Sunday, November 21, 2010

Latest trip by the numbers

If you like statistics and maps, like I do, you’ll be interested in this post noting where I’ve been over the last two months and how I got there.
If you don’t like those things, well, that just makes me sad.

Here are the bullet-point highlights of my recent travels:
  • ·         Total trip time in days: 66
  • ·         Countries visited: 7, including the US, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, and Spain.
  • ·         US states visited (not including layovers where I didn’t get out of the bus station or airport): Texas, Louisiana, Florida
  • ·         Cities visited (not counting brief layovers at bus stations, train stations, airports, etc): 21, including Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, London, Oxford, Bath, Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Fort Augustus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Istanbul, Barcelona, Tricio, Najera, Bilbao.
  • ·         Number of flights taken: 10
  • ·         Number of hours on airplanes: 39.25 (give or take)
  • ·         Number of buses taken (not counting rides within cities): 11 (including a 3-day tour in Scotland)
  • ·         Facebook friends added as a result of the trip: 5
  • ·         Amount of money spent: about $7,000
  • ·         Amount of money I would’ve spent if I hadn’t stayed with friends and Couchsurfing hosts in several spots along the way: A lot more
  • ·         Amount of money I’m now in debt: way, way too much
  • ·         Articles of clothing lost along the way: 4, including a sock stuffed into a broken air conditioning vent on a Greyhound bus in Texas; a pair of flip-flops left under a bed in a hostel in Barcelona; a hoody left in a friend’s car in Bilbao; and a hat blown off my head and into a river in Bilbao.
  • ·         Amount of planning I did: A lot
  • ·         Amount of planning I should have done: A lot more
  • ·         Number of photos and videos taken: 2,250
  • ·         Favorite place visited: Spain. No one city in particular, just every bit of it. (When I told a British friend I loved Spain, he noted that sentiment was popular among other Americans he’d met on a recent trip to Andalucia. “These Americans were jacking off about Spain,” he said. He asked why we like it so much, and my explanation was that the lifestyle there is so pleasantly different from that of the US, and you see it especially in their approach to food. Meals tend to be occasions for gathering with friends and enjoying oneself. The TV is off. There is no desire to eat and run. And another contributing factor is the fact that Spanish women are sexy.) 
Please enjoy the map below, and feel free to zoom in and out and play with it.
 

View Europe in a larger map

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Spain's wine country - a great place to end the journey

I won’t be home for another four days, but as far as I’m concerned my trip is done.
After two straight months of travel through 23 cities and towns (give or take), I’m ready to settle in at home for the winter. Or at least until I can scrounge up the money for another trip.

I just finished one of most enjoyable legs of this journey, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. For six days I relaxed and ate delicious local food with an old friend and his in-laws in a tiny town 2 hours south of Bilbao, in the heart of Spain’s wine country. While there, I realized that although I’ve loved seeing the beautiful, famous sites that certain places have to offer, some of my fondest memories from this trip were made possible simply because I enjoyed the people surrounding me.
Dallas, for example, didn’t seem like a great city in and of itself. But I loved it there. I spent 3 days getting reacquainted with an old college buddy, who introduced me to a great troupe of his friends. I also happened to be there during Oktoberfest and the filming of a TV show, so that helped.

The town of Tricio, the 300-person village where I spent most of the last week, is as attractive as the most beautiful Spanish women I’ve seen (which is high praise considering the eye candy riding the subways in Barcelona). I tend to like big cities because of the convenience, diversions, variety of people, sights and experiences, etc. But I loved Tricio. Before I came, my host Jason, an old friend and an Army vet with a fair number of stamps on his passport, said of Tricio, “I’ve done enough traveling to know that I will be buried here.” Granted, he has a wife and in-laws in Tricio, and I probably wouldn’t stay there long-term without such roots anchoring me. But the charm of that little town is undeniable, and not just because it sits on a hill looking out over mountains and vineyards that were every shade of orange, red and yellow during my November visit.
Jason and his wife Maite live in an old house owned by Maite’s family. The first time I entered it, I felt like I was on the set of a movie about rural life in Spain’s wine country. “This is way too clichéd,” I thought. But it was all real. There were peppers and garlic hanging from strings in the kitchen, but they were edible, not plastic like the décor you see in restaurants back home. There was a grinder for making sausage upstairs and spicy chorizo drying in a pan downstairs next to the dinner table. There were three newborn chicks peeping away in the backyard. Jason had recently picked tomatoes from his garden and stomped some grapes into his very own wine. I’d get to do the same with a neighbor’s grapes a few days later. 
Making wine with Jason and his friend, Mike. Photo: Jason Richards

Every room in that ancient house, from the entryway to the attic, was cluttered with trinkets and antique objects, like century-old rifles, horseshoes, paintings, and books, books, books. Maite’s father doesn’t like to throw anything away, and he loves to keep himself busy tinkering, refurbishing and of course developing new debate fodder by making use of the veritable library stored in his house.
Every day I was there, Jason would buy a baguette from the town store down the street. Most days, he’d include that bread in the central meal of the day: lunch. Currently a student, he’s become sort of a house-husband and a talented cook, in charge of the kitchen while Maite works in nearby Nájera. 
Jason liked to pick peppers from the strands to spice up his meals.

Collected books and antiques in the Tricio house.

Jason’s cooking was delicious, but my favorite meal was the one we had next door. On my second night in Tricio, Jason took me to his weekly guys-only meal with his father-in-law and their friends. Eight of us sat around a long table and dug into various types of chorizo, sausage, ribs, eggs, and of course bread. Everything was homemade, save for the bread purchased at the local store. Some of the men drank wine from glass bottles with spouts coming out of the side, pouring it directly into their mouths without wasting a goblet. At one end of the table there sat a leg of cured ham, with the hoof still intact. Jason cut me a thin slice of the jamon serrano from the leg and as soon as it touched my tongue I had a new meat to add to my list of favorites. It was somewhat firm and chewy like jerky, but much softer, with oils that emerged as it sat in my mouth. I washed it down with some wine the Irish expat across the table had made. “It’s a bit fruity, isn’t it?” I said. “It is,” he responded. “It may not have fermented long enough this time.” It was last year’s batch, the first he’d made in the two decades he’d been married to his Spanish wife. I sat back and thought about how similar he and Jason already were, despite being separated by 25 years of age. Then I realized just how much of the dinner I’d eaten, and my attention turned to keeping my stomach from bursting.
In addition to the food, I was impressed by the people I met in Tricio. Jason’s father-in-law, Humberto, was friendly from the start, as were most others. I neglected to take photos during my first couple of days in town because I felt like a guest rather than a tourist. (Also, I suppose the tourist attractions and photo-ops were somewhat limited.) Tricio was a break from the frenzy of the big cities that was not only relaxing, but necessary.
Now I’m back in a big city. Perhaps too soon. As I write this, I’m sitting in the morgue-silent lobby of a hotel on the outskirts of Bilbao, Spain. I’ve been here a little over a day, and I’ve got about a day left before I fly back to London. It’s raining lightly outside, and I already saw most of the city yesterday, and I’m trying not to spend money, so I’m sitting here next to the vending machine trying to keep myself occupied.
I can’t wait to get on that plane to London. Once I arrive there, I’ll be back amongst friends for a day and a half. Then I’ll leave them to fly to Miami, where I know no one. But the following day, I’ll fly home (via Chicago), where family and friends are plentiful and where I can (hopefully) find a job to keep myself busy and earn a little cash for the next trip.

Monday, November 1, 2010

The surprising silence of a bomb heard round the world


Let’s talk about the bombing in Taksim Square. Anyone who reads the news knows by now that a suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of Istanbul yesterday, injuring 15 police officers and 17 civilians. I was in my hostel, about 3 miles across town, when this occurred, so I was in no danger. I was surprised to hear about it, because, one: I read it on the New York Times website instead of hearing from a local source; and two: I had been in Taksim Square the previous afternoon lolling about with the rest of the unsuspecting locals and tourists who frequent the square each day.
Reading about the bombing gave me a slightly unsettled feeling at first. Just before I saw the story, I was looking in my guidebook for things to do and decided on a walk up Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Avenue), which terminates at Taksim Square. But when I read about the bombing, my first thought was, “Wow. I’d better stay away from that area.”
And then some other instinct kicked in. Maybe it was a habit developed during my time as a newspaper reporter. Or maybe it was a more natural sense of curiosity. Whatever it was, it made me want to check out the situation across town.
I started by venturing just a few hundred meters, to the Hagia Sofia. I wanted to see if people appeared disturbed by what had just happened a few miles away. Nothing seemed amiss. People bustled about as usual. News travels fast over the internet and television, but word of mouth is just as slow as it’s ever been.
I headed north. Walking through town, across the Galata Bridge spanning the Golden Horn, nothing was out of the ordinary. I walked up to Tunel Square, the southern terminus of Istiklal Caddesi, and watched a crowd gather around a man playing a didgeridoo. Along Istiklal, a pedestrian-only street lined with shops and restaurants, people went about their day shopping and eating and taking photos and talking and laughing. 
 
The first evidence something disturbing had happened was at the street’s northern end, a 20-minute walk from the didgeridoo. Police stopped pedestrians from going any further, into Taksim Square. Business in the shops in that area was slow or nonexistent. Up ahead a couple hundred meters you could spot a man in a basket lift, scraping broken glass off the side of a building. An effect of the bomb’s concussion, no doubt. Here, at this end of the avenue, people stopped to look. Some questioned what had happened and gazed on with worried expressions. Most took little notice and simply continued with their shopping. 

Scraping off the broken glass.

Looky-loos on Istiklal Caddesi.
 I hustled down a side street and up a main road parallel to Istiklal. Traffic going toward Taksim was barely crawling. Police cars and vans surrounded the square, while men in white jumpsuits examined evidence on the concrete. Pedestrians crowded the area around the square, some stopping to take photos while others walked by, glued to their cell phones. It had been nearly four hours since the bomb went off, and only a handful of TV and news photographers remained, wrapping up their coverage. I looked at the Monument to the Republic and the open area around it, where I had sat the previous afternoon, taking photos of the flags waving in celebration of the Turkish Republic’s founding (four-score and seven years ago that weekend, as it turns out).


Taksim Square the day before the bombing.

Taksim Square about 4 hours after the bombing.



As I walked back along Istiklal and toward my hostel across town, I wondered how many people even knew what had happened that morning. And whether knowing would make any difference to them. I'm sure the Taksim Square bombing will be forgotten quickly by the news media and anyone who wasn't directly affected by it. As for me, I don’t feel concerned for my safety. Maybe it’s because of everyone else’s calm. Although I am curious as to why I’m hearing fighter jets flying overhead as I write this. There's nothing in the news about that.

Side note:
I’m sorry I haven’t been more regular with my postings during this trip. I’ve found it hard to find the time and energy to write, given all the running around and hopping from city to city every few days.