Dos and Don'ts

It's hard to believe, but I crossed the one-month mark on the road last weekend, promptly celebrating in London with two of my buddies from SF who were in town for work, Gina and Julie. London greeted us with the sunniest day I've ever seen in England - the kind of day George Harrison must have been singing about - which we somewhat squandered when the gals took naps in the early afternoon. Sorry, ladies. Them's just the facts. 

Pre-nap in Sunny London

Post nap - all better

 They made up for it later in the day, though, when we celebrated 20/4 in style: wait. How does that work in Europe? Is a 20-4 a punishable offense? Damn you and your logical-date-styling ways, Euros. 4/20 is easier to use as a counter-culture holiday. 20/4 is just a cumbersome way to write out Kiefer Sutherland's TV show. I repeat: Damn you, Euros (and rest of the world who all write out the date from the smallest increment to the largest, day/month/year.) I don't care if it makes more sense. Just do it our way. 

And now that you mentioned things that make logical sense but hurt American brains: the metric system and Celsius. Come on!

Small perturbances notwithstanding, we managed to have a lot of fun, visiting Ryan and Loni's local and spending the night talking 'merica with a few cool Irish dudes. And it gave me an idea: in honor of my first month on the road, I've devised a handy list of rules I've come up with so far.

Here they are:

DO: Pack light. No matter what you bring, you're gonna hate your clothes. Even your favorite npr t-shirt. Hard to believe, but I'm sick of that damn thing. And my two favorite pairs of jeans? Ready to chuck 'em and spend too much on new ones. The every-other-day rotation has stopped fooling me into thinking I brought more than two pairs. But you know what you're gonna hate more? Stuffing everything you own into a suitcase every week. That. Sucks.

(I know, I know. You're holding the world's smallest violin.)

DO: ask "is it okay if I speak English?" Even when they look at you and say "of course" in a way not designed to come across as smug as it does, it's nice not to assume they'll just ignore the language their country has been speaking for centuries for the foreigner who thinks he rules the world. And even though you'd be screwed if they ever said "no," it's still the polite thing to do. Unless...

DON'T: ask if it's okay to speak English when you're in England. They don't care that you just spent three weeks on the continent, and they're only too happy to add yours into their cache of "dumb American" stories next to the girl who asked them if they had African-Americans in England and anything Homer Simpson ever said. Noooo...I didn't actually do that. I'm just helping you out, in case you're ever traveling yourself. Got to protect our Yankee rep. I'd never do something like ask an English person if he speaks English. 

Okay, I did it. But I had just spent three weeks on the continent, and I was on four hours sleep. Don't be like that English guy and look down your nose at me. Cut me some slack! And yes, African-Americans do visit England, but I think she was asking if there were black English people. Which there are, of course. They wouldn't be American; they'd just wish they were. 

ZING!

DO: Play the SIM card shuffle. I've had three phone numbers already, but these iPhones sure are useful when on the road. I'm sure Androids would be, too, if you have bad taste in phone operating systems, since they allegedly offer the same vital services we've all become dependent on: maps, email, pictures, texts, games, music, proof that your bit of trivia is right, restaurant recommendations, etc. (Google maps and I are back on speaking terms after our rocky start) It's no different on the road, and since SIM cards are cheap, I highly recommend buying a new one each time you hit a different part of the world. Look no further than the kind of stuff people will do when they don't have cell coverage for a few days. They do super weird things, like ignore friends they haven't seen for a month because the London pub they're in has free wifi, allowing them to play Candy Crush Saga for the first time since Friday. Then they blame it on Baruch, who got them started on the game in the first place. It's usually a good strategy to blame it on Baruch, but I'm not buying it this time. It's just easier to get a local SIM card. Right, Jules?

DON'T: Fall in love with your plans. To quote my prescient cookie fortune: be prepared to change your plans. And I have. A lot. I may have once said I'd go to the Baltics, to Morocco, to three continents, "maybe more." But nope. I scrapped the Baltics and Morocco entirely, opting instead to spend the next few weeks in Italy. All it took to change my mind? Three weeks in Northern Europe in April, and one brown puffy jacket I got sick of wearing. Bring on the flip flops, pasta, and vino rojo. But I'm still thinking I'll end up in three continents before it's all said and done. Substitute Australia for Africa, and we've got our third.

I think.

DO: bring interesting t-shirts. My nickname in Copenhagen was "Google Maps," because I wore that awesome shirt my buddy Adam Hughes gave me a few years ago. Consider your shirts a sartorial icebreaker. Just trust me. It worked again last night, introducing me to my new best friends from Brazil who almost made me miss my flight this morning. Good people, Brazilians.

DON'T: convert the following currencies back to dollars when paying for stuff: Swiss Francs, Norwegian, Swedish, or Dutch Krone(r). You're just gonna want to punch someone, and it's not productive. Just buy your $14 extra value meal at McDonalds, recognize it's the same two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and sesame seed bun that you get at home, and eat it. No need to worry about the cost. After all, you get to go to SE Asia soon, where you won't believe everything costs only $2. 

Side note: never, ever get into a debate about the "Big Mac Index" with a super-awkward American kid who moved to Sweden without a job. He means well, he just doesn't get it. And you'll end up worrying that the reasonable, genial Indian dude you're dining with may actually engage in fisticuffs with him. Which just isn't worth it.

DO: make liberal use of Spotify's offline mode. I don't care what you say, Rdio heds, Spotify's the best. It's comforting to have a few albums in the queue when you don't want to burn through your mobile phone plan's data allowance. My obsession for the last month? ∆'s "An Awesome Wave," (hold down alt-j on your keyboard to make their symbol...cool, eh?). It's like having that old friend who speaks in poems all the time right there with you on long bus/train rides where you don't feel like reading and you already watched the best documentary ever, "Searching for Sugarman." Okay, so I don't actually have an old friend who speaks in poems, but if I did, I'm sure he'd say things like "triangles are my favorite shape" and then justify them with specious support like "three points where two lines meet." And then I'd spend the next few weeks pondering why we need to pick a favorite shape. I thought we'd agreed on needing the following favorites: color, food, restaurant, song, movie, book. That's it. Now we need shapes? Confusing. I'm also pretty sure that my poem-speaking friend would wax one about Natalie Portman's character in The Professional (Leon for the international audience), Matilda, because she was a lovely little sprite. And that I need to find different things to spend my time on.

Here are a few candidates in the contest to be my favorite shape, courtesy of lovely Krakow.

DON'T: tell your fellow travelers that you're the crown prince of Norway slumming it on holiday. Turns out they have google everywhere, and unless you take the time to memorize your wife and kids' names, or learn a few words in Norwegian, you're gonna get caught. Quickly. 

A Tour of Hell

Yesterday, I spent the day in Auschwitz, taking a three hour tour of both camps that are still standing, Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). I felt compelled to see it for myself at some point in my life, and it's everything you expect; a massive pile of "fuck you, Nazis" that makes you question how humanity even works when it's capable of something like this. Near the end of the tour, we were led to the ruins of the two main gas chambers in Birkenau (the second camp that was designed explicitly to more efficiently kill people), demolished by the Germans in the waning days of the war to hide any evidence of their crimes. Standing there, 10 feet from the spot where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered, I looked across the train tracks to the other side of the camp where a group of tourists were carrying flags near the other chamber. Israeli flags. Five of them, flapping triumphantly in the wind high above the ruins of evil.

Awhile later, as the tour wrapped up and we were leaving, I looked toward the main gate entering Birkenau, the one the trains passed through when they delivered a fresh group of Jews to be slaughtered, 500 people at a time stuffed into railcars designed to comfortably fit 20. And there they were again, marching out through the gate, five white flags flying, a blue Star of David rolling into visibility with each ripple in the wind. 

Of all the unforgettable stuff I saw there - the piles of human hair that were waiting to be shipped to factories to make socks for German soldiers, the pond next to the gas chamber still containing human ashes, the ovens, the "standing cells" smaller than my shower that four Jews at a time were forced to stand in for weeks until they finally died - that's the scene from Auschwitz I hope I think of first till the day I die. Five Israeli flags flapping in the wind, a group of 20 Jews walking freely out of the gate that used to mean sure death, the one that more than a million people crossed through to enter the camp 70 years ago. Five flags carried down a dirt road by 20 smiling, thriving people who just finished touring a museum, now quietly exiting the camp that people like them only used to enter.

Getting in their cars. 

And driving away. 

The Gate

Back in Stockholm for the weekend, then off to Rome next week. 

Shalom.