Backpacking Across Europe

Forget the floozy-shmoozy lines I scribbled on my Bristol applications.  Spare me the intellectual enrichment and cultural adaptation curves.  And one big nasty Cheerio Sucka! to all personal development poetics.  Really -- down deep where that thrillseeker in me revs his Harley and guns for the next big leap of adventure -- really, I came to England for this:

Bristol, Madrid, Sevilla, Cordoba, Madrid, Barcelona, Lyon, Geneva, Zurich, Munich, Regensberg, Prague, Krakow, Vienna, Venice, Cortona, Rome, Vatican, Turin, Bristol.

Or something like that.  From March 30th - April 18th, or something like that.  After Lyon, France, where Troy and I stayed with my former French Exchange family, the cities blur.  My memory flips from a contrite destination-based sequence pedantically inserting push pins into a mental map of Europe, to a swarm of episodes, unpatternable, frantic, linked together only by the tenuous sinew of the odd overnight train.      

I thought for a long while how to write about backpacking across Europe trip.  I considered top-10 lists or a country-by-country breakdown.  But those means of representation all seemed too academic.  Too orderly.  Too eager to take what was a tangled glorious mess and loosen the knots.  Too quick to find value by shaking the memories until something glittery falls out.  

In the end, I want the travel narrative to mirror the trip with an honesty that's as sharp as a scalpel and as selfish as a Barcelona pickpocket.  Because let's be clear: although categorized under "vacation," backpacking across Europe -- at least in Eric and Troy's city-snapshot style -- is more like climbing a mountain than sunning in the Caribbean.  

Backpacking across Europe demands a different sort of thinking altogether.  A sort of thinking that awards patience and tolerance, but also ruthlessness and decisiveness.  Because there are plenty of unknown characters and situations watching from the fringes.  Some turn out to be delightful and enriching additions.  Others...well, I'll get around to the others.

Barcelona:

I would love to see what Weird Al would come up with if he ever got a hold of these seedy Barcelona street vendors.  He could make a pretty mean song out of their catchphrases. They're everywhere.  First, there's the black Mediterranean Rustafarian-looking guys asking "Smoke weed?"  "Smoke weed?"  "Smoke weed?"

(Once one of our group, instead of just ignoring them, responded with a "No" and the vendor said "Neither do I."  Go figure.) 

Then there's the Indian beer vendors.  They frequent the middle of Barcelona's main boulevard, interrupt sunbathers on the beach, and pop out from dark corners wielding 6-packs of the cheapest passable beer and saying "Cerveza, Beer?"  "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?"

We were curious why exactly anyone would buy a can from them, so we stopped and asked. Apparently, their economic plan was to stockpile cheap beer for when the supermarkets closed and the much more expensive bars opened.  At that point, beer got expensive, so their "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?" was the only thing able to quench the late-night cheap beer thirst.  

And quench it did.

Troy and I met up with an Indiana University guy studying in Milan and traveling by himself across Europe.  During the day, we didn't travel with him much because he was testing out the nude beach (and shouting "No, don't you understand NO!" to an old Asian woman wanting to give him a massage -- only 5 euros for the back)  while we were exploring the city.  But at night, we met up with him to go out for Subway.  Afterwards, we walked down the main strip, peppered with requests for "Cerveza, Beer?" "Cerveza, Beer?"  

Well, he bought a beer from one of these vendors.  Good travel buddies never let another drink alone, so I bought one, too.  As I sipped mine, this guy, with a vow to show Barcelona how "we do it in America," borrowed a key from Troy and shotgunned the beer in the middle of the main strip.

(Shotgunning a beer involves puncturing the base of the beer, putting the hole to your mouth, then popping the tab so the beer gushes out of the hole.  Apparently, the beer he got was a bit shaken.  When he punctured it, a stream of beer jetted out, splashing the guy who sold him it.  As far as I know, Troy's room key is still sticky.) 

So that's "Smoke some weed" and "Beer, Cerveza."  The two most common sounds of the night

 

There be rarer and more frightening species in the woodwork, too.  Once I accidentally made eye-contact with a middle-aged man riding a bicycle.  His head snapped to mine like something out of the Exorcist as he said: "Want some crack?" After that, I learned to admire the scenery rather than the people.

Thievery, drugs, and cerveza.  

Ahhh...Barcelona.

London Weekend Part Deux

The only reason I can understand why it's the strange memories from London Weekend that stand out is because a guy running ahead of my dad in the 1984 Chicago Marathon decided to take a piss.

That was one of the two things my dad remembered from his Marathon: the urine dribbling down the guy's leg as they pushed towards the finish.  Of those two things, that's the only one I remember.  Although I do know he told me, before I ran the Chicago Marathon this past year, that he didn't remember most of the race.  Not even finishing.  

Back to London.  The strange workings of memory mean that it's not so much being on Tower Bridge, finding Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey, seeing the Ancient Egypt exhibit at the British Museum, or wandering through the exhibits at Tower of London that I'll remember.  Don't get me wrong -- they were great.  And yet these adventures are expected.  They're the norm.  They're the 26 miles of the race that you're expected to run.  

 

It's the other .2 that stick. 

Episode 1:

"Red or white?" the MC asked.  His bloated red face was slicked with sweat from screaming out pub quiz questions for the past hour.  

I had no idea what he meant.  I had just captained our pub-quiz team to a championship -- with little thanks to me, really.  In a pub packed with over 50 U of I students and alums living in London, my team was lucky to have both Ryan, our spiky-haired London Weekend guide who actually read the stories beneath headlines, and Chris, the English husband of a U of I alum who took care of anything about England. 

"Red," I said.

The MC reached behind the bar and handed me a bottle of red wine as we left the pub to head to a Brazilian diner on the River Thames.  In the hierarchy of concerns and values of your vacation-minded U of I student, the bottle was a potion of instant popularity.

I'll have a feeling I'll be remembering that moment for a long time.  I have no idea why.  Maybe it was the spontaneity of the question.  Of having absolutely, positively no clue what he meant.  Or maybe it was the winning.  We always remember winning, don't we? 

Episode 2:

And then I'll remember the big orange "Drugs" sign.

After the Brazilian diner, Christian, a 2006 U of I alum, led us to a club called Rodeo.  The decor tried really hard to be American Old West, from the Harley to the Route 66 signs. 

But what caught my eye was the big orange neon "Drugs."  No catchy phrase, no embellishment, just "Drugs."  I found this hilarious, in a delusional sort of way.  I don't think there were any drugs there.  They wanded and padded down everyone who entered.  But then again, I'm not sure how else to excuse the flailing-limb-lolling-tongue dance style popular with most of the London crowd.  

Episode 3:

And then, of course, there was the waterfall.

On the last night, we played Circle of Death.  My roommate had annexed our room as the party room.  I decided to skip going to another club, wanting only to go to sleep to fight off a wicked sore throat.  It seemed that over the course of three days, we swapped bugs from our respective English universities so that, even if I was immune to Bristol bugs, the suckers from everywhere else got me sick.

But as more and more students piled into the room, sleep was becoming a less and less likely option. 

So I uncorked a bottle of throat-soothing 7-Up and played along.  It was good rowdy fun until someone crossed the line and threw beer out the window.

Now, Jerome, my study abroad advisor, said the average Londoner is caught on camera over 300 times per day.  Whether or not this is accurate, it certainly is true that there are cameras everywhere.

And one of them nabbed our beer hurler.

Ten minutes later, a fat security guard knocked on the door, breaking up the party and asking "Who dunnit?"  He made the usual threats -- accusations that the perpetrator could be charged with assault, or that we could all be kicked off the floor.  When some of the students denied the beer toss even happened, he victoriously pointed to the wet splatters on the window, evidently pleased with his detective work. 

I wasn't nervous, just angry.   The security guard wanted blood.  American blood made it all the sweeter.   But no one was going to be the rat, and the kid who threw the water was too much of a coward to turn himself in.  So a girl took the bullet for everyone, saying she did it while the guy who did slunk out of the noose.  I was furious at the injustice, but at the same time I was glad finally to get to bed.  Sure enough, the whole thing had blown over by morning.

In the end, what makes for a story are the unexpected snippets that grow like weeds or wildflowers in the cracks of an agenda.  No trip is worth it without these curveballs.  Luckily, they're not hard to come by. 

Indeed, a flexible mindset, a spirit of adventure, and a willingness to depart from the agendas of our expectations provide infinite opportunities for these curveballs.  (And believe me, some of them are very curvy indeed.)   The trick is not to fear the zigs and zags, but to realize that -- weeks, months, years later -- they'll be the tokens we use to assess our own enthusiasm for the experience.  They're the grains of sand that make the pearls. 

They're the reasons we should never be bored with the trials of travel.

Fish 'n Chips 'n Puke 'n Stonehenge

The brief blog haitus wasn't due to a lack of writing, but an excess of it.

A flurry of scholarship deadlines, essays, and presentations came tsunami-style, so I was busy buttressing the fort with sandbags of sentences, poems, papers and preparations.

The storm is weathered.  For now.

Although it feels so good to get it done with that I never want to think of it again lest I puke all over my keyboard, I'd like to revisit the semi-truck pulling contest that was last week's Medieval Drama paper.   It was 2,000 words.  Not even half a piece of cake, I thought.   Still, I was worried.  The thing about essays here is that a lot more chips are on the table.  The stakes are amplified.  Medieval Drama is 30 modules, which translates to about 8 credit hours at Illinois.  Which is the equivalent of a little more than 2 courses.  Which means the single grade for this class makes a big splash. 

Even better/worse, despite being so heavily weighted, you only hand in two papers, and this was the first.  There's no room for a warm-up.   So as I compiled research and crafted arguments for a measley 2,000 word paper that, by US standards, I would crank out in 10 hours or so,  I did all I could to get a favorable roll of the dice.  

Despite the informality of many of the classes, the paper turn-in process is paradoxically structured.  There are three different cover sheets you have to fill out in BLOCK CAPITALS which took a good half-hour considering the course name, "Tradition and Innovation in Pre-Shakespearean Drama," is an essay in and of itself for the pixelated 21st century college student.

Add onto that the time spent dealing with widespread technical incompetence.  When I went to print, printers were down across campus, of course, and no one was in any rush to fix them.  Luckily, I'd given myself three hours to get everything turned in -- enough time to locate a working printer and get the darn thing stamped, signed, put in an airtight vaporlock chamber at the turn-in station, cross-referenced with a sample of my blood, then whisked away in an armored van.

Or so I saw.  I was a bit sleep-deprived.

Speaking of seeing things: Stonehenge.  An ancient wonder of the world.  I went on a trip through the Bristol International Student Center.  The BISC team runs a very good show.  They have tea and cakes for #1 on Monday, all-you-can-eat soup for #2 on Wednesdays and Fridays, and always good company.  That's free.

Stonehenge was fun in that it was fun to make fun of, but otherwise it is a tired-looking monument -- if that's the word -- that, in seeing, I regrettably demystified from the glossy pages of National Geographic.  For part of the walking tour, you're much closer to the road where cars fly by than the structure.  There's nothing that can pull you out of a historical illusion like a stream of cars.  

I walked around Stonehenge twice before the bus moved on to Salisbury Cathedral, the tallest church in England.  It was impressive and imposing, and I got to see one of the four original Magna Cartas.  I tried fish 'n chips for lunch.  Again, like Stonehenge, an English treat better left in the romantic cultural imagination.  Still, many agreed that both are somethings you have to partake in, and I'll subscribe to that.  If only to be puzzled once again why mediocre things are lauded and great things (the English pint, for instance, or pub food) are demeaned.

The highlight of the daytrip was sitting next to a German law student on the way home and discussing how aspiring lawyers sell their souls for big law firm money.  A common enemy and our enlightened non-materialistic selves established, we got along well.  

Mess Theory

Doing the dishes by hand is a good time to wrestle with unanswerable questions. Like why am I doing my flatmates' dishes on a Saturday night?

I saw the notice when I returned from Paris.

Dear residents of flat 610,

We have inspected your flat for the second time and on both occasions have found the common area's to be dirty and badly cared for, no real improvements have been made...If the rooms are continually dirty and untidy there is possibility that you will attract pests of all sorts that will not only affect you but other tenants.

We had to clean, or else they'd do it for us at our expense.

I showed this to my flatmates. "Did you read that letter we got from Housing?" I asked.

"What letter?"

None of them had. Not that I could really fault them for it. The kitchen table was the base of a precarious architectural experiment that, at the moment, was defying gravity. Bowls with cherrios cemented in solidifying milk teetered on pots speckled with stale ramen. The only thing holding it together was the sticky patches on the table's surface that ripped pages out of any reading material I brought along for meals. Our mail slipped through the cracks and was devoured by whatever three-eyed mutants slobbered below.

Thing is, the note wasn't my problem because the mess wasn't my problem. If I had an isotope to label each molecule of dirt constructing this trash edifice, I'm pretty sure none would say "Eric." I had squeezed all my eating things into a single cupboard. I used one cup, one plate, one bowl, and one of each utensil. But here I was, wiping fossilized crumbs from the counters, peeling black molasses-like gunk from the stove top, and scrubbing dishes.

And the worst part was, I didn't know if my flatmates would even notice.

So as I scrubbed dishes the old-fashioned way, freezing my hands under the cold nozzle and burning them under the hot, I hashed out what I call Mess Theory.

Working definition of Mess: Something that deviates from order and into unattractive, unseemly chaos.

Mess Theory is nothing new. It describes our ability to adjust standards and comfort zones so that what I see as a Mess, you see as a normal order of things.

But here's the kicker: Gradually, as I invest time in forming connections, the Mess gets un-messy simply by adjusting to it. Call it cleaning with psychological powers. Eventually, I'll adapt to your perspective. No dishes have been cleaned. No cherrios liberated from their milky tombs. But the mess is gone. We both see what was previously a horrifying kitchen as a kitchen. Without ever lifting a broom.

I wasn't going to wait for Mess Theory to take hold of me. Lest I become that 44-year-old saxophone street performer. What he saw as a stepping stone to greatness (Paris hasn't discovered me because I don't want them to discover me yet), I saw as a trap door into financial and personal destruction. He lied to himself to hide the Mess of pain.

I think one of the reasons travel is so important is because it shields you from becoming a pawn to Mess Theory. As an international student, you're always on your toes. You're never given the full chance to adjust. You still are your "back home" self, with your own standards to measure Messes against. That's part of the reason why traveling to Guatemala this summer was so stunning: what natives saw as their lives, I saw as a Mess of poverty.

Here the Mess wasn't as grave, but it was enough to make my hands chap.

So I washed dishes. And hoped for happier times visiting Bath tomorrow.

My Semester in England

Welcome to my Bristol Blog.

I've deliberated long enough how to introduce what will, fingers crossed, become five to six months of daily recounts. But we all know that moments spent deliberating are potential adventures forever lost. And because we never know if the dials will land 7-7-7 unless we give them a chance to stop, I'll make this quick.

My aim is to keep a concise running record of interesting, unexpected, or downright entertaining things that happen during my study in England. As honestly as I can translate them, I'll weave in my own thoughts with the plot of each day. Hopefully any rambling will be because I'm still fumbling around here, and probably will be for the duration of the adventure.

So why an overly cliche, slightly narcissistic, and a largely unread log of my trip? Simply: I feel compelled to write about my travels. Travel and writing fit together. Not like peanut butter and jelly, but like a cop and a prisoner cuffed at the wrist. Neither can ever get completely what he wants (arrest for the cop, escape for the prisoner) without sacrificing authority to his opponent, lest they beat each other up and destroy their own ambitions in destroying their opponent's.

But sometimes, the cop and the prisoner, travel and writing...sometimes they work together to solve what neither could solve alone. That's exciting. The flipside is that sometimes the travel/writing connection sparks conflict that would never have come about had I decided to travel without reflection or write sheltered from my environment.

The point is that writing is not a passive reflection of travel. And travel is not a neatly plotted novel easily scribed into words. Not even close.

For one, knowing I'm writing changes how I travel. I'm more prone to sneak an ear into a bystander's conversation. I'm more libel to try new things, whether risky or bizarre, in the hope that I discover a gem of a story. In short, I have more fun.

While writing affords me an excuse for the multiple embarrassing failings that energize each day, it also makes the trip worth something. A token of memory, yes. A way to share a journey with loved ones, definitely. But also a way to anchor every journey, whether mundane or majestic, in the oceans of novelty. A way to encode, make sense of, and cohabit with the big blasts of newness that I might otherwise not be courageous enough to confront. A way to get down the specifics before they become impressionistic smears.

Most of all, writing extends the journey. It's a way to travel when you're too tired to walk anymore.

I'd like to dedicate these entries to the late Michael Crichton, whose memoir Travels is just plain awesome. To my brother Matt, who gets to go to Handball Nationals but who encouraged this blog by saying mine might be good enough to surmount the cliche. To my sister Jane, for her affability and social skills that, by mimicking, have already won me a couple friends here. And of course, to my mom and dad, for the infinite number of ways they've supported this trip and every trip I've ever taken.

I hope you enjoy it.