The archived ramblings of my time as a world traveler up to my current life in Washington, D.C.
Exchange with the immigration desk after arriving in Glasgow, Scotland from Germany:
Official: How long will you be staying?
Me: About 10 days.
Official: And what is your next destination?
Me: Ireland.
Official: Yeah. How long will you be staying in the UK, including the Republic of Ireland?
And I thought they'd settled the independence question years ago...
This is Steven, our one-time flatmate in Wellington. This week we traveled to Magdeburg, Germany, to renew our friendship. In Magdeburg we sat up and talked while playing dice at his kitchen table, met his latest collection of wonderful flatmates, made a half-day side trip to Berlin, stayed up far too late generally, and definitely stayed up too late on Saturday, our final night. We accompanied Steven to his friend's birthday party. By the end of the night I was talking with someone who barely knew English (I, of course, know no German). He made statements in his language, I made statements in mine, and we had what I think was a rather lengthy and enjoyable discussion in which neither of us knew what the other was saying.
This German trip has been quite nice - it's always good to have someone to talk to when you are in an unfamiliar town, especially if that someone is also giving you a free place to sleep. We've been quite lucky, especially since two of our stops have been to visit people who we did not know two months ago and who we previously met only for a few days during our travels. Everyone has been very gracious (we're in Munich now, staying in the apartment of a guy we met in Thailand. We knew him for three days before we arrived, and here he handed us the key to his apartment so we could stay even though he isn't in Munich tonight). What goes unsaid, and mostly unthought about, is the fact we are unlikely to see these people again. I hope they take us up on our own offer to house them on any future trips to the States, but the odds are against it. Even an email correspondence might die out over the passage of time.
It's nice to think, however, people are willing to put us up even though this probably will be a momentary blip of acquaintance rather than a lasting friendship.
Hopefully we will be able to reciprocate for some of them. We will have a definite karma debt to repay.
To Giessen, Germany, a small university town just north of Frankfurt. We're staying with a couple we met while sailing in Australia. We met lots of people over the course of the past year from several different countries who offered us a place to stay, but no country's people have come through on those promises quite like the Germans. We have a couple of old flatmates here we planned on visiting, and then we're breaking up the trip here and in Munich, with some travelers met on the hill trek in Thailand.
We're also getting help in Scotland, and should have a lot in Ireland. Unfortunately for Ryan, the rest of our London connections never did materialize.
The first installment of posts that should have already been written over the past month or so:
It's never in any of the guidebooks - where to get a decent, cheap haircut and how to deal with any language or cultural barriers to getting one.
Even in New Zealand, it took a while to find a good place to get my hair cut. In Beijing it wasn't hard to find one - there's one across the street from where we were staying - but it was a bit more difficult to deal with an utter lack of English.
I needed a haircut, so I chanced it. The initial bit was easy - I walked toward the shop and a girl outside said, 'Haircut?' I nod, she leads me inside and through the salon to the back where she proceeds to give me a shampoo and head massage for 25 minutes. It was actually two of what I assume were shampoo cycles, each followed by a massage of the head and neck, then another (conditioner?) cycle, followed by not only another round of massage but also an ear-cleaning. I have never had anyone else's fingers that far into my ears, which was a bit disconcerting. I wasn't sure if this was part of the normal routine, or if she just found my ears particularly offensive.
The whole affair was quite relaxing, other than the ear bit, and then I was led over to a standard hair-cutting chair, where the same girl briefly gave me a shoulder massage.
While sitting there, I was approached by a couple of other girls. The first tried, even though I don't speak Chinese and she didn't speak more than five words of English, to sell me a frequent-user discount card. The second came over, talked for a while, saw my blank look, stopped, then brought over a menu of services. I think she was trying to sell me the optional extras (I made out senior styler), but I couldn't read the menu any more than I understood what she was saying. Thankfully, on the door it read in English 'Haircut 38 yuan' and 38 was the first bit on the list.
The actual stylist had a few phrases of English, enough so we could make ourselves understood when he asked what I wanted and I pointed to my head and made motions for the length. The cut itself turned out well, although after I assumed he was finished he spent another 15 minutes trimming individual hairs he decided weren't sufficiently conforming to the overall effect.
I was slightly distracted as this was going on, since the original washing girl wandered over. I think she was satisfied I couldn't understand what she was saying, so was talking with the stylist about this crazy Westerner. She was certainly amused by my earring, and curious about my eyelashes. Curious enough about the last bit to get me to close my eyes so she could inspect them close up.
The whole thing took more than an hour and a quarter. I ended up with a clean head and a decent haircut.
It all cost me about $5.
Left London today to fly into Germany, where we'll be for the next week and a half.
It's my second time in Germany, although the first time around two years ago was mostly just a brief stop in the middle of a long train ride from Amsterdam to Prague. On that trip Germany seemed like a very foreign destination. Now, after six weeks in Asia and 14 months away from the States, Germany seems like a very easy place to travel. Sure, a lot of things aren't written in English (although quite a bit is). But at least you can figure out a bit of what is going on with German, or at least pretend you can, which is something you can't do with Chinese.
It's one aspect of a larger difference I'm noticing after a few months of solid traveling. On my first trips to Europe, and even when arriving in New Zealand, there was a serious feeling of displacement. Even London, on arrival after a long flight when you have`t been abroad, seems like a very foreign place. When I first got into London the jetlag and culture shock froze my brain; it took at least a day to even recognize the language people were speaking to me was English and I should be able to parse their meaning and perhaps even respond.
I haven't had quite as much of the displacement buzz when we've arrived at our last few destinations - probably not since Bangkok. Switching languages, surroundings and cultures is starting to seem like the ordinary manner of things, rather than a huge abrupt change requiring a serious mental effort to accommodate.
This is a good thing, I suppose, in that it means I've traveled around enough to deal with different environments much faster. But I do miss the feeling of arriving into a complete unknown. Not just the unknown of a place you haven't been, but the unknown of a mental shift and adjustment you haven't made anywhere before. Just landing in London that first time set off a buzz in my brain for a few days, and that's always fun.
One other downside to becoming used to traveling is being totally unprepared for jetlag. Before, jetlag was an excuse to explain the brain's inability to keep up with all the new input. When I arrived in London, since it didn't seem particularly daunting, I also expected my body to adjust as easily as my mind. My body had other ideas.
We left Beijing around 11 a.m. (which meant a 6:30 a.m. wakeup call). It was a 10-hour flight across seven time zones, so we landed around 2 p.m. It was a long period of daylight, and by the time we got to bed, our bodies were at about 4 a.m. although the clocks were at 9 p.m. I figured a sleep would put me right, but all week I felt a wave of fatigue hit in the late afternoon.
Our first full day in London was spent walking leisurely along the south bank of the Thames from Ryan's dorm toward the Tate Modern.
It was just an excuse to have some sort of destination (and it helped that the museum is free). But it ended up being the first day a new installation at the Tate was truly opened to the public: the museum has installed a number of large stainless-steel slides in its huge open turbine room area. The slides are from one to five stories high, and riding is free (although you have to stand in line to get a timed ticket).
Certainly more interactive than the usual art installation, and a slightly incongruous addition to the rooms of paintings, photos and sculptures. But they do have the aesthetic value of a sculpture - the sinewy path of the tubular slides and the visual twists they turn on each other is quite pleasing to the eye. And I'm not much of an art critic anyway. I do know the four-story slide gives you quick ride, a bit of an adrenaline boost and a pleasant rush of feeling. I also know more people were talking, and grinning, about the slides than any other art exhibit or installation I've ever been to.
It reminded me a bit of St. Louis' City Museum, one of the oddest and most-interesting places I've been. That building is crammed full of slides, crawling tunnels and other bits to explore made out of scrap metal and other pieces of what are usually referred to as junk. And it's also a ton of fun.
(Photo is from The Telegraph)
Since leaving Dunedin in mid-July (our last working stop in New Zealand) we've rarely spent more than a couple nights in the same spot. We've been seeing the must-see sights, taking the tours, having cultural experiences, meeting fellow travelers.
We've also been running on overload, both in terms of taking it all in and in terms of always being on the go. It's a little tough to relax, even when you're not doing anything in particular, when you can never unpack and have no real place to base out of for more than a few hours.
China was the exception. My cousin graciously gave us the run of his apartment in Beijing for the duration of our stay, along with its satellite TV and library of books and DVDs. We took full advantage, spending far too much time just sitting in the apartment. We saw plenty of Beijing sights, did the obligatory Beijing shopping, but we also slept in and occasionally wasted time just hanging around a place we didn't have to immediately leave. It was a much-needed respite.
Now we're in London and back on the move. For most of the next six weeks, we're hoping to hop from one friend to another, staying on floors for a few days and moving on before (hopefully) wearing out our welcome. The floor-surfing era has begun here (and we're very grateful to Ryan, who has allowed us to take up pretty much all of the unoccupied space in his dorm room for the next few days). Next Monday, on to Germany to hopefully stay with four or five different people we've met during the past year's travels. Then Scotland, northern England, Ireland and back to London. It'll be good to see all these friends again, and it'll be nice not to have the daily financial drain of always paying for places to sleep. But I don't think we'll really have a chance to relax again until we return to the States in December (and even then we'll be traveling around crashing with people until we sort out how and where to settle).
Last night we met up with some of Kirsten's friends and went out for dinner. My pasta dish was about 8 pounds, which seemed more than reasonable until I realized it was more than we'd paid for any meal combined (including drinks) since leaving Australia.
Sigh.
Skewers of street food, ready for cooking. The scorpions on the center sticks were still moving.
It's the most constant feature of life in Beijing, at least since we've been here (and we have it on good authority it's always like this).
The air is usually a thick, grey soup. Yesterday it was thick enough you could barely make out buildings more than a block or two away. It's been the first thing we do each morning - look out the window to check whether we can see the building across the courtyard. If we can, it's a day worth being outside. If we can't, we go back to bed.
One of the few benefits to the smog are the sunsets. Sometimes the sun turns red around 3 o'clock, making the sunset about four hours long. This would be the place to be for a solar eclipse - by the afternoon, you can stare straight at the sun, no problem.
The official translations of signs here often leave something to be desired. Sometimes they add an entire new level of meaning, as well. With apologies to Stephen's Konglish files, here's a couple of Chinglish examples:
Fun signs seen on a trip to the Great Wall of China:
"Fire is heartless" (but the water, she will love you)
"Don't drive fatigue" (especially if it's hitchhiking)
