I love to travel. In this past year alone, I did Czech-Poland-Ukraine in March, 2008; Peru in August, 2008; China in December, 2008; and am now living in Europe. My ambition is to make it to Africa, probably Morocco and Egypt, by the end of my stint in Europe, so that I can claim to have been in five of the seven continents in the space of a year. And let’s just leave unsaid all the interesting things I’ve eaten during that space of time.
Yet yesterday I spent the better part of a night (it was rainy in London) watching an American football game. And I loved it.
It’s the same impulse that drives me to eat at least one McDonald’s meal almost anytime I go abroad.
I think most expats have it somewhere, that deep longing for something familiar and home like. In Peru, Cuzco, Jim and I thought it was so funny that the most popular bar in the central square was (drumroll) the British Pub! But it makes a certain amount of sense: you spend the entire day racking your brains, politely listening to other people explain their cultures to you, gamely trying the guinea pig that’s still got its claws attached to it, and, when the night comes, there’s an intense desire to go back and drink the same Guinesse that you know, love, and have drank all your life. (Note: I actually hate Guiness. Such a rich beer, and yet almost only half the alcohol of an actual real beer.)
That’s the basic tension for people like me. We’re bored by home. It’s why we leave in the first place. We’re bored by the same five restaurants on the same streets, with knowing what’s around every corner. We’re driven by a sense of wanting to be completely lost, with knowing that beyond our trusty Visa cards and folding maps, we’re alone and on our own. (I do admit that if the Visa card wasn’t there, it would be a lot more scary.) That feeling that it’s possible to be lost, and in fact the feeling of being lost and needing to find your way home in the cold, is one of the most exhilarating for me. (And I have the flu to prove it.)
But we do miss home. The ones we love. The friends we crave. The familiar meal that we know we’ll like. And in my case last night, the sports game where I knew all the rules, knew all the teams, knew all the history, and, in the end, knew what the score meant.
It meant that Pittsburgh won.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
"Doing" London
Just came back from “doing” London. The whole concept of “doing” a city seems a funny one, in retrospect. You go to the city, pop open a travel guide, find the series of sights that are acknowledged to be the city’s “must-see destinations,” and proceed to tick them off one by one. It’s bound to be a rather fruitless exercise. If anyone told me I could “do” New York by seeing Times Sq, Rockefeller, Broadway, Lincoln Center, and then round it off with a Statute of Liberty, I’d tell them that it’s the equivalent of eating a Ho-Ho and thinking it’s a French pastry. You simply don’t get the real experience of being a New Yorker. Yet, here I was, in London, working my way from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London, “doing” London. And of course, even in eating, I was self-consciously chugging down on the British ales (very good, warm and filling, but never bitter) and eating the fish and chips (terrible, the culinary equivalent of McDonald’s Filet of Fish, which of course it is).
Priya and Nathan, as my hosts, did take me around to East London, to the area around White Chapel around which there now exists a vibrant Bangladeshi community: supermarkets and Bollywood DVD stores, all there. (Of slight concern was the flyer on one of the store’s doors calling for the Islamic countries of the world to join together and defeat Israel. This whole Gaza affair has all tempers on flair.) There I did experience “real” London, in the sense that indigenous (can you call an immigrant community “indigenous”?) Londoners were chowing down on the same excellent grilled chickens and curries that I was. It’s “real,” non?
Of course not. I was still just a Chinese-American having a Bangeladeshi meal in a London restaurant with an Indian-American and a white Pennsylvanian. If you put it in words, the entire affair seems just that ridiculous; so many different identities intersecting together and gorging itself on excellent food. But certainly not “London,” not as my tour-guide in the Tower of London, a Yeoman Guard named Paul who was in the British army for two decades and as British as British gets, would think to London, as he recalls to us the lives and deaths of ancient Brits like Henry VIII and Anne Boyeln. Is “London” that history, and that heritage, preserved now in its buildings and its gorgeous crown jewels? (530-some carats on the Star of Africa; what a nice prize for colonialism.)
The idea of how does one actually experience a city, reach out and touch a city, to do morally intelligent tourism, is one that bothers me. Mostly it’s a function of the fact that a city itself has different faces: the historical, the modern, the native, the immigrant. And then, layered atop that, is the impossibility of penetrating any of those layers as a weekend visitor. Those layers present a public face to you: they let you glimpse them and eat their food. But no “Londoner” can sit you down and reveal himself. He can’t explain it either.
Most people living in a city would be hard pressed to define their city in words. I feel that in two and a half years of New York, I have some sense of it, of its rhythms, of its patterns. Some of it is functional: which subway goes where, imprinted as a map of the city. Some of it is intellectual: how do people here interact, who does what and who has what aspirations, which neighborhood means what. But the last part, that’s the part I can’t describe, some sense of comfort with the city and its people, some connection, some anthropomorphization of the city into an actual person that is possible to get to know beyond the stage of an acquaintance.
That last one is what one gropes with when visiting a city like London. Like meeting a stranger, it’s a subtle probing, beyond his social facts, into whether the two of you can become deep friends, whether the intangibles are there.
And in this one city, in that little glimpse, in that five-minute cocktail conversation, I liked what I saw.
Priya and Nathan, as my hosts, did take me around to East London, to the area around White Chapel around which there now exists a vibrant Bangladeshi community: supermarkets and Bollywood DVD stores, all there. (Of slight concern was the flyer on one of the store’s doors calling for the Islamic countries of the world to join together and defeat Israel. This whole Gaza affair has all tempers on flair.) There I did experience “real” London, in the sense that indigenous (can you call an immigrant community “indigenous”?) Londoners were chowing down on the same excellent grilled chickens and curries that I was. It’s “real,” non?
Of course not. I was still just a Chinese-American having a Bangeladeshi meal in a London restaurant with an Indian-American and a white Pennsylvanian. If you put it in words, the entire affair seems just that ridiculous; so many different identities intersecting together and gorging itself on excellent food. But certainly not “London,” not as my tour-guide in the Tower of London, a Yeoman Guard named Paul who was in the British army for two decades and as British as British gets, would think to London, as he recalls to us the lives and deaths of ancient Brits like Henry VIII and Anne Boyeln. Is “London” that history, and that heritage, preserved now in its buildings and its gorgeous crown jewels? (530-some carats on the Star of Africa; what a nice prize for colonialism.)
The idea of how does one actually experience a city, reach out and touch a city, to do morally intelligent tourism, is one that bothers me. Mostly it’s a function of the fact that a city itself has different faces: the historical, the modern, the native, the immigrant. And then, layered atop that, is the impossibility of penetrating any of those layers as a weekend visitor. Those layers present a public face to you: they let you glimpse them and eat their food. But no “Londoner” can sit you down and reveal himself. He can’t explain it either.
Most people living in a city would be hard pressed to define their city in words. I feel that in two and a half years of New York, I have some sense of it, of its rhythms, of its patterns. Some of it is functional: which subway goes where, imprinted as a map of the city. Some of it is intellectual: how do people here interact, who does what and who has what aspirations, which neighborhood means what. But the last part, that’s the part I can’t describe, some sense of comfort with the city and its people, some connection, some anthropomorphization of the city into an actual person that is possible to get to know beyond the stage of an acquaintance.
That last one is what one gropes with when visiting a city like London. Like meeting a stranger, it’s a subtle probing, beyond his social facts, into whether the two of you can become deep friends, whether the intangibles are there.
And in this one city, in that little glimpse, in that five-minute cocktail conversation, I liked what I saw.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Impressions from the first week
Arrived in Paris last Sunday, the 4th, so been here exactly a week now. First week has mostly been consumed with setting up the daily necessities of life: moving into my new apartment, in the 15th arrondissment, getting a cell phone, etc. As Anna describes it, because of the language barrier, accomplishing even the simplest task is a moral victory. Choosing the right pricing plan at the cell phone shop, for instance, could induce a feeling of sheer joy. Of course, language barriers have their upsides: a panhandler just walked up to me in the McD's where I was typing, and I managed to avoid the awkwardness by explaining that I didn't speak French. Ignorance has its uses.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Travel Distances
Thought I'd keep a running tally of how far I've traveled, based on distances from http://webflyer.com/ and Google Maps.
New York --> Shanghai: 11900 KM
Shanghai --> Xuzhou: 514 KM
Xuzhou --> Beijing: 749 KM
Beijing --> Paris: 8190 KM
Paris <--> London: 612 KM
Paris <--> Dublin: 784 KM
Paris <--> Istanbul: 2,250 KM
Paris --> Madrid --> Granada --> Seville --> Barcelona --> Paris: 3,291 KM
Paris <--> Vienna: 1030 KM
Running Total: 29,320 KM
Equatorial Circumference of Earth (my goal): 40,075 KM
New York --> Shanghai: 11900 KM
Shanghai --> Xuzhou: 514 KM
Xuzhou --> Beijing: 749 KM
Beijing --> Paris: 8190 KM
Paris <--> London: 612 KM
Paris <--> Dublin: 784 KM
Paris <--> Istanbul: 2,250 KM
Paris --> Madrid --> Granada --> Seville --> Barcelona --> Paris: 3,291 KM
Paris <--> Vienna: 1030 KM
Running Total: 29,320 KM
Equatorial Circumference of Earth (my goal): 40,075 KM
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