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.