The people you meet

If there is one thing in common across all of the characters you meet while traveling, it’s that everybody has been somewhere. Whether it’s the Neapolitan pizzeria with a two-hour wait for the original thing, the hidden gem-of-a-beach littered with Indiana Jones-style ruins, that place in Rome – “you know the one” – or the local deli that shuts down mid-day. Sometimes it’s the end of the street; sometimes it’s the tourist hotspots: The nearest big city, or three-dozen countries around the globe. Everyone has been somewhere, and will at some point have somewhere to go.

But a lot of the time the places the people you meet are going take them right out of your life as fast as they flew in. It’s so easy to relate to perfect strangers that it feels like a week in a country leaves you with lifelong friends you will most likely never see again. So you carry them with you to new places as old memories.
 
It’s like this: The next time someone shows me a weird little tattoo they got at some point between the bar and the hangover, I’ll think of this guy…
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And the next time I meet someone from Tunisia, I’ll simultaneously think of the cool girl I met while navigating the streets of Rome, and Ali, who, after realizing that he was getting nowhere, stole some cash and ran. (As for where he’s going now, it’s probably straight to hell.)
 
Neila
 
The list goes on: The man from Senegal who proposed in French, the blacksmith I spent seven hours walking with, the person who took me to see the Colosseum at night, the two people from the previous post who turned my day around. Even the person who I had a greater chance of meeting back home as he has spent every other weekend in Vancouver, but who I probably wouldn’t have spoken to even if we’d been in the same bar at the same time. (Partially because he walks unbelievably fast and generally right into my shots)…
 
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It’s difficult to say whether things are meant to be; if there’s a reason why life brings you together with certain people at certain times. Some say it’s more a matter of things happening with potential, that wherever you are and whoever you’re with could lead to memorable experiences if you’re willing to let go and just go with it.
 
It can be a really small world if you’re out living life with your eyes wide open.
 
To the people I’ve met – safe travels, chin-chin.
 
Arik
 
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Kevin

Everything I didn’t see at the Vatican

Know where you’re going, but not where it will take you.
 
Bewildered and amused, it was this philosophy that kept me grounded. And after the afternoon I’d had, I was in need of some grounding. It would have been too easy to assume that I’d made the whole thing up: That it was the heat or exhaustion or hunger that was responsible for my poor sense of reality. 
 
But the truth was that the warmth from the sun was exhilerating, I had walked several kilometres but had had a nice break, and the pizza ordered for me had left me more than satisfied. Rome had gotten to my heart, but it hadn’t gotten to my mind.
 
Confident in my own sanity, the question then became: How do I tell an unbelievable story without others doubting my clarity?
 
As I stood in the sun outside a wonderful family-run pizzeria in Vatican City, shaking hands with the chief of the Vatican police, laughing with an Italian man who managed Germany’s best local soccer team, and a man from Munich who worked at a hotel frequented by presidents, princes, and movie stars, I couldn’t help but think how no one would believe me.
 
*  *  *
 
I’d overslept. And by that I mean I’d gotten back to my hostel somewhere around 5 a.m. and woke up a little too close to when I had to leave for my pre-paid tour of the Sistine Chapel and Vatican museums. (The evening had consisted of drinks with new friends – from Algeria and Tunisia – over bruschetta at an English pub, followed by drinks at the hostel bar with a crew from Norway and America, and a private wine party for two in front of the beautifully lit Colosseum – sans tourists or traffic.)
 
The crumpled map I’d been using didn’t do the distance between my room and the world’s smallest country any justice. An hour and a half of power-walking and power-navigating Rome’s chaotic streets later, I was 20 minutes late for my tour, and without any means to let anybody know that I was desperately on my way.
 
Miraculously, I didn’t get lost. It was almost as though my subconscious recognized that I couldn’t afford to make any wrong turns, and consequently heightened my senses. I weaved in and out of tourists like a real Roman woman on a mission, crossing streets with confidence, accutely aware of where I needed to go, all the time.
 
So as I hauled my burning calves up the hill to the meeting point, it was with great relief that I saw the tour guide’s bobbing red flag slowly heading toward the museums. 
 
Once inside, I promptly proceeded to lose the tour. The truth is that there is some truly stunning artwork in the Vatican museum, and while the English-speaking guide will highlight a few of the most prominent pieces, you could really spend days taking it all in. I’d had enough rushing for one day; I wanted to meander the holy halls at my own pace.
 
Somewhere between the Sistine Chapel and the cafeteria, I accidentally exited the building.
 
That was it. No re-admittance, no more tour.
 
Hungry, I decided it was about time for some lunch. And that is how I met Joseph and Lars. 
 
As I contemplated which sidewalk table offered the best view and the most sun, a man asked if I wanted him to take my photo outside of the Vatican wall. I approached his table and handed him my camera. He put it on the table, and said: “Later. First, we eat.”
 
He spoke very little English, and gestured in Italian. His friend spoke German, was fluent in English, and knew a lot about Canada. They ordered me a prosciutto pizza and got me some water. 
 
Earlier in the day, as I was rushing to my tour, I’d passed what I assumed was some sort of funeral procession leading out of a Basilica. The area had been cordoned off, and was surrounded by fancy cars, and even fancier suits. As it turns out, both men had driven 10 hours from Munich to attend the service of an Italian policeman. 
 
They were waiting on a friend as I had happened to stumble into their lives, and then they were to head back to Germany. Halfway through my pizza, a sleek black car pulled up to the corner, and out stepped an armed bodyguard and the chief of the Vatican police. 
 
What Joseph’s and his business was, I couldn’t understand. But I was introduced as the bella from Canada, and I believe he asked me if I was in Italy for Easter break. To whatever he said, I replied: “Si.”
 
Before leaving, we went in to the pizzeria to say goodbye to the owner, to whom I was also introduced. Rambunctious singing broke out, and my new acquaintance announced La Bella from Canada to the entire restaurant, which was filled with a delegation from Cuba.
 
After a nerve-racking scenic drive back to my part of town – it’s hard to say whether the drivers or the pedestrians are crazier – we all parted ways. (But not after the Italian man insisted I take a banana for the road, and a chocolate marzipan Easter egg – he apparently knows the owner of the company.)
 
I had spent most of the day lost and wandering about, but in hindsight I like to think that I ended up, at every stage, exactly where I was supposed to be; I just didn’t know it at the time. I certainly thought I knew where I was going, but I was taken almost everywhere but there.
 
It’s all about the journey.

A detour out of town

If grey were an emotion, it would probably be dread.

And everything in the vicinity was grey.

The mist, the air, the sense of numbness that gripped shivering limbs and clouded weary minds.

The fog was a smoke that lingered around the corners of the 28 buildings. They lined the rough and sandy pavement like numbered tombstones; two stories each and crumbling after six decades of remembrance. Today they see many visitors, but no one ever brings flowers.

The trees just outside of the barbed wire fences were spidery patterns, drawn with burnt charcoal on a blank slate of a sky. While everything in sight looked bleak, worn and used, no amount of time would be able to wash away the grey that permeated the decaying walls, the shattered windows, the creaking slats between the wooden barrack roofs.

The red bricks were dull and the grass was frosted. It was as though colour was an afterthought, a desperate attempt to breathe some life into the unforgiving scenery normally known through black and white photographs.

The clouds huddled together against the biting bitter wind, refraining from crying on the cold, hard ground.

Auschwitz.

Just an hour on a bus from the already faded pastel facades of Rynek Glowny, Krakow’s main square. Even after suffering through two world wars, the architecture in Poland’s second largest city is virtually untouched.

But when the Nazis came, the country could not, and did not, put up a fight. It wasn’t long until the bricks from the buildings on the city’s outskirts were taken out of the homes of Jewish residents, and put into new infrastructure for the same people.

Over a million Jews, Poles, Soviets, and Roma people were exterminated at one of the very few camps specifically designed to be a final destination: The entire population of Manchester exterminated, twice over.

Today, the Birkenau camp remains as a field of ever-increasing ruin and rubble. Two black strokes, heading toward death in parallel, enter and stop abruptly, literally at the end of the line. After decades of time and weather taking their toll, what surrounds the rails now is what is left of the nearest barracks: A single brick furnace per unit, attached to nothing but the ground that bears it.

Off in the distance is a group of two-dozen Israeli-Jewish travelers, chanting in Hebrew around a modern art monument. A smooth black sculpture void of any detail, it represents the final moments of life in the barren gas chambers. Jagged pale grey stones no bigger than two-pound coins cover its surfaces, traditional Jewish tokens of respect. They are placed haphazardly, as if dropped by birds flying over the desolate camps.

There were no birds, though. The swallows and martins singing elsewhere were nowhere to be seen. The trees were barren, and the wind blew forcefully as if trying to command attention without emitting a single moan. The lack of natural sound engulfed the site in a quiet sense of hesitation.

As the songs from the young men and women clad in black rang out mournfully to no one in particular, there were only two other sounds that could be heard.

The first, the thudding of heavy feet on gravel, mixed with sand, packed from being well-tread. The second, the Polish woman whispering nightmares into the ears of tourists and visitors.

“To survive in Hitler’s Germany…”

Her words speak truths, listing facts and figures as though she was reading an aftermath report of the damage done: Cold, emotionless, clinical.

It is the shoes – the hundreds of thousands of shoes – that visualized the impact of her account. There are babies’ shoes that, at one time, were most likely white, dainty, and worn by a girl who could not yet walk; there are formal women’s shoes with leathery straps and a wooden heel an inch-and-a-half high; there are the shoes of men who could do nothing to protect their families. Once worn by unsuspecting people, the shoes are now faded grey symbols of the Holocaust’s atrocities, preserved behind glass in one of the camp’s exhibitions.

Just outside, behind the thick brick walls that are too high to scale even with a helping hand, bodiless voices float up and over the spiked black wires that crown the fences. There’s chatter, and there’s laughter, as packs of tourists with cameras and grumbling bellies board buses with navy blue padded seats back to Rynek Glowny, and away from Auschwitz.

People came to remember, so that they could try to forget.

36 hours in London

You can learn a lot in 36 hours.

It’s the act of being fully immersed in something new that pushes you cleanly right out of your comfort zone, and lands you – rather messily – into a form of survival mode that is in constant conflict with the wanderlust of the traveler, and the curiosity of the journalist. For all three of these reasons, my eyes are wide open, and have taken in a lot on my weekend trip to Shoreditch, London.

Yesterday morning, I caught the 6 a.m. train from Preston to London Euston, a station I was warned would be completely overwhelming.

It was. But I am adamant that people at any sort of information booth, whether they want to or not, are going to help me find where I need to go. (It helps having a foreign accent, too.) The girl who helped me was lovely, and after studying and re-studying my tube map, I’ve finally understood the difference between the rails, the underground, and the overground.

So, after taking the underground, I found myself in what I would describe as London’s “gastown” (although really, Gastown should be called Vancouver’s Shoreditch). The area’s crumbling buildings have been revived with artistic graffiti that beautifies the hip, trendy shops.

I was headed to the Rich Mix cinema for a two-day documentary film fest. With my “superpass,” I was allowed to see any of the films I wanted, attend any of the panels, and watch any of the private screenings in what was dubbed the Delegates Lounge.

I soon learned that as badly as I wanted to take in as many features as I could, I have a low threshold for how long I’m able to sit in dark rooms.

Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark, Pink Saris, and The Yes Men Fix the World were the ones I watched yesterday. The first being my favourite, the third being incredibly quirky but overall a good laugh. I attended one of the two-hour sessions that boldly asked what the differences, or lack thereof, are between documentarians and journalists to a brilliant roster of panelists, including the director of Pink Saris; the commissioning editor for major series, specials, and discussions at Al Jazeera English; the managing editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism; a talented journalist whose documentary on Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields was nominated for the 2012 Noble Peace Prize.

Between the Lines, so far, has proven to be worth the daunting trip. It’s inspiring and, as its tagline of “breaking boundaries in documenting the world” suggests, norm-challenging.

After my first day, I asked the woman at the reception desk if she could give me directions to the cheap hotel I’d (proudly) found and reserved online. She kind of politely refused, explaining that walking through the Roman Road ghetto is probably not something a wide-eyed chatty white girl like me (she didn’t say this, but I swore her eyes did) should be doing in the dark.

So I’m writing this long-overdue post from the comfort of a Premier Inn with a view of the city.

iPhone - Hotel Room

Needless to say, it hasn’t been a cheap weekend. But you live, and you learn. And the two biggest things I’m taking away from this quick jaunt are that 1) while I may not make the best decisions right out of the ghetto, I’m very capable of finding solutions (or finding someone who can find solutions) and being resourceful; 2) I’m enormously excited at the prospect of working in film and television.

Day two, here we go.

PS – Hi Grandma.

Carpe diem

iPhone - Chinatown

Picking up where I left off last post, I spent the Sunday after ringing in the Year of the Snake with a trip to Manchester. For someone who had never previously been to a Chinese New Year celebration, I would say I’ve done pretty well this year, tallying one festivity, and doubling that number the next day.

When I first arrived in Preston, I took a taxi from the rail station to my flat, partially because a full day in transit had made my luggage unbearably heavy, partially because I had no idea where I was.

I’ve realized since that the trains are a short 15-minute walk from my place. After a quick 40-minute scenic tour of grassy hills, covered in sheep and black spidery trees, I was in a real city.

I fell in love with Manchester the moment our train entered Victoria Station. Half of the buildings in the city are historic, weathered with age, and architecturally beautiful. The other half are modern, avant-garde compared to Vancouver standards. It’s almost like being in a miniature display one might find in a museum: The contrast inherent to the city is itself a form of art.

Had it not been a miserably cold and wet day, I would have brought along my camera. Unfortunately, I’m still in that new-purchase phase, where I’m extra cautiously trying to avoid subjecting my camera to the tiniest scratch or speck of dirt.

iPhone - Fireworks

But there’s no doubt I’ll be going back.

I took the trip with two new friends who are studying at UCLan for the year, both of whom are from Spain. One had to take photos of the city’s Chinese New Year festivities for a class, so off to Chinatown we went.

We saw dragons, we heard music, we braved the crowds and the rain and eventually took a break to warm up in an English pub. I had the classic fish and chips, which came with the typically British “mushy peas” that, although looking like baby food, tasted not too bad.

After wandering around a bit more, we chatted about the differences between Spain and Canada, about education, and stereotypes, over coffees and cakes until it was time for the fireworks. It was a perfect end to the weekend.

The next day – back to reality. Well, my reality: A class I enjoy that starts at two in the afternoon, and a random eco-friendly rickshaw ride to get me there. Carpe diem.

PS – Hi Grandma.