Food and Friends in London

Posted on November 13, 2011 by tsraveling

Kate and I are on the bus by eleven, and by one the dark untamed landscape of Scotland is already fading into the green farmlands of England, cultivated and tame for centuries now. They have a different sort of beauty, but already I miss the crags, the heather, the dark pine forests we’re leaving behind.

The ride is a long one — nine hours — and by the time we finally drift into the outskirts of London Kate’s asleep on my left and the sky outside is dark. London passes by, mile after mile of city lights, crowd after crowd of busy Londoners, chip shop after neon-lit chip shop. It’s a far cry from Edinburgh, but despite my personal lack of enthusiasm for the city, it feels good somehow to be back in one of the world’s great centers of transit.

We leave the bus and enter the Underground, and half an hour later we’re at King’s Cross, a five minute walk from SOAS, where Shreya is now ensconced as a student on yet another scholarship. She meets us walking hand-in-hand with her boyfriend, Adam, and we go out to a small neighborhood restaurant for a late supper. Afterwards, we return to her little room. It’s small, but comfortable enough, and we stay up talking before finally going to sleep.

The next day, my life changes.

Kate, a brilliant cook in her own right and quite a connoisseur of good food (or ‘snob,’ as I called it, before my life was changed), has convinced me to visit St. John, a restaurant that’s only been around for a little over fifteen years, is set up in what used to be a Chinese beer store with attached garage, and is regularly listed as one of the top fifty restaurants in the world. While a meal costs much more than what I’d usually spend, it’s spectacularly low for the sorts of names its usually mentioned in the same sentence with.

Courtesy of Patricia Niven

The founders, chefs Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver, designed their experience entirely around the food. Kate tells me it was a major influence on the casual gourmet scene in Portland. Its lack of emphasis on theater is almost theater in itself: we’re greeted as we sit down by a grinning red-haired waiter in a work-stained apron, holding a notepad. The menu changes daily based on what local ingredients can be had, but our waiter still knows every item, and what wines will go best with it. I sit back and let Kate do the talking, and there’s a ten minute conversation before she’s finally settled on a spread of appetizers, two bottles of wine, and a couple of main courses. There’s no music, but the large white room is alive with loud conversation. The three tables in the center are long, with fifteen or more seats a piece, and at each of these, a feast is being served.

Courtesy of Patricia Niven

The feasts are one of the restaurant’s specialties; as we wait, a whole roasted pig is brought out and placed in the center, to the applause of those gathered around it. Their meal is already in full swing when we arrive, and doesn’t wrap up until just before we leave, almost three hours later.

Kate’s made her choices, and the first courses begin to arrive; razor clams in lemon, butter, and thyme, cauliflower and lima beans with capers and even more butter, crusty bread from St. John’s in-house bakery, and a ham-and-pea soup that rather impressively outdoes its very British-sounding name. St. John also has its own smokehouse, and that’s obvious in the quality of the meat.

Courtesy of Laurie Fletcher

We slowly work through these, and the empty dishes are replaced by escargot, a meat pate made from half a dozen different cuts, and — the truly critical item — marrow still in the bone, with thin spoons to extract it. One bite, spread on thin-sliced toasted bread, and my mind explodes in fireworks of sheer happiness.

This, I think, in a daze, is the best thing I have ever eaten.

I eat as slowly as I can, savoring it, wishing there was more when it’s gone; but the main courses are already on their way. Wild game: widgeon and rabbit. I immediately recognize the taste of the widgeon, though Kate doesn’t — it’s exactly like wild duck, the kind I grew up with, from hunting trips down in the river bottom with my dad. What’s impressive is that it’s actually tender, which is difficult with this kind of game, and is accompanied by a sauce that actually accents and improves the gaminess, rather than simply trying to overwhelm it the way a sweet honey sauce might do.

We’re slowing down now, but there’s still more: the desert. One is a “Queen of Puddings”, thick and warmly sweet, with wild berries on the bottom and cream to pour across the top as we eat. The other I’d call, in any other circumstance, a brownie. In this case, it feels like blasphemy. It’s definitely chocolate, and roughly square, but it’s impossibly rich, kept just short of too much by sliced cherries to be eaten along with it. Even so, Kate and I between us are only able to finish half of it. As we eat, we pass glasses of dessert wine back and forth between us, which our knowledgeable waiter has recommended. They complement their respective desserts perfectly.

When we finally stagger out, it’s one-thirty in the morning, and already I’m having flashbacks. We’re talking, and my eyes glaze over; marrow, my mind says. It’s like post-traumatic stress disorder, but of happiness.

This continues through the next day, but I slowly recover, enough to make a Georgian meal for Kate and Shreya and Adam a couple days later. It’s not bad, and before my life was changed, I thought it was pretty good. Now, though, there’s a higher mark to reach, a whole level of inspiration I didn’t even know existed. Yes, I think, musingly, I actually would spend five hundred dollars on a meal, if it came down to it. I pause. Hell yes.

“So,” Kate says, “the number one restaurant in the world is in Denmark.”

I pause again, then nod judiciously. “Hell yes.”

But for now, our time is up. Kate and I wake up on our last day and pack blearily. We say goodbye to Shreya and Adam at SOAS, then take the Underground back to Victoria. She’s got a bus to catch, and time is short; selfishly, I will her to miss it, and to spend another night in London.

She doesn’t. We arrive just in time, and say goodbye as the bus is boarding. We agree to meet again, sooner or later, and hitchhike through Italy and France, all the way up to Denmark, camping in fields and eating at the best restaurants in Europe, and maybe, if we have time and aren’t too full, change the world while we’re at it.

I watch her board, watch the doors close. It’s strange, I think, to make what will probably be a lifelong friendship in so short a time. When I turn to go, it’s not as easy as it usually is.

But the world’s ahead, all blank canvas and archaic inscriptions that read “here be dragons.”

It’s time to travel on.

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Settling Down

Posted on November 7, 2011 by tsraveling

Ullapool’s a quiet little town, and I spend my night there reading and writing. A bus the next day takes me back to Edinburgh.

I’ve made a decision; my reasons for not flying on this trip is that flying has a tendency to separate one place from another, and removes your ability to see what lies in between. Night buses, while less extreme, tend to do the same thing. I want to see the places I go through, and so I listen to audiobooks — the history of Rome — as the Scottish Highlands roll past outside. A storm chases us south, and the light on the dark hills and crags alternates between gold and gray as we go.

I make it back to Edinburgh in the evening and am greeted by my friends there. Initially, I plan to stay for a week; but as days pass, the date of my departure moves further and further away. For the first time on this trip, and for one of the few times in my life, I feel as if I belong in a place. Briefly, ever so briefly, I consider giving up this quest for the time being, getting an apartment, and settling into the routine of Edinburgh life: wake up, write, work, eat, then go out to the pub with my friends for a night of conversation. Our backgrounds are varied enough to provide us with a wide range of topics, from science and economics, to history and archaeology, to literature, art, music, film, television. I find myself wondering if, ten or twenty years down the road, these friends of mine will be known beyond just the pubs and cafes of Edinburgh.

Toward the end of September, some friends and I go to a burlesque show called “Confusion is Sex,” a local mainstay. It’s meant to be fancy dress, and the four of us fit ourselves out in evening finery. In my case, I borrow a tuxedo, which fits surprisingly well. I learn to tie a bow tie, finally breaking my one-time resolution to never tie a bit of cloth around my neck just because the Parisians of the 17th century found the Croatian mercenaries employed by Louis XIII of France fetching.

Friends ready for Confusion is Sex

The venue is the Bongo club, and the evening opens with a take on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with a bit of improvisational theatrics thrown in; actors dressed like characters from the movies accost random visitors and make melodramatic accusations of treachery and adultery and one-night trysts over cereal and tea.

Then the main event; a cavernous room filled with people losing themselves to electropop beneath strobelights, punctuated by carefully choreographed burlesque acts. Given the intro, the acts themselves are surprisingly unimaginative, and so I turn to the audience; as a dancer teases off clothing under the spotlights, a young man slow dances with his girl, his back conspicuously to the stage. Is it love, I wonder, or just making a point? The music resumes, and two men dance in the corner, shyly. There’s no way of knowing what their daylight lives are like, or what their worlds expect of them, but here in the noise and darkness, no one is watching.

A month later, my departure date is no longer receding. While I don’t look forward to leaving this city and my friends here, my feet are starting to feel that old familiar itch, and the road beckons. One night, a week or so before I leave, Kate the hitchhiker and musician shows up in Edinburgh again, to the delight of all. She and Thom and I take a trip up to St. Andrews over my last weekend, where I visit an old friend of mine, John, from back in the States.

St. Andrews is a university town, home to the third oldest university in the Anglophone world. It’s small and rich, with students nineteen or twenty years old walking about arm-in-arm in two-hundred-pound sweaters and leather shoes. My friend John, in contrast, has been working for the last year and a half in Kabul, and is studying Central Asian and Middle Eastern security; his fellow security students, with their experiences in Tajikistan, Libya, Syria, and other little-visited places of the world, make for a tight-knit group and are a blast to hang out with. One of them, a sharp-tongued Englishman called Richard, writes down the directions to his favorite restaurant in Tripoli, and tells me Libya should open up for travel by spring.

Kate, Thom and I leave at the end of the weekend, and miss the last direct bus due to problems on the route, and spend six hours on what should be a two hour journey, taking local buses from little town to little town, in what turns out to be one of the most ridiculous legs of travel I’ve yet experienced — six transfers, including one at the Edinburgh airport, before we finally get back into town after midnight, starving but triumphant at not having had to sleep under a bench somewhere.

Kate’s heading back to the States in a week, and she and I decide to visit Shreya in London before parting ways. There’s a last night, with chess and pints and live Scottish music, and then goodbyes are said. As Kate and I head to the station the next morning, fully packed and ready to be on the road, the sky is unusually blue. As we wait in line to board our bus I realize that, whatever else happens on this journey, I’ll eventually make it back to Edinburgh. It’s only a matter of time.

Me in St. Andrews

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South Uist to Stornoway

Posted on September 28, 2011 by tsraveling

The crossing from Barra to South Uist is rough and windswept, but short, and when we reach the other side Barra’s still visible behind the low mist and clouds. A bus meets us at the ferry. My hostel for the night is two miles off the main road, so the bus drops me at the junction and I walk the rest of the way. By now, the weather’s clearing, so I enjoy the walk — but two miles later, I see no sign of a hostel. The closest thing is a house with a hand-painted sign on the gate that says “Glendale Bunkhouse.” As I stand there, wondering, an elderly lady with a cane comes out and waves to me.

“Is this the hostel?” I ask. “The one owned by the musician?”

“Hostel?” she says. “Is that what Paul’s calling it these days? Yes, yes, come in.”

Five minutes walk from the bunkhouse

‘Bunkhouse’ is really a more fitting term — the lodging is a long, low building behind the house, lined on one side with beds, and heated at one end with a peat-fired stove. I find that I quite like it and, being as far off the road as it is, I have the place to myself. I take the opportunity of a sunny afternoon to walk out in the hills behind the house toward the coast, and am treated to some of the best scenery I’ve seen yet, beautiful rolling hills tinged purple with heather rolling all the way out to the sea. Across the bay is the little port town of Lochboisdale, with its whitewashed houses and boats tooling in and out.

There are no trees on the island — Paul, the musician owner of the hostel, later tells me that there used to be, before the Vikings arrived and cut them down to built houses and ships. The growing cycle being what it was, the trees never made a comeback — though, because of the heather and dense low plants of the hills, these islands haven’t been victim to as much soil erosion as other deforested islands have been. So instead of wood, the locals burn peat, which looks more or less like dried and cured chunks of sod, but, once you get it going, burns long and well, with an earthy, sweetish smoke of the sort you get when you burn rotten logs. I come across one of these peat bogs up in the hills — there’s a cart there with one wheel gone, that was once used to haul peat down, but was left there when it broke. When I return, the old woman — Paul’s mother — tells me who it belonged to, which house he lives in, and how long it’s been since the cart was left. Bloodlines here go back a long ways — Paul’s mother was born in this house in the thirties, in the same room where she now sleeps. With less than two thousand people on the island, everyone seems to know everyone else.

Their insulation from the mainland shows — these islands are one of the few places left in the world where Gaelic (the Scots Islands variety, pronounced Gallic) is spoken by many as a first language, and is still used on a day-to-day conversational basis. You hear it in shops, on the streets, in the buses, at least as much as you hear English.

The next day is sunday, and the islands have shut down for the Sabbath. I spend the day, which is rainy and windy again, reading and working beside the fire. That night a cyclist, Ken from Malaysia via a few years in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, shows up and we talk languages.

From there I head up to Howmore, another thatched bunkhouse further north and on the west coast of the Island. Nearby is a long sand beach, windswept and empty, with nothing to the west until you hit Newfoundland. A local museum proudly displays an assortment of items that have washed up over the years, the most interesting of which is a two-foot-high African statue carved from dark wood. I spend a day exploring, leaving my backpack behind, and miss the last bus back — but these are the islands, and hitching is a matter of waiting on the side of the road for ten minutes and looking hopeful.

From Howmore north, through the wider North Uist, past the incongruous and identical cinderblock apartment buildings of the military base there, and out across the causeway to Berneray. This trip, not so far as the crow flies, includes three bus switches, including one that also doubles as the mail carrier. Houses on these islands are spread out, communities scattered, which makes the local buses a center of socializing and gossip. One man in his thirties stumbles on in one little town, reeling slightly at three in the afternoon, and has a short drunken conversation with a shop worker headed home. He gets off a few stops later, there’s a silence, and the driver says, “That Tommy, he’s going too much down the road of his old dad.” The gray-bearded man seated behind her nods sadly. “Aye,” he says, “aye.”

The Berneray Hostel

The bus turns around next to the Berneray hostel, a pair of white buildings with thatch roofs right on a wide white beach and overlooking the rocky shallows between here and Harris. Every few hours the ferry goes, weaving slowly through a course dredged out for depth and marked by brightly colored buoys. Berneray has even less people than many of the other islands, and is mostly “machair” — a highly nutritious concoction of peat and sand that coats the whole island in soft grass and clusters of flowers. In many places the sheep keep whole hillsides looking like close-cropped lawns, a fairly common feature in Scotland, and it’s no surprise that golf was first invented here.

I walk across Berneray on one of the most beautiful days yet, then down for a few miles on a wide unbroken beach of white sand broken occasionally by sunburnt rocks. There are meant to be ruins here, from the Norse days and before, but I don’t see any of them. The natural scenery is enough.

Only a day in Berneray; I have work to do, and that requires a few more of the trappings of civilization than these islands have to offer. Harris, next, where I stay in a proper hostel called Am Bothan, which greets its guests with a sign set up beside a massive whale backbone, and has a lifeboat hanging from the high rafters inside.

Moving from Harris north to Lewis, I see the first real mountains of these islands, lifting high up into the clouds, dark and imposing after the soft grassy hills of Berneray and the Uists. Here, too, are people; still scattered, but not so much, and the buses north are large and fast and lacking in gossip.

I end up in Stornoway, the only city (of a sort) in these islands. I stay for a few days, working and exploring. I take an afternoon to visit the Callanish standing stones, jagged and a little lost, bearing the awestruck gaze of tourists and their cameras impassively.

I take another to visit the northern coast with an American translator living in Germany and a British police trainee; on this northwestern side, there are no beaches or glacier-smoothed hills. Just rocky cliffs descending to a rough sea, and in one place, the overgrown foundations of an old clan fortress on an isolated rock connected to the main island by only a narrow bridge across a sea-filled crevasse.

On Monday afternoon, there’s a ferry back to Ullapool on the Scottish mainland. As Stornoway falls behind us the sun comes out for a moment, lighting everything up, and then the clouds roll back in and the sea opens up around us.

Stornoway, from the ferry out

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West to the Outer Hebrides

Posted on September 11, 2011 by tsraveling

Iceland, it seems, is going to have to wait. My desire to see a bit more of Scotland, combined with finding a relatively cheap apartment in Paris for the month of October, has made me decide to put off Iceland until next spring. In the meantime, I spend my last couple of weeks in Edinburgh working and writing, sitting outside when it’s nice enough. By the time I leave the city, my first notebook is nearly full.

I leave Edinburgh on a Monday evening, having made my goodbyes, and board a train headed west. The first hour is on a cramped commuter train to Glasgow, and then I switch at the Queen Street station to one bound for Oban — the first leg, in fact, of the West Highland Line I took the last time I was in Scotland. We pass along the long and winding shores of a loch before climbing up into the mountains. In the fading light of evening they’re dark, craggy, densely furred with forest in the valleys and climbing to soft heather meadows near the top. Once, we pass a road climbing over a hilltop, where two figures are briefly silhouetted against the sky.

Dark falls as we near Oban. Two girls get thrown off the train for smoking and drinking in the toilets, which causes a minor scandal among the other passengers, and then we crest a hill to see the dark expanse of the ocean and the cluster of lights at the shore that is Oban. Stepping off the train into the wet night air, I look out to see a pretty little town wrapped around a bay full of fishing boats. When I get to my hostel, I book two extra nights.

The next day, however, is anything but pretty. A strong constant wind drives the rain in horizontal sheets, soaking anyone foolish enough to go outside, and even the Scots are reluctant to be about. One woman, taking shelter in a doorway, tells me apologetically that it’s the hurricane’s fault; Oban is usually much nicer. So instead of being out, I go in; Oban’s home to a fine single-malt Scotch distillery, and tours are only a few pounds. I’m not allowed to take pictures, unfortunately, but I still enjoy the tour, and learning how specific notes in Oban Scotch, such as sea salt, citrus, and honey, are all brought about through the process of distillation — no flavoring is added.

I contemplate buying a bottle, but they don’t sell anything smaller than the full size, and besides, I have a plan for an extravagant expense already. Oban is the seafood capital of Scotland, and without fail the one restaurant that gets recommended by everyone is the “one with the red roof down by the pier” — known officially as Ee-Usk. On my last night in Oban, when the weather’s cleared up a bit and the sun is shining on the ocean, I get a table and order a fish platter — sea bass, monkfish, and halibut — with a sweet white wine, and then for desert, toffee pudding with thick cream, and a cup of coffee. It’s expensive — more so, in fact, than that night’s lodging — but entirely worth it, and will make the resulting next few weeks of living off of bread and cheese all that much more endurable.

Early on the morning of the 8th, I board the Caledonian MacBryne ferry to the tiny island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides. Close to the Scottish coast, the islands that pass us by are densely packed. It looks less like an archipelago than a mountainous plain some mischievous deity has filled with water — and of course, that’s more or less what it is. The plateau of the Scottish Highlands slants down the further west you go on it, and the islands here, like Mull, for instance, are the mountaintops and mesas of a flooded landscape.

Further out, though, we pass the last of these and head into open ocean. The sea is a bit rough, with three and four foot swells, and there are more than few green-tinted passengers staring anxiously at the horizon for any sign of our destination. Before arrival, we dock at Coll and Tiree, and the difference in geology and ecology is immediately apparent. These islands are low and grassy, more eroded by time and weather, and the few rocks that do show are whitish, jumbled, prone to crumbling into gravel. Barra is another three hours west far enough away that it’s not visible on the horizon when we round the shore of Tiree.

When it does finally appear, and when it draws closer, my first look at Castlebay is of a tiny scattered town of white cottages, and, in the middle of it’s bay, the eponymous castle on a low rocky island. I learn later that the castle is a clan holding of the MacNeils, currently on lease to Historic Scotland for the next thousand years, at the price of one pound and a bottle of whiskey, paid annually to the clan chief.

My hostel in Castlebay is quiet and cozy and small, a welcome relief after the noise and size of the one in Oban. But the day’s nice, and bad weather’s on its way, so I do some exploring, taking the loop bus around the perimeter of the island for a couple of pounds.

Castlebay Main Street

The west coast is home to spectacular long sandy beaches, a common feature in the Outer Hebrides, that would be a world renowned tourist attraction if it weren’t for the near-constant rains and high winds. Barra’s airport, in fact, is a building set up beside one of these — it’s one of only two beach airports in the world, and is only open for business at low tide. It’s the first thing I’ve seen yet that makes me want to break my rules and take a flight.

Barra's Airport

The next day is rainy and windy, though, so I spend most of it indoors, transcribing my writing work from my notebook onto my computer, and talking with a few of the hostel’s other guests. Then it’s time to move on, and the next morning I head north to take the ferry to South Uist.

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Festivals and New Friends

Posted on August 28, 2011 by tsraveling

As the bus that took Shreya and I from London to Edinburgh pulls out and carries on north, the city falls silent around us. It’s two in the morning, damp and cool. I have an apartment for the month, and Shreya’s staying at the university for her creative writing program, but neither of us feels like trying to find them at this time in the morning. So instead, Shreya’s found us a place on Couchsurfing. After a few minutes, our host walks up and greets us. His name is Joel: long hair, bearded, born Swedish but grown up in Australia (with the accent to match), he’s full of energy despite the late hour, and points out landmarks as we walk past them in the dark: Princes Street in Newtown, the Sir Walter Scott monument, like a cathedral tower sliced off and set up dark and gothic on the side of the narrow valley that holds the train station. Beyond, the steep climb to High Street, the center of the old city, and to the right, Edinburgh’s castle.

The next morning Joel shows us around, and introduces us to a circle of friends that I’ll continue to hang out with for the rest of my stay in Edinburgh. Damian, with the long hair of a Viking and the style sense of a Russian officer from the turn of the last century, who grew up in Portugal, speaks a handful of Latin languages, and isn’t precisely “from” anywhere; Oisin, an Irishman who enjoys the “aesthetic” of the hippy life but is nonetheless a hardcore rationalist and a materialist; Mark and Yalena, students from Canada and Serbia who are gearing up for a visit to India in a month or so. We eat a fantastic meal at a local organic and fair trade food shop that is a far cry from the greasy haggis and soggy chips that were my introduction to food in Scotland on my last visit.

Edinburgh itself is already busy when we arrive, and quickly becomes frenetic over the next few days. The Fringe festival and International festival mean every bar is hosting comedy shows or music, every theater has concerts or ballets or operas, and every street-corner has a talented busker performing magic tricks or beatboxing or juggling flaming torches. The Book Festival, which starts a week and a half later, injects a third layer of literary energy to the whole mix, and Edinburgh’s multitude of bookstores open their doors to a surge of clientele. People on the streets chatter about this famous author or that famous musician who’s been seen in this museum or that pub. At one point, during a performance in the Forest Cafe, Neil Gaiman stands up to do an impromptu song with the accordion player, to much applause.

As for the city: it’s dark stone and steeply slanted roofs, chimneys and exposed rock, narrowly medieval around High Street and expansively imperial around Princes Street. Along the east side curves a high green ridge and, at its highest point, the stony outcrop of Arthur’s Seat. The sea isn’t far: you can see it if you stand on Drummond, or if you’re walking north on Nicholson, and for a pound thirty you can take the bus to the harbor at Leith. It rains most days, but the Scots are used to that, and the pubs are always warm and dry.

For me, though, Edinburgh is about the people. That first happenstance meeting with Joel as a couchsurfing host quickly expands; there’s Kate, an American girl whose main occupation in life at the moment is to wander as cheaply and widely as possible while playing beautiful music and making excellent food. There’s Ciaran and Donal, a pair of half-brothers who only found out about each other via Facebook a few months back and so far seem to be getting on famously. Thom, a physicist studying at Edinburgh, who plays the guitar and sings, and who, with Kate, does a killer acoustic cover of “Boyz-in-the-Hood.” Chris, the seemingly constantly high Scotsman from up north who plays the blues in local pubs with real southern soul. And more, always more: it’s impossible to sit outside at a cafe and write without seeing someone I know walk by, which usually ends up in a three hour conversation and more coffees than are good for my wallet.

And Shreya, of course. Though I’ve known her for two years through correspondence, it’s great to get to know her in person; we hang out and write, visit bookstores, and sit for author talks at the book festival. We make a trip one day out to North Berwick, a little town on the coast east of Edinburgh. It’s rainy, and ends up in quite a scare involving a lost passport, which fortunately the local police find and return a few days later.

Now, my time here is coming to an end. While I’d originally planned to visit Iceland next, the weather and my pocketbook are making me daydream about places both sunny and cheap. So, I may spend a few weeks exploring Scotland, and then head back into mainland Europe via Amsterdam. From Holland, south: France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco. After that, I’ll probably spend the winter skipping around the Mediterranean, to Tunisia, Malta, Italy, Greece and Turkey, hopefully meeting up with my brother for Christmas, and then swinging back up north in the spring.

So: I’m looking for advice. What inexpensive, warm places would you recommend? Or, am I crazy to forgo Iceland at the moment? Let me know below.

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North to London

Posted on August 11, 2011 by tsraveling

The English Channel Tunnel must be one of the most boring technological wonders in the world. It’s more than fifty kilometers long, took six years and almost double the original estimated cost, and has since its completion survived fires, technical breakdowns, and attempted crossings by illegal immigrants. And yet when you travel through it, none of this is apparent. All you see is a rail-yard with oddly oversized train cars in neat lines on tracks leading into the ground. The moment your bus drives into one of these cars is the greatest novelty of the trip; after that there’s a flicker of lights, a hum of movement, and half an hour later you’re rolling back off the train into another rail-yard — on the other side of the Dover strait.

The disconnect between the intellectual impact of the journey and the lack of a visceral one is quickly forgotten, though, as the rocky slopes of the southeast English coastal region rise outside. Our bus climbs into the hills and gives us just a glimpse of Dover’s white cliffs before we pass into the clumps of forest and green farms that alternate in the country alongside the road.

Then, London: immense, sprawling, with nearly an hour from the time we enter the city’s outskirts until our bus finally pulls into the Victoria Coach Station. After weeks of rain in Belgium, London is surprisingly warm and sunny, and I enjoy the walk from the bus station to the tube. Twenty minutes underground brings me up to the surface at Edgware Road, in a middle eastern immigrant district in northwest London. My hostel, the Green Man, is right next to the tube station and is located above an old pub. There’s music there most nights, ranging from talented local singers to some truly horrific karaoke.

Hyde Park

I don’t spend much time there, aside from breakfast and sleeping. Between paychecks at the moment, I’m living frugally, walking everywhere and eating out of grocery stores. As a result, I see more of London itself than I would have otherwise; I spend a day walking first south through Hyde Park, where soccer games are being played under a patchy gray-blue sky, and into the whitewashed and stately embassy district beyond it. Then southeast to the Thames, where I find an old man wrestling with a fishing pole, bent double. Throwing a glance at me, he says “hold this!” and thrusts the rod into my hands — I brace it while he pulls in the string by hand. On the end is an eel as long as my leg. The old man grins: “this makes my fourth one,” he says, “now off to supper!”

On the advice of my sister, I walk past Buckingham Palace, but can’t manage to catch a glimpse of Prince William. I walk around the Tate, which is free, then head back as the light softens and warms on the grays and whites and occasional patches of color on the London cityscape.

Another day I meet Tom, a friend of a friend, and we head out for lunch at a Polish cafe before spending the rest of the afternoon walking around and talking about books and travel and international politics. He takes me through a street market in south London where fruits and vegetables are on display at shockingly (for London, at any rate) low prices, and where the people move in a loose mass between fruit stalls and discount electronics carts.

My final day in London I check out of the Green Man and head into the city, where I lock my backpack up at the bus station to wait for my 4:30pm bus to Edinburgh. I’m meeting Shreya here, a friend I’ve actually never met in person; a couple of years ago, when I was traveling through Greece and writing about it, she started reading this blog at the same time I was reading one of her articles on Matador, and we started exchanging emails; the rest, as they say, is history. I meet her around lunch at the Shakespeare Cafe a few blocks from the station. She’s spending a few weeks in Edinburgh as well, on a scholarship for a creative writing program, and we’re taking the same bus to Scotland; while we wait, we walk across the river and wander through a park, where we find a buddhist shrine with a little girl running around its base and occasionally peeking out at passing tourists.

The day passes quickly; we board the bus in the afternoon and make our way back to a pair of hard seats placed directly over the engine, and twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the bus. Shreya’s crossed five time zones and has been traveling for the last three days, so she falls asleep quickly, and I move a seat ahead so she can stretch out. I try to read and ignore the temperature.

In Newcastle, the emergency door, directly beside me, swings open, and two swaying Scotsmen are blinking into the bus. It’s clear enough that they’re drunk, but takes me a good few minutes to figure out that they’re actually speaking English — their accent is thick enough already, and a night of heavy drinking means that I never understand more than about a fourth of what they’re trying to say.

I gather they want a free ride back to Scotland, though, because they loudly clamber in and slam the emergency exit behind them, before hunkering down in the back of the bus to hide until we’re moving. The rest of the Scottish crowd on at Newcastle, a group of five girls, is giggling and whispering at our two stowaways to stay quiet while our driver gets on, sits down behind the wheel, and puts the bus in motion without ever looking into the back.

Our new Scottish friends are talking loudly, and impossible to ignore (though Shreya somehow manages to sleep through most of it), so I think: if you can’t beat them, join them, and we talk for the next couple of hours up to Edinburgh. One of the girls, a little younger than I am, already has “two wee bairns” back at home; in Scotland, new mothers are often very young.

By now it’s dark outside, with rain misting on and off, and when we finally clear a rise and see the sparkling lights of Edinburgh outside I wake Shreya and start getting my things together. The Scots pile off the bus as we stop to light up cigarettes, despite their extremely high cost in the U.K., and Shreya and I look around at our new city for the next few weeks. We’re couchsurfing tonight in the city center, since she can’t stay in her dorm yet and I don’t feel like finding my apartment south of town at two in the morning, but at the moment none of it matters. The air is cool and damp, the buildings old and grand, and I’m happy to be here.

London in the evening

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In Bruges

Posted on July 29, 2011 by tsraveling

The train from Antwerp to Bruges takes less than two hours, a rattling across low green fields and through villages with narrow block houses. Above, gray skies that would be more or less a constant for the next week and a half. From the Bruges station it’s ten minutes walking to the center of town. The streets are narrow and cobbled, and pass over a canal here and there, or a grand old church made the more imposing by the dark skies overhead.

My hostel is located in the floors above a dark restaurant lit by candles and lamps, with dark wood beams and replications of medieval tapestries hung on the walls. I look around and make up my mind; I need to get some work done, and it might as well be here. I extend my reservation from two days to twelve and drop my pack before heading out to explore.

While I’m generally pretty good at finding my way back to a place I’ve been, even without a map, Bruges is a different story. This city is often called the “Venice of the North” because of its network of canals, but the name could fit some of the twisting streets just as well. You navigate by church steeples, as they’re far taller than any other building in the city, and a chance misplacement of one before I leave keeps me circling until dark, when I finally find a map and make my way back to the hostel. With a good walk under my belt and a better understanding of the city’s layout, I go to sleep happy with my choice to stay.

This is a working visit, and so for the first week I hardly get any exploring in. My hostel restaurant opens for breakfast and closes again until dinner at six in the evening, but I can work there otherwise since it has power plugins and free wifi (surprisingly rare in Bruges). My day starts at around 8, when I wake up and walk out into the city to get a coffee at a cafe and write for a couple of hours. Then I go back to the hostel, where I sit and work until the restaurant opens again. I walk out, read on a bench or get coffee and write some more, then find someplace to work a bit more on batteries or head back to the hostel to talk with the new arrivals.

My morning writing setup

At any hostel, being there for more than a few days makes you a veteran of sorts, and during my stay I see a constant flow of other travelers pass through. The first day there’s a couple of young guys from the States on their way down to Italy to try to learn Italian in a few weeks. The next, there’s Jesse from North Carolina, who’s headed to a metal festival in Germany, Karlie, a Kiwi on vacation from teaching in an English-speaking school in Abu Dhabi who’s heading up to the U.K. to see her fiancée, and a trio of girls from Austria who like my name because it’s one syllable and easy to remember. Next there’s Chenoa, an Australian linguistics student getting ready to study German in Germany, a random assortment of Aussies and Spaniards, and a Japanese or Korean couple here and there.

I get to know the staff as well, staying there as long as I am and working inside the hostel as much as I do. There’s Hanne at the desk, who speaks an impressive assortment of languages and works the day shift while I work across the room. Peter the cook, with a shaved head and a pierced eyebrow and a friendly smile for anyone who comes by. Masroud, the hostel’s jack-of-all-trades from Pakistan. Dominic, the tall older guy who lives upstairs, who’s slowly scraping down an outside wall to paint while taking frequent breaks to have a smoke or a coffee or talk about plans for the future. Hakir from Albania, who starts each workday with a cigarette and cup of coffee, and occasionally makes one for me as well if I happen to be nearby. Sabine, the owner, who’s in her late forties and comes in at night. With her weathered face, blue jeans, and plaid shirts, she could fit right in back in Montana, if not for the Dutch accent.

As the days go by I come to realize I rather like working while I travel. Traveling alone in a new country with nothing to do but sightsee is a sure recipe for eventual boredom and restlessness. Work lends some structure to my days and makes me appreciate the free time I do get, and goes a long way to making this new way of living seem less like an interminable vacation and more simply a different kind of lifestyle.

For those who are interested, this is how my business model works: I have clients in the States who I communicate with via email or Skype calls. I make iPhone applications, and my beta builds and their resources are shared via Dropbox, which updates automatically whenever you have internet but is still available offline. For banking, I use Charles Schwab, which lets me handle all my finances — even check processing from clients — remotely. It also redeems any ATM fees, which works perfectly given that some ATMs around the world charge as much as five or eight dollars for an international transaction.

Toward the end of my trip we finally have a marginally sunny day and I head out with Elke, Anoek, and Kyra, students on vacation from Holland. We visit the Chocolate Museum, where we find out about the relationships between chocolate and human sacrifice in the Incan empire, see the famous Belgian methods of chocolate-making,, and finally gaze upon the wonder that is the 500+ kilo Chocolate Obama (an old man I meet later tells me that the chocolatiers here were happy because “it’s a long time since any brown people were famous in Belgium”).

We spend the rest of the day walking around, and I enjoy the first really warm day since I’ve arrived. The edges of the city, where the old walls once stood, still have their moats, now plied by expensive private boats and complete with the modern equivalent to drawbridges.

Elke, Kyra, and Anoek, on a drawbridge

The city itself is narrow and medieval, and is still reminiscent of the vast wealth it controlled in its heyday as an important Belgian seaport. During that time it was a semi-independent fortified city-state, with a tendency to do what it wished and damn the consequences. At one point Maximillian of Austria, the nominal ruler of the region, was kidnapped while passing through Bruges and imprisoned in the building that’s now home to the Cronenberg Cafe. His legal representative, Pieter Lankhals (“Peter Long-Neck”) was beheaded, and when Maximillian was finally released he punished the city by shutting down the Yearmarket festival so important to the city traders. He also proclaimed that they should always feed and care for swans, to remind them of Peter Long-Neck’s murder. Bruges still does, to this day — the canals are full of the birds, much to the annoyance of the boat pilots, who will as soon speed up to run one over as turn aside to avoid them.

The people eventually started itching for their Yearmarket back, so they sent a petition to Maximillian. He’d apparently recovered by this time, because he granted their request. Feeling hopeful, they also asked him for a new insane asylum. Maximillian is said to have responded: “Close the gates of Bruges, and you’ll have your asylum already.” To this day, Bruggians (“Bruhas” in the local dialect) are inordinately proud of this intended insult, and the local beer, “Bruges Zot,” literally means “Brugge madman”.

My final day in the city is as cold and wet as the rest have been, but I’m still sad to finally pack my bags and check out. But as always, walking with weight on my back makes my heart lighter, and by the time I get off the train in Ghent to catch my bus to London, I’m positively happy. I navigate across the city and board outside the train station, settling into a hard seat and watching as the city rolls away outside. Somewhere up ahead is the English Channel crossing, and beyond that, London.

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Big Sticky Now Available!

Posted on July 26, 2011 by tsraveling

As many of you already know, one of the ways I support my travel addiction and vagabondish lifestyle is by developing iPhone applications. We all have to earn a living, and as far as it goes, iPhone development gives me the freedom and mobility I want in a job.

One project I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year and only just wrapped up in Charleston was called Big Sticky, which tells the story of a purple frog prince searching for his lost princess through a giant sentient castle. It was a blast to work on, and my artist partners at Big Bad Brush have the level of talent and dedication needed to make a great game.

As of today, Big Sticky is officially available for download, and is currently only $1.

With prices like that, you can’t resist. In addition, I get a percentage of that dollar. So when you’re thinking that a dollar is maybe too much to spend (*cough*tightwad*cough*), or you’re considering telling your friends about that new taco place instead of this awesome new game, just call to mind an image of me, shivering and cold in a ditch, because I can’t afford a warm place to sleep at night. Have a change of heart, buy, tell your friends, and you’ll keep me traveling and writing well into the future!

If you’re interested in hearing what it’s like to work regularly while on the road, stay tuned; I’ve been now a week and a half in Bruges, Belgium, working every day, and the main subject of my next post will be what the work environment is like for a digital nomad like myself.

Now, loyal readers, go forth into the world and spread the good news, because Big Sticky is here, and it’s here to stay.

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A Week in Antwerp

Posted on July 22, 2011 by tsraveling

A shuttle collects Paulis, Julia, Adam and I from the Hanjin Palermo, and I watch the ship fall away behind us before disappearing entirely in the tangle of stacked containers and heavy machinery. After a brief detour where I have my passport stamped, we head into the city by port taxi, passing factories and industrial areas belching steam under an overcast sky. Then the rattling of our tires on rough cobblestones, and I wonder what the average lifespan of a taxi cab is in a city like this, where the nearly every street must be bad for the axles.

There’s a brand new hostel in town with over two hundred beds, so we head there first. It’s five floors, cavernous, and still sterile and new, with clean white walls and neat, identical beds in room after room. My first thought is of a rather comfortable asylum. But it’s cheap: Adam and I book a room while Paulis and Julia wait, then head out to see the city.

Adam’s planning on getting a ride with a truck driver friend in a few days, so he heads off to find an internet cafe and get in touch while Paulis and Julia and I explore the city. It’s beautiful and busy, with plenty of tourists but still retaining the businesslike feel of a north Atlantic seaport. We walk for a while down along the canal, then head back in to look for an ATM. In the process we get turned around, and coming rather suddenly upon a grungy street full of lone, shifty-looking men, and shocked, nervously snickering tourists, we’re in Antwerp’s red light district. Tired-looking women in scanty getups no doubt meant to look sexy pose in windows, and make half-hearted attempts at seduction when any of the milling men outside happens to make eye contact. It’s two in the afternoon, and neither establishments nor customers are showing much enthusiasm.

Because I didn't know how much I'd have to pay to take pictures of Antwerp's lovely ladies, I didn't take any; here's a random house instead

Since the red light districts here are legalized, this one has clear boundaries and little of the attendant sketchiness you might find elsewhere in the world. The street ends; then there are some cheap diners and fast food places; and then we’re back in the old town, surrounded by churches and outdoor cafes.

That evening, we meet up with Adam again and have a burger near the city’s grand main train station, washing it down with a Belgian beer. As it turns out, Belgium rightly deserves its reputations as one of the world’s capitals of brewing. With our first glass, we make a toast to the Hanjin Palermo.

Then Paulis and Julia have to head back to the ship for their last leg to Bremerhaven. We say our goodbyes, and Adam and I head back to the hostel.

The next day I bring my computer into the shop to get it fixed, and am informed that it will take three to five days. With nothing else to be done, I leave it there and spend the next few days exploring and, in the evenings, talking with people staying at the hostel. I think we all feel a little dwarfed by the size of the place, especially given the fact that it’s still relatively unheard of, and so relatively empty. There’s Leif, an American passing through, Kris, a Norwegian hitchhiking south and still a bit shellshocked by the abundance of legalized cannabis in the Netherlands, and Anke, an art student here for some of the many museums in Antwerp.

I spend my mornings writing in cafes in my notebook, forced back into longhand with the temporary loss of my computer, and rather enjoying it. In the afternoons I walk, or sit on benches and read, or see a museum; Anke and I spend an afternoon at the Plantin-Moretus museum of printing, which turns out to be one of the best museums I’ve ever been to, but which I unfortunately wasn’t able to take any photos of. Cafes and fashion shops are everywhere, as are bikes; for every car that passes at least two or three bicycles do, even in the pouring rain. Parking for cars is all underground, but on the surface all you see is long curving metal racks holding hundreds of bicycles, set up at the edges of the public squares.

It rains on and off, making me wish I was able to work, but I make the best of it. I try Belgian fries, known in America as French fries, which are always cheap and filling and more substantial than their American fast-food counterparts. I try a Belgian waffle, which is a couple inches thick and has a couple more of whipped cream on top, with ice cream on the side. The mussels look amazing, but my computer crash has tightened my budget considerably, so mostly I content myself to just breathe deep when I walk past a restaurant. To distract myself, I buy bread and walk — through the pedestrian tunnel to the park across the river, where there’s a beautiful view of the city, or along the river walk, where you can see long flatboats steaming up toward the docks or down to the river ports further inland.

It’s about four days before I finally get my computer back, and after that I spend a few rainy days in Antwerp calculating my budget and getting everything back in working order. I realize that this is the downside to traveling while working — when you have to work, you have to work. I cancel plans to go to Paris, and reserve a week at a hostel in Bruges.

The pedestrian tunnel under the river

I spend my last day in Antwerp reading and writing in the station while I wait for my train.

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Across the Atlantic by Cargo Ship

Posted on July 16, 2011 by tsraveling


It’s six in the evening on the day I’m supposed to leave Charleston on the Hanjin Palermo, bound for Antwerp, and I haven’t heard a thing. Emails to my freighter agent have gone unanswered; repeated calls get only an answering machine. A google search shows the Hanjin Palermo head into the New York harbor, about two days behind schedule, but I still feel immensely better the next morning when my agent calls me and tells me that I’ll now be leaving on July 1.

I spend my extra two days working furiously to finish a work project, finally wrapping everything up late on the night before my departure. The next morning, a couple staying at the hostel gives me a ride to the container port north of town, and from there I get a taxi to the Hanjin Palermo’s gangplank — due to security concerns, it’s not possible to just walk into a port.

Trucks entering the crane unloading area

We pass through what feel like canyons of containers, laid out in neat rows and presided over by forklifts the width of a city street and four-wheeled lifters three stories high. The Hanjin Palermo, some eight hundred feet long, is being loaded by towering blue cranes that pluck incoming containres off of trucks and with startling precision settle them into place on board.

I pay the taxi driver and, backpack on my back, climb the creaking gangplank up onto the ship. The crew, who aren’t involved with the loading and unloading operations, are sitting on deck, watching everything while they smoke and eat lunch. I’m handed on down the side of the ship to where the first officer, a thin German with a strong handshake, greets me and shows me to my cabin. It’s four flights of stairs, but when I get there I couldn’t be happier; it’s hot and humid outside, but the cabin is air conditioned and spacious, and the two windows facing forward give me a perfect view of the loading operations.

I drop my bags and have a shower (in my very own private bathroom, I might add) and change my clothes, then go out on deck. Two levels further up is the bridge, with wings on either side that allow a greater range of perspective should the ship’s pilot need it for manuevering. Out on one of these is an older German woman named Inga, and we talk as I snap pictures of the activity down on the dock. Her reasons for taking the freighter are much like mine. Her son lives in Michigan. “I wanted to be able to feel the distance,” she says. “If you fly, it’s …” She waves a hand. “It’s nothing.”

The desk in my cabin

My bed and pack

My table and reading couch

At dinner I meet three other younger passengers: Adam from Austria, returning home after nine months on his own round-the-world trip, and Paulis and Julia, who’ve been living in Vancouver for a few years and are headed back to Latvia, where Paulis’ family lives, so that Paulis can start his own cabinet-making shop. Also on board are an older German couple. Wolfgang used to be in shipping, and is enthusiastic about the inner workings of our vessel. His English is sparse and my German is much worse, so I end up writing down ship parts in German with plans to look them up when I reach land.

Adam, Julia, and Paulis in the officer's mess

Dinner is excellent, the first of many heavy German recipes featuring meat and potatoes. Aftewards, the passengers head up to the bridge to watch as we cast off. Ropes thick as my leg are detached from the iron posts on shore and reeled in while two stocky tugboats tie on from the other side. Then, with a shudder barely felt through all the steel and cargo of the ship, we’re moving; slowly sideways at first, the distance widening by an inch a second. Then stronger, as the bow points out into the harbor and the screws get enough clearance from the dock to engage, boiling the water white behind us.

We make a wide circle within the harbor before pointing our nose eastward. The container port, navy base, and industrial plants of north Charleston pass along the shore, backlit by the setting sun; then the poorer parts of the residential areas, where little kids jump up and down on the end of wooden piers, waving at us; then the old town, with its glittering lights and church steeples and promenade along the waterfront. It’s almost dark when we pass Fort Sumter, with its blinking light, and the night obscures our view of land before the distance does.

It’s a strange moment, realizing that those few glittering lights in the distance will my last sight of the United States for a long time, but not an unpleasant one. It has none of the hurried rush of boarding a plane, none of the sterility of an airline cabin, none of the speed of takeoff, none of the objective distance of a coastline seen from thirty thousand feet. It’s just movement, a steady twenty knots, twenty-three miles per hour, and Adam, Paulis, Julia and I have a brief moment of silence over bottles of duty-free Becks beer as we watch it go. For Adam, too, it’s important: the last leg of his journey home, just as it’s the first real leg of mine. When I go inside, I still have cell service, and I give my parents a last phone call before turning off my phone for good.

After that, life aboard quickly settles into a routine. Breakfast is 7:30 to 8:30, lunch is 11:30 to 12:30, and dinner is 5:30-6:30. There’s coffee at 10 am and 3 pm, and for the last half of the trip, a few lively games of Mensch Argere Dich Nicht after afternoon coffee. My computer breaks again early in the trip, leaving me books leant by Adam and a fully stocked Kindle. If it’s nice, I go out on the deck and sweep the soot (which collects slowly, but constantly, from the ship’s smokestack) off one of the deck chairs and kick back and read. If it’s not, I go into my cabin and read. If no one’s at my table when you come down for breakfast, I read. I read one book for almost every full day I’m on board. After the last few 15-hour workdays in Charleston, it feels nice to be able to relax.

Mensch Argere Dich Nicht

One night, the Filipino crew throws a party, the first the weather has allowed in five months. There’s different vegetable dishes, grilled steaks and sausages, pasta, beer, strawberry punch, and an entire roasted pig on a spit. With all passengers, crew, and officers (except for the unlucky soul who draws bridge duty that night) on deck, we still only fill about three tables. We’re dwarfed by the mountain of containers in front of us, which is in turn dwarfed by the vast ocean around us. When the stars come out and the last light of day fades to a blue fringe on the horizon and you’ve had a beer or three, you can almost swear you can see the curvature of the Earth. And under it all, the rumble of constant eastward movement.

The crew (and hosts of the party)

I walk the perimeter of the ship every morning or afternoon, down the corridors that line the containers, to the bow, where if you’re lucky you can see flying fish gliding for stretches of a hundred feet or more, or dolphins leaping in pairs along the wake. Walking back, the containers creak worryingly overhead with the rocking of the ship, but the Captain assures us he’s never lost a single one, not even in the massive storm in the north Atlantic they passed through last year.

Our first few days are sunny, the next week cool and shrouded in fog. It’s only in the last full day that the sun really breaks out again. On that day, we enter the English channel, though at this point it’s still far too wide to see land. That night wake up around one, and outside in the dark is the glittering lights of a city on the French coast. I watch it for a while before going back to sleep.

I spend the next morning packing as the Belgian shoreline passes by outside. We cut into a side passage that funnels us from the English Channel into the vast container port of Antwerp, and spend four or five hours just navigating to our berth. Adam is grinning like a maniac. He breathes deeply and theatrically and says, “Smell this? This is European air!”

The Belgian shoreline

The process from Charleston is reversed; the tugs push us into our berth, the ropes are secured, the gangplank lowered. I check and re-check my cabin, which feels comfortably familiar after eleven days, and carry my pack down to the deck. Adam’s getting off here, too, and Paulus and Julia are going into town with us for the day. We’re finally given the okay to go ashore, and I walk down the gangplank with excitement in my soul.

Breathing deeply of this new air, I take my first step onto European soil.

Antwerp; last view from the Hanjin Palermo

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