Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the travel category.
From A to B
It is the beginning of the worst season of the year to be in Estonia – which will run from mid-November to about mid-March. The weather is mostly either bad or miserable and the daylight is trickling down to a couple of hours around mid-day, succeeded by grey and pale twilight that succumbs to a complete darkness before most of the people get out of their offices. There will be a few days of nice winter, as there always have been, but overall it has long appeared to me that the price of having to endure all the rest of those 4 months for those brief sunny spots is way too stiff.
Anyhow, I am glad to report that this year I won’t be paying it. On Friday I changed our car back to summer tires and on Saturday morning we packed it to its limit and left Tallinn with Helelyn, Miikael, Chiba and me. Two days of driving has taken us to Brno, CZ and if we put in another 13-hour day of driving we could reach Dubrovnik (which is our final destination) already tomorrow.
However, I have heard nice things about both Bratislava and Zagreb, so it is likely that we will take it easy tomorrow and just try to reach the Croatian coast – which would leave us with another easy day to get to Dubrovnik on Tuesday.
Full circle
This morning I boarded the plane at Tegel, switched flights in rainy Riga and landed in Helsinki around 2pm. Ferry schedules between Helsinki and Tallinn look a lot less busy nowadays than what they used to be, but I suppose I’ll find something around 6pm, and this would bring me back to Tallinn before the nightfall – precisely 8 months after I left on January 14th.
Given that I have long had somewhat irrational but nonetheless rather strong aversion towards most things German, Berlin was a whole lot more pleasant than I expected it to be. It is a very mellow place with friendly and easy-going people who keep their voices down and move around in an organised way. Berlin’s many parks were especially nice with people sitting on lawns, reading books, drinking beer from bottles (after half a year in the US I still need to get over of this not being an offense one can get detained for) and simply having a good time.
Being in Berlin reminded me of one beautiful short story by Nabokov, titled “A Letter That Never Reached Russia”. You can read it in its entirety here (highly recommended, never mind all the typoes), but it is the last melancholic and hauntingly beautiful paragraph that has lingered in my mind for many years now:
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so gernerously surrounds human loneliness.
Good Old World
It is three days shy of exactly five months since I few from London to NY – and it is great to be back in a place where cars are small, Starbucks is considered bad rather than good coffee, people treat you indifferently without trying to fake otherwise, and the word “historic” means at least several centuries.
This morning I had a brief stopover and change of planes in Dublin and then landed in Paris a couple of hours later. I took a metro to St. Michel, valiantly ignored Gilbert Jeune (probably my favourite bookstore in Paris) for the moment, and got myself a small room with a tiny balcony in a hotel right next to College de France along Rue des Écoles. I’ve got quite a few friends in Paris right now so it will probably be some rather busy time for the next couple of days catching up with all of them.
However, I do have one specific memory regarding Paris – from the first time ever I was here, what must now be about 17 years ago. I was in Paris only for one day, from sunrise to midnight, having snuck in without a visa from Netherlands. I ended up walking the whole day. By nightfall I was resting my sore feet somewhere along the Boulevard des Capucines and then suddenly saw an older man with gray hair and in a red sweater sitting in a restaurant across the street. He was alone, reading a book that looked like poetry, and on his table there was a big bowl of mussels and a bottle of champagne in a cooler. That sight really struck me, as on the one hand, drinking champagne alone at night in a restaurant in Paris somehow feels an incredibly lonely thing to do. At the same time this man didn’t look that way at all to me – he was alone, but not lonely. I have had that picture very vividly in my mind and although I don’t have a red sweater (or hair quite as gray yet), I DO have a nice book of Lorca in my bag and it somehow feels just right to put it in my pocket, walk over to the Boulevard des Capucines, find a table and order a bottle of prosecco for the night.
Sad to go
Time moves fast in the Aloha State and my six days in Hawaii are over all too soon and tomorrow morning I will fly on to Los Angeles. More than any other place this year I am actually sad to leave Hawaii – I guess this only means that I have to come back one day.
This weekend there was a big celebration of 30th Pan-Pacific Festival, and although there were indeed also some performers from Mexico and Guatemala, it was in all honesty a full-blown Japanese matsuri. On Friday night, the main drag was closed to traffic and there was a taiko (Japanese drumming) group every hundred meters. The whole town was full of old Japanese ladies in kimonos and young Japanese women with small black Chanel paper bags, you can hear Japanese spoken everywhere and in Waikiki most of places seem to accept yens alongside of dollars – in many ways it really does look more like Japan than America. This also had me reconsider what I knew about Pearl Harbour – I now have a feeling that there was quite a bit more behind that attack than simply trying to deter the US Naval Forces interfering with Japanese conquest of Indonesia and Malay. Even though Hawaii has been a US State since 1959, japanese seem to still consider it very much their home turf. So in that sense, having their own country apparently never was an option for hawaiians – it was probably simply a choice between being Japanese or American colony.
The surfing was great fun and apart from one day for my knees to recover a bit I’ve been in waves every morning for several hours. Although pretty tough physically, it was quite a bit easier than I initially thought to get up and riding. However, riding well is another matter. Yesterday I finally caught a wave pure for the first time and it was truly great sensation – if you manage to get on the wave right at the moment when it breaks it almost feels as if somebody is throwing you down and forward.
But just a while later I got taught some respect when I was a little late in my paddling and couldn’t get the board straight, but instead of giving the wave up still decided to try and force my way into it. Before I could realise what just happened I was hurled underwater, a gallon of saltwater being injected through my nostrils down my throat, with my board flying somewhere high above the wave and pulling my right leg on a leash. Six hours later, walking on a street, I was still coughing up salty water. And this was a baby wave, maybe about 1.2-1.5m high. If you want to get an idea of the punishment that people take on REAL waves then check out the clip below:
I will probably stay in LA until the end of the week. This means skipping Las Vegas for this time and going straight back to the East Coast by the weekend – where I will then spend the next six weeks in Cornell Summer School.
Aloha!
Although I have consistently had to show my ID over the last few months when ordering a glass of wine in America there is no escaping from the fact that I am no longer young – this is also reflected in surprised faces and apologies of the waitstaff once they check my birth date. This also means that, little by little and on purely realistic grounds, I too have started to cross out items from my imaginary things-still-to-do-list. While some things are still hanging on there – I might yet go and skydive one fine day! – others are becoming less and less likely. For example, I am now reasonably certain that I will never climb Mt. Everest nor will I become a famous DJ.
There was once a movie, called Point Break, where young Patrick Swayze was robbing banks whenever he was not surfing the waves, and even younger Keanu Reeves was trying to catch him. I remember watching it back in university days and thinking that this is way cool and that one day I will have to check this surfing thing out myself. With each additional year lived and pound gained, the mental image of me running into the booming surf somewhere in Pacific with a trusty board under my arm was becoming ever more pathetic and silly, and I suppose that by the beginning of this year I had pretty much put it off.
But who knows! Eating less and exercising more can clearly do wonders and I am now in a shape that I honestly never hoped to see any more when looking into mirror. And as I have about 10 days before I have to be in LA, I decided to fly there with a brief change of planes in Honolulu, and to be on a safe side I planned a layover of 6 days. So there – while waiting for my connecting flight I might take a few surf lessons in Waikiki.
Of course, my prior experiences with snowboard and windsurfing have taught me to manage my expectations on how fast I will be ripping those waves at Hawaii beaches – in all likelihood this all will end simply with a bruised ego and few swallowed gallons of saltwater as a price for finally shakily riding one shallow wave to the shore. But I don’t count on getting many more chances to try this while making only a marginal fool of myself – so here I come, Hawaii!
And sunscreen, of course, is for wimps!
Californication
Today when I was sitting on a bench in Stanford campus, a girl with some seriously messy hair and a look on her face as if he had just been abducted by aliens walks up to me, apologizes profusedly and then asks “Could you please tell me what day of the week is it?” I was somewhat taken aback by the question as, to be perfectly honest, keeping track of weekdays is currently not my strongest suit. Anyway, after some quick counting and basic calculus I was able to state with some conviction that it must be Thursday. To which the girl responded “Wow… that explains a lot”, thanked me and walked her way.
This encounter goes some way describing the feeling of California – especially when compared to the upper East Coast cities. People are seriously laid back and taking it very easy, and I haven’t even got to the LA yet. I did manage to catch some cold here within the first two days though – on the first day we were wondering why on earth are people wearing scarves, jackets and sweaters in such a nice sunny day, but I suppose that now we know. The sun may be warm but the constant ocean breeze is surprisingly chilly and that must have got me.
I did have first of my meetings at Stanford today (went very well) with one more coming next week. As Stanford seems such a nice place and their library has a rather relaxed policy regarding visitors it sounds very enticing to try and find myself a place to stay in Palo Alto and spend another week here before heading to UCLA.
We have another two days before Helelyn will fly back, so tomorrow we might rent a car – which is dirt cheap here – and take a tour of the wine country just north of San Francisco.
West coast here we come
So tonight we will leave Guatemala and fly first to San Salvador and then on to San Fransisco. Six days is not long enough time to do a country like Guatemala full justice, but we did manage to take a trip along the main gringo trail around the Guatemala City, taking in places like Antigua, Chichicastenanga and Panajachel. In addition it enabled us to skip the whole Bible and Jell-O Belt in favour of a very friendly and colourful country – all in all a good deal.
On the news front there was an interesting bit last week – in addition to recently overshooting their estimate on the cost of the UK bank bailout to the tune of £70 billion (missing the mark roughly by 50%), IMF was forced to aknowledge that their official figures on the Eastern European external debt levels were grossly overestimated. The ratio of external debt to foreign exchange reserves for the Czech Republic was adjusted from 236% to 89%, in the case of Estonia the respective cut was from initially reported 210% to somewhat more benign 132% – with more likely to follow. Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that all is well in the proverbial Kingdom of Denmark, and I for one wouldn’t expect investors rushing to buy CEE assets or setting up new factories now that they learned that the leverage is much lower than formerly thought. It does, however, mean that both the risk of a complete meltdown as well as the outcome, should it still happen, is a lot less drastic than it appeared before. With all that in mind, it is really interesting to note is how little attention did this news get. I suspect that had this thing been the other way around – i.e. IMF correcting the indebtness figures upward by about 2x – the whole thing would have been all over the place. I guess it simply goes to underline how scared everyone is – good news are treated as inconsequential as everybody knows that the situation is bad.
¿Dónde Está la Biblioteca?
The bus trip that took 20 minutes from airport to Miami Beach turned out taking a whopping 1 hour 40 minutes when going the other way – and so it happened that once we made it to the counter we were politely informed that the check-in is closed and that the Taca Airlines flight to Guatemala City will leave without us on board. Luckily there seems to be plenty of traffic and so it ended with a $100 penalty for each, transfer in San Salvador and subsequent arrival in Guatemala a few hours later than we had initially planned. This must be only the second time I ever miss a flight – and given the number of close shaves I’ve had in that respect over the years I suppose it was long overdue anyway.
It is the start of a rainy season and Guatemala City is pretty high up, about 2000m above the sea level – so the temperature is very pleasant. There’s a somewhat more unfortunate side effect to living in Central American mountains – apparently the place was hit by a 20 second earthquake just a couple of days before our arrival, with shorter and lighter ones being a pretty regular occurence. Tomorrow we’ll probably take a trip to La Antigua just a short distance away, but mostly we intend to tómalo con calma and just laze around. So no biblioteca for a week at least.
Miami
This morning I decidedly put on my pink polo that I have felt a bit awkward to wear lately, ever since I was asked to show and ID in Boston solely because of my curious choice of shirt colour (confirmed in my conversation with the barmaid). And indeed, while it may look a bit off when worn by a 38 years old male at Harvard, it is spot on in Miami where I landed this afternoon. If anything, I looked positively tame compared to all the silky cuban shirts with flamingos and assorted embroidery around.
Helelyn arrived about 1.5 hours later and so we headed together to our hotel at Miami Beach – and if anyone needs a place to stay around here then Circa39 comes highly reccommended. The service is very friendly, location great, prices cheap and the whole place oozes late 80s charm. And the helpful concierge dons, in addition to regular Miami Beach tan and ripped muscles, a t-shirt with a line “Let Us Spoil You” written on it. Too bad our stay here is going to be brief, as already in tomorrow afternoon we’ll head on to Guatemala City.
Georgia on my mind
In Atlanta trees are blossoming, grass is green and accents are thick as maple syrup. People on the street not only look you in your eyes, but also actually smile at you and say hello – for someone coming from NYC this is enough to cause a mild shock.
Both architecture and overall ambience have changed a lot from north and at some places you could be excused of thinking that you’re somewhere in Britain rather than in the US – that is until someone opens their mouth and you’re immediately reminded of the famous line by George Bernard Shaw: “England and America are two countries divided by a common language“.
This morning it was actually snowing briefly, but rest of the week is going to get nicer and weekend should be sunny and in low 20s Celsius in the Coca-Cola city. I found myself a very conveniently located and surprisingly affordable place to stay – so now I only need the library ID and I’m set for the next couple of weeks again.
