Honk. Bleat.
posted by Stephen at 6:46 PM
19 comments
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Vernal.
Stuart helped me fix my bike, and just in time. The week after he went back to Berlin the snow disappeared from the bike paths, and the sun now seems to stay in the broad, Central European prairie sky for hours longer.
Finishing the leftover chicken acquired on the previous day’s excursion to the huge department store on the Southwestern outskirts of town perpendicular to my own Southcentral outskirts of town, I suit up and glide into the city proper. The three rivers that meet in Győr are all swollen with the spring thaw, and the artifically high banks that surround them suddenly make a lot more sense. I cross a bridge and stop pedalling. There are dozens of swans floating amidst the debris in the murky Raba, their black feet barely moving under the cloudy surface. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wild swan before. They honk or bleat softly, and it sounds sort of like a 12-year-old trumpet student practicing. Black ducks fly overhead. Directly beneath me a swan exerts only as much effort as is required to keep the current at bay. It successfully creates the illusion of motionlessness, dipping its beak casually to drink the chemical sludge the many factories that line the river have helpfully contributed to its well-being. A kid and his dog harrass the birds that are closest to the swampy shore. A few hundred yards away one of the swans takes flight and its wings are wider than a 60s Skoda is long.
It gets darker, and I ride into the neighbourhood colloquially known as "Gypsytown." This is where the city’s relatively small Roma minority lives, and it’s clear that the town or the county haven’t spent the reconstruction money on the elegant older buildings on this side of the river that they have in the commercial center. A woman with a long dark ponytail leans out of her streetlevel apartment, smiling. On a smaller back street a couple stands in the middle of an intersection screaming at each other. There is an open bar door on one corner. They are Hungarian, not Roma. They are very, very angry.
There are two ways to cross the railyard: you can take the bridge above it where the traffic bottlenecks, next to the city hall, or you can take the street-crossing on the far side of the city’s prison. Waiting for the street-crossing is a test of the will, as the striped arms lift only once every twenty minutes or so. Of course there is nothing like a little timer sign tracking how long it’s been since the path has been clear, like there is in the Metro marking the time since the last train, so the game involves hoping that you are about to catch a window. There are only a few walkers and drivers idling when I arrive, but it’s a warm pleasant night and I am buoyed by the flush of the season, so I decide to wait it out. More cars come. More bikes come. Full trains pass. Single engines coast to their evening resting place. A train creaks by, stops, and then reverses. Pedestrians stike up conversations in Hungarian. A white sedan on the opposite side of the tracks backs up and peals off down an alley, the driver losing patience. Apart from him, everyone realises that they have invested too much time in this crossing to forsake it for the bridge; we all wait together.
A few minutes past the rails I roll by a group of about twelve teenage girls walking toward the center, almost all of whom have signature Eastern European bleached blonde hair. They are loudly singing a Hungarian song in unison. The voices are light but ersatz, fraught with giggles and missed notes and more enthusiasm than proficiency. They turn a corner and keep singing. I stand on my pedals the entire way back to Pattantyus Ut.
Finishing the leftover chicken acquired on the previous day’s excursion to the huge department store on the Southwestern outskirts of town perpendicular to my own Southcentral outskirts of town, I suit up and glide into the city proper. The three rivers that meet in Győr are all swollen with the spring thaw, and the artifically high banks that surround them suddenly make a lot more sense. I cross a bridge and stop pedalling. There are dozens of swans floating amidst the debris in the murky Raba, their black feet barely moving under the cloudy surface. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a wild swan before. They honk or bleat softly, and it sounds sort of like a 12-year-old trumpet student practicing. Black ducks fly overhead. Directly beneath me a swan exerts only as much effort as is required to keep the current at bay. It successfully creates the illusion of motionlessness, dipping its beak casually to drink the chemical sludge the many factories that line the river have helpfully contributed to its well-being. A kid and his dog harrass the birds that are closest to the swampy shore. A few hundred yards away one of the swans takes flight and its wings are wider than a 60s Skoda is long.
It gets darker, and I ride into the neighbourhood colloquially known as "Gypsytown." This is where the city’s relatively small Roma minority lives, and it’s clear that the town or the county haven’t spent the reconstruction money on the elegant older buildings on this side of the river that they have in the commercial center. A woman with a long dark ponytail leans out of her streetlevel apartment, smiling. On a smaller back street a couple stands in the middle of an intersection screaming at each other. There is an open bar door on one corner. They are Hungarian, not Roma. They are very, very angry.
There are two ways to cross the railyard: you can take the bridge above it where the traffic bottlenecks, next to the city hall, or you can take the street-crossing on the far side of the city’s prison. Waiting for the street-crossing is a test of the will, as the striped arms lift only once every twenty minutes or so. Of course there is nothing like a little timer sign tracking how long it’s been since the path has been clear, like there is in the Metro marking the time since the last train, so the game involves hoping that you are about to catch a window. There are only a few walkers and drivers idling when I arrive, but it’s a warm pleasant night and I am buoyed by the flush of the season, so I decide to wait it out. More cars come. More bikes come. Full trains pass. Single engines coast to their evening resting place. A train creaks by, stops, and then reverses. Pedestrians stike up conversations in Hungarian. A white sedan on the opposite side of the tracks backs up and peals off down an alley, the driver losing patience. Apart from him, everyone realises that they have invested too much time in this crossing to forsake it for the bridge; we all wait together.
A few minutes past the rails I roll by a group of about twelve teenage girls walking toward the center, almost all of whom have signature Eastern European bleached blonde hair. They are loudly singing a Hungarian song in unison. The voices are light but ersatz, fraught with giggles and missed notes and more enthusiasm than proficiency. They turn a corner and keep singing. I stand on my pedals the entire way back to Pattantyus Ut.
posted by Stephen at 4:48 PM
1 comments
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Sziasztok.
Determined to avoid another near miss at any airport anywhere ever again, I get back to Orly five hours before my flight leaves for Budapest. I read and pace and even nap. The flight is on SkyEurope, and the plane seems rickety to me. I don’t like the way the rivets seem to be straining outward from the wings. I nap some more.
By the time I arrive in Hungary, it’s about 10pm. I catch the subway to the bus station and realise that it’s deserted. Uh oh. I try the train station and it too is empty. I am stranded in Budapest with no money and nowhere to stay. Fuck. It is much colder here than it was in France or Germany, so I bundle up and start the wandering. I spend a few hours drinking coffee and resting in a McDonalds, but it closes at 2am. The only establishments open on a Wednesday night in Eastern Pest are strip clubs, and I have no intention of spending the next week’s food money on overpriced beer or of marinating in the uberdepressing nudie bar atmosphere. I walk through the empty streets to Hőssők Ter and examine the huge statues of dead Hungarian heroes. The wind penetrates both of my jackets, worn one on top of the other. Walking down Andrássy I spy a well-insulated looking phone booth and I stuff myself inside, wedging myself onto the small bench and propping myself up with my feet against the glass wall.
Sheltered from the Danubian wind, I watch my breath cloud the scratched plexiglass and think about how fucking ridiculous (and ultimately preventable) the situation is. But I don’t really mind tracing the edges of loneliness in these big European cities late at night, and I have to admit that some masochistic part of me (apparently that part is way bigger and way more demanding than I ever thought it was) gets off on doing this to myself. I decide that I need to spend my money on coffee or movies or museums instead of leaving a safety cushion should I, say, miss the last train to my warm and comfortably-appointed suburban Győr apartment. Why is it that I insist on doing everything the absolute hardest way? I think it’s a healthy combination of my inability to account for contingencies when planning and my depraved desire to suffer like the martyr after whom I was named.
I escape the phone booth but not the prison of my mind. I carve a wide loop through quiet Pest neighbourhoods and return to the train station where I buy a ticket and find a heating vent to hover over. My toes are numb. I realise that the 5:25 to Győr is sitting in the station already and, hello, the doors are open and the heat’s on! I pick a compartment and stretch out along the seat and fall quickly into a welcome sleep.
Soon a guard is waking me up and demanding to see my passport. He’s actually pretty friendly and he speaks enough english to know that he is holding all the cards:
"American?"
Handing over passport. "Canadian."
"Ah, Canadian. Going to Győr?" Examining passport.
"Yeah, I knew this was the train so I just stepped in. It’s pretty cold outside."
"Ah, yes." Handing back passport. "Give me one bill, it’s no problem."
Mild disbelief. I am being asked for a hush-up bribe. Truly I am back in Eastern Europe. I hand him a 200 forint bill (like $1.25 Canadian).
"That’s not even a coffee," he scoffs. For Christ’s sake.
I exchange it for a 500 forint bill. Realizing that I am broke, not merely cheap, he takes the equivalent of three loaves of bread or two bags of oranges from me and leaves me alone. I go back to sleep, waking only to get my ticket punched. When I do, I find myself being stared at by a compartment full of commuting students. They have to nudge me awake when we pull into Győr. In one final senseless show of asceticism I walk the half hour from the train station to my apartment and then slip into a coma for a day or two.
By the time I arrive in Hungary, it’s about 10pm. I catch the subway to the bus station and realise that it’s deserted. Uh oh. I try the train station and it too is empty. I am stranded in Budapest with no money and nowhere to stay. Fuck. It is much colder here than it was in France or Germany, so I bundle up and start the wandering. I spend a few hours drinking coffee and resting in a McDonalds, but it closes at 2am. The only establishments open on a Wednesday night in Eastern Pest are strip clubs, and I have no intention of spending the next week’s food money on overpriced beer or of marinating in the uberdepressing nudie bar atmosphere. I walk through the empty streets to Hőssők Ter and examine the huge statues of dead Hungarian heroes. The wind penetrates both of my jackets, worn one on top of the other. Walking down Andrássy I spy a well-insulated looking phone booth and I stuff myself inside, wedging myself onto the small bench and propping myself up with my feet against the glass wall.
Sheltered from the Danubian wind, I watch my breath cloud the scratched plexiglass and think about how fucking ridiculous (and ultimately preventable) the situation is. But I don’t really mind tracing the edges of loneliness in these big European cities late at night, and I have to admit that some masochistic part of me (apparently that part is way bigger and way more demanding than I ever thought it was) gets off on doing this to myself. I decide that I need to spend my money on coffee or movies or museums instead of leaving a safety cushion should I, say, miss the last train to my warm and comfortably-appointed suburban Győr apartment. Why is it that I insist on doing everything the absolute hardest way? I think it’s a healthy combination of my inability to account for contingencies when planning and my depraved desire to suffer like the martyr after whom I was named.
I escape the phone booth but not the prison of my mind. I carve a wide loop through quiet Pest neighbourhoods and return to the train station where I buy a ticket and find a heating vent to hover over. My toes are numb. I realise that the 5:25 to Győr is sitting in the station already and, hello, the doors are open and the heat’s on! I pick a compartment and stretch out along the seat and fall quickly into a welcome sleep.
Soon a guard is waking me up and demanding to see my passport. He’s actually pretty friendly and he speaks enough english to know that he is holding all the cards:
"American?"
Handing over passport. "Canadian."
"Ah, Canadian. Going to Győr?" Examining passport.
"Yeah, I knew this was the train so I just stepped in. It’s pretty cold outside."
"Ah, yes." Handing back passport. "Give me one bill, it’s no problem."
Mild disbelief. I am being asked for a hush-up bribe. Truly I am back in Eastern Europe. I hand him a 200 forint bill (like $1.25 Canadian).
"That’s not even a coffee," he scoffs. For Christ’s sake.
I exchange it for a 500 forint bill. Realizing that I am broke, not merely cheap, he takes the equivalent of three loaves of bread or two bags of oranges from me and leaves me alone. I go back to sleep, waking only to get my ticket punched. When I do, I find myself being stared at by a compartment full of commuting students. They have to nudge me awake when we pull into Győr. In one final senseless show of asceticism I walk the half hour from the train station to my apartment and then slip into a coma for a day or two.
posted by Stephen at 12:50 PM
0 comments
Patriotism.
Apart from the decrepidly decadent moral turpitude our hotel room encourages, the most shockingly indulgent aspect of our stay is definitely the delivery of breakfast and coffee to our room each morning at 8. We prop ourselves up and slurp the limp brew from those huge French coffee cups and gnaw on croissants, heedlessly strewing crumbs about the sheets. Of course we are staying in the Hotel d’Avenir, which is to say the crumbs will still be there in the evening after the attendant has made our bed but left the sheets unchanged.
We start the day by climbing the steps at Sacre Coeur in the chilly January sunshine and by violating our NO CHURCHES policy again. We wander around Montmartre and detour through a graveyard full of cats. We drink more coffee at a sidewalk cafe. After discovering, once again, that we (I) have almost no money left, we decide to thriftily buy nuts and cheese and little snack shrimps and munch them as lunch in a park by the Louvre. I don’t eat any cheese. We skip the Louvre and visit the Centre Georges Pompidou, which means a four hour stagger through gallery after gallery of monumental Modern Art. Michelle naps while we watch a very nice but sad black and white film of a car driving around Paris at dawn narrated by an existentially-malaised Parisienne.
The next day we meet up with Michelle’s roommate from Canada who is having her own Euroxmas with two friends. They have just returned from London, where apparently it costs more to eat fish and chips than it does to buy a full week’s worth of groceries in Hungary. It is nice to be around other people for a little while, and especially nice to bathe in the hum created by the supersonically zinging wit of Michelle’s roommate. We are invited to their going away dinner with one of the girls’ parents (the three-woman Canuck gang are staying in their apartment), and we accept the invitation.
After returning to the Hotel d’Avenir to change and relax, we meet at Favela Chic, a Brazilian canteen-style place (the name translates as "ghetto fabulous," so we feel a little weird to be participating in some slumming/Otherization ritual, but not so weird that we don’t eat huge amounts of shrimp [again!] and/or black beans and drink a small bar’s worth of mojitos). Finally, I meet Canadians abroad who do not make me wish I was Welsh: Friend of Roommate’s parents are in their fifties, but have challenging, interesting jobs (he: an environmental engineer with the UN; she: a freelance writer) and are obviously still in love. They are engaging conversationalists, they smile easily, and they invite me to stay with them if I’m back in Paris before leaving Europe. They even give me their phone number.
After dinner we dance to the very fine DJ and Michelle’s Roommate’s ridiculous Parisian friend Timothé arrives with a small entourage. Timothé works in advertising, has a villa in the South of France, and uses the word "trendy" to indicate positive approval, ie: "this place used to be trendy, but now it is getting popular with tourists, no offense" or "you should have called earlier, I could have taken you to the trendiest places in Paris on my Vespa!" I have met Timothé in Montreal, but Timothé (thankfully, given the circumstances) doesn’t remember me:
"Timothé." Extends hand.
"Yeah, hi, we met before in Montreal."
"Ah, yes, okay, sure...so you’re living in Vienna that must be fabulous!"
"Actually I’m living in Hungary."
"Oh, I have a few friends in Budapest they tell me things are starting to happen there."
"Actually I live in a small industrial city called Győr half way between Budapest and Vienna."
"Oh.” Visible pity. "What’s between Vienna and Budapest?"
"Not much of anything."
"What are you doing there?"
"I’m working for PAN Parks, it’s this WWF project."
"Ah, the WWF, my friend is working to save these baby sea turtles in South Africa, it’s really amazing."
"Yeah, actually I just sit in an office in an industrial park and proofread website articles."
"Oh. I’m so sorry."
We say adieu to the gyrating gang (parents included in gyration) and walk happily back to Montmartre. It has rained a little and the streets are damp and glistening. It is the last night of our trip together but we try to avoid mentioning that. We enjoy our final physical moments together at the Hotel and then savour our last breakfast. Michelle’s flight leaves earlier than mine and from a different airport, so I escort her to the shuttle stop and then walk briskly away, suddenly alone again, when it arrives to collect her.
We start the day by climbing the steps at Sacre Coeur in the chilly January sunshine and by violating our NO CHURCHES policy again. We wander around Montmartre and detour through a graveyard full of cats. We drink more coffee at a sidewalk cafe. After discovering, once again, that we (I) have almost no money left, we decide to thriftily buy nuts and cheese and little snack shrimps and munch them as lunch in a park by the Louvre. I don’t eat any cheese. We skip the Louvre and visit the Centre Georges Pompidou, which means a four hour stagger through gallery after gallery of monumental Modern Art. Michelle naps while we watch a very nice but sad black and white film of a car driving around Paris at dawn narrated by an existentially-malaised Parisienne.
The next day we meet up with Michelle’s roommate from Canada who is having her own Euroxmas with two friends. They have just returned from London, where apparently it costs more to eat fish and chips than it does to buy a full week’s worth of groceries in Hungary. It is nice to be around other people for a little while, and especially nice to bathe in the hum created by the supersonically zinging wit of Michelle’s roommate. We are invited to their going away dinner with one of the girls’ parents (the three-woman Canuck gang are staying in their apartment), and we accept the invitation.
After returning to the Hotel d’Avenir to change and relax, we meet at Favela Chic, a Brazilian canteen-style place (the name translates as "ghetto fabulous," so we feel a little weird to be participating in some slumming/Otherization ritual, but not so weird that we don’t eat huge amounts of shrimp [again!] and/or black beans and drink a small bar’s worth of mojitos). Finally, I meet Canadians abroad who do not make me wish I was Welsh: Friend of Roommate’s parents are in their fifties, but have challenging, interesting jobs (he: an environmental engineer with the UN; she: a freelance writer) and are obviously still in love. They are engaging conversationalists, they smile easily, and they invite me to stay with them if I’m back in Paris before leaving Europe. They even give me their phone number.
After dinner we dance to the very fine DJ and Michelle’s Roommate’s ridiculous Parisian friend Timothé arrives with a small entourage. Timothé works in advertising, has a villa in the South of France, and uses the word "trendy" to indicate positive approval, ie: "this place used to be trendy, but now it is getting popular with tourists, no offense" or "you should have called earlier, I could have taken you to the trendiest places in Paris on my Vespa!" I have met Timothé in Montreal, but Timothé (thankfully, given the circumstances) doesn’t remember me:
"Timothé." Extends hand.
"Yeah, hi, we met before in Montreal."
"Ah, yes, okay, sure...so you’re living in Vienna that must be fabulous!"
"Actually I’m living in Hungary."
"Oh, I have a few friends in Budapest they tell me things are starting to happen there."
"Actually I live in a small industrial city called Győr half way between Budapest and Vienna."
"Oh.” Visible pity. "What’s between Vienna and Budapest?"
"Not much of anything."
"What are you doing there?"
"I’m working for PAN Parks, it’s this WWF project."
"Ah, the WWF, my friend is working to save these baby sea turtles in South Africa, it’s really amazing."
"Yeah, actually I just sit in an office in an industrial park and proofread website articles."
"Oh. I’m so sorry."
We say adieu to the gyrating gang (parents included in gyration) and walk happily back to Montmartre. It has rained a little and the streets are damp and glistening. It is the last night of our trip together but we try to avoid mentioning that. We enjoy our final physical moments together at the Hotel and then savour our last breakfast. Michelle’s flight leaves earlier than mine and from a different airport, so I escort her to the shuttle stop and then walk briskly away, suddenly alone again, when it arrives to collect her.
posted by Stephen at 12:33 PM
1 comments
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Interior, Hotel d'Avenir. Bathroom of our hearts visible in bottom left of mirror of our hearts.
posted by Stephen at 5:45 PM
4 comments
Ma belle.
I sleep through the flight, and when we arrive in France I am so disoriented that I have to sit on a bench in the airport for about twenty minutes. Incapable of holding thoughts together long enough to compose the simplest sentence, I mumble occasionally and watch the baggage cart zamboni drivers joylessly corral wayward metal suitcase racks. Like bike messengers, they are used to navigating moving crowds of the walking dead (like me) and speed seemingly without heed, pushing dozens or hundreds of carts back into place on their orange mollusk steeds. Michelle brings me coffee and I approach lucidity.
Escaping Orly isn’t too difficult or expensive, and the bus ride is pleasant because it’s so sunny and even the outskirts of Paris look, well, Parisian. Boarding the metro we both thrill to the cosmopolitan ethnic diversity which was so visibly absent in the East, even in Berlin. There is a young African-French family next to us and the kids are grinning and laughing and asking their gregarious mother curious questions. I briefly consider stealing one as we step off the train to change lines.
The biggest indulgence of our whole trip is the hotel in Montmartre that we’ve booked. The tiny, slightly decrepit room with the bathroom from the 40s and the large be-flower-boxed window is perfect. I am Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michelle is Jean Seberg. There is a plastic pad beneath the sheets. After 3 chaste and chastening days in Germany we are in no way hesitant about inhabiting Parisian tourist cliches and we do it in the afternoon in a cheap, dirty hotel room in France and all the pent up sturm und drang transubstantiates into joie de vivre. Michelle smokes in bed. "International Herald Tribune!"
After a long Metro ride back across the city and a quick perambulation of a random pleasant neighbourhood where every second group of pedestrians seem to be young, scandalously attractive families - on a bogus tip from the inflight magazine (there is, in fact, no large outdoor used book fair in this park today, thanks Easyjet you misleading bright orange vest-wearing motherfuckers) - we head towards the southern half of the historic center of the city. We walk down St. Germain-de-Pres and wander through narrow streets lined with dumb-looking art galleries. I am Jean-Paul Sartre and Michelle is Simone de Beauvoir. Stopping in front of an in-no-way-dumb-looking photograph library, our concentrated inspection is interrupted when a crazed or drunk woman starts loudly singing at the other end of the street. We wish that all crazy or drunk people could sing so well, and so happily, and that their voices always had beautiful old buildings off of which to carom. Actually, it would maybe be a better world if more people broke into song in public whenever they felt like it, regardless of talent or mood or proximity to 19th century architecture. It would definitely make, say, South River more interesting if the woman my parents pass walking her dog down Love Lane (no really, there’s a Love Lane in South River) every Sunday morning replied with a lusty "Brown Sugar" or "Je T’aime...Moi Non Plus" or "C.R.E.A.M" when they asked her innocently how she was. We are actually sort of afraid of the singing woman and hasten to leave her alone with her vaguely threatening melodious contentment.
Breaking our strict NO CHURCHES IN EUROPE policy, we slide quickly in and out of Notre Dame Cathedral. Outside there are two young women wearing long flowing skirts, berets, and flamboyant scarves pushing curvy old bikes with baskets. Are these French women, or Faux French women? Cute women playfully reappropriating stereotypical trappings or My-Senior-Year-Abroad Americans? We are unable to get close enough to their coloured-tighted/be-mary-janed ankles to catch what language they are speaking. For the rest of my stay I am constantly vigilant on the lookout for those who look too "Parisien" to actually be Parisien, and feel like a fool whenever I carry a baguette on the street, suppressing the urge to say "it’s just a cheap snack, I’m not posing, honest" to random passersby.
Retreading my October steps, we skip down the stone stairs and walk along the Seine. It is a little more enjoyable doing this with someone you are in love with than doing it starving, cold, exhausted and alone. I am actually pretty hungry, and a little cold, and still really tired (recall that I have not slept longer than a few hours at a stretch for days) and powerfully hungover (again, recall the airport delerium), but our stroll is maybe the highlight of the trip. We talk about our feelings. For a long time. My feelings are in Hangoverdrive®, and that makes me a fractured, dangerously sentimental mess of human emotion. There are many honest but retrospectively embarrassing confessions of Really Serious Love. We walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower, stopping long enough for me to drink sweet and sour sauce thinking it’s some exotic gingery syrup at a little pan-Asian diner. In my defense it comes to the table in a recycled Snapple bottle. The shockingly pretty 14 year old Chinese waitress laughs openly, mocking me again for the way I pronounce "toilette?"
Seizing the opportunity at the Tower to breeze through the maze of waiting line rails unchecked by mobs of tourists or souvenir hustlers or pickpockets or anyone at all, really, we splurge on elevator tickets to the top floor. The attendants – and there are dozens of them, presumably to accommodate the hordes that would be around if it weren’t 9:30pm on a Sunday in mid-January - look bored. They probably speak five or six languages and hold advanced degrees in art history from the Sorbonne and just got kicked out of their apartments by angry rising-star-fashion-designer lovers 18 months earlier and never recovered from what they thought would be a temporary breakup bender and are now stuck in deadend Eiffel Tower attendant jobs, their will to succeed crushed by broken French hearts and exposure to the likes of us all day every day for six euros an hour.
The thing about the Eiffel Tower is that it doesn’t look imposing or even all that impressive from the middle distance or underneath, but from the top it is the Tallest Building in the World because the rest of Paris is so lowrise. When we reach the summit and step outside I am completely terrified. Michelle thinks this is funny. A latemiddleaged man has his much younger, pneumatically enhanced female companion remove her jacket (it’s January! And she’s hundreds of feet in the air and it’s cold, you creep!) and pose seductively so that he can snap photographs of her. I have to walk diagonally toward the sturdy-but-not-sturdy-enough grill that it is the only thing between me and l’oblivion, eventually making it to the edge after a few concentric trips around the circumference. Do I have vertigo or is the tower wavering in the wind? Paris is large and probably even nicer to look at when it isn’t shrouded in a wintry mist.
We descend and cross the river and notice the enormous ad for the city’s Olympic bid splashed across the Tower. I show Michelle the bench on which I came a hair’s breadth from dying of hypothermia just three months earlier. We take the Metro back to the Hotel d’Avenir and do it again. Feelings!
Escaping Orly isn’t too difficult or expensive, and the bus ride is pleasant because it’s so sunny and even the outskirts of Paris look, well, Parisian. Boarding the metro we both thrill to the cosmopolitan ethnic diversity which was so visibly absent in the East, even in Berlin. There is a young African-French family next to us and the kids are grinning and laughing and asking their gregarious mother curious questions. I briefly consider stealing one as we step off the train to change lines.
The biggest indulgence of our whole trip is the hotel in Montmartre that we’ve booked. The tiny, slightly decrepit room with the bathroom from the 40s and the large be-flower-boxed window is perfect. I am Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michelle is Jean Seberg. There is a plastic pad beneath the sheets. After 3 chaste and chastening days in Germany we are in no way hesitant about inhabiting Parisian tourist cliches and we do it in the afternoon in a cheap, dirty hotel room in France and all the pent up sturm und drang transubstantiates into joie de vivre. Michelle smokes in bed. "International Herald Tribune!"
After a long Metro ride back across the city and a quick perambulation of a random pleasant neighbourhood where every second group of pedestrians seem to be young, scandalously attractive families - on a bogus tip from the inflight magazine (there is, in fact, no large outdoor used book fair in this park today, thanks Easyjet you misleading bright orange vest-wearing motherfuckers) - we head towards the southern half of the historic center of the city. We walk down St. Germain-de-Pres and wander through narrow streets lined with dumb-looking art galleries. I am Jean-Paul Sartre and Michelle is Simone de Beauvoir. Stopping in front of an in-no-way-dumb-looking photograph library, our concentrated inspection is interrupted when a crazed or drunk woman starts loudly singing at the other end of the street. We wish that all crazy or drunk people could sing so well, and so happily, and that their voices always had beautiful old buildings off of which to carom. Actually, it would maybe be a better world if more people broke into song in public whenever they felt like it, regardless of talent or mood or proximity to 19th century architecture. It would definitely make, say, South River more interesting if the woman my parents pass walking her dog down Love Lane (no really, there’s a Love Lane in South River) every Sunday morning replied with a lusty "Brown Sugar" or "Je T’aime...Moi Non Plus" or "C.R.E.A.M" when they asked her innocently how she was. We are actually sort of afraid of the singing woman and hasten to leave her alone with her vaguely threatening melodious contentment.
Breaking our strict NO CHURCHES IN EUROPE policy, we slide quickly in and out of Notre Dame Cathedral. Outside there are two young women wearing long flowing skirts, berets, and flamboyant scarves pushing curvy old bikes with baskets. Are these French women, or Faux French women? Cute women playfully reappropriating stereotypical trappings or My-Senior-Year-Abroad Americans? We are unable to get close enough to their coloured-tighted/be-mary-janed ankles to catch what language they are speaking. For the rest of my stay I am constantly vigilant on the lookout for those who look too "Parisien" to actually be Parisien, and feel like a fool whenever I carry a baguette on the street, suppressing the urge to say "it’s just a cheap snack, I’m not posing, honest" to random passersby.
Retreading my October steps, we skip down the stone stairs and walk along the Seine. It is a little more enjoyable doing this with someone you are in love with than doing it starving, cold, exhausted and alone. I am actually pretty hungry, and a little cold, and still really tired (recall that I have not slept longer than a few hours at a stretch for days) and powerfully hungover (again, recall the airport delerium), but our stroll is maybe the highlight of the trip. We talk about our feelings. For a long time. My feelings are in Hangoverdrive®, and that makes me a fractured, dangerously sentimental mess of human emotion. There are many honest but retrospectively embarrassing confessions of Really Serious Love. We walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower, stopping long enough for me to drink sweet and sour sauce thinking it’s some exotic gingery syrup at a little pan-Asian diner. In my defense it comes to the table in a recycled Snapple bottle. The shockingly pretty 14 year old Chinese waitress laughs openly, mocking me again for the way I pronounce "toilette?"
Seizing the opportunity at the Tower to breeze through the maze of waiting line rails unchecked by mobs of tourists or souvenir hustlers or pickpockets or anyone at all, really, we splurge on elevator tickets to the top floor. The attendants – and there are dozens of them, presumably to accommodate the hordes that would be around if it weren’t 9:30pm on a Sunday in mid-January - look bored. They probably speak five or six languages and hold advanced degrees in art history from the Sorbonne and just got kicked out of their apartments by angry rising-star-fashion-designer lovers 18 months earlier and never recovered from what they thought would be a temporary breakup bender and are now stuck in deadend Eiffel Tower attendant jobs, their will to succeed crushed by broken French hearts and exposure to the likes of us all day every day for six euros an hour.
The thing about the Eiffel Tower is that it doesn’t look imposing or even all that impressive from the middle distance or underneath, but from the top it is the Tallest Building in the World because the rest of Paris is so lowrise. When we reach the summit and step outside I am completely terrified. Michelle thinks this is funny. A latemiddleaged man has his much younger, pneumatically enhanced female companion remove her jacket (it’s January! And she’s hundreds of feet in the air and it’s cold, you creep!) and pose seductively so that he can snap photographs of her. I have to walk diagonally toward the sturdy-but-not-sturdy-enough grill that it is the only thing between me and l’oblivion, eventually making it to the edge after a few concentric trips around the circumference. Do I have vertigo or is the tower wavering in the wind? Paris is large and probably even nicer to look at when it isn’t shrouded in a wintry mist.
We descend and cross the river and notice the enormous ad for the city’s Olympic bid splashed across the Tower. I show Michelle the bench on which I came a hair’s breadth from dying of hypothermia just three months earlier. We take the Metro back to the Hotel d’Avenir and do it again. Feelings!
posted by Stephen at 5:27 PM
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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Monday, February 14, 2005
Skeet with frament of wall, note juxtaposition of inviting orange glow with pyhsical manifestation of totalitarianism.
posted by Stephen at 4:42 PM
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Stephen with beer and gaping chasm where once there was an iron curtain.
posted by Stephen at 4:40 PM
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Kreuzberg bound, II.
After more hard riding and other park breaks, we meet Michelle at the Sony Center in the heart of the gleaming high-rise district in downtown West Berlin. We watch her smoke and stare at a huge video screen outside the Film Museum showing sweeping natural landscapes. There is loud accompanying new age music. We go for gourmet ice cream at an American style family restaurant on the groundfloor of a nearby building and tell each other about our days. Michelle has spent the afternoon wandering from bookstore to record shop to scrubby art gallery in the intriguing recesses of Kreuzberg. She mentions that she has been having intense stare-downs with people on the street, and expresses mild discomfort at the unabashed, unwaveringly judgemental cruising eye that Berlin’s passers-by seem to cast on one another. It’s true, it seems as if people don’t ferret their glances away from one another here as quickly as they do in my corners of Canada or Hungary. Are these Germans imposingly forthright, or are we shifty? Both, according to history.
We introduce Stuart to Thai food at a place where garnish is inversely proportional to price – each of our inexpensive pad thai or green curry plates are adorned with ornate carrot-ducks. Stuart likes his Thai food. We retire to his house to meet Caithrina and drink beer and pick a place to dance, choosing a place called 8mm with an interesting sounding rock DJ night. When we get there it is completely packed, as in fight to step inside the doorway packed. Like Elvis Costello said, there’s going to be no dancing. We halfheartedly investigate a few other dank holes in the vicinity and decide that we are tired and that it would be alright to go home early so that we can get going before noon tomorrow. Stuart and I return to the Sony Center where we had locked up our bikes in the afternoon. Be-second-winded, we gear up to do some night riding and picture taking. Early start be damned.
Stu pauses to service his substance abuse needs at a small mandmade pond just becond the glassy towers called Marlene Dietrichplatz. It is quiet and deserted and filled with the now familiar straight lines and concrete boxes. Michelle observed earlier that the city feels more welcoming at night, the orange street light glow softening the stark angularity and unforgiving coldness of the place, and I feel the invitation while skipping along the ledges and wide concrete tiles. It’s also unseasonably warm. We saddle up and ride toward the river and follow it towards Kreuzberg, stopping along the way at a small park to play on a huge piece of factory machinery enjoying an afterlife as a graffitied readymade sculpture. Stuart sits on top of the thing and smokes. We pause under an S-Bahn track and eat currywurst from a sausage stand. Kreuzberg isn’t as lively as I hoped it would be at 4am, but we walk around drinking beer and peer into bookshop and record store windows. Spent, we load the bikes onto an U-Bahn car and Stuart poses while I take a thousand close-up digiphotos of his fake-sleeping face.
In the morning we are hungover and sleepdeprived. Undeterred, we grope towards consciousness and Michelle gives me a haircut over coffee. It’s sunny out, and we take another group bike ride. Michelle is chafing at adhering to a schedule not completely of her own devising, so she rides way out ahead of us in Stuart’s favorite park by way of protest. We take a shortcut and head her off when she follows the wide pleasant loop of the path. There is mild admonishment. We had hoped to get to the Reichstag to climb the winding staircase inside the big glass dome, but the lineup outside looks hours long, so we just pedal around the Brandenberger Gate and rub our hungover and sleep deprived nerves against each other. Stuart swings by a bench we had occupied the afternoon previous and finds the half of a joint that he had discarded midsmoke when a happy Turkish family had passed. He is pleased, and smokes the rest of it. It is Michelle’s turn to be wryly bemused.
We visit the Berlin Film Museum and see way more of Marlene Dietrich’s makeup trinkets than we ever could have dreamed of wanting to see. Despite the potent wind, we plan a barbeque for dinner and fetch some little bratwursts and fish steaks, stopping on the way to creep around a preserved section of the Wall. Back at the apartment there is a brief but embarrassing gendered division of labour when Michelle chops vegetables indoors with Caithrina while Stuart and I drink beer and light the coals. Sparks trace amber rays across the courtyard. Her schedule characteristically full, Caithrina has to run off to a function, leaving the three of us to enjoy the barbequed peppers and onions that she has seasoned and wrapped. On the way to a second attempt at 8mm we run into Geoff, a classmate of mine from Montreal, on the street. It is bizarre, but not completely unexpected, as I had just discovered that he was back in Berlin after some travelling. We have a beer in one of the many decent little dives along this strip of Stu’s Mitte neighbourhood and he spins a quick sturdy web of insider knowledge about the city and its goings-on. Previously committed, he leaves us and our three-person band makes it, at long last, to 8mm, which isn’t nearly as packed as the evening before or interesting enough to justify the dogged way I was promoting it as a destination. The music is good and they are projecting austere, grainy, early 80s new wave band rehearsal and performance footage on a concrete wall. Finding our milieu is, as usual, more than a little sad and we slump in a couch heap and quip exhaustedly to one another about our creeping disaffection.
Stuart wants me to accompany him to work (he has to be there at 5am), but Michelle plays the voice of reason and wisely persuades me not to risk getting lost in the suburbs of Berlin when we have a plane to catch at 9:30. Instead Stu and I sit on a bench across the street from his apartment drinking beer and quietly enjoy the last hour or so of our visit together. Stuart says he’ll make it to Hungary and I believe him. I manage a few hours of sleep before getting shaken awake by Michelle, who is industriously packing avocado sandwiches for our trip to Paris. Caithrina has offered to guide us through the handful of train transfers to the airport, and she adds good natured ribbing when I complain about being disoriented and exhausted: "were you thinking that you would be refreshed and ready to travel by staying up all night drinking for the third night in a row?" Touché, or more accurately, as they say in German, schadenfreude. I am still hungover, which means I am ruthlessly emotional, and I choke up when I say goodbye to the woman who I’ve probably only spent about 4 waking hours with in the last 3 days. Sitting in the airport cafe I make sure that I have remembered the burned CD of pictures that Stuart prepared for me before leaving for work, and wonder how he could possibly be wielding cleaning machines effectively if I can barely make my shaking hands open this sandwich bag.
We introduce Stuart to Thai food at a place where garnish is inversely proportional to price – each of our inexpensive pad thai or green curry plates are adorned with ornate carrot-ducks. Stuart likes his Thai food. We retire to his house to meet Caithrina and drink beer and pick a place to dance, choosing a place called 8mm with an interesting sounding rock DJ night. When we get there it is completely packed, as in fight to step inside the doorway packed. Like Elvis Costello said, there’s going to be no dancing. We halfheartedly investigate a few other dank holes in the vicinity and decide that we are tired and that it would be alright to go home early so that we can get going before noon tomorrow. Stuart and I return to the Sony Center where we had locked up our bikes in the afternoon. Be-second-winded, we gear up to do some night riding and picture taking. Early start be damned.
Stu pauses to service his substance abuse needs at a small mandmade pond just becond the glassy towers called Marlene Dietrichplatz. It is quiet and deserted and filled with the now familiar straight lines and concrete boxes. Michelle observed earlier that the city feels more welcoming at night, the orange street light glow softening the stark angularity and unforgiving coldness of the place, and I feel the invitation while skipping along the ledges and wide concrete tiles. It’s also unseasonably warm. We saddle up and ride toward the river and follow it towards Kreuzberg, stopping along the way at a small park to play on a huge piece of factory machinery enjoying an afterlife as a graffitied readymade sculpture. Stuart sits on top of the thing and smokes. We pause under an S-Bahn track and eat currywurst from a sausage stand. Kreuzberg isn’t as lively as I hoped it would be at 4am, but we walk around drinking beer and peer into bookshop and record store windows. Spent, we load the bikes onto an U-Bahn car and Stuart poses while I take a thousand close-up digiphotos of his fake-sleeping face.
In the morning we are hungover and sleepdeprived. Undeterred, we grope towards consciousness and Michelle gives me a haircut over coffee. It’s sunny out, and we take another group bike ride. Michelle is chafing at adhering to a schedule not completely of her own devising, so she rides way out ahead of us in Stuart’s favorite park by way of protest. We take a shortcut and head her off when she follows the wide pleasant loop of the path. There is mild admonishment. We had hoped to get to the Reichstag to climb the winding staircase inside the big glass dome, but the lineup outside looks hours long, so we just pedal around the Brandenberger Gate and rub our hungover and sleep deprived nerves against each other. Stuart swings by a bench we had occupied the afternoon previous and finds the half of a joint that he had discarded midsmoke when a happy Turkish family had passed. He is pleased, and smokes the rest of it. It is Michelle’s turn to be wryly bemused.
We visit the Berlin Film Museum and see way more of Marlene Dietrich’s makeup trinkets than we ever could have dreamed of wanting to see. Despite the potent wind, we plan a barbeque for dinner and fetch some little bratwursts and fish steaks, stopping on the way to creep around a preserved section of the Wall. Back at the apartment there is a brief but embarrassing gendered division of labour when Michelle chops vegetables indoors with Caithrina while Stuart and I drink beer and light the coals. Sparks trace amber rays across the courtyard. Her schedule characteristically full, Caithrina has to run off to a function, leaving the three of us to enjoy the barbequed peppers and onions that she has seasoned and wrapped. On the way to a second attempt at 8mm we run into Geoff, a classmate of mine from Montreal, on the street. It is bizarre, but not completely unexpected, as I had just discovered that he was back in Berlin after some travelling. We have a beer in one of the many decent little dives along this strip of Stu’s Mitte neighbourhood and he spins a quick sturdy web of insider knowledge about the city and its goings-on. Previously committed, he leaves us and our three-person band makes it, at long last, to 8mm, which isn’t nearly as packed as the evening before or interesting enough to justify the dogged way I was promoting it as a destination. The music is good and they are projecting austere, grainy, early 80s new wave band rehearsal and performance footage on a concrete wall. Finding our milieu is, as usual, more than a little sad and we slump in a couch heap and quip exhaustedly to one another about our creeping disaffection.
Stuart wants me to accompany him to work (he has to be there at 5am), but Michelle plays the voice of reason and wisely persuades me not to risk getting lost in the suburbs of Berlin when we have a plane to catch at 9:30. Instead Stu and I sit on a bench across the street from his apartment drinking beer and quietly enjoy the last hour or so of our visit together. Stuart says he’ll make it to Hungary and I believe him. I manage a few hours of sleep before getting shaken awake by Michelle, who is industriously packing avocado sandwiches for our trip to Paris. Caithrina has offered to guide us through the handful of train transfers to the airport, and she adds good natured ribbing when I complain about being disoriented and exhausted: "were you thinking that you would be refreshed and ready to travel by staying up all night drinking for the third night in a row?" Touché, or more accurately, as they say in German, schadenfreude. I am still hungover, which means I am ruthlessly emotional, and I choke up when I say goodbye to the woman who I’ve probably only spent about 4 waking hours with in the last 3 days. Sitting in the airport cafe I make sure that I have remembered the burned CD of pictures that Stuart prepared for me before leaving for work, and wonder how he could possibly be wielding cleaning machines effectively if I can barely make my shaking hands open this sandwich bag.
posted by Stephen at 4:18 PM
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