Train of Thought

I am unoriginal. I love to travel. Once, for work, I traveled four cities, four countries, in five days. That was one of my favorite weeks, so far.

1.

In Paris, I went to the Banlieux to visit with an arts center, getting lost in a market full of plaster urns and scrap metal. As the evening fell, before meeting a young, ardent, inarticulate poet in a Russian restaurant, for vodka and Blinis, with twinkling fairy lights, I sat in a green courtyard, and had thin slivers of carpaccio, a glass of rose wine, and the doves cooed.

My hotel room had a lopsided sink and cool, stone flooring, the bed was very hard, the sheets stretched tightly, and the window I threw open.

2.

In Belgrade, some men, part of an underground political group, took me to a rally. I walked to our meeting place from the hotel, a humongous concrete structure, full of cigarette smoke and the smell of bland breakfast cheese and cleaning products. The staff were friendly but the windows did not open.

First we stopped in a bullet-riddled apartment building and went up the stairs, smelling of urine, to sit in a kitchen and eat stale birthday cake while waiting for a third man. While we waited the spoke rapidly of politics and money, politics and money. Never about history. I was unsure whether it was taboo, or understood, or whether the past simply was not important: what was important were the very low wages, and the increasingly angry taste in music of the young.

We drove without lights, in dark night, zig-zagging over what might have been a one-lane, or a freeway, and before complete dark fell, I peered out the dusty window at the clapboard, corrugated hovels erected on the roadside, in growth of bare and feeble forest. Of the language at the rally, I didn’t understand a word.

3.

Germany we mostly hurried though, except Hamburg. In Hamburg, the commercial port makes inroads into the city proper. You might see rats from the ships, I believe, on city streets. Old warehouses, in stately brick, stand across the water from super modern apartment buildings, maybe even an Opera, freshly white and lit.

In the old warehouse, a big buffet had been set out, and glasses of champagne, and at my right was an old professor of music, who waved his fork and its dribble of asparagus and sauce, of fish and sauce, of raspberry moussé, like a conductors baton. Across sat a young and collected Italian city planner, full of admiration for the way things were done in Germany, in Sweden, full of scorn for his home town, which I think, if I remember rightly, might have been Bologna.

He kept his elbows, in a pale blue shirt, very close to his sides. Leaving the banquet, walking at a slow pace, feet tired, people sat out under fairy lights, sipping bottled beer.

4.

In Amsterdam, I had the afternoon off and sat, while it rained, in a small bar and ate a hamburger with extra cheese, and read the papers, trying to make out the dutch, and then at night I lay again, with windows thrown open, and great big chess-nuts rustling. Naively, I thought I could make out the sound of bicycle wheels, spinning, and pages of books, being turned, over the traffic and the humming of the mini-fridge.

5.

I am unoriginal. I love trains.

Planes I won’t mention, for obvious reasons. Ferries, if overnight, are just asking for trouble. Being driven, taking a cab, is a perfectly pleasant options given that your driver isn’t sui/homicidal.

On buses, one tries to keep from vomiting. The worst ride I was ever on was the morning after a huge dinner, which my mother treated me to at the tail-end of a particularly bleak summer. In an overladen country eatery, we went trough seven courses, desert wine et al. The next morning at seven, I got in a cheap student seat on a bus, a bus of swirly purple fabric seats, scant air-conditioning and faint respect for g-force curves.

Another bus wound its way up a serpentine road in some southern European country, red clay steep drops into Eucalyptus death. And on a bus outside Madras, though making fast friends with lady and her blushing, flushed, ready to marry son – the sun beating on the roof and the chickens, the goat, the much worn, made a too heady, cineastic cliché of a stew.

But take the train. Take it quickly through France for a weekend hidden away in Nice, 16 and on the lam. Take it, seat turned backward, over the swooping bridges of Denmark. Wait for the whistle in some border town, speed through tunnels, mini-slices of altitude buried deep.

Or wait for it, eating stale sandwiches and watching the clubfoot doves peck their way along dirty tiled floors, or watching the red head-scarves of the carriers bob, or reading desultory, half a page of Vouge and then gossiping, listlessly, after too many nights spent together.