Deja Vu

    Okay, I know that I haven’t posted in quite some time, but, in my defense, I was stuck in Spain for a week. While there are certainly worse places to be stuck, this was not a good one to be stuck in if you wanted to just lay back and write. I mean, why would I be in my hotel room writing about exotic places when I could be wandering the streets of Granada and making sure that no one tried to mug me while I was sightseeing? More on that later.

    When I returned from Germany at half-term (February 22nd), one of my day student roommates had said that I could spend the last weekend before school started with him and help his family move into their new house. I like those sort of deals, where I can stay with friends while making myself useful around the house. I always feel awkward if I’m just crashing with someone and not doing chores too. Well, my friend’s family missed out on some cheap labor because the person they were buying the house from delayed the deal for about a week. I only found out once I had returned to England, as Vodafone had been knocked out by a storm some two weeks past. That left them in a hotel and me scrambling for shelter, so where did I go? Chester. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I like the hostels there, one has a manager on occasion that makes sure to leave one bed open for stragglers like me, I could hit a club if I felt like it, and still meet up with a friend or two, right? Wrong.
    With the exception of the first night, every hostel, hotel, and inn was booked, save some places where you had to pay anything between seventy and one-hundred and twenty quid for one night. I spent the entirety of Sunday looking for somewhere within my budget to stay to no avail. Still sick from Germany, remembering my homeless night in Venice, and also recalling some of the more… colourful stories about Chester at night, I was not looking forward to this experience. Oh, and it looked like it was going to rain. Running options through my head, I decided that my best bet was probably to go to a club, check my bag and coat, dance and drink the night away until I got kicked out at 3 or 4am, and then persuade one of the local pubs to let me become a member and stay there until 6am when I could get a train to school. Well, this weekend just seemed determined to alter my plans.
    Another friend hit me up that day and asked if I could help him at work that night. Considering how he’d put me up for a week during our October half-term, I owed him. Instead of dancing the night away in a club, I worked in one. Of course he waited to tell me until we were standing outside that this club was known for its lowlifes and that the staff had broken up a fight the previous weekend after a man “glassed” his girlfriend. I spent about six hours picking up empty glasses and beer bottles, washing dishes, and realizing that my friend had exaggerated a bit. Yes, the customers tended to be older and scruffier than most party-going clubbers (I saw one lady who must have been over fifty just sitting back and watching everything while she drank and there were others like her), but there was no hint of violence. The only discontent in these people seemed to be regarding their own lives and that’s not surprising at all. Why else go to a club if not to cut loose and forget yourself for a time? I actually rather enjoyed the whole experience. As I was doing this mostly out of generosity (my friend promised me a few free drinks and a couple of bills from the register at the end of the night), I went ahead and danced a little as I wove through the crowd gathering their refuse. Just because I was working and sober didn’t mean that I couldn’t jump like an idiot waving an empty bottle over my head. The customers seemed to think it was great fun besides and I was still getting my job done. Hell, I was probably doing more than most of the paid employees! I enjoyed the work, it gave me something to do, and I tend to work hard, especially in an energetic atmosphere.  I received many compliments from guests and co-workers alike, kept the place tidy, and ended with one drink and a fiver. Wait, that doesn’t seem quite right… Ah, as I said, I owed the guy! To be honest, this was a lot more fun than that night in Venice, even disregarding the pocket change I gained by the end.
    The rest of the week was uneventful until the Oswestry Music Festival on Thursday. I had been preparing for this competition for months, with two categories that I was to contend with solos in. I knew the songs, I’d practiced them at every opportunity, and I had spent every day of that last week coughing up a lung. Yeah, my prospects weren’t looking good. My voice was nearly shot, even after two days of vocal rest, I wasn’t breathing well, and I was about as jittery as a cat surrounded by six year-old delinquents for all of my nerves. In short, I did my best, placing only eleventh out of thirteen in the first category after singing a George Frederic Handel song and fifth out of eight in the other after performing “Bring Him Home” from “Les Miserables.” To be honest, I was pretty stoked with my results, considering how briefly I’ve been taking lessons and considering the rather stiff competition. One boy in particular floored me with his rendition of “‘Till I Hear You Sing.” I melted into the church pew and stared without a thought for the world as the guy sang. He only got third place, beaten for one by a guy who sang a scratchy, loud, discordant version of “Heaven On Their Minds.” I guess there’s just no accounting for taste. On the way out, my choir directer said something that I didn’t catch.
    “Hm? Sorry, what did you say, sir?”
    “Did you hear that guy?” Mr. Coupe nodded toward an elderly fellow in a maroon jumper who had just passed.
    “What guy. Him?” I stepped outside and shut the heavy-timbered door behind us. “I didn’t hear a thing.”
    “That gentleman we passed as we were leaving was humming “Bring Him Home.” Out of all of the songs that he could have chosen, he was singing yours.”
    I shrugged as I mounted the steps down to the street. “It’s a catchy song. He probably knew it already.” I bowed my head as I entered the school bus to keep anyone from seeing the big grin plastered to my face.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

    Have you ever walked through a city filled with churches when all of the bells started ringing? They never chime in tandem plus the variations in tones and quality mixed with sound distortions over distance and from bouncing off of buildings creates a discordant, almost painful cacophony that vibrates through your poor ears and shivers in your body. I expected the same from Cologne. Yet something remarkable occurred. When each hour struck, bells started to ring all across the city and their sounds did not overlap. I would walk through one part of the city and hear only one set of bells tolling and fading as I moved away. Just when those bells faded into the distance, I would catch the tune of the next bells, their sounds almost touching across the air like God’s and Adam’s fingers in Michaelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel. I could distinguish between actual songs, picking out what sounded like Chopin and Vivaldi as I went my way. I don’t know how much the churches’ architects knew about acoustics, but it was impressive. Perhaps those ruling the city measured their volumes and limited them to produce this effect.
    The Dom’s bells were by far the loudest and dominated the neighborhood whenever they played, but the sounds were brief and bothered no one. Until the Spaniards and I tried to have lunch that is. After visiting the local chocolate museum, we stopped by a restaurant with a nice view of the church peeping over the buildings ringing the plaza we overlooked. Just as we ordered our food at three o’clock, the bells started to chime. And they did not stop. After ten minutes, it was still a pleasant sound. After twenty minutes, it was hypnotic. After forty minutes it was maddening. We imagined that the bells had broken somehow and that there was some poor priest trying to stop them by grabbing the pull-ropes and getting yanked into the air yelling “No! No! Help! Help!” Even through the jokes though, those maddening bells would not stop their tolling and speech was drowned and the world seemed filled with-
    The bells stopped. Conversation ceased. We looked at each other, sighed, grinned and started to cheer and laugh. Then the bells started to play again and we all groaned.
    One thing that I forgot to mention earlier was that this city (or maybe Germany in general) has a surplus of sex shops. There was a kinky clothing store down the street from my hotel, several related shops on Rudolfi Platz (aka Rudolf Plaza) including one aimed at homosexuals and another advertising Christmas *ahem* stuff in the middle of February. I must say that having a blur of hookah bars and sex toy shops as a city’s final “farewell” to you leaves one heck of an impression as the train you’re riding speeds away.
    I went on to spend a very relaxing five days with my friend Lucas Wiehofsky in his gorgeous, modernist house near Bad Oeynhausen. He showed me the town and took me to a monument to Kaiser Wilhelm that overlooked the sprawling Rhine-Westphalia territory. From that shrine, I gazed across vast, even lands divided by a broken range of hills, all shrouded in a thin mist that shone and seemed to tease the sun as the clouds dimmed its light. Pleasant, but I was still unimpressed. Of course, I didn’t have the heart to tell Lucas, as the view was spectacular and the trouble he went to to bring me was still well appreciated. However, as we moved on higher into the wooded hills, I felt some of my enthusiasm tickle inside of me. I left the path and started to hop over fallen branches and jump off of rocks and tree roots. Why? Because it was fun. I’ve had this thing since I was a kid where I pretend to be a mountain goat whenever I go hiking or backpacking, bouncing off of obstacles, traversing the landscape as if I had been born to do so. There, in the forest far from any city with the monument of the kaiser obscured by foliage, I began to feel excitement and happiness again. We soon left though and spent the next few days doing homework, watching the new batman movies plus some others, going to the theater, and acquainting me with German cuisine and fast food before I had to leave on Friday to catch a flight back to England. Before that though, I caught a royal whopper of a fever on Wednesday night.
    Yeah, I’d been feeling a little punk that day, but waking up at midnight sweating, realizing that you’d been muttering in your sleep, and suddenly convinced that there were men with knives waiting for you in the shadows and thinking that you could see them moving toward you was rather unexpected. In short, I was boring and spent most of Thursday in bed. Five weeks later I’m still trying to shake the cough it gave me. Still, I decided to try a few puffs of shisha before I left. It was fun blowing smoke, but I hated having anything other than air in my lungs and with the stuffed nose I couldn’t taste the flavored tobacco anyhow. While Lucas, his friend and I were down there chatting, I also happened to learn that in German “pugs” is slang for boobs and, yes, it can also refer to the type of dog. Just thought you’d wanna know.
    Before coming down with the plague and a case of the crazies, I had been determined to do something around the house to make it less like I was imposing on this family. I had helped with the dishes and whatnot, but I never got to cook my father’s lasagna for them as I’d planned. Hell bent on not being a burden on them any longer, I refused their offers for me to stay another night and caught a train to the airport back in Dusseldorf.
    As I left, I reflected upon what I had seen and done in this country. I had seen much, met many people, made new friends, and had a good laugh, yet I could not help feeling… unmoved. Seeing the churches, spitting into the Rhein river (I couldn’t piss in it in to properly honor General George Patton, but close enough) and wandering around a foreign city really gave me no great pleasure. For the entire trip, it felt like I was swimming. I felt like I was going through the motions just to stay afloat, maybe to maintain my image as a traveler or maybe to keep an old, dying dream alive. I could have made friends in any city, had a good time with them anywhere, and I would not have been so empty while I felt almost obligated to tour a place I’d never seen. Maybe now I understand why I had hesitated at German customs when the guard asked me what I was doing there. Maybe a part of me was callusing to the glories of the world or maybe awakening to how everything is so similar everywhere. Maybe in truly distant places things are quite different and perhaps that can inspire and awe me. Maybe a traditional Japanese festival or a Hindu mandir in the jungle would move me, but until I go there, I just don’t really want to deal with it all. I’m done with the expense. I’m done with the stress. I’m done with my heart being jaded in the sight of wonders. I think I’m done with travel.