My first experience of traveling alone was nothing short of eye-opening. Despite that I’m a generally sociable creature, I found at times the loneliness of walking down a foreign street both fascinating and frightening. In an English-speaking environment, I feel generally comfortable approaching strangers by way of eaves-dropping or observation; this trick doesn’t work so well when you can’t understand anyone around you at the bar, and you’re never sure if they speak English, or least speak it well. I learned that acquiring new friends requires leveraging any social currency you have. This is to say I picked up smoking again, because its an easy way to pick up men. This is also to say that I got in the habit of getting one more beer at the bar, because that kept the conversation going between me and a new group of friends. I mostly stayed with other queer hosts, because it was something we had in common, even if there was a significant language barrier. Any commonality you can use to make a connection with someone, work it.
Most of my experiences of cities were through everyday environments: sitting at a café, people watching at a park, sitting at the 5th-floor balcony looking down on the activity buzzing below. My favorite city person is the old woman. She inches along the sidewalk as the hurried young lives rush past her. She’s got her groceries in one hand, and perhaps a cigarette in the other, and I love watching this living history. I’d see these types in Berlin and think, what has this woman seen? She’s probably witnessed her city torn and pulled and demolished and rethought and rebuilt so many times. And all these youngsters think Berlin is still hip.
I was in a squat building in central Amsterdam, which had been turned into a punk bar-slash-music-venue, and there was a poster up high, with Margaret Thatcher’s face plastered over it. Words above it read: “Only the Good Die Young”
I don’t usually engage in watching sports. This is probably because I was never really that involved in playing sports (tennis aside, but does that even really count?). The FIFA World Cup was in full swing by the time I arrived in Copenhagen, and throughout my travels I was followed by the championship everywhere. In the beginning, there were at least two games every night, so to avoid it, I would have to be blind. After some time, I really grew to enjoy the camaraderie of watching football (excuse me, soccer). I was rooting for he Dutch, until they lost… then I was with the Germans. I was at a bar in Cologne where the conversations all surrounded the game: the players, the teams, the venues. We all got drunk, smiled at each as we joked about the players, scoffed when a move was mis-handled. These are things many people over the world take for granted, but to me it was quite special. By the time it was over, I felt sort of sad, because I wasn’t sure what would replace that sort of camaraderie. Rio 2016?
I’ve grown to love trains even more than I did before this trip. On my way to Amsterdam from Hamburg, the landscape was generally pretty dull, and needless to say, this was on the German side. The clouds were gloomy and it rained occasionally as we smoothly whizzed past the provincial landscape. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I returned, the light from the sun was shining through like it was the first day of spring. The trees seemed greener, the occasional cottages we passed were cuter, and somehow I knew I was in Holland.
I met a lot of interesting, handsome men on my travels, and needless to say, I had a lot of fun with them. There was one in particular that I really connected with. He showed me around Cologne, and was the most open-minded, flexible host I had. We drank beers at midnight on a bench in Volksgarten, a beautiful park from the 19th century. He showed me to my train when I left the city, and there was a very real sort of sadness at hugging him, perhaps for the last time, as I boarded the regional Deutsche Baun to Cologne Hauptbaunhoff, the central station. I entered the train, and saw him wave as the train slowly inched forward. I waved back and saw his stunning grin fade away out of vision. I laughed for a moment, remembering all the fun we had together, how valuable that was to me, how much he taught me about myself in such a short time. And then I just wanted to cry.
Things I lost or got stolen whilst traveling:
-Kenneth Cole watch my father gave me for Christmas two years ago
-three shower luffas, each on separate occasions
-€90 at a bar in Paris
-skin moisturizer
-shampoo
-my brain
I awoke on the upper-level of the N11 night bus in London. It was raining, and from up above the city felt like the mysterious medieval metropolis I had begun to be charmed by. Through the foggy window, through the hazy darkness of the night, all I could see was a faintly-lit clock face atop a shadowy tower, whose time read 4:31 AM. Panicked, I wondered when I’d get home, if this bus was even going in the right direction. Big Ben is like a ghost of 19th-century London, a phantom watching the city as it booms once again. Even as skyscrapers colonize the old city, bombarding the the skyline with Manhattanized verticality, Big Ben seems to top them all.
I met a French boy in Berlin who was a very funny character. I met him at a gay bar called “Roses” which had pink fur lining the walls and a red hue of light permeating the interior. I immediately liked him because he smiled a lot, and, especially for a Parisian, he was very easy-going. Speaking of Parisians, he spoke almost no English (despite that people jokingly say that English is the national language of Berlin). We spent a few days together, and it was one of the first times I didn’t feel alone. The language barrier was so thick that every thought had to be mimed and hand-signed, like an ongoing game of trans-national charades. Every sentence took at least five minutes to explain, but somehow this was fun. We both would laugh when we couldn’t articulate what we wanted to say, which made the mood always light… but needless to say, a kiss is never lost in translation, especially a French one.
I encountered a great deal of pretentiousness in most of the big cities I travelled through. The cosmic joke I found was that everyone seems to think that their city is the best in the world, despite that they’ve seldom seen the other big metropolises around the globe. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin… they all claimed to hold the secret to city living, and no other city would do. I love San Francisco, no doubt, but I would never make the dubious claim that its the best city in the world. Neither is New York. No one city can possibly provide the best combination of urban living, because no one has really figured out what that combination is. To humble these pretentious city-dwellers, I will provide one short roast for each city I feel qualified to judge (despite that I pretty much loved all of them):
-San Francisco is being gutted of its character at warp speed, and the class warfare is splitting it into a bifurcated metropolis that doesn’t know what it is anymore (and I don’t know that I would call it the “liberal capital of the US” anymore)
-New York’s infrastructure looks like a third-world country compared to London and Paris
-Copenhagen is too racially homogenous, and too expensive for budgeted travelers
-Berlin, physically, is just plain ugly, because it was rebuilt during one of the most unfortunate eras in global architecture
-Amsterdam seems to be getting a bit too rich for its own good
-Utrecht is a little too small for its own good
-Cologne is not at all the “gay capital of Germany”. That goes to Berlin now.
-Parisians need to realize that they don’t live in a global city… one could more accurately describe it as a large French city, but certainly not a global one
-London’s Underground needs to stay open later. Seriously.
Having dropped all this hate on these cities, I’d like to balance it with some compliments:
-San Francisco is still fabulously weird
-New York is still just plain fabulous
-Copenhagen is truly a model of civilized culture and politeness
-Berlin is still an artist’s and poor-twenty-something’s dream
-Amsterdam is still so damn picturesque
-Utrecht has a true Dutch authenticity that other cities could take a note from
-Cologne is a beautifully green city, with lots of sidewalk gardens and beautiful street trees
-Paris is still stunningly romantic
-London is the city of cities, the first in so many ways, and all other modern cities really came after it.
I can’t wait for my next adventure.
