Tomorrow: China

When you first arrive in a new place, you may have some preconceived notions about it. Paris is the most romantic city in the world, or Tokyo is brimming with bowing businessmen. Or you might not know a thing about it. In both cases, the truth is really closer to the latter; the city, for all your ideas about it, or lack thereof, is an unknown quantity.

You don’t know how or how long it takes to get from Gare du Nord to Port de la Chapelle. You don’t know how much help you’ll get from kind strangers (it turns out, usually, a lot). You don’t know what it smells like on the street or just how that belfry in the market square looks when the sun rises behind it at 8 in the morning.

All these things you begin to know the second you step off the train or leave the airport. All these things, the contours of a city, are part of the landscape of your memories by the time you board the train or plane to leave.

The surprising part of it, considering your sheer ignorance of the place days or weeks before, is how loathe you are sometimes to leave. Even when you’re eager to move on, even when you’re homesick. It’s like leaving a new friend, or a new home.

On Dec. 28 of last year, in that hollow space between Christmas and New Year, Eric (of Anticompass, see right), said it best when he wrote about moving on:

… And so I continued on my way with creaking legs and an aching heart. It seems that everywhere I go I meet so many wonderful people, and each place I stay for a few days, I could stay all my life. The hardest part of traveling isn’t the riding nor the uncertainty of where I shall sleep or what I shall eat. It is the certainty that leaving will break my heart and will be an abandonment of home.

Pull this thread and just walk away

Back in London for a week, staying with my friends here. We were meant to watch this new movie “Jumper” the other night. You know, this one:

A genetic abnormality allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Paladins’ who have sworn to kill them.

But here, “jumper” means what “sweater” means in the United States. So if you want to destroy my sweater …

Do your country proud
One of the first things my friend Devon did when she got home last night was ask if I wanted to be on TV today. I would be one of a few Americans on a panel talking about the U.S. presidential election.

I did a little soul searching and then agreed to make a fool of myself on European cable TV. The next morning I got out of bed and rushed over to the studio, where I met the four other people — they were all more than well-informed. They were students of the London School of Economics and a couple were even campaigning for Barack Obama, if not Hillary Clinton.

Basically, in comparison, I sounded a little silly. To keep my nervousness in check, I pretended we were just making a Wayne’s World sort of video podcast with all our African friends phoning in to debate the virtues of Barack versus Hillary.

I hear I will get a DVD of the event, though I doubt I will ever subject myself to the watching of it.

Last day on the continent

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving continental Europe. After months of moving from place to place, always on the next train to the next city, the next hostel, the next place with the new language and the different food, I can barely believe it. I’m in denial, I think. I can’t believe it’s actually over.

Well, sort of anyway. I’m spending a few more days in London and then flying to China.

I spent my last night here at a hostel in Lisbon that was probably as different from any hostel I’ve stayed at as it could be. It’s probably the second smallest hostel I’ve ever stayed at, which lent it a perfect sort of intimate atmosphere. At dinner (the place has an in-house chef), about a dozen of us, half travelers half Portuguese, sat around the table talking about our homes, cultures, about Lisbon and Portugal. It was the perfect place, and the perfect way to end Europe.

And now I’m in Seville

I feel like I’ve been missing in action from my blog for a while, even though it’s only been a little over a week since Cinque Terre.

Maybe because that was two countries (or four cities) ago, and I haven’t written about any of those places. It wasn’t uneventful though:

Avignon was small and kind of charming; I braved some local version of the Santa Ana winds in the early morning to catch my train to Barcelona, which is, incidentally, an awesome city. In Madrid I spent one night in a hostel, and then resigned myself — due to being blindsided by weekend travelers — to staying two nights in an expensive hotel.

There I took my first bath in adult memory and watched Sylvester Stallone and Daniel Dae Kim dubbed in Spanish in their respective movies. I also watched Sky News report breathlessly around the clock on beached ferries in England.

A couple days ago I met a Kiwi on the train who had lost €100 in a shell game on the streets of Barcelona. To compensate, he was sleeping on overnight trains rather than finding beds in hostels. To him destinations were not so much end goals as an incidental byproduct of having slept on a moving train through the night.

Five days — five beds I should say — before I fly back to London, I kind of feel the same way. As if I’m really only interested in each new place (and there are two more) in so far as they offer me another bed, another night, to cross off my countdown to London.

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I reached Seville in the early afternoon and had a stroll about. The one place I wanted to visit, the Giralda, was closed. Nearby, the trees in the Alcazar garden were swollen with oranges. Some had splattered onto the ground. I was amazed no one was picking them to eat. I saw an intact one on the ground and considered picking it up for the sake of vitamin C, but orange has never really been my fruit, let alone road orange.

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It’s late afternoon and I’m lying on my hostel bed staring upward, listening to the birds chirping outside and eating those long rolls of bread with chocolate bits in them — you know the kind. The French girl who is reading next to me is stealing glances at me, I can tell. Maybe I’m retardedly enjoying my bread too much. I’m almost done with Europe. Seville is so quiet. Life is good.

On the Cinque Terre path

View the photoset, or check out the slideshow.

Cinque Terre has been hyped to me more than once, each time by trustworthy friends, so I had high expectations when I arrived. I wasn’t disappointed.

I got my first glimpse of the place from the train. I had been seat-bound in a regional train for about six hours, and it was 5 p.m. when I finally boarded the train from nearby La Spezia to Riomaggiore, the first of Cinque Terre’s five coastal villages. During the short trip to Riomaggiore, the train emerged from a long tunnel briefly — for probably a full second at most before entering another tunnel — long enough for me to see that the train had, in its transit, gone from nondescript train station to hillside track perched above the exhilarating waters of the Mediterranean. The view, brief as it was, knocked the breath out of me. The sky was a shocking pink, and the water below, a rippling white and blue. So this was Cinque Terre.

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The last time I was in a place that similarly bowled me over was Venice (just days ago), and it was there that I had a conversation with two fellow travelers that went something like this. Traveler 1 was glad he didn’t live in a place like Venice because if he had, he would never be able to appreciate its beauty. Traveler 2 disagreed; in his view, not only did Venetians see the beauty of Venice, but the city’s beauty was part and parcel of every Venetian’s being. In that sense, every Venetian is in some way more beautiful, or special, than people of other cities, even if they are entirely ordinary in every other way.

I can see truth in both viewpoints, but I have to admit an affinity for the latter. I like the idea that a people can be marked as extraordinary for the places in which they live. After all, a person’s home is an inextricable part of his identity.

Ruins of the past and present

Naples isn’t a pleasant city, but it does seem familiar. Maybe because it resembles all the mangier parts of cities I’ve seen before, all rolled into one.

There’s also the garbage crisis. Apparently, some time ago, the city’s landfills simply filled up, and garbage has been literally piling up on the streets ever since. I took a brief walk around the evening of the day I arrived — it was as long as I could stand — and let’s say it’s not a very photogenic place.

But it was for Pompeii that I visited Naples. The ancient city that was both destroyed and preserved by a deadly volcanic blast from nearby Mount Vesuvius is only half an hour away by train.

If the ruins of Rome did nothing for me, the ruins of the excavated city of Pompeii was an awe-inspiring experience.

After doing so much walking in other cities, it was a little bizarre to be walking the streets of an uninhabited one, looking for this or that point of interest. There, you can walk into random, private houses, whether they be typical homes or upper-class villas. Paintings on the walls are still intact. You can walk into the town bordello or sit up in the nosebleeds of the Grand Theater.

While I was wandering about, I heard a girl say, for whatever reason (I think she was eating chocolate), “Its like Halloween!”

What a cool thought. On Halloween night, we dress up as ghouls and ghosts and visit the homes of the living. In Pompeii, we are the living, strolling between homes of the dead — occasionally, you even see their bodies, frozen in agony.

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Places like Pompeii, where signs of a former civilization are clearly visible through the ruins, always remind me of post-apocalyptic scenes from Hollywood movies. Like the Statue of Liberty in “Planet of the Apes” or Manhattan under water in “A.I.”

I think it’s because when you visit a place like Pompeii, you can’t help but be convinced of the mortality of your own civilization. People in Pompeii used to make art, put on plays, worship in temples. Then one day Mount Vesuvius blew up and it was all over. The idea is morbid but undeniably fascinating: What if it happened to us? What if we were laid to ruin?

I imagine strolling through the seaside ruins of Third Street in Santa Monica, or walking without a ticket into the Disney Concert Hall, its curvy metallic roof lying in twisted shards on Grand Avenue. Think of all the empty malls and dead Abercrombies, Starbuckses without latte lines, streets and parking lots full of cars as usual but curiously absent of traffic.

There’s been a book written about this: “The World Without Us.” I’m definitely reading it when I get back.