Backpacking Europe - first post

June 1, 2006

Stephanie and I are just now on a train going from La Spezia to Parma. We will then go from Parma to Bologna, and Bologna to Venice. We got up this morning at 7 in order to catch the bus from the camp we are staying at - high in the cliffs overlooking the Meditteranean - into Riomaggiore. Riomaggiore is a tiny Italian town: one of five fishing villages which cling to the cliffs along the south-east coast. They cater a good deal today to the hordes of tourists - many young backpackers like ourselves - who flock to the cliffs every summer for the chance to hike in one of the most beautiful regions of the world. But they still have a strong local small-town feel. Among the backpacks and cameras are men lifiting cement blocks onto trucks, old ladies picking dead buds off their impressive flowers and gardeners tending to trees drooping from the weight of their bright yellow lemons. Italian words fly around with the emphatic lyricism typical to the speakers of that language.

Looking out the window now I am taken aback by how striking the scenery is. I can't believe people are lucky enough to live in this paradise. Huge cliffs, bright blue Medittaranean Sea and massive mountains, covered in deep green forests, fading into the background. All of this against the bluest of blue skies. It seems like the sun is always shining here. The clouds are low and impossibly white and fluffy, and everywhere are wildflowers - purple, yellow. Delicate red poppies sprout up between the railway tracks and at the side of the road. They face the sun and, like everything else here, reflect the essence of beauty and vitality. Even the buildings contribute with smooth colourful walls and flowers that protrude from every corner. Palm trees, cacti...it is all so overwhelming. The landscape is alien, and brings to it a whole new level of impressiveness. During my travels I always think back to home and think that it is still the most beautiful place on earth. But here in Cinque Terre, and South of France, la vie est belle: life is beautiful!

The best part, though, is being here with my sister. She is sitting across from me looking the same as she has since we were 5 and 7 - pencil resting gently against her lips, her brow slightly furrowed, staring intently at the puzzle book in her lap. I don't think Steph could live without a pencil and erasure.

Back to the trip. Paris was grand, although it was possibly the quickest tour of the famous city in world history. Eiffel Tower - check. Arc de Triomphe - check. Champs d'Elysees - check. Esplanade des Invalides - check. The Sacre Coeur was just behind our hostel, and we had a great view of it from our window. One evening we bought a baguette and some brie, and cherries and avocado, and had a snack on the green grass of the hill in front of the Sacre Coeur, with a view of all of Paris! Seeing the sites in Paris was great - it's a very exciting city. We were able to converse easily with the locals, since we both speak French. But it was also the most familiar-feeling city I've been to in Europe, and was very crowded with tourists.

Cannes was beachy and had palm trees. We got there the day after the film festival ended, which was good because it felt somewhat calm and relaxed, and wasn't too crazytouristy. We took a boat to the island and were completely alone for most of the time, exploring the shoreline, looking at the hills and white sailboats and generally soaking up the warm sun and relaxation of a truly summery day.

All this travelling is tiring, but we've seen some amazing places in a short time. Backpacking France and Italy with my sister - fantastique!

Saying goodbye...soon...

Time is running out in Scotland. I have two twenty page papers and one presentation due by next Tuesday. The infamous May Ball is next week, run by the Kate Kennedy club which is peopled by the finest of the fine St. Andrews aristocratic young gentlemen. The May Dip is this Sunday, which will see loads of scantily clad St. Andrews students run into the freezing North Sea at dawn - myself included. I've been working at Rufflets Country House like a madwoman. Well I can't really waitress like a madwoman, so that statement is made only in reference to the astounding amount of shifts I've been working. However, that does mean that I've decided to travel France, Italy, Greece and Turkey for the entire month of June as opposed to just a few weeks, since I've been making more money than I thought I would. I'll leave after my last exam - the 20th - and meet my beautiful Sister in France, and she'll travel with me to Italy, then I'll hopefully meet up with my friend Marnie for Greece and Turkey.

So what all this really means is that my time in Scotland, and at St. Andrews, is coming to an end. I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. I still waver between loving and hating this place on a daily basis. It's beauty is unarguable. Many of my recent shifts at the restaurant have been breakfast shifts, meaning I wake up at 6 and walk out of St. Andrews, where the footpath runs out and the farmland begins. Anyone who knows me would likely agree that I am not a morning person. But I look forward to these mornings. They alone have allowed for my most personal relationship with Scotland. Hardly anyone is about at that time of the day. It's just me walking along the road. The birds have started their first songs of the day. I often see a pheasant darting across the field and his brassy feathers shine in the slanted morning sun. The lighting in Scotland is nothing if not dramatic. I'm not sure why, but the lighting here is so often so glorious. It will shine through the clouds, or come in low over the fields, or hit the earth in bright rays that illuminate a tiny part of ocean or hill which all of a sudden becomes exceptionally beautiful. I don't know why the light is like this here, but it constantly and literally takes my breath away.

This is especially true on these early mornings, when Scotland opens its beauty before my eyes and I fall in love with it. The field just outside town is very intriguing to me. Initially I loved it for its dark, moist soil that the tractor had turned up, filling the air with the organic, alluring smell only freshly turned soil can evoke. It reminds me of the garden in our farm in Iron Bridge. Even though I was very young when I left that house I remember loving the dirt, and that specific smell of soil. It makes me want to grab a handful and crumble it in my hand because I know exactly what it will feel and smell like. Like something that makes things grow.
The blackbirds - the ones from the nursery rhymes who always end up in pies or poking peoples' eyes out - wander around the field, picking out worms or bugs here and there.

One day I walked by and the entire field was blanketed with the greenest stems of new grass. The field was transformed into a photograph, or painting. Each blade of grass was only about an inch tall, and insignificant on its own, but when viewed in the context of the whole field it positively glowed with a strong pallet of Spring Green. And the morning sun - dramatic as all Scottish light is - illuminated its perfect rows, which were parallel to one another and raced up to meet the sky at the horizon.

I may despise the aristocracy of St. Andrews, but I love its fields. And its mountains. And its oceans. And its dramatic lighting. And its highland cattle, and sheep with their baby fleecy white lambs. And its streams, like the one that winds its way through St. Andrews which I just discovered last week. I love Scotland. I am in love with Scotland. I don't want to say goodbye. I don't want to talk about it like it was something I was a part of, and now am not. I want to always be a part of it. We have a personal relationship now, afforded by the mornings and the mountains. It may only have been a part of me for a short time, but it has entered my poetic memory, and that memory never fades.

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."

St.Patrick's Day in Dublin!!!

Everything you think St. Patrick's Day would be in Dublin - all the Irish dancing and celtic music, singing along to Cockels and Mussels and Danny Boy, drinking pints of Guinness and being kissed on the cheek by friendly Irish men - Dublin measures up to all of these expectations, and then some. And then a lot, actually. I had the best time of my life in Dublin for St. Patrick's Day. The city is vibrant and friendly. There are horses clip clopping their way past on the cobbled streets, celtic music (real celtic music, being played by old musicians) sneaks out of every pub you pass. The shopping is phenomenal, the buildings beautiful, and everyone is willing to stop and say hello. And I officially love the Irish accent above all others.

Stevie and I spent St. Paddy's Day at the huge outdoor Ceilidh Mor, dancing Irish dances with complete strangers from across the world. It was neat to see all the highschool age Irish students who really knew all the dances and who were chanting and singing along with all the songs. The Irish culture is so rich and natural that it is really refreshing - even though the city was packed with tourists, it was clear that all this "Irishness" wasn't just for show - these people really do love their culture, and they really do sit around in pubs playing the guitar and Irish bagpipes, and girls really do climb on the bar to do some Irish step dancing in tune to the music and the crowd's clapping hands and hooting.

St. Paddy's night was spent in St. John of Gogarty Bar in the Temple Bar district. The place was packed so that you could barely move, and glasses of Guinness were being spilled on people and broken every two seconds. But you can't help but be in high spirits when everyone is there for the party, dressed in green, and no one is afraid to spark up conversation. I had a shamrock and maple leaf painted on to my face, and we met a lot of Canadians that way. On the second level of the bar was the Irish Music level, and we weren't in there two seconds when I got swept into a dance with a guy who really knew how to do the dances - he held both my hands, facing me, and we would kick and twirl to the music, while the rest of the bar stood and clapped and cheered us on. That is my single best memory of St. Paddy's Day, it was so exhilerating!!!!!

The next night was spent much the same way although a little more subdued in Temple Bar, the most famous of the pubs in Dublin, and rightly so. We spent most of the night singing along with their Irish Band.

The next day we spent wandering around shops and coffee shop hopping, then headed back to St. Andrews in preparation for our next adventure to Eastern and Central Europe. I will never have a more exciting St. Paddy's Day than the one spent in Dublin. And I am forever in love with that city of friendly people, beautiful accents, and cobbled streets.

Censored in China

But still writing strong despite it. I can't actually access my own blog site from here since it has been blocked by the government - blogs are a popular form of dissent in repressed countries these days, so I guess they figure they can't be too careful. But I'm pretty sure my first blog was posted even though I can't see it, so I'll post this one and hope that you can see it. Please let me know if it worked! I'm still receiving messages posted on the blogsite in my Inbox, so you can let me know that way. Yeesh!

Jan 23, 2006

I have been in China for two days now, and it is one of the more interesting experiences I have had. It's not your typical escape holiday - there are no sparkling beaches, no room service, no cocktails served with juicy red cherries. Although there are palm trees, there is no languishing, bikini-clad, in their warm shadows. It is, instead, the kind of experience that allows you to take a glimpse into a world literally and figuratively foreign to your own.

Nanning is in the far south of China, bordering with Vietnam, and is a very poor city of about three million - relatively small for China. It is not an industrial city, but is important for its services, being home to a number of hospitals and universities, including the one my Dad works for - Guangxi University. I somewhat expected that being a foreigner in China would not be as noticeable or outstanding a trait as it had been in my previous two visits to South Korea. However, even in Hong Kong, with its abundance ofAmerican pop culture (which I lapped up greedily, starved as I am in Scotland for it, which feeds only a few trashy US series', the rest of the time filling the airwaves with bad British soap operas and even worse comedies if such they can even be named), I was nonetheless apparently quite the anomaly. Although as a word out of context an anomaly seems like a cool thing to be, in practice it is not as fun and perky a thing as it semiotically appears (I think that is not a word). In Hong Kong, and trebly so in Nanning, people stare at anomalies. Heads turn, boys whisper - you could not be a wallflower if you tried. And as a traveller, a visitor to a new place, one out of their element, I would prefer to blend in as much as possible. I want to be an anonymous observer; the one behind the lens and behind the words. But in this place my hair, my eyes and my skin colour will not allow me to entertain that desire even briefly. Here, walking the streets past merchants with stalls of alien fruit and stepping clear of a cart being pulled down the city sidewalk by a small horse - here, I am the main attraction. To them, I am rich - you can buy a full meal for $2.00 Canadian. Also I am likely one of the few white people they've seen outside of TV, although there are quite a few foreign teachers here.

But I, of course, find the inhabitants of Nanning just as interesting as they find me. Being a poor city, and close to the country, it has a very rural feel. The main mode of transportation is the bicycle, which they ride in all four lanes of traffic, often dragging carts behind loaded to the max with wood or seed or some other product, with a second rider standing on the back to keep it in place. There seems to be little order to the city, and little rush as well.

A merchant hacks the bark off a sugarcane stalk and hands it to a little boy, who absentmindedly chews it, swallowing its sweet juices and getting his hands all sticky in the process. In a park, a group of three mothers play London bridge (although I’m sure they use different lyrics!) with their young daughters, while grandma watches from under the shade of a banana tree. The drivers of the pedicabs – bicycles dragging a makeshift buggy cart with two benches inside, a much cheaper option than taxis – sit waiting for their customers in the shade, shouting “hello” to any foreigner who may pass. The air is warm and there is an atmosphere of rest which can likely in part be attributed to the fact that it is holiday time, being the week of the Lunar New Year.

The plants here are lush and huge, as we saw today at the traditional medicine garden we visited, part of the Nanning Chinese Traditional Medical University. There we found acres of landscaped plants and herbs, huge twisting vines, towering palms trees, bright pink orchids lifting themselves to the sun and considering their beauty in the reflective waters beneath. The fig trees spread their branches far out and far up, then dropped more trunks from their branches straight down to the ground again in a concerted effort to take up as much room as possible. A magpie flickered black and white amid the massive foliage of ferns and leaves.

What I find most interesting is to watch people at work and play, and to see how easy it is to come down to a level of complete comfort in such a foreign setting and to feel that this is neither different nor strange, but only the daily life of these particular people in this particular part of the world. To them the interesting Chinese characters plastered in every open space are not unique or decorous as I consider them to be, but are merely giving information: “For Sale”, “Reduced Price”, “Have Your Shoes Polished Here”. The dialogue which to my ears is a wall of unfamiliar sound to them is idle banter: “Buy some corn”, “Which bus do I take”, “How much for that watch”.

This is not a place many people would choose to visit during their vacation, but I think the very fact that it is off the tourist maps, and quite poor, and slightly country, make it all that much more valuable a place to visit. It’s not a vacation so much as a trip to a place that will provide yet another perspective on what this world is all about, really. Which is exactly what I want to find out.

China

Well now I am in China, in Nanning which is a city in Guangxi Province, near Vietnam. It's great! I'll write more later...just seeing if this blog will post. :P

I am just now flying from Berlin to Newcastle. The past two days have been interesting to say the least. January 30 I said goodbye to my mum and sister at the airport. Saying goodbye to my sister was unexpectedly difficult. For me it meant letting go once again of the one person who, despite radically different personalities, completely understands me. Unfortunately her detailed map of Inner Robin includes my many faults - many more than I would like to admit, and many more that are both undeniably and infallibly part of me, even in face of my most ardent denials and vicious mental scrubbing. I hate that she sees those in me and yet, crying into her long brown hair at the end of the nylon gate which would soon seperate us, I know that when she is gone I will miss her as I would miss myself, if that makes any sense. She is my sister and she is my world.

Having sent my mum and sister on their way I leave in search of the Underground - the infamous "tube". The day before the flight, midway toward London, we had discovered that Mum had forgotten the Very Important Piece of Paper. On this I had written my flight confirmation number to Berlin, the flight number and the number of my friend whom I was supposed to meet in London today. Luckily there are Internet terminals that mercilessly overcharge you in the airport, where I had been able to recapture this vital information. I had also learned that I was to take the Piccadilly Circus line to Baron's Court stop in London, where my friend Christine - whom I met when working at Ontario Place two summers ago - and her sister Jocelyn would meet me.

Christine and I have shared some interesting experiences together. Along with Erin and Laurie, the othe two "OP girls", I have been introduced to Bob the Builder and Barney (there are only 7 people in the world who can act as Barney, and I have met two of them - both leud individuals, with the kind of sick sense of humour specific to child entertainers). The summer we met - my first in Toronto - I started the chain reaction of breaking off long-term relationships, ending my four year relationship with Joey which Christine echoed half a year later by breaking off with her 3 year boyfriend, with Erin following suit another half year later by ending her own 3 year relationship. We have all pranced around and kissed babies dressed as oversized monkeys, dinosaurs, octopi and bears. And we were all, save for Laurie, thrown into the lake without a lifejacket when we were suddenly recruited to Day Camp staff with no training, trying to control 9 unruly six year old boys in an amusement park (as impossible a task as it sounds). We also partied many nights away together downtown Toronto, the most memorable for me being the End of the Year OP Boat Cruise, where I had one of the most romantic nights of my life in the arms of a certain James who worked at the Cinesphere. Me leaning on the railing of the boat in my little black dress. He putting his arms around me from behind and commenting absentmindedly on the beauty of the huge orange moon hanging low over the Toronto skyline. The waves. The fireworks.

These are the memories I turn over in my head while riding the oddly circular tube to my next destination. Here, as always when travelling, I try to use my acting skills to emote the presence of a seasoned traveller to those around me. A "seasoned traveller" is one of those fantastical personas I have always admired and wished to become. I've gone through many of these - a graceful, proper dancer; an expressive, working actress (one of the kind who are somehow completely confident in their role as an actor, even against seemingly insurmoutnable odds and a much more lucrative parallel career as a waiter), a competent and organized secretary with an enviously tidy desk and endless array of post-it pads, paper clips, pens and papers organized into meticulously labelled folders; a gracious waitress possessed of an endlessly brilliant smile, flawless dexterity and a mind that processes and acts upon a million thoughts at once, without ever leaving a customer unattended. Also a trapeze artist, air hostess and a mother as utterly perfect as my own. Like most of these personas, however, the well-seasoned traveller always eludes me. Maybe the only role I will ever truthfully play will be that of an actor.

Take, for instance, the fact that my most recent boyfriend, upon breaking up with me, stated as main reason for doing so that he felt I was a "compulsive liar", a term he would later turn into the slightly more insulting "lying bitch". I couldn't help but worry that the former claim was true (I am the sort that can never dispense of the few assaults on my personality I have recieved but instead go back to them again and again as one would to a sore tooth, poking and prodding to make sure it still hurts). Was I a compulsive liar? Or was he somehow tapping into my role-playing? Perhaps I think too much about who I am or the person I think I might like to be, and try to slip into that role, rather than be the person I really am. Instead of acting on my own honest and immediate impulses and desires, I distance myself and create a persona for whom, like a noveslist's character, I can determine the "right" way to act, the "proper" thing to say; the course of action which will bring the plot to an undoubtedly happy and sensible ending. I think that is the romantic in me. Maybe it was this self-deception that Ryan was sensing. One thing I really loved about him was that he was resolutely and unapologetically himself, an attribute I am constantly attracted to most likely because it is one that I doubt I will ever find in myself. Maybe he sensed this lack in me and misplaced his dislike of by creating the illusion of me lying to him. I don't know. Either way, it makes me wonder how convincing my personas truly are, and how dangerous.

We are coming down to land in Newcastle. I love watching the cities approach from above. The way our cities glow golden from the air, how can life in them be anything but perfect?