In München, I stayed in a hostel called the Tent. I don’t believe in fairies and by virtue of that, I don’t believe in fairies circles, but in the nighttime with a fire the size of a Fiat and everyone drinking beer and talking different languages and all of the noises of playful debauchery surrounding me, the laughter and guitars and singing and slurring, and the multi-colored globe lights strung perfectly lazily around the camp, arcing through the darkness beyond the firepit toward the large 200 bunk tent, I think I understood why people did or do believe in fairies. From an outside perspective, it is probably what this community must have looked like, careless and loud and happy, moving like an organism pushing and pulling against one another, silhouetted by flame and embers.
Before the first night, two women sat next to me under the small structure that acted as the kitchen and smoking area, a shield from rain and a place for quiet during the nighttime festivities. Their names were Connie and Isabel. Connie is from Scotland and Isabel from Germany. We were then joined by a French man with a great, short beard named Luc.
Isabel rolls her own cigarettes with a speed and fluidity that could be taken for professional and always has a slight smile. Connie has a shyness thats level of waning can be gauged by the increasing size and frequency of her smiles. Luc is a lawyer and has a level of intensity that is never frightening, he is simply excited by the things he talks about. All of these people were very endearing and became my first long-term friends on this trip. Isabel invited us to go to a lake the next day and we all took her up on the offer.
That evening, Luc and I played guitar together and then I played my sad songs and some people liked them and I’m positive some people would have preferred that I stuck to cover songs for the sake of not making anyone sober while drunk.
That evening felt like the imagined travels I’ve taken in my mind before this trip.
The next day, we woke up and had breakfast in the area I had met them the afternoon before. I found out that Luc is very into Dungeons & Dragons and so I said I would be happy to run a short campaign that evening, so he decided to stay another day for the love of the game.
After breakfast, we made it to the lake. This was only because of Isabel, her being both the organizer and interpreter for our travelling party. We arrived at a lake surrounded by a small town, with water so blue and air so clean it could be confused for the last beautiful place you wait in before getting into heaven. We walked to a park just a couple kilometers away and I went and changed into my bathing suit behind some bushes, careful to make sure no one could see me standing naked in a foreign country and because of my intense fear of being yelled at and not understanding why (I learned later from an old man changing into a speedo that no one really seems to mind nudity for the sake of changing clothes).
The water was a little cold, but not unbearable, and became very pleasant after just a little while.
Luc and Connie got into the water shortly after in their underwear and Isabel dangled her feet over the peer and watched something. I would have liked to know what, and I suppose I could have asked, but sometimes what is watched silently is best codified in continued silence.
We saw fish in the water, jokingly tried to catch them, and then we sat on the dock and dried off. I borrowed Luc’s towel because I did not bring my own on this trip, something I wish I had done in hindsight.
“That towel is shit,” he said as I walked over to pick it up. The good news is that it did in fact function mostly as a towel should, but he wasn’t wrong.
We walked back in a calm that can only be felt after swimming in a lake or river or stream. It’s a tranquil sleepiness that feels almost like you’re still in the water.
We got lunch after this and had beer with it and Luc and myself explained D&D to Connie and Isabel, who planned to play, in a way that only two adult-children can.
I had planned the whole campaign, but we ended up napping and sitting around the fire that night and never got to play.
The night before, my first night at the Tent, I also met Elliot, a British guy who lives in Berlin. He is recently self-described as “funemployed” and working on making a contracting business helping photographers and other skilled workers find jobs. The night after the lake, I met Jason, a fellow writer. He is tall and lanky and wore overalls, a multicolored striped shirt under it. He listened to my songs intensely, leaning close to make sure he heard the words. He also read a post on my website and talked to me about it. It felt nice to be paid attention to in that way. I also met Sam, a soon-to-be officer in the Canadian military with a dark and flippant sense of humor.
Elliot invited me to go rock climbing the day after the lake day and then the next morning Sam and Jason decided to join as well. It was fun and Elliot is a much stronger rock climber than the rest of us. While leaving he told me,
“Some of the best rock climbers in the world were in that gym.” He then listed their names and I dont remember them. “They’re practicing for this weekend, the world championship is here in Munich.”
“Huh, that’s cool,” I replied, intrigued but humored by how lost as to the gravity of the situation I often am.
We went to a Hofbrauhaus after this, for traditional Bavarian cuisine. We drank beer and joked around and sometimes got serious, in a lean-in kind of way, and another link felt formed. Sam and Jason decided to go with Elliot to Berlin the next day. I knew I had to be in Cuneo, Italy by the 20th, so Berlin was out for me. I had to decide where to go next, which was both exciting and scary in the way that the unknown always is.
I’d said goodbye to Isabel, Connie, and Luc the morning of going rock climbing, which was more difficult than I’d anticipated. For one, I felt bad about not getting to D&D, but also their presences were so easy for me to mesh with that I feared it would be a one-off situation that couldn’t be replicated (in some ways it can, in others, it can’t).
That night I hung out with new people. I met CJ from Britain, he was learning guitar, and Liam from Ireland, he liked Elliott Smith, and I met a girl I cannot remember the name of. I remember she was from Australia, a masseuse by trade, and very kind. She spoke in a calming tone all the time. I don’t know if this was natural for her or just part of her training, like an FBI agent learning how to fool a lie detector test.
There was also a man named Rinaldo, a man with Angolan heritage, from Italy. He is moving to Munich and staying at the Tent for a month. His fiancé was going to be there in about a week and it was an honest disappointment that I didn’t get to meet her. We drank beer and he beat me in chess a few times. He told me, “You are fun to play chess with. Why do you not practice more? You have intuition.” I didn’t really have an answer.
We discussed literature and got along very well. He had the mind and speech patterns of a philosopher. Metered and thoughtful. He played chess intensely, knocking wooden pieces down with a gusto when the games became a battle of sharpness and a couple beers had been processed.
The next morning, after a night of drinking not a small amount with the group of people afforementioned, when Elliot, Sam, and Jason left, I decided to find my next destination. I settled on Interlaken, Switzerland, because my roommate Eddie told me, “it’s like heaven on earth for people who don’t believe in anything.” And after feeling that about the lake in Germany, I decided more heavenly lakes couldn’t hurt.
On the train from München to Zürich, I met a woman from a small town near Zürich and works in a beergarten there. Her family works as dairy farmers and she was coming from a week-long music festival in, I believe, Hungary. The train was four and a half hours long but with our conversation it felt like two. I’ve sort of become infatuated with those few hours. They felt more human and honest than most conversations I’ve ever had. There was some kind of knowing behind each of our pale blue eyes, an understanding that forms quickly, and a conversation that includes “oh, you always say this,” in the way I’d never heard from a stranger of two hours up until that point. I have more descriptors for this, and while my romantic brain is screaming to tell the world these connections can happen and they feel like a movie, my logical brain tells me that most of that memory is for me.
We delayed ourselves in Zürich by one train each and had a glass of wine and in that train station with huge columns of stone and “the fat angel” and “the reindeer,” both beautiful and strange art installations hanging from the ceiling and against the archway of the train platforms respectively, I kind of wished we could delay forever and never run out of things to talk about. We had to go, though, and I understood at a certain point that loneliness while travelling alone is not something you can really have the luxury of letting yourself process, lest it eat you alive. For this loneliness, I suggest long books.
From friends leaving and strangers with wonderful minds departing from your life and days passing by after that, you process the minuscule amount of time that the person or people have in your life, but the gravity of it while traveling feels heavier. Not being able to see them again, possibly ever, is hard to wrap your head around. It’s lonesome but not destitute. It is sad, but not morose. It is travel and it is newness and it is a requirement to remember this and differentiate these previous terms from one another.
When I got to Interlaken, a pitch black and then starry sky at 23:00, I was to stay in a place called the Funny Farm. On the walk to the hostel, surrounded by buildings replete with swiss flags and strong construction of thick wood structure and stone shingle ceilings, I turned around and saw an orange glow in the sky. My heart froze a little because I thought the apocalypse had started on the most neutral land possible, but then squinted to see that there was a clear demarcation of where the stars ended and I realized the orange glow was a building at the top of a mountain. I felt a rush of excitement that I couldn’t see these mountains because I knew it meant I could tomorrow.
Not tired because I was buzzing from a few train beers and travel and my recent conversation, I went to the back porch and met two men. One, Andy, worked for the hostel, and the other was his friend from childhood-a youth league soccer coach and waiter. We discussed the U.S. College prices, and minimum wage (28 francs/hr in Switzerland), and Trump and how he’s a raging dickhead (this is a common conversation I’ve had in Europe). They got me beers and we just talked until they decided to leave to go to bed. Then two women wandered up from around the building and went to get beers and talked to me a little. One spoke very little English and the other spoke English well. I showed them some songs. The one who spoke English seemed to like them, and the one who didn’t speak much English told me to play happier things because my songs made her want to shoot herself. It seemed like more of her problem than mine, because her friend kept asking me to play more. I then went to the restroom, only taking my phone and wallet and passport. When I returned, everything was on the table except for my lighter. My backpack and guitar and cigarettes hadn’t been tampered with, I just got my lighter taken by two ghosts. This seemed like a sign to stop smoking, though I can’t read signs in Swiss-German, and so I’ve continued to smoke.
The next morning I woke at eleven. The only person still in the room was a Scottish guy named Ross. I looked out from the small balcony from the room we shared and saw tremendous mountains sloping upward and continuing into the great beyond, roughly cutting clouds and making decisions for the wind. I went back inside and me and my hostel roommate groggily exchanged “good mornings” and the morningtime introductions you make in a hostel (where are you from, why, and it’s nice that the murder rate is so low in Europe because I like walking at night), then we exchanged numbers on WhatsApp and planned to get a beer later.
That day I walked around town and then to the nearby lake on the east side. The town is surrounded on the north and south sides by mountains and the east and west sides by lakes. The mountains tower and the lakes sit pristine and blue and less cold than glacial water rightfully should be in my mind. Then it started to rain and I took refuge under a bridge with an Indian family that lived in Belgium. The father said he liked my guitar playing at the lake and I said, “thank you, do you know how to get back to town?” He pointed me in the right direction and I started jogging that way. I then took refuge in a cafe near the train station and had a beer and a cup of coffee. I messaged Ross to see where he was. We were both near the train station so he messaged me, “I’m just gonna leg it to the Coop near the station,” and not wanting to show myself as weak willed as I sometimes am, I legged it to the Coop too.
We drank beer in the restaurant above the grocery store and became friends quickly. We proceeded to hang out the rest of the night. We walked around the town and talked. Turns out he is a journalist in Perth, Scotland. Twenty-two and already worked for a newspaper, had a front page spread and all. We got dinner, had more beer, and then we played pool.
That night, there was a crowded café we stopped in after playing pool at the hostel. It was in an old building with so many people it was humid inside. We talked to some people from Chicago that were pretty typically American and then Ross said he was tired and went back to the hostel.
I talked to a woman named Ali who told me I could sit with her and her friends. It turned out she lived in Interlaken, but was from Italy. I spoke a small amount of broken Italian in the humid room and then the café closed. I went with her and her friends to a nearby hostel. Her friends went to dance in the club underneath the hostel and she and I went into the main room and talked about music and movies and how we weren’t good at dancing and don’t like clubs. I added her on Facebook and after a while of listening to a hostel guest play beautiful piano music, we parted ways.
The next day she invited me to the lake on the west side of Interlaken to grill food and go swimming.
The water was ice blue, glacial melt. I had to wait a little while for her and her friends to arrive. It started raining a little and sailboats on the water skidded towards shore as quick as possible and grey clouds hung around the mountains that bordered the lake and sent thunder through them. After Ali got there and then her friends, we grilled our food and made introductions in the light rain and then decided to go swimming. Though, Ali and I were the only two to swim. For her it was practice for when she plans to do it in the winter (for some kind of work function), and for me it’s because I just want to say that I did it and also not look weak willed. She jumped in immediately and as I tiptoed in, I realized unless I jumped too, I wasn’t going to do it. So, I jumped to say that I did.
It was raining a little and more cloudy then and there was a Turkish family making the grill flare high with flames and singing. We sat under a tree and tried to bear the rain, but as it got dark about an hour and a half later we decided that it was best to leave. They had bikes and I had to wait for a bus. They waited with me at a small dockside restaurant where we had coffee and there was a 65th birthday party replete with a conga line and alcohol that went on around us. The next day, I left for Cuneo, Italy, which I will talk about in another post, along with Bratislava.
Falling in love every day is common for me here, even in the times I feel alone and distraught (which does happen). I try to remember that I’ll fall in love with something the next day, or did earlier that day (though it tends to be harder to look back when the days run together so much, so I mostly look ahead) which is – while a little difficult to remind myself sometimes – pretty comforting. Whether it’s falling in love with the concept of travel, a city, a conversation, a friendship, or the ability of someone to get lost in a book. The list goes on and it gets more annoying and hyper-romantic from there.
It sounds optimistic to say, but it’s not because I’m not an optimistic person (I don’t know if you can tell by this point). I think being internally romantic and idealistic spontaneously comes naturally to people who have some kind of common internal darkness. If the whole world isn’t beautiful to you, you find it in small things. For instance, watch someone while they’re really intently reading, because the way they square their eyebrows at certain parts of the text, move their hair out of their face or idly rub their neck but still don’t change their posture, there’s beauty in it.
So, speaking of love, I guess I was technically engaged for about twenty minutes in Krakow, Poland. There’s qualifications for that and the relationship didn’t pan out.
The way this happened is that I found a small dance party in the middle of the city with a friend I’d made at my hostel and he was dancing and I was sort of bobbing my head on the sidelines. Two women asked if I wanted to dance because they thought I danced well (I don’t). One said, “At least you don’t dance like these people – throwing their arms around and nearly hitting people.” This seemed fair, so I bobbed a little near them while they actually danced like people who know how to. Men continually approached them to hit on them (because men are pests and monsters) and they kept rejecting them. After one guy took a particularly long time to fuck off, I said to them, “If you want, you can just tell people you’re with me to get them to go away. I promise I won’t be creepy or anything.” They thought this sounded like a good idea.
The dance party moved across the downtown area to outside of a bar, the PA worn like a backpack by a guy who looked like The Mountain if he were a bro. A very drunk, middle-aged Polish man walked up to one of the women I was with and said something that, while I speak no Polish, I could figure out pretty easy to mean “Will you dance with him?” because he pointed to a young man behind him (observational skills are important when you have no fucking idea what anyone is actually saying).
He stuck around saying more that I took to mean, “please, and also, I’m going to keep asking.” So, she grabs my hand with both of hers and pulls me close to her and says something in Polish. I smile at him like a dipshit and she puts her arm around my waist and squeezes me a little closer as she says something and the man smiles. Two young men come from behind the middle aged one and start talking and then smiling and then the middle aged man shakes my hand (he had hands like that felt like stone) and clasps me on the shoulder, smiling. One of them looks at me and says, “Ah, parlé vous Francé” to me. I took it she told them I was French, so I say “Uh, oui.” Then they smile and thankfully speak no more French than I do, and then say a couple more things in Polish and then leave. The whole conversation took about fifteen minutes.
“What just happened?”
“I told him you’re my fiance from France. Then he told me you were a good man and have a wonderful smile.”
“Ahh,” I say. “My mother is going to be delighted. Also, what’s your name?”
Me and the two girls ended up getting beers and sitting in a park and talking about journalism (one just graduated with a masters and the other just started a masters in that field). We talked about books, Russia, music, the U.S. and general pleasantries and unpleasantries of life and divorce and breakups. Then at 5 a.m. they got on a bus and went back to their apartment and I went to my hostel to fall asleep for about four hours.
I departed from my recent travelling partner Ross, he’s on his way to Ukraine soon, by bus. Best friend I’ve made on the trip. Walking to the train station today in the rain, dripping like a knackered fridge (I learned a lot of great phrases common to the Scottish lexicon), I realized I wouldn’t see him again until I went to Scotland or he comes to Portland. It made me sad, but right now i’m pulling up to Warsaw to see my old friend Kacper for his birthday and i’m excited and nervous for the evening. If I know anything about Kacper, it’s that he will never allow time to be spent in a dull way. He is a person who understands the necessity of falling in love every day.
-Daylon M. Phillips (08/26/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 