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| Mr. Worldwide, Pt. 1: Europe | Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love tomatoes. |
TODO
Outline
- Denver
- What I had
- Why I left
- Loadout
- Road Trip
- Ibrahim notebook
- Choosing destinations
- The First Leg
- Munich
- Silence
- Relative
- Italy
- Milan
- Ostello Bello, friends
- Duomo
- Walking/Getting around (Google maps)
- Ravenna
- Currency
- Old monastaries, mosaics
- Florence
- Museums
- Celia
- Rome
- Tourism's effect on a city
- Too much to see in Italy, too little time
- Milan
- Spain
- Barcelona
- La Sagrada Familia, churches
- Madrid
- Royalty, revolution
- Cordoba
- Playing things close
- Granada
- Flamenco
- Peace
- Barcelona
- Lisbon
- Hostels
- A city where people still live
- Escher (Granada/Cordoba)
- Munich
- The Second Leg
- Munich
- No more pictures, no more tourism
- Diet
- Belgium
- Brussels
- Communism and french fries
- Comic book museum
- Drawing
- Bruges
- Beer
- A fucking expensive fairytale
- So cold, so scarfed
- Camina Del Santiago
- Brussels
- UK
- London
- Cost of museums, theft of culture
- Dublin
- Housing problems
- Glendalough
- Edinburgh
- Reading/Writing
- Harry Fucking Potter
- London
- Amsterdam
- Pub crawl (partying vs ...)
- Van Gogh
- Weed
- Sex (museum)
- Copenhagen
- Freedom (Christiania)
- So many chairs
- Stockholm
- Tradition
- Berlin
- History
- Movie
- Prague
- Wandering
- Planning
- Munich
- The Third Leg
- Munich
- Alps, Olympics
- Passport
- Venice
- Beauty in spite of tourism
- Rijeka
- Hitchikers
- A strange beauty
- Vienna
- Riches and empire
- A day at the palace
- The Couchsurfing Cult
- Athens
- Culture
- History
- Munich
Denver
In mid-2015 (???) I moved to Denver, CO while continuing to work remotely at the company I had helped to found back in Gainesville, FL. Florida had been my home for my entire life up until that point, and it felt like a change was needed. Denver was certainly a change, and ultimately I think it was one in the right direction, but it turned out to not be enough.
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While in Denver I'd been living in a small studio apartment, which over the course of two years I'd learned to live in. Living large is pretty easy; for some reason we find it more difficult to throw something away than we do to exert the effort to make space for it in our lives. It takes a non-trivial amount of trial-and-error to figure out a smaller lifestyle with fewer things. So minimalism is something I practice, in the literal sense of the word, and often fail at. But I find the challenge to be worth it.
I'd always separated my work-place with my living-place, mentally. But I eventually realized that just because the two places were physically separate doesn't mean they aren't a part of the same thing. At the most basic level I work in order afford basic necessities, like food and clothing and shelter. I have a dedicated home because it allows me to keep myself fit and healthy most efficiently (by having my own ammenities and routines which work best for me).
But the more I work, the more I burn out and need to recuperate at home. The more time spent at home, the more things accumulate there and the more upkeep of the home is needed, which in turn requires money which requires work. The one leads to the other, and so they are really part of the same thing. I neither want to work nor spend a lot of time at home, but that's what my life had turned into. It was unbearable, and I had to change it.
Mr. Worldwide
In early 2016 I took a trip to Japan with some friends. It was the first time I'd been out of the US (sans a family trip to Nova Scotia when I was like 9 or something). Going to Japan might as well have been a trip to an alien planet, and yet it was also familiar. I learned that no matter how different our cultures are, the individuals of the world aren't all that different at all. By the end of that trip I felt as at home in Japan as I did in Denver, even more so really because of how much time was able to spend exploring (rather than being couped up working).
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/kyoto-2017.jpg" descr="Kyoto at sunset, 2017" %}
By the end of 2016 I knew I wanted to travel and see as much as possible, and work as little as possible in the meantime (except on my own ideas, as they came up and I felt like working on them). I began trimming down my life as much as possible, with the aim of only having as many things as would fit into a backpack. It probably seemed to everyone like I was preparing to become a homeless person. And in one way they would have been right, and in another, not.
My plan wasn't that I would never work again, or never live in a home again. Vagrancy isn't a sustainable way to live. But finding a life which involved neither spending all my energy working and being homeless is surely possible, I knew, though maybe I wouldn't find it in the US. So I saved as much money as possible, so I could have as much runway as I needed to find that life, wherever in the world it might be; and in the meantime, I could see all the things worth seeing.
Europe seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Leaving Denver
By the end of 2017 I was ready to go. I had saved nearly $20k, had put in my notice to quit my job at the end of the year, and had given notice to my landlord of the same. My friends in Denver saw me off, and my friend Ibrahim gave me a small notebook to take notes in, with some helpful phrases that might aid me in my travels.
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/notebook.jpg" descr="Ibrahim made sure I was covered if I ever found myself in a tight spot" %}
I drove all my things back to Miami just before Christmas, and enjoyed Christmas and New Year's with them. In mid-January I grabbed my single backpack, said goodbye to my parents, and headed to the airport. It had worked out to be cheaper to fly back to Denver before flying to Europe, so I spent another day there saying hello/goodbye to everyone again, collecting some recommendations of places to go while I was there, and continued on to Munich.
The Loadout
(Wherein I give a summary of what I had with me throughout the trip, with affiliate links sprinkled in, cause money. You can skip this section if you don't really care).
I'd already had a 40L backpacking bag which had done me well enough on a
couple trips already, so I decided to try and only use that. Other homeless
backpackers tend to go a little bigger, but they risk not being able to fit
their bags in luggage overhead on planes. I also ended up needing a smaller day
bag almost immediately, since being out and about all day necessitates bringing
some things with you. The big bag/day bag combo is a classic amongst the
homeless backpackers.
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/loadout-packed.jpg" descr="All packed up, one for overhead and the other for under the seat" inline=true %}
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/loadout-unpacked.jpg" descr="Everything unpacked, but still rolled up" inline=true %}
Most space in the bag is taken by clothes. Which clothes I actually had along changed as the weather changed and I gained and lost things. But my general clothing strategy consisted of a couple key points:
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All things need to be re-wearable, 2 to 3 days at least. This is more difficult for under layers, but wool is ideal as it's durable, warm, and it quickly-dries (which means the fungi/bacteria, which would otherwise cause smell, quickly-die). Wool socks were easy to find on sale for $5 a pair at the end of winter. Wool undershirts (smart wool or merino) are findable on eBay with some difficulty. Uniqlo makes good undershirts to fill in when wool undershirts are too expensive. ExOfficio is worth the money in the underwear department. A pair of leggings is also super worth it for the cold.
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For outer layers I went with two pairs of pants, one comfy and one a bit nicer, and a few wool shirts/sweaters. Finding wool outer shirts on eBay is trivially easy. For shoes I went with a pair of flip-flops and a pair of waterproof boots (also from eBay). The boots I chose for being able to be used in basically any occasion where flip-flops wouldn't do (marathons excepted).
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I really can't stress enough how great wool is. That said, I would have died without this jacket, which was well worth the relatively tiny amount of space it took up. Same can be said for my linen towel, which struck a perfect balance of being a towel and being packable.
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Other random things which were must-haves: rubber bands (for tying up clothes), sewing kit, external phone battery, tape, super glue, and a small package of baby wipes.
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I also insisted on bringing a laughingly small and old netbook with me, cause I get cranky if I can't code now and then.
Even before deciding on doing this trip I had begun purging all my old clothes in favor of a much smaller set of more durable, though perhaps more expensive, ones. So a lot of these clothes carried over from that, and all that I just described is really just my current wardrobe.
(Lack of) Planning
The trip was deliberately not planned out. I knew I would show up in Munich, because I have a friend who lives there as well as a distant relative. But passed that I figured "show up and look around" would suffice. My motto for the trip would eventually become "plans are just lists of things which won't happen". From start to finish the only things I had figured out at any moment was a general trajectory and my next destination. Rarely was my next place to sleep booked more than a week ahead of time, or my next bus or train ticket bought more than a day before.
It could not have worked any other way. For a short trip it might be viable to have an itinerary with a list of destinations/sights which will be visited and all the traveling needed in between, but the strictness of an itinerary always adds tension. Rather than spend some pre-allotted time at each sight, adding a feeling of being on a timer no matter where you are, I would rather just meander around and spend as much time as feels right at each place. There's zero chance of seeing all there is to see no matter how much is planned, so might as well see each thing in as much depth and detail as you feel like.
And looking back, I don't think I did miss all that much. Each city has its notable sights, and you can know by looking around and talking to other people which ones are right for you. Start with those, if there's time do the others, but you won't feel like you've missed anything if you don't get to them.
Much later in my trip someone would ask me and another backpacker (who'd been traveling even longer than me) if we had advice for him. The other backpacker immediately replied "Just keep your head on a swivel". As in, just look around you, keep your eyes open, you'll see all you want and need to. My grandma gave me similar advice before I left, when I asked her what I should do in Spain (her home country): "Oh, you don'thave to do anything. You see something you like, you go there. You see something else, you go there instead. There is nothing you have to do".
Munich, Germany
I arrived in Munich late at night on January 14th. My friend Caitlin met me at the train station near her house and we walked over to it to drop my stuff off. Jetlag hit me real good at this point, so I only barely remember her taking me to a nearby biergarten to get some food and catch up. The next day we headed down to the center of the city, and she showed me around the sights, like Marienplatz and the Frauenkirche (one of many famous churches in Munich).
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/munich-victory-gate-2018.jpg" descr="Siegestor (Victory Gate), Munich, 2018" %}
As we walked and ate our way through the day Caitlin told me all of the things that are different in Europe, like how water is never free anywhere, nor are public restrooms; like how many buildings which are still used and lived in are older than our entire country; like how people use cash instead of card, and get irritated if you make them break a large bill, or they just might not do it at all; like how even in a large city like Munich everything can still be closed on a Sunday.
{% include image.html src="mr-worldwide/munich-moosach-2018.jpg" descr="Moosach neighborhood, Munich, 2018" float="right" %}
The thing which struck me most about Munich was how quiet it was. The din of traffic is so ingrained into me that I don't even hear it until it's not there. And to not hear it inside of a city was very strange. More than sound, there was a quietness of life. It didn't feel like people were rushed, with too much to do and too little time. People crowded onto the subway, but not with impatience, and people walked home from the train station after work without hurry. It was like the priorities of the whole culture were different in some fundamental way that I could never quite put a finger on.
Caitlin worked during the week and so I was set free into the City for a few days. I visited more churches, ate more food, hung out at the library figuring out the next steps of my travels, and just generally wandered around the city.
One snowy day I had lunch with a distant relative on my mom's side, who is an artist in Munich. I met her at her studio, and from there we wandered around various museums where she gave me essentially a private guided tour of the exhibits. We talked about politics, with Trump being the main topic of course. We talked about art, and school, and our different cultures. She told me that Europe had always looked to the US as a kind of older brother, but now that image was starting to fall apart, and I told her about the tiny house and minimalism movement that is hopefully picking up steam in the US. (TODO finish this paragraph).
A week after arriving it was time for me to continue on. One cold morning I hopped onto a bus, rode through a snowy Switzerland, and hopped off into a bright and sunny Milan.
Milan, Italy
My first impression of Milan was: "Wow, this place is sketchy". The streets were dirty, old, and covered in graffiti. There were homeless everywhere, people selling bootleg clothes in the street, scammers targeting tourists, and a general disheveldness which Munich didn't have. But on the other side of that coin, Milan is one of the fashion capitals of the world, and everywhere I looked there were also beautiful people in expensive looking clothes, driving fancy cars, and eating at fancy cafes. Where Munich was simple and wealthy, Milan was lavish and disparate.
My hostel in Milan was called the Ostello Bello, and was probably the best one I could have gotten as my first hostel in Europe. The hostel's downstairs area was a restaurant/bar, with tables reserved for hostel guests. Upon arriving they immediately sat me down at one of those tables, where others were sitting, and said "this is Brian, talk to him". They did this with every person who arrived, as well as giving us free food and drinks, so that every night turned into a small party.
It took a while for me to fully break out of my shell and get used to meeting people in hostels, but if it weren't for Ostello Bello it might not have happened at all. Every night I got to hand out and make friends with people from South Korea, Scotland, Argentina, France, Switzerland, and locals from Milan too. So despite all the negative things I'm going to have to say about party hostels later, I'm grateful for Ostello Bello.
As far as Milan itself, the only thing which really impacted me was the Duomo. And boy did it impact me, so much so that I visited it twice. It's the third largest church in the world, but my experience of it was even better than when I went to St. Peter's, the first largest. The interior is so cavernous that all sounds echo virtually forever, creating a low hum which reminded me of the Hindu Om. To think that the words of a book carried such force that, 2000 years later, people were erecting and maintaining incredible structures like the Milan's Duomo in their honor floored me. There's a lot of criticism which could and should be leveled towards the Catholic Church, but damnit they know how to build a building.
Besides the Duomo I also visited some museums and other sights, like the Sforza Castle, walking from one to the other as the days went on. Walking became a frequent past-time for me during my traveling. Between Google Maps and an external batter pack I always had with me there was never a worry about getting lost, and with hostels generally being clustered near the sights it was rarely more than a half-hour walk to any given thing I wanted to see. So I got used to walking a lot, and taking public transit infrequently, and never once used a taxi or rental car while in Europe.
Five days after arriving in Milan I left it, having made many friends and having learned a lot about Italy and Italians. I also learned I was spending too long at each city: It was almost 2 weeks into my 3 month-max trip (for visa reasons), and I'd only been to two! From then on I kept to two or three days per city, depending on how much I cared about it, with a couple of five day-ers when I really needed a rest.
Ravenna, Italy
After the hecticness of Milan I needed something more quiet. Before leaving the US a friend had told me about Ravenna, the once capital of the Western Roman Empire and now small Italian city, where some of the world's oldest Christian structures still reside. Mosaics retain their original quality over time far better than many other mediums, and Ravenna was full of ones from as early as the 6th century. While not as glamorous and fast-paced as Milan, Ravenna really hit me with the depth of its history. As someone from the US I'm not accustomed to seeing anything built before 1500, and yet here were buildings in excellent condition which were built a thousand years prior.
Another thing which took some time to get accustomed to was using cash. By this point in the trip it had become somewhat second-nature, but only by way of many mishaps previously. In the US using cash is usually a backup option, with credit/debit cards ruling supreme. ATMs never give out bills bigger than $20, and no establishment would ever complain about having to break a $20 except for maybe the smallest purchases. In Europe the ATMs (or cash machines, whatever) almost always give out €50 bills, which absolutely no one wants to break except big chain stores. I still remember the exact location of an ATM in Munich which gave me €10 bills, it was that exciting of a find, and I went out of my way to go back to it more than once.
So in addition to needing to keep an eye on your cash and get more out periodically, you also need to keep an eye out for places which will break your bills and plan accordingly. Before leaving the US I had gotten a debit card with free international ATM withdrawls at any ATM, so finding places to get cash out wasn't a problem, but breaking it always was.
By the time I got back to the US, I missed doing everything in cash, and even kept doing it for a while in spite of my culture. While having to find places to break fifties was a pain, a little friction to making random purchases wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Instead of impulsively buying whatever was in front of me, I was incentivized to wait until a better opportunity arrose, generally by waiting until I could buy multiple things at the same time, which generally meant buying more efficiently because I was actually putting thought into it. Also, by always paying in cash, I had a better sense of how much I was actually spending day-to-day. In the US we abhor inconvenience, but in my opinion our reluctance to use cash is a good example of how that abhorance can be to our own detriment.
Florence, Italy
The train from Ravenna to Florence (or, as Italians spell it, Firenze) was uneventful. Finding the best route between cities turned out to be pretty straightforward. There's an app called GoEuro which helps compare different methods like bus, train, plane, and taxi/ride-sharing. There's another app called Rome2Trio which does roughly the same thing. There's a bus company called FlexBus which I used quite a bit; their prices are good, their buses are new, and the UI of their site was made in the last decade.
Florence was by far my favorite city in Italy. On the one hand it was very trourist-friendly, and on the other it still retained the feeling of being a historic city. I split my time there between visiting museums and churches and finding the best cheapest spots to eat. Before leaving the US a friend had told me to avoid any restaurant in Europe that has pictures on its menu; they're targeted at tourists and priced accordingly. My strategy for finding food involved marking off hole-in-the-wall spots in my maps app whenever I came across them during the day.
On my second day in Florence I was sitting by the Uffizi, eating a panini, and I randomly met an art history student from Madrid who was also visiting Florence. Together we went to a bunch of museums, saw the David, and just generally hung out. I asked her a lot of questions at the museums, because, to be honest, I'd never understood what to make of art in museums.
I'd already learned that, even if I could see a picture of something online, seeing it in person is way different. In person the colors in a painting pop out more (many even have gold leef paint which doesn't really show up in pictures at all, but makes a world of difference), there's a lot more detail to be seen, and the size of some is absolutely baffling. I also enjoy learning about history, and the history of art is effectively the history of the world. So museums had become a meditative place for me; I could go to one and just wander, taking in art pieces at whatever rate I liked, learning and thinking about history as I went.
What had always confused me, though, was how to judge art. As in, what makes one piece better than another, or what makes one artist better than another? Why do some paintings become famous and others remain obscure? What my friend from Madrid told me is that there's not really a metric. Some paintings become famous for historical reasons, either due to where they were originally displayed or some story associated with them. Same for some artists. Ultimately it's up to the individual to judge them. There was a painting in the same room as the famous Birth of Venus painting which I liked far more, and was happy to admire it alone as throngs of other tourists vied for good selfies with the more famous piece.
I left Florence with a greater appreciation and understanding of museums, as well as a good friend who I would be able to visit later while making my way through Spain.
Rome, Italy
Rome surprised me when I got there, though to be honest it's not clear what my expectations actually were. The city center, aka the tourist center, is absolutely massive, and all of it is completely tourist-centric. Living in Rome must feel like living inside of Disney World. The city no longer exists for its residents, but instead has been completely swallowed by the tourism industry. Every street corner and storefront is filled with souvenir shops, overpriced food, clothing stores with "I <3 Rome" shirts, gelato shops, walking tour agencies, bike rentals, "experience" vendors (helicopter rides over the Colosseum! Oh my!), shitty jewelry stores, and so much more, all aimed at someone who has too much money and not enough time to spend it all.
My hostel was one of the cheapest I could find, but since I was only staying two full days I figured it'd be fine. Seeing all the sights of Rome in only two days is not recommended, but I did the best I could. The first day I went straight to the Vatican, getting there as early as possible to try (unsuccessfully) to beat the line. St. Peters is the largest church in the world, but being rushed I wasn't able to enjoy it like Milan's Duomo, and a lot of it was closed off unless you wanted to pay more. I wasn't able to spend enough time in it to enjoy it.
The Vatican museum was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. For starters it's huge, with tons and tons of things to see, including, obviously, the Sistene Chapel. I took my time wandering around. After the museum I left the Vatican and wandered over to some other sights, like the Castel Sant'Angelo and the Pantheon. As the day wore on, and more and more tourists started pouring out, everything became impossibly crowded. It was difficult to really enjoy anything, what with everyone taking their phones out to capture anything and everything the guidebook said to, without really taking the time to take in the thing itself.
This was something I began to struggle with while I was in Rome. It wasn't always clear to me why these people cared about these sights, with myself being included. My pessimistic self would say that people just want the social media points gained by a nice selfie in front of Trevi Fountain, and that the tourism explosion which has started in the last decade is driven by narcissism. My charitable self might say that everyone understands that the journey matters more than the destination, and that seeing the sights isn't really the point, but rather prefer the adventure taken with friends and/or family, and so they snap a quick picture and continue on with their good time.
The reason people travel and visit tourist spots is really only their business, and I can't be one to judge. It just seems unfortunate to take an entire city, arguably the most important city in written history, and turn it into a theme park for the sake of people who don't actually care all too much about it. I carried this realization with me for the rest of my trip, that tourism is a deal-with-the-devil, taking the money of people who, ostensibly, find some place interesting, in exchange for driving away the original inhabitants of that place who made it interesting in the first place.
Later on I would learn that the creep of tourism and the dreaded plague of "gentrification" were spoken of as the same thing in popular destinations. The problem of wealthy people driving out the inhabitants of a city in order to take part in the city culture the original inhabitants created is a global one, and one I'm certainly a part of. I moved to Denver because I liked the culture of that city, and was fortunate enough to be able to afford to do so, but then left only three years later, and was now doing the same in even shorter time periods in cities the world over.
I obviously didn't stop being a tourist after Rome, but I made a conscious attempt to be a better one. I put down the guidebook (or, in my case, the guide app) and tried to explore more naturally, taking in each sight as I found it, and learning as much about it as I could. Rather than trying to see a little of everything I find something which really called out to me and focus on that. It's a tough predicament to be in; it's important to go out and see the world, to meet people from all different cultures and see all the ways they live, but doing so is, often, detrimental to those cultures. It was tough to find a balance I was comfortable with, and I'm still not sure a "correct" balance actually exists.
My second day in Rome I spent at the Colosseum and the Palatino, but I was so utterly exhausted and brain-melted I barely remember them. I left Rome with a ton of things left unseen, but without any regret about it. Italy itself had far too much for me to do in this trip, and I knew I'd be back one day, both to Italy and to Rome itself. On the third day I hopped on a plane, flew across the sea, and landed in Spain.