London; The Departure

Spent a few days with Esmond and Sim in Witham, which is a really quaint, adorable little town an hour away from London. It had all the essentials of a quiet English village: leafy trees, pebbled roads and duck ponds.

This was pretty much the tourist part of the trip, with the 3 of us going to see the various sights. Madame Tussaud’s was pretty amazing; took a photo with Hitler! At night we (ok, they) cooked a fantastic meal of beggar’s chicken, followed by a nourishing game of Dota and good movies to watch. Sitting around a dinner table eating carefully prepared food while talking to friends is therapeutic beyond belief.

Last night was my final night in London. Went out with Jon for a full French dinner, with entrees (escargot and foie gras), main courses of honey-roasted duck and veal and finally our respective desserts of panna cotta and some white biscuit thingy! The quality of the food and conversation was absolutely excellent.

Over these past few days I’ve increasingly begun to realize what I envision getting out of life. Great experiences with great friends - but both come few and far between.

So now it’s back to Dartmouth, and girding my loins for another tumultuous battle. But I’ll be back soon enough.

London; 306 Reunion

Right now at this very moment, I’m sitting in Jon’s rented apartment while Jon and Zhuu are mooching in the other room.

Life is excellent, fantastic and magnificent.

We went to Borough Market yesterday and blew an insane amount of money for very little food. Walked around and listened to music. Ate tapas and had sangria at a Spanish cafe. At night we went for a great performance called Stomp, which I’ll soon try to pass to the band back home. As usual we somehow end up arguing about the most retarded shit, current topic of discussion being whether ovens switch off automatically even when the beeper still makes sounds.

Why are things so good?

Because it’s a reunion. A much anticipated reunion with some of the people who made life in Singapore even moderately tolerable. Uncovering old memories and catching up on what’s been going on, reliving the old days in new ways, going for lunch and dinner and perusing the life and times of the ASEAN gang. If only Foo were here, but maybe next time…

Happiness. If I could but distill times like these into moments that could nourish me through the hard times.

Lol Jon just shouted LUNCH. Where have I heard this summons before. w00t!

Time to Say Goodbye

I remember going to buy my money belt with Su. That money belt seems to represent all that I thought I knew about Europe and traveling in it. Money! It costs so much. Danger! Excitement and the possibility of getting robbed. The money-beltness of the money belt itself; a symbol of travel and preparation for risk.

Now I look at it and it’s curiously deflated. The money is gone, though much less than I expected. In the final weeks, as traveling became commonplace, I didn’t even wear it any longer, content to stuff it in my backpack, my multiple layers of hedged security unneeded and unheeded.

So now the time comes to say goodbye to Continental Europe.

6 weeks here. What do I think?

I’m not really sure.

For those of you who’ve been talking to me during my trip here, you’ll know it wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be. There was a lot more walking than I expected, and some days it seemed as though Europe had nothing but sights to be seen, when I was really looking for experiences to be had.

But I think ultimately, this trip has been a journey and a chance to grow.

Every new thing we do in life takes us new places. It forces us to think about things we never thought of before, make choices we were never prepared to make and present us with opportunities to see, understand and learn new things. There was the expected culture, the history, the friends.

Even more important though, would be learning how to survive by oneself, how to walk into situations blind and hostel-less, how to maintain shreds of dignity while pantomiming food, how to meet people and make friends and handle fuckwads and many more things. All these and more I learnt.

But maybe most importantly, I learnt enough to confidently travel on my own in the future. Some skills are universal, and can be easily adapted to the rigors of traveling alone in the future.

Now it’s time for my holiday from this holiday, where I’ll go hang out with old friends and roommates, living in security and assurance that someone will know what to do next and everything is settled. But I’ll be taking with me the lessons and experiences gleaned from a trip worth taking.

Paris

Paris was everything it was made out to be and more.

I arrived at night and walked around the city for ages. Paris at night is wonderful – the streets are only moderately crowded, and the buildings all lit up with soft, mellowy yellow light. Unlike Rome, these buildings seem to have an elegant grandeur about them, especially at night.

As you can see, I really didn’t like Rome.

I stood along the river trying to figure out exactly what it was that gave Paris this elegant and sophisticated feel. But it was more than that: Paris had an air of majesty. After some time, I realized it was just the overall feel of the place. It wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower shimmering in the distance or the glittering lights of the Champs’ Elysees. It was all this and more – the wide open boulevards flanked by baroque streetlamps and guarded at the entrances by immense pillars topped with golden statues, the orderly rows of trees growing along the sides of beautiful pavements, the scent of food and the low murmur of French as I thread through brasseries facing the roads.

In the daytime, I saw Montmartre, though in a rather poor mood at waking up so early. Nonetheless, Montmartre is still beautiful. Quaint apartments perched on a steep, high hill, where students flock to draw and paint in the daytime. Later that evening, we went to the Musee d’Orsay and saw literally 3.5 hours of paintings, sculpture and art.

At night, I had a great meal at a café, comprising fondant de boeuf and crème brulee for dessert. Horrendously expensive, but what’s Paris if you don’t get to taste the food while sitting on a pavement looking at the world go by?

Another place to come back to.

Amsterdam

Wah… Amsterdam.

Only spent a day there and went back with Jon at 4 am, but it was still fantastic.

Pretty much the main attractions in Amsterdam are the red-light district and the coffeeshops, i.e. the little places which sell pot, hash and shrooms. We hunted around for coffeeshops at first, thinking, in our naïveté, that they would be small and out of the way. Later on I would realize that every single corner in Amsterdam has a little coffeeshop with pictures of Bob Marley in the front.

Paradise Coffeeshop was the very first one I saw, and it was the first one I went into. Thankfully, the Indian guy behind the counter spoke some English and was helpful enough in explaining the different brands and types of pot. I also bought space cake! Space cake is amazing… I thought it would just be cheap cake with pot but the cake actually tasted pretty good in and of itself.

The red light district is fascinating as well. The interesting thing about this area in Amsterdam is how safe it feels. Torrents of tourists walk along the two streets comprising the district, flirting with the sex workers and laughing among themselves, while police cycle around looking scary and vigilant. Far from the seedy heroin-dealing pimp-infested place I thought it would be.

But the actual work seems rather sad and seamy. From the streets, it’s possible to look in through the “booths” of the sex workers, booths that are basically windows or doors of rooms lit with red neon. The rooms are bare and uncarpeted, with sometimes just a cheap plastic chair to sit on and a mat in the corner. It has a slightly sad feel about it, despite all the hype and glitter of the district: Under the glamour, lies the basic bureaucracy and boredom of daily life.

All that said though, I think it’ll be a great place to go again if/when the gang comes over next year. The sheer abundance of pot alone should guarantee happiness.

Berlin

I have decided to just write about the most important and significant cities visited, since I realize that it’s actually quite difficult to evoke the feelings and memories of every single place I’ve been to.

So!

Berlin!

Berlin was quite marvelous. After the dry, dusty and tourist-deluged roads of Rome, Berlin’s wide boulevards, clean streets and magnificent architecture were really welcome. I was really surprised by Berlin, probably because American literature so often depicts Berlin in its post-WW2 state, or just barely recovering from the Berlin wall split.

I feel like Berlin is a city of remembrance. On the façade, everything is brand new and sparkling. Standing in the Hauptbahnhof is amazing – trains whiz in and out of the multileveled, glass and steel construction; jacketed businesspeople hurry up and down transparent walkways holding briefcases; and above the hustle and bustle of an ultramodern station, a voice announces the various arrivals and departures of everything from the S-Bahn to the ICE like a soothing backdrop to the hum of motion.

Yet when I walk around the city, I see countless memorials to what happened in WW2. Partly, too, I am looking for them. But beyond that, there is a dignified elegance to Berlin that stands aloof from tourists. It seems to say: Here, history was made. We are not Rome of tourist fame; real, living, important history was created here, and we remember it.

There was just an aura of reserved culture everywhere I walked at night. The chill winds blew, and some might call it somber. But to me, it was magnificent.

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Rome

Sigh… Rome is complicated.

We had a great time sketching people away from our train cabin… hung shirts all over the place, coughed like TB patients whenever anyone came nearby, set our bags all over the floor and were an inch away from spraying water everywhere as well.

But more about Rome-

On one hand, it’s supposed to be one of the 4 must-see places in Europe. I’ve seen it all… the Vatican Museum, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Colosseo, the Pantheon, the Fountain de Travi etc.

But I’ve asked myself again and again, what sort of happiness or benefit am I supposed to derive from seeing all these buildings? Let’s look at this rationally:

~I feel awed by the amazing history of this place?
Well.. kind of difficult when there are more tourists than flies around a pile of dung. It’s insane! The Obelisk was good at 7.15 am with just nuns walking around, but by the time it was 10 am, every single place in the whole city was ridiculously crowded with tourists of every race and nationality. Boring. And crowded.

I honestly can’t think of anything else. The problem with paintings and tapestries is that they are just so absolutely uninteractive. They just stay there. They don’t move. They don’t create or generate. Maybe one needs a more powerful imagination than I possess to appreciate the difference between Jesus on a cross and Jesus on a cross.

The food has been ok… been eating really cheap kebabs and trying to survive minimally. I guess these things always look better in retrospect. But this experience has at least taught me a few lessons.

Booking Our Tickets

It´s 3 a.m. and I just got off the phone, booking our tickets to Barcelona.

In SPANISH.

Omg was fucking exciting… the lady was very nice and tried to use the very simplest Spanish at the very slowest pace possible, but when I asked complicated questions like ¨How much discount would I get with my Eurail pass,¨ she´d get really excited and speed up while I´d be praying hard and trying to catch numbers in the rapid barrage of Spanish. And there were so many instructions! The number to quote, where to pick them up, when the reservation expired, prices, ticket types etc etc etc…

Thank god for those Spanish lessons. The sense of accomplishment is absolutely immeasurable.

I BOOKED MY OWN TICKETS IN SPANISH W00T!