Posts tagged "travel":
Fuck Eurail for real this time
Ok, so I have previously complained about Eurail. But it’s gotten worse: today I tried to take a train, and I discovered that the mobile pass had been removed from my device. Alright, that’s within their rights. But there doesn’t seem to be any reason that it should have been removed: I’m well within the expiration, and I haven’t used up my remaining travel days. It just…disappeared. For a bit of context, the pass is checked on the train by the conductor, who validates it by scanning a code with their machine. In short, my machine generates a number encoded in a black and white image, and their machine uses a camera to recover the number and validate the pass. The code is generated for each trip: I have to say “yes, I’m taking this particular train,” (not literally outloud, but it’s not as exciting to talk about swiping and tapping on a touch screen), and the machine generates a code valid for that particular trip.
(...)Eurail is frustrating
Never buy a fucking Eurail pass—you have to reserve seats in advance, which is fine, I guess. But the actual process that they propose by which you are expected to reserve seats doesn’t fucking work. The website (which is the only means by which you can reserve the seats in advance) doesn’t show the tickets and arbitrarily prohibits you from booking certain ones that it does show. And you have to book several hours, preferably days, in advance. So although you can, in principle, book in the station, it isn’t generally possible to do it the day of the travel itself. There is, indeed, a second website that allows booking seats on trains, but it will not accept electronic passes: even though the passes are in theory equivalent, the electronic pass lacks a certain code number that appears on the paper pass, and this website explicitly demands this code number, which it explicitly admits only appears on the paper pass. This, despite the fact that you are meant to book the tickets on-line, which is to say, using an electronic device. Honestly the whole thing is an enormous pain in the ass from this perspective: in short, it really isn’t an option, practically, to make long-distance or high-speed trains using the Eurail pass. I’m going to have a fucking aneurysm: is this the “don’t panic” shit? It’s literally an enormous scam. What am I supposed to do? I suppose I’m meant to have planned better in advance—fuck that noise. If the website weren’t literally fucking broken and the second site (why are there two!?) didn’t only accept paper passes (which take months to arrive in the mail), I wouldn’t have this problem. I guess that the alternative is to schlep out to the train station in Lyon today and beg them for a reservation—though I suppose further that the tickets are almost certainly sold out on the twenty TGVs a day that run Paris–Lyon. Honestly, it’s not fucking worth it: I’ll almost certainly have to buy a full-price ticket anyway, which entirely defeats the purpose of the fucking rail pass that I bought so that I didn’t have to buy full-price tickets.
(...)Not all those who wander are lost
Staying in a hostel is like being at summer camp. I am at a hostel in Lyon, in a room of six beds. One of the roommates is almost always in the room. Now, at 5 in the afternoon, he is taking a nap in his clothes with socks on. I can see the imprint the soles of his feet made walking on the bottom of his socks, and I can smell them. The guy who made me lunch today confessed that, when travelling, he doesn’t change his underwear every day. The staff at the hostel are having their own great time: they hang out here because it’s where their friends and family are. There’s a bar, a patio, a kitchen, music, drinks, fun. The place is called Flâneur, which might mean “wanderer,” from the verb flâner, meaning “stroll aimlessly and without haste.” It’s difficult to give a precise translation, but Baudelaire summed it up well in his essay on Le peintre de la vie moderne:
(...)Off to see the sisters
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the creacked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
(...)I ramble as I ramble out under the sky
I’m on the train again, so I have the time and space to write; I’m headed from Milan to Verona, where I will meet my father and step-mother and half-sisters who’ll come down from Switzerland. I haven’t seen any of them in two, three years. I’ve lost count of how long it’s been exactly—I don’t remember when the last time I saw them was, but I remember, when I was leaving, the girls saying, “don’t be gone so long next time!”. Of course, I was gone much longer the next time: part of it was due to COVID, but it’s not as though they didn’t travel during that time; part of it was because I’ve never once been either invited to stay at theirs, and only very rarely am I permitted to see them when I ask. I suppose we’ve all been busy, or I’m a bad influence. I don’t know that there’s anything I can do about my mother’s behavior in the divorce, but my father had started his relations with his now-wife before he and my mother seperated; my father met my step-mother through work, and their relationship was technically a conflict of interest; my mother used this fact to her advantage in negotiating the divorce settlement; I’m astonished that my father and step-mother are still married, but not that my step-mother holds some bitterness towards my mother. I only wish that it were bitterness for true things and not for fantasies.
(...)Bugging in, bugging out, and going shopping
Today I left Genoa and came back to Milan. I’ve been here before: it was the first place I came in Italy when I got here for the first time last fall. When I was here last, I spoke not a single word of Italian. I sat in a café in the city and saw two German girls (my age) studying Italian—I was inspired to begin by them. As I have mentioned before, my initial plan was to learn German: I know that in the work I’d like to do, it will behoove me to read German texts in the original language; perhaps this is a hold-over from my theological training, but I couldn’t do, for example, Marxological work without reading the original text; a translation just won’t cut it.
(...)Summertime in Genoa
So I’m back in Italy: Don’s service was last Wednesday, and by Friday everyone but me had left Charlotte. I flew out on Saturday, because I was fighting with the Chase Travel Center to reschedule my ticket; I spent most of the time on hold, not because I was waiting for someone to help me, but because the people who were helping me needed to get approval for telling me whether I was allowed to get a travel voucher and how much the value of said voucher would be. From the ammount of time it took to divide $1500 by 2, it seemed as though she had to go JP Morgan himself to get permission. I imagine, though, that they don’t trust the call center operators to do math, lest they give some wrong information and anger somebody. It was all extraordinarily tedious, and I ended up just buying another round trip—my plan is still to get the voucher refund, which I have to do before June 1st or so.
(...)Ahhhh...
I have arrived in Tropea, officially the most beautiful town in Italy. If you’re asking me, and you’re reading my blog so I suppose you are, that puts it solidly in the running for the one of the most beautiful towns in the world. It’s an ancient resort town perched on a rock above the Mediterranean; we’re on the north coast of Calbria, which non-Italians would know as “the toe of the boot”.
(...)Don't Panic
I may have mentioned that Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite series of books. I’ve made reference to it before in this blog, though I may not have talked about my love for it explicitly. For those of you who don’t know, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the best guide book for those seeking to travel through the universe on less than 30 Altarrian Dollars a day, seeing all there is to see and avoiding all there is to avoid. Its field researchers are the most intrepid, persevering, and downright fun-to-be-around folks you’re going to find; they can be trusted to tell you what you need to know. On the front of the Guide, which is distributed electronically in a package much like a mobile phone but with a nifty sliding cover, are stamped the simple words “don’t panic.” Good advice, hard to follow.
(...)Floating away (doo doo doo, doo doo)
I kind of suck at planning my travels: I leave it past the last minute. For example: tonight is the last night I have booked at the hostel I’m staying at in Sorrento; I should be planning my next move, or at least figuring out where I’ll go tomorrow. But I’m much too happy just sitting outside at a table at a bar, writing and playing solitaire. I have my bitter rosso and my olives; I got a terrific set of playing cards from the tabbachi and it’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue, and there’s a soft breeze blowing in off the bay. The trees are regaining their green regalia, but the heat of summer hasn’t set in yet. The Italians are never in a rush for anything—“don’t panic.”
(...)A hoopy frood who knows where his towel is
Surprise, bitches—this is still a travel blog! So I fucked up: I’m flying by the seat of my pants, and that usually works out fine. Call it privilege. But tonight it wore out: everyone and their mother and law is staying in Rome this weekend, unsurprisingly: it’s spring (Easter) break, after all. And I missed the via crucis on Friday, so I’m clearly so invested in the Roman-ness of the holiday. But I’ve fallen in love with Rome, and I’d like to stay a few nights more. Now, why I waited until today to book a room for tonight, I don’t know: I knew that I should be booking, looking, whatever. But I didn’t: I had some SICP exercises to do, and some realy good books to read. And god, the food.
(...)On the move again
I got back to Italy today. Boy, you might have thought this wasn’t a travel blog, but guess what? It is! I landed in Rome’s airport this morning after a restful several weeks at my cousin’s house in DC. This is the cousin who’s taking care of Xerxes; it was as good to see her and her family as it was to be reunited with Mr. Peepers.
(...)Time with friends
So I ran away. Not quite, but I had to get out of my mom and step-dad’s house. I wrote out a few of my thoughts about that, but it’s too depressing and intimate for this blog. But basically, it had soured, so I came out to Washington DC to stay with some family.
(...)I'm new around here
Surely by now I’ve lost all (three) of my readers due to my inactivity. But what can I say?—I’ve been busy. In the last few weeks I’ve gotten to know Bologna much better. At first, I could only navigate by checking a map or by tracing the paths that I knew worked. If I, say, had to get from my apartment to the Piazza Santo Stefano, I would follow Via Castiglione all the way in to Le Due Torri, then turn and walk from Le Torri to the Piazza. To those who know Bologna, this is a hopeless roundabout path that requires doubling back on oneself, but it was the only way I knew how to get from point A to point B; or rather, I knew how to get from A to B and from B to C, so to get from A to C, I would have to go via B, no matter how out of the way it was. The other day I learned a far more direct way to get from my apartment to Santo Stefano, a path so obvious that I can’t believe how far out of my way I would go. But my sense of where Santo Stefano is was so intimately linked to the path I took to get there, so I didn’t even notice that I was doubling back as I walked.
(...)Hello, is it me you're looking for?
They say, “I went on a trip to find myself.”
(...)Stuff to carry
Sorry for the long hiatus in posts. As far as I know, Cíara is the only person still reading this blog, so it’s not as though I have a large audience to disappoint.
(...)In the Rhineland
I have to learn German. And Italian, and Spanish. Trust me, there is nothing more frustrating than being in a country and not speaking the language. If everyone spoke Esperanto, it wouldn’t be so terrible, but English is so damn difficult that, very often, it is almost impossible to communicate.
(...)The city of canals
So, I’m still in Amsterdam. It’s a really fun city, and my trip is fully underway. Yesterday, I went to lunch and spent the afternoon with some US-people (America is a continent, so “Americans” means “people from the continents of America”—what do you call people from the US?): we got omelets in De Pijp, a hip neighborhood in Amsterdam near the museum district. It was nice to get out of De Wallen, where the hostel is: it’s an intensely-touristed part of the city, but nice enough. We sat in a Sarphatipark, which is beautiful; all the Dutch cities I’ve visited so far are well greened: trees line the canals, and green spaces abound. The US nationals I was with (Frank Lloyd Wright (a famous US architect of the first part of the 20th century) designed a series of houses he called “Usonian”, because “American” didn’t mean the right thing), being from the US, immediately made friends with the US citizens (the Esperanto word is “Usono” for the country, “Usonano” for a person from the US) sitting next to us (parentheses are a power that is easily abused).
(...)In Amsterdam
Where did I leave off? First, sorry for the incredibly inconsistent upload schedule (as though there’s anybody reading this): travelling is incredibly messy, especially the way I do it. But here I am in Amsterdam.
(...)Music without speakers: in the SpeelKlok Museum
When I arrived in Utrecht, it was raining. I sought shelter in the Speelklok museum, the city’s museum of automatic, mechanical instruments. Their collection ranges from clocks that play songs on the hour, through self-playing pianos for the living rooms, to the incredble orchestrion, which plays violins and piano accompaniment. The collection is crowned by a number of enormous automatic organs from dance-halls and carnivals.
(...)Vojaĝoj en Esperantujo (journeys in Esperantoland)
Today, I leave my hosts in Maastricht and head to Utrecht. There, I am staying on the couch of an Esperanto speaker I found on Pasporta Servo. For those of you not in the know, Esperanto is an constructed (invented, artificial) language from the late 19th century that is meant to be a neutral international common language. In practice, English serves this role in the EU now; the advantage of Eperanto is that it is not anybody’s native language, so everyone is on equal footing, and it is significantly easier to learn than any natural language (no irregularities, but lots of idiosyncrasies). I wouldn’t say that it is easier to master than any other language, but it is very easy to reach basic proficiency. Because the grammar is simple and regular, learning the language is pretty much all about vocabulary. The genius (and the creator, Zamenhof, figured this out by trial and error) is that words are derived from one another according to their meaning. For example, “bona” means “good” and “malbona” means “bad”.
(...)Down to the Low Countries
Last night in Paris was an adventure: the hostel, it turns out, was next door to a bar that the students of Belleville frequented. The place was hopping, and the music was good.
(...)Through the tunnel
Today I’m leaving London for the continent of Europe (this has become a de facto travel blog, hasn’t it?). After extensive negotiations with the Eurostar people, I managed to get a train to Paris, where I will stay overnight. It turns out that one must book and pay for a seat on the Eurostar train under the channel to France, even with a Eurail/Interail pass. Still, the pass earns a massive discount (about 85%), so it’s very much worth it. The problem is that there are only a limited number of seats available for Eurail travelers, and that it is often necessary to book far in advance. I, of course, had no idea. I couldn’t get a discounted ticket to Brussels or Amsterdam for another two days, but I can get on a train to Paris tonight. So I’m off to Paris. It’ll be nice to be there for a bit, even if it was an accident.
(...)When in London...
I dropped Xerxes off at the airport today. I took the tube from my friend’s house where I am staying out to Heathrow, about a two hour journey in total. Xerxes was a very good sport about it: I think that he’s almost used to going out and about in the carrier, or at least, isn’t so afraid of it. He complained a little when I put him in the carrier at home (his little arms could reach out of the carrier through the grate and wave around, which is why I couldn’t use this very carrier to ship him); once we were on the move, though, he calmed down.
(...)On the move
My cat Xerxes and I left the town I went to college in today. We’re taking a train down to the big city; tomorrow I’ll put him on an airplane back to the US, and the next day I’ll take a train to the Netherlands. I am very grateful to my cousin because she aagreed at the last minute to take care of Xerxes for some time while I travel around. It’s good to have family who’ll look out for you.
(...)Downloads and bookstores
I about half way through Anna Karenina. When I finish, I will make a post of quotes excerpted from the book. This post is a follow-up to that post, even though this post comes first chronologically.
(...)