This is gonna be a long one, so strap in or take whatever nearby exit you deem fit. It goes without saying that I haven’t posted in a while, since a very strange and mostly wonderful trip to Poland that feels like yesterday, an eon ago. A few people that read this blog have mentioned that I haven’t posted since then and honestly it feels kind of nice to know they wish I would’ve posted more, though I do apologize for not doing that. My copout is that I have been writing, I just haven’t posted it. While traveling during the second half of my journey, I would always get to the end of my pieces and realize I’m not doing my stories justice, and that the length I want to make these posts would be suited only for a computer (people who write novels on their phones—like Ross—are incredible, but they’re monsters).
I have 15 hours of travel ahead of me that I’ll try and utilize effectively for writing and maybe get a really long post that will hopefully be worth your time. I wish you luck. I wish me luck too. It’s been a lucky morning—I got my 60-euro guitar on the plane without any problems and at no extra cost—and a lucky two months that I’ve been able to undisasterously fumble my way through Europe. So, maybe my luck will hold out just a bit longer and I’ll find the wherewithal to write a good, long piece on my phone while I make my way back to Portland.
I’ll start with my general travels, making a Frankenstein monster of the things I’ve written up to this point—starting from leaving Poland, after my purgatory in Katowice (Though, frankly, the things that passed through my head there weren’t really abnormal for any other day up until that point, they were just in a foreign country, in a place I didn’t plan to be, during hours I didn’t plan to be there, and so maybe I created the purgatory-esque feeling myself, because I rarely need help doing so). If you read this, and I met you in my travels, and you aren’t mentioned here—I do remember you—and if I showed you this mildly embarrassing website, I care about your thoughts and I’m sorry that my brain created a structure of this story in which you are glossed over. I did a lot of things and holy hell does it not work cohesively to write absolutely everything. But, truth be told, I don’t believe there is such thing as a full story, so here are some snapshots of the last half of my trip:
After my week and some change in Warsaw and Krakow, Poland I made my way to Vienna, the unabashedly beautiful Austrian city. The nightlife is, for lack of a better term, fucking wild, and frankly there’s a beauty to that too. During the day when debauchery is more frowned upon, there’s a lot to see as far as tall and beautiful marble-white buildings and fountains that are backsplashed with sky and clouds, reflecting ponds that shimmer with the wind making a wobbly and inverted world before your eyes, and crisscross streets that I wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of without google maps. The nighttime, as stated before, has an assortment of different spectacles that are equally flowery but less couth, but I’ll get to those later.
When I arrived in Vienna at 10 a.m., after staying up all night in Katowice, in that state of tired which makes you delirious and the inside of your mouth cottony, I realized that I had to wait for my friend to be done with a pick-up tennis match at 1:30 p.m. Thanks to google maps, I trudged my way through the city to a park near my friend’s apartment. It turns out that it was primarily a children’s park, so while a bunch of younglings ran around in the middle-distance, I sat down at a wooden table, messaged my friend where I was, then opened my book to kill the time and fell asleep at the bench almost instantly. I woke up to my friend having found me (he had tried to message and call me, but that didn’t work for reasons that are evident to people who have fallen asleep in a park at 11:00 in the morning). He shook my shoulder a little and said, “Hello, Daylon. Are you okay?” To which I replied, in what was little more than air escaping my lungs in muddled succession, “Hur, uh, yeah, great, tired. I’m up. You?”
So, we walked to his apartment while I thought about how seeing a twenty-something fall asleep at a bench after opening a book could damage a child’s psyche and/or make them think “this is what I could be,” and then I passed out on his couch for around four hours. After escaping reality dreamlessly, I woke up and showered and felt like I had been brought back from the edge of a fugue-like oblivion, and then we hung out for a bit. We went to a store and got some food, a sandwich that was bologna with cheese bits in it, heated up and put on bread (and frankly one of the most delicious quick-eats I’ve ever had when I ignored the grease dripping from my fingers), and then I showed him some tiny desk concerts that aren’t good for pumping yourself or others up for a party, right before we went to a party. More specifically, it was a beer pong tournament run by his friends at their apartment. At the party/tournament, I was immediately asked, “You must be good at beer pong, because you are American?”
“No, I’m not cool enough to be good at it. More the bookish kind. See, I brought my guitar.” What I didn’t add, but could be implied was: “I also listened to Julien Baker before coming over here, if that helps you pinpoint exactly how bad I am at parties.”
“Do people play beer pong a lot in America?”
“Yeh, I mean, it kills time, and if nothing else, we’re pretty good at that. Y’all seem to be pretty good at it too. I like your kitchen backsplash.”
“There is beer in and next to the fridge.”
“Perfect.”
There was, conservatively estimated, a shitload of beer, and the rest of the night was good. We listened to music, I made it to a second round of beer pong before getting beaten by a man with long, curly brown hair, who I more formally met on the porch before our match. His name was Stephan.
Later that night, I drank enough to be comfortable pulling out my guitar, and by the time I left, Pascal, one of the hosts, while brushing his teeth (I forgot my jacket upstairs so had to go back up and he was preparing for sleep) told me that I was “a badass motherfucker,” which felt pretty nice to hear.
The rest of my stay in Vienna was good. Stephan and I hung out a few days later at a bar on a rooftop that overlooked the city, sprawling light-brown white and yellowish buildings extending to a visionless distance, clustered together closely and shielded on all sides by faraway hills. After having a couple beers on the rooftop of this bar/assortment of restaurants, we went to a bar within the city and I met some of his friends. We sat inside and smoked cigarettes in a large room with a whirring fan while waiting for the rest of the group, talking about unrequited love and home. Then we hung out with his friends until we all parted ways.
Austrians are welcoming and the hostel was a friendly and calm place up until happy hour. Saturday, my second night in Vienna, I went to a bar where people pay to take a shot and then get slapped in the face by a beautiful bartender, or have a fake penis loaded with some kind of yogurty shot and have it pumped onto their face. These aren’t things I did, nor did I watch the bar long enough to see them happen, but they were definitely there because the bar was incredibly proud of their offerings. If you are to be a debaucherous establishment—wear it proudly. Sometimes it’s beautiful to know that you are the shitheap that is loved.
I’m not a partier, as you can probably tell from my writing. I went to that bar because the Turkish woman with long black hair and a beautiful smile behind pale lips at the hostel that I was smoking a cigarette with on the curb out front said, “Come on, you gotta see this place,” and I didn’t really have any recourse to say, “No thank you,” because she was kind and pretty and it was Saturday and I was traveling in part to experience things that people say I’ve got to see. So, I went. This wasn’t an infrequent form of discovering interesting places. I was given the advice that, while traveling, I should generally just say yes. I think, within reason, this is good advice.
The woman from the hostel and I met some great people there: A military brat and Air Force vet who is “kinda from Georgia, kinda from all over,” a guy from Sweden who has more style than I could ever hope to have, and a wonderful Russian woman with a degree in chemical engineering and a smirk that’ll put you through the floor. We all hung out and took turns trying out the communal stripper pole, which is actually pretty fun except for the fact that you’re just playing merrygoround with all the liquids in your stomach, and can actively feel them making a whirlpool in your gut once you let go and wobble-leg your way into the crowd. After having PG-13 fun about the pole with my new friends, I washed my hands and we left the bar.
While we were outside, me and the two women in the group discussed politics (turns out that very few people like fascism, who would’ve thought), and then the group told me to play something on my guitar and so I played for them (this seems to happen a lot when you carry around a guitar) and they enjoyed it (which, I’m happy to say, also seems to happen a lot if you play anything that no one usually listens to).
The next morning, the Russian woman messaged me and we spent the day walking around and then hanging out in a Vienna park together. We saw a fountain that hung over our heads, depicting some kind of ancient mythical battle and she peeked into the water of the fountain, watching the clouds in the reflection. We also went to a Starbucks and I got a smileyface next to my name to which the Russian woman flippantly said, “That’s how it goes, ‘Oh, yes, I’ll put a smiley face next to the cute guy’s name and misspell the name of that bitch he’s with.'” With her mordant sense of humor, I feel it makes sense that we got along. We took ourselves to the park after that and ended up talking about a plethora of things, ranging from television, to relationships, to sex education, before she left to go back to Russia. She didn’t let me walk her to the train station. She said, “I don’t like to be walked to trains or planes. If you walk me to the station you have to do the hug goodbye and all that sad shit. I’ll just hug you here and you can continue on with your day.” So, we hugged and she left and I continued on with my day, wandering around Vienna, still humming from a kiss and a conversation with a wonderful stranger.
The following day, I made friends with two people at my hostel and flipped a coin to decide whether or not I would stay another day. The coin chose that I would stay and we all spent the day together, walking to a park around the Russian war memorial, the Klimpt museum that was too expensive while living up to the expected beauty, the Kunsthaus café where I had a delicious sachertorte (a kind of chocolate cake that Vienna is known form), and during the night we all decided to go to a string orchestra in a church designed by some genius of acoustics. It was a wonderful concert that lulled you into a dream-like state where stories and ideas roil around in your brain. Noise carried and cut in a fashion that I’d never heard in any other venue, and as soon as the music sharply stopped, the spell was broken until the next song. The next day I continued to Budapest.
The final words for my time in Vienna—I got to the halfway point of my trip there, and while it was a wonderful city, I had waves of feeling burnt out. I know if I were in Portland I’d have been burnt out on life in general, but stuffing all your clothes and knickknacks into a backpack every day, toiletries not wanting to stay put in the side-pockets you keep them in or otherwise leaking all over one another making that pocket feel like dog slobber and smell like the perfume section of a J.C. Penny, can wear on you. I guess I crave structure in some way. Flipping coins to decide if you will be in a country for 24 more hours is exciting and makes the world feel like it is filled with a plethora of avenues, if only chance will show you the way to them. But because I decided to flip the coin and not just leave, I knew I needed some rest that I hadn’t rightly gotten in a month.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get burnt out on traveling, but I did get burnt out on not having a schedule or my daily/semi-daily rituals. I’m a creature of habit. I like to work out on a schedule, I like to write on a schedule, I like to do my laundry and get ready for bed in my particular ways that are a bit time consuming and require putting myself into a lulling tranquility that is difficult to find while traveling, unless you’re falling into the hypnosis of a string orchestra, which I certainly didn’t have the money to do again.
Traveling is unformed, a nonnewtonian dispersal of time. It requires making a new schedule every day. At least, that’s how I traveled. And it’s good to have this chaos in some ways—maybe I’ll have learned something from it (if so, I’ll write about that). But I realized in Vienna that you need to give yourself time to rest. The world isn’t in any rush to have you see every corner of it, so don’t make yourself rush to do so. Rest is not a waste of time, it is breathing, it is quiet, it is a day of reading in the shady spots of a hostel community area, and it is a requirement if you would like to find peace. Halfway across the world, surrounded by wonder and newness, you still need to allow yourself time to settle.
Traveling isn’t all tranquil countryside flitting by in a train window or otherwise wild adventure. It’s small details, like waking up early and catching trains, making decisions on what to do, missing connections and getting stranded, saying goodbye too early to people you would like to know better, still feeling their kiss when you lick your lips after a bite of cake, and forgetting things and then letting them go. I think these are good things to experience and learn to run with, but learning is exhausting.
On not taking my own advice, after Vienna I went to Budapest. Things got a little weird there. It was nothing terrible, it’s just a party city and I realized how easy it is to get sucked into the constant, “Hey, come do this thing because it should be crazy.”
“I kinda wanna relaxed night.”
“Ahh, come on.”
“Well, okay then.”
I found out that, while traveling, I am not a person with an exceedingly high threshold for sticking to my vague decision. And I made some good friends there. There was an Irishman and an Australian woman that I spent a good bit of time with and I am happy that I did, regardless of how upset my liver was about it.
The first night I played an open mic. Made some people laugh, which isn’t usually the reaction you go for when you play music that is supposed to be a manifestation of your emotions through a sonic catharsis, but there was a rule at the bar that the crowd should be respectful and not talk while people are playing, and people were talking while I was playing, so I kept using the fills of my songs to tell people to shut the hell up, and in no kinder words than that. It actually kind of worked, too. People don’t like being laughed at for being assholes. Social pressure is phenomenally powerful.
After the open mic I was roped into going to a ruin bar—which is a bar that has been bric-a-brac’d out of the ruins of a building. It had been reinforced with iron and whatever else is required for the structure to not be a complete death trap. There were lights hanging between trees and their roots coming up through the floor, cracking and shifting the stone tiles. There were rooms of games and hookah, people meandering amongst one another in all the multi-colored lights in a building underneath the starless sky. If not for the drunkenness expected of these places, they could be lovely late-night coffee shops, though that certainly doesn’t seem to be what they are.
The next day I spent with my Irish and Australian friends and we walked an absurd amount around both sides of the city and the island park in the middle of the Danube. That night I went on a party boat to see the lights of the city from the river. It was beautiful, the parliament building had bats wisping in front of the lights and the water churning under the boat made the reflected yellow light seem like a portal to a world made up only of kaleidoscopic visions. Though, I felt very woozy at the point that the boat was turning around. I hadn’t eaten much and didn’t drink a small amount on the boat (just a side-bit of advice: probably don’t let the Irishman pour the drinks, especially when he says, “And now here’s a proper Irish drink”)—but I truly didn’t drink enough to warrant feeling as shit as I did. What I’m saying is, it was compounding stupidity on my part. Between the empty stomach, the alcohol, the rocking boat, and the obscenely loud house music, things weren’t going to end superbly for me. I didn’t throw up, though. I just sat down below deck next to two people drunkenly eating each other’s faces and slept it off in a plastic chair. This is a bit embarrassing to write—but it happened and made me realize that “well, okay then” is not the best phrase if you want a restful night. Rest if you wanna rest, and know when your body and mind want to. Do as I say, not as I do. I implore you this.
Budapest is a city that I was told people get trapped in. I saw this happen to a man from Australia who had spent at least two full days drunk and two months in the same pants. He was destined to be trapped in Budapest. 11 a.m. drunk on a couch and pissed himself as well, apparently. His friends left him behind and carried on to Croatia. He got another flight to Croatia but I think he missed that too. I’ve never been on a bender, but that’s the only one I’ve seen firsthand and it certainly did a fair bit to give me a sour feeling about them.
I know I have decent self-control, but I also have anxiety that blends with the part of me that is a little superstitious, so on my final day in Budapest, when I thought I was going to miss my train because I had the realization while at the station that my only phone charger was still plugged in in my hostel room, I had an hour until my train left, it was 20 minutes by bus to the hostel and 20 minutes back to the station, and the buses were having a hard time that day, I got worried. My brain automatically made the jump that if I missed my train, then I would immediately be the alcoholic Australian man who didn’t change his pants for two months. So, I decided that there was no way I was going to get trapped in Budapest.
I took the bus to the hostel, explained my problem to the desk, sprinted upstairs and got my charger, sprinted to the bus stop and realized the bus was seven minutes late, then got on the bus and had a conversation with a woman about my age from Mexico who was studying in Budapest about whether or not I was going to be okay (she said I would be, which was comforting), and then sprinted the half mile from the bus stop to the train platform with my backpack on and my guitar in my hand. I made the train to Romania and did not get trapped in the myriad streets of Budapest due to my own forgetfulness.
On the train to Cluj I met two women. I was still gasping for air from my run to the train when I asked them, “Is this the train to Cluj?”
“I hope so,” said the one closest to me.
“I think so,” said the one next to the window.
I went and sat in the next cabin, completely empty, and assessed if I was having arrhythmia or if I just needed water. I drank water and figured my insides would figure themselves out, but I also figured I had nine hours on a train and didn’t want to spend it completely alone. I walked over to the other cabin that the two women were in and asked, “Do you mind if I sit in here? Sitting alone for nine hours seems awful.”
With slight shrugs they said a collective, “Yeah, sure,” and I brought my backpack and guitar into the cabin. “Oh, you have a guitar? You can only stay in here if you play it for nine hours.”
With a reciprocal slight shrug I said, “Well, okay then.”
I guess I should retroactively explain my reasoning for travelling to both Budapest and Cluj a little bit. Budapest was because I wanted to see it and I didn’t know where to go from there so I did what my go-to on the trip tended to be when I wanted to know where else to go: I asked my friend Ross where he was going. He said Cluj, Romania and then Serbia, so I told him I’d see him in Cluj.
The two women on the train were cousins. They came from Belgium to visit a friend that had studied in Belgium on Erasmus, but she was from Cluj. The two cousins were rife with inside jokes—inappropriate and endearing. It wasn’t hard to see why they got along so well. They were both unserious and easy-going—in the way someone tends to be while drinking white wine in the middle of the day at the beginning of a nine-hour train ride. So, I inherited that easygoingness, forgot all about my hectic day and left behind the foggy memories of Budapest. We drank the rest of their wine, and I played music, we talked about passions and future goals and our respective homelands. They told me I should see Belgium—they suggested Ghent because it was a college town with a lot of artists. I kept that idea in my back pocket. I said something and they both wrote it in their journals.
We watched the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen from the back of the train, watched the decrepit buildings and abandoned vehicles of the Romanian countryside float past, watched border patrol walk away with my passport (Linde, one of the women in the car, looking out of the window and saying, “Now they’re taking it and laughing, and one of them is peeing on it, and now they’ve lit it on fire”)
We got off the train in Cluj after a very peaceful nine hours of getting to know one another. We had all been in the same hostel in Budapest and hadn’t even known it (for such a small world it is such a large one), and I met their friend Dana and one of her friends at the train station in Cluj, and they helped me find my hostel (my phone had died on the train). We all hung out for a little while later that night and got food and I waited for them in front of a large, dark church built over an old Roman marketplace.
Ross had a plethora of problems getting to Romania from Moldova, so he was delayed by two days. I spent those two days primarily with Linde, Jolene, Dana, and a number of Dana’s friends. Dana and her friends are all lovely people who are deeply confused by their country’s reverence for the Romans, which, coming from a country that holds reverence for some pretty horrible human beings, I understand. I saw Cluj from a large metal cross at the top of a tall hill. The city looked like a burnt orange and white and yellow liquid that flowed in between trees and around a river, set in between a plethora of knob-like hills.
Ross got to the hostel at around two in the morning a couple days after I had arrived there and we went to the haunted forest outside of the city the next day. We took an uber there and it drove us through an industrial district and onto a potholed, gravel backroad. We both prepared for being mugged, silently glad we didn’t have much money on us. But the driver just dropped us off at the end of the gravel where it turned into a sheen asphalt road. A little confused and a little lost, we just wandered around. It had rained earlier in the day and was too muddy to traverse anything except the road, so we just walked along the road until we found what seemed to be the start of some trails. There was an old picnic structure that looked like a driftwood bus-station and some logs utilized as seats for a two-plank table next to it.
“Well, good to know vampires have decorum.”
We walked through the forest and every time we stepped off the trail and looked down on the brown-leaf matting of the forest we could see a thousand tiny spiders skittering around our feet, which encouraged us to stay on the trail. Some trees bent around each other and curved like they were doing a very slow and very long dance, but as a whole, the forest didn’t feel haunted. We heard screaming at one point, but it turned out to be some people in the clearing (we didn’t do more research into it except for finding the source of the noise, and they seemed to be fine). The clearing of the forest was supposed to be part of the scare-factor, where alien abductions take place and a myriad of people have gone insane, but there were people there with a tent trying to set up some kind of party. The clearing appeared to simply be a place where trees couldn’t grow, which is certainly strange in the middle of a forest, but not altogether otherworldly. Apparently now the forest is used to throw raves, and it’s pretty hard to be scared when you know people are sitting around with a box full of glowsticks. So, we walked all the way back to Cluj, something like 12 km, along the river, stopping every so often to rest our legs, walking in streets when there were no sidewalks, seeing dogs behind short metal fences and old architecture well kept, primarily in greys and yellows, with every other balcony being used as a place to dry blankets and clothes. At a park we stopped at to eat some food we’d bought at a convenience store, there were about twelve old men chattering around a table in a children’s park, playing cards and vaguely attempting to hide small bottles of liquor. We stayed an extra day in Cluj because we wanted some rest and because the beds there were the most comfortable either of us had slept in since our travels started, and the staff and guests at the hostel were all very kind and enjoyable to talk to. We spent the extra day relaxing and playing pool and making acquaintances, and it was rest that I needed. After Cluj, we went to Serbia to try and get tickets for a football match.
I’ll start by saying we didn’t get tickets, so we only stayed in Serbia for a day and a half. The initial plan was to get tickets for a match the following Saturday and then make our way into Bosnia and then head back to Serbia for the game between Partizan and Red Star. Those are the local teams, and they have a fierce rivalry. Their sectarianism is more based upon Partizan being fascist and Red Star being communist, as opposed to the classic catholic/protestant deal, so they don’t like each other to the tune of stabbings taking place. The game going on the day we got there was a Champion’s League game between Napoli and Red Star, which was sold out and scalping prices were ridiculous. So, we walked around the city to both the Red Star and Partizan stadium. Partizan wasn’t playing that day, and the parking lot of the stadium was being used as a base-of-operations for riot police. There were piles of shields and batons, young to middle-aged men standing around with body armor on, smoking cigarettes, probably discussing how the upcoming game would go. In a bit of disappointment at missing the match, after going to the stadiums, we walked to a nearby bar to drink some beers and watch the influx of red-shirted people, young and old, men and women, thirteen year-olds with beer bottles in their hands walking next to their fathers, make their way as a unit up towards the Red Star stadium, stopping cars by surrounding them and moving slowly, surrounded like a disease in a bloodstream, puttering exhaust in people’s faces that didn’t seem to notice in all the excitement.
We weren’t allowed to have beer at the bar. We still did, mind you, but the bottles were illegal to have, because of the police presence and because of the madness of Belgrade during a football match. Ross and I watched the riot police walk up and down the sidewalk, and one walked into the bar to make sure everything was up to snuff. It wasn’t, but people kept drinking anyhow and we asked no more questions about the matter. The beer bottles had to be kept under the table, preferably hidden from any sight at all, and the beer had to be kept in glossed, grey-painted clay cups.
We drank our beer and watched what could be a mad scene unfold in front of us. A building in the semi-distance had smoke pluming from it for one reason or another. No one showed up to put out the fire and eventually we walked to another bar, nearer to our hostel and with smoking inside, and ended up watching the match that ended 0 – 0. At that bar I had to make a decision. Either I could go with Ross to Bosnia still, or I could make my way towards Spain and be back in western Europe for my plane. I decided to look up trains and make my way west.
I missed the train the next morning (got to the station on time, but it was the wrong station) and went with Ross to the bus station and found an overnight bus to Vienna at 9:30, from there I would take trains to Frankfurt, then to Paris, then to Spain to get to Bilbao in the Basque country. Ross had a bus at 1:30 to Bosnia and I said goodbye to him. We had a last cheers and wished each other well. It was unceremonious, excepting the cheers (which wasn’t an uncommon occurrence between us), as though I could possibly message him again and meet with him in whatever country he happened to be in in a couple weeks, as I’d done multiple times during my tenure in Europe. But, I had a little less than two weeks left in my trip, so it was evident that this was the last time we’d hang out. That was a hollow feeling. He’s a good man and seeing him go was a shame, though now he’s off, still galivanting about the world and becoming the hermit-traveler I wish I had the willpower to be—taking everything with an unserious yet excited stride, fanny pack lolling about his shoulder like a travel-worn sash. After he left, I went to take a shower at the hostel we’d stayed at the night before (luckily, they had no problem with this even though I had checked out already), and then hung out there for a few hours before making my way back to the train station.
My way to Spain was arduous. 48 hours of straight travel kind of arduous. After about 9 hours on a bus without a toilet, the travel just became part of my reality. Everything after that is a fever dream up until getting to Paris. I got there at 10 p.m. and was there until 7 a.m. That’s not a long time to be in a place, and I was initially resentful to have to pass through Paris, because some part of me thought I wouldn’t like it—a large part of me thought that, actually. A man at the first train station who worked in Paris but was from Germany told me if I wanted to make it to the next train station and had a good few hours to kill—I should walk along a canal. So, that’s what I did. I walked along it and stopped at a bar with a good view and a smoking section. Before the bar I just absorbed the night, happy to be out of transportation, but wishing I had a bed to lie down on. Directly along the canal were large streets, but after that they thinned-out and tunneled like molehills through each other. The buildings, like they are in much of Europe, were tall and old. There were soft yellow lights everywhere in parks and bridges along the canal. Lovers and friends and people sitting alone lined parts of the canal with beer bottles or wine-glasses or just crossed legs and a thoughtful look on their face. The water was pitch black and reflected trees with an uncanny crispness and streetlights with a divine bloom. I started to like Paris.
At the bar I met a Danish couple and we talked for about four hours. We stayed at the bar until close (around 3:00), and then we sat next to the canal and I played music for them while we finished a last beer. A lot of what we talked about was politics and relationships. At around 4:00 they were tired and walked to their hotel and I continued walking along the canal. I wandered onto a street that smelled heavily of cheap weed, with little lighting in the windows, so the only light came from streetlights, and was peopled on all-sides by hipstery-looking Parisians. I wandered into a bar with low light and had a conversation with a guy around my age about how I happened to wander around one of the 4 biggest places for pickpocketing and general petty-crime in Paris. I felt this made sense for me. I have a history of wandering into strange situations, where the air feels bizarre and dense. I couldn’t be bothered to feel tense there, so languid and tired, with everyone seeming at least relatively nice. I left after an hour with no problems, and made it to the train station to finish my journey to Spain.
~ ~ ~
Well, I didn’t finish this on the plane-ride back to America. It’s December fifth now, two months since I left from Germany, and I ran out of steam on the planes. I wanted to finish this earlier, but I’ve been readjusting to my life—my usual life. It’s different than I thought it would be. Nothing really turns out how you think it will, and I’m learning more and more that that’s okay, and that things will work out. I’m utilizing what I learned during my trip—fuck it, things happen, react accordingly. So, I’m reacting accordingly and finishing what started, hopefully not too little, and hopefully not too late. I’ll start from where I ended last, when I got to Spain:
The rest of the train trip was a fugue. Falling asleep on trains and waking up from the dark green of central France to the brown, dry sage green, and clay colors of the Basque country, and being helped through conversations with ticket-checkers about why I didn’t have an actual ticket and being given some amnesty because I was a stupid, sleepy young American who didn’t have time to buy a real ticket and just had an Eurail pass.
I was met at the train station in Bilbao by Nerea, who I met and spent a wonderful few days with in Warsaw. I was staying with her and her roommates. I only really got to know one of the two roommates, Andrea. He is from Italy and recently finished his PhD in mathematics. A phenomenally kind man with an easy-going nature. It matched Nerea’s flippant approach to most things—though Nerea seems like more of a planner than Andrea or myself. We all got along swimmingly, made one-another dinner on different nights, discussed music and the goings-on in our lives.
A day and a half after I traveled for 48 hours from Belgrade to Bilbao, I got ruthlessly sick. I stayed in their living room and waited for my stomach pain to pass, my light sensitivity and migraine to lessen, and eventually it did. Trains and busses are tubes of recirculated air, so it isn’t all that surprising that after staying up for most of 48 hours and compromising my immune system in those fast-moving disease tubes that I got sick.
My week in Bilbao was filled with relaxing dinners, having pintxos ordered for me by Nerea because I didn’t understand at all what the menu said, and then going to a festival in which me and Nerea and Andrea drank and did a traveling karaoke that Nerea’s older brother (an engineer) had built a couple years ago after getting drunk with friends and thinking about how making traveling karaoke would be fun. It was his weekend gig, and the weekends run late (to the tune of sunrise) in Spain. He and friends, and often Nerea, dress up in brightly-colored tutus and wigs, sport sunglasses at night, and walk along the thin streets of Bilbao, encouraging people to sing and dance and galivant with them. They are fun people, people that know how to mix effort and enjoyment in an effortless fashion.
Bilbao was also a lot of Nerea and I walking around and talking, going to the park area that overlooked the entire city. While Nerea and Andrea worked, I often walked around alone. One of the days I went to the Guggenheim and took my time wandering around and looking at modern art. I even bought a poster of my favorite painting and kept it as pristine as I could in my guitar-bag (it is now hanging in my room). I met some of Nerea’s best friends that she had known since childhood. One night we all went out and had a nice night of bar-hopping and pleasant getting-to-know-eachother conversation, and the next day we went to the beach and lay on our towels in the sand and jumped in the cold water and let it chill us to our bones. We watched surfers wait for waves and a drunken father play some kind of made-up game with his young son.
Upon leaving Spain, I had a couple options. I could go to Belgium and see Linde, the woman that I met on the train to Cluj, or I could go to Germany and spend the last week with Kevin. I decided to see Belgium for a few days.
I left Bilbao and felt a little tattered, emotionally. I didn’t want my trip to be coming to an end, I wanted to keep going, the waves of tiredness had waned and I had been rejuvenated by the fear of returning to my life. I missed my friends in Portland, I missed my cat, my bed, and I missed structure in some way, but I was afraid at what returning meant. It meant that this story would end and I would be held accountable for finishing it. The memories of the trip scattered about my brain and I wanted to relive them, I wanted to reverse time and go back to the beginning, back to riding a bike longer than I ever had, even if it meant reexperiencing the pain I felt the night after. I yearned for time, for more train-meetings with lovely women that I have wine with, more time to go visit all the people I said I would, more time to meet friends and acquaintances, but ran out of time in the unformed adventure that had been the past month and a half up to that point. I wanted to experience it all again, even in the hiccups that I had—and there were plenty—but they were all, undoubtedly, worth it.
I’ll take a moment now to continue my thoughts on hiccups. There isn’t much structure to this story except for the natural structure of experience, and the way humans can make structure and story arc from just about any experience. A part of life, and a part of stories, is fucking up—embarrassing oneself and making yourself look like the fool you tell yourself you are when you’re sad. I would relive all of that just to do it all again. Of course, nothing egregiously bad or embarrassing happened, just moments of being drunk and motion sick, being woken up by a knock on a bathroom stall after drinking too much with an Australian man who was insistent on buying me more alcohol to keep up the pace, and catching feelings that are either unreciprocated or awkwardly approached. I would relive waking up and feeling mildly embarrassed a thousand times over if it meant I got to relive that trip in its entirety—even if it meant I couldn’t do anything different. We all fuck up. You either learn from it, or you don’t, and you sure as shit better try and learn. If I could redo the trip and plan better or be firmer in my wanting to stay in for a night, I would. But that wasn’t always how it went, and it was still far more worth it than it was embarrassing. We get hung up constantly, or at least I do, on whether or not we’re making fools of ourselves in any given situation. I still do, I’m often an anxious wreck after I get out of a conversation at any point in the day, and so I’m about to tell you something that I take as a truism that I don’t often-enough remind myself: No one probably thinks about you that much. Not to say that people don’t recall the egregiously stupid things that people do around them (I’m a writer, and so one of my goals is to see and experience things that are worth writing about, even if they are embarrassing or painful), but no one gets hung up on the human mistakes other people make, usually just the human mistakes they themselves make. The world feels a lot less big and morose if you think of your own experience as only truly important to you. At least, that sometimes helps me. Fuck it, things happen, react accordingly and learn from them.
I got to Belgium after getting deeply upset with a Parisian train-conductor who asked me what I needed and then walked away when I was halfway through my sentence. Needless to say, I didn’t like that man. I caught the next train and there was only standing-room left, and so I stayed in the kitchen/bar area of the car and met a very nice Belgian man and a very nice British man. We drank Duvel and chatted about ourselves. The Belgian man owned a company that took groups of people skiing all around the world. The British man was young, in the business of antiques, talked fast and according to the Belgian man spoke better French than he did English. His English was perfectly fine, well, and good, just slurred and thickly accented and spoken fervently, as though words had to come out or they would get lost.
I got to Antwerp, Belgium around 10:30 p.m. the wind was blowing and the sky was cloudless. Linde, from the train to Cluj, met me at the train station. She asked if I wanted to get beer before we went back to her family’s house. I rented a bicycle with a card that she had for the public bike system they have around Antwerp and we biked about twenty minutes to a small bar with a drop-off station for the bike near it. Once we sat down, she informed me she had to wake up at six a.m. to go to classes the next day (after her undergrad and masters in animation, she is continuing education on a different path), so I would be at her family’s house for a little while with just her brother and possibly her mother. I said this was okay, because I figured I would be doing a fair amount of sleeping in, and I’m not horrific at interacting with people.
We sat at the bar, with bulbous string-lights littering the patio around us. We sat on the wooden bench-seats and talked for a long time, about exes and aspirations, and she asked me to play guitar for her. Eventually, a couple beers in, we realized how cold we were and we put our hands in the sleeves around our wrists and held hands in a strange way and I asked if I could kiss her, and she said yes. We kissed across the table awkwardly and cold-lipped. Eventually we had to get back because it was getting late. We walked back slowly, and at a certain point in a park near her house she said, “This is where I was going to ask you if you wanted to kiss. I decided a little after we got to the bar.” Neither of us had planned on my visit to Antwerp being romantic, but sometimes it happens and you just allow it to happen. I woke up the next morning and realized how much I needed a shower, so I fumbled my way upstairs and found it. I met her brother on the way up, peeking my head through doors that led to other parts of the house because I realized I didn’t know the layout of the building.
“Hi, I’m Daylon.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“I’m looking for the washroom.”
“It’s on the third floor. You can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
I walked up to the third floor and took my shower, and a bit into the day I went to see Linde in Ghent, the city she goes to school in. We walked around and went to a few of her favorite places, a large and humid garden room. The streams through the city made it look gargantuan, the buildings’ architecture making the city look like something out of a dream of a faraway place I would never be able to see. Linde said that her mother was going to cook the classic Belgian dish of mussels with fries that night, and I said that sounded wonderful. We stopped at a bar that translates to the Troll Basement, and sat in the bottom level (the basement), where there were wooden trolls behind iron bars, or otherwise just littered around with their arms around empty beer bottles. Overall, a quite cute—if not a little bit creepy—place. We realized we had been talking for too long and decided it was time to get back to Antwerp. We were mostly quiet on the train, a little tired, and within 45 minutes we were back in Antwerp. At her house I met her mother and father, two wonderful people with a bit of shyness about them at first, but always entirely welcoming and incredibly endearing.
Later that night I went out and met some of her friends, all wonderful people. We were a little late to the gathering, but the next night we went out with a few people from the night before and I got to know them over a few beers and a good few hours.
There is a word that was taught to me later on during my tenure in Belgium: gezellig. The easy translation is “cozy,” but that doesn’t seem to do the word justice. It’s a somewhat all-encompassing feeling of peace and tranquility amongst a group of people. This word does well to describe my days in Belgium, and I could write more about my trip there, more about how I made dinner for her family as a thank you, got to know them a little as I played guitar in their kitchen, drinking wine surrounded by soft lighting, and grew very comfortable being around them, met her friends and realized how easily I could be friends with any one of them. I could talk about the sights of Bruges, of the tunnels below the city that smelled of sewage and a horrid minty stench that stayed in your nostrils. I could talk in depth about making omelettes and Linde making me coffee every morning and how it was the most relaxing part of my time in Europe, watching television, reading, trying to take pictures of Linde in front of buildings and statues and her sprinting out of the way like the camera would steal her soul, about wine with her family and about how powerful and extraordinary Belgian beer is with the right people, and about how I know I could easily live in Belgium. I could write thousands of more words about these, but something I’ve realized about my time since coming back is how much of it is special to me and hopefully the people I spent that time with, and now I realize how useless words can be to describe feelings when you aren’t writing fiction.
I have a hard time looking back at pictures of my trip, of vaguely reliving memories that I wish I could close my eyes and thrust myself back into, of seeing a two-month span of my life where I was no one, everywhere. It was freeing, and it’s hard to think about in the context of it being finished. I am exactly two months back now, and I was gone almost exactly two months, and I miss a lot of the people I met, and I wish I could see them sooner than I will probably be able to—if I am ever able to see them again. I think emotional pain, in some contexts, forces you to realize how you didn’t really take for granted the things that you tell yourself you did. That you remember these things is indicative of a facet of yourself that understands their importance. Maybe you didn’t handle situations correctly, or appreciate them for what they were, but the pain you feel after the fact should not tell you that you took these times, this person or persons, for granted. Maybe you fucked up, but you’re going to in just about every situation at least once. Let your sadness, or pain, or whatever way you want to describe your feelings on events gone by, let you realize how much you appreciate them in the present. The old cliché of “you don’t know what you got until it’s gone” is because you’re experiencing things constantly and you are living in your own world that always has something to be processed and reacted to. Appreciating something after the fact, or even feelings of sadness or anxiety about that thing, means that you understand more than you did before it or they happened. You can always hold onto that understanding, that knowledge, and you can utilize it effectively.
After Belgium I went to Germany to see Kevin again, for the final stint of my trip. It wasn’t quite full-circle. I stayed with him and one of his uncle’s and his uncle’s family, near Dusseldorf. I spent most of the nights there with Kevin and the two brothers that were tenants on his uncle’s land, one just about out of high school and one a little older than myself, playing video games late into the night and stepping out into the cold to piss under the milky-way in a town of 300, next to cowfields and stoney fences. One of the days, we went to a college town with a nearby castle that was comprised of an incredible number of different styles of architecture, due to the number of additions put on it for wedding presents, memorials, attempting to build the eighth wonder of the world, etc. It had been completely ravaged and broken by siege into a shell of its former grandeur, but it was still grand. We appreciate certain kinds of brokenness, given enough time.
My last day I said goodbye and happy birthday to Kevin and went with his uncle to Dusseldorf airport. His uncle mentioned something about the autobahn system and my response was, “Wait, are we on the autobahn right now?”
“Yes, it is like the interstate system in America. Have you never been on the autobahn before?”
“No, never.”
“Well, okay then.”
And then he shifted the car and went about 120mph down the straightaway, which strangely didn’t feel unsafe on a system as well managed as the autobahn. When we got to the airport, he dropped me off, said it was very nice to have me around, and I thanked him for his hospitality and said that I hope to see him again and I went into the airport to check in for my flight back to the United States, where this entry started.
My two months in Europe was something that came with ups and downs. I met some of the best people I will probably ever meet, drank more than I probably ever should, and made a nuisance of myself with nothing more than a 60-euro guitar. It was undoubtedly worth it in every way, and after being back for as long as I was gone, I can say that with certainty. I’m even glad I did it the way that I did, without any real plan.
So, that’s the end of this journal, or blog, or whatever you want to call it. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that you got something out of it, and if not, I hope you took the exit at your nearest convenience. This isn’t a story arc, because that’s not how life works—we just make structures in our minds to make things make sense because our brains like order and uniformity in storytelling. This is just a recollection of the things I wanted to share. It isn’t completed, because to say everything would be horrifically slow, and I’ve almost certainly forgotten things already. I think after two months I have processed what I will from that experience. Leaving that trip was painful, and getting back to reality and work and paycheck-to-paycheck has sometimes been like having the air sucked out of me. I had a two-month dream, and waking up from it left me hollow for a while, and I still feel a little hollow about being back sometimes.
I still talk to some of the people that I met on the trip, but I’ve found that I have nothing new to say, and after having something new to say every single day for a while, you realize how much life just forces you to keep walking the same street. Every once in a while, you should extend yourself, go that extra street ahead, flip a coin on which street you’ll go down. When you are lost on that new avenue, looking at the string lights dangling loosely above your head and the people dancing and singing around fires, fumbling your way further ahead than you’ve ever been, the world spinning and someone new running their hands through your hair and the ruins of old buildings becoming the places where you solidify new friendships with a shot of liquor that tastes like death, you realize that there is so much to explore, that the streets are never ending, and that even though you can never see all of them, seeing any single new street is always going to be worth it somehow. The world is so big and so small, and there’s no amount of writing in circles I could do to qualify why I feel that way. Thank you for reading, and I hope my journal, with all it’s ups and downs and gaps of silence, meant something to you, because writing it all down has reminded me of how much it all meant to me.
-Daylon M. Phillips (12/05/2018)
Daylon M. Phillips 