By the time my feet touched Irish soil, it had been six months since I’d been in an English-speaking country. Even so, when the letter “h” is “haych,” the word “film” has two distinct syllables, the remark “oh, it was great craic [‘crack’]!” can be heard in polite company and Republicans have my respect and admiration, there is no mistaking Ireland for the United States.

I spent a couple of weeks in the South (the independent Irish state that includes 26 of the island’s 32 counties), then went north to Belfast (the capital of the British-controlled six counties that make up “Northern Ireland”) for the remaining month of my trip. It had been three years since I was in the North, and this time around I had a Yale grant to do a news photography internship at a newspaper in the overwhelmingly Catholic and Republican community of West Belfast.

American press coverage of the situation in the North has too often had a decidedly pro-British bias. It depicts the British army as a neutral force in the conflict, and condemns the IRA for “terrorism” while remaining silent on violence by Loyalist paramilitary groups supported and often tipped off by British agents. It attempts to explain away “the Troubles” as senseless sectarian tribalism (Catholics and Protestants killing each other for no other reason than for belonging to the opposing group)--dangerously ignoring the complexity of Ireland’s status as one of the first, and one of the last remaining, colonies in the British Empire-- and the discrimination, violent intimidation and denial of civil rights that this status has entailed for its non-Protestant subjects.

If the specter of the modern “Troubles” in the North of Ireland dates from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the roots of Republican-Loyalist antagonism are deep. I will spare myself the task of writing an extensive history of the British presence in Ireland, but to give you an idea I will point out that the still highly contentious, often violent, Loyalist marches through Catholic neighborhoods every summer celebrate a military victory that took place in 1690, and that when Belfast’s City Cemetery was built in 1869, a 3m deep underground wall was constructed to ensure that Catholics were separated from Protestants, even in death’s decay.

During my time in West Belfast I lived with a wonderful and amazingly hospitable couple, whom I’ll call Tim and Eileen, and their four children. After months of staying in hostels, it was a pleasure to live with a family again: the boys, aged seven and ten, who watched soccer matches bouncing on their feet in excitement with their eyes just inches from the television; the girls, aged eleven and fifteen, singing Rihanna songs in their pink rooms. There was the Sunday morning when I was woken by the plaintive cry of “Mummy can we never have ONE DAY off from Mass?!”; and the night when the youngest boy asked me to show him in his atlas coloring book the places I’d visited (“Have you been to Barcelona?” Yes. “Have you been to Celtic [Scotland]?” No. “Have you been to Alligator?” His finger rested on Algeria.)

The night I arrived in Belfast, Tim and Eileen had another couple, their friends since childhood, over for dinner. As the sun sank and the kids played soccer in the backyard, the adults started to reminisce, as adults will after several bottles of wine. Eileen remembered when her family was chased by Loyalist mobs which burned the family house to the ground along with those of the other Catholics on the block--leaving her, her parents, and her twelve siblings homeless on the curb. She remembered how after that, two of her brothers joined the IRA—and how her parents didn’t want them to, but they could understand why they did. She remembered how the only time her mother slept well over all those years was when her sons were interned, because while she knew that the guards beat them viciously, they were unlikely to kill them. (The two brothers were eventually sentenced to long prison terms—25 years for one, “natural life” for the other.)

Eileen remembered the British soldiers in blackface who kicked in the door of her family’s house nearly every other night looking in every room for her brothers before they were interned--and after they were imprisoned, looking simply to terrorize the family. She remembered how she and her older sisters would go out into the streets to protest during the day, banging pots and pans at the soldiers, and how her youngest sister, Mary, would mostly stay in the house, because the raids made her so anxious and scared.

The man they’d invited remembered growing up with “involved men” (IRA volunteers) hiding out in his house each night, and making bombs at the kitchen table. He remembered the iced lollies, meat and crisps all the neighborhood kids used to grab from the hijacked delivery trucks during the riots that erupted in 1971 when the British interned 342 men (all but a handful of them Catholic), imprisoning them without trial.

His wife remembered watching her father get shot before her eyes, and watching, too, when fourteen-year-old Mary was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by a British soldier, unprovoked. In Long Kesh the following day, the prison governor summoned Eileen’s brothers into his office. “Do you have a sister called Maria?” he asked them. It’s Mary, they responded. “Yeah, well she’s dead.”

Auntie Mary, I would learn, still faithfully attended every family gathering. She was in the framed pictures on the wall and on the mural on the side of the brick apartments just a few blocks away; she was the namesake of the niece who described excitedly the new apartment she was preparing to move into, the niece who saw the end of the Troubles, and has already outlived her aunt by twelve years.

The Belfast Mary lives in is very different from the Belfast in which her aunt, her namesake, was murdered twenty-six years ago. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement announced the end of the war (if not necessarily the hostilities). And in May of this year, a devolved assembly was reestablished at Stormont with Ian Paisley--a man who once stood on a truck with a bullhorn urging on the Loyalist mobs who burned down Eileen's family home—as Deputy First Minister , doing what he swore again and again he would never do: sharing power with former high-ranking IRA man and Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness.

For those of you unfamiliar with Irish politics, the sight of Paisley and McGuinness working and even laughing together publicly might have seemed, not so very long ago about as likely, in an American context, as Strom Thurmond and Malcolm X draping daisy chains around one another’s necks.

But in Belfast today Loyalists and Republicans are indeed sharing political power.

In staunchly Republican neighborhoods the long-resisted, Protestant-dominated police force (recently renamed the PSNI) is patrolling again for the first time in years, with Sinn Fein’s support.

Along the top of the deep green hills from which Tim remembers that Loyalists would fire shots into his neighborhood, his youngest son rides his training-wheeled bike down a recently-completed hiking trail.

At family gatherings Eileen’s brothers, once condemned to 25 years and “natural life" are in attendance. Thanks to the prisoner releases stipulated by the Good Friday Agreement, they laugh and drink with their wives, siblings and cousins. And when their youngest nieces and nephews ask them why they were in prison, they’ve been known to say, ashen faced, that they were caught smoking cigarettes on the bus.

In Eileen’s backyard her sons play soccer, and she says to me simply, “Thank God our kids don’t have to go through what we went through.” They will grow up in a house where no one is making bombs at the kitchen table; and while they will know about their Aunt Mary, of course, Eileen will have the luxury of not having to discuss politics with them unless (until) they ask.

In Belfast today Eileen’s youngest son climbs all the way inside the army-themed laundry hamper that he’s dragged into a corner of the kitchen, his eyes just visible peeking mischievously over the top while his older brother stalks the house with a toy revolver looking to hunt him down. As Eileen explains what she means by “what we went through” (burned-out house, imprisoned brothers, blackfaced soldiers, dead sister) her youngest son catches my attention with a forcefully whispered “Psssssssst.” I look over at him. “Do you see anyone out there?” In Belfast today I lean back in my chair, take a wide look around and whisper back: “I think the coast is clear.”

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was.

But still, there are the death threats against the Republican ex-prisoners-turned-black-taxi-drivers accused by Loyalist paramilitaries of spying in their neighborhoods while dropping off passengers. There are the 12 July bonfires where, in Coleraine this year, Loyalists placed the name of a 16-year-old Catholic boy recently dead of a heart attack on top of the pile to be burned (next to effigies of Gerry Adams and the Pope), and when the boy’s grieving father climbed to the top to retrieve it, he was issued a death threat. There is the Orange Order march where a banner commemorating Ulster Volunteer Force man Noel Kinner was unveiled when the procession reached the spot just yards from where Kinner once murdered a Catholic father of three.

There are the visual demarcations of turf: the Union Jacks and red white and blue curbstones in some communities, and the tricolors and IRA graffiti in others. There are the ironically named “Peace Walls” that divide the two communities and the fact that while more and more of them have been built since the trumpeted end of the Troubles in 1998, not a single one has come down—a troubling reminder that peace is distinct from reconciliation.

And what, after all, is meant by peace? If peace is, as Einstein put it, “not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice,” than Belfast (along with many, if not most, places in the world) may yet be far from it. Which is why when I asked Eileen how she felt about seeing the PSNI patrolling her neighborhood again, she sighed and said “It’s hard. For a lot of people, it’s just too soon. Sinn Fein, they expect you to walk down the street and look [the PSNI officers] in the eye, they really do. But I just can’t.”

She can’t because although the name and uniform of the police service has changed, and although they are taking steps to recruit more Catholics, Sinn Fein is asking its constituents to look to the very people who terrorized Republican neighborhoods for decades suddenly to protect and serve them. “For me it’s too soon. It’s hard to change when they don’t—and a leopard doesn’t change its spots. I don’t want anything to do with them—because of Mary.”

Because no one was ever prosecuted for Eileen’s sister’s death, just as no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths of so many civilians on both sides. Because despite the reports of external international commissions confirming the existence of collusion between the British Army and Loyalist paramilitary groups, the British government continues to obstruct investigations and prosecutions in the highest profile cases (notably the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane, which Amnesty International cites in its report finding that the United Kingdom “continues to erode fundamental human rights”).

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was, and thank God that Tim and Eileen’s children will not have to go through what their parents did. But they will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

Across the North Protestant and Catholic communities alike are plagued by a growing epidemic of suicide, with 57 people already having taken their own lives so far this year in West Belfast alone (a community of only about 90,000).

Residents complain of “anti-social behavior” (drinking, arson, vandalism, racist attacks) among gangs of youth. One afternoon I photographed residents who live alongside a nursery school playground where janitors have to quickly clean up the remains of the night (underpants, broken bottles and used condoms) every morning before the kids arrive. As the reporter and I turned to leave, an old woman shouted to us from the front yard of her house: “See the peelers [cops]? They haven’t shot enough of them [the teenagers who’ve been partying at the school at night]. Tell them they should shoot them all.”

With the PSNI only halfway patrolling the Republican neighborhoods where they are only halfway welcome, and with the Provisional IRA (which policed Republican neighborhoods very effectively, if unofficially, for decades) having officially given up violence, the resulting vacuum is being exploited. In the Ballymurphy housing estate, a feud between two families has been linked to 600 criminal incidents, ranging from arson, to murder, to the nighttime leveling of a house with a stolen bulldozer. So for the residents of these communities plagued by crime, there is little peace in peacetime Belfast. As someone wrote in an anonymous letter to the editor that referenced the IRA’s former favored form of punishing criminals, “bring back kneecapping!”

Drug abuse is another problem claiming more and more of Belfast’s young. On one morning I sat with a reporter in the darkened parlor of Mrs. McVeigh’s house as her fifteen-year-old daughter Ashling, who choked on her own vomit while on ecstasy, lay in a wooden box covered by cards just feet away. “She was the heart of this family,” Mrs. McVeigh told us as Ashling smiled from the framed photographs on the mantle. “She was our whole world in this house. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go on.”

She lifted a couple of the cards from the coffin and handed them to us, explaining that the ones we were holding were from Ashling’s Protestant friends. Ashling was a popular kid, popular with everyone, and when she started going to the Protestant neighborhoods to see her friends, her mother was worried that it wasn’t safe for her there. “But Ashling just couldn’t understand what all this bad blood was between Protestants and Catholics,” she told us. “All her wee Protestant friends came by last night and you should’ve seen them. They loved her.”

Ashling bridged the sectarian divide only to die from a drug overdose—a fitting poster child for the complexities of peace, sealed up in a polished wooden box.

Tim and Eileen’s children will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

When the eldest daughter asks about politics one night at dinner after the younger children have gone away, her parents will struggle (understandably so) to explain cogently a war half won and a country half free. “Is the IRA still around?” The Provisional IRA isn’t, but the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA splinter groups are. “Are Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams mates now?” No, not exactly. “And Ireland, Belfast, is part of Britain?” Yes, right now it is, but we want a united Ireland. “So I’m a British citizen then?” No. No, don’t ever say that, you’re Irish. “Is the war going to start again?” No. “Well how do you know?” It’ll never be as bad as it was. You have to work through politics now if you want to change things. War is a very bad thing. “But the IRA wasn’t bad, was it?” No, because the IRA was fighting for our civil rights and our freedom. “So if you’re fighting for your freedom then war is okay?”

In Belfast today peace—even peace without reconciliation, even peace without justice—is better than war. So in reply Tim said to his daughter, because he knows it all too well: “look, it’s not a pretty thing standing over coffins.”

And now I've come to the end. Over seven and a half months I’ve passed through three continents and twenty-five countries. When I arrived at American immigration and was handed a customs declaration directing me to list the “countries visited on this trip prior to U.S. arrival” in the space of about two inches, all I could do was laugh and write down three or four of the least offensive ones. It’s been a hell of a trip.

I realize that a lot of you thought I was crazy to travel around the world by myself, and from the beginning I could see your point. Maybe it was the fact that the recurring sentiment nearly every one of you expressed to me in our goodbyes was “please don’t die,” or maybe I was just being realistic, but before I left for this trip I was really scared. Scared enough to write letters to friends and family in case anything happened to me. Scared enough to pack a knife.

The letters are still unopened, and the only person I cut with the knife was myself (making a sandwich). When I think about the people I met, the kindness I was shown and the fact that I have seen more of the world in twenty years than most people will see in a lifetime, I feel nothing but overwhelmed, humbled and fortunate beyond measure.

Maybe I was crazy to do this trip, but given that I could, I would’ve been crazy not to do it. I may have come to the end for now, but traveling is no cure for a longing to travel—it only makes it worse.

Two days before I left early last January I had a strange dream. As some of you have heard me complain about how outrageously boring my dreams usually are (sipping a mug of tea, turning the pages of the newspaper, and the like), I thought I should pay attention to this one. I was sitting on a long flight next to two of you, and the plane suddenly split open like a Christmas cracker. As all of the passengers hurtled to the ground I realized that the plane had been equipped with parachutes under every seat, though I hadn’t known to grab one before I’d jumped from the wreckage. As I fell faster and faster, as I braced myself for the impact and awaited my certain death, one of you reached out and pulled me in, deployed the parachute attached to your back and guided both of us gently to the ground.

It's a crazy thing to think you can travel around the world; to show up in places where you don’t know a single person and sometimes don’t even know the language and expect, even depend on, finding a welcome.

And the fact that it worked says something desperately good about a world that so often seems so desperately bad.

This trip was a crazy and presumptuous thing to do, and I knew it even before I left. Which is probably why I dreamt what I did, that dream about manmade wings melting in a too-high flight.

I can say two things equally: that I have missed all of you for every day of the past seven-and- a-half months, at times so much that it physically hurt; and also, that this trip has been the best time of my life. No matter how often you wrote, and no matter how long I took to write back, please know that I simply would not have been able to do this without you guys.

So thank you for letting me wander so far—and above all, thank you for reaching out to pluck me from freefall, bring me home.

Love,

Fitz

Still, there is no place in the world quite like Paris (and I've looked).

With my transportation fortunes brightening rapidly, I took a train (!) from Istanbul to Athens (towering mountains, shepherds and sheep, a Thessaloniki thunderstorm), and then an airplane (!!) from Athens to Paris.

In between, I spent a day alongside throngs of tourists in Athens seeing the Acropolis and assorted other old shit that left me, if you can't tell, a bit cold. Someone’s bound to point out that I'm a History major. Let me live.

When I was seven I had a calendar of photographs from the Greek Isles, and I've never forgotten the deep blue of the ocean in those pictures. Inspired by these memories, I took an eight hour ferry to the island of Santorini to stay for five days.

Every day in Santorini I stayed on the beach until the last light finally disappeared around ten in the evening. I swam, read a long book and otherwise did as little as possible. No place looks how it does in calendars, but Santorini does (with the exception that on one afternoon there was a visiting karate team whose members were jumping from iconic white roof and blue-domed church to another— an innovative variation on the theme just in time for the 2008 calendars).

I could go on fawning for several paragraphs, but it should suffice to say that Santorini is stunning, and that the ocean was blue enough to satisfy even memories formed at the age of seven-- the peak of the Crayola years, when one is particularly attuned to bold colors (box of 64, not a poor man's 8-count)-- and not impressed by just anything.

Since I have the obscene privilege of having been to Paris three times before, I didn’t arrive this time around particularly wanting to climb the Eiffel Tower, see the view from Notre Dame, or visit the Louvre, though these are all perfectly pleasant things to do.

This time around, I just wanted to know if Arthur and Henri were alive. Because if they were, I needed to bring them back into my life.

I met Arthur and Henri on a miserably hot July day four years ago. It was the last day of the Tour de France, when the riders enter the capital and complete eight laps around the length of the Champs Elysee before a winner is finally named. It’s an event that draws immense crowds every year, and any cycling aficionado knows that in order to get in a good position to watch the final stage, you need to arrive at around six in the morning. I’m not a cycling aficionado, and if nothing else I’m a sleep aficionado, so I walked up to the boulevard at 3:00 in the afternoon, half an hour after the riders were scheduled to arrive.

I managed to push my way through the crowd to climb up onto the window ledge of a bank building. An old man and a boy were already standing there, having recognized the rare perch from which, if you could remember to hold on and manage not to get heat stroke, you had a decent chance of not falling to death or disfigurement. But if we could breathe a little more freely than the people down below, none of three of us on the ledge could see the race any better from where we were standing, and soon we were a bit starved for entertainment.

Within fifteen minutes twelve-year-old Arthur and Henri (his father, but at 68 old enough to be his grandfather) had struck up a conversation. Over the next three hours we had glimpsed, two times (through the crowds, behind lampposts, through the branches of trees), what may or may not have been Lance Armstrong’s yellow jersey, and in the long periods of waiting in between, we had discussed everything from Eminem, to my high school soccer team’s training regimen, to a comparison of conditions for cows on dairy farms in the United States and France. (I would later learn that both Henri and Arthur have a charming and inexplicable affection for all things cow.) When the race was over we exchanged addresses, said goodbye fondly and went our separate ways.

It had been a lovely encounter but I didn’t expect to hear from them again. However a few weeks after my return to California I had a card bisected into two halves by a hand-drawn line. The top half was filled with Henri’s small, idiosyncratic and semi-legible script, the bottom half with Arthur’s loopy cursive misspellings.

From that first short card, our correspondence continued consistently for three years, with Henri and I exchanging letters that were often three or four pages long two or three times a year, and Arthur sending postcards from his summer vacations. I wrote to Henri about applying to colleges and the debacle of the 2004 elections, about my travels in Northern Ireland and India, the devastation in New Orleans, and my despair at watching Zinedine Zidane get ejected from the World Cup final.

On blue construction paper, lined paper and Christmas cards, Henri wrote to me about the books he was reading, the progress he was making (or not making) on his paintings and collages, the rioting in the Parisian suburbs, the French reaction to the American elections, the trouble he had getting Arthur to clean his room, and the brief news report he’d seen on French television that had shown footage of Yale (they’d looked closely, but hadn’t managed to spot me).

He wrote to me about many more things in moments when his handwriting became so loosely formed as to be illegible. If you’ve ever walked into my room and seen me holding a letter two inches from my face, then holding it at arms length trying to catch the light in just the right way, chances are I was trying to read one of Henri’s letters. Henri was too old, and Arthur too young, to want to give up our letters for e-mails, and in the end it was better that way. If half of what Henri had written was routinely indecipherable, the thought and care he had put into each letter was plain.

Two years after our first meeting I was going to Paris again, so Arthur and Henri sent me their phone number and told me to call them up. On a Saturday afternoon I took the metro to their small apartment not far from the Eiffel Tower, and Henri drove us to the field where Arthur’s soccer team was halfway through a game. We watched the second half and then the three of us went to lunch in Chinatown, wandering through the bazaar afterwards, sizing up the jade lions and wooden snakes.

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and we wandered through the street market nearby, had a cup of tea at the bistro on the corner and visited Henri’s artist friend who, scandalized, recounted his recent run-in with the Parisian police (he had been hanging around his gallery one night in dark clothes and a Batman mask, and a passing pedestrian had reported a robbery in progress).

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and during Arthur’s lunch break from the school he attended a couple blocks away, we quickly ate the three course meal Henri had prepared. Arthur ran back to school, Henri and I had another cup of tea at the bistro and browsed through the selection at the bookstore next door to their apartment.

I flew back to Yale the next morning, and the long letters kept arriving a couple times a year; each semester, not long after finals were finally over, I wrote them long letters back.

And then, about a year ago, the letters stopped. Since it was not unusual for several months to go by between them it was awhile before I noticed. I rummaged around for the last thing I’d received from Henri, a quick postcard from a vacation promising a long letter once he returned to Paris the following week. Alarmed, I wrote him and Arthur a letter and waited, but nothing came back. Months later I wrote another short note, but still nothing.

After nine months had gone by without any news I would periodically type their names into Google or the websites for Parisian newspapers, worried that they had been killed in a car accident, or that Henri might have had a heart attack-- he would have been 72 by then, and if he had, in fact, died, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Arthur had been unable to reply to any of my letters . Dozens of scenarios ran through my head, but there wasn’t much more I could do to find out what had happened to them from the other side of the Atlantic.

I had long ago misplaced their phone number, so not knowing what else to do, on the morning of my first full day in Paris I got on the subway and went to their apartment. The bookstore Henri had taken me to years ago seemed as good a place as any to start. A somewhat surly older man was sitting behind the desk and when I asked, he told me that he did know Henri. “Do you know if he still lives next door?” The man asked me how I knew him, and I told him I was his American friend. “Yeah, he’s still next door.”

The surly man went back to his accounts. “If I leave you a note would you mind passing it on to him when you see him?” The man shrugged: “If you want.” At the end of twenty minutes at the back of the bookstore painstakingly writing out a letter to Henri in French, the surly man’s cheerful wife walked in the bookstore, exchanged a few words with her husband, and walked over to me.

“Are you Maura?” she asked me excitedly. I was. “Henri will be so glad to know you’re here, he’s told me all about you. He’s in the hospital right now, he had an operation on his eye and it got horribly infected.” I shot a quick glare at surly man in the corner, crumpled up my nearly finished letter and, despite myself, I broke into a relieved smile. The woman had already dialed Henri’s hospital room, and she thrust the phone into my hand. Within seconds Henri’s voice was at the other end of the line, shocked to hear from me, but evidently delighted when I asked if I could stop by during visiting hours. By the time I’d hung up the phone the woman at the bookstore was passing me a hand-drawn map with directions to the hospital.

Two hours later I walked into Henri’s hospital room. I found him sitting in a chair by the window wearing a bandage over one eye, but otherwise looking like a relatively healthy 72-year-old man. On the bed beside him there was a book on astrophysics, and another book, lying open and already half-read, entitled Why Cows Can’t Go Down Stairs.

He smiled warmly when I walked in, offered me a chair, and immediately launched into one of his characteristic speeches that went on, with only minimal interjections on my part, for nearly an hour and a half-- about health care, anarchism, the menace of Nicolas Sarkozy, and the wonders of cows and the cosmos. And then, finally, he got to why he’d stopped writing.

He was terribly sorry, the last year had been very hard with Arthur, who was going through a rocky adolescence. The last time I’d seen Arthur he’d been a rosy-cheeked and particularly sweet-natured thirteen year old, if a bit shy, and I wondered what kind of trouble he could have gotten himself into in two short years. Henri told me that Arthur had spent half of the school year in the bistro across the street, or riding his moto around, smoking cigarettes and staying out with friends every night until 2 AM. Henri is already acutely philosophical and sensitive in disposition, and since he's retired he has all the time in the world to worry about Arthur, his only child.

In the latest episode, not a week before, the police had called Henri into the neighborhood precinct to collect Arthur after he’d been arrested for tagging. The building he’d chosen had been slated for demolition anyway, and Henri conceded that the police might have shown his son some leniency-- had Arthur not made the small mistake of informing the officers that he refused to answer any of their questions until they asked them in proper French.

As I’d always been charmed by Arthur’s frequent and often egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes (and had never envisioned him the future academicien he now, apparently, would style himself to be), I couldn’t help but see a good deal of humor in his classically French declaration. Still, I did my best not to show it, because Henri was clearly worried to death about his son. He told me that in the last year he had stopped painting-- had stopped everything, really. He had gotten my letters and had started to write back a couple of times, but he'd always stopped not even halfway through. He just couldn’t do anything. We talked for an hour longer, and when I finally stood to go, I told him that I hoped he’d write to me even if things weren’t going well. Henri smiled, promised that he would, and told me how happy he was that I had come.

Having successfully tracked down Arthur and Henri, I spent my remaining four days walking around Paris the best way I know how—with no plan and all the time in the world. Because when you don’t have a plan in Paris, things just happen; because to try to mold the greatest city in the world to your will is hubris.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because if you climb up on a window ledge, you will climb down with two friends; and if you lose them, just come back—Paris will find them.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because the woman selling olives in the marketplace scowls when you ask for a second sample (how could you not be familiar already with the over two dozen varieties she has devoted her life to selling?) And because the woman who sells you the slice of spinach and cheese tart gushes (after the sale has been made and the money handed over and nothing other than the purest appreciation for her metier could have inspired her to say it): “magnificent … she [the tart] is just magnificent!”

Paris is the greatest city in the world because there are streets named for a dragon, a wooden sword, the four winds, mules’ tracks, the “honest bourgeoisie” and something called “looking for noon.” And because on one of these streets there is a stroller stopped mid-sidewalk, sending passing pedestrians on a detour onto the road because its two-year-old occupant is down on his hands and knees drawing with chalk (because there’s no helping when and where inspiration deigns to strike).

Paris is the greatest city in the world because a scoop of pear Berthillon ice cream is simultaneously exactly what a pear tastes like, and better than any pear that ever could have graced this earth; because the petit pain figue noix at Poujauran bakery is handed to you still warm; and because while you sip your mint tea from a glass in the salon of the city’s main mosque on a rainy day, little birds land on the chairs nearby and flit in and out of the brass Moroccan lamps overhead.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because on an evening dubbed La Fete de La Musique, bands take to street corners in every neighborhood across the city to play free concerts (classical, jazz, indie, klezmer, tango, punk, drumming, Piaf standards, Scottish bagpipes and covers of the Clash)— some of them decent, the rare two or three good, a good deal of it horrendous, but taken together something wonderful and unexpected. Because as I walked away from the boisterous public sing-a-long attended by over a hundred people in the corner of the Place des Vosges (balding guitar man in the center of the crowd flinging stacks of xeroxed lyrics into the air like confetti before each song as hands shot up to snatch the lyrics as they fluttered down), I was almost knocked over by two teenaged girls chasing a runaway orange balloon. And because as I walked along Boulevard Richard Lenoir many hours later, I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was looking for, exactly, but I did know that there was a small brass band and a few scattered second-liners just steps ahead of me feeling out a path through the night.

In the weeks before my arrival, I had made a plan with Pan Pan (who’s in Geneva for the summer) to meet up with her during my last day there. It would be her first time in Paris; she’d be arriving in the morning and taking an early train back the following morning.

A couple of days before she was supposed to arrive, Pan Pan wrote to say that every single hostel in the city was booked for that night.

For a couple minutes this seemed like a problem. But Paris is an insomnia-inducing city-- why do something as trivial as sleep in a place like that? If we had no place to sleep, then all the better. We just wouldn’t sleep.

This plan got off to an auspicious start when we actually managed to find each other in the train station without any problems. Things started going quickly downhill when we tried to leave the train station. I stepped off the escalator and noticed that Pan Pan, behind me, did not. “Um … Maura? I think I’m stuck.” I looked back and Pan Pan’s loose pants were, indeed stuck in the bottom of the escalator. Within a few moments several gendarmes had descended on the escalator and were cutting Pan Pan free with a hunting knife while Pan Pan held onto the waistband of her pants (what little remained of them) to keep from flashing all of Paris. Within another few moments Pan Pan had bought and changed into a skirt from a shop in the train station. As we left the train station, we walked over a vent in the sidewalk emitting large upwardly gusts of air. As Pan Pan walked over it, her skirt flew up and she flashed all of Paris. Things were going well so far. A few minutes later, the torrential rains began.

But only a fool would let destroyed pants, involuntary exhibitionism and near-biblical rains ruin a day in Paris. Until night fell we walked across the entire city, right bank and left, Ile-de-la-Cité and Ile St.-Louis, making our way from bakery to outdoor market to ice cream stand to cheese store to bakery (again), stopping to study the exteriors of whatever tourist attractions we happened to come across along the way, but saving our entry fees for the good stuff: food.

If you need to stay up all night in Paris and you’ve made the mistake of walking around all day, by 1 AM you will already be wondering if you're going to make it at all. There isn’t much open at this time of night, but there is a 24-hour McDonald’s at Place de la République where for €1 the girl behind the counter will give you a token and point you to the coffee machine next to the toilets. You will put your token in the machine, and watch as dense brown and vaguely milky liquids pour, steaming, into the cup. You will look back at the girl as if to say, for fuck’s sake, this can’t be what it’s supposed to look like, but she isn’t paid minimum wage working all hours of the night to be your shoulder to cry on. You will take your “coffee” to a plastic chair by the window, and it will look vile. Drink it anyway.

You will drink it anyway because you’ll want to be awake between 2 and 6 AM in Paris. When the McDonald’s nightman will tell you that you have to visit the Congo—and will even go so far as to write down his banlieux street address (no phone, no e-mail) to let him know when you’re ready to go, because he has family there who will look after you. When you will unknowingly walk away from where you will think you were heading, and only realize your mistake three miles later, when you will realize, too, that with five more hours to kill the whole thing can hardly be called a “wrong turn.” When a drunk Vana White will stand unsteadily on the sidewalk displaying, to no one in particular, the paint samples in a darkened storefront. When the square outside Notre Dame will be emptied of people and filled with chairs. When you will come upon a sober and startlingly normal guy of about your age walking down the street, and without any preamble he will ask you a question, then at the next intersection turn and walk away, leaving you to ponder an exchange so effortless and mundane that it could have happened between old friends on a living room couch in the afternoon, had it not happened with a stranger on the streets of Paris nearing dawn: “Do you know how to speak Chinese?” he will have asked you. “It must be a very difficult language, you know, a character for every word and all .... But the writing is so pretty.”

Around six, when you and Pan Pan finally will be able to walk no further, you will collapse against the wall across from the bakery in the subway, sitting there like bums while you wait for it to open. And after awhile a decently-dressed black man will come up to the two of you, say something quickly, walk away, walk back: he was sitting right over there (he will point, your heads will follow) and they told him to leave. But he just wanted to get some coffee (you will nod) you don’t see those fucking gendarmes saying a word to the two of you, do you? He will mumble to himself, walk away and then, just as you turn to look at Pan Pan because you are astonished by the eloquence of his enraged movements, his subway soliloquy, he will turn on his heel and all he wanted was some fucking coffee. Sometimes these racist cops just make him wanna (he will walk a few paces away, sigh heavily, stride quickly back) just make him wanna (he will pinch the hem of his shirt, will pull it up slightly and let it drop) just make him wanna, wanna (he will lift the hem again and grab for the gun that will not be tucked in the waistband of his trousers) shit GODDAMNIT. Show me a man bored by Paris, and I will show you a man who is no longer interested in life, and probably never was.

A couple of weeks after I left Paris my mom e-mailed me from California to say that a letter had arrived from Henri, did I want her to open it? I did.

“I went back home Saturday,” he had written on stationery that features a cow in a green pasture watching an old-fashioned locomotive. “My eye is regaining its images at the speed of a small train!” When you open the card, the cow has climbed on board and is riding in the freight car.

There are several nearly illegible paragraphs, and then, at the end, this:

“For me this stay [in the hospital] was like a voyage where I’ve re-learned what life makes you forget: sight, life holds so few things: a few drops and some friends.”

Which is not so very much. And which, after all, is enough.

Love,

Fitz

When, in the morning upon waking, you can recall the year, but not the day of the week or even the month you find yourself in; when the search for the answer to your drowsy question of "where am I?", stumbles on continent before even considering country, city and street; and when you walk out the door unsure of which currency you don't have enough of, and which language you don't speak, you've been traveling for a long time.


After Krakow I spent a week in Prague, a city where nothing seemed to be where it should have been, and yet nothing felt out of place (the Bohemian, Baroque, Renaissance and Art Nouveau buildings next to churches and synagogues, next to Communist-era bureaucratic offices; the alcohol cupboard-turned-neighborhood bar in a clothing boutique-turned-art gallery tended by two elderly female proprietors; the late-day light batiked on a garden's outer wall).

Next was a week in Budapest, a fantastic city where I went to the opera for $4, stayed in a hostel with beautiful light and a brothel on the third floor, and was literally stopped in my tracks one evening on a stone stairway by the sound of someone practicing Mozart on a cellar piano, punctuated by the squeals and giggles of a gymnastics class on the first floor, the chiming of church bells down the block and a thunderstorm overhead.

I needed to get to Bucharest, a city just 400 miles from Budapest. As we've already established that I never make decisions that make geographic sense, it will come as no surprise that from Budapest I took the bus 8 hours in the wrong direction to Berlin for a long weekend to visit Gabriel, a German friend whom I lived with in Buenos Aires earlier in my trip.

It’s one thing to know that it’s not fair to hold a grudge against all Germans for World War II, but another thing altogether not to hold a grudge against them for World War II. It’s one thing to reason that probably not all Germans are dull, humorless and overly efficient, but another thing altogether to believe it. So for a long time Germany topped my (very) short list of countries I have no desire to go to, ever. Enter Gabriel—a German who not only was always a lot of fun, but also one of the most astoundingly lazy people I’ve ever encountered. Gabriel had raved about Berlin, and four months later I was in the loosely-defined “neighborhood” (just an eight hour bus ride away!), so I thought I’d give Germany a chance.

I can’t speak to the rest of the country, but I’m not too proud to admit that Berlin has made my (very long) list of places I’d love to go back to. Berlin is a deeply interesting city, lively and vibrant and new while still leaving the unmistakeable impression of age and fatigue, of just how much suffering it has endured (two World Wars, crippling economic depression and a long Cold War in the 20th century alone).

You see this in the small stretch of the Berlin Wall downtown dwarfed by the reflective glass of modern commercial developments going up on all sides and next to H&M advertisements. Or in the teenage couple making out on one of the cement blocks that makes up the sprawling Holocaust memorial, or in the kids playing hide and seek below its undulating heights not far away. Or in the choral recital given one evening in the rebuilt structure of Kaiser-Wilhelm Church--which stands in the busy center of the city in the shadow of its still-standing original, partially destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943—a jolting but not unfamiliar boom that interrupted the program just seconds after it had gotten under way. A boom like a bomb exploding (thunder again).

On a Sunday morning Gabriel’s father and I drove to the East Side Gallery, where the longest remaining stretch of the wall has been preserved. It was Gabriel’s father’s first visit there as well as mine, and we weren’t sure what to expect. We parked, walked out, turned the corner, and there was the unadorned wall, with little text or other direction for the visitor. Gabriel’s father looked confused, then disappointed: “I was hoping they would’ve done a bit more with it.”

“I remember watching the bulldozers rip it down,” he had told me on the drive over (new Mercedes glides through the former East Berlin). “We ran to embrace the people on the other side." It was a story that he seemed to be in the habit of recounting for visiting guests, but it was a story with some grandeur, and I was happy hearing it. "We were all strangers, but everyone was hugging and crying.”

The exhibit at the East Side Gallery, on the other hand, told no easy story. It was a dull gray wall, a “death strip” of empty space, and then another dull gray wall. Gabriel’s father was right that they could’ve “done a bit more with it.” Which is to say that they could have told a story, and they didn’t. We stayed, hands in pockets, a few moments longer, and as we turned to leave Gabriel’s father looked back: “Well,” he conceded, “that is exactly what it looked like.”

Because for most of the time that the wall stood, though there was certainly no shortage of international propaganda from both sides, there was no story to tell that would've made any sense to Berliners on the ground. There was just a dull gray wall, ugly and unkind, that could not credibly be reasoned into the reassuring narrative of victims and villains, the progression of a narrative rising, the climactic moment of a wall falling, the reassuringly sunny denouement.

When I booked my bus ticket to Bucharest, the very nice ladies at the Berlin bus station had given me a pitying look when I asked how long the trip was. One of them smiled kindly as she said "this is going to be the longest bus trip of your life." They obviously didn't know who they were talking to. At 36 hours, it was a full four hours short of matching Barcelona-Krakow.

I believe in a couple universal truths: there is 2pac graffiti everywhere (even in rural Romania), and poor people the world over travel with those red, white and blue wide plaid woven plastic bags (at least one of you has to know what I'm talking about).

Next to the dozens of those bags, a man with a face the color of milky coffee and a well-trimmed sugar white moustache rolled up the sleeves of his houndstooth blazer, crouched down on his brown socks and sandals, and placed in the luggage hold his only baggage: two accordions. As the bus pulled onto the autobahn, the metallic tones of his ringing cell phone resounded through the bus as he fumbled through his pockets, slowed by a half smoked pack of Marlboros (What do ye do with a drunken sailor, what do do ye do with a drunken sailor, what do ye do with a drunken sailor earl'y in the morning!)

From the window of the "longest bus trip of your life" Romania is fishermen in high boots dragging in cast nets; beggar girls staring up at you, all leg limps, out-stretched arms and open hands; old women in aprons and scarves carrying potted flowers; old men in blue work overalls riding bicycles loaded down with pitchforks and rakes; hunched backs over hoes in the fields; stacks of firewood circling a boxcar home; the jet black hair of so many Morticia Addamses; two men and a boy in black vests along the roadside, holding a polished brass plate before them at arm's length.

I spent a few days in Bucharest staying at the apartment of a great French girl I met at Auschwitz (where do you go to make friends?) who's doing a year-long internship there. It turns out that there are a lot of French students who study abroad in Bucharest, and as I met what seemed like every single one of them, I was introduced each time with a "Je te presente Maura. Elle est americaine ... mais sympa" ("this is Maura. She's American ... but she's cool.")

Bucharest is noticeably poorer than the other European capitals I've visited. Roads in some of the poorer neighborhoods are still unpaved, and there are beggars everywhere, packs of stray dogs and a woman who wanders around the train station trying to sell a single bouquet of wildflowers. The too-large squares surrounded by billboard-capped buildings, the lifeless wide boulevards, the abandoned, trash-strewn buildings, the rattling subway escalators, the unmarked open manholes on the sidewalk-- the scenes that betray a city that seems to resent those who would try to live in it. If found it interesting, I didn’t quite manage to like it.

Bucharest does have a few gems, however, foremost among them the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, where an exhibit placard reads:

“Few people are ignorant of what happiness in grandma’s kitchen means. The problem is what to do after grandma’s dead. You come into an inheritance that can be a burden. You cannot keep all the objects, word, gestures, smells … at least put some of them in a safe place.”

Looking at the displays, I couldn’t help thinking that if dead Romanian grandma was ever to rise from her grave, she could be excused for being a little perplexed to find everything—from her wooden kitchen table and chipped white plates, to her woven shawls and painted eggs, to her windmill, wooden house, schoolhouse desk, crucifix collection, rolling pins, rings of sesame seed bread, transistor radio, window dressings, wool rugs, newspapers she used to line the cupboard shelves and yes, even her tombstone—in a cold room with a piece of sheet metal over the door, from which a crucifix shape had been cut to make an entryway.

It was an entryway that was too narrow for any of the Romanian peasant women I’d seen to be able to enter the room, or perhaps more to the point, to be able to get out it.

Because we tend to put things in museums when they are dead or dying—or when we wish they were. And after all what safer place than a museum to store the “burden” of the past, to write a story we can all live with? Here was the “bit more” that could’ve been done at the unsettlingly stark patch of Berlin wall at the East Side Gallery. Here was a story-- that creation of the human imagination characterized by a beginning and yes, most importantly, thank God, an end.

It probably started last fall, on one of those days in Spanish class when we had to partner up and discuss answers to a string of fairly inane questions. What is your family like? What is your most embarrassing moment? Where do you see yourself in 20 years? Neither Onur nor I could have given a shit, quite honestly, and it had been a pretty boring morning. What is your home town like? Onur, still bored, told me briefly about a city split by a river, one half in Europe and half in Asia, one half modern, the other traditional.

That was all it took, really. I wanted to go to Istanbul. And six months later, I had crossed all of Europe to get there.

And if he hadn’t been so tired, bored or hung-over that morning in Spanish, or if we had known the Spanish words for “labyrinthine” and “loofah,” Onur might have mentioned that the streets of Istanbul are the former, and that there are strings of the latter hung from the stands in the covered marketplaces. He might have mentioned the pyramids of ground spices, piles of delicate saffron strands, blocks of feta, towers of Turkish delight, bunches of mint leaves, tubs of olives and burlap sacks full of nuts or dried dates, apricots, and sun dried tomatoes. Or the tree seedlings, the Ataturk flags, the boxes of bunnies, the cages of pigeons, the freshly-shaven carpet dealers wearing their best suits to attract the obese older American women whom they say pay the highest prices. Or the plastic jugs of leeches said to cure eczema, rheumatism and arthritis.

He might have mentioned that if you walk ten feet you are liable to pass women wearing everything from tank tops, to stylish patterned satin headscarves, to long black burkas. Or that a merchant will shout across the bazaar his contribution to the heated debate over the public high school teacher recently caught leading students in Muslim prayers: “two girls praying and they want to close a school, but people show their bare asses on TV and nothing closes!”

He might have mentioned that if you’re looking for a trash can you’ll be hard pressed to find one (there’s been trouble with people placing bombs inside them). Or that when you go for drinks on a rooftop terrace you will be overlooking the British Embassy bombed by Al Qaeda, and toasting a friend’s bad eyesight, the only thing that spared him a deployment to Afghanistan under Turkey's system of compulsory military service for male citizens. Or that in a country where the army intervenes in politics every several years or so, a country which is slated to hold contentious early national elections later this month, you can buy a handgun for about $20 as you leave the tram on your way home from work. But as it was, he said enough to make me curious enough to come and see the rest for myself.

When you travel for months on end, there will be some days when you can’t help feeling that you’ve seen it all, when you think you can’t be bothered to see one more 17th century chateau, one more architecturally notable cathedral. But these kinds of thoughts cannot last.

They can’t last because there are places in the world where if you happen to be sitting by the water when the call to prayer starts, the sounds emanating from the six mosques on the surrounding river banks will form a cacophony of chanting interrupted by brief moments of absolute unison; where as the bazaar shuts down for the evening a man twirls the bottom half of a mannequin in a sidewalk waltz; where a little boy charges through the streets with a garbage bag half full of aluminum cans slung across his back like a superhero cape; where a Gypsy girl huddles in a street corner setting a discarded pack of cigarettes alight; where a double amputee roams the street in a wheelchair hawking red heart balloons he’s piled on his lap; where at night in the glare of the floodlights illuminating the mosques that line the Bosphorus, the gulls diving overhead look like oversized fireflies in the world’s vast jam jar.

These thoughts can’t last because there are places in the world that in an instant will wipe all cynicism from your mind, then strike all eloquence from your thoughts, and finally leave you incapable of thinking (simply, humbly) anything more than: wow.

After two weeks in Istanbul I still hadn’t been inside the city’s foremost tourist attraction, the Hagia Sofia, a Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque that dates from the 4th century. This seemed a little ridiculous, so on my last day in Istanbul I woke up planning to spend the day there. But then I walked to the entrance and the thought of spending my last day in Istanbul surrounded by tourists seemed distasteful, 4th century mosque or none. Also, admission was $10. I studied the outside of the building for awhile and turned, satisfied enough, and walked away.

I walked to the river and took a long ferry ride to the residential suburb of Fener, without any idea of what I was doing, but comforted by the thought that you can’t be late if no one’s waiting for you, and you can’t get lost if you set out without a destination.

I fell in love with Istanbul all over again. In hours of walking through neighborhoods where I didn’t run into a single other tourist, I passed kids playing soccer in the street, laundry drying overhead, men on scaffolding repairing crumbling buildings, Greeks and Hasidic Jews, a colorful vegetable market that stretched for blocks and blocks, a Bulgarian church with headless angel statues and two women sitting under the afternoon sun in burkas, knitting.

On the ferry ride back I sat on the deck exposed to the wind, on benches that ran the outer length of the indoor seating area. Just as I leaned my head back and stared out over the water, there was a tap on the window behind me. I looked back and saw two young girls staring at me. I made a face and they made faces back, giggled, pressed their cheeks against the window, looked back to their mothers and grandmothers who sat laughing behind them. We kept it up for twenty minutes, until the boat reached their stop and they stood to leave.

As they left the indoor area and reached the outdoor deck on their way off the boat, one of the girls let go of her mother’s hand, ran over to me and, smiling, asked me a question in Turkish. “America?” I guessed. She repeated the word, and looked satisfied. Then she said what I can only guess was goodbye, and ran off the boat to her mother, who was waiting onshore.

Earlier in the day, wandering around Fener, as I walked down a hill I had been given a brief glimpse over the high wall of a schoolyard full of children playing. Something about the scene, I couldn’t say what, had caught my eye. I walked a dozen steps more, and then curiosity got the better of me.

Curiosity: that recognition that none of us (living just once) can know much of anything about the world, and that the best we might do is to set off blindly, get our hands dirty and return at day’s end to listen to the stories that we could tell each other--stories that are flawed and self-serving, every one of them individually false and all of them, collectively, true.


It was curiosity that brought me to Istanbul and curiosity that knocked on the window of the ferry and pressed its two faces against the glass.

It was curiosity that led me up the uninviting stairs of the Mercado Central in Valparaiso, Chile, and rewarded me with a cardboard box full of kittens.

It was curiosity that woke me one morning in Guediawaye, Senegal, when light streamed into my eyes from the small window onto the courtyard stairs that had been opened by two neighborhood girls I’d never talked to. They stood huddled together, staring back at me bashfully: sorry to wake you up but there are a few things we’ve been wanting to ask you.

On my last day in Istanbul, I walked a dozen steps more, and then curiosity got the better of me. I walked back, glanced quickly around to see that no one was watching, and then timidly put my eyes to a crack in the high schoolyard wall.

From the other side of the wall and just inches from my face, a child’s eyes were staring back.

Love,

Fitz

"The plan," though it was never really worthy of the name in the first place, has changed. I had been ready to deal with the considerable harassment that girls traveling by themselves in Morocco often encounter. But when, on top of that, there were suicide bombings in Casablanca and the American embassy closed, I decided to skip Morocco and just spend a bit longer in Western Europe. But then I flew from Dakar into Madrid and it was clear that this new plan wouldn't do either. Spain and France are lovely countries—and they'll still be lovely in four decades when I'm lucid enough no longer to want to go to places like Salvador de Bahia and Bamako. But in my present irrationality, I only managed to spend an hour in Spain (a country which has a perfectly functioning tourist infrastructure and where I speak the language) before I found myself missing adventure, nostalgic for chaos.

I decided to head east for Turkey, stopping in any country that seems cheap and intriguing along the way. At least that's "the plan" as of today.

But first there were a few places in Spain and France that I did want to see before I left. A friend from high school was studying in Madrid for the semester so I spent several days living with her host family, going around the city with her and happily staying longer than I'd meant to because it was great to see her. Madrid, too, is a great city that has won a permanently fond place in my heart if for no other reason than because on a rainy-turned-sunny morning in the sprawling grounds of the Parque del Buen Retiro, I saw an old man sitting on a bench wearing a formal, well-tailored three piece suit and a tri-cornered paper hat he'd folded out of his morning newspaper.

I went south to Granada where I met up with another friend from high school. He was leaving town for the weekend but managed, before he left, to arrange for me to sleep on the couch of a girl on his study abroad program. Then the girl went away for the weekend as well, leaving me with a bed, a kitchen, a laptop and a sunny Andalusian balcony for free. I'm not as dumb as I look, sound and act, so I stayed there as long as possible trying to figure out where to go next and visiting the nearby Alhambra Palace. While not quite as breathtaking, the palace is impressively reminiscent of the Taj Mahal, and the Alhambra does have the distinct advantage that I didn't see a single person taking a shit on it.

Since I had tickets to see FC Barcelona play Levante at Camp Nou I went to Barcelona, though only for one night initially because every hostel was booked for the rest of the week. The game was decent but the atmosphere at Camp Nou (capacity 98,000) was incredible, even if the crowd was somewhat tamer than the one at the River Plate game I went to in Buenos Aires—which is really only to say that no one was shot in the stadium before the match (it occurs to me now that I forgot to mention that before).

Within five minutes of walking around Barcelona I had stumbled across the police breaking up a nasty domestic dispute that had spilled into the street and I had also, only minutes later, had to make a quick about-face on the sidewalk to lose a crazy man who seemed to be following me. I like my cities gritty, so I took these as wholly promising signs for Barcelona, and I decided to come back for a week once the hostels had freed up again.

In the 24 hours I had in Barcelona before I left for Marseille, I managed to meet, by complete chance, Naeha's brother's two childhood friends, with whom I spent a day at Antoni Gaudi's bizarre and wonderful church, La Sagrada Familia, and park, Parc Guell. It was here, alongside the plaza atop the hill where tourists swarm with digital cameras held out at the panoramic view of the city below, that an African guy was selling 5 euro "designer" sunglasses that were spread out across the pavement in front of him.

In the past decade the sight of African men on the street selling everything from watches, sunglasses, belts, curio woodcarvings to bootleg music and DVDs has become ubiquitous in Spain, when once it was seen mostly in neighboring France. Almost all of these immigrants are from West Africa, where I was just a month ago, so it was strange seeing them here in Europe, out of the context of the huge but tightly-knit families back home that I know will struggle to eat if the sun does not shine strongly enough on Parc Guell in Barcelona and Western tourists don't buy fake Gucci sunglasses to replace, for just a day, the real ones they left on their hotel nightstands this cloudy morning.

I watched the man for a few minutes, watched the tourists ignoring him, then walked over. "Only 5 euros," he told me. I greeted him in Wolof and he looked surprised, then smiled and responded in Wolof as well. "How did you know I was from Senegal?" Just a guess. We talked about Guédiawaye, the Senegalese food we're both missing, his seven years in Spain and his hope to go home as soon as he can. Seven years ago he arrived in France, but he only stayed a week: "it's horrible there." And here in Spain? "It's hard here too..." (I thought of the bar in Granada where I'd watched one of the Champion's League games, of how every one of the dozen Africans in the bar had watched the game holding their drinks and standing just inside the door or even on the sidewalk, though there was no lack of tables if they'd wanted to sit, or felt welcomed to) "...mais France, France c'est le pire." But France, he told me, echoing what I'd heard so many times in Senegal and Mali, France is the worst.


The next morning, in Marseille, I was beginning to understand what he meant. The hostel I'd booked was not in the city itself (hard, dirty, a place I like quite a bit but that many people would not), but about an hour's walk away in one of those quintessentially French small towns with just one main road, but a dozen boulangeries and at least two chocolatiers, and where no posting signs reference, in elegant cursive, laws dating from 1882. It was a charming town, and also the kind of place where French people who decry the African and Maghreb "takeover" of the big cities have grudgingly decamped to try to reconstruct their social and racial fortresses. It took me about a minute to realize that the owner of my small hostel was decidedly among their ranks.

Where's the best boulangerie in the neighborhood? "Well, you came on the worst day of the year, the Communists have closed everything." (It was May Day.) "Where are you from?" he asked me. "America is a good country, unlike France with all these Socialists who are so bad for business." His only employee spoke up to tell me that they were closing the hostel by the end of this year and moving to the Philippines-- tired, he claimed, of a government that taxes away everything they earn and fed up, too, with French women. Looking at the two of them-- the owner hardly a great catch and his employee a short, round, middle-aged chain smoker who I would soon discover felt about as much inhibition about farting loudly in the company of others as normal people feel breathing--I couldn't help thinking that it was more likely that French women are fed up with them.


They went on to tell me that they were very impatient for the results of that coming weekend's presidential elections between, as the owner put it, "Sarkozy and the fucking girl" (Socialist candidate Segolene Royal). Do you think Sarkozy will win? "I'm not sure..." he told me, adding in a tone of distinct contempt, "all the immigrants are registered to vote." Whether this was true or not, Sarkozy did indeed win, and from the looks of it France will continue to be the worst for Africans like the ones who welcomed me time and again into their homes.

That night I talked for awhile to a Chinese guy, Yang, whom I was sharing the dorm with, then climbed into my bed. Just before I fell asleep he looked over and asked me if I'd been into Marseille yet. I hadn't. "It's..." he thought for a moment, circling in on the English words to approximate the pictographs before him in his mind, "it's ... a kingdom of shit."


I could tell you about Marseille's ancient Roman port, its crumbling buildings, the man who ran down the upwards escalator in the train station yelling unintelligibly and the wedding dress-clad mannequins staring past the passing crowds of dour expressions, long moustaches and hands shoved in pockets, or I could tell you simply that Yang was precisely right.


After several days in Marseille I took the bus back to Barcelona to stay for a week this time around. I arrived at 5 AM but couldn't check into my hostel until noon, so I dropped my bag and walked the streets at random while the sun came up, eventually being given an impromptu city tour by two guys I met at a neighborhood cafe where I was starting my day and they were ending their long, apparently drunken, night.


Barcelona is infused with golden light unlike any I've ever seen. It renders the palm trees stark silhouettes at dawn, gilds the graffiti along the Port and wakens the drunks passed out on the beach next to old women going for Sunday morning swims while their old husbands play dominoes wearing bathing suits and cloaks of cigar smoke.


On long Barcelona afternoons Barcelona light casts long the shadows of people passing on the street, reveals the too-heavy concealer on the too-old faces of the hookers smoking Marlboros on the sidewalks of the red light district and warms the terrace of Gaudi's La Pedrera apartment building (its twirling stucco towers and sentries of still watchmen, its undulating lines that give the impression of flying high above the city on a dragon's back).


And on a Barcelona evening it was Barcelona light that slowly crept away from the square in front of the post office where two men shook hands to jovial exclamations of "qué tal, hermosa!"; from the street nearby where a woman pushed a stroller containing a small child and a bigger red balloon; from the guitar-strapped back of a white guy kneeling in front of the large Ganesh statue in the glass storefront of Kama Indian Restaurant and Lounge, only removing his lips from the window to cross himself; from the white hair of the shrunken woman with the small bag of groceries who stopped to ask me, in a small mumble, something I had to ask her to repeat.


On that last evening in Barcelona I reached into my pocket and gave the single euro I'd been asked for to that woman decades older than me, then walked away quickly (light receding slowly) to collapse on my back for a long time in the park across the street, paralyzed by the feeling that the world is a kingdom of shit-- majestically, overwhelmingly, beautiful, strange and sad.


Having spent a couple days trying to plan the rest of my travels methodically and rationally, having failed spectacularly, I impulsively bought a bus pass good for most of Europe that I then realized I should probably use. I looked at the list of the 40 cities the pass covered, circled six or so that sounded interesting, and connected the dots between them.

Since I was "educated" by the Berkeley public schools (too progressive and alternative to teach such traditional, purportedly obsolete subjects as world geography), I have to admit that my mental map of Europe includes little more than France, Spain, a couple major bodies of water for good measure, and an indistinct blur that eventually becomes Asia at some point or another. Or at least that was my idea of Europe until I took the bus from Barcelona to Krakow and I had some 40 hours and about 1,500 miles to learn the map of Europe as I (slowly) crossed it, and to "appreciate" what perhaps I hadn't sufficiently before: Europe is really big.

No one in their right mind takes the bus from Spain to Poland, but I'm long on time and short on money, so that's what I did. In South America I got used to taking long bus rides, and in Africa I got used to taking shorter bus rides that seemed infinitely longer, so I was confident that I could survive a 40 hour European bus ride, though I didn't expect to enjoy it.


But I did. In praise of taking the bus: the passing waters of the Cote d'Azur, the Seussian whovilles tucked into terraced Italian hillsides, the rain pouring down on Austria during the night, the strobe lights of tunnels that waken you momentarily, the church spires like overturned beets, a cathedral next to a graveyard next to a boat building workshop, a statue of Jesus crucified like a grapevine next to rows of grapevines, the lavender and poppy-dusted fields of Slovakia, the man in blue shirtsleeves riding his bicycle down a two-track dirt road, the train cars rusting in their tracks and the front yards of Poland: vegetable gardens, laundry on the line, a boy trying unsuccessfully to train a puppy.


And if I hadn't taken the bus I wouldn't have realized: that the bus will almost drive away without you when the length of rest stops are announced only in Polish; that when you open your eyes in the morning thinking about breakfast the Slovaks behind you will already be nursing tall cans of beer, or else shuffling to the bus toilet, returning minutes later with bashful grins and the smell of the cigarettes they've just smoked; that in one small village next to the garish life size Jesus statue the garish life size peasant woman statue (white and blue checkered gingham dress, white headscarf, rosy cheeks) is, in fact, very much alive-- she's watering the flowers.


Krakow is an unexpectedly lovely city, though what drew me there originally was my desire to see Auschwitz, about an hour's drive away.


In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect: barbed wire fences around brick barracks, "hospitals" where human medical experiments were performed, firing walls, public gallows, gas chambers, crematoriums, ponds filled with human ashes and the other trappings of a profoundly depressing afternoon. If you're wondering what the hell I was thinking, I was hoping to remind you that the first Fitzgerald, my father's father, to "summer" in Spain was fighting Franco, and he later considered Communist East Germany the ideal holiday spot. So within a certain context, the fact that I went to Auschwitz on my vacation might have even been construed as familial progress towards normality. But then, by complete coincidence, I went to Auschwitz on Mother's Day.


But in another strange coincidence, the very first paragraph of the book I'm reading (Waterland by Graham Swift, it's fantastic) is the following:

"And don't forget,' my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, 'whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk...'"

In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect, but in a sense that I have trouble articulating, it was only when I was standing there that I believed that the Holocaust happened-- or that I realized that I hadn't believed, really believed, this before. Because in the end the greatest danger to our collective historical memory will not come from those who, out of ignorance or malice, would deny the Holocaust-- they are easily refuted with facts, their absurdity not to be excused but maybe pitied. What will prove more dangerous in the end is the best of our intentions-- that in our attempts to convey the full horror of the Holocaust, in our desire that it be repeated "never again," we will rarefy that event to such an extent that we will believe groundlessly that it will never happen again simply because it could never happen again.


In popular consciousness the Holocaust (note the big H) looms so dangerously large that it is not until you are standing in Auschwitz that you realize its human scale-- that the grounds of concentration camps could be walked fence to fence in under 15 minutes, that those fences were only as high as normal fences, that those torturous "medical experiments" were performed in buildings that look not unlike Connecticut Hall, and that millions of people were systematically murdered not in the black and white of old newsreels (over six decades back on that time line of human history that we imagine reaches ever forward towards progress), but in the full color of our present world (with its present holocaust in Sudan). For indeed long before the Holocaust there were other holocausts, and after the Holocaust there were holocausts that followed, follow and, it seems, will follow.


In the museum that today occupies the site where the Auschwitz camp once stood are displayed dozens of piles (floor-to-ceiling, many stretching 25 feet wide) of items the Russians found when they liberated the camp: empty canisters of zyklon b pellets, shaved human hair, suitcases marked with family names, eyeglasses, crutches, back braces, artificial limbs, mugs, bowls and shoes.


Outside the museum today, along the 3km road connecting Auschwitz I and the extension camp Auschwitz II - Birkenau (built when the Nazis felt that human beings were not being exterminated quickly enough) there is a pigeon lying decapitated on the sidewalk.In the spring the woods bordering Birkenau are tranquil and beautiful. In Krakow Oskar Schindler's former factory is notable only for its banality (empty offices with views of the adjacent buildings now housing an hp computer factory, the smell of bread baking in the neighborhood). One of the few remaining fragments of the gray walls that once contained Krakow's 60,000 Jews in the Podgorze ghetto (57,000 would not survive the war) is today the backdrop for a quiet children's park.


I sat on a bench one afternoon facing that wall-- facing a small boy talking to his grandmother and his sister rocking on a toy horse nearby. It was a Pole, I remembered, who exhorted us to "praise the mutilated world," but watching that scene it was hard to know whether to feel hopeful or simply dejected. Whether we are able to believe it, really believe it, or not, holocausts happened and will happen, and as much as it should not life goes on-- and on the whole really never so much as pauses even while they are happening (Birkenau trees grew, morning bread was baked).


Life goes on: Polish children will laugh and play in a ghetto-turned-playground, while the barefoot children of about their age in Mali and Senegal could still, truth be told, get a lot of wear out of the concentration camp victims' shoes on display in the Auschwitz museum (it's been cloudy in Barcelona).

Life goes on, and never really stops as it should for holocausts, because holocausts are human events carried out on a human scale. And human beings (we of mother's milk) are so flawed, so unintelligently designed that we cannot even comprehend the evil we are capable of inflicting on each other. We all, at some time, act no better than the majority of the perpetrators of holocausts-- not the Hitlers and Pol Pots, but the soldiers and citizen collaborators who enabled them. It is not really the malice displayed in holocausts that makes them relatively anomalous events in human history, but rather their extraordinary coordination of the disorganized, static, apparently small-scale pettiness and cruelty of which we are all guilty in our lives.


Even when we try to comprehend this evil we have done collectively to ourselves, we are reduced to mourning piles of shoes to suggest (this is all we can bear, suggestion) those who once filled them.

And even after hours wandering the grounds of Auschwitz contemplating the murder of millions of human beings, it was only a decapitated pigeon on the sidewalk that finally made me feel viscerally sick.

And after an hour watching kids playing in front of the remnants of the ghetto walls, I stood up and walked home. Because big drops of rain had started falling from the sky. Because there was no sense in getting sick; I had things to do the next day.

Love,

Fitz