My first impressions of Rome were not so favourable. It seemed to be a city made of garbage and graffiti. I saw it on the bus from the airport to the train station, and then again on the walk from the train station to the apartment. Garbage and graffiti everywhere.
“You’re going to love Europe,” I told my niece. “Everything here is so pretty. The ornate buildings. The immaculate gardens. The cobblestone streets. Everything.
No, not everything. Definitely not the trajectory from the Termini train station to our humble abode. Rome, I thought, is a dirty, unpalatable city. I’m not so sure I like it here.
I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.
But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.
Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem. Rows of crosses, row on row. Thousands and thousands of them. Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks. Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage. Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks. Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial. Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.
A few months ago I had the super-bright idea that it would be cool to snorkel between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, having two continents within arms’ reach. Cool, I thought. I’m going to do that. Because I do all the things.
So off I went to Iceland, where I did all sorts of other things. I went zip-lining upside down. I went hiking in the mountains. I bathed in the Blue Lagoon. I paid 35,000 Icelandic króna for a pair of rain pants that I didn’t end up using (that’s okay — it’s just money. Sometimes it goes away like that). I photographed geysers and waterfalls, soaked in hot springs, and ate rye bread that had been baked for 24 hours underground, where the water is at a constant volcanic boil. I wandered the streets of Reykjavik, went to the flea market, and ate an incomparable fish dinner. I bumped my head on the top of a cave and marvelled at the almost-midnight sun. All the things.
My province recently announced the inauguration of the long-awaited Phase 3 of its reopening plan, after 16 months of pandemic restrictions that stripped us of so many basic human needs: needs for safety, companionship, and freedom of movement; needs for familiarity and novelty, frivolity and meaning; needs for physical contact and emotional connection. These unpopular restrictions have been essential to the ongoing eradication of the cause of all this loss, and therefore had my full support. The threat has not passed; ongoing vigilance is necessary, and will be for some time. But I and those I care about have recently achieved “fully vaccinated” status, just when the powers that be have opened doors that have long been bolted fast.
And so it was that after a lonely year of disconnection and discontent, I found my way back to humanity, in the form of a modest road trip to see people and places from my Pre-Pandemic Past.
Captain’s Log: Things I Did this Week that Made me Feel Human Again:
When I moved to Morocco in 2015, every day held a story that I was eager to share with anyone who cared to read. By contrast, returning to Canada in 2019 has left me largely wordless. I had not written a thing since my return, when I came across a “receiving letter” that my thoughtful employers had written for all departing staff before we left. The idea was to prepare us, and the people who care about us, for the “reverse culture shock” that was about to hit us when we returned to a home that no longer felt like home. Here is that letter, and the thoughts it provoked.
So here it is: all that I have left unsaid since the day four months ago when I made my last voyage between the two places that have been home to me for the last four years: one, the place of my upbringing and my roots, the other, the place of my uprooting, and re-rooting, my redefinition of myself as “one who goes forth.”
Do you know the story of Stone Soup? It’s a story of deception and manipulation, cleverly disguised as “sharing.” I had a little taste of it a few weeks ago on my return trip from Slovenia, and it’s a bitter brew indeed.
I didn’t miss the bus. The bus missed me. And now I am missing hundreds of Euros. It stings. Oh, it stings.
It started the previous week in Casablanca, when I decided to play it safe and reserve a 20-Euro bus from the airport in Venice to take me to my final destination in Ljubljana, Slovenia. All through the convenience of online booking. Only I never got a receipt. Or a confirmation of payment. Or a ticket. Nothing. Of course my credit card was still charged. Of course I immediately emailed the bus company. Of course I got no response.
When I landed in Venice the next day I immediately hooked myself up
intravenously to the airport wifi, only to check my email and receive a message
saying “Please send us your phone number.
The bus driver does not have your name on his list.” Of course I responded immediately. Of course I received no further
response. None. I lost a Euro to an Italian pay phone trying
to dial a number that turned out to be out of service. I asked every possible person at the airport
who might be able to direct me to the bus in question. No one had heard of it. No one.
I should have read the reviews…
The phantom bus stop
I stood in the rain for an hour waiting for the phantom bus that
never came. Without an umbrella. And then I went inside and booked a second bus
with another company. Waited in the
airport for another three hours. Boarded
the bus without incident, and arrived four hours later in Ljubljana, soaking
wet but otherwise intact.
“It’s only 20 Euros,” I told myself. “It’s just money. Sometimes it goes away like that. You’re safe. You’re here. Get over it.”
I got over it. I economized
in other unfortunate ways. I walked
around in the rain all week instead of paying for taxis or transit passes. I ate oatmeal in my mini-airbnb instead of staying
in hotels and dining in Slovenian restaurants.
I did not buy jewelry or pretty porcelain mugs at the market. Only a flimsy orange umbrella and a
rainhat. To enhance my daily walks in
the rain. Without rainboots.
“Just take a taxi,” my mom said.
“Just buy some rainboots,” my mom said.
“You can do that, you know.” No I can’t.
I can’t.
One week later, I thanked myself for having booked my 5am bus ticket back to Venice with a reliable, reputable bus company that I’d used many times before.
I did not exactly arrive 15 minutes early, as the ticket suggested, but I was five minutes early. I ran. In the rain. Through the puddles. My shoes were flooded. The bus was waiting.
4:55am: “Is this the bus to Venice?”
“No.”
Oh no… did it take the liberty of leaving 15 minutes early?
Another bus pulled up.
4:58am: “Is this the bus to Venice?”
“No.”
A third bus pulled up. One of
the many cities flashing on its banner was “Venezia.” Oh, thank heavens.
For those of you who may be dreaming of an exotic life of travel and adventure, here’s a little reality check. Written a few weeks before my recent trip to Slovenia, it chronicles some of the more maddening aspects of international living.
So they’ve imaged a black hole. It’s a staggering accomplishment, according to those who know.
I will now attempt to image for you the black hole that was my Saturday morning.
It started last week when I tried to pay for a few things in dirhams instead of dollars. Big things, like a course at the French Institute and a plane ticket to Venice.
You see, ex-pats in Morocco are limited in the amount of money they can send out of the country in any given year, and as I don’t want to exceed this limit before it’s time to send my last paycheque home, I am trying to make big purchases using the local currency instead of my Canadian credit card whenever possible.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
I tried to pay for two things online using my Moroccan bank card. It took multiple restarts, emails, and pleas for help, and in the end I did not succeed. All went well until the very last of many agonizing steps: I was supposed to receive a security code from the bank by SMS to complete my transaction, but the magic numbers never arrived. (Side note: This is not unusual. SMS confirmations from Uber, Airbnb, and various other enterprises have also been sucked into the black hole before they ever reach my Moroccan phone. This is why I keep using other people’s numbers to do things that should be easy).
In this way, several hours were lost to the void before the day even started. The only thing I could do, I was told, was go to the bank. Any branch. Just go. They would know what to do.
So that was the first thing on my list of things to do this Saturday morning. Then, I could come home, make my two online purchases, and my life would be complete.
BAHAHAHAHAHAH.
Common sense reeled me in. Exactly how likely is it that the bank would be able to instantly remedy this situation? If you’ve dealt with Moroccan banks, you already know the answer: highly unlikely. Therefore, it is always wise to have a back-up plan.
In a normal world, I would return from the bank, try to make the transactions, and then consider alternate courses of action if necessary. But in Morocco, one must be wily. One must think ahead. Way ahead. Kind of like this:
I can pay for the course and the plane ticket in dirhams if I go into the city and pay in person. If I drive to the French Institute at 9am, the traffic will still be bearable. I can then pay for my course, walk the 15 minutes to the Air Arabia office, buy my plane ticket, walk back to the French Institute, and drive home. It should only take a couple hours.
Upon minimal reflection, I decided to make Plan B my Plan A, and make the trip to the bank a side errand. In this way, I would be certain to make my purchases in one day, and getting the annoying SMS issue fixed would just be the icing on the cake.
Step 1: Drive to the French Institute. Check. It wasn’t even awful. Waze actually found me a tolerable route. There was parking. There was no line-up at the cashier. All went eerily well.
“Yes, of course! But the less you know, the better!” he replied.
I suppose there is some truth in that. It’s best not to think about all the things that could go wrong when you leap from an airplane with 4000 metres of nothingness between you and planet Earth.
Here are the things no one told me before I signed the 14 waivers required to make the jump:
There are just so very many of them.
Inner Places, outer Places, upper Places, lower Places. Even those of us who collect Places can never
hope to find them all.
You think you know a Place, until you see it from the sky. And then you think you know the sky, until
you’re falling through it. How the sky
feels in an airplane, in a free-fall, in the cushion of a parachute; how the
river feels beneath a bridge, beneath a raft, above your head; how a mountain
feels, within, without, above, below; there are oh so many Places. Did you know that every Place has a
verticality?
Here we are in the Ides of March, and it’s the Ides of Ex-pat Angst.
It’s the season where many among us who live abroad have decided to move on, but now find the abyss of the unknown gaping before us.
It was not an abyss six months ago, when horizons were broad and sunny, possibilities were endless, and we were itching for a change. Whether it’s our insatiable wanderlust, or the inescapable pull homeward to our roots, or (in most cases), a combination of the two, we are people on the move, and it’s time to go.
