Europe 2014: Air, Water, Food

One of the things I noticed while traveling this summer was how different the air, water and food was in each of the three places I spent significant time.

Air

Behind Sacre Coeur, Paris

Madrid has an arid climate, so the air is fairly dry (though not as dry as, say, Bend, Oregon). Smells carry well, especially in the summer when the sun heats the air. It smells mostly of urine and feces, both from dogs and from humans. On occasion one also smells delicious food, but it's hard to know how to react when you're simultaneously smelling delicious food and sun-heated urine.

The only two things I remember about Paris's air is that it was humid - once you started sweating, you never dried off all day - and that at times it smelled so strongly of the sewer that I felt nauseous.

I don't recall that Vienna smelled a particular way, nor that it struck me as either humid or dry. What I do remember is that the air was somehow greasy. At the end of the day my skin felt greasy and my hair looked as though I hadn't washed it in three days. I'm not sure what causes this...perhaps all the street-vended meat?

The Tale of the Lost Luggage

In order to get back to Madrid from Vienna, I had the option of taking the train - which would've only cost about $170 but would've taken three days - or flying for $380 and arriving same day. Up until that point in my travels I'd stuck to trains for various reasons, and when I arrived at the Madrid airport on Sunday, August 31st, I added one more reason to prefer train travel: it's a lot harder to lose your luggage when going by train.

When it became clear that all the luggage had been unloaded from my flight and my bag was not among it, I briefly considered losing my shit but decided against and instead queried my way to my airline's lost luggage window. It turned out there were six other bags that hadn't made it onto our Brussels Airlines flight.

As I gave my flight information, described my bag, and wrote down my contact information, I began to feel a slight sense of relief: at the very least this would mean one fewer bag to deal with on the Madrid metro today. I figured my bag would come in later that day and I could pick it up when I returned to the airport the next day to fly home. If not? Well, maybe that would be okay; in that moment I felt very zen about the possibility of having lost it forever. Sure there were things in there I wanted, but after having lived with very few things over the last two and a half months, I felt sure I could let go of my attachment. I was practically a Buddhist monk by this point.

And the most important thing was that I still had my computer. Losing that would've been a completely different thing - it had all my writing on it, all my photos from the last several years.

Coming home: Madrid to Portland

I can't remember ever having a more stressful journey between two points. Even though it's been over a month since it happened, in telling this story to a friend two days ago I got all stressed out all over again, which indicates to me that I'm not over it yet. But perhaps writing this blog post will help me process and get some of that energy out of my system.

My flight was scheduled to leave Madrid for Chicago around noon on Monday, Sept. 1. Since I didn't have any bags to check - in fact now only had one bag, period, because Brussels Airlines had lost one of my bags the day before - and I had checked in online the night before, I decided to leave the place I was staying at 9am so I could be at the airport by 10, which (my experience led me to believe) would be plenty of time to use one of those self-service machines to print out my ticket, go through security and find my gate. Ahahahahahahaaaaa!!!

Coming home: Vienna to Madrid

I awoke to my phone alarm at 4:30am on Sunday, August 31. As is my unintended custom when I have to get up early for something, I hadn't slept much or very well.

Veronika got up with me and made us coffee while I dressed and finished packing my bags. We stood in the kitchen chatting as I drank my coffee and ate the croissant I'd had the unusual foresight to buy the previous afternoon. Though I don't remember now what we talked about, I remember it was a pleasant and interesting conversation, and that I was grateful for her company.

Around a ten after five, I hugged Veronika goodbye, reassured us both that I'd left the keys to the flat on her entryway bench, and left her flat for the last time. With a pack full of clothes on my back and my purse and another backpack full of computer and notebooks, I went down the stairs and out the front door into the quiet, still-dark street. As I rounded the corner I heard a voice above me. "Yes, that is right!" she said. I looked up to see Veronika had poked her head out the window to make sure I knew the way to the tram stop. We waved to each other and I continued on.

Last week in Vienna

It only took me one weekend in Prague to forget how to do tipping in Vienna, and it took me most of the week to remember to answer the server with a new total.

At a Heurigen with classmates

In other news, I went out several times with classmates and/or our German teacher last week. As a result, I got to see an entirely different side of Vienna. Up until going out to her favorite bar with my German teacher, Vienna had seemed to me a subdued city with unfriendly servers and people who don't smile much or interact with random people they don't know. But at Jetzt (the bar), the servers and other patrons both were friendly and willing to chat. 

The bar itself reminded me a bit of my favorite bar in Portland, The Florida Room, in terms of lighting and quirky décor. A beat-up billiard table in the back. Plenty of regular clientele. The main difference was that I don't think there was a single person in Jetzt above the age of 40, whereas you can find people of all ages at The Flo' Ro'...but it could've just been the fact that it was a Wednesday night.

Heurigan feast!

This weekend (Vienna/Prague)

This weekend, the following things happened:

• One of my German classmates, a Japanese woman, got married to her Viennese boyfriend. Jetzt ist sie verheiratet.
• My German language teacher, Barbara, sliced off the tip of her pinkie finger, found it on the floor, washed it off, stuck it back on, and wrapped it in gauze and medical tape. Wide-eyed,  "Did you go to the hospital?" I asked in present-tense German and using the English word for hospital. "Nah," she said. And after a little more thought/discussion, "But maybe I should."
• I went to Prague.

My favorite things about Prague:

Adventures in Wien (Vienna), Part 1

A street in downtown Vienna

Weather
It feels like autumn here already. We had a week of hot (in the low 80s Fahrenheit) and humid (one day it was 97% humidity!), and now we're having a stretch of cold, cloudy and sometimes rainy days. Today, for example, it was 61 degree Fahrenheit at noon, and the breeze is chilly.

Culture of tipping

Simple breakfast

Unlike in Spain and Paris, where tipping is completely voluntary & there are no hard feelings if you don't, tipping in Vienna is the norm, and if you don't tip it's an insult. I haven't asked anyone yet what the usual amount is, but based on experience it seems that 10% is completely satisfactory, and if you leave 20% they act like you've just given them a huge present. The tricky part - which luckily I learned during my first week from Georg, my housemate's brother - is that (unlike in the U.S., Spain & France) you're not supposed to wait until they've already given you change and walked away. Instead, when the server tells you the total, you should immediately say back to them a new total that includes tip. For example, if the server says that the bill for my coffee is €3,20, then I might tell her €3,50. That way she knows I intend to leave a tip and she might actually smile at me. Or at least let one corner of her mouth lift a centimeter for a split-second. It also saves her the trouble of trying to find the right amount of change when I only intend to give part of it back to her anyway. So I tell her the new total, she immediately says, "Danke," and then gives me the correct change minus tip.

Reflections on Paris & what's next

Pastry & coffee in Paris

In my previous visits to Paris, what I liked most was the food, the coffee, and the energy of the city. Regarding the last: it felt alive and vibrant, well-suited to philosophy and creativity.

My experience this time was quite different, in part due to being on a tight budget (therefore couldn't afford to eat out in restaurants much) and in part due to a difference in energy. I'm not sure whether it's the high unemployment rate or the particular neighborhood I was in, but this time Paris felt...heavy. Not stagnant, more like slightly oppressive. (Now that I say that, I realize that might again be a result of the limited budget; it's hard to feel free in a place where you can't afford anything.) I still loved the coffee (and eventually found some for €1,60) and the pastries were delicious, though, so not everything had changed.

Some things

Some things I saw today
I saw water bubbling out of a drain and gushing down the street. This seems to happen every day. Every day a different drain.

I saw a regular customer of my cafe-bar pass by on the other side of the street wave to Daniel, the cafe-bar owner, and he waved back.

I saw a young man in a suit come into Le Gyozabar by himself and try to sit at the counter, but the ladies in charge of the restaurant said he couldn't because there were two open places and they wanted to keep them open for two customers together. I watched the young man say, "Okay," and go stand by the door and read his book for a while. I saw him come back after 5-10 minutes and ask again, and they still said no. I saw the young man argue a little with them. I saw them apologize but hold firm to their policy. I saw him shake his head and not leave. I saw him stand just outside the door reading his book. When I got up to leave 10 minutes later, no one had been seated in the two seats next to me, and the young man was ordering takeout with another young man.

I saw this:

Au bar

The advantage to having conversations with a group of drunk people in French is that they sometimes forget what you've already talked about (or perhaps your accent is unintelligible and they didn't understand the first time), and you get asked the same questions over again, which gives you the opportunity to practice saying the same things over and over - your age, your profession, what you're currently writing, why you were ensconced in the corner of the bar yesterday busily writing in your journal, what Americans tend to think of the French, etc.

I went to my regular cafe/bar today around 1pm for my daily café au lait. I got my coffee, retreated to a table in the back and began observing my fellow bar-goers/writing in my journal/watching the news on the bar's television. At one point I looked up and met the eye of a 50-something blue-eyed bald man wearing a baseball cap, who gestured and repeated in French until I understood.

"Your eyes are very pretty." He slapped the bicep of the older gentleman beside him with the back of his hand and pointed at me, saying something I couldn't make out.

The older gentleman looked at me. "Yes," he said. "Eyes like the Mediterranean sea."

"Thank you," I said with a warm smile, and went back to writing.

The news: pro-Palestine protests (some violent) followed by sports. Tennis. How can one hold in one's heart simultaneously the grief & outrage assoc. w/ ppl killing ppl alongside that which brings us joy? My heart is not big enough, my feels organs not skilled enuf to recognize & live both simultaneously. After seeing that news segment (signs in French

A la maison

The house is big and beautiful and old, with real marble floors in the foyer and a wood floor in the dining room so warped by time that each footstep falls at different intervals, either sooner or later than one would expect, but never arriving exactly on time.

The house is big and beautiful and old, and it's also cold and damp, with plaster walls that seem to trap the moisture, especially these days, when the sky sporadically spits rain and the sun shows its face for less than half an hour at a time.

And I've started finding the little bugs. Tiny black things with long bodies that wander independently, one on the pages of my journal today, another swimming in my water glass last night. I wonder where they come from and what they are. I wonder how many are crawling on my body, unseen, at this very moment. 

Will they burrow beneath my skin and lay their eggs? Did the one in my water glass lay eggs there that are even now gestating in my abdomen? Will I awake one morning to find myself covered in little black bugs that pour out of the open wounds covering my body? Or will the larvae, once hatched, burrow deeper still into my body, preferring first to feast on moist entrails, consuming my flesh from the inside out?

Only time will tell.

A few observations

Paris, France - 12:52pm local time - 59 degrees Fahrenheit - overcast & occasionally drizzly

1. After being in Spain, where if the sunlight doesn't wake you up the heat coming off of it will, it's really hard to get up at 8am when it's cloudy and cold. (Read: I got up at 11am today.)
2. Yesterday I walked from the apartment to the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. To get there I walked past the Sacre Coeur area. I knew I'd officially left Sacre Coeur territory and entered Montmartre when the souvenir shops gave way to sex shops.
   
3. The neighborhood I'm staying in: In the nearest streets to the south and west of the apartment there are a lot of African and Middle Eastern people. In the streets the ratio of men to women seems to be about 10:1. In most of the cafes and bars, the clientele is 100% male. I passed by one store/cafe where the clientele was 100% female. Today I explored to the northeast and was delighted to find a bunch of Chinese grocery stores and restaurants only a block or two over.
4. This morning I chatted for a bit with Flora, my Airbnb host. It turns out she's a professional photographer. She has two books ready to be printed but she can't find a publisher because there isn't a lot of money available in France right now to support the arts and printing books of photography is expensive, and these days they choose to undertake projects only from the same well-known photographers whose books they know they can sell. One of the books is about maternity - the good, the bad and the ugly of pregnancy and motherhood. The other book is a love story told in three settings: Tasmania (where the love ignites), Smhrshuhblerg (didn't quite catch the name here), and Japan. Last winter (2013) she was an Artist in Residence in Quebec. Not Montreal - it was a rural area. There will be an exposition of her photographs from her time there...soon? (I think I overheard her 9 yr old son on the phone saying she was going to Canada in August.) The theme of her exposition: frozen. These photos could tell the final part of aforementioned love story, where the love and the people are frozen. At least, this is all what I *think* she said. My French isn't great.
5. I had forgotten how to find a decently priced cup of coffee in Paris. From being in Spain, I was already used to the idea that you pay more to sit out on the terrace/patio than you pay to be inside, but I'd forgotten that in Paris you also pay more to sit at a table than you do to stand at the bar. I'd forgotten that any cafe/restaurant with a terrace will be more expensive - inside or out - than a cafe/restaurant without a terrace. I'd forgotten that you pay more for a coffee at a place on a main street than you do at a place on a little side street. So many rules! Yesterday I found a place that only charges €1,20 for a cafe au lait at the bar, which was like striking gold. The only issue was I didn't feel particularly welcome there; I think it's one of those places that doesn't have a lot of female clientele. Today I found a place just a couple streets over where I felt very comfortable/welcome - I think with time I could get some good French practice in there - but the cafe au lait was €2,50 at the bar because the place is on a main street. Do I go for the price or the atmosphere? Tricky. Very tricky.
   
   
   
   
   

Traveling by train in Spain

In part because traveling by train is just not something I do in the States and in part because it's far more comfortable than traveling by airplane, even if it does take longer, I prefer to travel by train. What's more, these days it costs roughly the same to travel by plane as it does by train, especially if you need to check a bag and if you take into account the cost of getting from whatever airport to your destination's city center, whereas the train usually drops you off right in the midst of things.

That said, there are some tricks to traveling by train in Spain. Here are a few I've learned.

Carly & Sione on a train

Foreword
The key to buying a train ticket in Spain is patience and persistence. If patience and persistence are not your forte, I suggest you either travel by airplane or travel with someone who does possess these qualities and work out a deal with them where they do the ticket-buying in exchange for dinner. Or perhaps a nice shoulder rub, since they'll need it (and perhaps an aspirin) after navigating the system.

Adventures in Minneapolis, part 2

I should have pictures for you, but I don't. Which is to say: if I were reading someone's travel blog, I would want some photos, dammit, to break up the text. But I'm not much of a picture-taker. I'm more the type to want to experience a thing first-hand when I'm there rather than through the lens of a camera (she says as though one has to choose between being there & taking the photo).

Last weekend
Last Saturday, Jackie and I went downtown and met up with a couple of friends (Scott & Liz) at the Mill City Farmers Market, which seemed to be more about people selling prepared food and crafty things than about fresh produce, but that was okay by me. Three things to note here:

1. People were moving at a slower pace. I did not get the impression that anyone was going to elbow me out of the way or that they were particularly mission-driven. The lady who accidentally shoulder-checked me didn't seem to notice, but it wasn't because she was moving quickly. People were out with their kids and dogs, sitting on the steps in the sun, drinking coffee & eating things from the food carts.
2. The French toast comes with a sausage! No, seriously, you don't ask for it extra or anything. You just get this big ol' sausage on top of your little cardboard container of French toast! Wha?!?
3. It's a zero-waste market. All the vendors have agreed to only use packaging that is either compostable or recyclable. So cool!

Anyway, it was fun. Milton got a lot of attention, of course, and I had a great time getting to know Scott and Liz.

Adventures in Minneapolis, Part 1

Just to catch you up real quick: 1) I was in Bend from the end of January through April, and then 2) I spent a couple wonderful days in Portland, visiting friends (Oh, Portland friends, how I miss you!) and doing car-care stuff before I 3) spent three days driving to Minneapolis. 

What am I doing here? When I began to consider a year of nomadery, one of the ideas that occurred to me was that I could finally spend significant periods of time with people whom I adore and don't get to see very much, like my mom and my life partners, Jackie and Carly. So I'm in Minneapolis mainly to see Jackie, who is from this area originally and has been living here for the last few years, and whom I've missed dearly. A second objective to being here is the same objective I have whenever I travel to exotic places: to get a sense of the place, culture and people. 

I arrived on Sunday the 4th, and my plan was to unpack, set up shop, and get back to work on Monday without missing a beat. HA!

Here are some of my adventures and learnings from my first week in Minneapolis.

Deep thought & travel update

Deep thought of the day:
If Maltese + Poodle = Malty-poo
Does Shih Tzu + Poodle = Shitty-poo?

If so, I'm going to get one just so I have an excuse to go around saying "Shitty-poo" to strangers.

"What kind of dog is that?"
"She's a Shitty-poo. Shitty-poos are generally very friendly, tolerant and independent. I highly recommend a Shitty-poo as a pet."

And now for the travel update. A few things have changed since my last post. Here's the new tentative itinerary:

Nomadery

Let's see. Quickly up to speed: I sold my condo, bought a ticket to Europe, and plan to spend this year house-hopping.

Ooh! *pats self on back* I think that's probably the quickest I've ever explained anything in my life! =*D

The plan:
January to April in Bend, OR
May in Minneapolis, MN
June 3-11 split between Bend & Portland
June 12-30 in Spain, traveling with/visiting friends
July in Paris (because I always wanted to)
August in Munich, doing an intensive German-language course
September to November in Portland
December back in Bend

This makes me happy.