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