The Kindness of Strangers (or, a week in Bremen)

Before I left for Russia the first time around, Len gave us two words of advice: 1) Never take ‘no’ for an answer (i.e. there’s always someway to maneuver your way through the bureaucracy of Russia); and 2) your success in this venture will depend on the kindness of strangers. Our safe arrival to Bremen earlier this week once again proved true at least the latter of these counsels. After leaving Stan’s Dalston apartment at 3am, we made our way to Gatwick airport by means of a meandering late night bus and then a train in time to find out that the liquor at the duty free shop was only duty free if you are leaving the EU, and then to talk a café worker into giving us two coffees for the remaining pounds and pence we could muster out of our increasingly eclectic change collection. And five hours after departing for the airport, we flew a short 1.5 hours to Hamburg and made it through customs with much less to report than in England. From the airport we discovered that we needed to take a bus to the train station. This bus we found fairly easily, and sat down at the back beside a man who looked to be in his mid-40s. Mark proceeded to practice the few German phrases he’d been working on, and between our German phrasebook and the man’s broken English, we discovered that he was from a Kurdish town in Eastern Turkey, that we shared a love for (or at least knowledge of) Sultanahmet and Aya Sofia, and that he too was headed to Bremen on the train. When we arrived at the train station, he directed us to the ticket line, then told us to wait while he went to an automated ticket machine, then led us towards the trains. We were slightly confused as to what exactly he had purchased, until another wayward German youth we picked up while boarding the train explained that he’d purchased some type of 2-day group pass (that strangely cost only 1euro more than a single one-way ticket). He refused our offers of money to pay for the ticket, and kept a watchful eye on our luggage as we enjoyed the scenery beyond the train windows. And so we traveled to Bremen by means of the generosity of a middle-aged Kurdish man with the kindest of hazel eyes and the gentlest smile I have seen in awhile.

After parting ways with our Turkish friend, we met up with Konsti (the German exchange student who lived with my parents this year) and have been enjoying his hospitality and beautiful home for the past week. This week has been necessarily slower than the last, as we’ve spent time catching up on some sleep, exploring the streets and endless parks of Bremen, reading, swimming, kayaking, cooking extravagant dinners and eating them together, and catching up with Konsti in his home element. While not a major tourist destination, Bremen is quite a picturesque city, with the biggest park of meandering rivers, forests, even fields full of cows and sheep and goats that I have ever seen and the best system of bike lanes and pathways of any city I’ve ever encountered. This week has been a week of greenery, good food, good conversations, and space to consider more fully what exactly this year is going to entail. On the one hand, on the train between Hamburg and Bremen I felt for the first time that this adventure was actually real, probably a result of no longer understanding the conversations going on around me, the thrill of being somewhere I’ve never been before, another plane and country behind us, the chance encounter and kindness of a Kurdish stranger, and the freshness of the wind-turbine spotted northern German country-side. Yet on this side of the Atlantic, Konsti is the closest thing I have to family. And so while I finally feel as if at long last we are departed, I also feel as if we are at home. I imagine this phenomenon will continue as I am re-acquainted with long-lost friends as we continue to make our way east.

On that note, we are headed out tomorrow morning to new cities and new friends. We are taking the train to Kiel, a city on the North Sea, where a friend of mine from high school is living, and then on Sunday we will head to Strasbourg and then Mulhouse to visit with Cephas (a friend of the family) at his family’s farm in Alsace. We will return to Bremen next Friday before we finally head to Moscow on Sunday morning. And as we set out once again, or succumb to our transient nature, I trust that we will find our way at least in part by the grace and kindness of the strangers and friends we shall meet along the way.

Snapshots of England

A week has come and gone and it is only now on the other side of the English Channel that I find the time to write. In the rush of buses, subways, trains, planes, museums, couches, bread, fruit, rivers, rolling hills, rain and much more, it’s hard to know where to begin. I could document what we’ve done each day, though I fear such an approach would not allow for a full appreciation of the moments that make these days unique from each other, memorable among many. And so, perhaps as I’ve recently finished Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a memoir of photos and prose, I am going to speak of England in snapshots, using various photographs as starting points, as windows into frozen moments, captured memories. I was sitting today on the banks of the Thames flipping through some of my pictures from both the past week and earlier in the summer, and I had the strange feeling of being present in more than one place and time at once—photographs can have that transporting quality—mixed with a contented revelation that I, just as the camera in my hands, had witnessed these things myself, these images proof that I have indeed seen these things with my own two eyes. And so, without further ado, I offer these images and wandering thoughts to you…

(my gmail account has somehow switched itself in German and I can't figure out how to upload pictures...more to come soon)

I Wonder as I Wander...

Some thoughts before take-off (and an explanation of this title)

wanderlust: (wŏn'dər-lŭst') –noun, a very strong or irresistible impulse to explore

wonder: noun, (1) a feeling of surprise and admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexected, or unfamiliar (2) a person or thing that causes such a feeling; verb (1) feel curious; desire to know (2) feel doubt (3) feel amazement and admiration

A few months ago I was introduced by a dear friend to the idea of wanderlust, defined above here as “a very strong or irresistible impulse to explore.” At the time I had just arrived in Rivière-du-Loup, and had written that although before departure I’d been somewhat indifferent to my trip, somewhere between watching the sun rise over the Toronto skyline and watching it set over the St. Lawrence, softly illuminating the foothills of the Appalachians behind, that unquenchable desire to explore the unknown had been re-kindled. I also noted that three months to the day from then I would be boarding a plane bound for the far shores of the Atlantic, the beginning of another journey into foreign wildernesses, and that I’d come to deeply appreciate these in between times, the hours—days, weeks even—spent in transit, not merely as the time spent between point A and point B, but as the most acute physical representation of why we journey at all: the constant motion, the transfers, the changing scenery, the fatigue, the same sun rising and setting, the mind sometimes still, sometimes running wild, the by-chance meetings of people going here and there, criss-crossing lives intersecting for a moment...the knowledge that the joy of the road is in the journey and not the end.

These initial discussions of wanderlust moved into more conversations and thoughts on the idea of wonder, wandering, and the relationship between the two. I often accidentally confuse the two—a slip in spelling here and there changing the meaning of sentences though not their coherency—and am intrigued by their etymological similarity. Over the past few months, as I’ve wandered the banks of the St. Lawrence and then the lakes and rivers and wilds of Algonquin Park and my physical and emotional limits, I’ve come to understand the relationship between these two phenomena—wondering and wandering—to be more than a closeness in spelling, but as a reciprocal, cyclical, never-ending courtship in which each idea enforces and re-enforces, enriches and fuels the other. Or, as a friend once wrote, wonder is best understood as both a cause and an effect; in this vein, I’ve come to understand wandering as just that—both the cause of wonder and also its effect.

The three months that separated my trip to foreign shores when I arrived in Rivière-du-Loup have changed somehow into days (hours!), and as I go through the processes of preparing to leave and saying goodbye, I find myself alternating between feelings of sadness, fear, and, of course, excitement. The sadness is for what I am leaving behind—a city that has never felt more like home, and the family and friends who make it home; the fear is for the unknown and unpredictability of adventures such as these; and the excitement is for both the known and unknown possibilities, adventures, discoveries, friendships and wisdom that I know will come over the next year. And for one reason or another, as I embark on this particular adventure, I find the ideas of wondering and wandering especially relevant. Perhaps it is because the itinerary of this trip is still relatively unknown, and we really are wandering our way to Yekaterinburg, through multiple countries and even more cities, and by means of numerous forms of transportation. Perhaps it is because for the first time in my life, I don’t really have a concrete plan, or a rational explanation for why I am going where I am, fueled only by an inexplicable wonder for the language, people, history, beauty, contradictions and endless wildernesses that are Russia. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. Above all else, however, I think it is because as I explore—wander, that is—the various places, ideas, relationships, cities, libraries, palettes, poetry, philosophy, universities, faces, music and emotions that are of interest to me, the one concept that unites these seemingly unrelated tangents is wonder: wonder for the awesome discovered and yet to be uncovered corners of this finely woven planet that we call home, for the beautiful and fragile diversity of our species, for the joy and suffering that make us human and connect us to each other, and for the unpredictability of the waters that make up this river of life.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky… (John Jacob Niles)

Welcome!

Hello and welcome dear friends, family and internet strangers! I’ve finally decided to take the plunge into the world of information communication technology, and, mostly out of a dislike of mass e-mails, reconciled myself to the idea of having my thoughts and ideas and aimless ramblings floating around in the public domains of cyberspace. As many of you know, I’m beginning this blog as I set off for foreign lands and adventures, and hope to document many of the stories of the coming year here. I hope that you all enjoy what you read. Whether you read it to know where in the world I am and what I’m doing there, as a window into another life facilitated through my experiences, or you’ve just stumbled across these ramblings of a long-winded traveler, please let me know what you think! And as the hours before take-off slowly slip away, here the adventure begins. Thanks in advance for your ears (or eyes). Пока (poka, for now)!