Couldn't sing.

2005-03-30T18:46:00.000+02:00

Honk. Bleat.

2005-03-28T22:04:00.000+02:00

Snowflower.

2005-03-28T22:00:00.000+02:00

The tiny white dots on the forest floor are flowers.

Vernal.

2005-03-23T16:48:00.000+01:00

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.

Sziasztok.

2005-03-16T12:50:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-03-16T12:45:00.000+01:00

Adieu.

2005-03-16T12:44:00.000+01:00

Adieu.

Patriotism.

2005-03-16T12:33:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-02-23T17:45:00.000+01:00

Interior, Hotel d'Avenir. Bathroom of our hearts visible in bottom left of mirror of our hearts.

2005-02-23T17:43:00.000+01:00

Sometimes fear looks like joy.

Ma belle.

2005-02-23T17:27:00.000+01:00

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!

2005-02-15T13:27:00.000+01:00

Ride.

2005-02-14T16:52:00.000+01:00

Station.

2005-02-14T16:50:00.000+01:00

The elusive Garnish Duck.

2005-02-14T16:49:00.000+01:00

Reunion, by Sony.

2005-02-14T16:47:00.000+01:00

Romantic tableau.

2005-02-14T16:46:00.000+01:00

Marlene Dietrich?

2005-02-14T16:44:00.000+01:00

Stuart looms.

2005-02-14T16:43:00.000+01:00

Stu-Bahn.

2005-02-14T16:42:00.000+01:00

Skeet with frament of wall, note juxtaposition of inviting orange glow with pyhsical manifestation of totalitarianism.

2005-02-14T16:40:00.000+01:00

Stephen with beer and gaping chasm where once there was an iron curtain.

Kreuzberg bound, II.

2005-02-14T16:18:00.000+01:00

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.

2005-02-09T16:55:00.000+01:00

Stuart, bleak.

2005-02-09T16:53:00.000+01:00

Monumental architecture with friends, featuring pelvic thrust.

Kreuzberg bound, I.

2005-02-09T15:55:00.000+01:00

After the loud, cold, sad and shoddy train from Hungary, our ride to Berlin seems to be on a soft cushion of silent air. A second class berth on a German train is like flying on a discount airline, except with a closer view of the patchwork of fields and ribbons of rivers – there’s even a snack cart attended by a chipper stewart. Again we have a compartment to ourselves, so we watch the Czech Republic turn into Moravia and read and take short naps, scattering our things everywhere and stretching languidly like pampered kittens. Are we kidding ourselves, or can we actually see Germany materialize in the form of larger, shinier cars and neater lawns as we whizz by? My nominally anti-capitalist brain suppresses the extremely white-liberal-guilty pleasure of returning to the Great Big W-West. Of course, we are still, for the moment, on turf once protected by the Warsaw Pact, and it is most likely that my penchant for sociohistorical melodrama is creating vivid sleep-deprived tourist fantasies.

When we reach the Ostbanhof the difference is very real. Unlike the other two drafty, dirty, shady-feeling big city train stations we’ve passed through, the building we disembark towards in Berlin feels like a commercial airport. The toilet costs 50 euros. Ouch. Michelle has a coffee while I wander around looking for Stuart, my old friend from Conception Bay who, with his wife, will be hosting us. I try to look conspicuous. Before long I hear the unmistakable sound of Stu’s voice over the station’s crisp PA:

"Steve Guy to the information desk. Steve Guy to information."

I grin. It takes a few moments longer to find the desk, and the message gets repeated several times in a clipped German accent by a woman who is not Stuart. The desk, surprise, is in the exact middle of the station, and Stuart is standing in front of it with his typical loose composure, wild curls buzzed short. We shake hands excitedly.

"Did you hear me on the PA?"

"I definitely heard you on the PA, did they not speak English?"

"No, there was just this old man there and he told me to make the announcement myself. Then this younger girl came who spoke English."

"Yes, I heard her, too." We walk toward the coffee shop where Michelle is waiting. She and Stuart are introduced and he guides us to the S-Bahn train which is waiting in the station. Stu explains that he has come straight from work (he is a caretaker at a hotel – he shows us his working-man’s calloused hands and we are impressed) and that he asked information if their was a train from Prague arriving at 2:30. The rail desk worker said that there was no such train and Stu was confused (recall that we were a day late and that our arrangements seem to always be seat-of-the-unwashed-pants). After a few minutes of mild mutual hectoring the clerk finally exclaimed "oooooooooooooh, you mean the train from Prague at 2:21." Welcome to Germany, Stu says.

We switch to the U-Bahn and Stuart is stoked that we get to ride in one of the new trains. He insists that we stand in the middle at the back of the last car and face forward. The entire train is connected and open, and as we zip underneath Berlin we watch the train slither around corners as if we were standing inside the tail of a huge fluorescently-lit snake. I cannot possibly think of a better introduction to Stu’s personality for Michelle than this, and I share in the wonder at technology and movement and everyday miracles that he has always made me stop and appreciate. I am moved by the goofy charm.

Stuart and his wife live right next to a(n?) U-Bahn stop on the formerly East side of Mitte in the center of the city in a restored old building. We have coffee and showers and admire the bed and shelves that Stu built before setting out for Indian food in Prenzlauerberg. Everybody on the street seems to be our age, and there are plenty of people biking happily around, Montreal in spring style. We are pleased with the meal. We head to the grocery store to buy food and meet up with Caithrina at the apartment. We peruse photos of their Atlantic Canadian honeymoon and go out to a funny place called Scotch and Sofa where we talk about Native Americans. There is a table full of American expats sitting behind us and I hear them talking about On the Road. The guy at the table says "you know, I read like the first hundred pages or so, but I couldn’t get into it...there were too many symbols or something, you know, it was too surreal." One of the girls at the table says "uh...symbols? It’s actually pretty straightforward." He replies, "I dunno, man, I didn’t think so." Right. Tad here has obviously not read the book, but is desperately trying to hide that from the chatty brunette with the expensive looking dreadlocks.

After some posing in front of monumental architecture, we walk back to get some sleep. Michelle and I share a large comfortable queen sized air mattress on the floor. Caithrina slips out in morning long before the rest of us to make her early class. We rise and have a pleasant, leisurely breakfast and Michelle decides to go exploring on her own while Stuart and I do some adventuring, bay style.

Our first stop is Stu’s friend Benny’s apartment, just a few blocks away. Stu stuffs his bag full of leftover holiday firecrackers for us to set off in a park. I am apprehensive, but prepared to handle a few rounds for his sake. We creep into Benny’s (his graveyard-shift girlfriend is sleeping) and he offers us glasses of soda. Benny is a tall, thin German guy in a baseball cap who looks like my childhood neighbour David Mercer (who once rewarded his brother and me for finding his wallet while snooping around the remains of a party he’d held with $5, which bought my silence but not his brother's). He doesn’t speak much english, but he does complain about being bored on his day off. I am suspicious of boredom and the people who say they are bored – I think there is always a way to entertain/edify yourself in almost any situation, and if you admit defeat by declaring yourself bored you are doomed to remain so. Stu and Benny worked together until recently, and their friendship – largely workplace related – has been sliding towards obsolesence since the employment split.

We sit around a glass-topped coffe table. The apartment is big and bright and, on the top floor of a gleaming new building, it has the feel of a dentist’s waiting room. There isn’t enough furniture, the art is awful, and everything is way too clean. Stuart produces a large joint and, in spite of all better judgement, I smoke dope with him and Benny, who suggests that we try out Grand Theft Auto on his large flatscreen TV. At first I think I’m going to be fine, that I won’t mind spending a few stoned minutes watching Stuart pilot a small man in a bad blazer around a digitized city stealing sports cars and punching sex workers, but then that familiar creeping anxiety surfaces and I curse my foolish decision: why am I wasting my time in a foreign country sitting in a horrible apartment watching someone play video games? Why isn’t Benny making any eye contact with me? Damn, Stuart’s German is impressive, I wish he’d tell Benny that it was time to split so that we could escape into the fresh air. Why can’t I take my coat off? I can’t take my coat off, that would only encourage him to stay longer. What am I doing with my life? What was that sound? Are they talking about me in German? What are they saying? What was that sound?

And on and on until Stuart lands his stolen helicopter and decides that it’s time to hit the real non-digitized street. I can barely breathe, much less talk, for the paranoia, but in the prison of my mind I am undyingly grateful. It takes me about 15 seconds to shut each door behind me (the spring loaded self-closing variety being a distinct rarity in my European experience), hypermindful of the sleeping girlfriend.

After what feels like 3 hours (but is probably much more like 20 minutes), we bumble out into the light and walk toward some mysterious park where Benny is going to procure more grass for Stuart. It feels like a huge, scary adventure, and I hunch into my jacket and let my eyes dart around the formerly East German street, wary and afraid. In the daylight Berlin seems to be a flat grey, and everyone looks hard and unhappy. We dip into an U-Bahn station and ride for a stop or two when a ticket inspector appears tersely demanding to see our tickets: she is a middle-aged woman in a nondescript parka and she, ahem, freaks me out. My quasi-historical fantasies are further fuelled, and now I really feel like I am a restless youth in Bowie-Reed-Iggy 70s Berlin, desperate to evade the secret police and eventually make it to the West where I can, I don't know, eat Kit Kats or go see Can. Except I am just a stoned tourist and the secret police is somebody’s mom whose only power is to fine me for abusing public transportation. Which I’m not even doing. God damn it, I feel so dangerous.

While Benny goes to the park, Stuart and I stand on a street corner and watch the lights change and talk about the city. I confess that I am terrified of everything around me, but that it’s thrilling and that I’d probably be just as terrified in Eurodisney right now. In fact I would be far more terrified in Eurodisney. Every now and then I think I hear Stuart say something really disparaging about my inability to speak another language, or about the nature of my relationship, or about how I’m taking advantage of him and his wife and imposing myself on their hospitality, but I realize later that I am inventing all of that stuff, and that we’re just shooting the shit about cars and jobs and bands the same as always, only my cripplingly self-conscious joints-mind is making me think that Stuart might have transformed into some cold absurdly forthright condescending adult who is scolding me scolding me scolding me crap what was that sound?

Benny shows up and we head back so that he and Stuart can divvy up their purchases. On the walk we pass a neat looking little co-op trading post run by anarchists who have attached a sign wryly parodying the wall-time division to their door reading "you are now leaving the capitalistic sector." Sadly, the shop is closed, but we stand for a while examining the agitprop and cut-and-paste art and sculpture in their display window. I don’t know if I could handle the piercing stare of German anarchists in my tender frame of mind, so I think maybe it’s for the best.

Stuart tries to figure out the best place for us to light the firecrackers, but Benny warns that it’s illegal to do it after the holiday season and that if we’re caught I could get deported. I tell Stu gently yet firmly that I would really, really appreciate it if we could skip the lighting of the firecrackers. Benny is going to stop by the co-op trading post later anyhow, so he volunteers to bring them as trading supplies and I am relieved times four million. We say goodbye to Benny after a short visit to the apartment of my discontent and light out on bicycle across the city.

We ride past the former East German assembly building (empty and derelict and awaiting demolition) toward the Reichstag and the Brandenberger Gate. Stuart has borrowed a bike for me from his father-in-law and it is in good shape, big and sturdy with a basket. The traffic is a little scary since the only riding I’ve done since September has been around bike paths in Győr, but I manage to keep up with Stu and not get flattened by a speeding Audi. We stop regularly so that he can smoke cigarettes and speak in his ponderous way about a new life in a foreign capital, and the challenges of marriage, and the dull malaise of his temporarily workaday existence (he is working full time to support his wife while she's in school, and when she’s finished their roles will reverse). Our longest break is at a large eerie park by a canal. It is perfectly rectangular and flat, covered in fine brown gravel, and punctuated at regular intervals by leafless black trees and starkly utilitarian metal benches. Recovering from the acute mental paralysis of an hour earlier, I revel in the severity of our surroundings; my expectations of German design are powerfully afirmed and, fueled by my earlier flights of spy-novel fancy, I feel like I’m surrounded by all the malevolent Teutonic ghosts of the 20th Century. It is grey. There is order and modestly restored grandeur, but not many flags. It is moving but very creepy. Unable to contain myself any longer I share these thoughts with Stu, finally shouting "look at how BLEAK this place is! It’s so fucking BLEAK here! The BLEAK, Stuart, the BLEAK!"

Stuart is wryly bemused, as usual.

2005-01-27T16:03:00.000+01:00

Michelle invisible in front of cathedral, Prague Castle. Small pile of orange peels beside me, not pictured.

2005-01-27T16:01:00.000+01:00

Michelle dwarved by statue in front of museum.

2005-01-27T16:00:00.000+01:00

Prague Castle.

Some of our secrets.

2005-01-27T15:49:00.000+01:00

Our accomodation in Prague is an apartment in a freshly renovated building across the street from a dog park. We are on a hill and trams whizz by regularly. After our train ride and crippling breakfast (followed by hours of tired wandering while waiting for the apartment to be ready at 2pm) we have a long, important nap. We wake up and marvel at the cooking implement overload in the straight-from-Ikea kitchen while sipping Becherovka (tasty Czech clove liquor) from ugly martini glasses.

The Prague subway is reliable, fast and pleasant, and like those in Budapest, its access escalators are very long and steep. We ride it sort of drunkenly into what I have taken to calling The Shit in each city, where we wander around the Old Town and opt not to see a puppet version of Don Giovanni at a grossly inflated price. Dinner is pizza in a pleasantly dank basement dive showing car racing on a TV. We try Pilsner Urquell (the original pilsner, brewed in the nearby town of Pilzner; a sad disappointment) and talk about babies and the person one may or may not become after one produces them. While I’m in the bathroom two Spanish tourists try to convince Michelle to abandon me and come dancing with them. She doesn’t.

For breakfast Michelle runs out to a bakery and procures me a pastry consisting of a sausage wrapped in a croissant-like bread substance. No mere pig in a blanket, it is the best thing I have ever eaten in bed. She eats cheese, as is her wont. Eventually we get it as together as we ever can and revisit The Shit in the daylight. A large group of tourists stand around a very ornate clock to watch a small skeleton suddenly animate on the hour and ring a bell. The Kafka "museum" is much as I imagine the man’s life to have been - a short and depressing experience. The Charles Bridge is packed with digicam-toting tourists and it bums us out, but we are touched by the sour teenage punk couple crumpled together at the feet of one of the statues. The hill winding up toward the Castle is steep and we pause near the top for coffee in what most be the Eurotrashiest cafe in the city: the poor waiter is forced to wear a bowtie, and he smokes sullenly while blaring Euro-house and watching a Czech soap opera on a soundless TV. The Castle itself is huge, but governed by a complex and irritating admission policy which makes us pay for stuff we don’t care about seeing, so we just walk around outside. We sit on a bench at the edge of the wide square in front of the palace and eat small oranges. I take hits of Becherovka from the hipflask and Michelle has her picture taken by the big gothic church.

Later we find a street blessed with interesting cafes and restaurants and a crazily overpriced recycled thrift store. Supper is good and cheap, but there is a bald Canadian English teacher sitting two tables away from us talking loudly and simply about the Canadian political system to an attractive, younger Czech woman who I presume is a student he is desperately trying to impress. To calm the surge of loathing we order more drinks and review each other’s meals. Why do I hate the Canadians I encounter in Eastern Europe so much? They are much worse than the snoring Australians, the giggling American teenagers, and the Mediterranean dwellers hiding from the "cold" in unnecessarily warm coats because I am OF THEM and they are pathetic and embarrassing. The great thing about travelling is that you realise just how little your country has contributed to the cultural fabric of the world.

To escape the anti-nationalistic self-hate we creep down the narrow, sparsely populated street to a small cafe for more drinks. The atmosphere is much more congenial and the staff are hilariously relaxed, openly shooting booze with their friends at the bar. Our waiter crouches and rests his chin on our table and intones "tell me all your zeek-rets." My secret is a large glass of your cheapest beer, thanks. Michelle’s is a glass of their cheapest red wine. We like the waiter and decide to tip him extra. We are drunk and tired and in love. It’s been a long day but we’re still amusing each other with what we think are witty asides. Michelle smokes and smokes and smokes.

The next morning we make it all the way to the train station on the north side of town before we realise that we can’t afford the train to Berlin. We have enough to stay the night in a hostel (I get paid the next day), so we do that instead. It’s close to the train station and it comes with an amusing, photocopied guide to the city that would have been helpful a few days earlier, but no matter - a handful of the cafes and restaurants we stumbled across are listed as worth visiting. We decide that we have a sixth sense for awesome, then head back to the strip we had haunted the night before and try another small cafe. The waiter isn’t as friendly, but he is definitely drinking as much or more than our Zeecret Friend. Michelle smokes and smokes and we decide to see the puppet show recommended in the little guide. When we make to the theatre, we discover that the listings had been wrong and there is no convenient performance. I stare sadly at the pictures of the strange and beautiful wooden marionettes outside the box office. There is a funny dog on the street and we follow it for a few blocks.

It starts to rain. Plan B is to go see a movie, but there isn’t anything interesting playing and when we visit a huge, scary mall to try and concede defeat at the hands of The Incredibles we are shocked to learn that Czech multiplex prices are even more expensive than Canadian multiplex prices. Low on cash, morale, and creativity, we try the little photocopied guide again and slink toward a brew pub for traditional Czech food. We share a long, solid wooden table with Russian tourists, Czech designers handing photos of empty rooms around to each other, and a girthy, lonely-seeming old man who chugs full pints of ale. I feel like I’m at a medieval inn alongside fellow travellers with my rich, dark, tasty mug of beer and Zesty Pork Medallions. Surprisingly, traditional Czech fare includes a huge vegetarian platter, and – even more surprisingly – Michelle totally loves her own rich, dark, tasty mug of beer. We decide that we are glad to be stranded in Prague by our own (full disclosure: MY own) lack of effective budgetting skills. We smile at the old man and he chugs a beer and smiles back.

2005-01-21T16:21:00.000+01:00

Author's face reflected in surface of mortal enemy, New European window. With mineral water.

Slovakian hustle.

2005-01-21T16:15:00.001+01:00

We decide to buy overnight train tickets to Prague, skipping Vienna. We have exhausted the charms of Győr and spent a little too much time in small quiet rooms with each other. It rains. On the way to the train station we argue and Michelle trips and falls in a puddle and rips her stockings.

The tickets are more expensive than we thought they’d be, so we ration florints and buy water and oranges. While Michelle goes to find cigarettes I sit reading on a bench next to a morbidly obese Magyar woman who talks on a cell phone. She asks me a question but I use my classic shutdown, "I’msorryIdon’tspeakHungarian" and defensively bury my eyes in my book. For some reason I am nervous about travelling and, less surprisingly, I am worried about money. Morale is low.

I watch a group of Hungarian teenagers track Michelle’s movement across the large, nearly empty station. She grins and brandishes a pack of smokes like a talisman. The large woman says something to her in Magyar when she reaches our bench, and makes the universal extended-fingers-to-mouth "spare a cigarette" motion. Michelle unwraps the celophane and offers a few cylinders from the new, scandalously inexpensive pack. They engage in a brief dialogue – the woman knows a few english phrases. No, not American, Canadian. Oh, a light, of couse. We’re going to Prague. I feel the same grim humiliation that comes over me every time I realise I am making about 4% of the effort I could be to overcome language and interpersonal barriers. I realise for the hundredth time in the past three months that I am often a deeply unfriendly person. I entertain the idea of taking up smoking so that I’ll have an excuse to interact with strangers, then realise that cancer is not worth a handful of superficial connections with people I’ll never see again. They invented books so that people like me wouldn’t have to actually communicate with anyone in person more than absolutely necessary.

We stand to move to the platform and Michelle and the woman smile and cheerily say "bye!" to each other. I stuff an orange wedge into my mouth and grab Michelle’s unwieldly red thriftstore suitcase.

On the platform my mood brightens and our excitement about starting the adventure leg of our holiday overcomes mild perturbance. We have the nonsense conversations of joy that are the especially embarrassing province of wisftul romance:

"Another orange, babies?"

"Yes please, babies of babies."

"We’re in Europe! Zoop!"

"I hate your suitcase."

"It’s Morgan’s suitcase."

"I hate Morgan’s suitcase, babies."

"We’re in Europe! Together!"

"Hooray!"

The train comes and we find an empty second class compartment and get comfortable. The ride is almost six hours, and it is eleven o’clock. I read and Michelle stretches out and quickly goes to sleep. We cross the Slovakian border at Rajka and a large, severe guard woman slides open the door and says "passport" with no enthusiasm or visible emotion. We silently hand her our small blue booklets and she examines them and hands them back. She leaves and bangs the door shut again. There is brief confusion about the possibility of switching trains because of a misleading display at the Győr station, but we wisely stay put and the train rumbles back to life. Michelle goes back to sleep.

As we approach Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, I see the depressing wall of communist-era concrete apartment buildings that Maria had mentioned to me after her visit here in the fall. It is endless, staggering; there are literally kilometres of these things built end to end along the southern outskirts of the city. There are dozens of similar buildings in Győr (and in every other city of any size I’ve visited in Hungary), and Maria lives on the top floor of one. There is no fire escape, but all the windows helpfully open widely – a bedsheet parachute should take care of a ten-storey drop, no? I can’t begin to understand the rationale behind the construction of such eyesores and deathtraps and monuments to conformity of lifestyle. Or maybe I can.

The romance of communism is really gone for me. The hammer and sickle symbolize tyranny and oppression here in the former bloc, and reading Hungarian history and talking with my boss who lived under the system and was forced to learn Russian in grade school has revealed that people view the Soviet regime as the continuation of terror that started with the Nazi occupation in the second world war. It’s one thing to have a popular revolution and demand the adoption of an ideology and quite another to have one imposed on you. Maybe somebody could have mentioned that to Donald Rumsfeld.

The buildings are a really ugly reminder of history. But the rent is probably wicked cheap.

The north side of Bratislava seems pretty nice, with its cascading series of hills, the valleys between which host clusters of small, warm-looking houses. I’ll make a day trip here sometime in the next few months, I decide.

I stretch out and do some sleeping of my own. Second class Hungarian-Slovak-Czech trains are really second class, and our compartment is pretty cold. The big problem is the window, which develops the habit of rattling all the way open every 20 minutes. Named after the first Christian martyr, I methodically rise and force the thing closed each time while Michelle snoozes beneath her long, warm wool coat. I tuck my sweatshirt into my jeans so that the draft doesn’t spook up around my ribs and shoulderblades.

At the Czech border we are literally jostled awake by another guard. This time our passports get a pleasantly ornate blue stamp. After Brno, the second biggest Czech city and another industrial town with a quaint looking downtown, a conductor wakes us up again to punch our tickets. I sleep the rest of the way to Prague, save the moments I am awake tending to the window.

The Prague train station is pretty busy for 5am, and there is a marked increase in the number of young-looking, obviously foreign tourists. They bend beneath their signature huge backbacks, the practical fashion embarassment that I long for more and more with every minute I spend lugging the red leather rectangle that shelters my mate’s undergarments. We have hours to kill until the office opens where we can claim keys to our apartment, so we argue and I buy reconciliatory coffee and stand around waiting for Michelle to come back. A group of short Slovakians try to hustle me for one of the small plastic cups of espresso, but Michelle reappears just in time to save me and we wander out of the train station.

It takes over an hour and a half to locate a breakfast spot, but when we do it is a beautiful, empty little bistro playing Bruce Springsteen. The proprietor is a smiling, round blonde woman who speaks decent english. We order big coffees and breakfast specials. Michelle decides to change dishes mid-order. When our food comes, there are three huge plates of artfully arranged fresh fruit, nutty, oat-filled pancakes, spicy roast potatoes and perfectly cooked fried eggs and omlettes. We decide not to correct the mistake and eat a breakfast and a half each and slide into a contented, sated, sleep-deprived daze.

2005-01-21T16:15:00.000+01:00

Citadel statue. Quadraceps obscured by modesty-flag.

2005-01-21T16:13:00.000+01:00

Buda Castle from Pest. We didn't go there.

2005-01-21T16:12:00.000+01:00

Domestic scene, with falafel and rare Hungarian sunshine.

Sweet strains of.

2005-01-18T16:10:00.000+01:00

The Metro in Budapest might not be further underground than the average subway, but it definitely feels that way when you get dragged up or down on one of its entrance's endless, incredibly steep escalators. Michelle and I take the subway around Budapest many times during the few days we spend there, and every trip on one of these escalators is a brief vertiginous shock. The weirdest part of the ascent isn’t the minute or so of conversational lull or even the unnatural amount of elevation covered in such a brief time, but the inevitable eye contact that gets made with the descenders to the left or the ascenders to the right. Everytime I ride I manage to get caught in a staredown with someone headed in the other direction. We move slowly, quietly, unthinkingly through and past each other’s glare. Then, if I'm headed topside I buy a meat pastry from the distracted woman behind the pastry-chain counter at the top. Michelle buys revolting cheese buns.

Climbing down Gellert Hill - at the citadel of which we sat and marvelled at one of the few statues from the Communist era that haven’t been removed to the Statuegraveyard on the outskirts of town, a naked man with huge (huge!) quadraceps throttling a three-headed snakedragon – Michelle and I argue about our respective roles in an imaginary band that we have just conjured into imaginary rock being. We separate for about 10 minutes in a large park to reflect on the grievance and gender in a general way.

We meet at the entrance to the Gellert Baths, a large, ornate thermal pool complex at the foot of the hill, and head inside. Michelle accidentally takes the paper ticket I need to enter the locker room and I have to ask a lady with too much lipstick on from the front desk to walk me to the opposite end of the building like a naughty schoolboy and have the grim, squat attendant let me in. I am confused and ashamed and there is absolutely no way I’m going to do what most everyone else is doing, which is don the just-genital-covering see-through sheet the place provides as bath apparel. I morph into the Prudish Canadian. I opt for my completely inconspicuous bright red trunks, navigate the labyrinth of locker rooms and massage tables and sauna closets and slink into the pleasantly grimy warm bath with a few dozen rotund, middle-aged Hungarians. I imagine that they are the business elite of Hungary plotting new ways to extort money from the coffers of the nation (my boss has told me stories about crooked dealings here that make Enron or WorldCom look like shoplifting a pack of ProSet ’92s from Shoppers). Following the instructions on the wall, I switch to the slightly cooler pool to my left to prevent contracting the grippe or whatever it is that happens to you if you aren’t careful about regulating your body temperature. There’s nothing like sitting alone in a roomful of naked men speaking a foreign language after failing to gain entrance without the help of a scornful ticketlady to banish swirling thoughts about masculinity and assertiveness.

As if to complete the omnidirectional assault on that afternoon’s self-concept, Michelle announces when we meet in the lobby that there was a snaking passageway to a huge, beautiful co-ed swimming pool from each gendered enclave. She waited for me there, but I didn’t realize I could access it. I feel defeated by the baths. Also nonspecifically rejuvenated and moisturized.

We decide to go see a production of Verdi’s "Macbeth" at the Budapest Opera House. Neither of us have seen a full opera before, let alone in a huge, lavishly decorated edifice like this. We fill the hipflask I have received from Michelle as a Christmas present with kalinka and take our place in seats at the rail on the top floor. There are subtitles in Hungarian, to help us with the translation from Italian, running across a wide LED display above the stage. Lady Macbeth is played by the stereotypical woman of size, and when she races around the stage maniacally in the last act I keep whispering "out damned spot out damned spot" to Michelle until she gives me the "shhh, I know" in response. Later we dance animatedly to the Stooges in a bar full of 17 year olds.

*

All through December Maria and I had been wondering why Hungarian cars seemed to backfire so much, as we were both hearing loud bangs all day, every day. I thought it was just a combination of damp-followed-swiftly-by-dry-cold and tottering old Cold War sedans, and a few had backfired close enough to me while walking the mean streets of Győr to convince me that they were the source of the noise pollution.

I discovered one night, however - the hard, irritating way - that backfiring jalopies were only part of the problem: young toughs threw firecrackers on the sidewalk a few dozen yards behind me while I was walking home with my groceries, giggling at me when I jumped and swore. Said young toughs, along with thousands of their brethren across the continent (or at least the formerly communist part of it, using Stu as corroborating East German evidence) light firecrackers in the days leading up to New Year’s, reaching peak intensity on the 31st.

I don’t know if my nerves have been worsened by the constant threat of yapping dog attacks here (more on this later), or if the relatively new coffee habit or lonely paranoia are to blame, but I developed a simmering detestation of firecrackers and those who would waste money and time throwing them.

The cracking reaches a fever pitch on New Year’s Eve, as Michelle and I prepare a modestly celebratory meal and drink wine and joke about spending the night in Beirut in the 80s. We forget the noise outside and remove one another’s clothes and continue reacquainting ourselves with each other’s bodies. It is good. At about 11:30 the popping takes on a different timbre, and I peer out of the ski-chalet-like windows of my apartment and survey the neighbourhood. Fireworks are beginning to sprout in different locations all over town. At 12, the horizon is packed, in every direction, with blossoms of light. We scamper back and forth between the windows on opposite sides of the building, turning off the bedside lamp for a better view. For over an hour shadows creep across our bodies, and our bare skin is lit green or purple or blue or orange as the good people of Győr wish us a prosperous '05, loudly and and expensively and wonderfully.

All of the horrible firecracker jerks are forgiven.

Three Hungarian concerts.

2004-12-22T15:09:00.000+01:00

First.

"This is Szusana."

I produce my irritating, nervous grin and shake the hand of the Hungarian woman in her late 20s who is sitting next to me in in the back seat of Anita’s tiny Skoda hatchback. We are headed into the center of town for a concert by Edda, who are "the second most popular rock group in Hungary," according to my boss. Anita works with Maria, and we’ve all eaten lunch together a few times a week since my arrival. Szusana is dressed like an extra on Street Legal and she doesn’t speak much english.

We arrive at the venue, a university sports center, and wait in a short line outside. The opening act is soundchecking and we are negotiating stilted conversation. Edda fans range from married couples in their 30s to groups of 14 year old girls wearing too much makeup to dull late-20-somethings in practical coats. We are members of this latter group and I wonder if it’s common to hold one’s present age in contempt at all times, thinking that things were better and that one was sweetly innocent just a few years ago, or that things are going to suddenly get better and that one will acquire wisdom and grace and drive and some kind of still-inspired stability in an illogically continuous pattern of disatisfied longing, or if that’s just me. Incapable of devising a succinct way of explaining this to Szusana I jam my hands into my coat pockets and do the cold-and-bored-of-waiting microdance.

Concert security takes my ticket and makes me throw my empty mineral water bottle away. I buy a big cup of beer and the bartender asks me in fluent english if I am an Edda fan. I tell him that I’m about to find out.

The opening act is a local band called Progress. They are fronted by a woman with bleached blonde hair wearing leather pants and a shirt with a plunging neckline. The guitarist is obviously leading the band, however, with his neck-lock-aided whammy bar and pointlessly large effects rack. He is a walking music store employee stereotype; he’s even wearing a Peavey tshirt over his massive stomach (20 stone easy, I’m serious) and he introduces songs with the kind of leaden 'I let my guitar do the talking but this is my fucking band and I’m obviously not going to let these other fuckers speak so I’m going to feebly attempt banter anyhow' discomfort that transcends the language barrier which defines my daily existence here. Progress play a competent but predictably awful kind of proggy pop metal. When the singer stops wailing to let the rotund axeman jerk off – which is at least twice a song – she grinds her hips and dances up behind him, mugging and air guitaring and generally drawing attention to herself, lest we forget about her breasts.

On air guitaring: dudes are nonironically doing this throughout the audience all night, as an acceptable and common show of rock appreciation.

Edda follow, and judging by the quarter-full stadium, they are well past their best-before date. From the beginning of their first song, almost the entire crowd is holding its hands above its head and clapping to the beat. Or as closely as these Hungarian-pop-metal-fans can approximate 'the beat.' There are two Edda songs: the rollicking, galloping, "Barracuda"-style rave-up with big singalong chorus and wailing guitar solo and then the lumbering, bombastic, lighters-up (literally) ballad. By the middle of the set, the band begins overemploying its favorite audience participation trick, the 'now we’re going to stop playing, but keep singing you’re the stars without you Edda is nothing look we’ll even turn the rock lights onto you look you are the music freedom excitement sing clap yay GUITAR SOLO WOO!' routine. Each song drags past 5 minutes: 2 minutes of actual song, and then 3 more for chorus repetitions and guitar solos.

Two-thirds of the way through the band leaves the stage and it’s drum solo time. When they return, the blocky bald singer is wearing a tight one-piece sleeveless denim jumpsuit.

The most popular merchandise item is a neon yellow Edda-logo bandana, worn on the head, or wrapped around the bicep.

Second.

It takes almost half an hour for the bus to show up. We’ve spent the entire afternoon climbing to the top of the mountain that overlooks the city of Pécs and then the entire evening cooking and eating a big delicious spicey supper and we’re just temporarily out of material for pleasant idle chitchat and the will to fake an interest in one another. We stare at the schedule and quietly make bad jokes when yet another wrong bus rumbles past.

When we reach the small concert hall at the university across town, Kispal És A Borz have already started playing. We push through the dense crowd and I find a concrete wall to lean my fatigued body against. The crowd is drunk and enthusiastic, dancing unselfconsciously and singing along with most of the words. At the back, around us, in the adult section, things are a little more subdued. From there it looks like most of the audience is college-aged, which stands to reason given the venue. I am tired and cranky on a Saturday night. I feel self-conscious about my beard and its betrayal of my two-and-a-half-decades’ worth of rambling.

Kispal are, for lack of a more original description, a college rock band. Their songs are fairly straightforward, structure and instrumentation-wise, but they throw in enough math and dissonance to save themselves from Coldplayhood. They are the Hungarian Bends-era Radiohead. I had heard their latest album from my boss at the office, where he told me that their lyrics are self-consciously poetic and mildly activist. So maybe they’re the Hungarian Weakerthans, if you replace the pedal steel with a buzzing synthesizer and give J. K. Sampson the added credibility of having been jailed for anti-Communist sentiments in the 80s. Maybe life in early Propagandhi was like life in a Soviet-era Magyar jail cell, who knows?

Not the teenaged girl in the anti-fascist shirt singing rapturously along just in front of me. My heart is warmed by the audience’s involvement in the surprisingly listenable performance, and I find the second wind I’ll need to confront nazi creeps in a few hours.

Third.

Torock is across the street from the Győr bus station. I’ve been walking past it for two and a half months, and there’s finally an excuse to visit: a concert by Aurora, Hungary’s D.O.A. First generation punks who were also jailed for anti-Communist lyrics and activities (the boss tells me that the totalitarian government really thought of punk rock as a legitimate threat to order and authority, which seems quaintly inspiring in this, the Good Charlotte era), Aurora are still playing small divey punk bars all over eastern Europe. Torock included.

Three times as big as the metal bar in Pécs (with an identical atmosphere), Toe-Roke (its actual pronunciation, although I still like saying 'To Rock' as if it were the lyric in the Bouznuh song about Pat Palmer) is half-full, on this night, of teenagers and people in their late 30s. Maria and I sit on a heater about 25 feet from the stage and drink beer while she tells me about her South Shore-dwelling (as in Brossard, not Trepassy...that would be SouthERN Shore) ex-boyfriend. The opening act is a high school affair, and they churn out a decent set of NOFX-y skatepunk before being asked to leave the stage by a disgruntled, seemingly random audience member. I am slightly shocked by the near-complete lack of applause for any of the band’s songs. It is the kind of pleasant punk rock jerkitude that reminds me of the time we asked Still Hip With the Kids to play with our band in St. John’s and members were blunty rude after their soundcheck was delayed by hours and ultimately cancelled. ’Wow,’ I thought then as now, 'REAL punks are impolite!'

Aurora play and faithfully reproduce their buzzing two-step pop material. It’s fine, if uninspiring. A small pit accumulates in front of the stage, but nobody seems too excited, the band included. What’s Hungarian for 'washed up'?

We decide to leave early and Maria, whom I have left sitting on the heater so that I can stand and watch, tells me that someone with a huge, gaping bloody hand wound has asked her for cigarettes and finished her beer. The next day her roommate says that she passed Torock an hour after we left and found it surrounded by an ambulance and police cars.

2004-12-21T20:14:00.000+01:00

Have I just danced my ass off with Maria? Si.

2004-12-21T20:12:00.000+01:00

Man for whom I randomly bought a beer (happened to be standing next to me at the bar when I was feeling particularly giving). Could not understand why he was getting the beer, even with translation of "it's from baby Jesus!" by helpful bartender.

2004-12-21T20:10:00.000+01:00

Guy who was taking all of the pictures (found on party promoters' website) with one of the many girls he used the camera as an excuse to get close to.

2004-12-21T20:07:00.000+01:00

Man on left: spoke decent english, condescendingly ended every phrase with "yes baby." Man on right: ate lunch with 2 months ago for work, refused to acknowledge that we had met.

2004-12-21T20:05:00.000+01:00

From right to left: sad and alone, sadder and alone, saddest and alone.

2004-12-21T20:04:00.000+01:00

Waiting for Maria and Dieter to stop being publicly amorous on the other side of the bar so that I can dance my ass off again.

2004-12-20T15:35:00.000+01:00

Stephen with angry children.

2004-12-20T15:34:00.000+01:00

Stephen and landscape architect.

2004-12-20T15:30:00.000+01:00

Stephen and boss.

2004-12-20T15:29:00.000+01:00

Pepsi in large Lego block.

2004-12-20T15:27:00.000+01:00

Stephen with Pepsi Kun, the hamster.

For the first time in my life I have been regularly showering on Sunday mornings.

2004-12-10T14:15:00.000+01:00

Every Sunday I eat a meal with the family who own the house in which I am living. I have a separate apartment on the third floor with a small kitchen and a private bathroom, but we share an entrance, meaning I walk up their stairs on the inside.

At about one there will be a knock on the door and a family member, usually Laszlo the Dad or the son whose name I don’t know, will gesture that it’s time to eat and that I should follow downstairs. If it’s the son, he’ll say "come, eating now," and make a spoon-to-mouth gesture. If I have forgotten to wear the slippers that were here for me when I arrived, he will tap the soles of his sandals to remind me.

The dining room, on the first floor, is filled with a big table and a huge china hutch. Six places are always set, but there is almost always someone missing. I sit at one head of the table, opposite Laszlo the Dad. Mystery Slipper Son sits to my left, Big Frowning Tomás to the right. Hungarian Grandma, who always wears brightly coloured jogging suits, ocasionally with a fruit pattern, sits next to him. Hungarian Mom sits opposite her, next to Laszlo.

We always start with a pleasant chicken noodle and carrot soup. The main course is always some sort of meat (breaded pork chops, breaded turkey breast, some sort of bacon-turkey-pork layered casserole) served with dry white rice and potatoes. Unfortunately, it is not the Hungarian custom to sip a beverage while eating, so you have to pray that your saliva glands are working overtime to accomodate the outrageously high salt and dry meat/rice factors.

I do not make any attempt to talk to the family and they do not make any attempt to talk with me. As far as I can tell, the only one among them who speaks any english is Slipper Son, and he never strikes up a conversation about, say, women’s handball, his favorite sport (according to the previous intern – apparently both of the sons are such big fans that they once travelled with the local women’s handball team to Denmark for an important match). To encourage me to take seconds, family members move the serving bowls and look expectantly in my direction. There is a TV behind me, and most often it plays sports or a Hungarian crime drama.

Last week there were chocolate figurines wrapped in gold foil at each place setting. I picked mine up to examine it closely and Hungarian Mom smiled at me and said ’Nicholash!’ and we laughed quietly at each other.

700 florints worth of booty.

2004-12-07T09:48:00.000+01:00

I proclaim to Maria that I am not feeling very social. She encourages me to take the front seat in Anita’s car to 'warm up' my cool dsinterest in others. We ride downtown in near silence.

Gin Joe’s, like almost every other commercial interior in Győr, is way too bright. David and a short round man in a 'Scotland' sweatshirt are standing near the bar. The short man’s name is Daniel, and he also teaches english at the local college. He advises against the dark Austrian beer on tap, alluding to its swift journey through the digestive system. Maria and I order two large glasses.

Daniel: 'So I was moving to Oman to teach, and I said there’s no way I can go alone, I need someone to take care of me, and they said you can only take this woman with you if she’s your wife, so I married her.' Oh, romance.

The Romer Haz is full and Magic Feet - a very competent Scottish band who blend traditional songs and instruments with, yes, jazz - are playing some engaging weirdness, led by a skronking clarinet. The ingenious design of the place includes a false wall separating the bar from the cinema which can be lifted for performances, doubling the capacity. We sit at the very back. I suffer pangs of Newfoundland nostalgia when the hooting fiddlers play familiar reels. David asks me if I’m okay. Chastising myself for being predictably, transparently sentimental, I fetch another beer and sullenly wipe the foam from my moustache.

Daniel is the only person in the place whooping along with the music. David has cornered Anita. She suggests that we go dancing at Mayo, a tacky-looking castle of a club by the river.

Traversing the nice suspension bridge across the Raba, Daniel asks us if we have scrambled along its girders, insisting that it is a ritual in Győr to climb the thing and blow up a joint at the top. Anita, who rarely drinks and once brought Maria and I to a wholesome Edda concert (the Hungarian Scorpions or Bon Jovi), denies knowledge of any such rite. Dropping behind the group, Daniel reveals to me that he has jumped off the bridge into the river as well. I ask if he wasn’t worried about contracting disease from the sludgy brown water and he replies that you don’t care about nought when yer pissed. Attila, hilariously odd and friendly boyfriend of Annette the Badminton Player, asks if we have visited the rumoured brothel near the club. Oh, many, many times, Daniel replies.

We are outraged but undeterred by the whopping 700ft cover at Mayo. We are the first group on the dancefloor. There is a DJ and a BONGO PLAYER, who does not stop fucking jamming it out all night long. During those long housey tone-fading-from-low-and-blurry-to-crisp-and-full breakdowns he shakes a maraca.

Cold rocking my unimpeachable moves provokes David to quip that I had seen Saturday Night Fever one too many times. I dance up on him.

Daniel refuses to dance and disappears without anyone noticing.

As the floor fills several bald Lords of the Hungarian Dance strut around, trying to attract the attention of the be-high-heel-booted dance ladies. One tries to ridicule-dance me from behind but instead we settle into a weaving rhythm. Wordlessly we bridge the cultural gap, and mutual contempt gives way to a brief moment of dance floor-ruling unity.

"Egy Borsodi Sör. Köszi."

2004-12-03T19:11:00.000+01:00

I bought bottles of Co-Op grocery store brand 'Szent Iztvan' beer for 89 florints (about 60 cents) a pop. The bottles were covered in dust. The checkout lady eyed me warily and I wanted to yell "Iztvan is Stephen in english and that’s my name!" or "I’m cheap, so fucking what?" at her.

Some nights I watch Die Simpson’s on one of the german channels. Yesterday I plowed back huge tomato-on-toast sandwiches and drank vile, vile Szent Iztvan through the John Waters episode. I knocked loudly on the french doors downstairs and I paid rent with three 20,000 florint bills.

Walking from Szechenyi Square to the university bar, Ann the Hungarian Badminton Player talked for over 15 minutes about an upcoming english oral exam, complaining that she was going to find it difficult and stressful to talk for 3 minutes about something. When she asked me why I was being so quiet, I fell to the ground and played dead for a minute or so. Then I stood up, brushed the mud from my beard, and walked in silence with her and Maria to the bar.

At first we thought we were wrong and that there wasn’t, in fact, an International Club meeting. I was relieved, and ready to buy a tall cool disgusting Borsodi and endure a brief dull evening before retiring alone to watch late night CNN. Then we saw a guy slinking back to a table wearing a bold red Canada Cup-logo hockey t-shirt tucked into his jeans. He assisted a tall bottle-blonde in a flashing pink Dolce and Gabana t-shirt out of a mauve pea coat and the senseless rage began boiling in my petty, petty heart. He was Mike From Cal-GARY, he had been here for 6 years, he had a Hungarian wife and a Hungarian child and he could get deals from Hungarian lawyers and doctors and bike mechanics because he had taught them all english and he was really bummed out about not being able to vote in the upcoming Hungarian health-care referendum because he was just a resident, not a citizen. He was so bummed out about not being allowed to vote that he lectured the girl in pink about it while I bought more beer and silently hated him and talked to David, a British english teacher in his 50s who had moved to Győr from Libya and who had met Yasser Arafat in the early 70s while he was a member of a radical leftist group in the UK.

After maybe a few too many ugly brown bottles of the Ox urine they have the balls to call beer around here, I barely restrained the urge to grab Mike by the hair and hold his face close to mine and tell him that he made me ashamed of my country. He bragged about getting paid by the university to come and smoke a couple of beers with us and he left to go mind his poor Hungaro-Canuck spawn and we told him we’d see him in February.

David led us to the Romer Haz, "The Underground," where last night we had seen Ang Lee’s reworking of Rick Moody’s treatise on mid-70s existential malaise, The Ice Storm (the most moving scene in which being the one where the throes-of-adolescence younger brother stares intensly at the inch of flesh visible between the bottom of Christina Ricci’s shirt and the top of her jeans...I saw so much of my own pathetic self in that sad gaze that I wept bitter tears of recognition). The STEREODREAM EXPERIENCE from Budapest were playing. The bass had five strings. David puked all over the image of casual cool he had spent all evening cultivating by proclaiming that the best concert he had ever seen was Pat Metheny in Lisbon. I braced myself for 4 months of eastern european jazz fusion.

When I made to leave, I found Maria standing in the hallway at the center of a circle of Hungarian men with their cell phones hanging out, exchanging phone numbers.

2004-11-29T17:09:00.000+01:00

I turned 25 in a cave in Hungary. It was fucking awesome.

2004-11-29T17:06:00.000+01:00

A huge dripstone column.

2004-11-29T17:04:00.000+01:00

You cannot mistake the childlike wonder on my face.

Not to mention the Dominic Hasek.

2004-11-29T16:36:00.000+01:00

Earlier, inside the metal bar, on the way to the back to hang out with the nice German social workers, an enormous Hungarian man (6’6”, easy) with a long ponytail, dressed in the metal uniform of black hoodie and tight black jeans, overhears us speaking English and blocks my path, drunkenly leaning in close.

"Amerikai?" Typical first question, followed by the typically anxious, emphatic reply.

"Nem, nem, kanadai vagyok. Canadian."

The enormous man’s face brightens. "Ah! Canadian! I love Canada. I love, you have, very good eyes hokey.”

"Hockey, yeah yeah, totally!" I am relieved and enthusiastic.

"I watch Olympics." There is some drunken swaying of to-and-fro. That is, swaying from very very close to my face to just fairly close to my face. "Canada, eyes hokey, gold medal. I watch men’s team and women’s team, both win, very good for Canada."

"Yeah, totally, it was fucking awesome, 2002!" Maria and Dieter are laughing. My neck is craning so that I can make sympathetic eye contact with the Big Friendly Hungarian Hockey Fan Giant.

"Yes, Canada very good....'I-gem, Ka-na-dai'..." He starts singing "Oh Canada." Approximately. "'Ka-na-dai ice hock-ey, truuue patriotic loversh, sing ice hock-ey good,' yes? Sing! Sing!"

We sing a verse together, him improvising on the lyrics. We shake hands and pat each other's shoulders. I am moved by the charming goofiness. It gets better.

"Do you play hockey?" I ask.

"Yes, yes, ice hockey, very good."

"What position do you play?"

"Yes, ice hockey, Canada good." Communication begins suffering a mild, metal-induced breakdown.

"I mean are you a goalie, a defenseman, a forward..."

"NHL, also,very good. My favorite team, Detroit Red Wings." In junior high, when I did things like try-out-for and fail-to-make-even the Amalgamated Academy ice hockey B-team, my favorite NHL club was also the Detroit Red Wings, who were just about to begin their late-90s Stanley Cup dynasty.

"Me too! Steve Yzerman, Niklas Lidstrom!"

"Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan, Brett Hull, very good."

"The best!"

"Yes, the best!" We shake hands and pat shoulders again. There is plenty of dumb grinning from both sides. Intense, thrashy death metal plays in what can only be accurately called the foreground.

"Okay, I gotta go over here now," I say, pointing behind him. "My name is Steve, it’s been really nice talking to you." We shake hands one more time, arms upward, the way you would imagine patrons of a metal bar shaking hands after talking about hockey and posturing in an exaggeratedly masculine fashion.

"I am Tomás. Very good, very good. Cool, man."

We ease past Big Tomás and play some noncompetitive foosball with the friendly Germans. In retrospect, I realize that loudly singing my national anthem in a bar patronized by inebriated skinheads may not have been so wise.

They played "War pigs" on the electronic jukebox.

2004-11-26T16:31:00.000+01:00

"I’m really sorry, nem magyarul, nemdötöm, nem, I don’t know what you’re saying to me. I have no idea what’s happening."

The reply is angry slurred speech in Hungarian, way more incomprehensible to me than usual. There is gesturing, tottering, and a face way too close to mine.

"Listen, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say, I don't speak Magyar, I’m just going to drink this beer while I’m walking home, which will happen as soon as my friends get out here." I shake my large plastic cup of beer to demonstrate amiability and imminent departure. It’s 5am on a Sunday and I’m standing outside of a dank metal bar in Pécs, a large university city in the south of Hungary. Amiability does not, however, seem to be forthcoming.

A short, shaved-bald Hungarian goon has confronted me on the street. His puffy parka is falling off at one shoulder and his boots are puke-spattered. I would be afraid if I weren’t so shocked that I was getting accosted by an eastern european fascist outside of a metal bar where until recently I had been inside having a pleasant if alcohol-clouded conversation with two tall, friendly German social work students.

Suddenly the goon jerks out of his stupor and throws a rigid zeig heil-ing arm into the air. I am not too drunk to be completely horrified.

"Heil Hitler!" the thug gamely shouts in my face. The thin fabric that connects my brain to good sense and reason snaps, finally.

"Did you really just make a Nazi salute at me at 5 in the morning in Hungary?" I shout back, perhaps less gamely. "Did that actually just happen? Are you fucking insane?!? Do you have any conception of how preposterous that is?” The subtlty of my disbelief-as-taunt is lost in the absence of shared language.

In response the guy reaches out and grabs my plastic cup and crushes it, spilling beer all over my mitts and jacket. He is growling at me in Hungarian the whole time. A fresh wave of disbelief breaks across my sodden consciousness. I am all lip.

"What the fuck did you do that for? Why did you pour out my beer? You’re a mannerless fascist asshole!"

At this point the thug’s small blonde girlfriend rushes over and drags him away from me. I stand clutching shards of the cup in my beer-soaked mitt and I stare angrily as the couple move up the narrow street. The girl apologizes to me in english, and admonishes her drunken date loudly in hungarian until they are out of sight. In truth, I should probably be shouting humble thanks to her for saving me from having by ribs cracked by steel-toed foreigner-bashing boots. Instead I rush inside to tell Maria and Dieter – our Belgian host – that I’ve come face-to-uncomfortably-close-face with the least savoury element of New Europe.

When I enter the junk-strewn courtyard my friends are emerging from the staggeringly rank bathrooms (seriously, take the image that "Hungarian-dirt-floor-metal-bar-bathroom" conjours for you and then flush it down the "filthiest toilet in Scotland" in Trainspotting), making romantically-interested eyes at each other. I yell as soon as I recognize them.

"A Nazi just poured out my beer!"

They laugh every time I repeat the ridiculous phrase, which is once every 20 seconds for the entire walk home.

2004-11-26T14:43:00.000+01:00

Pink toilet paper.

2004-11-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

Apparently Logan painted the gender icons on the bathroom doors at the foosball bar.

2004-11-26T14:40:00.000+01:00

Up close the foosball table looked like this.

2004-11-26T14:38:00.000+01:00

Maria (left) played mad foosball with Hungarian strangers.

2004-11-26T14:37:00.000+01:00

Dieter and Jules look at Pécs again.

2004-11-26T14:35:00.000+01:00

The hill above Pécs with Jules from France and Dieter from Belgium.

2004-11-19T10:40:00.000+01:00

The sun sets on suburban Gyõr and my dreams. These vivd colours brought to you by Audi factory emissions and oil-burning central-heating plants.

2004-11-19T10:36:00.000+01:00

The eastern bloc, a-crumbling. Within children learn a history of defeat, and maybe math.

2004-11-19T10:34:00.000+01:00

The library at Pannonhalma near Gyõr. Old nuns like cats.

2004-11-19T10:32:00.000+01:00

Stephen Guy sits at his desk in front of sad, sun-faded, sticky-tacked, torn-from-calendar photos of Fort Amherst and some frosty outport. And Hungarian children's drawings.

Three More Weeks, vol. 3.

2004-11-10T16:21:00.000+01:00

As my bus motors through eastern France on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, I imagine that every green field east of Paris was once a muddy battleground, every village holding its own tale of hidden resistance operatives in barn lofts and root cellars. There are only 3 other people on the bus with me. We sit and watch the Hungarian dub of Gladiator together.

When we reach Strasbourg, on the French-German border, a big class of what appear to be Hungarian high school students climb aboard. They are loud and rowdy and most of them have cell phones. I am reading Hugh McClellan’s Two Solitudes – what I should have been consulting on the way to Montreal with Rudy Regular in June instead of a trashy true-crime-esque retelling of Patti Hearst’s 'kidnapping.' Rudy didn’t ask me about the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Hungarian teenagers that surround me don’t ask about rocky English/French relations in rural Quebec.

I am the only passenger on the bus who gets a passport stamp at the Hungarian border. I have slept through most of Vienna, waking only to see huge factories and industrial warehouses. Vienna looked like a dirtier Lachine to me. Think about it. The stretch of Hungary between the border and Győr is flat and dull, with only a handful of villages peeking above corn and wheat fields - the Saskatchewan, or at least western Manitoba, of Central Europe.

I am nervous for the imminent meeting of my supervisor for the upcoming months. Just before I left I received a testy email from him chastising me for providing scant information about arrival dates and times and such, and that was before I had to delay my trip because of the aforementioned bureaucracy problem. Basically, I have betrayed my sketchiness far earlier in the boss-employee relationship than I usually do (in this case, before the relationship has begun, really). And now I haven’t slept in a bed in a few days and I smell (and look) like I’ve been spending a lot of time on benches of various sizes and descriptions lately. Which, of course, I have.

When we reach Győr (half an hour late...hell, what’s an extra half an hour on top of 4 days?), I limp down the bus steps – literally, because my feet are bruised from having walked nonstop for a full day and swollen from sitting upright for another full day – grab my single suitcase from the hold, and walk gingerly across the street toward a short man in hiking boots shielding his eyes from the sun.

"Are you Stephen, then?"

"Yes." Did that sound like a reluctant whimper?

He shakes my hand and introduces himself as the British intern whose position I will be filling. He gestures at my boss-to-be, who is stooping slightly, pacing in small circles and talking animatedly in Hungarian on a cellphone a few yards away.

We walk to a sizable, sleek, silver egg of a car (a Citroen Picasso, the 21st century european equivalent of a station wagon) and make it to the trunk before my boss finishes his phone call and introduces himself.

"Are these all of your luggages?" he asks, eye-ing my backpack and small suitcase, mildly incredulous.

"Uh, yes. I like to travel light." My retort is so lamely transparent that I think I see it vanish with an emptily flirtatious wink and curtsy into the warm Hungarian air as soon as it escapes my mouth. The British intern and my boss exchange a knowing glance, and I can only imagine that my visible sketchiness and obvious lack of preparation have confirmed their water-cooler speculation that my lousy correspondence and inability to navigate consular affairs signal a deep, abiding absence of capability and shallowness of character.

"That’s okay, we have lots of cheap clothes in Hungary," my boss offers, squinting at me resignedly.

We get in the egg car and leave the bus station. I think I’m going to fall asleep in the backseat, but I don’t.

Three More Weeks, vol. 2 (after Burian, I guess).

2004-10-29T16:02:00.000+02:00

Here’s a punk vagabond cliche, bolstered by the facts: all bus stations look the same. Am I in Truro, or the City of Lights? Truro: city of light underpants.

The Paris international bus station occupies the basement level of a mall on the far side of the irritatingly complex Port de Bagnolet highway interchange, and it looks like a bigger version of every bus station you’ve ever been in: it’s dirty, lit by sad fluorescent lights, and patronised by tired, impulsive failures.

The girl ahead of me in the ticket line has a thick Scottish accent, and she’s wearing a hemp necklace, and she seems to be carrying something about the size and shape of a caribou carcass in her scuffed backback. I overhear her ask about luggage lockers and I make a note. It takes about a phrase and a half of my worthless French to prompt the ticket-lady to speak to me in fluent English while selling me a one-way ticket to Győr.

As I wrestle with the computerized baggage locker payment system, I am told by a hard-luck looking man to try the set of lockers further down because they’re cheaper. I take a few steps and stare at this next LED screen. He waves his hand.

"All the way down. Last one."

He’s right. These lockers are about one-third of the price of the largest group, and they’re hidden in a dark corner at the far end of the station. People like me (the chief patrons of these lockers, I’m assuming) wouldn’t examine all of the units to find the cheapest one. People like me would reward themselves for having found the lockers at all, and would happily pump 5 euros into the fancy automated machine and skip off, self-satisfied, into the Parisien afternoon.

But Mr. Helpful is here, crumpled in an inebriated ball on the concrete floor, aiding the clueless and weary fools like me who are too detached to know what’s best for them. And he’s doing it in at least three different languages. I imagine that the man has been sitting in the bus station for a dozen years, warning people not to make the same mistake that he did in the early 80s, trying to right the wrong of the locker-company and Eurolines Transport who have conspired to bilk their clients out of a few extra pesos. He shows up for work at the same time as the ticket wicketeers and the cleaning staff and the coffee counter ladies. They know his name, and he knows theirs, and they bring him one of those pitiful little plastic cups of dank espresso that passes for coffee in Europe and, once they’ve finished reading the football scores, the morning paper. He even comes to the staff Christmas party, and he mans the picket line every year when they go on strike (an honoured French tradition).

I say "merci" to the man, but he’s already waving another confused looking traveller further down the line of lockers and he doesn’t hear me.

*

I don’t feel paranoid about pickpockets until I see "attention" signs posted near the long Eiffel Tower elevator lines. Defiantly, I choose to expose myself to risk by laying down on one of the many lawns near the base of the Tower to nap. There are small groups of teenagers having small wine-and-baguette picnics all over the place. I assume that these are tourists behaving as they imagine the French would behave, but I will find people having wine picnics all over the city, especially in the evening, and they can’t all be American theatre students. God help France if they are.

Most of the day has been a blur of heavy architecture, narrow streets, and metro transfers. I investigate youth hostels, but they are all booked. There is some all-night outdoor art event happening that I didn’t know anything about and, having assumed my bus ticket to Hungary would cost twice as much as it had (thereby rendering a hostel room cost prohibitive), I didn’t book a room in advance. So it’s back to the original plan: walking around all night, and maybe catching a few hours of sleep in a park or in the bus station. I decide to start at the bus station.

I try lying on the grass along the side of one of the highways near the terminal (parks in Paris are gated and locked at night, and the high fences that surround them have pointy-looking spikes at the top), but it’s cold and uncomfortable and I’m afraid that some small European tick may burrow into my ear and lay strange European eggs. My metro pass is about to expire, and I have something like 12 hours to kill, so I decide to walk back to the Eiffel Tower and the comfortable lawn that I remember so fondly from the afternoon.

Paris is huge. I have slept only a few hours (on the flight), and I’ve spent the entire day walking around. It’s midnight, but I decide to risk permanent fallen arches or mugging or molestation or worse and light out across the city again. When I reach the Seine, I discover thousands of people drinking wine and smoking reefer all over the parks that line the riverbank. The fear of molestation fades and is replaced with the fear of death from hobbling loneliness or, worse, a crippling lack of cultural sensitvity (read: cynicism). The square in front of Notre Dame is packed with people, and there are empty beer cans and broken wine bottles all over the place. There is a large group of people swooning to a guy singing terrible folk-sap in English. The only ’adventurous art’ (from the poster) that I can find is the Harbour-Symphony-esque honking of the tour boats cruising the river.

I walk past the Louvre and make eye contact with a few lonely looking older men and wonder if I am being cruised. I stop every 15 minutes to sit on benches, giving my ailing feet little breaks. There are people everywhere; it must be 3 in the morning.

When I finally make it to the Tower, I am running on fumes and I’m cold, even in my toque and mitts. Realising that any self-respecting grass is wet with dew at this hour, I lie down on a bench on the University side of the river and try to sleep. It doesn’t work. Revellers stream past me on the path the bench faces, and I hear someone ask their friend if I am dead. Touched, I wave at them and they wave back. I stare at the sky and wonder if I have just cheated myself out of some desperately needed help. I consider the possibility that I am about to die from exposure or exhaustion, and I conclude that I’m going to have to walk back across the city to the bus station where it’s warm, and where I won’t seem out of place (or dead) lying in a heap on a bench.

So I start walking again, this time up the Champs Elysses (uphill this time, awesome). The street is crawling with rich French teenagers recently vomitted out of overpriced clubs where they've spent countless hours and many more euros dancing to awful house music, and I crowd with them into a fancy casse-croute and spend like $15 on a sandwich and ’coffee.’ Morale is boosted. Winding through backstreets toward Blvd Haussman a bunch of drunken 17 year old goons ask me for some of my sandwich. I do not offer them any.

By the time I reach the bus station light is creeping into the sky and it’s warm enough to unzip my coat. I do not feel elated - I feel like my feet might need amputating. Too wired to sleep, I plow through the final hundred pages of Don Delillo’s Libra which I've successfully avoided reading for the last three months. It is not relaxing, and neither is passing out on the filty metal bench near the ’Moroccan Bus Lines’ check-in window, an equally formidable task which I also eventually manage.

Three More Weeks, vol. 1 (after Goldstein).

2004-10-20T18:03:00.000+02:00

I’m sitting on the Aerobus and I can’t bear to look out at St. Henri. Not because I’m welling with premature nostalgia, but because I’m stupidly late in leaving for the airport and I’m afraid I might explode with panic if I can really gauge how slowly I’m moving. I cancelled a flight 4 days ago because I was tussling with Magyar bureaucracy, and smart uninformed money would have had me sitting reading in the departure lounge hours before takeoff today, but instead I’m staring at my knees on an airport shuttlebus on the 20 and we’re not moving. At all. And I can’t figure out where to unobtrusively lodge this empty ginger ale can.

*

My hair is slick with sweat and I can’t stop touching it. I’ve trapped myself in the domestic departure wing of Trudeau/Dorval airport and I’m waiting for security to drive me to the international terminal. I can’t stop pacing and muttering to myself. Every now and then my eyes meet those of a retiree on her way back to Red Deer or somewhere after a dull Canadian vacation and I wonder if she can see how desperate I am. It must be obvious; I’m tottering around the waiting area like a diseased Father-to-be.

Suddenly the hall is swarmed by a Japanese tour group lead by a pretty, slim girl about my age who is proudly holding aloft a modified ping pong paddle. She asks me where the bathroom is. I emerge briefly from my cocoon of self-absorbed panic and smile and point to the left and then sink back in, where I am mentally applying for the telemarketing jobs I’ll need to find to pay everyone back.

*

Is this flight attendant transgendered? She offers me red wine. I hold up my plastic airline coffee cup and she fills it to the brim. I interpret this as flirting, because I am sitting in the absolute cheapest seats, and I don’t think I am entitled to complimentary wine, and everyone else gets their wine in much smaller plastic soda cups. The woman to my right was denied a vegetarian meal because of our mutually held humble rank, and if she weren’t engrossed in the remake of The Manchurian Candidate starring Denzel Washington I’m sure she’d be eye-ing and/or begrudging me this treat. I sip the awful red wine and get back to my book.

*

I drag my bags away from the Opera metro stop. It is 7am on a Saturday morning and Paris is sleeping. All of the small shops are shuttered and all of the homeless are carefully covered by their blue sleeping bags. Every sleeping homeless person that I see on the streets of Paris is hiding, head and all, inside a bright blue sleeping bag, and I fantasize that there is a standard noble civic practice of providing bright blue, thermally-lined, water-resistant sleeping bags to the French homeless.

As I drift toward the Arc De Triomphe, people start to come to life and man their impressive scooters. I take a long break in a well-maintained park. Joggers are out in full force, and there are dense clouds of Gallic runners, as in black-fly-in-Central-Newfoundland-dense: I have to leap across their path as if negotiating a busy roundabout (a feat I will decline to attempt in half an hour when I reach the heavily scaffolded Arc). Flimsy 80s-style gym shorts seem to be the only permissable lower-body covering if you’re jogging in a park in Paris. And maybe it’s just me, or maybe just this particular group of hundreds of people, but I think the French run with a really goofy, uncoordinated, graceless sort of gait. Gait seems too generous a term to describe the flailing I witness.

The Champs Elysses is downhill, and I am grateful.

Succumbed.

2004-09-21T20:05:00.000+02:00

Check this space for some writing about my imminent trip to Hungary.