Voyage, voyage...

Parisians are, famously and incontestably, snobs, and they will tell any adorer of the city of lights that the best part of living in Paris is leaving Paris.

  

If you are an expat, this becomes true after about a year and a half. Though am not convinced that this is any different from living anywhere else. We’re like toddlers testing the world. We wander away from Mommy only to run back to make sure she’s still there before heading further out. It is helpful, of course, when Mommy is somewhere close to other places we want to see.

view from Chrystal Palace Park, Porto, awesome napping spot

I have recently been bingeing on travel. Last week I went to Porto with friends, eleven of us wandering groggily through the sloping, cobblestone streets, eating grilled seafood and drinking vinho verde and Superbock (one of my favorite beer names ever). Created instant parties in empty dance clubs, ate at absurdly long tables, took group naps in parks and crowded photographs in front of supposedly famous buildings...

I had known absolutely nothing about Porto before going, and was surprised at how lovely it is. But even more interesting was the fact that we were there together, two couples and seven singles, before the advent of children and prohibitive financial responsibility, spending five full days of in-between in some random foreign city, together. A shared vacation in blissful limbo.

Pretty places are nice, but I have always been fascinated by those with visible layers of history. Russia, where I was about 6 years ago, is this way. Stalinist apartment buildings rising in front of Orthodox onion-dome churches with Cyrillic-lettered MacDonalds signs in between them. Crazy.

Berliners, lounging between flea market and amphitheater karaoke

Berlin, where I was two weeks before Porto, is the same. Not with the Cyrillic symbols of global capitalism, but with the history, and for some reason I didn’t expect it as much. We went to a flea market on former killing fields and a complex of bars and studios and clubs in what used to be an industrial park, just about everywhere we went seemed to be a converted something else. My friends live next to what up to two years ago was the Tegel airport, and I went jogging on the runways. The overgrown spaces between airplane-sized lanes are now marked off as bird sanctuaries, and people were rollerblading and kite-boarding and lounging and sitting around having tea in a makeshift furniture swap-meet.

There is a feeling in the air of Berlin that I hadn’t experienced before, not just because I went on the first hot weekend of the year in a country that gets COLD, and the entire city descended into the streets to party. I think that there is something to the idea that chaos leads to potential. Thirteen years since the Wall went down, and the graffiti has only gotten better.

It is tempting to make this post interminable with anecdotes from neat adventures. Drinking Guinness to a Celtic jam session with the presiding priest from St Patrick’s Cathedral, who rode to and from the Dublin pub on his bicycle. In Malta, being told during a tour of the capital city that they stopped building opera houses because they were just easy targets for bombings. Getting stuck in Naples on a quiet Christmas eve because the Italians can’t handle snow on their train tracks- the only time I saw the city not vibrating with vespas and language and gestures and clotheslines. I spent one New Year’s swimming in Hyde Park in London, cheered on by old ladies and chased by swans, and another stuffing twelve grapes in my mouth at midnight in Barcelona, laughing in four languages. Memories, doobedoobedoobedoo.

Gellert mineral baths, Budapest

Many of these ventures have been with people who were cruising through Europe, the nice part of the double-edged sword that is living in a desirable destination. I crashed part of Pete’s honeymoon a year or so ago, slept on the floor of the bridal suite and bonded with his wifey in the topless women’s area of the tiled mineral baths in Budapest. For Renzo’s thirtieth birthday, I was invited to the family village near Sorrento. We wandered through town with his brothers and people popped out of windows and doorways, storagerooms and alcoves, to say:  “You’re a Staiano? Ima Staiano! He’s a Staiano, She’s a Staiano.” It was like a Disney movie.

Amalfi Coast, Italy. Or theatrical backdrop. Not sure. 

For me, a lot of Europe seems like a Disney movie. It’s surprising how much things can live up to your expectations, but in a more surround-sound way. It’s A Small World in Virtual Reality. Fondue in Switzerland, herring in Sweden, waffles in Belgium, joints in the Netherlands, and metal bands in Latvia. Can a place be real if it is an exact manifestation of your expectations?

Maybe this is why I so like sticking around in one spot for so long. I feel pulled to the exciting new places, but it’s the living in them that is really interesting. The difference in mundanity. It’s exciting to be alien and yet entirely comfortable, where returning from a trip is still going somewhere kind of new. If the best thing about living in Paris is leaving Paris, the second best is quite possibly coming back.