Back to Reality

I suppose I should write something profound about the Pope. I spent a lot of the last month and a half with his buildings and people.

I suppose I should write something profound about Europe. About the wonderful, delicious mess that has been the last two months.

Coming back from Virginia last night on the Metro, surrounded by close friends chattering in our lovely blabbering way, I couldn't help but wonder if it was really all this easy. And that hard. The subway stop, the empty rainy streets, the vague churning of the stomach that comes from cheap beer consumed too quickly... except for the English signs, I could have been back in Vienna, Prague, Madrid. Is "home" really as simple as a few years of inside jokes and familiar glances? Or that difficult?

I hope sincerely that in the not too distant future, when I have a new job and am back to being a responsible, bill-paying, community-contributing American citizen, I will look out a window at a hazy, rainy Washington afternoon and think of the sea undulating under the cracking sheets of ice in Nyhavn. Of the strangers that made my days who I will never see again. Of that canal corner in Amsterdam where I watched the moon rise after a day of whipping rain. Of the fathers and sons kicking footballs in Dublin parks. When I pass the IMF building, that I have a new definition for those initials.

There is more of course. There always is. However, trying to recount it all, record every minute for posterity, cheapens it, makes it a commodity. What would be best is that it stays present, popping up when I least expect it.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, aka my semisecret pre-Europe blog. If you ask nicely, maybe I'll give you the URL. Maybe not. It's nice to keep some things to oneself.

Thank you.

Home Sweet Home

Thank God, made it back to DC unraped, unrobbed, and except for a really disturbing incident in which I was kicked off a train on the Adriatic Coast at 3:3o the morning I had to be in Rome to catch a flight, with a Transylvanian prostitute clinging to me , basically unscathed any further.

That last sentence probably deserves more explanation, or at least a coherent grammar structure, but I haven't slept in 90 hours or showered in 89. Time for both, in my own shower and my own, big girl, non-bunked bed. Tomorrow I will wake up, and my first thought will not be, "Where am I again?"

From all of the postings of the last few days, you probably think I had a miserable trip. Not so! A run of bad luck does not a bad trip make. Once I'm fully conscious, I'll write a lovely summary post in which I brag incessantly and you'll generally get really sick of my ponderous prose.

I HAVE A PASSPORT

Praise God and all His cherubs, saints, archangels and harp-stringers, I have a passport!

And if you were wondering what I meant when I said "I rode a lion," this is what I was talking about. Yes, that´s Christopher Columbus on a statue in Barcelona. Allow me to be a total jerk and mention that A) he´s Italian, not Spanish, and B) he´s totally pointing to Libya. Silly Spanish architects.

By the way, I was totally drunk last night when I wrote that last entry and I still managed to properly use and spell the word "nomenclature." How could I possibly not get hired for a fantastic job right after I get back to DC??

Now let´s just hope that the train works strike in France does not affect my overnighter from Barcelona to Milan. FYI, I probably will not be blogging again until I get back to DC on Thusday night. Oh who am I kidding... I´ll probably blog before that. But just in case, thank you for your comments and advice. This blog has been a hugely fun part of this trip, and thanks for sharing it with me.

Catch you in the next hemisphere.

Today I Rode a Lion (Statue)

Maybe it´s a good thing that Blogger is ridiculously erratic. When I was online earlier today, gabbing with Remley and Libby and Jonas, I wrote this ridiculously bitter entry entailing the number of hours in Barcelona I´ve spent sleeping, clutching my purse in fear, and generally behaving like a refugee might upon fleeing her war-torn homeland.

Here´s the thing: Blogger somehow knew enough to have a system error at the moment I was ready to post, and in the process deleted my entire entry. And I´m incredibly glad it did. Because in the interim, I read over my travel journal and was reminded of all the fantastic things, places and people I´ve seen on this trip. In the interim, I walked on the beaches of Barcelona and dipped my feet in the Mediterranian Ocean as the sun set over Spain. I sipped a triple of Bailey´s that was four times the size and one quarter the price as a Baileys in Venice as I watched the sky deepen to a pinky-purple over the sea, as the clatter of steel drums and conversation in Spanish decorated the scenery around me.

And though the Gods of Travel, for some awful reason, found fit to relieve me of every document and tangible memory of this trip beyond my journal and this blog, I have still managed to find bliss in this experience. Yes, for a time I was stranded in a foreign nation without money or documentation. An experience like that will very quickly illustrate who will be there for you in the most difficult of circumstances. For those of you who were there, and you know well who you are, I am incredibly grateful. Whether it be for you financial support, your silly websites, your words of comfort or your offers to take me out for good ol´fashioned greasy American food when I get back to the States, I feel incredibly lucky to have you in my life. Thank you, thank you, a million times over.

For those of you whom have asked, I did try to meet with Edna and Marie (yes I got the name wrong, but in my defense I was highly emotional that day. You try getting your money and documentation stolen in a country where you don´t really speak the language and don´t know a soul, and see how you do with nomenclature). However, when I´d called them for lunch, Marie suggested metting at La Segrada Familia, the big Gaudi cathedral in town. Perhaps planning to meet at a cathedral on Easter Sunday in a Catholic nation was not wise, because I wasn´t able to find them in the hordes, though I´m sure they were there. I wish so much I could have seen them, to thank them properly for the wonderful kindness and comfort they gave me and to tell them I would repay it by showing such kindness to a stranger someday soon, when given the opportunity. They will be very much on my mind, and I hope I can find them somehow, to say thank you properly.

Ten hours until I can meet with the US Consulate and get out of this country. It´s no longer the godforsaken nation I thought it 24 hours ago... no nation with such paella and views could be. Nonetheless, I will be glad to leave it behind, to go home to the land of friends, and potential, and greasy hamburgers and Bud Light.

Don´t it always seem to go...?

48 Hours in Barcelona By Numbers

29: hours spent sleeping/in bed at Barcelona Dream Hostel, clutching Jenny´s iPod and key to my locker in KungFu Death Grip.

8: hours spent in Internet cafes reading blogs and emailing/IMing with Americans

6: hours spent walking around Barcelona in glorious, burning sunshine glaring suspiciously at everyone passing by me. This foray into Barcelona was solely because of

1: attempts to meet Edna and Marie (yes, I got the name wrong, but understandable as was a little emotional) for lunch at the Sagrada Familia Cathedral

0: successful attempts to meet Edna and Marie. Perhaps meeting at a cathedral on Easter Sunday in a Catholic country was not a good plan. V. sad

1: Non American-meeting/Internet-cafe-related journeys out of hostel to find food

25: minutes it took to eat a doner kebab in a square off Las Ramblas

17: times approached by creepy Spanish me wanting to sell me beer/pot/into white slavery whilst eating said doner kebab

1: incidents in which particularly creepy Spanish would not leave me alone even after I stood up and walked away, forcing me to elbow him in the ribs with the arm that was not clutching my bag with even more terror and anger than usual for my time in Spain.


I think that pretty well sums up my time in Barcelona. Fifteen hours until the US Consulate opens and I can get the necessary papers to leave this godforsaken country. On happier notes:

immense, overlarge amount: gratitude to Matt, Libs and Remley for their various silly websites, concert tickets and offers of greasy American food and cheap American beer when am back in the civilized world. you rock.

You Win

Someone pickpocketed me today. He got my travel wallet with my passport, driver´s license, ATM card, cash, all the gifts I´d bought and my one remaining credit card. Which is of course the one that links to my parent´s account.

I give up. I´m not leaving the hostel except to visit the US Consulate for my passport. If by some miracle I make it out of Barcelona with a new ID and all parts of my person unassaulted, I am taking the train to Rome and fleeing Europe like a refugee. Because guess what... I live in a city at home, but never once have I felt really unsafe there. Like, the kind of unsafe that interferes with your life and makes you scared to leave your bed. After having $400 worth of merchandise stolen, I was really mad, yes. Now, I am seriously scared to leave the relative safety and comfort of my hostel. The streets of Europe have spoken, and they want me off their continent.

So OK. You´ll get your wish soon enough, Europe. Frankly, if I had any documentation and if the US Consulate didn´t have to be closed until Tuesday to fully celebrate the resurrection of Christ, I´d cheerfully leave right now. At least the other robberies... and I so love that I can refer to "robberies,¨plural... affected only me. With this one, I had to terrify my poor parents as they prepared to leave for New York for their first professional conference together, to say nothing of having to cancel their credit card from Spain. Mom, Dad, I´m so sorry that this happened. The last thing I ever wanted was for you to be affected by this trip. The whole point of it was to do it independently, with my own resources and money. I´m just so sorry. Good luck with your presentations in New York, and be glad I didn´t take the proferred Discover card in Paris as well.

You know what really got me? In the police station, where I was busy freaking out and trying not to assault the officers out of frustration with their disdain (I understand Spanish enough to know "tourista estupida," muchos gracias), two lovely middle-aged American women came up to me. "Oh honey," said the first, whose name (of course) turned out to be Edna, "you shouldn´t have to be alone at a time like this. How horrible. Why don´t we wait for you to finish, and we´ll all go get a drink together?"

I fell apart. I started crying in Edna´s big soft arms and this total stranger hugged me while her friend Maureen sympathetically patted my arm. After such callousness from the streets of Spain, on top of all the other crap that has happened since Amsterdam, I was just overwhelmed by such friendliness. Call it naivete, call it simple if you must, but it is that honest American goodness that just made me weak with gratitude.

I had a mountain of paperwork to fill out and Western Union to visit, so I thanked Edna and Maureen but told them that I probably wouldn´t be able to escape. Maureen asked me if I had any money at all, to which I replied that the thief had taken everything. Edna instantly reached under her shirt into her money belt. ¨Oh no, I can´t-¨ I started. ¨You can and you will,¨she replied, handing me a fifty euro bill. She continued ¨We´re not going out tonight, since out hotel is in a bad neighborhood, but let´s do breakfast or lunch tomorrow. You don´t want to come all the way here and be afraid to leave.¨

So maybe I will venture out onto the streets of Europe again tomorrow. But it will be with Edna and Maureen, and with a big honking bag of wired money and the passport photocopy hung around my neck, under my shirt and ducktaped to my chest even after I bleed from the chafing. Thank you God, for the American angels you sent my way, even if you found fit to screw me and my parents over in order to make the introduction.

And Jenny, your iPod is safe and sound. The present I´d bought you is another story, though.

¨Where you going?¨ ¨Barcelona...¨ ¨Oh.¨

Mom, to answer your questions, because I think everyone out there cares desperately about my responses: 1) Katie Holmes. God help me, because I love her and have a total girl crush on her, but there is no film more unwatchable yet packed with unintentional comedy than First Daughter (a parasol??? I mean really). 2) I got a doner kebab, ate it on the Ile de la Citte in the shadow of Notre Dame in that little park we passed in the BotuBus, then wandered back to Shakespeare and Co. to write, find and pet their cat and flirt with the cute British clerk who you so ably chatted up on our first visit. Then just wandered around the Latin Quarter and Sorbonne campus, stuffing my face with crepes and people watching, eventually buying a ridiculous amount of food and wine for the train trip to Madrid.

Yes, Madrid, the city I´m actually in now and have fun stories from. I´ve been taking it pretty easy... today is the first day in a week that I haven´t had something stolen from me and/or gotten sick, and you don´t want to press that kind of luck. Madrid is an incredibly appealing city to me because it operates with my body clock. Cafes and art museums are the only things open before noon, people eat ridiculous amounts of food and the streets are still packed late into the night. I mean late... as in, a club is no good before 3 AM. I wasn´t quite up to that kind of schedule last night, plus it was Holy Thursday and the crowds tended to be more of the prostrating-before-the-statue-of-Mary sort than the salsa sort, so insetad of clubbing I watched a church procession. It´s really something to see-- scores of church officials in robes and black hoods, the KKK kind whose name I can´t recall now. It´s actually very forbidding and creepy looking, even if you keep on reminding yourself that the Spanish and the Church don´t apply those kinds of connotations to the attire. Anyways, the officials are hardly the main attraction-- that would be the enormous altar with hundreds of candles surrounding the statue of Mary. The altar is carried down the street by a dozen men, only the tips of their shuffling feet visible beneath the mammoth altar, and is followed by a surprisingly informal band playing this strange clunky music that sounds not unlike the Glockenspiel in Munich.

After that I wandered down to the Palacio Real, which the royal family doesn´t really use but is almost as friendly and accessible as the Amelianborg Palace in Copenhagen. There are stunning sculpture gardens and it´s on a huge hill that overlooks the Western suburbs, so the view all lit up at night is spectacular. I really like this business of letting anyone, even foreign tourists, be able to wander right up to the steps of a palace. I remember a story Dad once told me of a Soviet colleague of a friend who visited the US before the fall of Communism, and upon finding himself able to walk up the steps of the US Capitol wept with emotion, overwhelmed that people could get so close to what was literally the center of the government power. Of course it hasn´t felt anything quite like that, since these palaces are hardly the actual government buildings and growing up in a democracy (to say nothing of working for it) takes the wonder out of the access, but it´s a wonderfully fun and surprising thing to find a similar access in other nations.

I spent today doing more of the same, wandering about Madrid stuffing my face with paella and wine and visiting gardens and art museums. The Prado is stunning, the only museum I´ve seen that out-Louvres the Louvre (and has a hell of a lot fewer visitors). Still, my favorite was the modern art museum Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, which is home to Picasso´s Guernica. Seeing it live is overwhelming... nothing prepares you for how immense it it, over ten times are large as any other Picasso work I´ve seen on this trip. It´s also in shades of black and white, to allow the viewer to focus on the suffering depicted rather than the carnage, but that doesn´t mean it´s not shocking. I ws also delighted to see more of the loony Fibonacci Crocodile artist´s works, including a Fibonacci Coffee Cup. I´m so confused. Who is this guy and why do museums keep giving him wall space? Does he have dirty pictures of all the European museum curators??

Madrid has been great, but I´m off to Barcelona on the night train. Adios, chicos y chicas.

Hola

I know, I know. I haven´t blogged in forever. There are valid reasons for this, though a reason is just an excuse with a cuter outfit.

1) Paris. Paris, the City of Lights, is also the City of 19.5% Value-Added-Tax and Overpriced Everything. Even in Denmark, where you´re charged for breathing Danish oxygen, Internet access is a reasonable price. Not so in Paris, where nary an inch of anything that a tourist could want has been left unmarked by the Gods of Price Gouging.

2) The Mother in Paris. When your Mommy flies all the way to France so that the two of you can see priceless works of art and get drunk at a titty show (more on that later), it seems a touch rude to spend too much time on the computer.

3) The Death. I would get sick as soon as Pam got to Europe, of course. I don´t blame Dublin and her spoils, but by the time I left the UK I was not in good shape. Paris, at least for the first two days, is a pretty blur of priceless works of art and elegant cream-colored buildings made hazy by the combination of French Tylenol and French wine. Between the coughing and the fever, along with the above circumstances, writing didn´t really seem like a dream activity.

Anyways, Paris was wonderful, and a few highlights should be mentioned. Mom wrote that we went to the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum and cultural center, but she didnçt write just how loony and pretentiously silly it was. I have pretty skeptical feelings on any modern art created after 1970... it´s all so ponderous and yet goofy. Example: one "work" consisted of a crocodile attached to the wall, apparently pooping out the Fibonacci Sequence of numbers behind him in a trail of neon digits that covered the entire wall. I mean really. What is the artist (and I use the term loosely) possibly trying to say with that?

Also unintentionally hilarious was the Moulin Rouge show, which we decided to go to on a whim on our last night. It´s very Vegas, with insane costumes (doesn´t it hurt, being topless but with big chunky beads constantly swishing over your chest?? ow!) and ludicrous lipsynching to French classics with a healthy dose of American disco thrown in. Mom and I especially loved the extended Colonialism number, which contained both really thought-provoking social commentary and an underwater number where the girl danced with snakes. Good times!

Mom left yesterday morning, and I´m so glad she got to come. We had a fantastic time, and I feel incredibly lucky to have shared part of the trip with her.

Took the overnight train to Madrid last night, and am there now. Am trying to make myself be a Good Tourist and get back out to the Prado and cathedrals, but it´s a little hard to get motivated today. It was a rough train ride and I got sick again, plus it´s practically impossible to find a room in Madrid during Holy Week. I found a place for tonight at the fourth hostel I stoppped at, but literally nada for tomorrow. That means overnight train to Barcelona tomorrow, then two days there. Madrid is lovely, at least what I´ve seen of it so far-- winding cobblestone streets with tile streets markers, and a surprising amount of parks for such an urban, mountainous city. I´m just not feeling super touristy... truth be told, all I really want to do is watch a DVD in English and go to sleep. Nonetheless, I will be touring around with the best of them today. After all, will be home in less than a week... plenty of time for that when in DC.

Hero of the Week Award goes to The Sister, who so generously sent her iPod along to Paris for me to borrow. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I will take very good care of it, and I love your loony taste in music. I´m listening to the soundtrack from "Bat Boy: The Musical" as I type this.