“I lived in the midst of Arabian tale, and shut my eyes, as much as possible, to every thing that called me back to every day life; and if there is any country in Europe where one can do so, it is in poor, wild, legendary, proud-spirited, romantic Spain; where the old magnificent barbaric spirit still contends agains the utilitarianism of modern Civilization.”
-Washington Irving, Recollections of the Alhambra.
On a slow afternoon at work late last September, I came across a sale by British Airlines to various European destinations that all seemed like a really good deals. For instance, a ticket from Seattle to Madrid via London was $484 round trip, and as cheap as that was, I:
a) Don’t live in Seattle.
b) Didn’t particularly want to go to Madrid.
c) Didn’t really have any vacation time.
The only part of Spain that I hadn’t visited was the south. With the exception of Sevilla, the region of Andalucia remained an exotic, sun drenched mystery to me. I looked out the window at a typical autumn day in Portland, cool and crisp, overcast but pleasant. Within weeks the clouds would open up and stay that way for four months. I suddenly imagined myself driving along the rugged southern coast of Spain, on my way from one one gorgeous medieval city to another. For a moment I smelled the salty Mediterranean air and heard the tapping of my shoes on thousand year old cobblestones as I wandered narrow alleys in search of good wine and tapas.
As olive skinned flamenco dancers danced across a stage inside my head, I pulled a credit card out of my pocket and began booking tickets. I decided to leave on a Wednesday afternoon and return the following Tuesday. Like a true junkie, I was fully aware of how poorly I had considered this decision, as well as how little that mattered to me. The vision I’d had was just too strong, as was the prospect of a spontaneous European weekend, which is a fantasy that I suspect a lot of people have and very few ever actually fulfill.
Fifteen minutes after first coming across the tickets, they were purchased. Six weeks later, I was going to be in Spain.
Those six weeks passed quickly, and by the start of November I suddenly realized that, with the exception of a place to stay on my first night in Granada and a rental car the following afternoon, I had failed to do any research or make reservations of any kind. And just after that I thought to myself, so what? I’ve traveled extensively, speak a little Spanish, and love the country intensely.
Not only did I love Spain, I trusted that Spain was going to look out for me while I was there. In fact, I trusted that so much that I decided to see just how light I could travel: I decided go there without any luggage, maps, or guidebooks. Instead, I would arrive there with the clothes on my back, a camera, passport, wallet, toothbrush, and little else. And that’s what I did.
***
Rather than book a single ticket between my departure and destination cities, I courageously (some would say stupidly) worked out the itinerary myself and purchased the three legs of the journey separately: Portland to Seattle, Seattle to London to Madrid, and Madrid to Granada. I gave myself less than two hours of layover time at each stop, but everything went as smooth as I hoped it would.
How did they know?
The flight from Seattle to London was remarkably brief- the pilot capitalized on the geometry of spheres and, by plotting a course over northern Canada and Greenland, it ended up taking a little over nine hours.
There’s a line in the movie Punch Drunk Love when Adam Sandler’s character, having just arrived in Hawaii says, “Wow, it really looks like Hawaii.” It’s a silly line, but that’s exactly how I felt seeing London for the first time in my life- as though I was descending into my own preconceptions of the place as a gray, foggy, dour place, as though the settlers of London had simply sloshed through a muddy field until reaching the river Thames and then said, “Alright, here we are. Start bulding.”
My layover in London was short and sweet: a (imperial!) pint of Bass, a dish of chips with brown sauce, and then I was off again.
British meteorologists have the easiest job in the world.
My first glimpse of my second (really third, I spent a night in Pamplona once) time in Spain.
Upon arriving in Madrid, I was corralled through customs and spent the entire time giddily taking in a seemingly endless parade of idiosyncratic and beautiful Spanish faces. I felt like I was in an Pedro Almodovar film with a cast of thousands.
I had a two and a half hour layover in Madrid, but wasted no time tearing into manchego, jamon, and lomo bocadillos and quaffing three (or was it four?) copas of delicious Tempranillo.
Just like the hopper flight between Portland and Seattle, the flight from Madrid to Granada took less than an hour. Granada’s airport is tiny. I walked from the landing strip to the terminal and then directly outside to a waiting city bus.
Not having any maps or knowledge of the city forced me to rely almost entirely on the goodwill of strangers. I knew that my hotel was located on the “Plaza de Campos”, which I explained to the bus driver. He didn’t seem to know exactly where that was, but had an idea as to which part of town it was in. When we arrived there, he let me know.
Once on the sidewalk, I followed his pointed finger across the street and down a dimly lit alley. Then I crossed a parklike pair of streets, took a right, then a left, then a right, down another dark alley that opened up on a small treed square. I looked to my side and suddenly realized that I was standing next to the hotel where I’d booked my first night. I smiled. That was almost too easy.
The room was modest but very clean, and had a beautiful view overlooking the city. As exhausted as I was from traveling for 24 hours straight, this was to be my only night in Granada and I didn’t feel right about not seeing at least a glimpse of it. And so, after taking a long shower and refamiliarizing myself with late night Spanish television (3 channels of music videos, 5 channels of live fortune tellers, 1 channel of a live lottery game that doesn’t make any sense, and 2 channels of hardcore pornography), I got dressed and set out again.
It was a short walk down Calle Reyes Católicos to the Plaza Nueva, which I knew to be my best bet on a Thursday night for a taste of Granada. Once there, I ducked into the first bar that looked promising and ordered a glass of red wine. After it arrived I spent a moment trying to convince myself that I was really there, drinking Spanish wine not far from where it was made, and looking forward to… well, what was I looking forward to? The next four days were still a mystery, a mystery that could only be solved by experiencing whatever was in store.
After leaving that bar I became aware that all of the wine and tapas places were closing for the night, and that only nightclubs would be open. I went into one place called Gustav Klimt, which I took as a good sign until I realized what sort of place it was- loud, dark, and packed with an assortment of attractive young people, most of whom would be going home alone. In other words, it was a college bar. Rather than waste money on an overpriced, watered down drink, I snagged a chocolate covered fruit skewer and made a sneering exit.
No one noticed.
Granada is a college town, and the alleys around the Plaza Nueva were filled with groups of friends and students winding their way from one place to another. Since I had nothing else to do, I began walking with them. Rather than follow any one group I drifted between them like so many schools of interesting Spanish fish.
When I tired of that, I began to walk home. Along the way I came upon the ongoing drama of an accident involving a car and a scooter. A young woman was laying on the ground and howling with an intensity that did not appear to be appropriate given the fact that she wasn’t bleeding and the paramedics were not rushing to get her into the ambulance.
Maybe she was just imitating a Spanish soccer player.
Continuing on, I walked back the way I’d come and then realized I’d gone too far. Instead of turning around, I cut across the neighborhood where I thought I was staying in an attempt to repeat my earlier success of guessing my way back to the hotel. But this led me to another main street, and then another, and soon it was two a.m. and I had absolutely no idea where I was. Eventually I stopped into an all night convenience store, but the Turkish clerk there had only lived in Spain for a month and was little help. The Korean immigrants running the all night convenience store next to the first one didn’t know either. I thanked them both and continued on.
Eventually I ran into Peter, an exchange student from Boston who was heading towards the Plaza Nueva along with his friends. I figured that returning there was better than wandering aimlessly, and so I joined their group for a few minutes and chatted with them. As we walked it became apparent to me just how far I’d gone. My hotel was in the southeast part of the city, but I met up with the Americans far in the northwest. Still, I’d probably seen more of the city in one evening than many people see in a week, and never felt endangered by being lost, only confused.
Peter didn’t know where I was trying to go, but he did point me in roughly the right direction, and finally, finally, I found myself at the Plaza de Campos and my hotel. Having been awake for the majority of the last two days I wanted nothing more than to sleep deep for as long as my body felt like sleeping, but that was not possible. At seven a.m. I’d need to rise and leave again, this time to explore the fortress palace of the Alhambra and the rest of Granada. At times like these, an old quote by Henry Rollins always comes to mind, and it certainly applied then:
When I board my first flight towards Spain this afternoon I will have with me:
1 well worn U.S. passport
1 wallet containing 2 credit cards
1 travel toothbrush and toothpaste
1 Sony HX-1 camera, case and charger
1 black moleskin notebook containing flight times and confirmation numbers
1 pair black boots, freshly polished
1 pair of SmartWool socks
1 pair of denim jeans
1 pair of blue and orange checked boxers (of Spanish origin, coincidentally)
1 white t-shirt
1 striped dress shirt
1 pair of silver cufflinks
1 purple necktie
1 grey sweater
1 black Marmot softshell jacket
1 copy of The Adventures of Augie Marsh by Saul Bellow
1 keen sense of adventure
1 poor sense of direction
1 lifetime that I’m doing my best to make extraordinary
My inspiration to travel to another country with nearly nothing goes like this:
A long time ago, my friend José and I were talking about traveling, and he said that the best way to go was with a jacket, a wallet, and a camera. He said that you could buy anything else that you needed while you were there, and that whatever you bought would immediately become a souvenir. For instance, say you went to France, needed some underwear, bought some. Then for months or years after, you might get up in the morning and put on those underwear and think, “I got these in France.” And you’d spend a moment reminiscing about that trip when you wouldn’t have otherwise.
It was with José’s idea in mind that I set off with only a wallet and a camera to San Francisco earlier this summer, and I ended up having one of the most rewarding trips of my life during the day and a half that I spent getting there and back. It not only verified that traveling so light is possible, but it made me want to do it again, and for longer.
I will only be in Spain for four days, but I can imagine a time in the near future when I’ll leave again with pretty much the same list as above, except without any return flights to think about. In a way, by taking trips like this I am providing myself with a very real glimpse of that longed-for day.
This Wednesday afternoon I will be boarding series of planes that will convey me to the start of a four day visit to southern Spain. I purchased the tickets six weeks ago in an intense fit of wanderlust, and have managed to keep the trip in the back of my mind until now.
Depite having neither the funds nor vacation time for such a trip (and Colombia to look forward to in February), I simply couldn’t resist returning to one of my favorite places for a few days of Andalusian sun, moorish architecture, sherry, tapas, and adventure.
And it will be an adventure. I’m making sure of that by traveling there without luggage, maps or a fixed itinerary of any kind- I will arrive there only with the clothes on my back, my passport, wallet, camera, and my muy malo Spanish skills, content to let the country herself decide my fate. The only things I’ve arranged in advance are a visit to the Alhambra (because it’s difficult to get entry otherwise) and a rental car for three days of touring around by myself.
With the exception of Seville, I haven’t seen any of the part of Spain where I’ll be. At a minimum, I hope to see Granada, Malaga, Jerez, Jabugo, and Cordoba. But due to the fact that I haven’t actually planned anything, I can’t even imagine what I actually am going to see. And it’s thrilling. Below is a potential loop through those destinations and the places where it might make sense to spend the night.
I would say I can’t wait, but I can, and only have to for two more days. Ciao!
At the end of August I spent five days in Oahu visiting family and exploring the island with my friend Marissa. My second cousin Tori lives near Honolulu with her family and Marissa’s mother Florence and brother Jake live on the north shore.
I feel like I saw a lot of the island for how chill the trip was- I mean, it was really just an excuse to go somewhere beautiful and different and eat fresh fruit, shave ice, seafood and Hawaiian specialties every day. And that’s exactly what I did.
Squinting into the late morning sun, I pass an old Mexican panhandler keeping his balance by leaning against a bus shelter. I’m walking down Mission Street and the air is slowly filling with the smell of frying corn and the soundof a local band tuning their instruments- guitar, accordian, tambora, and maracas. As much as I want to stop and listen to them, I continue on. I’m looking for a place where I can buy a toothbrush and, if I’m lucky, a t-shirt, though not for a souvenir but because I need a change of clothes. I’ve been wearing the shirt I have on for a day and a night. It’s beginning to feel and smell like a sweaty second skin.
A few minutes later I’m in a crowded pharmacy buying a travel toothbrush, which I drop into my pocket next to my wallet, passport, and dead cellphone. The last call that I made on it was to my friend Kennedy to tell him that I was on my way to San Francisco and did he want to get together? Shortly after making plans and hanging up the screen went blank and I was left staring at the red piece of plastic as though it were the frayed end of a constant tether, now severed.
I’m sitting on my porch when they arrive. It’s two in the morning and I’ve been receiving regular updates from Atousa about the progress that she and Naomi have been making from Seattle to Portland, which I’m a little skeptical about given the fact that they are on track to complete the drive in just over two hours. In my experience, and under the best of circumstances, it takes three. But sure enough, just two hours and fifteen minutes after getting a text reading “We’re on our way!” a white Toyota Yaris turns the corner and begins to creep down my street.
I can see that Naomi is driving, and when they finally reach my house she tries to park parallel to the curb and ends up about 20 degrees off. Then she shuts off the car, gets out, stumbles by me, and sprawls out on my lawn like a long distance runner at the end of a marathon. Soon Atousa is climbing out of the car as well. “Oh my god,” she says, and then mutters something I don’t catch. I help the girls gather their things and lead them inside to the futon in my living room. I’m not sure if they’re planning to stay up and talk for a while or what, but that question is answered when I leave the room for a moment and find them both sound asleep by the time I return.
Four hours later I am trying not to disturb my slumbering houseguests while I get ready for work, and later we meet for a few happy hour drinks before they depart for San Francisco in the evening. I joke with them about their condition the night before: Naomi’s collapse on my lawn and Atousa’s near incomprehensibility. I ask if they were drinking during the trip to my house but they deny it, which means they both must have been frightfully drunk when they left Seattle. Tonight they’ll be driving through the night to get home and it would be wise for them to pace themselves, but they don’t, and either do I.
After the first bar we go to another to play pool. Portland is just coming off of a heatwave so I try to direct us to places with air conditioning or basements or both. The sun has set by the time we leave that pool hall, so our next stop is to a bar with an outdoor patio. Defying all logic and reason, one of us orders a Scorpion Bowl, which is 60 ounces of liquor and fruit juice and is intended to be shared between the three of us.
Sips are sipped, snacks are snacked, smokes are smoked. I vaguely recall having a long conversation with a friend of one of the girls on their cell phone. He is a complete stranger to me but we talk as though we’ve known each other for years. Soon after that Ivar arrives. He’s a guy that both Atousa and I know but not well. He once fed us both raw albacore tuna at his house minutes after meeting us.
A second Scorpion Bowl arrives at some point, although no one will admit to ordering it. The four of us stare at the pink globe with a dangerous mixture of fear and desire. Ivar finds a chair and pulls out some expensive French cigarettes that smell several orders of magnitude better than Atousa’s Parliaments. We talk, we laugh, we smoke, we eat, we drink, we laugh, and we drink.
Like a lighthouse on a distant shore, San Francisco waits patiently in our future, further from our minds than words like ”hours” and “miles” are capable of describing.
Last month, my sister Amanda moved to Portland, Oregon. I promised to help her get here, but only on the condition that we take a scenic route, one that meandered through the south and southwest and hopefully would give us more to see than corn and wheat fields. It did.
Also, it wasn’t just the two of us- Amanda’s maltipoo Ginger was along for the ride. The trip ended up taking exactly 7 days, we covered exactly 5,014 miles, and I took over a thousand photographs. Below are my favorites with commentary.
5014 miles/167 photos=30 miles per photo, by the way.
DAY ONE: West Haven, Connecticut to Dickson, Tennessee
Here we go…
WESTWARD HO!
As we headed out of Connecticut and into New York, Ginger began barking incessantly and refused to stay leashed to her custom made puppy chair, and I became very concerned that she was going to act that way for the entire week. Luckily (for her) she eventually calmed down and I didn’t have to throw her from an overpass.
Amanda doesn’t know this, but I tolerate Ginger mainly because
she reminds me of Falcor from The Neverending Story.
Within an hour, we had left New England.
Then we did this for 12 hours straight.
Early on in planning the trip, I researched a number of famous barbeque places that weren’t too far from our route. The one I was most excited about was Ridgewood Barbeque near Bluff City, Tennessee- there seemed to be a clear consensus that it was in the running for best Barbeque in the country, and based on our first look at their smokehouse, I couldn’t have been more excited to try it.
I participated in a neighborhood-wide photo scavenger hunt!
(This is us as the cover of Arrested Development)
Spring sprung!
I saw the premier of my friend Aaron’s band, Here Come Dots!
As well as their second show!
I hiked in the Oneonta Gorge!
I saw E*Rock make music with a Wii controller!
I took a lot of random pictures!
I caught up with old friends and made new ones!
I discovered a field of clover while driving back from Astoria!
I attended a FUTURE PARTY dressed as a time traveling Jules Verne!
Jules, pondering the future.
Marissa and Aaron went too.
In April, I launched my standup comedy career!
Here’s a sample ‘joke’:
“Recently some friends of mine were expecting their first child… and it ended up being stillborn. They were really upset, understandably, and so I tried to console them by sharing something with them that I’d never told anyone, which was that I had a brother who was stillborn.
My parents decided to keep it.
When people hear that, they ask if it was strange, growing up with a sibling who was, you know… dead. But it I never really thought about it. I mean, I was taught to just treat him the same as I would any other baby- so I’d take him to the park, push him on the swing… people would glare at us sometimes, but that was just ignorance. Basically it was decided that whatever it was that came out of my mother’s womb, was going to be raised right: as a stillborn-again Christian.”
Jimmy and Tory played that night, too!
In May I hiked around Mt. Saint Helens…
…where I saw a dragonfly and found a dessicated frog!
Click image to enlarge. Seriously, do it.
Also, this.
But for the most part, I spent way too much time in the city!
I also ate ALOT of incredible cart food:
And saw Femi Kuti play at the Oregon Zoo!
And at the beginning of June I flew back to Connecticut, where I’ll resume posting… now!
Besides a long weekend in Connecticut for my sister’s wedding last summer, I didn’t travel at all in 2008. In fact, I rarely left Portland’s city limits. Sensing that I would be hungry to experience traveling for the sake of itself than spend much time in any one place, I decided to plan a winter trip that would require me to endlessly catch planes, trains, and buses and do that “get in, get oriented, see some stuff, get out” ritual a total of 7 times in two weeks. All in all, I visited Brussels, Dresden, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, and Frankfurt.
For me, the difference between vacationing and traveling is that vacationing involves treating oneself to a less-than-average amount of hassles for a couple of weeks, while traveling involves challenging oneself with a greater-than-average amount of hassles for a couple of weeks.
As you will read, despite all the sights, laughs, and wonderful experiences that I enjoyed, this trip managed to provide me with more hassles than I was even expecting to endure. And you know what? It felt great to be traveling again.
I left Vienna in the late evening and boarded a train bound for Salzburg, Germany. I spent a little more than an hour reading and watching the Austrian countryside fly past my window, and by the time I arrived in Salzburg it was dark.
I was planning to spend only a few hours in Salzburg, and only felt that I needed to do two things:
1. See Mozart’s birthplace.
2. Eat dinner.
The evening was cold and clear, and as I made my way from the train station towards the Salzach river, the number of people walking around increased dramatically.
For a while I wandered down alleys and side streets- the old town is very compact, so I kept ending up on main streets no matter which way I went.
Eventually I wandered by the house that Mozart was born in, and it was then that I realized that my later portion of my trip had been a scattered version of “THIS IS YOUR LIFE” for him:
First in Prague, where he caught the illness that he would die from a few months later, I saw a perfomance of his Requiem, which was not only funeral music but was also incomplete at the time of his death.
Then in Vienna, where he lived and worked for most of his life, and is buried.
And finally, in Salzburg, where he was born and raised. I would have spent a few more minutes considering the man’s life and titantic musical contributions, but I was getting pretty hungry.
Not too far from the geburtshaus I found a cozy restaurant with a wonderful menu, and decided to treat myself to a celebratory end of trip meal.
If the waitress offered it, I ordered it. Everything was delicious- warm bread, fresh salad, hearty soup, veal wiener schnitzel, an impossibly tall glass of beer, and a glass of local brandy as a digestif.
Food and food and food and food and drink and drink
After dinner, I walked back towards the train station full and happy. All I wanted to do was find my seat and pass right out, but I couldn’t do that because I had stupidly bought tickets with a long layover in Munich at 2 a.m. and another one in Mannheim at 5 a.m. Ugh.
It might have been nice to see Salzburg in the day time, and I’ve heard that the surrounding mountains are very dramatic, but in a way I’m glad it worked out the way it did- until I go back, my memory of the place will remain dark, quiet, and blanketed in fresh snow.
***
After getting settled into my train seat, I read for a bit and then began to doze off. Eventually the conductor stopped by to check my ticket, which I produced immediately. A moment later, he asked to see the card I purchased the ticket with and a jolt shot through me- I didn’t have the same card anymore.
I tried to explain this to him, and show the cards I did have, and how the names were all the same, and what the hell was the difference- I was one of about three people on the train at that hour. Eventually, he asked to see my passport, at which point I figured he was going to relent and let it slide.
Instead, he printed out receipt and handed it to me, smiling. “Take this to the counter when you arrive in Mannheim”, he said. Then he moved on.
I thought everything was cool, and then I actually looked at what he’d handed me- it was a bill for a new ticket, and also contained an additional 20 Euro fine for riding the train “without a ticket” even though I hadn’t been doing that. What a dick!
Left: freedom. Right: facism.
The incident forced me to worry that the same thing would happen on the other two trains I would be taking that night, but it didn’t the conductors used common sense and left me in peace. When I finally arrived in Frankfurt I explained the situation to a woman at the ticket counter who became as indignant as I was- a real sweetheart, she canceled the bill and then hand wrote a letter in German that she attached to my original ticket and the new one.
Drowsy from the night’s travel, I took a street car to my hotel and begged them to check me in early. They did, and after a shower and a nap, I headed back out to explore my final trip destination, Frankfurt.
I ended up in a part of town thick with Turkish restaurants and internet cafes, which were the only things that were open because it was Sunday.
Later, I found this square.
Lunch was a seasonal beer, a pile of pork chops, and the best sauerkraut I’ve ever eaten in my life. It was as saur as it was krauty.
That evening I went to bed early, surprised at how eager I was to be head home. The pace of the trip had been frantic, but also filled with just as many great experiences as I’d hoped I would have.
The next morning while packing my things I flipped on the tv. Watching a few minutes of the German dubbed version of the video below was my final memorable experience of the trip:
