(Note: About 48 hours after writing this, I fell in love with Poland and never came out of it...)
Two days from now, I'll be in Poland. I find it difficult to comprehend my own quickness of judgement, the remorseless way I've changed all my own plans. I find it difficult to accept what I've so rapidly given up.
I won't be making it to Dublin, or to Spain. I might make it to France. Nothing is as I've said it would be. Everyone privy to the situational aspects of how and why is aghast: Just GO, they say. Do it on your own. Do it anyway. It's occurred to me that I am just not brave enough. I lack the courage necessary to risk the what-ifs, those insidious doubts about parts of life that seem to only work in concretion.
...and the greatest of these is money. I've heard plenty of tales about broke and weary adventurers who've purported to have made it across the continent of 5 Euro a day, feeding themselves on booze and poetry and air, sleeping in alleys and public parks, on borrowed beds. I don't doubt that it can and has been done. I doubt my own ability to handle it. Back at the airport in Porto, I paid what seemed exorbitant for an hour on the Internet. Within that hour, I purchased the ticket that brought me here to Lodz, another back to Portugal, and paid with my confidence. Instinctively I know I can't afford to find food, transport and lodging all over the U.K. The exchange rate has recently plummeted. The US Dollar is worth fuck-all, as they say. I reach instead for the lifeline offered by my friend and hiking partner, Rich (see Bear Mountain entry). Eastern Europe it will be, the course of this entire journey thusly changed.
If I were truly courageous, truly fearless, would I have done what I've done? Why not go, as everyone seems to think I should, eschewing any sense of practicality in favor of tracing out my original map? Maybe this will haunt me, my willingness to discard what's left of that map in favor of safety, familiarity. In Poland, I'll be able to shower every day, check my email and Facebook, watch movies, speak English. All semblance of travel to survival will be gone. And there it is-the ubiquitous appeal of travel at its barest, in its rawest incarnation: Those who have wandered from place to place, subsisting on (or so they say) naught but a few dollars and the kindness of strangers have not just seen or done what I haven't. They've survived it. Inherent in such minimalism and borderline poverty is the tenacity of the human will.
Right now, I unroll my sleeping bag on the hard, icy, polished granite floor of London's Stansted airport. Every hostel and hotel in Essex is full. I can't bring myself to pay for a bus into the city. I curl up under a 4-sided display of flashing flight times and gate numbers, still a full twelve hours from my own flight's takeoff. All around me, doorways and shop entrances and bits of floor space are covered with sleeping bodies: young couples huddled against each other, solo travelers leaning back against their overstuffed backpacks, groups of friends with limbs draped over limbs.
We're all waiting for something to carry us away. Maybe we don't know where we're going. Security guards patrol around us, stepping over jackets and purses and outstretched legs.
Somehow I sleep heavily through the night, waking at 7 AM to a security guard's boots right near my face. Thanks to my trusty sleeping bag, I've once again stayed warm. When I crawl out of it and out from under the display, a gentlemanly elderly Brit stands before me, manning a "Veterans of the U.K." table. I give him 2 pounds. He gives me a red poppy in exchange. He's never met anyone from Alaska before, not to mention a small girl traveling alone so far from home. The poppy has a gold back. I pin it on my hat, and head over to the closest restaurant for a proper English breakfast.
Everything seems better, somehow, in the earliest of the morning hours. I can afford this food now, this thick British bacon and this piece of toast and these potatoes. Only 6 more hours until I leave. It's windy out, the banners hung outside the airport snapping to and fro, and the tea is hot and sweet.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Porto, PT: Change in the Wind, says I.
(Note: I've started going back through the notebook I wrote in throughout my trip. Entries from here on out with be jumbled, from different dates and countries and mindsets.)
To communicate. This is not a wish, nor an action. It's a necessity, something essential that I can't grasp here, a handful of sand, or a wet, new rope: I have it in the palm of my hand yet I cannot hold onto it. At the airport (Charles de Gaulle), in line and at the cafes, my French must have been passable enough-after one sentence, I'm swept away by a flood of rapid French, only half of which is understandable.
Here, in Porto as in Lisboa, I'm mistaken for Brasilian, sometimes for Portuguese. The flood comes again. To communicate with rapidity, with fluency, I crave like, right now, I crave food, preemptively imagining what it used to be like to ignore the shape of my mouth, the roundness of "o" or the slurring of "l-h".
Hunger. This is not it's harshest form, something I will not venture to liken to what I am: sitting in a hotel room, a bag of tiny pears in front of me, dreaming of French fries, a baked potato, steak. When I get to London, no matter how late, I will find a place that's open, that sells pies and chips and peas. The last week's subsistence on 5-7 Euro a day has yielded a sandwich, two cups of milky coffee, a piece of fruit, some chocolate. This is not yet a debilitating hunger. Rather, like one word's contiguousness with another, this one pear and this croissant, this cup of coffee and an apple, all blend together to create a lack of satisfaction, an unremitting lack of ending, syntax stilted, the hesitation of native speakers before my halting questions.
Unable to face another night of cold, wet sleeplessness, I've spent 30 Euro on a hotel room in Porto. I've been somewhat marooned: having braved the ICC (intercity) trains and another long ride on the metro, I arrived here thinking Brandon would eventually do the same. We'd head off to London, and from there resume our much-touted trek through the UK. It's been 12 hours. He's nowhere in sight. The young man working the night shift here is grateful for the company. I drink a too-sweet European Coca-Cola and sit up with him, in the lobby, watching British sitcoms and comedy revivals. He asks if the entire state of Alaska is full of bears. This time, I don't mind answering the questions. In the morning, Liliana, the morning shift girl, fixes me a pot of hot, strong coffee. She's someone else who's shocked: she swears I'm Portuguese. I'm tired, groggy, I apologize, but I have to switch to English. Again I'm floundering, hunting for some justification, some reason for my certainly jumbled syntax. Why have I bothered to learn at all, if I can't have a conversation at 8 in the morning? Liliana doesn't seem to mind. She ignores the rules about check-in and check-out. She says I can stay until noon. We laugh at the supposed silliness of all these questions about bears and igloos and snow; she wants to take a cruise to Alaska one day. Before I leave, she looks the other way, waives the 25 cent charge for making a phone call, and lets me call Brandon one more time. He's not picking up. I need to find a computer, and fast.
Before heading back to the airport, I stop round the corner for something to eat. For 2.40 Euro, I get a bowl of soup and an apple. The apple, though I pull it from the mini-fridge outside the counter, is washed and handed back to me by the smiling shop-girl. She gives it to me on a china plate, with a tiny knife for cutting it into slices. The soup she brings out to me, first arranging a white paper cloth on my table, then a silverware set. My apple on its porcelain plate glistens with the water on its skin. Its tacitness is perfect: it waits to be cut into and when I do, I find it perfect inside as well, and I can't eat it all at once, but linger, taking small bites, turning the pages of my book methodically. The shop girl brings out my soup, and that I eat ravenously, Portuguese news blaring behind me.
I can almost understand what's happening, the inflection of the male newscaster over the female. I manage a strong Muito obrigada. O sopa estas bem. The shop-girl says nothing back. She seems to know that this is all I can manage. Each table in the cafe shines. Liliana's address is in my notebook; I'll send her something, when I get home. Rain-slicked red umbrellas on the patio, and an elderly man with a black cane walking by the window. There's a freshness to this version of alone that I hadn't known before.
To communicate. This is not a wish, nor an action. It's a necessity, something essential that I can't grasp here, a handful of sand, or a wet, new rope: I have it in the palm of my hand yet I cannot hold onto it. At the airport (Charles de Gaulle), in line and at the cafes, my French must have been passable enough-after one sentence, I'm swept away by a flood of rapid French, only half of which is understandable.
Here, in Porto as in Lisboa, I'm mistaken for Brasilian, sometimes for Portuguese. The flood comes again. To communicate with rapidity, with fluency, I crave like, right now, I crave food, preemptively imagining what it used to be like to ignore the shape of my mouth, the roundness of "o" or the slurring of "l-h".
Hunger. This is not it's harshest form, something I will not venture to liken to what I am: sitting in a hotel room, a bag of tiny pears in front of me, dreaming of French fries, a baked potato, steak. When I get to London, no matter how late, I will find a place that's open, that sells pies and chips and peas. The last week's subsistence on 5-7 Euro a day has yielded a sandwich, two cups of milky coffee, a piece of fruit, some chocolate. This is not yet a debilitating hunger. Rather, like one word's contiguousness with another, this one pear and this croissant, this cup of coffee and an apple, all blend together to create a lack of satisfaction, an unremitting lack of ending, syntax stilted, the hesitation of native speakers before my halting questions.
Unable to face another night of cold, wet sleeplessness, I've spent 30 Euro on a hotel room in Porto. I've been somewhat marooned: having braved the ICC (intercity) trains and another long ride on the metro, I arrived here thinking Brandon would eventually do the same. We'd head off to London, and from there resume our much-touted trek through the UK. It's been 12 hours. He's nowhere in sight. The young man working the night shift here is grateful for the company. I drink a too-sweet European Coca-Cola and sit up with him, in the lobby, watching British sitcoms and comedy revivals. He asks if the entire state of Alaska is full of bears. This time, I don't mind answering the questions. In the morning, Liliana, the morning shift girl, fixes me a pot of hot, strong coffee. She's someone else who's shocked: she swears I'm Portuguese. I'm tired, groggy, I apologize, but I have to switch to English. Again I'm floundering, hunting for some justification, some reason for my certainly jumbled syntax. Why have I bothered to learn at all, if I can't have a conversation at 8 in the morning? Liliana doesn't seem to mind. She ignores the rules about check-in and check-out. She says I can stay until noon. We laugh at the supposed silliness of all these questions about bears and igloos and snow; she wants to take a cruise to Alaska one day. Before I leave, she looks the other way, waives the 25 cent charge for making a phone call, and lets me call Brandon one more time. He's not picking up. I need to find a computer, and fast.
Before heading back to the airport, I stop round the corner for something to eat. For 2.40 Euro, I get a bowl of soup and an apple. The apple, though I pull it from the mini-fridge outside the counter, is washed and handed back to me by the smiling shop-girl. She gives it to me on a china plate, with a tiny knife for cutting it into slices. The soup she brings out to me, first arranging a white paper cloth on my table, then a silverware set. My apple on its porcelain plate glistens with the water on its skin. Its tacitness is perfect: it waits to be cut into and when I do, I find it perfect inside as well, and I can't eat it all at once, but linger, taking small bites, turning the pages of my book methodically. The shop girl brings out my soup, and that I eat ravenously, Portuguese news blaring behind me.
I can almost understand what's happening, the inflection of the male newscaster over the female. I manage a strong Muito obrigada. O sopa estas bem. The shop-girl says nothing back. She seems to know that this is all I can manage. Each table in the cafe shines. Liliana's address is in my notebook; I'll send her something, when I get home. Rain-slicked red umbrellas on the patio, and an elderly man with a black cane walking by the window. There's a freshness to this version of alone that I hadn't known before.
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