Matt Feldman Photography
Sleek chrome toasters that evoked speeding transcontinental trains. Vacuum cleaners and radios and power tools and water pitchers all so sculpted for speed they practically had wings. Magazine advertisements, brochures and newspaper articles of the day touted the materials of the wondrous and revolutionary future: magnesium alloys!
June 24th had slipped my mind. Across France, towns explode with the sound of music in the streets. And there are few accordions to be found. Last year…
I was due, I suppose. All these miles, all these countries, all these flights to all these airports over all these years and my luggage had always managed to travel with me.
I am selflessly volunteering. It starts with some kind of twitch, I think, and from what I can gather, most of you are afflicted with some form of this thing, too: After going some while without being on a plane across an ocean, without having another stamp in the passport, without the struggle of a strange language in a strange land, without the gastrointestinal chaos that inevitably comes from cuisine found just the other side of one’s sphere of microbial familiarity, the twitch metastasizes.
I ride a school bus every morning now. Again. A big yellow one. With green vinyl seats you peel yourself off of in hot weather. With the fold-out STOP sign. With the flashing lights. With the windows that only slide halfway down, enough to only tease riders about relief from the stifling environs. But my lunch hasn’t been stolen (yet), so things are still good.
Things have been, surprisingly, rather free from catastrophe as of late. But there will be much less to say after this email — I’m packing it in and heading home early. Plans for the Czech Republic and Italy have been abandoned and Poland had to be curtailed.
There are no smiles here. There are no families with strollers and balloons and ice cream for the kids. There is nobody selling ornamental models of monuments. No souvenir key chains or fold-out postcard sets or coffee mugs or t-shirts. There are no smiles here. There is horror. There is anguish. There is silence. And death.
The massive, grey odes to Communist architecture are everywhere. The central train station, dark, depressing and dirty, is gargantuan, like its own underground Gotham City. It’s a labrynth of snack shops, clothing stores, internet cafes. While the blocky buildings give Warsaw a distinct historical style, modernity is moving quickly to catch up.
It was a good introduction. I arrived in Poznan, Poland, by train from Berlin and after a day of travel originating at 3 am in Istanbul, Turkey, I needed food. Polish “milk bars” define no-frills eating, as if your high school cafeteria was redesigned without all that fancy decor.
With apologies to They Might Be Giants, I’ve been spoiled by Morocco. Again. In Istanbul, I was hoping for, and indeed expecting, a city teetering on the edge of two worlds. Straddling Europe and Asia, on the edge of the Middle East (Turkey’s neighbor to the east is Iraq), I expected crazy.
It’s awful. Really. So impossible looking is this, well, thing, that seeing it in person has served to shatter the mythical tales of its triumphant use.The legendary Trojan Horse is probably the most ridiculous looking thing I have ever seen.
I came to Ayvalik, Turkey, for a photo. A photo, more specifically, of the incredible beach with its coloured umbrellas and food and mountainous Greek isles on the horizon. This is the image on the cover of my guidebook, and I’m clearly poaching their idea.
Back in Selcuk, a working-class town devoid of much decoration or fanfare, I await my next bus while taking photos of kids playing in the streets. After a quick meal at a neighborhood eatery, my next stop is Pamukkale.
I am no fan of organized bus tours, led by the half-interested guide,with too-brief stops at too few places. So in the face of a thousand brochures for package tour operators, I set out on my own on regular bus service to Selcuk. Stashing my backpack at the bus depot, I set out to walk the 3 km back to my intended destination: Ephesus.
Geographically speaking, that is. The aquatic edition of Planes, Trains and Automobiles has brought me to the third continent of my trip. From Santorini, Greece, I spent 18 hours sailing eastward to Asia. Well, I’m in Turkey, but technically it’s still Asia.
Santorini was meant to be a one-night stand: a quick reunion with an island I loved my last time in Greece, while en route to the uncharted territory of Crete and Rhodes. My first visit to Santorini sold me on a place with fabulous volcanic beaches (take your pick of red, black or white sand).
Winning the prize for Most Stunningly Modern and Attractive Metro System is Athens, an achievement that would normally be fabulous. Except in Athens, it is a subway system designed to deliver passengers around a disgustingly rancid hellholeish cesspool of a city.
Death was imminent. I was sure of it. It was so humid that the word “air” could be used only sparingly. And it was so hot that there may as well have been an onion on my head and a tomato in my mouth: I was being roasted alive. The thermometer pegged the temperature at 72oC (162oF).
The first bombs fell about 10 pm. Their arrival was no surprise — journalists left the city two days prior. Residents gathered in Cold War-era shelters as the air raid sirens wailed and radio reports warned of the need for gas masks. The state-run television station blinked out. Explosions erupted around the city and the lights went black.
Set on an emerald blue lake, surrounded by the gentle mountains that mark the beginning of the Julian Alps, Bled has been a tourist favourite for decades. About a hundred decades, in fact, as the resort town of 5000 people is celebrating its thousandth year.
My visit to Italy lasts less than five hours. The lines long, the hostels full, the breakfast expensive (but still exquisitely delicious), I’m out of Venice in under 45 minutes, moving eastward again to Trieste, where a bus takes me across the border to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Its beauty is classic.
Welcome to Cannes, where the idle rich luxuriate and vaporize large sums of their money, all in shocking disregard for struggling backpackers. While beach chairs and umbrellas rent for €30 outside the Cannes Inter-Continental (€400 and above per night), the sand on the free slice of beach, with the backpacking, pasta-and-sauce eating, tap-water-drinking proletariat, is every bit as nice.
From Barcelona, Samy and I head to Perpignan, France, to stay with his aunt and their family. It is an exciting three nights of cultural immersion, culminating in the highly enriching experience of an elegant night of fine French cinema at its intellectual best: The Punisher (in French).
In Barcelona, things turned ugly. Well, ugly if you happen to be my liver. My big bottle of Smirnoff Vodka, in my bag since the Moroccan duty-free extravaganza, took one for the team. In a single night. The team, of course, comprising myself and Samy.
Ping… ping… The abstract geometric graphics swirl and twist on the massive overhead screens, as if a deranged architect is directing a computer-generated war between multicoloured polygons. Lights pivot and twirl, hurling coordinated blasts of photons around the basketball arena-sized room.
Morocco has been officially rocked. Aboard the ferry to Spain, I spent my last Dirhams on insanely cheap Smirnoff and candy bars. It was quite a way to go out.
The temperature has risen considerably in the past few days, both across the country as a whole and especially as we have moved northward, leaving us to regret not having taken the time for a trip to Merzouga for a camel trek across the sand dunes of the Sahara.
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