Last Day in Bristol

I'm spending my last day in Bristol remembering details.

Maybe that's the punishment for spending Saturday afternoon cleaning up the uber-nasty kitchen.  It took two-and-a-half passes through Green Day's "21st Century Breakdown" -- a 70 minute album -- to get everything done.  I did it not because I wanted to, or because I felt it'd be a nice parting gesture, but because Unite House charges mucho pounds for anything left untidy.  Since I'm the first to leave, and I have very little faith in the cleaning diligence of my flatmates, I now have an Ace in my pocket in case Unite House wants to cut into my security deposit for a sloppy flat.  

But details.

I'm beginning to believe more and more that most genius, success, and BIG accomplishmentes are all about details.  Boring, drab details.  The obvious example is marathon running.  Step by step, tolerating increasing increments of pain until its excruciating and you're only on mile 21, so you keep going until the next step is impossible and then the next step is really impossible and then the next step is obscenely impossible and then you're done and you've run a marathon.

Science is sometimes the same way.  Carl Woese is a University of Illinois scientist who discovered archaea, the third branch of life (prior to archaea there were only prokaryotes and eukaryotes).  I'm lucky enough to be taking a foundational evolution seminar with him next semester that he's teaching in order to jumpstart college courses on evolution.  In discovering archaea, Carl worked long hours for years and years, often by himself, only to reveal his discoveries and be ridiculed.  Now, he's hailed as one of the greatest scientists of our time.

Likewise, details make my four months of study? travel? life? in England and across Europe.  They're the grains of sand that build the pyramids of experience.  So this post is about commemorating some of the details that never made it into a blog post.  It's impossible to get all of them.  The only way to do that is to live it all over again.  But every now and then, a couple of these sand grains make pearls...

• The Chinese CD.  I was helping Jimmy from China with one of his essays when he said, "I have a gift for you."  That gift turned out to be a CD and several MSword documents.  He had made a history of China through music -- starting with ancient songs, progressing through the centuries of music, and arriving at modern times.  The documents described the tracks, why each is important to China, and how each relates to his life.  His gift worked.  I tried extra hard to make sure his essay was spic 'n span.  This one's called "Jasmine."  According to Jimmy, "This is a South-China folk song, famous in the whole China. It expresses the feeling of Chinese people to jasmine, pure and beautiful."  Have a listen:  

• Brinners: Artery-clogging, fat-sopping, syrup-drenched Brinners.  Troy and I had two of 'em.  We made beer pancakes, bacon, hash browns, and eggs fried in bacon grease.  Delish.

• Park St: The vibrant hill that connected my residence with the university.  I must've walked up and down Park St. hundreds of times.  I knew it was a good street because it never got old.  The people-watching opportunities were Vegas-quality.  I got to know this wooly mammoth in a business suit guy who sipped coffee every day at Woodes, a cafe at the base of the hill.  If he was still there with coffee and newspaper as I started walking to class, then I knew I was right on schedule.  If he wasn't there, or packing up to leave, then I knew I had to hoof it to make it to class on time.  

• BBQ on the Downs: Yes, it was rainy and windy and cold.  Yes, it was in the middle of nowhere.  Yes, it was a blast.  Some study abroad students bought a disposable grill; the rest of us brought meat skewers, marshmallows, chips, beer, etc.  We kicked a football around. 

• Football (i.e. soccer) in Pubs: They say football is a gentleman's game played by thugs; rugby a thug's game played by gentlemen.  Gus from Hong Kong and I watched several matches in pubs, happily blending with the gathering of glassy-eyed men (and their semi-bored girlfriends) draining pints and screaming at the television.

• The Hatchet: My very first impression of England was a door made of human skin.  (Allegedly).  Jet-lagged, I stepped out of the taxi and into the rain.  I'd given the cab driver 20 pounds and he'd driven off before my jet-lagged brain could think to demand change.  The cab driver didn't know where exactly Unite House was, but swore it was nearby.  I ended up going into the Hatchet and pulling my big fat suitcases through the throbbing heavy metal.  I asked a guy with a big bull ring through his nose and little studs running from his eyebrows down each side of his nose where Unite House was.  Since then, I've had a heart-to-heart connection with the Hatchet, it's door of human skin, and it's wall-shaking heavy metal.  

Talk It Up

Great conversations are rare.

This whole trip, I've been spoiled with great conversations, but this past weekend was extra groovy.

The past two weeks had been miserable trudgings through the end-of-the year grinder. After working ten to fourteen hour days in solitude to finish my essays, I organized a Friday night dinner and movie for international and English students. We met at Weatherspoons, a chain-pub, then saw Angels and Demons. The movie stunk, but the outing was great. 

By now, four months after arriving, a lot of the thrills of England have worn off. English accents aren't cute but normal.  Pub culture isn't "WOW" but "hm."  I'm even looking the right "right" way when crossing streets.  Sad, sad, sad...

But bringing together international students doesn't get old.  Expecting only five to seven people, I was surprised when there was such a huge gathering that I had to throw tables together and steal chairs to make enough space in the pub. There were students from the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Bahamas, China, France, England, Thailand and Chile.  A veritable mix of 20-somethings. 

The conversations were fantastic.  Over the past four months, we had gotten to know one another.  We had bypassed the generic "where are you from what are you studying why choose Bristol?" questions.  And in the process of progressing from strangers to friends, something magical had happened.  I'm not sure where or why or how.  We didn't talk of geo-politics or global poverty or trade deficits.  Or at least not entirely.  The converstaions were not what I would call "profound."  Mostly, we talked of normal things -- movies, funny dorm-room experiences, pranks, school.  But suddenly, we had reached a sweet spot in social dynamics: just enough familiarity and difference to pull a water-into-wine trick by turning mundanity into greatness.  

But really, it's no trick at all.  A great conversation tight-rope walks between extremes: there's got to be a little discord to perpetuate discussion but enough agreeableness to prevent our hands from becoming fists.  A familiar international crowd satisfies those requirements.

On Saturday, I visited Susan Feuille, my LAS Leaders advisor, and her daughter Julie in Bath.

Susan is an absolute delight to be around.  We had tea, visited the Roman Baths, then went to a bona fide Italian diner.  

Again, the conversation topics were normal: LAS Leaders, campus crime, the economic crisis, celebrity sightings, why the woman at the table next to us kept turning around and lookin at us (we decided it was because Susan had once met Matt Damon).  These conversations were great for a slightly different reason.  I remember when Troy and I were traveling, it was sometimes a thrill to meet up with our friends along the way just to unload all our stories onto another person.  If an Atlantic Monthly article is right that human relationships are the only things that really matter in life, then it makes sense that experiences are only worth something if they can be spread through friend and family circles.

Traveling blends experiences with relationships -- what Michael Crichton identifies as the two ingredients to a worthwhile existence.  A good conversation mixes both ingredients, but a great one mixes something else.  Luck?  Atmosphere?  A good meal?  I'm not sure.  Whatever it is, that's a whole nother conversation.

Forging the Frontier

The English novelist Graham Greene, one of my literary heroes, has a thrill-seeker's mentality to challenge that of Michael Crichton.  While at Oxford, Greene combatted boredom with Russian Roulette -- a game he deemed in his 1969 BBC interviews to be merely "a little risk."  In those same interviews, Greene discusses his travel life, saying: 

"I've always had a certain itch to get away for a while from my ordinary surroundings, combined with a curiosity to see the frontier."

In his cavalier accounts of using opium in Indo-China, one wonders just what "certain itch"  Greene was scratching.

Nonetheless, Greene's interview made me wonder a few things:

1. To what extent is a "travel-itch" a sign of some sort of psychotic, or at least mentally severe, behavior?

2. Is there such a thing as a "frontier" anymore, particularly in the Western world?

The second question first.  

Western Europe is certainly an adventure.   But is it a frontier?  Young Americans like treating it as one.  I know because on my recent backpacking trip, I did, too.  I romanticized Europe as "fresh ground."  I imagined a place where history thrives all around me, a place where I, in tramping through, can stitch my thread -- however small -- into its rich, bloody, fabric.     

In my mind, Troy and I conquered liter beers for lunch (and dinner) in Munich.  We persevered on a rattling train from Krakow to Auschwitz, only two granola bars to sustain us, braving a 20-minute queue snaking out of the ice-cream shop.  We survived an overnight bus from Madrid to Seville, parrying all it threw at us: crying babies, snarky bus drivers, Bob Marley music.  We discovered a way around pricey public restrooms in Venice.  We gritted our teeth through achey feet as we progressed through the painfully long trek to see the Sistine Chapel.  No pain, no game.  

But let's not kid ourselves.  Frontier?  Europe?  Western Europe? Uh, no.  A frontier, I think, means danger.  Think Wild West.  Think Louis and Clark.  Think ploughing forth into mapless territory, or journeying to the end of the earth when the world was still flat and sea monsters waited jaws-wide at the edge.

Outside the occasional thief, it often seems the greatest danger in Western Europe is 3.50 Euro cokes and fat European pigeons who, upon approaching, take so long to flap their flab off the ground that if you don't slow down, you'll get a face-full of feathers.  No joke: it's fun to treat Western Europe like a tiger, but stripped of imagination, Western Europe is as tame as a kitten.  Feed it some Euros, and it'll allow you to mistake its pur for the roar of the wild.

And yet...

As far as containing sights the first-time backpacker has never before seen, it is a slew of new stuff.   No, crossing a major touristy bridge in Prague will never be a frontier. Being stuck in and part of the thronging sunburnt faces listening again to a street performer jam Canon in D on accordian is a version of unpleasentness that belongs in the torture museum we visited in Cordoba.

And yet...

Backpacking was a challenge.  Great, yes, but difficult.  Emotions become compressed gun-powder that a simple spark -- say losing at a card game -- can really, really tempt.  In that sense, a frontier is not so much an unexplored physical space, but an unexplored region of your own expectations, temperment, and self-image.  Doing what you didn't think possible.  Being where you, one year ago, could never see yourself.  Pushing the horizons of expectation even farther with new experiences and then again pushing them even farther.

In that sense, Europe is a frontier.   Even if it is all in your head.

So in that sense, regarding the first question, we're all a little crazy.