Travelling notes

I'm not pretending that I know everything; I'm not assuming I know nothing. What travelling has taught me is once again to always question, and wonder. Assume nothing, leave yourself open to change, opportunities, chance and fate - they bring you happenings both amazing and catastrophic: neither can be foreseen.

During my recent travels across Europe (Warsaw-Krakow-Hamburg-Amsterdam-Kiel-Munich-Vienna-Budapest), I've had my wallet stolen, forgotten my passport, been piss broke and slept in a couchette with complete strangers no more than a foot away, the air stale and smelling of people - traces of smoke, lingering perfume, coffee, chips...smells of other peoples' lives intermingling with my own. Here lives do intermingle. On trains, planes, and in hostels I've learned life stories, inspirations for leaving home and launching into unknown countries, leaving comfort for questions and safety for ambiguity.

Of course there are also comforting things about travelling. Concluding that, to use a cliche, things are the same everywhere, for example. On the bus ride to Auschwitz I watched as an old Polish man shovelled snow from his driveway. For amusement's sake only, he flung the shovelfull of snow high into the air and smiled to see it fall glistening down around him. People are the same everywhere.

In Amsterdam a pregnant cat had made her nest in dark corner just outside the sliding door of our cafe. Upon passing her, visitors from every corner of the world made the same gesture -stopping, bending down, scratching her nose and making the universal "tch tch" sound of animal lovers the world over. People are the same everywhere.

Maria and I sat in an uber posh cafe overlooking a canal in Amsterdam. Reflected light danced seductively in the waves outside the window. Amsterdam's finest sipped wine around us. Despite the surreal setting and we were the same two girls that laughed over Maria's inability pronounce "deteriorating" during the hour and half long, impossibly bumpy bus ride from Blind River to Kynoch. People are the same everywhere. And so am I.

A moment:

It is our last night in Krakow and we are walking back to our hostel - past the horse drawn cart clopping over the cobblestones, past the rows of stalls selling hand-carved wooden figures and brightly painted, pear-shaped dolls-in-dolls. The air smells of freshly baked bagels. It is the time of day where the sun lies close and golden over the city, making everything that was pretty, beautiful. The air is simultaneously soft and expectant, fresh and tangy - like a new blade of grass, at once comforting and dazzlingly new. The locals mill about, chatting in the square flanked by buildings that in any other city would be striking and glorious, but here are just the way it is.

Of a sudden a note shrills from the mouth of trumpet or flugel horn and fills the square. Faces turn upward. The sound comes from the sky, or some impossibly high place - the bell tower of the chapel to the left. It is a stone building, crowned on every peak by statues kissed gently by the last rays of sun. Above their heads the sound emerges. The musician is absent within the darkness of the steeple, leaving his brassy notes to wander masterless over the listeners beneath. They listen as if it were what they had waited all day to hear. The sound falls over their faces as they lift upwards, their mouths forming the slightest of nostalgic smiles. It loosens joints and smoothing worries so deep they had nearly been forgotten.

What are they thinking of, their faces static and vulnerable to the early evening air and all things twilight? For me the brass note brings a sharp and crystalline thought: a remembrance of fresh summer nights, of frogsong and new leaves unfolding, their cousins disintegrating beneath, a season turning from one to the next, days lengthening. The same feeling of expectation and longing, of newness and birth, development, freedom. Anticipation that this year, this month, this very day will bring something vivid and good if only the repetition of all that was and all that will be - this is what the trumpeter spills out from the highest point in Krakow to the world in this moment. It falls on the ears beneath and floats around and in and out and over and across the hands and feet of listeners listening to a few notes, a few golden notes in the golden sun in the cobbled square in a city so old we can no longer relate. This message. This song. A lone trumpeter in a bell tower. I stood, face upturned. I listened.

"This is life", I thought.

"And life is beautiful."