WanderLost

Traveling to a country you’ve never visited before is a unique experience- a mixture of excitement, hope, and preconceived notions, the latter of which are usually instantly dissolved on arrival to make room for the real thing. I had been told less-than-savory things about Athens- mostly that it was an urban jungle and that its only positive attribute was the Acropolis- so I was wary and ready to hate it, but as I made my way through the city to my hostel, I found the feeling fading away, replaced with the usual awe and excitement of visiting a new city. My destination- the optimistically named Hostel Zeus- was near Monastiraki Square, near the Plaka district, and not far from the Acropolis itself. The streets were chaotic, filled with cars and people on bikes and signs in enigmatic Greek. A nearby open-air market gave the place a gritty, real-life feel that drew me in rather than repulsed me as expected. The air of the hostel’s street smelled strongly of spices, reminding me of a Moroccan spice shop I once visited, the pungence of saffron most notable.
Where I was pleasantly surprised by the city, however, I was amazed by the magnificent Acropolis. The manner of getting there- trekking uphill and through winding streets- felt like a pilgrimmage. Indeed, simply by looking at me one could easily guess my quest, and with the help of a friendly shopkeeper I arrived at the destination I sought. The climb up the hill offered small diversions- the Temple of Aesclypius, the Theater of Dionysus- appetizers to prepare one for the grand feast at the top, parts of which could already be glimpsed.
Though I arrived early, there was already a swarm of tourists- fellow pilgrims- making their way to the top. The line moved steadily, however, and soon I was in the shadow of the towering Propylaia, walking beneath its impressive columns and scaffolding, and at last emerging at the top of the Acropolis. There were no trees at the top- practically no vegetation at all- just dirt and ruins. But what ruins! True, the scaffolding kept my daydream-prone mind from wandering too quickly back to ancient times, but still- that was the Parthenon I was seeing, with my own eyes, its white columns impressive against the clear blue sky. I couldn’t help but feel a bit star-struck, especially when asking nearby tourists to take my picture in front of it. It felt like meeting a celebrity.
The nearby Erechtheion was just as interesting. Its most striking aspect is the Caryatid carvings. Everything on top of the Acropolis is tall smooth columns- except for the Caryatids, and for this they stand out even more. They are beautifully carved, the folds of their dresses falling at their feet, their faces, though time-scarred, expressive.
The top of the Acropolis also offers an amazing full-surround view of Athens, allowing one to appreciate the full immensity of the city- an ocean of white buildings from which a hill arises here and there, like the humps of sea serpent. Off to one side, something glints and sparkles- sunlight glancing off the Aegan Sea. Also visible from the top is the site of the Temple of Olympian Zeus- a patch of brown earth like a postage stamp among the modern buildings, the columns visible even from this distance.
It is difficult to descend from the Acropolis- not physically, but because it is so obvious and definite an end to your visit of the site. You have dallied in the place of the gods, among towering marble shrines, and now you must return to earth- to the dust and noise of the city below, to the reality of the tour bus and cruise ship, with only pictures to later remind you of the heights you momentarily attained, and even then could not appreciate fully.

Arriving in Prague was a whirlwind much like the taxi drive, long and lots of time to think yet it was all over so jumblequick, with only a few soft moments to myself to think and to admire the foreign consonant tangle of billboard words above old and cracked buildings announcing that I’m here in Eastern Europe and can’t escape and mostly don’t want to but am gaping like a tourist fish, the kind that migrates to places it’s never been before, drawn on by some strange urge having to do with winds or tides, wild crazy quickcolor dreams from childhood, or possibly the magnetic poles. Hip hop tip top up the stairs with my suitcase lumbering then back down and rush through the entire TEFL class course in one giant blur of bright lights and grammatical phrases, my new mantras that I chant to myself before going to sleep and dream of like giant white lilies of peace and wholeness, blending together harmoniously in streams of golden light. Migrate to the city next, downtown heart of the city, through the screaming metro tunnels of exposed cement, wires and artificial lights, crowds pressed in tight trying not to see each other while peering from the edges of their eyes. Snag a job and now I’m teaching, running up and down tram metro tram bus and heading into buildings with unfriendly secretaries who squint at my foreign words and call clients to come down for English lessons all the while eyeing me like I’m a genie who, misunderstood, might vaporize back into whatever exotic burnished lamp I crawled from — or sometimes they’re friendly the younger ones usually and they’ll talk and talk and tell me all about their boyfriends and school exams and cars and lives and hopes and dreams, they’ll bring me tea and show me pictures and always wave goodbye. Student faces in rows before me, whiteboard behind, and the panic the they’re-all-looking-at-me panic and realizing that they’re waiting now it’s quiet and everyone is waiting for someone to talk and realizing that it’s me. The power there is in ordering the classroom and the silly book lessons the absurd conversations and stilted topics to discuss over and over again, first in room 102 and then 109 210 415 etc. etc. row following row of students staring, wondering why I can’t get their hobscrabble consonant somewhat familiar yet entirely foreign names right, whispering to each other in their slick brumble tongue like I can’t hear it or don’t see it or won’t recognize the lickle trickle of syllables that surrounds me daily in the streets and separates me from the thought of the crowd like twisting strands of barbed wire. Close the books and run along home, dispersing into the night like shards of shattered glass, hop the tram and zombie-stare through dark windows until the fourth stop, run across the road play chicken with the traffic and make it (each time a triumph) to the fateful curb and over I go into the apartment, rattling red elevator pulling me up the levels one by painful slowly one until clang I’m here rattle keys and in through the door I go and the day is over, or at least it’s mine now, and that’s a comfort but is it really? Simmering stove pasta in its little bowl, same as every night, meanwhile waitreading Walden or Kerouac, admiring former’s simplistic lifestyle and latter’s hypnotic globetrotting, dreaming up halfway decent partway interesting tidbits about my own day and maybe writing them down or forgetting them in the softening of the pasta on the simmering stove strained from the pot with the spoon handle holding the noodles back as the boiled water rushes down the drain, then mix in some sauce and sit down at table book still held in one hand, immersing in soft saucy noodles and sweetdelicious words altogether combined with the spires-and-stone of Prague that makes this life bearable and in small bursts exquisitely wonderful.

A young man approaches me at the tram stop, cigarette dangling from his lips as he rambles at me in Czech. “Nemluvím cesky,” I say with an apologetic shrug of the shoulders. He pauses. “Nemluvite cesky,” he says, not a question so much as a doutful statement. His raised eyebrow suggests he doesn’t believe me, but it’s true. An old lady approached me in the metro but I couldn’t help her, nor could I answer the grocer’s rapid-fire question. “Nemluvím cesky,” I’m always saying. “I don’t speak Czech. I don’t speak —” I dream in Czech, people with blurry faces spitting out mangled sentences as over and over I repeat “I don’t speak your language. Nemluvím cesky. No, I don’t speak, not at all.” They shake their heads at me, gesture impatiently, stride away. I want to run after them, to hear again and understand. It seems important somehow.

Everything’s modernized, the tram passes the church, but not so completely modernized, I realize, as the man beside me crosses himself as we pass by.

Get off the tram, walk by the church. The cool green-smelling air hits you from the small garden-park around the stone church walls. The chirping of little holy church birds.
My apartment, I stand before open window, the green and lilac glory of the park below, the church spires above, and the fly-by birds at eye level.

9:30 pm, walking from work to tram stop:
The church, the tower, the fingernail crescent moon overflowing with deep indigo sky, its aching silverness as sharp against the sky as the throbbing gold numbers of the tower clock are against the must stone bricks. Every time, the sign pierces my heart (as though by the sickle-blade moon), blood drips out and the whole of Prague-at-night rushes in, and I can’t hate it here; the times when I did are unsteady memories, appearing false. I can’t resist a good night air, I have a weakness for it. One touch and I turn over, belly up in surrender, caressed by breezes soaking up the stars, scenting the air. I allow myself to be folded in the night’s embrace, giddy from its intoxicating elements, inhibitions as vanished as the sunlight. Night, as a lover, is a sable panther, with yellow moon eyes and silver whiskers. The rumble in his throat vibrates my heart and I nearly choke on the beauty of it all.

What is it about the name of a place that calls out to me like a siren-wail? Not like an ambulance but the spine-tingling melody of the sea maidens. Ulysses’ men lashed him to a mast but I have no such team and I follow the call, tracing my footsteps all across Europe in the form of colored pins on my wall map. The names I gather together on a string like jewels, a shining necklace that I touch over and over, like an old woman’s smoothed rosary, repeating the names to myself like a prayer. Oaxaca Honolulu Madrid Sevilla Lagos Tangiers Granada Barcelona Rome Florence Venice Vienna Salzburg Munich Geneva Lucerne Paris London Prague. Over and over, with many in between, my necklace, my travel rosary, gathering more and more in hopes of somehow finding a use for them.

Travel is more than just the big monuments, the famous places. Yes, it’s partly these things, but that’s not what hooks you; that’s not what keeps millions of people taking time off from work and school and dragging huge backpacks through train stations and airports. No, it’s the little things, the everyday. It’s walking down cobblestone streets while ivy and sweet Spanish words curl in the air above you. It’s the way the shadows play across the water and brick walls in the winding alleys of Venice. It’s ordering bread at a Parisian bakery and eating it on a bridge overlooking the Seine. When traveling, the small becomes beautiful, special. Food tastes better, the slightest tasks become great accomplishments in foreign languages. In short, we live life more fully, more immediately, when traveling. That’s what keeps us packing those bags.

People watching. The tourists I like best are the backpackers. With beat up packs and scruffy faces, they look well traveled. Potential Jack Kerouacs with jaded all-seeing eyes and poetic hearts. They sleep in hostels, wander the cobblestone streets with a practiced step, their bags perfectly contoured against their back. They’ve seen things, will see more things. Their roads stretch out before them, rich and winding. The rest of us, on our way to work, living the steady beat of daily lives, can only gaze at them with jealousy and longing, and later, sitting at our desks, think of them wandering the streets of Old Town, discovering hidden nooks and alleys in the shadows of the castle’s spires, discovering, as it were, life and what makes it worth living.

They call Prague ‘the golden claw’ because it traps you and never lets you go. Indeed, I can see how. It’s bright with the neon lights of clubs and bars and restaurants, flashy with the flags of tourism, yet it has that older, eastern influence smoldering in the background. The sky is bright and blue but also bleak in a heartbeat, punctured by spires, the bars of your cage. Its cobblestone streets swallow expats and tourists into their shadows. The idea of Prague broods in the backpacker’s mind long after he has boarded the train: the image of a castle overlooking a bridge.

The hardest part about travel, which at first I didn’t understand, is that you can’t hold onto it. It’s not something physical. You can take as many pictures and buy as many souvenirs as you want, but you’ll never fully capture it all. Some part of it will slip away. Even writing only saves a small part of it. But experiencing it’s the thing. In your mind, it’ll always be there. Even if the memories get fuzzy and rosy over the years, even if the little details disappear, it’ll always be there, stamped across your brain. It becomes a part of you, and you it, and both of you become something else entirely— something beautiful.

The other tram speeds past my window, making me think of that poem by Someone Famous about watching people on a subway and how their faces were like wet petals plastered against a branch, and I think that guy was right and that there’s no way I could say it any better.

The first night it snowed I was standing outside at the tram stop ready to get in and go home. The flakes came down and spoke of snow and nature and I stared up into the sky at them. A wind gusted and they swirled around the church spire, powdering the window ledges, brushing the stained glass, blanketing the bushes and trees growing around the holy concrete walls and I decided that I could not ride the tram, not tonight, and I started walking home, continually looking up at the white snow falling from the dark sky and I smiled and could not stop smiling because it was winter in Prague and it was snowing.

A couple entered the tram today, and with them were two wolf-dogs. The dogs were muzzled and on leashes as thick as my wrist, but they still seemed dangerous, seemed wild. Their fur was tan, tipped with black. They were lean and narrow, their tails long and bushy. They hunched their heads like predators on the hunt, their pyramid ears pricked up at every sound. Their eyes were what thrilled me most— yellow, with a perfect black pupil in the center. The kind of eyes that would look out at you from behind a bush or the shadow of a tree. The kind of eyes that would be the last thing you’d ever see.

I bought water today, two large gallon jugs of it. Each jug is equipped with a handle for easy carrying. It felt strange, walking up the modern day streets, boarding a tram, while holding a water jug on either side of me. I felt like the provincial country girl returning from the well. In a way I was— strange juxtaposition of era and purpose. In the end we can’t escape from it— our humanity.

Wenceslas Square becomes very different at night. The darkness shrouds the fancy buildings, the ancient architecture, and all you can see are shadows in the lamplight, while along both sides of the square blaze the neon signs, creating worlds of their own. Bright and eye-popping they beckon, advertise. Whispers during the day they become shouting voices at night, stealing your attention, distracting your eyes with unnatural colors. They are not for the night but against it, cutting into it, waging war against the darkening of things, yet without which they would be nothing. The square is buildings and statue by day but restaurants and clubs and cabaret (pulsings of neon suggestion) by night. Some cities are completely owned by the neon signs at night. Prague is not yet, and therefore the signs stand out more in their awkward unnaturalness, filled with that in-your-face-attitude that comes from all such trashy man-made products. What are they really? The screaming of some poor pathetic inventor to be noticed in the face of the infinite starry sky.

How to explain it? The weirdness of living modernly in an ancient-times city. America’s past howls in the winds of the prairie but Europe immobilized itself in spire and stone.

Living here, you get to look beyond the city’s general image. At first you’re a tourist, and all you notice is the stone majesty of Charles Bridge, and the dazzle of lights from Wenceslas Square. But then you blink and look around and see so much more— like how the Praguians take their dogs with them everywhere, and how the bakery sells fresh rolls out the back at 2 am. You’ll find yourself picking up small phrases, wishing “dobry den” to the grocer and throwing out a casual “naschla” when leaving a group of friends.

Overall the Czech Republic, I like it. Once you get over the initialities— the Praguians’ gruff exteriors, the devil-may-care attitudes about official formalities— it can be quite nice. That is, you can come to a truce with it, and the two of you can get along quite well, and enjoy each other. Strange sights become familiar and welcome. Statues and marvelously facaded buildings become friends to greet on your daily trek to work. The hieroglyphic names of tram and metro stops transition from nonsense (Masarykovo Namesti, Bila Labut) to meanings utilitarian and beautiful (train station, white swan).

I like it best when I’m walking down the street, especially some non-central everyday street where people actually live and work because it’s where I most belong in that just looking at me I might be Czech or European or anybody instead of my confused non-tourist American self, citizen-in-limbo by choice but not really.