The Continent

I’m back in Copenhagen. It took about 22 hours longer than expected plus a detour to the UK to get back in. I really had no idea if I was going to be able to get back as I traveled by bus the 60 miles between the Stansted and Gatwick airports (about 12% of the whole length of England) on the outskirts of London yesterday night. I believe I am here legally and was entitled to enter, but only due to a specific Denmark-USA bilateral agreement, the nuances of which are not well known or much cared about by other countries.

London Bridge!

I was warned about and discouraged from going to Turkey at all due to the instability, terrorism and refugee influx in that country in the past few years. The only effect of these on my trip however were in the extreme security at the airport, where the airline employees were not all interested in the nuances of Danish immigration law and would not let me board the plane. I thought that it would be easier to get into Denmark from the UK and ultimately that worked out.

So! I’m back, after my three week sojourn through central Europe, to the very edge of south-eastern Europe, finally crossing over the recently renamed 15th of July Martyrs Bridge across the Bosphorous to get to an Istanbul airport on the Asian side. I crossed all over land as far as Montenegro, and in doing so performed something of a north-to-south transect of the middle portion of Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic. A transect is a tool used by geographers, biologists, landscape architects and urban planners to collect data and create a conceptual model of the range of environments (including urban environments).

I wasn’t rigorously collecting data on anything, but I was aware of progressive changes in language, culture, built environments, transportation systems, basic economic transactions, and certain government functions like border control; basically all the things you interact with when you are travelling. Travelling alone makes it quite a bit easier to be observant of such minutia because, you know, you don't have anyone to talk to. I compiled some maps crudely showing the changes in these qualities I experienced as I traveled in a previous post.

So I got to see a whole range of qualities that make the continent of Europe “continental”. When you are travelling you always get to see and feel what is familiar and what is different. Copenhagen is a good place to start out because it feels pretty familiar. Some combination of it being a small country, a wealthy country, a country with a near-universal level of English as a second language, and perhaps being a country that was most often an outside observer of the traumatic episodes of 20th century European history seem to make it particularly accessible to an American like me.

Travelling south much of what seemed familiar from home gradually disappeared. As I got deep into the continent the USA felt more and more distant. Germany is fascinating partly because it feels like an alternate reality version of the USA. Prague was suddenly Catholic (if only nominally) after three months in subdued and self-conscious Protestant lands. The deeper you go into Hapsburg lands (Prague, Vienna, Zagreb but not Munich) you get a new diversity of cultural influences in which German is a strong element but Italian, Slavic and other cultures are also key. In Yugoslavia you have a mess of cultures with the same background and mostly the same language, but each looking outwards towards somewhere else: Slovenia to Germany, Croatia to Italy, Serbia to Russia, Bosnia to Turkey, Kosovo to Albania, (those are gut-level generalizations, half of which are about places I haven't even been). Finally in Turkey you get the crazy mashup of the Islamic Middle East, the Roman Empire, and the medieval christian Mediterranean world. The built legacies of each of these roots mixing and overlapping while the cultural elements of the latter two are mostly gone due to 20th century nationalism and ethnic purification, some sort of which also characterized all of the other countries I passed though. Peculiarly, while this was happening I began to notice a different kind of familiarity. More and more I got flashbacks to places I’ve been in Latin America: long bus rides through rural lands and villages, the insufferable tourist economy of Santo Domingo, the glorious coast of Chile in winter, the old crumbling downtown of Asuncion, the elegant and lively but also sort of crumbling colonial quarter of Mexico City.

I can think of three main reasons for the relationship these distant places.
First: the change from upper-income economies to middle-income economies.
Turkey, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro are considered to be “Upper-Middle Income” countries. They’re pretty developed and industrialized but there is also quite a bit of informality in the way economic transactions and government interactions take place that felt similar to places in Latin America. The democratic institutions also seem to work (or not work) in a more or less similar way, the culture is a bit more conservative and religion is taken more seriously.

I really like travelling in middle-income countries. It’s easy to get around because buses go everywhere, also the buses aren't completely awful so you're comfortable enough, prices are relatively cheap so you feel rich, there’s still clear connections to past ways of doing things which is charming, there aren’t nearly as many rules so you can have more fun (just be respectful!!!) and the population is doing okay overall so you don’t have to feel like shit for being American (BUT there is still a wealth gap between tourists and locals so the tourist economy is more prominent and obnoxious.) It would be interesting to write a book about all the middle income countries. It is remarkable how similarly things work in Croatia and Mexico; even the visual appearance of these places is similar because the economies of scale, the types of materials and manufactured goods available, and the relationship between wages and materials.  

Second: the Climate. The Mediterranean climate is the most perfect for human thriving I think. It being November there was a nice crispness and coolness to the air, but the sun usually came out too and warmed things up. There are trees but not too many so you have long, unobstructed views. Fruit, wine and fish are plentiful and cheap. In the summer there is water you can jump into (I even went swimming briefly in the Adriatic Sea while in Croatia). The interiors of buildings are not so nice and there isn’t much climate control because it’s generally nicer to be outside anyhow, so you are better connected with nature in a way and feel healthier and saner overall. Specifically Croatia reminded me a lot of the middle part of Chile, which is also quite nice, though the Pacific is a bit more boisterous than the Adriatic.

Why would you be inside?

   
Third: Continentalness.
This was the thing I was thinking about when I started writing this post, and it’s really the first of these three that I started noticing. It was especially strong in Vienna, where I really felt these strong echoes from from the historic downtown cores of Asunción (Paraguay), Salta (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), and Mexico City. That’s funny because they’re sort of reverse echoes. As far as I can tell, Vienna and Paris were the two poles of a cultural sphere in continental Europe for a period of time when that culture was the most prestigious and influential in the world. I am thinking especially of the period from the 1840’s to 1914, but we could probably start counting from 1750 or earlier. Due to the result of WWI Vienna never really rose past that peak of prominence and grandeur and it was preserved in a way; unlike Paris which continued to grow and has remained one of the cultural capitals of the world.


An important practice in studying history is to isolate the situation in which the subject came into being from whatever came after. This is very true of studying urban morphology because of the permanence of elements of the built environment. What were the architectural, economic, governmental, social realities at the moment that this building was built? They are going to tell you an awful lot about why it is the way it is.

The old downtown cores of the Latin American cities I mentioned all had their heyday in that period from the mid-19th century up until the early 20th century. (Generally this was the laissez faire period in the economies of these countries which enriched the elites who lived in the capitals. Argentina went through its period of outrageous economic growth then too, while Asuncion had it’s heyday in the 1860’s before the War of the Triple Alliance when the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez was enamoured with Napoleon III’s imperial Paris.) So the most important global culture at that time was continental Europe and the elites who shaped these cities were very consciously looking abroad for cultural models that they assumed were to superior to ones indigenous to their own countries.

After war, revolution, economic stagnation and/or economic nationalization these old downtown cores declined in their practical importance and wealth but maintained a tarnished splendor and cultural cachet. The influence of 19th and early 20th century continental European was maintained in the urban culture and built environment these cities too, and in funny ways got transmitted and adapted by the national cultural of each country. The use of continental style electrical outlets and bidets in rural Paraguay is one an example of some of those minutia. There’s also the pompous historicist and neo-classical public sculptures and architecture you see in Mexico City and Santiago. And there is the global culture of the hotel, glorified in the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel which I think comes from this period too, and of which I’ve gotten to glimpse the low-budget aspirations in Asuncion, Mexico, Zagreb, and most recently Istanbul, where the concierge politely addressed me as Monsieur.

the big three-oh

I spent today walking around Istanbul, just like I’ve done for the two previous days. Tuesday I saw the site of the old Roman Hippodrome with its 3,500 year old Egyptian Obelisk, the Sultanahmet Camii or “Blue Mosque”, the museum of the mosaics of Justinian’s Palace (6th century AD), the old great bazaar and adjacent market districts, the Galata Bridge (thronged with fishers), and finally the Galata Tower before riding the tram back to my hotel.

Wednesday I walked west past the site of the ruins of the forum of Theodosius, past Istanbul University, to stop in at the Kalenderhane Mosque which used to be a Byzantine church, then walked along the Valens Aqueduct (in used for over 1000 years until the 19th century), through another smaller market district and the Fatih Mosque complex, to the seat of the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople (the first-among equals among the heads of Orthodox Christian churches worldwide) in the Church of St. George, to the church of St. Mary of the Mongols (the only Byzantine church that was never converted to a mosque), through the (formerly) Greek neighborhood of Fener, past one of the Roman cisterns which now serves as a soccer stadium, to the still standing Walls of Theodosius, which are about four and a half kilometers from my hotel. I was able to mount a tower in a partially restored section of the walls near the Edirne Gate and enjoy a view of the city in every direction, it having spilled out of its old shell in the last century and grown thirty times in size. I walked along the old walls to a 13th century Byzantine palace, where I peered in the gate. The caretaker was standing nearby and told me that it was closed, but that he would let me in “special”. I got to walk all around the ruins of the grounds and the still-standing palace and tower, which are being restored and are due to open next year. That’s about all the information I could get from the caretaker, due to my total lack of Turkish and his very limited English. He wouldn’t let me take any pictures and refused a tip as I was leaving. From there I walked down to the waterfront along the Golden Horn, the famous harbor of the city. It occurred to me a moment too late to hop on the ferry that stopped nearby. I walked back towards the center until I hopped on a bus which went something like the right direction. After the bus turned away from my direction I still had about a kilometer walk through what turned out to be a luxury shopping district, with incredible displays of clothes and shoes down a semi-pedestrianized street. I was again quite tired when I got back.

Today I walked to the Hagia Sofia. After exasperating and costly confusion about the process for joining a tour group I ended up with a ridiculous, sleazy, not-particularly knowledgeable guide. Whatever it took to get in it was worth it. I spent about three hours in that wonderful building. All the things they say about it are true, the ceiling really does fell as though it’s floating above. You can feel the emperors and sultans in their, just as awed as everyone else. From the Hagia Sofia I walked through the great bazaar again and finished up my souvenir shopping. I walked up to the Suleymaniye Camii. It’s the second largest mosque in the city and generally considered to be the most perfect. I would concur with this assessment. After briefly visiting the tomb of Suleiman the Great I was fortunate to get into the mosque shortly before it was closed for the evening to visitors, and see the final light of the sun come in through the western windows. I walked down the hill towards the water, through a neighborhood of terrifyingly degraded old wooden houses. I bought fresh squeezed pomegranate juice for 35 cents and a kebab sandwich for 60 cents. Once I reached the harbor I hopped on a ferry, not knowing where it went. It was dusk, rush-hour, there were ferries going everywhere and I saw on the upper back deck and it was lovely. They served hot tea on the ferry for 45 cents. The ferry landed on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I had some trouble finding a ferry that went back in the right direction, and ended up riding back quite a bit north on the European side then catching a bus and the tram back towards the hotel. Another long good day.

I am exceedingly fortunate to get to spend my birthday in such a special place. This is my thirtieth birthday. A decade spent wandering comes to a close at the navel of the world. I have lived in many places, I have held many jobs, visited many cities. I have had a few lovers as well. It has been a restless ten years.

That’s how I wanted it. In my youth I spent my time thinking of far away places in old parts of the world (and other planets). When I read Kerouac it was so exciting partly because it was empowering: I could travel, simply, and take pleasure and learn from the simple things, the land, the buildings, the cities, the streets and buses, the music, the booze, the bus-stations and train terminals at the wrong hour of night.

I started travelling a little more than ten years ago when I took off from my house-painting job to go visit Calli in California on the train in July, 2006. A few months later I set out across the country, making it from Seattle to Boston by way of bus, train, rides with family and hitching, then flew home on the generosity of my mother. I spent the rest of that fall working at the grocery store, working at the coffee roasterie, delivering newspapers, baking bread, reading Walden, and killing English Ivy in the woods. (I played computer games and watched the Daily Show then too.)

The next summer I went to Korea with Calli and her dad, to teach English, learn to ride a motorcycle, visit Buddhist temples, and make out on basalt cliffs at dusk while the lights of the squid fishing fleet appeared one by one on the horizon.

The next spring I went to the Dominican Republic where I learned to speak Spanish, dance, and drink rum. I played chess with Andrew Shaw Kitch in the shade by the blue Caribbean water, and drank beer and rum, and talked about rock and roll, and danced in the shelter of overlapping awnings with Dominican women on a rainy night in Rio San Juan.
I graduated graduated from college and my father financed a trip to visit Erika in Cuenca, Ecuador. We ate mangoes and avocados and walked through waterfalls and then back to town in the warm night sounds of the forest while glow worms dangled from the branches. We hunted for mushrooms and then ate them on the side of a mountain, and got lost, and then found, and rode with a woman along crazy mountain roads in the real fog as we tried to remember who we were and how to speak Spanish and how we got to South America on the way back to the city.
I joined Americorps the next summer with other city kids and we went into the Oregon woods and learned to use chainsaws and got rained on and smelled bad and cooked for each other.
After our term of service was up I travelled south and east over land with a backpack like I had four years before. I ended up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I stayed with my old friend Brendan and met a young woman with beautiful big brown cow eyes.
I joined the Peace Corps towards the end of that winter and I went to Paraguay for the next two and one third years. I lived with families, had a house, built a wood stove, taught kids to read, fell in love, got run out of town, had a new house, built a new woodstove, and helped start a library. I got to know lovely people, got to feel at home in that country, and then I left and crossed the big Chaco wasteland, went up over the Andes and down the coast of Chile to Santiago before I flew home.
I came back to Vashon and slept in a comfortable bed, drank coffee, walked the beach and spent time around colorful people. I went to a wedding out East and saw New York city again and upstate and was with old friends from South America. I eventually found a job worth doing and applied to graduate school and didn’t really get in but started taking classes anyway.

I signed up for a study trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, where we ate non-hallucinogenic mushrooms in a mountain village and learned about old ways.
I got into grad school. I found a strange old warehouse to live in with other strange people. I decorated my room with a tie-dye lace tablecloth, an oriental rug, the words of Whitman, old shells and bottle caps and pictures of saints and a bottle of wine with a picture of a girl on it. I got a grant to come to Europe, where I got to do work that I thought was interesting and use skills that I felt good at.

These last ten years I have worked as an after school/summer-camp teacher, a community engagement coordinator, a pedicab driver, a Unitarian Sunday school teacher, a dendro-chronology lab technician and project manager, a freelance weed-puller and hole-digger, a Peace Corps volunteer (which is twelve jobs in itself), an Americorps member, a Salvation Army bell-ringer, a house-painter, a reading tutor, a groundskeeping assistant, an English teacher, a roastmaster’s assistant, a newspaper deliverer, a grocery bagger, a projectionist and theater cashier in something like that order. I love to learn how to do a new thing and to work in a new place. I have worked, but I have not earned my keep. I have amassed massive loan debt and relied often on the stability and generosity of others, especially my parents. If the measure of adulthood is to be able to cover your costs and more, I have yet to reach it.  

It's been ten years of movement and constantly shifting directions. I’m an unpredictable element. I am unattached; an unknown entity; a potentially dangerous free radical. At worst, I lose track of my own story, and it all starts to feel like just a bunch of random events. And an adult male is always a potential danger to others. An unattached one the more so, as he has less to lose. The male energy is vital, powerful, but without a direction and a purpose that energy poses a risk to others and to its host. These next ten years I hope to build. To build means one can’t always move around, try a new thing, slip off into the night. It is probably dull much of the time. Perhaps it is not! I do not know what my prospects for family life are but I know they are better if I am stable. I have as good a chance as one can ask for in life, if I can simply finish that degree and start that career. My own idiosyncrasy and my broad but strange work experience have not made it easy for me to find jobs in the past. When I find something either it is either temporary and ends or I head of to some other adventure. However, I feel immensely capable. I am somewhat unprepared to imagine a regular, long-term, middle-class job. Probably I should not get ahead of myself! But one must set goals and one must take steps to achieve them. I want to find work that is meaningful, challenging, and remunerative. I need to establish something stable, to develop long-term relationships, to build trust. This next decade will be the story of how that goes.

Borderlands

I've been enjoying thinking about the idea of crossing over borders during this trip. Linguistic, religious, sovereign, historic, there's a lot of kinds of borders and there's a lot of overlapping commonalities. I spent a silly amount of time looking this stuff up, but here are some maps with my route overlaid on top. Enjoy!

Europe during the Cold War.
Both Austria and Yugoslavia are colored white, but Austria was much more associated with the West and Yugoslavia with the East I believe. 

Linguistic Groups - Germanic: green, Romance: pale yellow, Slavic: dark yellow

Religions - Protestant: purple, Catholic: Blue, Orthodox: red, Muslim: Green.
It's hard to see on the map but my first stop in a majority Muslim place was in Mostar, Bosnia. 

The Roman Empire. This is interesting to me because it indicates how much experience cultures might have with organized, literate and bureaucratic government institutions. However, in the Yugoslavia and Turkey different populations and cultures have more or less displaced societies existing in Roman times, so perhaps that history doesn't carry any weight.

Europe in 1700. Ottoman Empire is real big, Germany is divided.

Europe in 1900. Austria-Hungary and Germany are bigger now.

aaaand here's a spreadsheet I made of these and other aspects of the places I've been visiting.

Fourth Leg: Dalmatian Coast

This morning I’m drinking Turkish coffee in Kotor, Montenegro. It has become clear that one can either try to cover the ground that I’ve been covering, or one can get productive work done while travelling, but it is difficult to do both. The last five days I stayed in Split (Croatia), Mostar (Bosnia i Herzegovina), and Kotor (Montenegro). I also took day trips to Stari Grad on Hvar Island (Croatia) and Dubrovnik (Croatia), the latter on the way in between Mostar and Kotor. These towns share a rich and complicated history. They end up on different sides of different wars and cultures in constantly shifting combinations. This is the essential theme of my entire trip. Hopping the borders between religious, linguistic, economic, and imperial boundaries.

I’m itching to make a big chart of all those variables, but at this moment that would disturb the flow of my writing and my coffee. Perhaps I’ll attempt a loose breakdown:

Split: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Mostar: Muslim

Byzantine > Bulgarian > Ottoman > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Bosnian
Dubrovnik: Catholic

Illyrian > Greek > Roman > Byzantine > Independent > Ottoman vassal > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Croatian
Kotor: Orthodox
Roman > Byzantine > Venetian > French > Austro-Hungarian > Yugoslavian > Montenegrin

Each of these towns has a small historic center of tightly packed stone buildings with narrow streets (or passageways rather). With the exception of Mostar each of these towns is surrounded by stone walls built (most recently) in the 15th-16th centuries. The walls enclose a surprisingly small area. I don’t know the historic numbers, but the population of Dubrovnik today is only 70,000, and the city encompasses an area much larger than the old walled segment.

Split is particularly interesting from morphological standpoint because it is a city that grew out of the ruins of a single Roman palace. In the 8th century the residents of Salona, the old capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia were driven out of their city by barbarian invaders. They took refuge on the nearby islands and in the ruins of the Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace, constructed near the city around 300 AD. Over the past 1300 years the city of Split has grown up within and around the old palace, the stone and walls of which have been used and reused to construct the dense, complex core of housing, shops, squares, and fortifications. It’s now the second largest city in Croatia, and so the old palatial core is quite a small part, mostly dominated by tourists, but it seems to retain some indigenous life, and forms part of a central area that seems to attract shoppers and strollers from all over the city. The hostel I stayed in, within the footprint of the palace, was an affordable family-run operation and was a refreshing break from the huge hostels I’ve been staying in in the capital cities to the north.

I visited the ruins of the city of Salona, then on a lark took a bus up towards a rocky outcrop that looked intriguing from down below. It turned out to be the fortress of Klis, a defensive post used since before Roman times. It has been developed over the centuries into a wonderful complex of walls, gates, turrets, which winds its way towards the summit, with an incredible view of Split and the surrounding land. It was just before sunset when I got there and the guard sold me my ticket about 20 minutes after the place was supposed to be closed. I was the only one there. The guard and his friend went home but left the front door (a massive wood and iron gate :) open for me. I ran around as a giddy boy in the most perfect lego-pirate fortress I could imagine. I even climbed across a tile roof to get to the highest observation point, the main access to which had already been closed.

The next day I took the ferry to Stari Grad (“Old City” in any Slavic toungue) on Hvar Island. I learned this is an old settlement, the town officially founded by greek colonists after they had displaced the native Delmatae. Unlike Split the town has not grown much since then so it feels more connected to those times. The fields behind the town are a protected UNESCO World Heritage Site (as are some part of all of these towns) because they essentially preserve the land division and agricultural methods of the ancient Greeks intact. I didn’t know that when I climbed up the hill next to the town to enjoy my lunch of pumpkin-seed bread, smoked sausage, hard cheese, walnuts, apples and mandarins, but they did look pretty, and unspoiled by the suburban sprawl that I have spent most of my life looking at. The island was predictably delightful otherwise, if somewhat empty at this time of year, despite the pleasant weather.

Mostar is in Herzegovina, the southern region of the country called Bosnia i Herzegovina, which is internally divided into three ethnic “republics”, one each for Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. (For what it’s worth these seem to be religious identities as much as anything: roughly: Serbs are Orthodox, Croats are Catholic, and Bosniaks are Muslim. The three languages are basically the same.) This arrangement is a result of the Dayton accords, worked through by the Clinton administration. It ended the war between these three groups, but created an incredibly complicated system in its place.

Mostar is a small city that was fairly prosperous and industrialized in Yugoslavia, but which was heavily damaged during the war, mostly during the phase of fighting during 1992 and 1993 between Croats and Bosniaks. There are still many buildings with visible damage from the war, though much money and effort has gone into rebuilding, particularly in the old town. The town formed around an impressive stone bridge commissioned by Suleiman the Great, the Ottoman emperor from 1520 to 1566. The bridge spans the Neretva river which is not wide but which is deep and swift flowing. The bridge is called Stari Most (“old bridge”) which gave the town its name.

The only tour I could find late in the day was called “The Death of Yugoslavia”. On it we visited an old underground fighter-jet hangar, one of more than a hundred across the former Yugoslavia, the former town square, once surrounded by banks, and grand buildings, which became the front line in the fighting in 1993, and a large monument to Yugoslav unity, which is now overgrown and abandoned.

While walking the streets I head the noon call to prayer. It was the first time I have ever heard that in my life. It came in stereo, at slightly different intervals from minarets in different directions. I was not expecting to be so moved to hear this. I’d stepped, just barely, into a part of the world which has been an enormous abstraction my entire adult life. It’s been the ultimate exotic foreign place, and perhaps the “Orient” is not the wrong thing to call it; the focus of angst and money and lives and fear and the proximate excuse for me having to take off my belt at the airport and the mass surveillance of my country by our government and the eviction of people from airplanes because they look or sound like a “terrorist”.

Mostar is a place where you hardly have to do anything, you can practically just sit and feel the waves of human history moving over you. Centuries of lives lived in prosperity and crisis leaving thier marks. On a sunny, cool Friday morning the main street was thronged with folks sitting outside drinking coffee at the numerous cafes. It feels to have all worked out well enough, for now. Right now, the painful feeling of the breakdown of trust among Americans is all over my body. That is a part of the roll of human history. To travel is to see how it has played out in other places. It is more pleasant to feel it play back while visiting than to be in the midst of it, I think.