Place

Each tap on the canvas above is uneven. Some are loud and heavy, hammering oh-so-slowly, oh-so-steadily from bowed branches. Others are tiny pitter-patters that fill the silence between bigger drops, falling from the skies beside the trees – every knock a reminder of just how dry the blankets are inside. Inside, away from the rain and the mist and the wet of the ocean, the tent is warm. Beaten cloth circulates breath and body heat like a thermos, until even the tip of my naked nose is comfortable. The damp is meaningless.

Mulch brown walls muffle the light, filtering what’s left of the sunshine until all there is to see are outlines of arms and legs and sweaters rolled into corners, collecting the runoff of human humidity and effectively ruining the possibility of staying warm once breakfast rolls around – though the uniform grey makes time impossible to tell and the down blankets render it irrelevant. The foot of heavy of heavy air settled on our faces leaves space to cushion each pointed drop and every half beat of rain, keeps us from unzipping the flap door and leaving our canvas cocoon. So the morning is forgotten.

This Side of West

So, a while back I was called in by the up-and-coming ambitious names of the writing future to help out and write a few random things for their literary journal, This Side of West. Yeah, me in a journal. Who'd a thunk? Nevertheless, I raked something marginally respectable together for them to publish. The book is now available for the low, low price of $12.95 (I think?) or - if you use my guest bathroom - you can read my copy for free on the can.

*****

I’ve always liked to imagine that I’m worldly. It makes me feel good, you know? Sitting around my buddy’s ash covered table, twirling a peeled beer bottle, I’ll whip out references to my foreign friends like they’re some kind of celebrity.

“Oh, you know my friend Eduarrrdo,” I’ll say, rolling the “r” to accentuate his exoticness, “was just telling me he might meet me in Prague.” Propping my feet on the adjacent plastic chair, I’ll switch the topic, asking someone about their friend from work because, you know, I wouldn’t want to rub in just how traveled I am. Not outright, anyway.

It takes that special sort of occasion to let myself indulge in full-on, egocentric story telling. I’ll slur my way through a recounting of that one time, in Schwitscherland, when I smoked pot on the train and went to see bears in a pit. And the crowds will ooh and they’ll ahh and they’ll proclaim a new round of Beer Pong in my honour, and I’ll feel awesome.

Then, someone will lean on my shoulder, spilling cheap rum down my cleavage, and suggest I write a story about it.

“Oh, well, the, ah, keyboard could never do such a story, um, justice,” I’ll say, waving down their protests and insisting that my travels are almost too epic to be written down. Then, I’ll retreat behind the plastic cup-covered table, and turn my attention to the crooked projectiles of a friend’s ping-pong ball and away from my ineptitudes as a writer. At home later, I’ll look wistfully at my laptop, before I stumble and decide it’s time to sprawl on top of my covers.

When morning and the hangover comes, I will be no more able to type the story than the night before, regardless of how much more accurately I’d hit the keys. Really, all I’d done was get high and look at bears. Of course they were Swiss bears and it was European pot, but that’s nothing more to write about. Anyone six shots deep would have thought I’d been to the moon, seen a dragon – without a helmet – and lived to tell the tale.

So I leave my laptop out of it, forget that I fail to find inspiration in the setting sun of Schwitscherland, and pick up another Canadian.

“Did I ever tell you that Froweeen wants to visit when I’m in Egypt?”

Egyptian Royalty

“Hey Lady! Yeah, where you from? England, Habibti? America?”

In a street the size of my apartment hallway, surrounded by tables of glass hookahs and plastic pyramids, I stand out.

“Lady, very beautiful, very beautiful! Come here, Habibti!”

A heavyset man sweating in the evening heat calls to me from his seat, gesturing at the door of the jewellery shop beside him, his legs tucked away from the tourists filing through the city bazaar. The next vendor jumps into the path my mother and I are exploring, getting close enough to put a hand on my back and for me to smell the day’s work on his skin. Not that the air doesn’t already reek of flavoured smoke and familiar men in close quarters.

“Look, Habibti, I have special price for you, you so beautiful. Where you from? I have special price, look.”

I smile appreciatively, but don’t stop to browse; neither Mom nor I have any need for highlighter yellow t-shirts. I am not the only white woman on vacation, nor am I the only one to warrant a Habibti, or “my darling”, as I wander with my mother, fingering the scarves and nosing the spices. But I am one of the few under fifty, and the only one to stand six feet tall; next to my five-foot-two-and-a-quarter, 51-year-old mother, I might as well be covered in gold.

Walking anywhere through sandy Cairo has earned me a slew of stares, calls and questions. After all, my stature means that I stand a head above most of the men in the Egyptian capital and that there is just that much more ankle to stare at under my long skirts. In the mosques, I’m given gowns for decency (though they hardly covered more than my own clothes did); in the streets, school girls come to touch my hair and tell me their names; in the restaurants, my mother is offered camels for my hand - and with her years of market bartering, she could easily make a fortune. More than a handful of strange locals pull me into embraces only to take out cell phones for pictures and gather around to discuss my dimples in bubbling Arabic as Mom watches, smiling slightly and bobbing her head to the local music. The Egyptian attention has made me into royalty.

Arm in arm with my mother, I pull her away from a tobacco shop and it’s greasy, bearded vendor and towards one of the silver-packed windows that line the alleyway. I direct her around a puddle caught in the bricks and we stop in front of a dusty ledge to check out the jewellery.

“Oh, that one looks nice, honey,” she says, patting my hand fondly and nodding at a simple, hoop necklace.

“Hey! Look at you, beautiful! Habibti, come here so I can see you.”

I tug on Mom’s arm again, towards the woven straw sacks a few stalls down and farther from the tobacco vendor. Between the layers of hanging linen and above the humid smoke, the smell of a hundred spices rise like a wall from the sacks. I pause just outside to let Mom don her reading glasses and examine the labels.

“Oh, wow, Habibti, wow. Come to talk to me, Habibti. Where you from?”

She is squinting at a bag of saffron; I ignore the tobacco vendor.

“Oh, the things I can do to your body, Habibti.”

Mom snaps.

“Excu-use me?” She turns face-to-sweaty-chest with the bearded man; glasses perched on her nose, saffron clenched in her fist. “Who do you think you are?” She put a finger up to his face and he sputters. “How dare you talk like that to my daughter?” Every word becomes slower, clearer; she perfected the art of the oral-lashing years ago. “How dare you be so rude? And in front of her mother.”

Staring at my little, bespectacled mother, he backs up. The other salesmen stop pressing in on us and Mom takes full advantage of her stage.

“How dare you say things like that. Did your own mother not raise you right? Who do you think you are?”

The tobacco vendor’s beard waggles and accented apologies begin to tumble out; he means no disrespect, his mother would never have raised him like that, he is very, very sorry. At this point, Mom decides she’s had enough, puts her arm back through mine, and marches towards the crowded exit of the bazaar.

“Wait, Madame, wait! I know people, I will get you good prices! Respect, Madame, respect!” He follows us past the silver stores, around circles of men sipping tea and puffing smoke rings, and under banners of pashmina scarves.

“Madame, please! I want to give you good price. Take my business card.”

Mom pauses, and he shoves an apologetic hand towards her, waving his little card in the air. I stand behind her, watching as he begs her wide-eyed to accept his small paper offering of penitence. She huffs - too good for anything less than gold - turning once again to walk out as I tail her, all eyes on my mother.

“I‘m sorry Madame! Have a good evening, Madame!”

I was really just a lady to the queen.

Stations

Arrivals

Two visible clocks? Check. Grease stained, gum smeared cement floors? Check. Well used vending machine? Check. And – oh, look! – the couple making out. They’re my favourite part. Awkward, I know, but watching kids lock braces somehow beats staring at train station floors for three hours. After all, I’d already named every trampled, grey piece of gum I’d seen and pushed a mountain range of cigarette butts together with my feet (being sure to avoid Lucy, Rex, Godzilla and friends); there was nothing more novel to find here than at any other station.

I was mid-adventure and ready to move on. I’d been waiting on my connection from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof to my grandmother in Prague since noon and the end of platform 12 had not gotten any more exciting as the sun had come down. I expected the long wait but, this being the sixth time in two weeks that I’d had to sprawl over my luggage for a seat, I’d gotten somewhat bored of naming gum and memorizing train schedules. Though, on the bright side, this station’s schedules were yellow and blue, just like the ones in Switzerland.

**************

I was fifteen when I first remember experiencing a real train station; not the day to day, inner-city, light-rail transit BS I’d grown up with, but one that connected not only cities, but entire countries. My new host mother and I were lugging everything I owned and a pair of skis through the tunnels beneath Zurich airport, dodging people until we found our platform. I hadn’t thought that the first thing I’d be doing off the plane was finding my way to a train, nor had I ever imagined a train station could be so… station like. Ducking our way through crowds determined to get somewhere, all I managed were glances from the back of my host mother’s head to the rows of business yellow schedules and billboards along the halls. The platforms were endless, everything was Swiss standard clean, and I had a million questions to ask the woman I hardly knew in front of me. What on earth was a “Gleis?” Wasn’t I here to learn French? How long was the train ride? Where were we going to be living? Like hell I could have even asked; instead, I swung my 45 pound suitcase into the carriage after her and informed her that, “Le train, c’est grand.”

**************

Stepping off the train and into the dry, orange heat of Barcelona’s Estación de Tren years later, I walked into my next adventure. Here, I was alone and eager to test the limits of my Spanish vocabulary. Voices echoed from floor to three story ceiling, chattering at me in bits and pieces as I made my way down the long platform, clutching my purse to my chest and staring at the dark women around me. God, I hoped I was well enough dressed. Jesus, what if the job was a scam and that 6 hour train ride a waste? Not like wasting any more time to panic in front of a cracked girls’ room mirror would do me any good at this point, anyway. I paused in the main hall to reorganize my bags, took a deep breath, and continued through the evening crowds, past a graffitied vending machine, until I found the Salido and street beyond.

Connections

One of the first times I ever got right hammered, I ended my glorious evening hugging the rim of a public toilet as a friend shoved french-fries down my throat. We were killing another Friday night and all thirteen of us had congregated to hang out in the middle of the local train station, sitting on the wooden benches in front of the McDonald’s and doing what teenaged exchange students do best. We were spilling cheap vodka by 9 and drunk by 9:30. Our group got rambunctious, throwing made-up French and bad grammar at each other until we echoed between the tire-sized clock and the arrivals board at the end of the fluorescent hall. This being Switzerland though, nobody said a damned thing until I ran to the garbage can, sticking my head sideways through the open slots, and tried to vomit inside unsuccessfully.

**************

I’d been fanning myself with a folded piece of my itinerary for the last twenty minutes, staring out the window to watch an older madame leaning on the sandy brick ledge and dragging at her smoke. Why had they even bothered with the “No Smoking” sign? By the time I got off the train, not a single one of the dozen smoking passengers prowling the platform could care less about the palm-sized sign, nor the announcement reminding them that smoking in train stations was no longer legal in France. I had abandoned my bags on the train and, wiping at the sweat sitting beneath my hairline, decided to abandon the heat too. Glass doors parted as I entered the air conditioned building, revealing a giant board of arrivals and departures with more empty slots than there were platforms outside. Apparently there had been an “accident of persons” ahead of us that needed to be scraped off the tracks and we all would be waiting for hours thanks to the inconsiderate asshole. I had people to meet and places to discover – just not very quickly. So I wandered into the dusty streets of town but, seeing nothing save a few sandy, crooked buildings and a bank machine, I went back to my platform. Leaning into a corner shaded from the midday sun, I lit a smoke to kill time.

**************

We were supposed to be traveling from the pyramids in Cairo to the temples in Luxor and the train was late. The air smelled like garbage. The people were too pushy. And what did he mean there were no bathrooms? I had come with a tour group and was doing everything I could to make it look as though I hadn’t. I had dragged my bags across the stained floors to the far wall of the crowded platform and sat on top of them, arranging my purse underneath me and my sweater across every open piece of skin I had to avoid foreign scrutiny. Even from here, my shorts-clad group was just as conspicuous against the robes and full suits of the local Muslims as a herd of cattle in a grocery store. I sighed, leaning back against the cement to watch the group buddy up with our tour guide. It was the only way I was going to see Egypt, so be damned if I had to be seen in public places moo-ing sweetly at whatever was put in front of me. I just hoped that no one would start vocally craving McDonald’s in the middle of the local station crowd before we managed to get onto the train and out of sight. I glanced at my watch again and turned to the nearest billboard, decidedly examining Arabic advertising.

Departures

She wasn’t quite sure I would make the train on time; even once we were there thirty five minutes early, coffee in hand, and seated on the very platform I was to depart from. There were maybe two other people, a Czech guard and an accepted silence hanging on the open-air cement. Save, of course, my grandmother’s hopes that I work hard in school, wishes that my brothers and parents were doing well, and occasional speculations as to whether the train was even coming that morning. Though that was quickly answered as a shaking carriage pulled up in front of the wooden bench my grandma and I had gotten comfortable on. We’d been up late last night, drinking that last bottle of wine and wondering where we might like to go next, if either of us made it there. Her soft arm in mine, I walked her to my door and once she’d confirmed my cabin with the guard and watched me put away my luggage, I stepped down from the carriage to say goodbye to her and Prague for what I hoped would not be the last time. Cheeks red with her lipstick, I left to sit at the next window from the door, and waved until I couldn’t see her standing on the concrete ledge anymore.

**************

He tottered towards us down the platform, hollering back to his friends before stopping to lean on the bright red vending machine beside us and ask us where we were from. A bottle popped out of his bag, open and far from full. I looked him over and raised an eyebrow; he was way too fucking scrawny to be able to drink that much. He had appeared just as me and my girlfriends were getting off the train, on our way to raise hell and lower expectations, and admitted he’d overheard our English on the train in to town. Then I told him I was Canadian and he got excited, smashing a hand against the plastic window of the machine with a “noo way.” He was too and he was determined to show a fellow countryman a good time, so we exchanged numbers in the glowing, late night lights of the station hall before heading our separate ways.

He stayed with his family in Switzerland after I went back to mine; graduating high school, working his way through law school, and perfecting the art of lighting a joint with a full glass in hand. A few scattered reunions later, we stood lounging against the grey railings of a different station, my bags between us, as we worked out just where and when we would meet next. It would have to be somewhere, sometime, for some sort of awesome adventure; who gave a shit about the specifics. The train rolled in, cutting us off from a billboard of Venice we’d just been contemplating, and he heaved my bags to me once I’d gotten inside. Dangling out of the train door into the morning air, I gave him a peck as he stood in front of a blue and yellow schedule to thank him for his hospitality, only to be yelled at.

“No, no! We’ve got to do this properly!” he said, kissing my right, left, and then right cheek again before jumping back onto the smudged concrete. I stood with my face pressed between blurred handprints as the train pulled out and mouthed another à bientôt !

Spoken Sex

Earlier that evening I’d thought that straddling him would somehow quash his desire to speak with me in broken Spanish. But no, the fact that his English was better and my German outweighed both made no difference to him; by the time we got to my apartment he’d convinced himself that the best method of communication would be the language he was worst at. So he continued by yelling “si, guapa, si!” thinking that I’d either be unable to hear his thick accent or that I’d admire his drunken efforts to practice Spanish with an English speaker.

I let him get away with a couple kisses the next time I ran into him, but spent the better part of the evening introducing him as my perrito tonto (or stupid puppy) while he grinned and nodded, proving my point. I hadn’t even thought about his intellect or linguistic skills the first time around. He could have spoken Mandarin for all it mattered, and I still would have taken the idiot home. There had been something about the way he’d swaggered, the way he’d grabbed my waist that had me wanting to humour his Spanish all night long – at least, until I got bored of it. It’s not like it made a difference what language he had chosen to digress my love of mushrooms in, anyway.

Having spent most of my adult life hitting on English speakers, I never fully realized just how easy it is to get the message across; though, it’s not like a “come-hither” look can really get lost in translation. One evening I didn’t even speak to the guy until we’d stepped outside together after more than a few sideways glances and an over-the-crowd cheers.
“You don’t speak English. Español? Aucun français? Aber Deutsch?” Ja doch, but he knew just enough to get me bee-lining it past the last couple bars in the opposite direction.

A Moroccan boxer eventually talked me home, making me dry off after a shower before he threw me into bed and checking Africa off my To-Do list of continents. A couple weeks later, while I lay on his covers, drunk and pointing out that my Spanish was probably better than his, he grinned and told me he didn’t speak any anyways. Then, of course, he proceeded to admit that his favourite part of sleeping with me was the way I’d mumble in English, imitating what I presume was supposed to be my very own “Oh God.” And there I was thinking it was my dashing good looks that had gotten me laid.

I could have been saying “green country cheese!” for all it mattered; I was female, naked and lying in his bed. Not that sex was ever a conversation-based past-time anyhow; why should I care if I can’t discuss the possibility of the ice caps melting while humping in the back seat of a car? After all, it’s almost sexier when the only thing you understand is what you’re both after.

Travelling Tips

Departure: Row 24 Seat D – Even though the people crawling outside look cold, it is pertinent to refrain yourself from suggesting that the flight attendant let them in and to remember that not everyone is taking the same sort of trip you are.

Stop 1: Calgary – Once the ugly lights come on, the loud banging noises you hear are no longer music and it is no longer an appropriate time to dance on the speakers.

Stop 2: Mississauga – Agreeing to see your 60 year-old aunt’s new dance moves means that you will actually be subjected to impromptu dance lessons and to reassurances that you’re a “natural” even if you’ve already stepped on her feet twice and only ever get the first step of the Cha-Cha right.

Stop 3: Amsterdam – Spending most of the day smoking up to recover from a hangover is in no way advantageous when a tour bus full of Slavs thinks it would be funny to take impromptu pictures with you at the ferry docks.

Stop 4: Prague – Spending $30 on beer is equivalent to paying to wander the streets alone and lost at about 4.30 in the morning on the way home from the pub two doors down. And then having to call your grandma to let you in when you realize you’re not physically capable of fitting a key in the lock.

Stop 5: Vienna – Being able to say “I can speak [language]” does not actually mean you will understand a word of it when someone questions you, gives you directions or asks how you’re doing in four different ones within ten minutes.

Stop 6: Neuchâtel – Fireman carrying the biggest guy you can find around the club does not, contrary popular belief, completely eliminate your chances of getting laid.

Stop 7: Lausanne – Teenaged exchange students still find incredibly creative ways to drink themselves into a stupor, and even more creative ways to stash it.

Stop 8: Montpellier – People inconsiderate enough to commit suicide on train tracks cause not only massive complications for railway customer service representatives, but massive – occasionally overnight – delays for anyone traveling those tracks.

Untamed Directions

The other day I discovered that my hair first thing in the morning vaguely reminds my roommate of how complicated travel plans can become. The mirror before my morning coffee regularly reflects a mess of different choices and different directions I could take. Would it be best to head east, like the strand at the very back of my scalp? Or perhaps a trip, imitating the curl above my left ear, to Costa Rica and back would be the best way to go? In the end, most people would just sigh, wash out the tangles and do their hair exactly as they would any other morning. I, on the other hand, am left to struggle with the sort hereditarily stubborn hair that refuses to settle into any sort of decent direction and accept that I simply have to go with it; I simply have to take the course plotted by the rooster’s crest I awake to.

My compulsion to get up and leave has proven itself to be, like my hair, something I find uniquely difficult to tame. The very idea that I am stuck in one town for the next three years to do something as inconsequential as “graduate” strikes me as the sort of tragedy books are written on; or rather aren’t, considering the lack of inspirational new terrains or languages left to conquer in Victoria. Instead, I’ve taken it upon myself to scrape my already liver-drained bank account empty and go anywhere at any time the student life will let me.

The itch to follow the kinks in my early morning tresses began to really bite early last year and I started soliciting friends to follow me to Mexico; mundane and touristy but something I had yet to get a taste of (besides, who wouldn’t love to spend a solid week tequila soaked on a beach?). And did I ever fucking solicit; you could have probably seen the knee high boots and neon belly tops on Google Earth. Of course, I got plenty of offers; a little nudge from one friend proclaiming how much they’ve always wanted to visit Mexico, another saying they’d long dreamed of spending spring break on a beach and yet one more who nearly drooled as much as I did at the idea of unlimited drinks. But, somehow, whenever it came time for me to walk into the travel agency’s office and take a stab at my credit, the friend mysteriously came down with an inability to pull their shit together.

So I sat myself in front of a pitcher. Hey, if I couldn’t drown myself in tequila for spring break, I planned on spending plenty of time with the Canadian alternative. Dejectedly sprawled in a booth at my local pub and drawing borders in the foam at the bottom of my pint, it came to me that this was not the first time I had been forced to curb my wanderlust after a partner in crime had come to their senses. Other people had incomes they couldn’t put on hold, a second half they couldn’t peel from their hips, or, you know, shit to get done.

And yet none of this seems to have even the slightest effect on how I wake up every day. I still can’t get that cowlick to sit smoothly on my neck, deny myself an opportunity to be anywhere unfamiliar, or come close to comprehending why so many people can’t push themselves outside of their home circle. Why bother with all the wistful sighs and talk of packing up your suitcase if you can’t even bring yourself to get a passport? Then again, that leaves the untold stories, untamed hair and uncharted men for me.

Cattles and Wives

Over the course of a trip to Kenya, it came about that I wasn’t only there to crisp my pallid complexion or ooh and ah appreciatively over animals whose names and forms I wasn’t familiar with. It turned out that all along I had been wearing a For Sale sign.

Being female, nubile and whiter than I would like to admit became my own personal advertisement that simply begged the locals to make extravagant offers to the family patriarch. Our first day in the country decidedly lay out the course of the next few weeks for me; one bold shopkeep took it upon himself to bid the entirety of the Masai Mara, animals included. Thankfully, despite his affinity for the bush and the potential for a prime piece of property, my dad declined.

Several days afterwards, a discussion with two younger Masai warriors brought about the question of the going rate for your average wife and I discovered that not only is the concept of a “free” wife baffling to them, but that a man would need to be at least ten cattle rich to even think of asking a girl from her father’s care (further confirmation that I am worth a hell of a lot more than one steak dinner). The conversation finally ended with a declarative offering of fifty cattle for my hand in marriage, much to the delight of my younger, growing and protein voracious brother. Needless to say, my dad spent most of the vacation giggling.

Eventually, Dad even took it upon himself to offer me to the locals we happened to engage in conversation. A particular group of the Masai tribe acting public relations several kilometres and tens of species later ended up, much to their misfortune, conversing with my rather spirited family. After a thorough discussion of Dad’s appreciation of the local birdlife, he began animated, and Tusker beer enthusiastic, gesticulation in my direction while seeking out a proposal in exchange for my hand in marraige. Unfortunately for my pride, partway through some light-hearted negotiations, my mother let slip that I was incapable of cattle milking. My brideprice instantly dropped to the entirety of one chicken. Brilliant.

To this day, my parents claim that our tour through Kenya was not intended as one to settle me with a paying husband; all proposals were, apparently, spontaneous. Whether or not I can believe my parent’s denial that this was premeditated is still up for debate, however. They must be holding out for a better deal with an oil-rich Arab; why else would they have put up with my shit for this long?