey I'd stayed in quite a few hostels and met a lot of great people, but I never had a crew like the one we put together at Milhouse. Drunken lunatics with hearts of gold - there could have been no better accomplices. Later on I met other travelers who stayed there and didn't like it. They said the place felt sterile, the people distant. Guess we just lucked out.
Every night Milhouse or its sister hostel has a party and then everyone goes out to a club. That first night Kyle made it home before I did but when I walked in our dorm room he popped his head up.
"Hey bmac."
"Hey."
"How was the rest of your night?"
"Great. Yours?"
"Great."
"Going to bed?"
"I'm not ready to but i might."
"I want to keep drinking."
"Let's steal something from the hostel."
"You serious?"
"Yeah."
"Let's go."
Fortunately we revised our plans and decided to obtain booze legally. Perhaps our somewhat deranged, desperate state was more apparent than I imagined because we were refused entry to several establishments and sale at several stores. Perhaps it was just morning. It was getting light now and the night's last revelers were trickling out of the closing bars. Finally we found a store whose owner discreetly pulled four 16 oz. cans of Quilmes beer from behind rows of soda-pop in the refrigerated case and sold them to us. We left the store and made our way back to the Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. We found some park benches on a grassy median and sat down and with each of us having arrived twenty-four hours earlier from different quadrants of the world we cracked our beers and watched Buenos Aires come to life. Ladies walking small dogs, old men shambling along their secret predawn routes. It was warm out and the sky was blue. It was going to be a beautiful day.
And one of our greatest benders. After a riot of a soccer game, a weed-fogged drum party in a converted warehouse, and a giant t-shirt wearing cockroach, among other highlights, it was finally time to part ways. On his last day Kyle went out to buy some fabric his sister, who's a designer, had requested. He failed to do this and we went to a bar. Where else to say goodbye? When it was time I gave him a hug and wished him farewell and watched him walk out the bar. There were some Irish kids drinking there who had just checked into Milhouse. I pulled up a chair and got back to what I was doing before Kyle arrived: having a good time by myself. But it wasn't quite the same. When it comes to partying, I could only have so much fun without the guy.
ADDENDUM: On our second or third night at Milhouse we met a young English guy who was traveling in South America for a month and had come to BA from Bolivia straight through on an 80-hour bus ride. To alleviate the obvious hardship of riding a Bolivian bus for 80 hours he'd obtained in Bolivia, legally, a variety of pharmaceutical depressants to take on the bus. He was studying to be a doctor and had confidence that he could apply his medical knowledge toward getting him through the ride. His confidence was misplaced. Where he faltered was the dosage. Downers can cause forgetfulness and if taken to excess outright amnesia. When he first got on the bus he took too many pills, later forgot he had taken them, and took more. Soon he had taken around four times the proper dose, blacked out completely, and encountered misfortune. He lost his iphone, ipod, and other gear (South America and BA specifically seem to be a graveyard of iphones. I met 4 people, in addition to myself, who lost one). On the bus he met a Colombian guy named Fernando who, seeing his compromised state, had at one point placed his jacket in the overhead compartment for safekeeping. When they had to disembark somewhere to switch buses Fernando grabbed the jacket and tried to give it to our friend. "That's not mine," he said. Despite Fernando's pleadings he denied the jacket. Ten minutes later he asked Fernando if he had seen his jacket anywhere.
The day I left Spain I saw the sun rise over the plains of Andalucia on a bus from Seville to Madrid and saw it rise again as my plane descended into Buenos Aires Argentina. The first thing I noticed was the change of season. Before this trip I'd only traveled abroad to Europe, which obviously has the same season as back home, and to the tropics, which have no season. Buenos Aires though, deep in the Southern Hemisphere, was the opposite of where I'd been. The oppressive heat of southern Spain was replaced by the cold air of early Spring. Pale winter sunlight on the august edifices, the monuments to faded glory.
I decided to walk the mile or two from where the airport shuttle dropped me off to the hostel. I already liked this town. It had a New York City vibe to it. Passing mile after mile of apartment buildings on the way from the airport I saw its massiveness and here in the center I could feel its density. There were people everywhere, many fashionable, absorbed in their appointments, errands, tasks. Their lives.
I was at the hostel maybe an hour when my friend walked in. We actually began with restraint - just two beers apiece over lunch in a literary cafe in the San Telmo neighborhood. We walked around, crashed a civic choir's concert, witnessed a youth street protest. Good, we agreed, to experience some culture before the debauch began in earnest.
By this point in my journey I'd stayed in quite a few hostels and met a lot of great people, but I never had a crew like the one we put together at Milhouse. Drunken lunatics with hearts of gold - there could have been no better accomplices. Later on I met other travelers who stayed there and didn't like it. They said the place felt sterile, the people distant. Guess we just lucked out.
Every night Milhouse or its sister hostel has a party and then everyone goes out to a club. That first night Kyle made it home before I did but when I walked in our dorm room he popped his head up.
"Hey bmac."
"Hey."
"How was the rest of your night?"
"Great. Yours?"
"Great."
"Going to bed?"
"I'm not ready to but i might."
"I want to keep drinking."
"Let's steal something from the hostel."
"You serious?"
"Yeah."
"Let's go."
Fortunately we revised our plans and decided to obtain booze legally. Perhaps our somewhat deranged, desperate state was more apparent than I imagined because we were refused entry to several establishments and sale at several stores. Perhaps it was just morning. It was getting light now and the night's last revelers were trickling out of the closing bars. Finally we found a store whose owner discreetly pulled four 16 oz. cans of Quilmes beer from behind rows of soda-pop in the refrigerated case and sold them to us. We left the store and made our way back to the Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. We found some park benches on a grassy median and sat down and with each of us having arrived twenty-four hours earlier from different quadrants of the world we cracked our beers and watched Buenos Aires come to life. Ladies walking small dogs, old men shambling along their secret predawn routes. It was warm out and the sky was blue. It was going to be a beautiful day.
And one of our greatest benders. After a riot of a soccer game, a weed-fogged drum party in a converted warehouse, and a giant t-shirt wearing cockroach, among other highlights, it was finally time to part ways. On his last day Kyle went out to buy some fabric his sister, who's a designer, had requested. He failed to do this and we went to a bar. Where else to say goodbye? When it was time I gave him a hug and wished him farewell and watched him walk out the bar. There were some Irish kids drinking there who had just checked into Milhouse. I pulled up a chair and got back to what I was doing before Kyle arrived: having a good time by myself. But it wasn't quite the same. When it comes to partying, I could only have so much fun without the guy.
ADDENDUM: On our second or third night at Milhouse we met a young English guy who was traveling in South America for a month and had come to BA from Bolivia straight through on an 80-hour bus ride. To alleviate the obvious hardship of riding a Bolivian bus for 80 hours he'd obtained in Bolivia, legally, a variety of pharmaceutical depressants to take on the bus. He was studying to be a doctor and had confidence that he could apply his medical knowledge toward getting him through the ride. His confidence was misplaced. Where he faltered was the dosage. Downers can cause forgetfulness and if taken to excess outright amnesia. When he first got on the bus he took too many pills, later forgot he had taken them, and took more. Soon he had taken around four times the proper dose, blacked out completely, and encountered misfortune. He lost his iphone, ipod, and other gear (South America and BA specifically seem to be a graveyard of iphones. I met 4 people, in addition to myself, who lost one). On the bus he met a Colombian guy named Fernando who, seeing his compromised state, had at one point placed his jacket in the overhead compartment for safekeeping. When they had to disembark somewhere to switch buses Fernando grabbed the jacket and tried to give it to our friend. "That's not mine," he said. Despite Fernando's pleadings he denied the jacket. Ten minutes later he asked Fernando if he had seen his jacket anywhere.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
The Sisters Visit
You can't beat the first foray. For me there's no rush that compared to arriving in a foreign land for the first time as an unsupervised adult. I was lucky enough to have experienced this feeling twice before; the trips I'd taken prior to my current odyssey had been so short that the novelty never wore off. That feeling was sure gone now. After traveling for more than two months I'd long grown used to being away. The initial intoxication is replaced by subtler satisfactions: becoming a better traveler through the practice; a new view of your life back home; primary knowledge of a people, a nation, a continent. But you'll never get back that first high.
The next best thing is to see someone else get it. And when it's someone you love, it's a wonderful thing to witness. Neither of my sisters had been to Europe and this trip was their college graduation present. My dad had agreed to send them before I left home but less than a month before we were supposed to meet the plane tickets still had not been bought. But he did come through and the plan was set: rendezvous in Barcelona, travel down the coast to Valencia, then head to Madrid from where they'd fly back home. I took a train from Segovia to Madrid and then another to Barcelona. We had a very happy reunion at the hostel and then went out exploring.
Barcelona has all the basic requirements to be counted among the great cities of the world: beautiful streets and buildings; a rich cultural and arts scene; cool stores, bars, museums, et cetera et cetera. But they come for the party, for that uniquely Spanish brand of languid hedonism. And no place in Spain does it like Barcelona.
A little adventure wasn't long in coming. After some drinks and dancing I suggested we round out the night with a stroll up La Rambla, the main tourist drag in Barcelona. By day it makes for a family-friendly paseo full of flower merchants, souvenir hawkers, and street artists who'll do your portrait in five minutes. At night you leave the kids at home. African prostitutes solicit johns in the pale, lurid wash of the streetlights. Drug dealers softly call their wares as they walk past. Thieves lurk in the shadows. But one cool thing about Barcelona and Europe in general is that people can hang out on the streets doing whatever they want and the police don't hassle them like they would in the states. The locals take full advantage of this and so despite all the sketchy characters on La Rambla there's hundreds of people around, so it feels safe.
It was on our way there that we fell into it. Our guide was to be a drunken young Scot saying something about a "Sherlock Holmes" bar. I was a little skeptical but my sister Anne seemed to have no doubts and so I followed on. He led us to some random apartment building and up the back stairwell. "Here's where we get Taken!" I joked. But instead of getting kidnapped we found ourselves in a space that looked more like an apartment than a bar. But a bar it was - and one of the coolest I've drank at in my life, let alone in Spain. Soft light from worn, gold sconces; silhouettes in oval frames; good tunes, good crowd. My youngest sister, just out of college, conversed with a chic Mexicana expat who maybe gave her a glimpse of just how cool adult life can be. We couldn't have asked for a better first night or a better town to start in.
Their visit wasn't without its setbacks. We all had our share of bad moods, stupid spats, and a few logistical headaches as well, the most memorable of which featured a cab driver in Valencia screaming at me at the top of his lungs as we raced to catch a bus and I nervously expressed he might be going the wrong way. But that was all nothing. The time with my sisters in Spain was the best of my trip.
Toward the end of their visit we were sitting on the sidewalk terrace of some cafe talking about the trip and they said they felt different having come. To have a great time and go back changed - that's all you can ask from a trip to Europe.
The morning of their departure from Madrid I woke up early to make sure they got off alright. These were special companions, but goodbye was the same. I was alone again. I had ten days or so left in Spain and was headed south. Andalucia, a final surfeit of loveliness from a country that offers the traveler everything. But in a way, I was looking past it. Europe, and with it the first half of my trip, was ending. I was headed to the former colonies, to my own hemisphere and the route that would take me home. I was headed to Argentina.
The next best thing is to see someone else get it. And when it's someone you love, it's a wonderful thing to witness. Neither of my sisters had been to Europe and this trip was their college graduation present. My dad had agreed to send them before I left home but less than a month before we were supposed to meet the plane tickets still had not been bought. But he did come through and the plan was set: rendezvous in Barcelona, travel down the coast to Valencia, then head to Madrid from where they'd fly back home. I took a train from Segovia to Madrid and then another to Barcelona. We had a very happy reunion at the hostel and then went out exploring.
Barcelona has all the basic requirements to be counted among the great cities of the world: beautiful streets and buildings; a rich cultural and arts scene; cool stores, bars, museums, et cetera et cetera. But they come for the party, for that uniquely Spanish brand of languid hedonism. And no place in Spain does it like Barcelona.
A little adventure wasn't long in coming. After some drinks and dancing I suggested we round out the night with a stroll up La Rambla, the main tourist drag in Barcelona. By day it makes for a family-friendly paseo full of flower merchants, souvenir hawkers, and street artists who'll do your portrait in five minutes. At night you leave the kids at home. African prostitutes solicit johns in the pale, lurid wash of the streetlights. Drug dealers softly call their wares as they walk past. Thieves lurk in the shadows. But one cool thing about Barcelona and Europe in general is that people can hang out on the streets doing whatever they want and the police don't hassle them like they would in the states. The locals take full advantage of this and so despite all the sketchy characters on La Rambla there's hundreds of people around, so it feels safe.
It was on our way there that we fell into it. Our guide was to be a drunken young Scot saying something about a "Sherlock Holmes" bar. I was a little skeptical but my sister Anne seemed to have no doubts and so I followed on. He led us to some random apartment building and up the back stairwell. "Here's where we get Taken!" I joked. But instead of getting kidnapped we found ourselves in a space that looked more like an apartment than a bar. But a bar it was - and one of the coolest I've drank at in my life, let alone in Spain. Soft light from worn, gold sconces; silhouettes in oval frames; good tunes, good crowd. My youngest sister, just out of college, conversed with a chic Mexicana expat who maybe gave her a glimpse of just how cool adult life can be. We couldn't have asked for a better first night or a better town to start in.
Their visit wasn't without its setbacks. We all had our share of bad moods, stupid spats, and a few logistical headaches as well, the most memorable of which featured a cab driver in Valencia screaming at me at the top of his lungs as we raced to catch a bus and I nervously expressed he might be going the wrong way. But that was all nothing. The time with my sisters in Spain was the best of my trip.
Toward the end of their visit we were sitting on the sidewalk terrace of some cafe talking about the trip and they said they felt different having come. To have a great time and go back changed - that's all you can ask from a trip to Europe.
The morning of their departure from Madrid I woke up early to make sure they got off alright. These were special companions, but goodbye was the same. I was alone again. I had ten days or so left in Spain and was headed south. Andalucia, a final surfeit of loveliness from a country that offers the traveler everything. But in a way, I was looking past it. Europe, and with it the first half of my trip, was ending. I was headed to the former colonies, to my own hemisphere and the route that would take me home. I was headed to Argentina.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Salamanca
After Santiago I was headed to Spain proper. I qualify in this way because Spain is not exactly a united nation. True Spain is Madrid and the center of country. Historically it is Castile, Leon and Aragon, the regions united by the marriage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in the year 1469. The periphery of the country is essentially conquered lands. There exists some degree of separatism in almost all the outlying provinces and in several, such as the Basque country, Galicia and Catalonia, there are outright independence movements.
The city of Salamanca, some 200 miles northwest of Madrid, was my destination. Looking out my bus window the seaclouds of the north were soon gone and bright yellow sunshine filled the land. Haystacks cluttered the broad, dry plains like spilled corn. Like crumbs of gold. We arrived at the station and I made my way into town.
Almost every small to midsize city in Spain has at its core a lovely old town and sprawling out from that in all directions revolting blocks of painted concrete constructed in the 1960's economic boom. Many a skyline is ruined by this architectural blight. Luckily Salamanca is not counted among its victims.
In addition to being unmarred, the town looks unlike any other that I saw in Spain. Every building is made with a locally-quarried, reddish-yellow stone that at the end of the day turns gold and pink in the sunset light. There are tranquil, tucked-away gardens, a grand cathedral among other architectural wonders, and the most impressive public square in Spain. It's tough to beat the big cities, particularly Barcelona, for man-made beauty. But after those, and really equal to them only different, Salamanca was the loveliest place I saw in that country.
It's also a college town - the third-oldest in Europe. In my dorm room was a Mexican guy named Ossi, short for Osorio, who was a student and had just finished his term. We got to talking and he mentioned he was going for tapas and then salsa dancing with a girl from Valencia who he knew from school. He kindly invited me to come along.
That was the first and perhaps the only time I ate tapas with a Spaniard in a natural setting. That is, when the Spaniard was not a hostel employee or tour guide or something. Ossi kept making fun of the girl's penchant for dropping her napkin on the floor rather than throwing it away, a Spanish custom that inevitably leads to the quality of uncleanliness that marks all authentic tapas bars. She really couldn't help it.
After tapas we went to the salsa bar. Here I was left behind. I got out on the floor and did my best with the girl but I was a lost cause from the start. It's just not something a person can pick up the first try, or so I consoled myself.
My new friends showed me how it's done. The Mexican in his white pants was like a dervish and the girl, who by day was an unassuming biologist, became the sexiest thing in that bar when she started to move. They were perfectly in sync, in step and in the sway of their hips and in the way their arms trailed across the other's back when they turned in passing. I watched them dance a few songs and then Ossi came over to the table I was sitting at with a drink while the girl stayed on the floor. He was covered in sweat.
"That was some show you guys put on," I said to him.
"We have experience. If you practiced you could dance just as good."
"I doubt it."
We drank our drinks.
"Have you got any designs on her?" I asked him. "Because I don't see how you can dance like that with a girl and have there be no feelings."
"It was actually the first time we danced together. We met here, but I never danced with her before tonight."
"Well you two are just a natural pair then aren't you."
He just smiled and looked away.
There were plans to get chocolate churros from some place that didn't open until 4 AM but by the time we left the bar I was dead tired and I wanted to give them some time alone anyway. We walked back to the hotel and I said goodnight and left them in the street. The Spanish girl looked fresh as a daisy. She had wanted to keep dancing. She hardly drank a thing all night.
After Salamanca I visited a few old, small towns near Madrid. Segovia with its Roman aqueduct. Avila with its medieval walls entirely intact. I wanted to relax and be alone because soon I would have plenty of company. My sisters were coming to Europe for the first time. I would meet them in Barcelona.
The city of Salamanca, some 200 miles northwest of Madrid, was my destination. Looking out my bus window the seaclouds of the north were soon gone and bright yellow sunshine filled the land. Haystacks cluttered the broad, dry plains like spilled corn. Like crumbs of gold. We arrived at the station and I made my way into town.
Almost every small to midsize city in Spain has at its core a lovely old town and sprawling out from that in all directions revolting blocks of painted concrete constructed in the 1960's economic boom. Many a skyline is ruined by this architectural blight. Luckily Salamanca is not counted among its victims.
In addition to being unmarred, the town looks unlike any other that I saw in Spain. Every building is made with a locally-quarried, reddish-yellow stone that at the end of the day turns gold and pink in the sunset light. There are tranquil, tucked-away gardens, a grand cathedral among other architectural wonders, and the most impressive public square in Spain. It's tough to beat the big cities, particularly Barcelona, for man-made beauty. But after those, and really equal to them only different, Salamanca was the loveliest place I saw in that country.
It's also a college town - the third-oldest in Europe. In my dorm room was a Mexican guy named Ossi, short for Osorio, who was a student and had just finished his term. We got to talking and he mentioned he was going for tapas and then salsa dancing with a girl from Valencia who he knew from school. He kindly invited me to come along.
That was the first and perhaps the only time I ate tapas with a Spaniard in a natural setting. That is, when the Spaniard was not a hostel employee or tour guide or something. Ossi kept making fun of the girl's penchant for dropping her napkin on the floor rather than throwing it away, a Spanish custom that inevitably leads to the quality of uncleanliness that marks all authentic tapas bars. She really couldn't help it.
After tapas we went to the salsa bar. Here I was left behind. I got out on the floor and did my best with the girl but I was a lost cause from the start. It's just not something a person can pick up the first try, or so I consoled myself.
My new friends showed me how it's done. The Mexican in his white pants was like a dervish and the girl, who by day was an unassuming biologist, became the sexiest thing in that bar when she started to move. They were perfectly in sync, in step and in the sway of their hips and in the way their arms trailed across the other's back when they turned in passing. I watched them dance a few songs and then Ossi came over to the table I was sitting at with a drink while the girl stayed on the floor. He was covered in sweat.
"That was some show you guys put on," I said to him.
"We have experience. If you practiced you could dance just as good."
"I doubt it."
We drank our drinks.
"Have you got any designs on her?" I asked him. "Because I don't see how you can dance like that with a girl and have there be no feelings."
"It was actually the first time we danced together. We met here, but I never danced with her before tonight."
"Well you two are just a natural pair then aren't you."
He just smiled and looked away.
There were plans to get chocolate churros from some place that didn't open until 4 AM but by the time we left the bar I was dead tired and I wanted to give them some time alone anyway. We walked back to the hotel and I said goodnight and left them in the street. The Spanish girl looked fresh as a daisy. She had wanted to keep dancing. She hardly drank a thing all night.
After Salamanca I visited a few old, small towns near Madrid. Segovia with its Roman aqueduct. Avila with its medieval walls entirely intact. I wanted to relax and be alone because soon I would have plenty of company. My sisters were coming to Europe for the first time. I would meet them in Barcelona.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Santiago de Compostela
Two days after the bullfight I left Gijón on a bus to the city of Santiago de Compostela. Santiago is located in Galicia, a region of Spain in the extreme northwest of the country, north of Portugal. It is Spain's holiest city and its cathedral the final resting place of St. James the disciple. After the death of Jesus James went to Spain, then a Roman province, to preach the good news. He was eventually beheaded in Judea for the crime of subverting the state religion but his remains were supposedly repatriated back to Spain and, again supposedly, interred at the cathedral.
In medieval times there was a pilgrimage wherein devout Christians walked, usually from the south of France but really from anywhere in Europe, to Santiago. This journey was called the Camino de Santiago. It still exists today, and while some people still do it for religious reasons most just do it for fun. From the customary starting point in France you walk some six to eight hours every day for a month to get there. All over Europe but especially in northern Spain seashells - the symbol of the camino as the grooves of the shell lead to the base just as all possible routes converge on Santiago - are pasted on signs, chiseled into walls, and painted on streets, accompanied by an arrow pointing in the direction the pilgrim needs to go.
I met many people at my hostel and around town who had done the camino. You can see them too just as they arrive in the main plaza, dominated by the magnificent facade of the cathedral. Some sit by themselves quietly, reflecting on their journey. Others jump for joy and embrace their friends and fellow travelers. And then there are some who are so overcome by emotion that they break down crying. This last type is a moving one to see. (I am aware the Camino would have been a fitting activity given the title of this blog. I had a great time traveling northern Spain by bus and harbor no regrets.)
The final step of the journey is attendance at a high mass said daily at the cathedral. I met a girl at my hostel who had walked the camino but had not yet gone to church. She was waiting for a specific mass where something would take place which she could only describe at "the swing thing." She asked me to go and wanting to check out the pilgrim mass anyway, and being curious about this "thing", I agreed. It was a five o'clock mass. We took our seats in a pew about halfway up the rows. Mass was in but a wing of the great cathedral and behind the pews snaked a line of tourists waiting to venerate the saint's remains.
This being church the mass had hardly started before I started wondering how long this was going to take. And did I mention the mass was in Spanish. I got through it and after communion a team of priests started preparing the show we'd come for. They brought forth a silver censer the size of a fire hydrant attached by rope to a pulley on the ceiling, a hundred feet high. They opened it, piled in hot coals and on top of those the incense. Then they fastened down the cover of the urn and hauled it off the ground using the counter-rope coming down from the pulley.
The swinging started. The priests pulled the rope up and down in steady heaves like men ringing a belfry. They got it going and at full extension the urn was swinging in a half-circle the length of the church and nearly touched the ceiling. It was easily moving 50 mph. The church filled with the incense smoke and its sweet burning smell. This shit was dangerous. If the receptacle had snapped off a crowd of several hundred worshippers and tourists would have been sprayed with pounds of burning coals plus the urn itself, a sight part of me would have liked to see had I not been in this hypothetical volley's direct path. Maybe if they swung a giant censer of burning incense through church at the end of every mass, I thought, people wouldn't leave after communion.
It had rained the whole time I was in Santiago but finally opened up my last day there and I got to photograph the cathedral and plaza in good sunlight. A few results below. The next day I was off to Salamanca.
In medieval times there was a pilgrimage wherein devout Christians walked, usually from the south of France but really from anywhere in Europe, to Santiago. This journey was called the Camino de Santiago. It still exists today, and while some people still do it for religious reasons most just do it for fun. From the customary starting point in France you walk some six to eight hours every day for a month to get there. All over Europe but especially in northern Spain seashells - the symbol of the camino as the grooves of the shell lead to the base just as all possible routes converge on Santiago - are pasted on signs, chiseled into walls, and painted on streets, accompanied by an arrow pointing in the direction the pilgrim needs to go.
I met many people at my hostel and around town who had done the camino. You can see them too just as they arrive in the main plaza, dominated by the magnificent facade of the cathedral. Some sit by themselves quietly, reflecting on their journey. Others jump for joy and embrace their friends and fellow travelers. And then there are some who are so overcome by emotion that they break down crying. This last type is a moving one to see. (I am aware the Camino would have been a fitting activity given the title of this blog. I had a great time traveling northern Spain by bus and harbor no regrets.)
The final step of the journey is attendance at a high mass said daily at the cathedral. I met a girl at my hostel who had walked the camino but had not yet gone to church. She was waiting for a specific mass where something would take place which she could only describe at "the swing thing." She asked me to go and wanting to check out the pilgrim mass anyway, and being curious about this "thing", I agreed. It was a five o'clock mass. We took our seats in a pew about halfway up the rows. Mass was in but a wing of the great cathedral and behind the pews snaked a line of tourists waiting to venerate the saint's remains.
This being church the mass had hardly started before I started wondering how long this was going to take. And did I mention the mass was in Spanish. I got through it and after communion a team of priests started preparing the show we'd come for. They brought forth a silver censer the size of a fire hydrant attached by rope to a pulley on the ceiling, a hundred feet high. They opened it, piled in hot coals and on top of those the incense. Then they fastened down the cover of the urn and hauled it off the ground using the counter-rope coming down from the pulley.
The swinging started. The priests pulled the rope up and down in steady heaves like men ringing a belfry. They got it going and at full extension the urn was swinging in a half-circle the length of the church and nearly touched the ceiling. It was easily moving 50 mph. The church filled with the incense smoke and its sweet burning smell. This shit was dangerous. If the receptacle had snapped off a crowd of several hundred worshippers and tourists would have been sprayed with pounds of burning coals plus the urn itself, a sight part of me would have liked to see had I not been in this hypothetical volley's direct path. Maybe if they swung a giant censer of burning incense through church at the end of every mass, I thought, people wouldn't leave after communion.
It had rained the whole time I was in Santiago but finally opened up my last day there and I got to photograph the cathedral and plaza in good sunlight. A few results below. The next day I was off to Salamanca.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
The Victor Carried Flowers
The second day after I took leave of my Italian friends was a Saturday and was the day I'd picked to attend my first bullfight. I wanted to go on a weekend because I figured there'd be more people. I was worried nobody would come. Many of the Spanish I'd had the chance to ask about bullfighting said they weren't interested. That it just wasn't something the young generation was into. I didn't know how I was going to react to the violence and to undergo a potentially distressing experience for a dying tradition was a worrisome prospect.
There were the usual justifications for going. I was trying to travel deeply, to gain for myself some true knowledge of Spain, and how could I do that without bearing witness to perhaps the country's most famous symbol? It was something to see, something to say I'd done. I was curious. And yeah, Hemingway had loved bullfighting and written about it. But these weren't the real reasons I was going.
"When the beautiful carries off the victory over the monstrous, then is grand style achieved." I don't know how many times I've quoted that line as my aesthetic creed. Now I wanted to find out if I had the stomach for it. If I had the balls to willingly behold the torture and killing of an innocent animal for the beauty that might be born from it.
I got out of bed and after lunch at a cafe I walked to the corrida. The building was three stacked rings of red brick arches built into cream-colored stone. I found beside the main entrance a little window where tickets were still being sold. I was standing in line when a woman approached me. She was dressed up in a floral skirt and heels and a frilled silk blouse. She looked about thirty years old. She asked me in Spanish if I was alone and when I replied that I was she explained that she was in possession of an extra ticket. She was with her parents and her father had been offered a better seat by a friend which he had taken but now they had the extra ticket. I would have to sit with them.
This was too good. We agreed on a price and walked through the tall gates of the corrida and up the concrete steps from the concourse to the plain stone bleachers and took our seats.
Perhaps the eulogies were premature; the place was full. All segments of society seemed to be represented. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor as far as was discernible by their dress and seating section.
There was a traditional band hidden behind the far wall of the arena and at exactly five o'clock it struck up some plaintive air handed down from long ago and the party of combatants entered. The two matadors walked in the center dressed in embroidered suits and neckties and black bowed hats. Together with the picadors on horseback wearing armor and the banderilleros afoot beside them bearing swords and other instruments of death they looked like medieval knights at tournament.
After a short commencement ceremony the first team of assistants took their stations behind wooden stands located just inside the wall of the arena where the bull cannot get to and the bull was released into the ring.
At first sight it is a thing of terror. The size is impressive but more so is its quickness. You can see it knows it is in an unfamiliar place, at the least. Whether it knows it is being hunted I couldn't tell but I could tell it was scared and that this fear only made it desperate and more ferocious. After the bull was goaded by the assistants' taunting to tire itself by running about the ring the mounted picador came away from the wall. The bull attempted to gore the horse (which is protected by matting it wears) while the picador stabbed it in the back with his lance. After the picador had done his job other assistants, the banderilleros, emerged on foot with sticks fitted at one end with steel barbs. They got the bull to charge and just as it was about to gore them in one motion they leapt out of the way and stabbed the sticks into the bull.
The matador now entered the ring and engaged the bull. He dandled the cape before its eyes which gave him control of the animal and with this power willed the bull to trot back and forth across his leaning form like a showdog. But he must have made some mistake because during one close pass the cape became tangled in the bull's hooves and the matador lost hold of it. The spell was broken. The fighter immediately retreated to the wall and the bull trampled the cape and tossed it with its horns and then stared at the fighter with spiteful anger. Like he was rubbing it in. Which he was.
The cape was retrieved and returned to the torero and with it he restored his power over the bull. But the fanciness with the cape was over. The time to kill had come. Mesmerizing the bull with the cape in his left hand he leveled the sword in his right. He struck at the bull's back but the sword did not go all the way in. The crowd moaned at this failure and the protagonist again receded to the wall while the bull stamped and wheeled and tossed its head defiantly. The fighter was given a new sword and with this he stabbed the bull about the neck five or six times but still could not bring it down and the crowd murmured worriedly with each false blow and the fighter looked troubled and ashamed.
At last the bull was wounded fatally and it lay down to die. The crowd applauded politely but even to a novice such as myself it was obvious this fight had not been a success. There was a break in the action while the ring was cleared for the next fight and people got up from their seats to buy beer or use the toilet or smoke.
About ten minutes later the second fight began. The bull was prepared for killing in the same way as in the first fight. When the matador entered the ring blood was bubbling from the shoulderwounds and flowing with bits of gore down the flank of the animal in a glossy red streak. He made the bull his toy just as the first fighter had done only there were no mistakes this time and the resultant applause fed the fighter's confidence. At one point after a successful suerte (which is the word for any intentional maneuver in the ring) the fighter looked up to the crowd as if to call for witness to his dominance and in doing so turned his back to the animal entirely with those horns not five feet away.
The day had been cloudy to this point but around this time the sun broke through and with the late afternoon light arced over the sand the full visual poetry of the scene was made manifest. The matador was in the sun whose reflection slid up and down the chrome of his sword and his scarlet cape was bright as blood. The bull meanwhile stood in the shade cast by the roof and the bluish dark enshrouding him was like a cloak of doom. The time to kill was again at hand. The torero bent back his body like a dancer and taunted the bull to come and kill him if it dared and then he drove the point of the sword between the shoulderblades and pushed it in to the handle. He did not give an inch but rather stepped closer to the bull which staggered and knelt and finally fell to the ground not to rise again.
The handsome face. The blood on the gold brocade. The matador was given a bouquet and he walked a lap around the edge of the ring waving to the cheering spectators, many of whom rained down hats or scarves or other articles each of which he picked up and threw back to its owner with a broad smile.
When the matador had thus moved away from the dying animal to take the adulation of the crowd an assistant came forth and plunged a spike into the bull's brain and it stretched out dead. The crowd was going crazy with everyone waving white kerchiefs in the air and all eyes turned to the best seat in the house, the center balcony adorned with festoons and bunting and a red banner marked with the insignia of the Principality of Asturias where sat the president of the fiesta.
He was a large man probably sixty years old with a big mustache. The crowd cheered and waved their kerchiefs until finally the president stoic in his perch rose to his feet and bowed to the torero with one arm folded before him as a sign he would accept the ear. A roar went up from the crowd and someone bent down over the dead bull to cut the ear off and then wiped the blade each side in turn just above the gaping eye. The ear was then wrapped in a cloth and given to a courier for immediate transport to the balcony.
"So he gets the ear, the president?" I asked the girl.
"Sí"
"And he gets all of them?"
"Sí. If the crowd gives its approval."
"He's going to have a lot of ears."
"Sí. But he gives them to the people."
After the matter of the ear had been resolved the matador looked up to the president's booth once more and twirled his index finger in the air like an umpire calling a disputed home run fair. The president nodded his assent to what request I did not know and in the strangest part of this so foreign and bizarre spectacle the dead bull was chained by the horns to a team of horses and dragged around the arena while the crowd applauded wildly.
I found this act of applauding the dead animal particularly sad and morbid. It was at this point I realized that bullfights might not be for me. The problem was that I saw no danger to the man. To my eyes it had all the authenticity of professional wrestling except for the death which made it maudlin. Hemingway would say that either I could not perceive the danger to the man because of my lack of knowledge of bullfighting or perhaps it really did not exist because the bull was inferior. More likely though, he would say, is that the matador simply made a dangerous and difficult thing look easy by virtue of his skill. Despite this understanding I found myself rooting for the fighter to be gored. That the animal is tortured and killed in a bullfight does not bother me. If this stance makes me cruel or otherwise morally contemptible then fine. What did bother me was that the bull never seemed to have a chance. What I saw seemed an execution, not a fight.
If the unfairness of the contest and the bloodthirstiness of the crowd turned me off I will say that I found certain aspects of the spectacle to be unexpectedly beautiful. The costumes and the ceremony yes but especially the music. It was at times profoundly sorrowful, at other times triumphant, but it was always moving. A bullfight is a glimpse into the past. A nobler, more barbarous past when violent death had not yet been robbed of its realness and immediacy and the man who had the courage to get in the ring with a wild beast and the ability to kill it was a hero.
The expression in Spanish to ask if something is worth doing is, "¿Vale la pena?" or literally, "Is it worth the sorrow?" It's a fitting way to ask about what I had witnessed. I would say it was.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
España
Spain is a quartet of octogenarian dames closing down a cafe at 2 AM having finished their last coffees hours earlier. Spain is a joint smoked on a topless beach while drinking a cold beer bought for a euro off a Senegalese thief. Spain is a mad crowd waving white kerchiefs in the air so that the ear of a dead bull might be severed and presented to a man of high station as a token of honor.
It was scenes like these that made me fall in love, that made me return. I'd been country-hopping through Europe, in some cases feeling the brevity of my stay almost an insult to my host land. But I didn't know when I'd be back, and I wanted to see a lot. I had. It was my plan all along to make a close study of a single country. Spain would be that country.
The women had something to do with it, too. To talk of their physical beauty is facile. What it is instead is a certain sensuality. A confidence that seems to emanate not from the conquest or suppression of self-doubt but rather from the absence of it entirely. But it must be a trick, I told myself. Surely they're afflicted by the same insecurities as American girls.
If they are, they don't show it. When I was in Spain a year ago I could hardly say a word to them, and what I could say came out very wrong. One of my friend's favorite anecdotes from that trip was when I thanked a girl in Spanish after spilling a beer on her. Now I could at least get started. It was never about trying to get a Spanish girl. Funny how it worked out. I would end up with a girl who spoke Spanish, but she wouldn't be from Spain.
My itinerary would allow me to cover the entire country. First San Sebastian, located in the extreme northeast just across the border with France. Then I would travel west to the pilgrim city of Santiago, and from there to the middle of the country toward an eventual rendezvous with my sisters in Barcelona.
I was lying in bed in my San Sebastian hostel dorm room finishing my book when a group of three Italians walked in. A couple and another girl. They were all architects who had just finished grad school or were still in it. I would end up traveling with them for a week. The single girl, Michela, would be as close to a girlfriend as someone who you won't see again for a long time, if ever, can be. From San Sebastian we went to Bilbao and then Gijón, where a fiesta was taking place. This was my first fiesta in Spain and the charming little town was invested with a wonderful vivacity. A stage was set up in the Plaza Mayor and each evening what seemed the whole population of the town streamed up to the square to watch the entertainment, the elderly seated in folding chairs in the center and everyone else standing around them looking on or spilling out of the bars that lined the edge of the square. The night we went there were traditional dancers. The men on stage wore black pants and long-sleeved white shirts with red kerchiefs tied at their necks and black gaucho hats. The women in colorful garb, shawls about their shoulders and clicking castanets in hand and their tapping shoes ringing out over the crowd. My new friends were moving on the next day to A Coruña where Michela had done her Erasmus studies. But I wasn't done with this town. We were arm in arm in the plaza watching the dancers when she asked me about my plans and I told her I was staying. That I needed to stay and write about this town and the fiesta.
"Well," she said, "you say it will be hard for you to leave Gijón, but it's going to be harder for me to leave you."
This affair had been long enough for real guilt. The disappointment in her eyes she tried to hide. The old sickening feeling of hurting a girl.
Later that night when I held her in my room I said to myself "Remember this" because a moment like that is a perfect encapsulation of the traveler's life. A few joyous days together, a week if you're lucky. The entire time colored fatally by the parting that is so soon to come. Then it comes. And beyond that sadness the promise of the next step, and the new people, places and experiences it will bring.
She left the next morning and I was alone again. The atmosphere of the town at fiesta - with the dancers, the decorations, the ceremony - was lovely. But that wasn't why I stayed. The posters were all over town. In the foreground a simple table with two roses laying on it and beyond the table the sand of the empty arena. The main event of the fiesta was a week of bullfights, and I was going to one.
It was scenes like these that made me fall in love, that made me return. I'd been country-hopping through Europe, in some cases feeling the brevity of my stay almost an insult to my host land. But I didn't know when I'd be back, and I wanted to see a lot. I had. It was my plan all along to make a close study of a single country. Spain would be that country.
The women had something to do with it, too. To talk of their physical beauty is facile. What it is instead is a certain sensuality. A confidence that seems to emanate not from the conquest or suppression of self-doubt but rather from the absence of it entirely. But it must be a trick, I told myself. Surely they're afflicted by the same insecurities as American girls.
If they are, they don't show it. When I was in Spain a year ago I could hardly say a word to them, and what I could say came out very wrong. One of my friend's favorite anecdotes from that trip was when I thanked a girl in Spanish after spilling a beer on her. Now I could at least get started. It was never about trying to get a Spanish girl. Funny how it worked out. I would end up with a girl who spoke Spanish, but she wouldn't be from Spain.
My itinerary would allow me to cover the entire country. First San Sebastian, located in the extreme northeast just across the border with France. Then I would travel west to the pilgrim city of Santiago, and from there to the middle of the country toward an eventual rendezvous with my sisters in Barcelona.
I was lying in bed in my San Sebastian hostel dorm room finishing my book when a group of three Italians walked in. A couple and another girl. They were all architects who had just finished grad school or were still in it. I would end up traveling with them for a week. The single girl, Michela, would be as close to a girlfriend as someone who you won't see again for a long time, if ever, can be. From San Sebastian we went to Bilbao and then Gijón, where a fiesta was taking place. This was my first fiesta in Spain and the charming little town was invested with a wonderful vivacity. A stage was set up in the Plaza Mayor and each evening what seemed the whole population of the town streamed up to the square to watch the entertainment, the elderly seated in folding chairs in the center and everyone else standing around them looking on or spilling out of the bars that lined the edge of the square. The night we went there were traditional dancers. The men on stage wore black pants and long-sleeved white shirts with red kerchiefs tied at their necks and black gaucho hats. The women in colorful garb, shawls about their shoulders and clicking castanets in hand and their tapping shoes ringing out over the crowd. My new friends were moving on the next day to A Coruña where Michela had done her Erasmus studies. But I wasn't done with this town. We were arm in arm in the plaza watching the dancers when she asked me about my plans and I told her I was staying. That I needed to stay and write about this town and the fiesta.
"Well," she said, "you say it will be hard for you to leave Gijón, but it's going to be harder for me to leave you."
This affair had been long enough for real guilt. The disappointment in her eyes she tried to hide. The old sickening feeling of hurting a girl.
Later that night when I held her in my room I said to myself "Remember this" because a moment like that is a perfect encapsulation of the traveler's life. A few joyous days together, a week if you're lucky. The entire time colored fatally by the parting that is so soon to come. Then it comes. And beyond that sadness the promise of the next step, and the new people, places and experiences it will bring.
She left the next morning and I was alone again. The atmosphere of the town at fiesta - with the dancers, the decorations, the ceremony - was lovely. But that wasn't why I stayed. The posters were all over town. In the foreground a simple table with two roses laying on it and beyond the table the sand of the empty arena. The main event of the fiesta was a week of bullfights, and I was going to one.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
London
At last, a chance to breathe. After six weeks of staying in no one place for more than five nights and having traveled some three thousand kilometers by air, road and rail I was finally stopping. For ten days, in my friend's apartment where I'd have my own room.
About that friend. Randy Hines was one of the first people I got to know at university. We lived across the hall from one another in a residential college, different from a dorm in that it tried to foster a more intimate atmosphere focused on cultural activities and extracurricular learning. I think the plan was to reform our wild high-school ways and make a go at legitimate young society. It proved an ill-fated ambition. My program of self-improvement was already teetering when I met Randy and when we started hanging out it utterly collapsed. He was the first of many great accomplices.
After school he moved to New York for work and then to London. He was always generous and gracious and these traits seemed only to have grown more pronounced with his success. Aside from opening his home to me he took me golfing at a prestigious club in the English countryside and even to the Olympics. All on him. All without a thought of taking the money I offered for these outings. Men's weightlifting was the event. A North Korean won gold and set a world record in the process. After each successful lift he'd jump up and down and cry out in triumph and the crowd just ate it up. His government calling my country its sworn enemy be damned I cheered him on like all hell. Good to know someone over there's getting enough to eat.
I first visited London two years ago and loving it was a foregone conclusion. It was my first time in Europe as an adult, and before that trip I loved Europe as much as a person could love a place they'd never been to. I was intoxicated by the beautiful streets and buildings, the people, the way of life, and I realize now that being in this state prevented me from seeing the place fairly.
This time I was an experienced traveler with the time to form a complete opinion. Randy gave me every free moment he had but he was working during the day and had some other commitments as well. That was fine, I like being alone. But it's the biggest cities that make you feel lonely. Seeing the Londoners spilling out of the pubs in huge crowds after work, pint glasses in hand, or sitting in small groups in the parks on blankets drinking wine or champagne - I wanted someone to do those things with. The fact that I had come very close to moving here until that chance was taken from me by circumstances beyond my control made this outside-looking-in feeling even worse. This was almost my life, my city. The local language was my own, and the barrier to being a part of it all didn't seem that high. But it was.
That's not to say I didn't meet anyone. There's one more anecdote from London I have to include because I told someone I would. One of my last nights there I went to a house party thrown by some guys Randy knew. Most of the people there lived in London but I met this one girl who was a traveler like me. Like practically everyone you meet in that town she had a cool international history, she was from New Zealand but lived in Qatar. I sat at the window with her while she smoked cigarette after cigarette and we talked about traveling, the middle east, my own story. Her name was Jade.
I thought she was a really cute girl and later on in the night when I saw she was leaving I caught her up and told her exactly that. She smiled and said "You're a sweet boy" and our eyes held a moment too long and I planted one on her.
"Did you just kiss me?"
I looked at her. I didn't say anything.
"Did you just kiss me?" she repeated.
"I did."
"Are you going to put this in your blog?"
"I thought I'd leave this out actually."
"Well now I want to be in it. What do I have to do to be in your blog?"
"Kiss me again."
And she pressed her body against mine and we made out in the middle of the party. We stopped and I said Goodbye and it was hard to watch her go because I knew she was going forever. I gave her the address of this thing before she left. So Jade, if you're reading, you made it in.
Two days later I would get my flight to San Sebastian, Spain.
About that friend. Randy Hines was one of the first people I got to know at university. We lived across the hall from one another in a residential college, different from a dorm in that it tried to foster a more intimate atmosphere focused on cultural activities and extracurricular learning. I think the plan was to reform our wild high-school ways and make a go at legitimate young society. It proved an ill-fated ambition. My program of self-improvement was already teetering when I met Randy and when we started hanging out it utterly collapsed. He was the first of many great accomplices.
After school he moved to New York for work and then to London. He was always generous and gracious and these traits seemed only to have grown more pronounced with his success. Aside from opening his home to me he took me golfing at a prestigious club in the English countryside and even to the Olympics. All on him. All without a thought of taking the money I offered for these outings. Men's weightlifting was the event. A North Korean won gold and set a world record in the process. After each successful lift he'd jump up and down and cry out in triumph and the crowd just ate it up. His government calling my country its sworn enemy be damned I cheered him on like all hell. Good to know someone over there's getting enough to eat.
I first visited London two years ago and loving it was a foregone conclusion. It was my first time in Europe as an adult, and before that trip I loved Europe as much as a person could love a place they'd never been to. I was intoxicated by the beautiful streets and buildings, the people, the way of life, and I realize now that being in this state prevented me from seeing the place fairly.
This time I was an experienced traveler with the time to form a complete opinion. Randy gave me every free moment he had but he was working during the day and had some other commitments as well. That was fine, I like being alone. But it's the biggest cities that make you feel lonely. Seeing the Londoners spilling out of the pubs in huge crowds after work, pint glasses in hand, or sitting in small groups in the parks on blankets drinking wine or champagne - I wanted someone to do those things with. The fact that I had come very close to moving here until that chance was taken from me by circumstances beyond my control made this outside-looking-in feeling even worse. This was almost my life, my city. The local language was my own, and the barrier to being a part of it all didn't seem that high. But it was.
That's not to say I didn't meet anyone. There's one more anecdote from London I have to include because I told someone I would. One of my last nights there I went to a house party thrown by some guys Randy knew. Most of the people there lived in London but I met this one girl who was a traveler like me. Like practically everyone you meet in that town she had a cool international history, she was from New Zealand but lived in Qatar. I sat at the window with her while she smoked cigarette after cigarette and we talked about traveling, the middle east, my own story. Her name was Jade.
I thought she was a really cute girl and later on in the night when I saw she was leaving I caught her up and told her exactly that. She smiled and said "You're a sweet boy" and our eyes held a moment too long and I planted one on her.
"Did you just kiss me?"
I looked at her. I didn't say anything.
"Did you just kiss me?" she repeated.
"I did."
"Are you going to put this in your blog?"
"I thought I'd leave this out actually."
"Well now I want to be in it. What do I have to do to be in your blog?"
"Kiss me again."
And she pressed her body against mine and we made out in the middle of the party. We stopped and I said Goodbye and it was hard to watch her go because I knew she was going forever. I gave her the address of this thing before she left. So Jade, if you're reading, you made it in.
Two days later I would get my flight to San Sebastian, Spain.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Amsterdam
The first discouraging sign was the weather. It had been beautiful from Istanbul to Budapest, fickle in Germany, and when I got off the train in Amsterdam it was pouring rain. I never knew the extent to which climate determines the personality of a people - and where there's not much sun, they don't smile. It rains a lot in Holland and the Dutch are reserved almost to the point of dourness. When I got to my hostel - really a budget hotel - I found at reception a tired-looking monotone youth who acted much put out that I'd interrupted his computer time. He took from me the exorbitant cost of my stay, gave me my keys and the house rules and returned to his techno.
A little later on I was sitting in the joyless lounge of the hotel fucking around on my ipad when a group of people came in. One of them was a friendly young guy from the Pacific Northwest named Andrew. We started chatting about the usual shit - where ya from, where ya been - when the man behind the reception desk came out and started shutting down the room. At 11 pm. That's it, I thought. I'm changing hostels.
We were remarking on how lame this closing of the room was when Andrew said they were going to a bar anyway. With them was a Ukrainian girl who lived in Amsterdam and was showing them around. "Would you like to go to a bar?" he asked me. I said I would. I went upstairs to change and would meet them in the lobby.
We were outside the front door about to leave when he addressed me.
"By the way, we're all rolling."
I looked at him quizzically. "What?"
"Or at least we will be soon. She hooked up some MDMA. Just wanted you to know what was going on in case we started acting weird. We put it in the water."
He was holding a half-full plastic water bottle.
"Oh," I said. A moment passed.
"Unless...you'd like to join us?"
I looked at the bottle. Another moment. Then I took the bottle unscrewed the cap and drank two huge gulps of the chemical-flavored liquid.
"That'll be enough," said the girl.
"Good. Let's roll."
It was a strange and motley patronage assembled at the club we entered. A group of ten or so Asians, some dancing awkwardly while the others sat at a table behind a velvet rope. I took them with no further basis to be nouveau riche Chinese. A Dutchman overdressed in a poorly matched coat and tie talking to two women. Tourists like ourselves. And standing in front of me at the bar were the strangest customers of all.
The first was a woman wearing a kind of corset made of what looked like black rubber. It covered her chest but left her back and shoulders bare and these were covered in strange tattoos. Hieroglyphs and arabesques and foreign words. All black ink on that pale skin. She was talking to a tanned woman with long hair and tight jeans each the same color of deepest black. This one wore a hot pink tanktop and was so, so thin that as I watched her sway rhythmically to the music she was like a snake charmed to dance entirely upright.
The Ukrainian girl seated next to me gestured at them. "Prostitutes", she said.
To top off this bizarre milieu the bartender was a dead ringer for Lindsay Lohan only she had a wax face. I was in a delirious state of heightened observation. I found myself rubbing my arms and chest just for the sensation of it. I redoubled my attention on the surreal scene before me, all of it scored and striped by the red lasers of the clublights and dreamily obscured by smoke from a machine.
Along with the two whores already described two more were congregated at the bar around a man who was obviously their pimp. He had olive skin and oiled hair and I placed him in his early twenties. He was well-dressed. He wore a Burberry sweater. The pimp would in turn hold the girls to his side and whisper coyly in their ears and then he would shove them away. There was one whore who was the least attractive of the bunch, tall and fat and ugly, who stood apart from the rest of the girls doting on the pimp. Pensive. Like an outcast. Watching this group interact I reflected that when you see a pimp in his element you're looking at a low form of life indeed.
Soon more whores had seeped into the club and they'd taken to dancing on the bar and tabletops with their perfect bodies, their distorted faces. At this point I wondered aloud whether we were in an outright brothel but the local girl assured me we were not. She said she didn't like it either but that it was a Monday night and everywhere else was closed.
We drank and danced for a while and then moved to another club for one more beer before calling it a night. I got into bed and passed out.
I awoke the next morning with a pretty good hangover. I ran into the people I'd gone out with the previous night. They were going to a coffeeshop around the corner from the hotel. I said I'd meet them there.
In Amsterdam a coffeeshop is a place where marijuana can be legally bought and smoked. What we call a coffee shop they just call a cafe. To someone used to the caution and secrecy with which the drug is treated by users in the US the novelty of being able to walk off the street, sit down and smoke it, of smelling it everywhere, is strange to the point of comedy. I found my friends and walked up to the bar to make a purchase. A cigarette of pure marijuana cost eight euro. I ordered one of these and coffee and received my item in a yellow plastic vial.
I sat down at the table and lit up and we sat smoking and drinking coffee in our shared hungover daze. There were plans to do a canal boat tour and I asked if I could tag along. Andrew looked at me with a look that admonished me for even thinking I had to ask. "Please dude," he said. "We've been waiting for you."
Being pretty hungover already I decided to just keep going and stay in that night. Andrew and I bought two beers apiece for the ride and I ended up drinking one of his. When we got off the boat I was drunk. As planned we were now close to our next sightseeing destination: the Red Light district.
Amsterdam, with its picturesque canals lined with tall and narrow homes and its ubiquitous cyclists rolling over the bridges and along the banks would be a place well worth visiting on the aesthetic merits alone. But this placid, quintessentially European setting combined with the tolerance for vice makes the city a truly unique place in the world. The Red Light district has a sketchy feeling to it even during the day. Here all pretense is dropped. Prostitutes dressed in but lingerie sit on faux-ornate chairs in booths covered floor to ceiling in red velvet that you step into directly from the street. When a man enters a curtain is drawn and the business conducted right there. Most of the women are old and fat and ugly and they bang on the glass doors of their booths and holler at you in Dutch to come to them. Some though are young and attractive and they do not call but only stare at you boldly and bid you come with their eyes alone. While we were walking around in our fucked-up state the bells of a nearby church began tolling loudly and I asked an Australian girl in our group what she thought and she said she felt like she was dreaming. A dream or a nightmare, I wondered.
After walking around some more I went back to the hotel to crash and recover from the night and day's debauch.
For the first four nights of my stay I was alone in my six-bed dorm with the weirdest girl ever. She was a Swiss national but she was not of European descent. She was tall and had hair of thin braids dyed blonde that went all the way down her back. Several times early in my stay I would glance over to find her staring at me and I actually had to tell her to stop doing this, which she obliged. She was harmless, just weird.
When she found out I was American she perked up and said she was moving to LA. "You wanna be an actress?" I said. She said no, a singer. I thought there was sufficient sarcasm in my voice to deter further conversation but apparently not. She said that night she happened to be singing at a local jazz club. She asked me to come watch her. Sometimes when you're traveling you just have to go with things despite having some reservations. I said sure thing.
I found out on the way to the bar that she didn't have an appointment to sing and there wasn't even an open mic, she was just going to try and cajole her way onstage. This only added to my initial skepticism and I was starting to regret coming. But the errand was partially redeemed when I heard the band play - they were incredible, each man an absolute virtuoso. The downside was that I figured no way musicians of this caliber were going to let some weirdo girl they'd never seen before just stand up and sing with them. What if she sucked? But she asked and must have said the right things because they agreed. And she wasn't half bad.
Her going to LA will be a complete disaster. But that wasn't the point. It had been a fun night and something different. And relatively wholesome.
The rest of my stay finished up quietly. The weather cleared up the day before I was to leave and at last this beautiful city was pleasant also. I was the only witness to a marriage proposal on the Canal Amstel and I gave the couple a thumbs up which they returned. I met a local seacaptain who kept gazing at me with a strange twinkle in his eye and later while taking me to a bar had us stop by his place where I thought I might get trafficked but nothing happened.
I walked around, talked to locals in cafes, read and wrote and drank.
Amsterdam was a highlight. Now I was leaving the Continent. On to London.
A little later on I was sitting in the joyless lounge of the hotel fucking around on my ipad when a group of people came in. One of them was a friendly young guy from the Pacific Northwest named Andrew. We started chatting about the usual shit - where ya from, where ya been - when the man behind the reception desk came out and started shutting down the room. At 11 pm. That's it, I thought. I'm changing hostels.
We were remarking on how lame this closing of the room was when Andrew said they were going to a bar anyway. With them was a Ukrainian girl who lived in Amsterdam and was showing them around. "Would you like to go to a bar?" he asked me. I said I would. I went upstairs to change and would meet them in the lobby.
We were outside the front door about to leave when he addressed me.
"By the way, we're all rolling."
I looked at him quizzically. "What?"
"Or at least we will be soon. She hooked up some MDMA. Just wanted you to know what was going on in case we started acting weird. We put it in the water."
He was holding a half-full plastic water bottle.
"Oh," I said. A moment passed.
"Unless...you'd like to join us?"
I looked at the bottle. Another moment. Then I took the bottle unscrewed the cap and drank two huge gulps of the chemical-flavored liquid.
"That'll be enough," said the girl.
"Good. Let's roll."
It was a strange and motley patronage assembled at the club we entered. A group of ten or so Asians, some dancing awkwardly while the others sat at a table behind a velvet rope. I took them with no further basis to be nouveau riche Chinese. A Dutchman overdressed in a poorly matched coat and tie talking to two women. Tourists like ourselves. And standing in front of me at the bar were the strangest customers of all.
The first was a woman wearing a kind of corset made of what looked like black rubber. It covered her chest but left her back and shoulders bare and these were covered in strange tattoos. Hieroglyphs and arabesques and foreign words. All black ink on that pale skin. She was talking to a tanned woman with long hair and tight jeans each the same color of deepest black. This one wore a hot pink tanktop and was so, so thin that as I watched her sway rhythmically to the music she was like a snake charmed to dance entirely upright.
The Ukrainian girl seated next to me gestured at them. "Prostitutes", she said.
To top off this bizarre milieu the bartender was a dead ringer for Lindsay Lohan only she had a wax face. I was in a delirious state of heightened observation. I found myself rubbing my arms and chest just for the sensation of it. I redoubled my attention on the surreal scene before me, all of it scored and striped by the red lasers of the clublights and dreamily obscured by smoke from a machine.
Along with the two whores already described two more were congregated at the bar around a man who was obviously their pimp. He had olive skin and oiled hair and I placed him in his early twenties. He was well-dressed. He wore a Burberry sweater. The pimp would in turn hold the girls to his side and whisper coyly in their ears and then he would shove them away. There was one whore who was the least attractive of the bunch, tall and fat and ugly, who stood apart from the rest of the girls doting on the pimp. Pensive. Like an outcast. Watching this group interact I reflected that when you see a pimp in his element you're looking at a low form of life indeed.
Soon more whores had seeped into the club and they'd taken to dancing on the bar and tabletops with their perfect bodies, their distorted faces. At this point I wondered aloud whether we were in an outright brothel but the local girl assured me we were not. She said she didn't like it either but that it was a Monday night and everywhere else was closed.
We drank and danced for a while and then moved to another club for one more beer before calling it a night. I got into bed and passed out.
I awoke the next morning with a pretty good hangover. I ran into the people I'd gone out with the previous night. They were going to a coffeeshop around the corner from the hotel. I said I'd meet them there.
In Amsterdam a coffeeshop is a place where marijuana can be legally bought and smoked. What we call a coffee shop they just call a cafe. To someone used to the caution and secrecy with which the drug is treated by users in the US the novelty of being able to walk off the street, sit down and smoke it, of smelling it everywhere, is strange to the point of comedy. I found my friends and walked up to the bar to make a purchase. A cigarette of pure marijuana cost eight euro. I ordered one of these and coffee and received my item in a yellow plastic vial.
I sat down at the table and lit up and we sat smoking and drinking coffee in our shared hungover daze. There were plans to do a canal boat tour and I asked if I could tag along. Andrew looked at me with a look that admonished me for even thinking I had to ask. "Please dude," he said. "We've been waiting for you."
Being pretty hungover already I decided to just keep going and stay in that night. Andrew and I bought two beers apiece for the ride and I ended up drinking one of his. When we got off the boat I was drunk. As planned we were now close to our next sightseeing destination: the Red Light district.
Amsterdam, with its picturesque canals lined with tall and narrow homes and its ubiquitous cyclists rolling over the bridges and along the banks would be a place well worth visiting on the aesthetic merits alone. But this placid, quintessentially European setting combined with the tolerance for vice makes the city a truly unique place in the world. The Red Light district has a sketchy feeling to it even during the day. Here all pretense is dropped. Prostitutes dressed in but lingerie sit on faux-ornate chairs in booths covered floor to ceiling in red velvet that you step into directly from the street. When a man enters a curtain is drawn and the business conducted right there. Most of the women are old and fat and ugly and they bang on the glass doors of their booths and holler at you in Dutch to come to them. Some though are young and attractive and they do not call but only stare at you boldly and bid you come with their eyes alone. While we were walking around in our fucked-up state the bells of a nearby church began tolling loudly and I asked an Australian girl in our group what she thought and she said she felt like she was dreaming. A dream or a nightmare, I wondered.
After walking around some more I went back to the hotel to crash and recover from the night and day's debauch.
For the first four nights of my stay I was alone in my six-bed dorm with the weirdest girl ever. She was a Swiss national but she was not of European descent. She was tall and had hair of thin braids dyed blonde that went all the way down her back. Several times early in my stay I would glance over to find her staring at me and I actually had to tell her to stop doing this, which she obliged. She was harmless, just weird.
When she found out I was American she perked up and said she was moving to LA. "You wanna be an actress?" I said. She said no, a singer. I thought there was sufficient sarcasm in my voice to deter further conversation but apparently not. She said that night she happened to be singing at a local jazz club. She asked me to come watch her. Sometimes when you're traveling you just have to go with things despite having some reservations. I said sure thing.
I found out on the way to the bar that she didn't have an appointment to sing and there wasn't even an open mic, she was just going to try and cajole her way onstage. This only added to my initial skepticism and I was starting to regret coming. But the errand was partially redeemed when I heard the band play - they were incredible, each man an absolute virtuoso. The downside was that I figured no way musicians of this caliber were going to let some weirdo girl they'd never seen before just stand up and sing with them. What if she sucked? But she asked and must have said the right things because they agreed. And she wasn't half bad.
Her going to LA will be a complete disaster. But that wasn't the point. It had been a fun night and something different. And relatively wholesome.
The rest of my stay finished up quietly. The weather cleared up the day before I was to leave and at last this beautiful city was pleasant also. I was the only witness to a marriage proposal on the Canal Amstel and I gave the couple a thumbs up which they returned. I met a local seacaptain who kept gazing at me with a strange twinkle in his eye and later while taking me to a bar had us stop by his place where I thought I might get trafficked but nothing happened.
I walked around, talked to locals in cafes, read and wrote and drank.
Amsterdam was a highlight. Now I was leaving the Continent. On to London.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Germany - Town & Country
Three straight weeks of partying finally caught up with me in Berlin and I got sick. Sucks not being able to drink in one of the nightlife capitals of Europe but when you're on the road six months the priority is to just get better. My first night I unwisely attempted to go out and had to turn back at the door of a bar I'd traveled a half-hour to get to.
I forced myself outside the next day. The first thing I noticed was the architecture. Unusual for Europe Berlin has few old buildings. It looks like a place devoid of history (when of course it is the opposite), fashioned out of nothing by the city's brilliant unapprenticed youth. That's the second thing I noticed. The young have made it their own. They swarm the streets in their strange dark clothing, tattoo the buildings with wondrous designs, smash the half-liter beer bottles they all carry around at night onto the sidewalks (in Friedrichshain, a popular hood for this crowd, they're covered in broken glass.) Young people are everywhere, and when you see an old person they're like an uncommon oddity you had almost forgotten about.
Berlin is seldom traditional-Europe beautiful. Sure there are more civilized districts than Friedrichshain, and the parks, monuments and institutional castles proceeding west from the Brandenberg Gate are reliably lovely. But the soul of Berlin is alternative, and poor. For street art it's without rival in Europe, and a young German native of Berlin harangued me about the moral imperative to reclaim public space from advertisers. Across the facade of one Soviet-era tenement was hung a huge sign reading "Fuck Media", part of a grassroots campaign against a planned corporate development of land along the river. But there are cracks in the proletarian armor. Below this impressive, wall-sized relief I recognized the "Go Forth" slogan of Levi's current ad campaign:
I was informed it had been done by a respected Portuguese street artist. So at least one guy's "sold out." Call them cooptions or collaborations, they're inevitable - and not all bad. I think the Levi's campaign is beautifully done and this artwork a cool and inspired extension of it. It's only when money becomes too interested in a place that it loses its authenticity and so too its appeal.
On top of being sick I only had two nights in Berlin which is really a crime. I was traveling too fast - for a major city you need at least four nights. I was looking forward to London and Spain where I'd be able to slow down. But I couldn't slow down yet. I had a rendezvous.
The seed of this whole voyage was a ten day trip I took to Spain last year with two of my closest friends. I had the time of my life and saw what I'd been missing not having traveled before. On that trip in the city of Valencia I met two German girls, Mariam and Lena. Over the next year they would badger me on facebook about when I was coming to visit them and I would say 'the next time I'm in Germany.' But I doubted I'd see them again. Then this trip took shape, and so did plans to come. I would meet Mariam at the train station in Hannover and we'd catch another train to Oldenberg, where the girls grew up and Lena still lives.
I knew nothing of our plans - where I would sleep that night, what we'd do, if this was going to be worth it. Turned out we were going to Mariam's family home. It was midafternoon when we arrived at the house she grew up in outside Oldenberg. Her family were all seated at a picnic table in the back yard. They had just finished lunch and were drinking little glasses of beer or wine or juice and talking. I was given a beer and we sat down with them. They were kind enough to speak English as I don't know a word of German.
Mariam's brother and his girlfriend live nearby in a farmhouse with horses and it was decided that a jaunt was in order. We took beers and attached one of the horses to a four-person coach and then we were off with the horse's hooves clopping over the German country backroads and Lena's dog loping alongside the coach and beaming. Here's me at the reins:
I stayed there one night and was shown every courtesy. I ate a delicious meal for free at a Turkish restaurant Mariam's father has owned for thirty years. When I asked if I could do my laundry the old lady who lived with them and who seemed to occupy the dual-role of grandmother and maid simply said "give it to me" and that night I found my clothes neatly folded in a basket in my room. When I came downstairs in the morning there was a full breakfast on the table and I was sent off a little while later with an embarrassment of goods, sandwiches and fruit and candy and a glass jar of strawberry jam made from the mother's garden that I said I loved.
Mariam and her brother drove me to the train and we stopped so I could buy a bottle of California wine for their parents.
If following up a recuperative stay in a family home with a blow-out debauch had become a strategy I was sticking to it. I hugged Mariam goodbye on the station platform and thanked her once more for everything and boarded a train bound for Amsterdam.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Incredible Budapest
I disembarked at the Keleti Railway Station in central Budapest at nine o'clock in the evening. Already I saw it was dirtier than Vienna, more weathered. The streets had a layer of grime on them. Litter on the sidewalks. The equally glorious buildings weren't kept up to the same standard; they needed to be restored, repainted. In Budapest I sensed decay. I sensed a place that - unlike some Western European capitals I'd visited - could no longer afford to maintain the splendor reared up in its golden age. But Budapest isn't the worse for it: the way its modern inhabitants embrace and interpret the decaying past is what gives the city its signature ambience of gothic cool.
Let me say it succinctly: Budapest is incredible. Beautiful during the day, a hell of a lot of fun at night, with a deluge of art and culture everywhere you turn. I saw in a decrepit, long-abandoned synagogue huge modern paintings suspended from a fifty-foot domed ceiling and not a trace of an exhibition space besides. The paintings hanging ghostly and unexplained as if left by squatting artists as payment in kind. I drank at some of the coolest bars I've ever been in my life, "ruin pubs" where locals gather in crumbling mansions turned with found decor to hip, stylish haunts. Where once lived prosperous merchant families, landed gentry, servants of the empire.
It would prove a hard place to leave, and not just because of what I'd see. I had a great time, with some wonderful people. Here's what happened to me.
From the train station I made my way to Carpe Noctem hostel. (That's "Seize the Night" in Latin. Sorry had to, Classics major.) I hove up around nine o'clock and found the place nearly empty. The staff member on duty informed me that most of the guests had already taken off for that night's drinking event, a karaoke bar called Morrison's. I got directions and headed over.
Carpe Noctem is affiliated with several other Party Hostels (they call themselves that explicitly), so each night you go out with them you get a good-sized crowd of young tourists looking to have fun. After about an hour in this bar it seemed like everyone was making out. I'll admit I hadn't had much luck with the ladies so far on this trip and I was starting to feel a little lonely. Then I saw a girl eyeing me from the bar.
She was American from Seattle and was a studying archaeology. She was really into it and we talked for a while about Egypt and ancient Greece and Rome. Finally a girl I liked and who seemed to like me. We went to the dancefloor and made out a little and when she went to the bathroom I told her I'd meet her at the bar and she smiled and nodded yes.
I never saw her again. I walked up and down that bar ten minutes and at six foot five I'm hard to miss. I don't know if she got sick or too drunk or if she just changed her mind. Anyway I was bummed out and not really knowing anyone I walked out of the bar and started home.
I'd gone perhaps a hundred feet when I heard good music and voices coming from a lit doorway down a set of steps from the street. The steps were behind a locked gate. The gate was ten or twelve feet high so there'd be no climbing this obstacle. But the gate didn't go all the way to the ground. It stopped maybe a foot and a half short. I bent over to gauge the space. Then I laid down flat on my stomach and slithered through the gap.
I walked down the steps into a room in which seven people were hanging out. Five guys and two girls, all Hungarian, one of the guys manning a small bar. The music didn't screech to a stop when I entered but it might as well have. They all looked at me.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," one of the guys responded.
"What is this place?"
"It's a private party. How did you get in here?"
"I walked in off the street, the gate was unlocked."
He looked me up and down, at my jeans and t-shirt covered in yellow dust.
"No you didn't."
"I crawled under the gate."
"I know you did. Where you from?"
"Chicago."
"Chicago," he said. Then he put his fists to his temples and stuck out an index finger from each hand to make little horns.
"Derrick Rose," he said.
I smiled at him and he put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the bar.
"What you drinking?"
It went from there. I bought the room a shot of the cheap local liquor and drank with them the rest of the night.
My second day I went to the public baths located in the city's main park that looked like the baths in ancient Rome must have. Three pools each a different temperature ringed by a baroque palace which was in turn crowned by a white colonnade. Water spewed into the pools from the mouths of goddesses carved in stone and from green bronze spigots affixed to the center of giant urns filled with flowers. I tried all the pools and levitated on the jets in the floors of the pools and let the sculpted fountains that feed the pools pour onto me.
When I got home to the hostel I ducked through the low door. Not low enough - I banged my head on the lintel. There to laugh good-naturedly at my misfortune were two girls, one a staff member from Australia and the other a girl from New York City who had just checked in. I didn't say much to her that day but she ended up with the bunk next to mine, we both had a top bunk. The following morning she woke up to find me reading my book. I don't remember if she asked me about it or if I volunteered the literature euphoria I was experiencing from reading it but soon we'd talked about books for a good half-hour and it was on. We had lunch at a cafe on a tree-lined boulevard where we were the only customers and the waitress brought us apertifs on the house. One was clear anise and the other looked like red wine and had the aroma of a sweet I could not place and an aftertaste of marzipan. When we'd finished eating we went to the park and laid down in a shady spot and I kissed her. We stayed in that place the whole afternoon and worked on a crossword puzzle and talked and kissed and slept.
There were other highlights. An elegant dinner of local fare taken with my roommate from that Istanbul hostel who was my first friend of this voyage and who I know will be my friend for a long time. A debauched evening cruise on the Danube where I nearly suffered blindness by champagne cork. An intrusion while consummating affection in a hostel that was an embarrassment to all involved.
I could have stayed another week in Budapest, but I was leaving without regret. I'd partied hard, met a great girl, and most importantly I felt I'd given the city a good look. The great haste of Europe continued next with Germany. Some photos of Budapest below.
Let me say it succinctly: Budapest is incredible. Beautiful during the day, a hell of a lot of fun at night, with a deluge of art and culture everywhere you turn. I saw in a decrepit, long-abandoned synagogue huge modern paintings suspended from a fifty-foot domed ceiling and not a trace of an exhibition space besides. The paintings hanging ghostly and unexplained as if left by squatting artists as payment in kind. I drank at some of the coolest bars I've ever been in my life, "ruin pubs" where locals gather in crumbling mansions turned with found decor to hip, stylish haunts. Where once lived prosperous merchant families, landed gentry, servants of the empire.
It would prove a hard place to leave, and not just because of what I'd see. I had a great time, with some wonderful people. Here's what happened to me.
From the train station I made my way to Carpe Noctem hostel. (That's "Seize the Night" in Latin. Sorry had to, Classics major.) I hove up around nine o'clock and found the place nearly empty. The staff member on duty informed me that most of the guests had already taken off for that night's drinking event, a karaoke bar called Morrison's. I got directions and headed over.
Carpe Noctem is affiliated with several other Party Hostels (they call themselves that explicitly), so each night you go out with them you get a good-sized crowd of young tourists looking to have fun. After about an hour in this bar it seemed like everyone was making out. I'll admit I hadn't had much luck with the ladies so far on this trip and I was starting to feel a little lonely. Then I saw a girl eyeing me from the bar.
She was American from Seattle and was a studying archaeology. She was really into it and we talked for a while about Egypt and ancient Greece and Rome. Finally a girl I liked and who seemed to like me. We went to the dancefloor and made out a little and when she went to the bathroom I told her I'd meet her at the bar and she smiled and nodded yes.
I never saw her again. I walked up and down that bar ten minutes and at six foot five I'm hard to miss. I don't know if she got sick or too drunk or if she just changed her mind. Anyway I was bummed out and not really knowing anyone I walked out of the bar and started home.
I'd gone perhaps a hundred feet when I heard good music and voices coming from a lit doorway down a set of steps from the street. The steps were behind a locked gate. The gate was ten or twelve feet high so there'd be no climbing this obstacle. But the gate didn't go all the way to the ground. It stopped maybe a foot and a half short. I bent over to gauge the space. Then I laid down flat on my stomach and slithered through the gap.
I walked down the steps into a room in which seven people were hanging out. Five guys and two girls, all Hungarian, one of the guys manning a small bar. The music didn't screech to a stop when I entered but it might as well have. They all looked at me.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello," one of the guys responded.
"What is this place?"
"It's a private party. How did you get in here?"
"I walked in off the street, the gate was unlocked."
He looked me up and down, at my jeans and t-shirt covered in yellow dust.
"No you didn't."
"I crawled under the gate."
"I know you did. Where you from?"
"Chicago."
"Chicago," he said. Then he put his fists to his temples and stuck out an index finger from each hand to make little horns.
"Derrick Rose," he said.
I smiled at him and he put his hand on my shoulder and guided me to the bar.
"What you drinking?"
It went from there. I bought the room a shot of the cheap local liquor and drank with them the rest of the night.
My second day I went to the public baths located in the city's main park that looked like the baths in ancient Rome must have. Three pools each a different temperature ringed by a baroque palace which was in turn crowned by a white colonnade. Water spewed into the pools from the mouths of goddesses carved in stone and from green bronze spigots affixed to the center of giant urns filled with flowers. I tried all the pools and levitated on the jets in the floors of the pools and let the sculpted fountains that feed the pools pour onto me.
When I got home to the hostel I ducked through the low door. Not low enough - I banged my head on the lintel. There to laugh good-naturedly at my misfortune were two girls, one a staff member from Australia and the other a girl from New York City who had just checked in. I didn't say much to her that day but she ended up with the bunk next to mine, we both had a top bunk. The following morning she woke up to find me reading my book. I don't remember if she asked me about it or if I volunteered the literature euphoria I was experiencing from reading it but soon we'd talked about books for a good half-hour and it was on. We had lunch at a cafe on a tree-lined boulevard where we were the only customers and the waitress brought us apertifs on the house. One was clear anise and the other looked like red wine and had the aroma of a sweet I could not place and an aftertaste of marzipan. When we'd finished eating we went to the park and laid down in a shady spot and I kissed her. We stayed in that place the whole afternoon and worked on a crossword puzzle and talked and kissed and slept.
There were other highlights. An elegant dinner of local fare taken with my roommate from that Istanbul hostel who was my first friend of this voyage and who I know will be my friend for a long time. A debauched evening cruise on the Danube where I nearly suffered blindness by champagne cork. An intrusion while consummating affection in a hostel that was an embarrassment to all involved.
I could have stayed another week in Budapest, but I was leaving without regret. I'd partied hard, met a great girl, and most importantly I felt I'd given the city a good look. The great haste of Europe continued next with Germany. Some photos of Budapest below.
Friday, August 3, 2012
A Personal Detour - Venice
Venice was to be the briefest of stopovers - I hadn't planned on going to Italy at all. When questioned pointedly on this omission by the many Italy-loving travelers I met along the way I responded that I wanted to do Italy with a girl, and even the most strident admitted it is a very romantic place. I was going to Italy for a specific reason - to see someone. Someone I've kept alluding to in this blog as an old friend. The real story is she's an old friend of my parents.
Years ago my father worked with a man who had an Italian wife. His name was Jim and hers was Eolina. My parents became friends with them, and after Jim stopped working with my dad and moved away our families still saw each other periodically. One of my earliest memories is driving to their house in Maryland in the Fall of some year to visit them. When we got there my dad and I went down with Jim and his son to a lake they lived by to skip stones. The leaves were in full change and I remember how all the yellows reds and oranges reflected off the black glass of the water. I remember my dad teaching me how to throw the stones to get them to skip because I'd never done it before.
Jim and Eolina moved to Italy in the early nineties and the last person to see them was me, when I went to Europe on a school trip in seventh grade. Then our families lost touch completely. My dad heard somewhere that Eolina had died. Knowing I'd be in the neighborhood for this trip I searched for their now-adult children on the internet and found the son, Terence. I wrote him and he responded saying his parents had split up, that his father had wound up in Cali Colombia after leaving Italy but that Eolina was still in Venice. I got in touch with her, made plans, and now I was on my way.
I took a bus from Ljubljana to a suburb of Venice called Mestre, then a train to Venice proper, and then finally a canal ferry to Lido, an island adjacent to Venice where Eolina lives. She met me at a cafe and bought me a gelato and we stood outside the open window of the cafe catching up. I told her about my mother's death. I realize now that the urge to convey this news was perhaps the single greatest motive driving me to this place, this reunion. I believe she was the last person on earth who knew my mom well and still hadn't heard the news (well, besides her now ex-husband). Telling her wasn't fun. "For he that increases knowledge increases sorrow." But I felt I had moved toward completing something, some vague morbid duty.
In her home she treated me as her own son. As soon as we got to her apartment she sent me off with a beer to her balcony where I read and watched the boats on the sea glide past. She cooked a dinner of old family recipes with fruits and vegetables and herbs from her own garden. Later I was offered clothes, a bathrobe, slippers. For someone used to hostels you can imagine the kind of respite this hospitality provided.
Nobody likes losing touch. I'm sorry to say it's already happened to me with some of my friends from high school and college who've moved away. But because our families were close and because of what happened to my mom I felt a responsibility to reconnect. Venice was out of my way, and I'd sacrificed a magical destination - Prague - to go there. But it was one of the best things I'd done on my trip so far, and I was so glad I went.
From Venice I flew to Vienna Austria for another brief stay of just two nights. It was beautiful but sleepy - I arrived on a Sunday night before midnight and wanted to get a beer and bite to eat at a bar. I couldn't even manage that - everything was closed and I ended up eating McDonald's. The main reason I'd gone to Vienna was to see some paintings by Gustav Klimt, and I got this done at the magnificent Belvedere museum.
In three days I'd experienced the tranquility of a family home in Venice and the beauty and culture of Vienna. Now I was ready to get into some trouble. I was headed to the right place. My next stop was Budapest Hungary.
Years ago my father worked with a man who had an Italian wife. His name was Jim and hers was Eolina. My parents became friends with them, and after Jim stopped working with my dad and moved away our families still saw each other periodically. One of my earliest memories is driving to their house in Maryland in the Fall of some year to visit them. When we got there my dad and I went down with Jim and his son to a lake they lived by to skip stones. The leaves were in full change and I remember how all the yellows reds and oranges reflected off the black glass of the water. I remember my dad teaching me how to throw the stones to get them to skip because I'd never done it before.
Jim and Eolina moved to Italy in the early nineties and the last person to see them was me, when I went to Europe on a school trip in seventh grade. Then our families lost touch completely. My dad heard somewhere that Eolina had died. Knowing I'd be in the neighborhood for this trip I searched for their now-adult children on the internet and found the son, Terence. I wrote him and he responded saying his parents had split up, that his father had wound up in Cali Colombia after leaving Italy but that Eolina was still in Venice. I got in touch with her, made plans, and now I was on my way.
I took a bus from Ljubljana to a suburb of Venice called Mestre, then a train to Venice proper, and then finally a canal ferry to Lido, an island adjacent to Venice where Eolina lives. She met me at a cafe and bought me a gelato and we stood outside the open window of the cafe catching up. I told her about my mother's death. I realize now that the urge to convey this news was perhaps the single greatest motive driving me to this place, this reunion. I believe she was the last person on earth who knew my mom well and still hadn't heard the news (well, besides her now ex-husband). Telling her wasn't fun. "For he that increases knowledge increases sorrow." But I felt I had moved toward completing something, some vague morbid duty.
In her home she treated me as her own son. As soon as we got to her apartment she sent me off with a beer to her balcony where I read and watched the boats on the sea glide past. She cooked a dinner of old family recipes with fruits and vegetables and herbs from her own garden. Later I was offered clothes, a bathrobe, slippers. For someone used to hostels you can imagine the kind of respite this hospitality provided.
Nobody likes losing touch. I'm sorry to say it's already happened to me with some of my friends from high school and college who've moved away. But because our families were close and because of what happened to my mom I felt a responsibility to reconnect. Venice was out of my way, and I'd sacrificed a magical destination - Prague - to go there. But it was one of the best things I'd done on my trip so far, and I was so glad I went.
From Venice I flew to Vienna Austria for another brief stay of just two nights. It was beautiful but sleepy - I arrived on a Sunday night before midnight and wanted to get a beer and bite to eat at a bar. I couldn't even manage that - everything was closed and I ended up eating McDonald's. The main reason I'd gone to Vienna was to see some paintings by Gustav Klimt, and I got this done at the magnificent Belvedere museum.
In three days I'd experienced the tranquility of a family home in Venice and the beauty and culture of Vienna. Now I was ready to get into some trouble. I was headed to the right place. My next stop was Budapest Hungary.
Location:A Personal Detour - Venice
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Slovenia
Going to Slovenia I would finally get a train. The now-fading romance of a long train journey, with its sleeping compartments, dining cars, and bow-tied porters was one of this trip's prospects that I most looked forward to. Up til now the lack of infrastructure in the areas I was traveling and the relative cheapness of flying had kept me off the rails. But now I'd have my chance. From Zadar I took a bus to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where after a layover of a few hours I would catch my train to Ljubljana Slovenia.
My train to Ljubljana was not crowded and I shared my six-person compartment with an elderly couple returning home from visiting a relative. Soon we were on our way and into the countryside. It had been hot weather my entire trip so far and even in the middle of the night I was never cold in shorts and a t-shirt. But now a chill was descending which provoked mists from the wooded country the train traversed. I fished out my jacket and zipped it up and folded my arms against the cool damp.
The train trip was lovely and so was Ljubljana. It is a small town of cobblestone streets and baroque buildings with pastel facades and much sculpture and ornament at the accents. A river cuts through the town and the tall, narrow houses flush against the water foreshadowed Amsterdam.
I checked in at my hostel and walked into my dorm room to find a girl changing clothes. I turned around and waited outside the room while she finished. She was from England and had just met a group of English guys staying in another room. They were going out for dinner and would I like to come?
I had planned on walking around Ljubljana by myself and taking some pictures but I said yes. Dinner was fine and afterwards we were off to a bar with strange, macabre decor. It was basically the cryptkeeper's pad, full of skulls and bones and skeletons climbing at you out of coffins. Here we joined up with another group of young people from England and with a 2-for-1 drink special the cocktails were flowing.
I looked around the table choked with plastic cups containing Mai Tai's, Mojitos, other dyed concoctions of sugar and booze. I was the only person sitting there who was not from the UK. They were all nice people; friendly, welcoming, not insular. But I felt like I was at a Uni bar in Leeds that had been transported to Slovenia. This wasn't what I came for. I got up from the table and walked out into the night alone.
I got down to the wandering that I'd earlier denied myself. Following any sound of life, no matter how faint. Going down any darkened street, as long as it might lead somewhere.
By and by I came to some kind of outdoor music hall. I could hear the production going on inside but couldn't see anything for the whole place was surrounded by a high stone wall. I walked to the rear where the wall ran along a leafy street and sat down on a bench. A man with long hair and a beard walked past and we regarded each other with the respectful wariness that people in cities employ when their paths cross in dark places in the night. He sat down a couple benches over and lit a cigarette.
I listened to the music and the scattered applause and I wanted to see what was going on. I looked at the wall. It was uneven, with the building stones jutting out from the masonry here and there. It was climbable.
I had just propped my arms up on the top of the wall and was pushing my head up when the man smoking on the bench noticed what I was doing and started shouting at me in Slovenian. I lifted my head up and saw nothing, just more dark. I jumped down from the wall and asked him what was wrong.
He responded in English saying that there's nothing to see, it's just another wall. He was waiting for his friends to get out of the concert so they could go to a bar. I told him why I was in Ljubljana and we talked about traveling. I was waiting for him to invite me to go out with him and his friends but he did not. I said goodbye and we parted ways.
I walked on and the street I took led under an arch of a building straddling the roadway. I went through and came out in the middle of a curving street that looked something like this:
I could go either left or right. I started left and then stopped in my tracks. I smelled marijuana.
I turned around and saw two men passing a hand-rolled cigarette in the otherwise deserted street. I approached them and asked to smoke. One of them passed me the joint and the other one addressed me.
"You are a tourist?"
"Yes"
"Where you from?"
"America."
"America," he said, repeating the word as if my answer was unexpected but still vaguely displeased him.
After hitting it a couple times I offered the joint back to the man who'd given it to me but he waved it off. "It's our second one," he said. Then they walked away.
The joint had tobacco in it which I don't use and it gave me a wicked head buzz that I had to sit down to let pass. After a minute it did and I got up and continued wandering. The night was ending now and I watched the groups of locals who'd been drinking together come out of the bars and split up, saying Great Night and See You Later, I imagined. I watched the couples walking arm-in-arm home to their flats, to make love in their warm beds.
On one street I heard someone calling 'American, American' and saw it was a group of Slovenians I had talked to for a minute back at the skeleton bar. They asked about a girl from Northern Ireland I was talking to there, asked where she was. I told them I had left them and when they asked why I said I just wanted to be alone. I don't think it translated because they just waved and said goodnight and kept walking. The town was pretty much asleep at that point and I walked on home myself.
It ended up being what I'd call a great night. I'd had some run-ins with locals, seen the city in its pretty dark, gotten high. It sure beat staying in that bar. With that crowd I had been a tourist. Without them, I was a traveler again. I knew that to the locals there wasn't any difference, but that wasn't the point. A sage advises about traveling, "see, do not be seen". It's the first part of this advice that's the more important. And you simply see more alone.
On to Venice. A few more picture of Ljubljana below.
My train to Ljubljana was not crowded and I shared my six-person compartment with an elderly couple returning home from visiting a relative. Soon we were on our way and into the countryside. It had been hot weather my entire trip so far and even in the middle of the night I was never cold in shorts and a t-shirt. But now a chill was descending which provoked mists from the wooded country the train traversed. I fished out my jacket and zipped it up and folded my arms against the cool damp.
The train trip was lovely and so was Ljubljana. It is a small town of cobblestone streets and baroque buildings with pastel facades and much sculpture and ornament at the accents. A river cuts through the town and the tall, narrow houses flush against the water foreshadowed Amsterdam.
I checked in at my hostel and walked into my dorm room to find a girl changing clothes. I turned around and waited outside the room while she finished. She was from England and had just met a group of English guys staying in another room. They were going out for dinner and would I like to come?
I had planned on walking around Ljubljana by myself and taking some pictures but I said yes. Dinner was fine and afterwards we were off to a bar with strange, macabre decor. It was basically the cryptkeeper's pad, full of skulls and bones and skeletons climbing at you out of coffins. Here we joined up with another group of young people from England and with a 2-for-1 drink special the cocktails were flowing.
I looked around the table choked with plastic cups containing Mai Tai's, Mojitos, other dyed concoctions of sugar and booze. I was the only person sitting there who was not from the UK. They were all nice people; friendly, welcoming, not insular. But I felt like I was at a Uni bar in Leeds that had been transported to Slovenia. This wasn't what I came for. I got up from the table and walked out into the night alone.
I got down to the wandering that I'd earlier denied myself. Following any sound of life, no matter how faint. Going down any darkened street, as long as it might lead somewhere.
By and by I came to some kind of outdoor music hall. I could hear the production going on inside but couldn't see anything for the whole place was surrounded by a high stone wall. I walked to the rear where the wall ran along a leafy street and sat down on a bench. A man with long hair and a beard walked past and we regarded each other with the respectful wariness that people in cities employ when their paths cross in dark places in the night. He sat down a couple benches over and lit a cigarette.
I listened to the music and the scattered applause and I wanted to see what was going on. I looked at the wall. It was uneven, with the building stones jutting out from the masonry here and there. It was climbable.
I had just propped my arms up on the top of the wall and was pushing my head up when the man smoking on the bench noticed what I was doing and started shouting at me in Slovenian. I lifted my head up and saw nothing, just more dark. I jumped down from the wall and asked him what was wrong.
He responded in English saying that there's nothing to see, it's just another wall. He was waiting for his friends to get out of the concert so they could go to a bar. I told him why I was in Ljubljana and we talked about traveling. I was waiting for him to invite me to go out with him and his friends but he did not. I said goodbye and we parted ways.
I walked on and the street I took led under an arch of a building straddling the roadway. I went through and came out in the middle of a curving street that looked something like this:
I could go either left or right. I started left and then stopped in my tracks. I smelled marijuana.
I turned around and saw two men passing a hand-rolled cigarette in the otherwise deserted street. I approached them and asked to smoke. One of them passed me the joint and the other one addressed me.
"You are a tourist?"
"Yes"
"Where you from?"
"America."
"America," he said, repeating the word as if my answer was unexpected but still vaguely displeased him.
After hitting it a couple times I offered the joint back to the man who'd given it to me but he waved it off. "It's our second one," he said. Then they walked away.
The joint had tobacco in it which I don't use and it gave me a wicked head buzz that I had to sit down to let pass. After a minute it did and I got up and continued wandering. The night was ending now and I watched the groups of locals who'd been drinking together come out of the bars and split up, saying Great Night and See You Later, I imagined. I watched the couples walking arm-in-arm home to their flats, to make love in their warm beds.
On one street I heard someone calling 'American, American' and saw it was a group of Slovenians I had talked to for a minute back at the skeleton bar. They asked about a girl from Northern Ireland I was talking to there, asked where she was. I told them I had left them and when they asked why I said I just wanted to be alone. I don't think it translated because they just waved and said goodnight and kept walking. The town was pretty much asleep at that point and I walked on home myself.
It ended up being what I'd call a great night. I'd had some run-ins with locals, seen the city in its pretty dark, gotten high. It sure beat staying in that bar. With that crowd I had been a tourist. Without them, I was a traveler again. I knew that to the locals there wasn't any difference, but that wasn't the point. A sage advises about traveling, "see, do not be seen". It's the first part of this advice that's the more important. And you simply see more alone.
On to Venice. A few more picture of Ljubljana below.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Croatia
I don't know whether the differences a traveler perceives when crossing a border are real or merely a product of his desire to see differences, but Croatia looked different to me. It was nicer than Montenegro. It had the same white or off-white colored houses and the same orange-tiled roofs, but the homes were larger and had more land. Many featured tidy walled gardens in front and rows of fruit trees or other plantings banking down the sides from the high ground of the house. Green spires of cypress trees dotted the rolling fields of long gold grass that flattened when the breeze blew and righted when it passed.
I would end up kind of fucking up this country. Apparently the place to be in Croatia are the islands that run up the whole coastline. But I never made it to them. I didn't have a set itinerary and by the time I decided to go to Hvar, one of the main attraction islands, all the good hostels were booked up. Same thing for the second island I was shooting for, Pag. This time I didn't procrastinate - there was a music festival I didn't know about and all the accommodation was booked solid. I'd also never planned on going to Montenegro at all and ended up staying five days, and that time was Croatia time. All these factors conspired to keep me on the mainland.
My first stop was Dubrovnik, the 'pearl of the Adriatic' as Byron dubbed it. Dubrovnik had been an independent city-state made wealthy by maritime trade, in the vein of Venice and Genoa. With its walled, medieval Old Town it was like a larger, more touristy version of Kotor, but admittedly more beautiful. It was like an outdoor museum. Pristine churches and palaces in the Venetian style and promenades of white stone polished by centuries of walkers to the smoothness of marble. You could slide down the street as over ice with just your socks on.
It was a lovely place, but it was expensive and crowded, and after a day and a night I was ready to move on. My next stop was Split, the site of the summer palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As a Classics major I was keen to see it and it proved cool enough. The people of Split have built their town into the actual ruins of the palace. This was novel, but the place would be better off as a museum. The halls and sanctums were full of cheap souvenir shops and I felt the Roman ghosts had been long ago expelled.
With the islands no longer a possibility I had one stop left: Zadar. Zadar was supposedly the least built up of the major coastal towns. I lucked out with a good hostel and my stay in this place ended up being the highlight of my visit to Croatia.
The music festival on Pag island I mentioned was called Hideout. It was a dance/house/electronic festival and apparently the partying was really hard. I'd been meeting refugees from it for a few days now on my way up the coast and my second night in Zadar I went with four of them who were at my hostel into the old town for drinks. We had a fine time and one of them, a kid from London of Mauritian descent, suggested an expedition to these famous lakes they have at Krka National Park. We all agreed to go and would leave early the next morning.
Our first bus left Zadar at 8 AM and two hours and two buses later we were at the park. The natural phenomenon contained there is called a karst, which is a formation of limestone ravines through which a river descends via a series of sinks and waterfalls. We hiked down a steep trail to the pools at the bottom where we could go swimming. Our crew was the people I'd gone out with the night before - two guys and one girl from England plus an Australian guy - along with a Belgian girl my age who'd been a tennis prodigy and had played in college in Alabama and with the most incredible long body for it.
We reached the bottom and changed into our swim clothes and scrambled down the roots of trees and the dirt banks (there was no beach) into the water. The lagoon was fed by a shelf of waterfalls twenty feet high and a hundred feet wide. The day was warm with the sun shining and the forested hills rose up above us and let me tell you it was quite a setting. After we swam for a while we made a picnic in a nearby park and then I laid down on my back to read while my new friends slept.
Where we transferred at some random town to get our bus back to Zadar we took leave of the guy who'd come up with the whole idea. He was going to Dubrovnik where he had a flight back home to London. It was a sad parting because we'd all gotten along well and had a fun couple of days together. The bus station was even playing some melancholy song - Everybody Hurts by REM I think it was - which was hilarious but also poignant. Croatia was ending.
That night the girls went to the local market and made fried sausages and boiled potatoes and salad for dinner. We ate this meal and drank wine at a picnic table in the front yard of the hostel in the gathering twilight of the day we'd made together. After dinner I made my plan to leave the country the next morning.
Slovenia was next, a stopover before I went to Venice to visit the old friend I had managed to get through to. I was leaving the coast - Central Europe lay ahead.
I would end up kind of fucking up this country. Apparently the place to be in Croatia are the islands that run up the whole coastline. But I never made it to them. I didn't have a set itinerary and by the time I decided to go to Hvar, one of the main attraction islands, all the good hostels were booked up. Same thing for the second island I was shooting for, Pag. This time I didn't procrastinate - there was a music festival I didn't know about and all the accommodation was booked solid. I'd also never planned on going to Montenegro at all and ended up staying five days, and that time was Croatia time. All these factors conspired to keep me on the mainland.
My first stop was Dubrovnik, the 'pearl of the Adriatic' as Byron dubbed it. Dubrovnik had been an independent city-state made wealthy by maritime trade, in the vein of Venice and Genoa. With its walled, medieval Old Town it was like a larger, more touristy version of Kotor, but admittedly more beautiful. It was like an outdoor museum. Pristine churches and palaces in the Venetian style and promenades of white stone polished by centuries of walkers to the smoothness of marble. You could slide down the street as over ice with just your socks on.
It was a lovely place, but it was expensive and crowded, and after a day and a night I was ready to move on. My next stop was Split, the site of the summer palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian. As a Classics major I was keen to see it and it proved cool enough. The people of Split have built their town into the actual ruins of the palace. This was novel, but the place would be better off as a museum. The halls and sanctums were full of cheap souvenir shops and I felt the Roman ghosts had been long ago expelled.
With the islands no longer a possibility I had one stop left: Zadar. Zadar was supposedly the least built up of the major coastal towns. I lucked out with a good hostel and my stay in this place ended up being the highlight of my visit to Croatia.
The music festival on Pag island I mentioned was called Hideout. It was a dance/house/electronic festival and apparently the partying was really hard. I'd been meeting refugees from it for a few days now on my way up the coast and my second night in Zadar I went with four of them who were at my hostel into the old town for drinks. We had a fine time and one of them, a kid from London of Mauritian descent, suggested an expedition to these famous lakes they have at Krka National Park. We all agreed to go and would leave early the next morning.
Our first bus left Zadar at 8 AM and two hours and two buses later we were at the park. The natural phenomenon contained there is called a karst, which is a formation of limestone ravines through which a river descends via a series of sinks and waterfalls. We hiked down a steep trail to the pools at the bottom where we could go swimming. Our crew was the people I'd gone out with the night before - two guys and one girl from England plus an Australian guy - along with a Belgian girl my age who'd been a tennis prodigy and had played in college in Alabama and with the most incredible long body for it.
We reached the bottom and changed into our swim clothes and scrambled down the roots of trees and the dirt banks (there was no beach) into the water. The lagoon was fed by a shelf of waterfalls twenty feet high and a hundred feet wide. The day was warm with the sun shining and the forested hills rose up above us and let me tell you it was quite a setting. After we swam for a while we made a picnic in a nearby park and then I laid down on my back to read while my new friends slept.
Where we transferred at some random town to get our bus back to Zadar we took leave of the guy who'd come up with the whole idea. He was going to Dubrovnik where he had a flight back home to London. It was a sad parting because we'd all gotten along well and had a fun couple of days together. The bus station was even playing some melancholy song - Everybody Hurts by REM I think it was - which was hilarious but also poignant. Croatia was ending.
That night the girls went to the local market and made fried sausages and boiled potatoes and salad for dinner. We ate this meal and drank wine at a picnic table in the front yard of the hostel in the gathering twilight of the day we'd made together. After dinner I made my plan to leave the country the next morning.
Slovenia was next, a stopover before I went to Venice to visit the old friend I had managed to get through to. I was leaving the coast - Central Europe lay ahead.
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