Marooned in Manchester, Sequestered in Spain

European Rambles, Pt. X: Coming Home

It felt strange to think of Manchester as home, but after surviving thirty days with almost everything I own on my back, I was ready to call it home. I had 12 euro in my pocket, my phone was dead, my camera batteries were dead, and I smelled like I’d been dead for a few days (No joke, it was AWFUL). I planned on taking the evening bus to Girona so I could get checked into my flight as soon as the gate opened with no hassles. I said my goodbyes to Lainey, Mackenzie and Amanda and walked to Estacio Nord. They were on their way to Barcelona Airport to catch a flight to Belfast. Much to my dismay, and in keeping with my run of hard luck with travel over the past week or so, I misread the timetable and once again found myself stuck in Barcelona. The first bus to the airport the next morning was at 3:30, so I had about seven and a half hours to kill. Not really worth putting myself up in another hostel, because I’d have to leave around two to get to the station. I decided instead to sit in the plaza outside of Universitat de Barcelona for as long as I felt safe, then I would try to find a bar to sit in until 2:30, when I would start making my way back to the bus station. With 24 hours until I’d be home I bought a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of Nutella, and some strawberry jam, and tried to make it on just that. This turned out to be a terrible idea, as I got a pretty bad headache from all the sugar and some serious indigestion to boot. Not to mention the bread was really crumbly. I sat in the plaza and read The Aeneid, translated by Patric Dickinson. It’s wonderful, and now I kind of want to read it again. As the night wore on the scene at the plaza changed considerably. By 11:30, all the skaters and young kids had given up and gone home to be replaced by immigrant street vendors trying to sell beer and various other paraphernalia. Meanwhile I still had three and a half hours until the bus station opened up. For a time I heard a bunch of people speaking in American English and I wondered if they had any idea I was probably their neighbor back home.

            It began to get too cold to stay outside, so I walked for awhile and ended up stopping at a crowded McDonald’s near Placa de Catalunya. I didn’t get anything to eat, but I made myself another sugary sandwich. It was around 1:40 when I got there. They serve beer in McDonald’s in Barcelona, and probably all over Europe. At this point in the night I was too tired to eat or drink anything, and I was struggling to stay awake. Most of the city is dead quiet late at night, and even the main streets aren’t well lit, so for the long walk to the bus station I was on the edge of my nerves the whole time. I made it safe and sound a few minutes after three and there was already a sizeable crowd waiting at the station. It was a great relief after such along delay. I made it to the airport and slept a few hours in a chair, then hung out most of the day waiting for my flight. I think I counted somewhere around 184 ½  hours of delays in getting home to Manchester, but finally around 1:30 or 2 in the morning on Monday I made it back to Wilmslow Road. The first thing I did was get a £1 pizza at Kebab King right across the street from Owens Park.

European Rambles, Pt. IX: Barcelona, Spain and Eyjafjallajökull!

It felt good to get into Spain, a place where I finally knew some of the native language (although in Barcelona most people speak Catalonian, a different brand of the Spanish I learned in high school). Barcelona was one of my favorite cities, because through the thick and thin of all that transpired while I was there I met some great friends and got pretty used to the way the city worked. There are open air markets on almost every street with the freshest, cheapest and most exotic selection of fruits and vegetables I’ve ever seen. I could spend all my time and money at La Boqueria on Las Ramblas and be quite content. It was a massive open air market under a large canopy tent with just about every imaginable food, from cactus juice to fresh octopus. That place was like a paradise for the palate. Las Ramblas is a playground for the rest of the senses. Street performers, artists, birds, flowers, bars, trees on a mile long boulevard stretching down to the shore of the Mediterranean and a statue of Christopher Columbus. I saw Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s famous cathedral which has been under construction for decades and still won’t be completed for another 30 years. I think it was Melville who said an architect’s greatest work is one which will never be completed. In the case of La Sagrada Familia I can see he was right. I walked around with a  Brazilian guy named Fabio who I met at my hostel and saw most of the Old City, which slightly resembled Florence with its narrow streets and ancient cathedrals. Everything in the touristy areas of the city is so visually stimulating it’s hard to put it all into words. I met a brother and sister named Matt and Michaela originally from Delaware but living on an American army base in Germany. We checked out the Olympic Park, which is high above the rest of the city and gives you a panoramic view of the valley. I saw the Montjuic Castle, which is probably the highest point in the city. There’s even a chairlift you can ride to the top. I saw some original Picasso paintings, as well as a long list of others which I wrote down somewhere, at the National Gallery which is up in the Olympic Park area. We also went to this awesome workshop where we made our own paella, tapas and sangria, some of Spain’s traditional dishes. We got to eat what we cooked and it was one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had. Then there’s the churros, the world’s greatest dessert pastry. Churros con dulce de leche are without doubt the most immaculate thing I have ever tasted. I think I got a churro just about every day I was in Barcelona.

4/17 – Thanks to the volcanic eruption in Iceland I was stranded in Barcelona. My Sunday flight to Newcastle was canceled, but luckily (or so I thought) I was able to jump on the last seat of a flight to Stansted outside of London on Monday the 19^th in morning. Throughout the day I walked past a bunch of Gaudi projects. I went off on my own for a visit to Parc du Guell, another masterpiece of Gaudi. It was hot in the park and packed with visitors, but it was still a nice sight to see. Pretty much the park wasn’t the most exciting place in the world, save for this one band that hustled the tourists called the Mañaners. They mixed traditional Spanish and Latin elements with reggae, second wave ska and folk sensibility and they performed with a surprising amount of energy. After the park I had no real plan so I just walked back to my hostel on a roundabout route which took about two and a half hours.

The new hostel I switched into was called Backpacker’s BCN, and it turned out to be pretty good. There was a guy from Colombia who worked there named Harold, and I practiced my Spanish with him. I was pretty rusty so he had to help me along, but he was a cool guy and I had little trouble adjusting to the new place. The first night was not a whole lot of fun as I had to wait around and try to find open flights online while the fury of Thor spewed its igneous malady all over Europe. My return flight to Liverpool would end up getting canceled several times, and I didn’t end up making it back to Manchester until about 2 in the morning on the 26^th. This meant I missed a week of classes, but having only six hours of class time a week, it wasn’t a huge loss.

            On the bright side, I got more time to explore Barcelona. I began to get used to living on a soup can budget in a place where the only supermarkets are out in the open air everyday from dawn until dusk. There were some days during the week which were too relaxed and I didn’t do much of anything, probably as a result of being too comfortable in Barcelona. By the end of the week and a half I spent there I ended up walking around most of the city.

            I also made some more cool friends at the second hostel. There was Lisa from Germany, Ben from California, Lainey from Oregon, Amanda from Iowa, Sean from Eastern Mass., and Mackenzie from Alaska. The last four were studying in Belfast, and we ended up hanging out for most of the week. It was great to talk with other Americans and learned about the differences we had in our observations of our home nation. They got me really interested in taking more time to explore the States a lot more. I’ve been to over 20 different states at one point or another, but I still feel like I haven’t seen 99% of the country. One of the coolest days was Dia de Sant Jordi, which is the Catalonian equivalent of Valentine’s day, only a bit more intellectual on one end. The tradition is the lady to present her man a book, and the man to present his lady a rose. We spent a lot of time on the beach in Barcelona, but the water was too cold to go for a swim. If I thought Rome’s migrant mobile street vendors were bad, Barcelona’s were almost unbearable. That was easily the biggest drawback of the city.

European Rambles, Pt. VIII: Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy

Beyond tired from the past 36 hours of sleeplessness, I arrived in Sardinia to begin what would turn out to be a two week stint of solo travelling. Once an old Roman outpost, the city is now Sardinia’s largest and a popular tourist trap. I met a group of Polish friends and we toured around the city together. They had rented a car and driven across Sardinia together. It seems like everywhere you go you’re bound to run into some really friendly Polish people.

My last day in Cagliari I took an hour bus ride to this resort town called Chia (pronounced Kee-uh) on the southern tip of Sardinia. No one speaks English, or if they do they pretend not to, so getting around proved to be really tough on Sardinia. I was there in the off-season, but during the peak season the island’s population swells from 1 million to 5 million. The bus dropped me off about a 5 minute walk from the beach in Chia. I found a small alcove which was completely deserted. To my right was a small bluff capped by the Torre de Chia, an old lighthouse tower. The landscape behind me was gorgeous, with the grassy dunes rolling down into lush marshy fields and back up into jagged, angular mountains of yellow clay and granite. Olive and pear trees unfolded in neat rows and were complemented by yellow and orange flowers which seemed to be everywhere at once. There were clusters of uniform houses built into hillsides which seemed designed to capture sunlight. I went swimming in the Mediterranean and for early April the water was really warm. After a few hours I tried to get back to the bus stop but I couldn’t figure out the schedule so I had no choice but to walk. It was mid afternoon and my flight out of Cagliari departed at 9:30 in the evening, and on top of that I was about 45 km from Cagliari. I walked all the way through Chia to a nearby town called Pula, which was somewhere between 6 and 10 km of walking. Eventually I saw one of the buses to Cagliari coming down the road and I jumped and flailed like a madman and since I was all alone on the side of the road the driver was kind enough to pull over and let me on.

European Rambles, Pt. VII: Krakow, Poland

Oh man, Krakow was one of my favorite cities. A quietly hidden gem on the divide between Eastern and Western Europe, Krakow is one of Poland’s largest and culturally rich cities. Krakow is definitely a work in progress on the long road to recovery following years of occupation first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets. Many of the city’s centuries-old churches and synogogues survived the troubled times nevertheless, and parts of the city were caught on film in Schindler’s List. Indeed, Schindler’s Factory was on the other side of the river, which Zach and I didn’t get a chance to check out. Everything looks old-fashioned and timeless. There is a huge square in the center of the city with shops and restaurants, all of which are affordable because everything is so cheap in Poland. It takes about 5 Polish zloty to equal $1 U.S. We ate a traditional Polish restaurant where I had a three course meal consisting of borscht, pirogues, and honey-fried chicken, easily one of the best meals I had in Europe. There was a popular snack food called zapiekanka, which  is kind of like a garlic bread with a mushroom spread beneath a layer of cheese, and you top it all off with ketchup. Sounds a bit weird but tastes great. Our stay in Poland ended on a sad note. The day we left Krakow was the same day that the president of Poland and many high-ranking Polish lawmakers were killed in a plane crash. It was a bit awkward leaving our hostel because the folks working there seemed very affected by the incident and we weren’t sure how to react.

Krakow is about an hour and a half from Oswecim, better known as the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. I didn’t write much about my experience there because it’s one of those places that can only be adequately described by being witnessed firsthand. I will say that it’s something everyone who visits Poland should feel obligated to see, and also that I am glad I got the opportunity to see it.

Return to the Eternal City and an Eternal Night in the Infernal City

I  woke up at 5:30 in the morning on Easter Sunday to catch a train from Rimini to Rome to meet my friend Zach. I said my goodbyes to Taylor, Scott and Jess and was out the door and on my way before the sun came up. I got to Termini Station at 10:24 in the morning in a driving rain. I wasn’t set to meet Zach until 2, so I had some time to kill. I set out to go to the Vatican and catch some of the Easter Mass. It was absolutely raining like the ocean got turned upside down, so after an hour’s walk through Rome I was soaked. I got to see the pope! I was disappointed to see street vendors hawking rosaries, people (including cops) smoking and eating, lots of people talking on cell phones, just a large body of generally disinterested witnesses to one of the worlds’ most important figures. But through it all I got to see the end of the mass and then watched the pope make a speech during which he proclaimed “Christ is Risen” in about every language there is. Walking back through the Eternal City of umbrella vendors and ungrateful tourists I felt glad to have made the grueling, soaking trek to the Vatican.

            Around 2 I ran into Zach at Termini Station and we made Nutella and strawberry sandwiches and took long naps. In the evening the rain had let up enough that we were able to go out and explore some. We ate at a restaurant that gave us free wine with our pizza; it was probably the best pizza not from America that I’ve had.

            The next day we met some Turkish girls named Melis, Sira and Nurten who were studying in Poznan, Poland. They invited us out to wander the city with them and we got to see Poet’s Corner and the Parthenon, among several other things. Of all the cities I visited on my rambles, Rome was somewhere in the middle. We found out that they were also on their way to Pisa that night, so we ended up taking the train with them.

After taking a train to Pisa with our newly made Turkish friends, Zach and I stayed up all night in a ridiculously overpriced café. I paid €6,20 (about $8.50) for a small glass of orange juice that was neither orange nor juice. But we made it through the night. We found out Turkish students love to study in Poland. Another group of Turks came in to the café and proceeded to have an animated conversation with our friends which lasted most of the night. Apart from the fact that the entire conversation was in Turkish, which sounds amazing to me but completely incomprehensible, Zach and I were both too tired to get involved. About 5 in the morning we left to go see the Leaning Tower of Pisa before heading to the airport, but it ended up being too cold and too long a walk to be worth it. Instead we just waited for a bus to come along outside of Pisa Centrale. I ended up seeing the  tower from the airplane on my way to Sardinia a few days later. I could tell it was leaning from high up in the air, and that was enough for me. I don’t recommend visiting Pisa if you are ever in Tuscany: there are far better and nicer places to see.

European Rambles, Pt. 5: Rimini, Italy

Rimini is a resort town on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, the Eastern coast of Italy. We arrived there during the height of the low season, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do. Nevertheless we made the most of our 2 days there. Walking along the beach we came across an international Frisbee tournament which appeared to be about the only thing going on in the city. Only thing was none of the Frisbee players seemed that good. I’ve seen better matches played on the slope of Orchard Hill at UMass. The weather wasn’t great – the last bits of winter were still hanging on and it rained most of the time we were in Rimini.

The cool thing about the Old City was that some structures built by the Romans during the reign of Tiberius still stand. This includes part of a brick wall fortifying the city, a marble arch at one end, and at the other a bridge called Ponte de Tiberio over which have raged several battles throughout the centuries.

A Break, A Pause

As the semester winds down I feel like I owe it to myself to take some time and reflect on the parts I can remember. I’ll be home on Sunday, after all. So I’ll take a break from the slow but steady documentation of my spring break trip and focus on what’s currently going through my head.

From the day I got off the plane, January 22^nd, 2010, I was aware that this experience would likely be one of the most eye-opening and life-affirming I will ever have. Now, nearly four and a half months later, and despite numerous ups and downs and starts and stops, I still believe that to be true. Manchester didn’t always like me, and even now I’d say we’re casual friends with each other at best. She tested me, made me question everything I stand for in one way or another. Sometimes she was loud and obtuse; other times she was subtle and patient. I’ve learned more about what it takes to do what you want to do. At first, I hid behind my American background and refused to be broken in by the Mancunian way. Every aspect of life as I knew it was still there, it’s just that more or less was expected of me in different areas. Classes, for example. Meet once a week for fifty minutes, read an entire novel, come back the next week and analyze it exhaustively. You need not know your professor, because he doesn’t want to know you. You might walk by him every day out on the street and he still wouldn’t bat an eyelid at you. Then write a 2,500 word paper for 40% of your grade and take a two hour final for the remaining 60%. Know your critics. Let the critics speak for you. Your opinion only matters when you can support it by the work of “professional” critics. Being able to do close readings is an added bonus, but again, be wary of those critics. Don’t expect to get anything higher than a 70 on any assessed material; remember, when your work is compared to the highest criticism in the field, chances are you’ll be exposed as a pedantic, inarticulate moron. Passing with a 40 is okay, though.

I finished my last exam about 2 hours ago, and it feels great to be all done. It wasn’t actually that extreme after all, probably because I’m used to having constant small assignments instead of occasional massive ones. The academic system here is one thing I won’t miss, but it’s taught me how to become a better writer and researcher. I feel like no task is too large now.

Anyway, I think I can say that to Manchester I am a fair-weather friend in every sense of the term. In the raw and rainy winter months I had trouble enjoying everything. Not to say that I didn’t have fun, because I certainly did, and met some great people along the way. As the weather’s warmed up (it stays light out until 10 at night here!) I’ve warmed up to my environment accordingly. Now that I’m leaving I wish I could have a few extra days or weeks. The realization has hit that I won’t be back here for a long long time, maybe even forever. And if I do come back the experience I have will be completely different.

I often wonder what it would have been like if I had spent this semester in Spain or Africa or Thailand or Australia. I’m sure wherever I went I would have had an awesome time. But I feel like Manchester, although it’s certainly not the most desirable destination out there, has helped me to learn more about who I am and what I like to do. I’m glad that my experience here progressed the way it did, improving gradually as I’ve gone along. It’s not been some instant revelation that solves all my problems and gives me a plan of exactly where I want to go next, and I’ve learned to accept that and just roll with the punches, always keeping in mind that where I am in the world at any given time is always the best place for me to be.

European Rambles Part 4: Firenze, Italy

Upon arriving at the train station in Florence, I wasn’t too impressed. But as soon as we took a turn off the main road I promptly changed my opinion. All of the architecture is authentic or made to look centuries old, and all of the streets are neatly cobbled. Each corner holds a fresh surprise, whether it’s an open air marketplace or a street filled with gelaterias and pizzerias. The first evening we stumbled upon il Duomo, the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, which is by far the city’s most eye-catching and memorable structure. Most of it was built during the 14th century with green and pink marble and an intricate copper facade added during the 19th century. When you look at the outside of the cathedral it makes everything around it look like part of an unfinished finger painting project by a five year old. After that we went to Ponte Vecchio, a bridge with shops on it. There we got this panoramic view of the city spilling into an amazing sunset landscape of mountains, ruins, and golden clouds. It looked like a living breathing Michelangelo painting. 

The next day, our only full day in Florence we were able to undertake a more thorough exploration of the city. It was rainy and chilly in the morning, but by the end of the day things had warmed up again. In the afternoon we crossed the river to the less touristy side of the city and climbed this steep hill to a place that was called Forte di Belvedere. From there most of the valley could be seen on all sides. On Piazzela Michelangelo nearby there was an even better view. We got to the top of the hill right around dusk. Looking down on Florence all of the light and colors seemed to bleed in the direction of il Duomo. The rest of our time in the city was great, but Florence has really expensive gelato, (I paid 5 euro for 2 scoops at one place) and it’s not even that good. Save your cash and hold out for soft serve ice cream.