Oslo! Bergen! And a little more about the fjords.

Ibsen kind of hated Norway, and Norwegians were thoroughly not crazy about him in his day, which is why it's funny to see statues of him all over Oslo and Bergen (the latter of which has an exhibit on his time in the city that defensively states "We think Ibsen quite enjoyed his time in Bergen!"). But he was fascinated by his home country, returning to it again and again - writing Peer Gynt in Italy, for instance, Ibsen worked through his frustrations with his home country through the use of mythology, fantasy, satire and the grand scale of an epic journey. (The play is also readable through any number of philosophical lenses but we aren't talking about that now.)

After the jump, videos, photo, ramblings, as per always.

Oslo City Hall is incredible. Started construction before WWII, finished in the mid-50s, with many elements altered in the wake of the war, the place is an allegory-packed series of murals, rooms designed with entirely home-sourced materials, and the cumulative effect is an architectural meditation on liberty, human rights, and Norway's place in the world. IT'S NEAT.

Oslo!

I hope I don't fall into the trap of "I visited Norway and now I understand Ibsen," because: hahahaha NOPE. But what I will say is that spending some time in modern Oslo and Bergen, with a fjord visit between the two, was illuminating. Both Oslo and Bergen, while in no way small towns, don't have the same sense of internationalist cosmopolitanism that you get in, say, Berlin/Rome/Copenhagen. And the fjords - oh man. You get a sense of why Norse mythology is a thing, why the idea of trolls in the mountains felt resonant, and you also get a sense (as gray and rain sweep through with regularity) why Ibsen found the place depressing, drab, and provincial when he wasn't busy using the environment to generate powerful allegories about morality, philosophy, Norwegian society, and a host of other concerns.

 Bergen!

I have said this elsewhere, but fjord country is indescribable. Photos and video don't do it justice - the magnitude of your surroundings, the otherworldly feeling of being in the clouds while you're at sea level, the thick air heavy with water vapor - it was one of the most transporting environments I spent time in over here.

Sognefjord! If you didn't see it the last time I yammered about it on this blag!

Barrage of photos below. As I think I said before, if I were to do this leg again, I'd spend almost the entire time on Sognefjord. Oslo gave me one of the top-five meals of my entire life bite-for-bite (no exaggeration) and Bergen was cool, but here's how stunning the fjords were: it was something like 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit while I was there, raining most of the time, and I'd booked a cheap cabin on a campground in Balestrand for the night without realizing that the campground wouldn't have rentable linens or blankets. I spent that night under a mattress that I pulled off the top bunk of the cabin (it was a very nice mattress! Scandinavia is very clean and nice!) and still walked away thinking I could have happily spent a week camping in the fjords.

OKAY. Pictures ahoy, and then next stop: COPENHAGEN, a leading candidate for favorite city of the entire summer.

HENRIK! In front of the National Theatre, where I was just a bit too early to see an adaptation of John Gabriel Borkman. I also realized too late to make plans accordingly that I was missing an annual Peer Gynt festival about three hours north of Oslo, built around a production featuring professional actors and about 100+ amateurs performed outside on the shores of a lake. It's maybe the strongest argument for making a return to Norway sooner than later...?

Visiting Oslo's open-air folk museum! These places are super fun - another will be coming when we get to Stockholm. Basically, the government purchased and relocated homes and farm/town buildings built in different eras in different parts of the country and brought them to a park near Oslo. It's a bit of historical reenactment, a bit of architectural and agricultural museumry, and a bit of... just fun wandering time. On a gorgeous day (which this was), that was pretty swell. This shot comes from a great demo of folk music and dancing. These people were great!

The Oslo opera house, which doubles as a public plaza and is just sleek and modern and cool in all the fun and human ways you can be those things.

FJORD COUNTRY IS ATMOSPHERIC

FJORD COUNTRY IS LUSH AND MYSTERIOUS

FJORD COUNTRY HAS STAVE CHURCHES BUILT 1,000 YEARS AGO OUT OF THE SAME WOOD THAT THEY HAVE NOW, IT'S JUST THIS BIG OLD GHOST TREE HANGING OUT AT THE FOOT OF SOME MOUNTAINS OK COOOOOL

Bergen from atop Fløyen mountain! The sunlight in the mountains across the city is a little prank, it was cloudy the entire time and it always will be. But the city was cool! My photos from the Hanseatic Quarter (wooden buildings all leaning into each other, extremely Deadwoody-feeling) didn't come out great, so you will have to imagine that for YOURSELF

This is how Bergen looks as you walk to the bus station at 4 AM to catch your flight to Copenhagen. Shortly after taking the photo, you'll sometimes be greeted by people who are sleeping next to the bike path that runs by this lake down to the bus station! It's a fun and groovy time, more or less!

How'd this HAPPEN even

Moving on to Norway in a post in the next day or two while real-time Pat finally settles into America after a whirlwind bachelor weekend in Kentucky (technically also part of America). In the meantime, this is a post I started writing a few weeks ago after a family friend asked how I planned the trip.

It occurred to me that I hadn't gone through the logistics of the trip in this space, so that's what this post will be about. I'll use a later post to talk about how I handle my trip research (deeply uninteresting!) but this is just about how long-term travel was even a possibility. I guess the hope is for people to jump if they ever get the weirdly specific set of circumstances that made this a possibility? Slogging through these things after the jump...



Rules of thumb for not ruining your financial future with long-term travel

1. Keep a budget. Trip budgets can always be wonky, and sometimes that's good! You want to leave some room for the unexpected, but for long-term travel it's best to think of the trip as an extension of your normal budgeting routines. Break it down into housing, food, entertainment, whatever makes sense to you. Keep a slush fund. There will be expenses you don't think about that have to find room somewhere, and opportunities that you didn't foresee that require a bit of cash, so keep a little back every month for that.
2. If you don't have rent or a mortgage back home, life on the road starts making a lot more financial sense. This is especially true if your usual budget is scaled to the stupid rent levels of, say, the Boston metro region. Once I realized I could get out of my lease for the summer and move everything I owned into a storage unit for about $100/mo, it suddenly meant that I could look for accommodations on the road that matched my rent on a day-to-day basis (about $50/night).
3.  Going slow is easier than moving quickly. This is always true - plane and train tickets are a big expense and if you're moving between spots once every week or so, your costs will drop compared to a whistle-stop tour where you jump a train every other day. It's especially true in the AirBnB age thanks to long-stay discounts. It's not uncommon to get 15% discounts for weeklong stays, and 35-65% discounts for monthlong stays. That's how Vienna worked out to be half the cost of my Boston apartment, and how every other country worked out to be the same or slightly less.
4. Remote income is rare, but it happens. The real unicorn factor in this trip is that it timed out to right when my program provides a dissertation fellowship - basically funding to bridge the gap between your prospectus being approved and the fall in which you'll either be TAing for your last year or adjuncting while you write. Most annoying professional travel bloggers talk about how great it is to find a job where you can do your [graphic design/web design/assassinations] from anywhere on the planet, but for most of us it's never going to happen. This is the one time in my life that I lucked into that, supplemented with some long-distance tutoring via Skype/other chat apps.
5. Budget like a normal human. Most traditional vacations are: stay in a hotel, eat meals out, do fun stuff, take tours, etc. And the thing is, you can still do some of that stuff on a long-term trip, but you have to balance it. I cooked my own meals I'd say 80-90% of the time, which meant that - just like in America - I was eating out once a week for most of the trip. If you can stretch your dollar for the everyday routine stuff, you have more to use on occasional splurges - food tours, nice (rather than utilitarian) meals out, museums that cost a bit but are worth the investment, stuff like that. Juuuust like normal life, but in different places!
6. Follow the local scene. Most cities have free days for certain museums, and most cities have specific ways that residents save here and there. Sometimes that's about the fact that they still serve workers' lunches for 3-5 Euro, sometimes it's about the fact that the Italian government regulates the price of coffee when you're standing at the bar. But finding those patterns both feels like you're closer to the pulse of the life of a city and keeps your costs down. This also means take public transit or walk if that's what most people do - or rent a bike for a few days if you're in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. IT'S FUN.
7. Take advantage of being in Europe in general (if that's where you are). Public transit is pretty inexpensive depending on the city. If you have a phone where you can swap in European sim cards, you will save significantly over US carrier prices (in the UK you can get 12 gigs of data, plus talk/text, for $25/month). Grocery stores are as cheap (sometimes cheaper!) as in the States, but full of local products that give you variety as you travel, and again, the local scene will instruct you because what products everybody eats/drinks will be astonishingly cheap. I am ruined for cheese/beer/wine pricing in the US, and would be ruined for the price of tubes of fish egg paste if I had enjoyed that at all.
8. Pace yourself. Financially, gastronomically, emotionally, physically. I wasn't great at the last of these (my body is still recovering from 3+ months of 8-10 hour days of walking being more common than not) but it's generally the case that if you're moving slow, it helps a lot to give yourself permission to take a day to just sit at home, do your work, and zone out. This doesn't really explicitly impact the financial picture, but it does help to keep you from going into dazed-tourist spend-your-way-out mode, and that is a great mode to never be in everrrrrr
9. Friends are laid-back and fine and mellow and pro-fi-ta-ble. This is a no-brainer, but if you have friends who live in other parts of the world and those friends have been telling you to come visit them for forever, take them up on it. It'll be amazing, they'll be good for your heart, you'll get a little bit more into the veins of a place than you would on your own, and you'll save some cash on your crash pads. It's kind of totally beside the point, but if we're talking realistically about how I was able to pull this trip off, that's a part of it! (Same deal goes if you have friends who want to meet up on the road. Any stop where you're splitting an AirBnB between two folk suddenly gets way more affordable.)
10. Plan stuff in advance. I'll get more into this in that later logistical post, but it's good to do your legwork in advance to avoid the most frustrating of vacation expenses (see above re spending your way out of situations). Low-cost flights and long-haul train tickets can be crazy cheap if you book far enough in advance. That said, here again you want to balance stuff, because while your long hops want to be cheap and pre-planned, you'll be a lot smarter and better at handling the day-to-day planning when you're actually on the ground.

To me this all seems kind of obvious and maybe it is, but since the question has come up a few times as to how this was even feasible, I thought I'd leave the big-picture pointers as they made sense to me! On the whole, I spent 3 1/2 months in Europe and broke even on the trip thanks to a lot of these approaches. Which is insane. So again: gratitude and joy and acknowledging that this is never going to happen ever agaaaaain!

Glaswegia! ...and that other city

OKAY, back to catching up on traveloguery. As threatened, here are more words-and-photos on Glasgow and Edinburgh - knocking both out in one post before we move on to Norway! Whiskey, pals, theatre, and adventure, alllllllll after the jump!

This is a thing you see in a lot of European capital cities and I am a FAN. More miniature sculptures of the city in which I am, PLEASE. (This one is Glasgow, you can tell because of all the... major city landmarks of which I am definitely aware)

Scotland was always going to be on the agenda since my good friend Sarah had set up shop here. She came over on a Fulbright a couple of years back to work with companies on devised theatre and, as is her way, barnstormed her way into everybody's hearts, minds, and organizations. She's back now on an artist visa, working with a few organizations but principally with the Scotish Youth Theatre. Thanks to her and her excellent gentleman friend Mark, I got a great behind-the-curtain look at Glasgow, and jeez you guys it's hard to imagine a city whose vibe more resonates with me.

SARAH, off on adventures from her TARDIS, or as she called it, "the box where all the policemen are HIDING."

Glasgow, as I was glad to find Sarah felt too, feels a lot like Chicago culturally. It's got a bit of the second-city thing going, with Edinburgh only an hour away, but it's an affordable place where artists dig in to do their thing because they love it, not because You Have To Be In Glasgow To Succeed. At the same time, it's home to the National Theatre (and the SYT) and so it's a magnet for talent and passion. Ultimately, it's a place with very little ego or pretension - it's a blue collar city where self-deprication and playfulness are very much the driving forces.

The Wellington Cone (or Cones, as depicted here) is a great thumbnail sketch of this place's sense of humor. Basically, people (drunken yahoos? FUN FOLK, let's say) climb this statue and plunk that traffic cone on the head, and the city gets a cherry-picker to get it off. This repeats endlessly. There was talk of raising the entire statue to make it impossible to climb, and there was civic uproar. This is the mark of an educated and sophisticated populace!

Running around the city with Sarah was superb. She's got awesome people there. We also spent a day in the country, where we got to play with horses, aka possibly the best day of my life.

We are best friends now and forever

I also had a great solo day - described earlier on this blog - in which I got to explore Auchentoshan distillery and meet some friendly Canadians and generally take in the city by my lonesome. It was: mega-swell! It should also be noted that I climbed The Lighthouse, one of the major works of Charles Mackintosh, and the latest example of Pat Climbing Things BEFORE Remembering That He Hates Heights. IT WAS FUN AND VERY BRAVE, OK.

The Way Up. DID YOU KNOW: when you climb the lighthouse, these stairs all start to spin and swim and suddenly with a puff of smoke they're gone and you're falling... falling.... f o r e v e r?

OFF TO EDINBURGH! There, I stayed with my friend Anne, her husband Conor, and their outrageously adorable baby. Sarah and Mark had made the trip too, and we met up with New-to-me friends Brian and Emily, who were wonderful and delightful and all the other adjectives you can throw at 'em. We saw Manual Cinema's show at the Fringe, which was spectacular, as well as a few other things. Other than that, it was a lot of walking and chatting, fantastic meals with Anne (once my Chicago fine-dining partner in crime) and the aforementioned climb of Arthur's Seat, and it was all wonderful. I also got a chance to catch up with my director friend Robin, who is one of the smartest and best people I know. Ugh, it was good good good good good.

Photos below - Edinburgh is a place I'd love to revisit outside of festival season, not because it was chaotic (we actually caught it before it got totally crazy, and the crowds were fun rather than annoying - I guess theatre festival crowds are pretty self-selecting!) but because the whole character of the city quite clearly changes in and out of festival season. All told, it felt far too brief a visit - but you know, tickets are tickets and Norway called...

The backs of some DELIGHTFUL heads, amidst the preview-weekend Festival crowds.

A Very Chicago Kind Of Thing To Do: despite the festival's very strict timetable and insistent turnover of spaces, Manual Cinema invited the audience up to check out their rigs, their puppets, and chat with the performers. Because we are all human and why wouldn't we want to share these moments of connection awww maaaaaan

I didn't even climb THIS thing, I climed the taller thing that looks down at it! Whatever, stunning geographical feature, I got taller than you!

I don't recall this happening but now that I look at this photo it seems certain that this ferris wheel tipped over as soon as I turned away. Ferris wheels are TERRIFYING, ne c'est pas?!? This is the main reason I ran away to Oslo, was all of Edinburgh's constantly-toppling ferris wheels.

Then We Came To The End

Well, while this space will still be marching through the latter stages of my adventure for a few weeks yet as I wrap up the rest of my Scotland stories and my Scandinavian loop, in real-time today is the day I return to the States, to a different set of routines, logistics, and practicalities. In a lot of ways I'm ready and in some ways it's happened impossibly quickly.

But I am most definitely ready to have my own living space again, to carve out my own schedule and make the most of the months ahead, to have a kitchen and a couch and a bed that are mine-all-mine, and to bring the lessons of this time abroad to bear on the life I lead in what's almost certain to be my final year in Boston.

Arlanda Airport! Gateway to the FUTURE!

I've been over here for 107 days - almost a third of a year, almost as long as my departure was from the day my wife walked out the door. I think I've found my way back to myself in a lot of ways, and I've grown from even the me-I-liked that existed before the incredibly difficult year that was 2015. It feels great to find that I can continue to change, grow, and explore. The challenge is to keep those engines running in the more stressful environment I'm headed back to, but I'm full of hope and have rediscovered the support systems that I need to make my way. All this feels good and encouraging, and I'm very mindful of how little I can do on my own!

And so, that's an end to this trip. As I say, more posts coming to detail the last stages of the journey, and I may use this space to kick around too-long-for-Facebook thoughts in the months to come. It'll definitely come alive again late in the year, when the goofy pricing scheme of airline tickets will have given me a cheaper return flight than a one-way would have been; no idea what that journey will entail, but excited for a reprise of these explorations, challenges, and - there is no better way to phrase it - neato times.

Thanks for following along. I hope it hasn't been too myopic and navel-gazing, and I hope to skim new horizons with y'all in the not-too-distant future!

Breaking All Chronology

Cats n kittens!

I think I have more to write about Glasgow/Edinburgh than the last post, and I haven't even begun to dip into Oslo yet, but I cut the following video together on the train from Copenhagen to Stockholm from footage I took on my trip through Sognefjord in Norway. Since I've not been able to take time to jot things down for this here spot, I figured this would be a nice placeholder until I start catching up in earnest... probably at Arlanda airport and the flight back Stateside in just a couple of days! Gulp.

So, past the jump, Sognefjord...

And okay, a couple quick things:
1. I could easily have spent my entire time in Norway out here, even though it rained probably 75% of the time. Camping and hiking in the earth-level clouds and the lush greenery of the fjords was brilliant even if only for a day and change.
2. Nature is awe-inspiring, which is probably why this song got in my head. Thundering horns and a driving beat felt like a close relation to the towering fjords and the water and the immensity of the world! It's good to be places that overwhelm you and suddenly remind you of the age and scale of the world.
3. It's a good life on a boat.

Scotland The First

Cutting together the video for Scotland reinforced how much was packed into the short, short, short slightly-more-than-a-week that I was there. It was well enough time to fall deeply in love. In some ways Scotland (and Glasgow in particular) combined everything I miss from Chicago with everything I love about New England. More on that, along with video and a few introductory photos, after the jump! With more posts probably to come! I Don't Really Know What I'm Doing!™

Yr humble narrator, alighting from his TARDIS to explore the mean streets of Glasgow

 Totally missing from this video: Anne Trodden, my Edinburgh host and delightful friend, from whom I was almost entirely distracted by her baby and/or delicious food the entire time we spent together. SORRY ANNNNNNE

OK, so this split I'm talking about is this: I loved being in a place full of unpretentious, self-depricating, generous, collaborative and fun people whose first instinct is to laugh and be friendly, in comparatively affordable cities, with just an hour or two's driving to get to Honest To God Wilderness. I only sampled a fragment of the latter - the gentle countryside, not the highlands or the islands, but what I got was enough to convince me that my next trip will be sooner than later. In general, the city/nature balance here was as close to perfect as I've gotten on this trip! Wowzers, innit?

I feel, as a total neophyte, like the Wellington Cone is the best kind of nickel-summary of what I love about Glasgow. Nineteenth-century art that people keep sticking a traffic cone on because they think it's funny and they like irritating the local authorities. (The city considered elevating the monument to make it even harder to pull this stunt off and there was public outcry against the proposal. That is a magnificent city right there.)

And of course the other piece to the puzzle was being around friends. FRIENDS! The heroes of all my narratives! Sarah and Anne are dear dear pals going back (WAY back in Sarah's case - we realized we've been friends for 15 years, rapidly approaching half of my actual life) and as was the case in Bristol, getting time with people who know me well and their friends, who despite just meeting me seemed to think I was An Okay Dude, was balm for my weary a-travelin' soul. More about that and the specific charm and magic of Glasgow and Edinburgh in upcoming posts! For now I gotta get back out into sunny, gorgeous, near-perfect-if-slightly-expensive Copenhagen! Copenhagen: The Scotland of Denmark? (I have not slept recently, no.)

Edinburgh at night, after a day spent with some of the best people, old and new. I'm a lucky cat, I am.

Whitby

Catching up, catching up, catching up! In actual-time, I'm in Copenhagen, my penultimate stop on the trip, and am finding it as magical and delightful and expensive as everybody has said it is. (The final two weeks of this trip are, incredibly, the only places that my lodging and transit costs will be equal to Boston rates. The Danes seem to get a little more bang for their buck...)

But let's not talk about that now! Instead, after the jump, let's have a quick little nickel summary of Whitby, videos and photos and all o' that like we likes to do!

A lighthouse between Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, a gorgeous coastal cliffside hike. There's SHEEP on it and EVERYTHING! (The hike, not the lighthouse. "No sheep on the lighthouse," that's rule # 1 of lighthousing.)

Whitby was cute, and my first experience with the English seaside. It's funny - I think so many of our conceptions of British culture come from entertainment set in London or the countryside that it's easy to forget other pockets of England that are... very different.

Whitby from the Ninety-Nine Steps up to the abbey that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula! No photos of that here because it's TOO SCARY, but it's in the video above, so watch that if you need to get spooked by some birds.

Some of it's what you'd expect: fish n chips, sailboats, cute antique shops, hiking (in general, England's hiking culture is fantastic, mostly due to laws that have long upheld the right of free passage, so hikers are entitled to roam the countryside with very few restrictions). But then there's also the weird, tacky fair/arcade/casino end of things, where everything is neon and sugar and noise and suddenly you realize "ohhhh arcades were a good way to train kids to gamble when they grew up, interesting." This was going to make it into its own video but the footage got tanked by some DOPE (hint: it was meeeee) so you will have to take my word for it or go to Whitby on your own dime and while you're at it fly me back to Glasgow please.

This is the cliff where all the birds live in between Robin Hood's Bay and Whitby! They hang out all day long and swoop around and yell at each other like a bunch of idiots. Birds are filthy and generally unpleasant animals. Ugh. Birds.

In any case, I liked Whitby, but after a few days in various parts of Yorkshire, I was really ready to move on. I missed my friends a lot and the week was oddly balanced in a way that made it hard to fully unplug and relax but also made it hard to get work done on the dissertation. Both of those things would change in Scotland, which is coming up... sometime! Hooray!

BLAH BLAH MORE NATURE ON THE WALK BLAH BLAH. (Note: shortly after taking this photo, I walked by a field of sheep and suddenly realized "If you've hit the point where you're not excited by your walk through a field of sheep, it's definitely time to leave England." AND THE VERY NEXT DAY I DID.

The Glory of Living: Another Navelgaze!

I’m writing this on Balestrand while I wait for my ferry on to Bergen, and oh man fellas, Sognefjord and fjord country in general is stunning. Much to share when I get caught up, but for now, without stable wifi, we’re a few days away from that, with all the photos and videos that it'd entail. So instead, a quick just-thinkin’ post about meeeeeeeeeee (a human person and author of this blog). Specifically: how I am in the world in different contexts! Wow how interesting click through if you want to read about this very thrilling and interesting topic, what a wild ride we are in for I am certain of it.

Something I’ve noticed on this trip is how physically variable I am depending on my surrounding context (environment?). I’m rarely a total sloth – okay, once every couple of weeks if I’ve had an all-day hike or accidentally climbed a mountain or in some other way stupidly overexerted myself – but there’s a heightened state of being that I only sometimes hit. Something more than the usual “in Rome I’m a fast-walking, alert cosmopolitan dude, but in the countryside I lope around smelling daisies all the frig dang day!” nonsense. It's something to how I carry myself and project into the world, and it's not something I've thought consciously about until this trip.

I noticed it first in Berlin at the Volkstheater. It was the first theatre I visited here that felt contemporary and I found myself sitting upright, craning my neck to take in the audience around me. I suddenly realized: this is what I’m like when I’m at the theatre in Chicago, expecting to see friends and colleagues from the scene there. And given the Volkstheater’s design and relatively youthful audience, somehow all that had sparked back into being.

A couple of weeks later, chatting with my friend Sarah and her friends at the Scottish Youth Theatre, I found myself stretching and bouncing, shifting weight and generally moving as though I expected to jump into a rehearsal or something at any moment. The same thing recurred later in the week when hanging with a group of friends ‘n’ lovelies at the Edinburgh Fringe. Something about the context –theatre folk, creative and open and friendly – apparently signaled my body that it was time to work, to get loose and to get fun.

I’ve missed that – particularly after this last year, having been in a lot of unfriendly (or at best indifferent) social settings, it feels like I’m starting to rediscover what it feels like to be in an environment where I expect to be met with collaboration, with excitement, with that uptick of energy and gameness that I’m so used to finding out there. And of course, a lot of it was me - wrestling with anxiety and depression doesn't exactly prime you to look for (or project) the kind of openness and energy that hopefully meets its match when you put it out there.

And man, that is where I’m ready to spend a lot more time as I return to the States. Seeking out the people and environments that hum with that energy of “let’s make something together,” that don’t default to wary distance. And putting that energy out into the world as much as I can, regardless of my surrounding context. I’m excited to get there and to find that sweet, sweet newness!

York the First

Wow hey cooooool, I’m not doing a greatjob of keeping up to speed on my posts, but for all the best reasons, really! In my Yorkshire week I was working into higher gear on translations (coming better than I anticipated, though still a steep road ahead) and trying to get hikes/walks/cycle rides in as much as possible, which generally left me pretty thoroughly tuckered out at the end of the day. And Scotland was jam packed with old and new friends and fantastic adventure, which I could/should have predicted, but didn't. And only having two days in Oslo has meant they are full full full. Remind me to write a bit about slow travel whenever I catch a moment.

But! Hey! I'm back, and I'm catching us up to speed on YORKSHIRE! This is split into two posts: the first video/photo/ramble is about York and the Yorkshire Moors, and sometime (Saturday? Sunday? October?) I'll add another bit about Whitby, a seaside town in North Yorkshire. But first, after the jump, THIS!

Detail from the city walls at York. I think. At a certain point all the stone facades start to blur and then the stone statues on top of them turn to you slowly and ask you who has taken The Master's pudding, and you wake up drenched in sweat and tell yourself it was all a dream...

Video first! I'm not 100% sure it captures the trip, but the last minute and a half or so (mostly the steam train trip I mention at the end of this post) is about right.

Ahhh Yorkshire. This was a swell-o-riffic place to spend a week. Particularly after the fun and excitement of friends, which itself followed the urban drive of Berlin, it was nice to catch my breath in the countryside (more or less). Not someplace I'd be able to live long-term, as I discovered by the end of the week, getting antsy for the business of city life, but man oh man does the UK ever make it seem appealing to live so close to nature. (SPOILER: this is made more evident in Scotland, but we're NOT THERE YET.)

Trip started in York, which I almost entirely experienced through its medieval core; you know that's the core because the city is THOROUGHLY ringed by its original wall, now open to the public for general meandering and gawking. And most of what I did, when I wasn't tapping away at dissertation stuff, was walk. Well, and cycle, once my AirBnB host kindly lent me his.

Made a friend on the road from York to Selby, a market town a short ways south.

 A side note: pub culture in Yorkshire is still pretty cozy/chummy/collegial, somewhat following the European model of the pub/bar as a place for friends to gather rather than to meet new folk. That said, it's a welcoming and lovely scene, and if you're ever wondering whether to just call it a night or to go out to the local to check out the open mic, obviously go to check out the open mic, it turns out to be a great evening and aside from the weird jerky Americans who are playing a festival that weekend and clearly think they're blowing everybody's minds by crashing the open mic, everybody is nice and open and fun and you're glad you went. Take more pictures next time, maybe?

The weather was mercifully gorgeous throughout the trip, but I ended up exploring a few museums anyway, and am glad I did. The national rail museum, located just next to York's train station, is free, and man is it huge. A dream come true for train nuts - I'm not quite the target market, but close enough - and kids would love the place. (I texted my friend Mike almost immediately to tell him how much his son Everett would love it there.) Far more impressive still was the Castle Museum, one of many cultural institutions on this summer's travels located in a former prison. Castle Museum's main exhibit is a time-lapse look at life and culture throughout English history, with recreated living spaces from multiple periods, and even a completely recreated Victorian city centre with costumed docents sharing information about the period. It was beautifully designed.

PLUS, when you LEAVE the Castle Museum sometimes the sun has come out and it's a gorgeous day and somebody has set up a fair on the grounds of the museum and gosh how lovely.

 The York Minster was gorgeous. I visited it for an Evensong one night, and between the incredible design and the pristine acoustics, it was a trip highlight by a significant margin. A young but talented visiting choir sang the (short, simple) service, and I was tempted to return later in the week, though my timing made that impossible.

The Minster, from without! This building has the largest collection of stained glass of any structure in the world, as I understand it. And man. I believe this to be true.

The entry into the Choir, where I sat for Evensong. I didn't wander too far afield, as my coming for Evensong meant dodging a normal tourism entry fee and it didn't feel Quite Right to turn the service into a photo op, but you know, while standing in line...

Instead, as the week went on, I pressed on north to Helmsley! My AirBnB host from York seemed puzzled by this being on my radar, noting that it was more someplace that people from York got away for a Sunday than someplace international tourists seek out, and (while I enjoyed my stay) I can see what he means. It's a sleepy market town, though its proximity to Rievaulx Abbey had put it on my radar, and I was not disappointed.

The Abbey! One of several sites that was excavated and became an attraction during the 19th century's fascination with ruins and Things Ancient, the Abbey has a swell audio guide and makes a great morning's walk from Helmsley. Even on an atypically-for-this-trip rainy day - especially on a rainy day - it was a beautiful and haunting building!

I was lucky in my B&B, a cozy and welcoming one-room guesthouse where my host was the vocal (and somewhat visual!) double of Emma Thompson. She was a superb chef and a kind, thoughtful, gracious host, and it was kind of nice to be looked after (even as my usual preference while traveling is to carve out my own space). But even if she'd been a terror, it would have been worth it to pick up her advice to take a steam train up to Whitby (which you can see in the above video). Golly that was swell.

This is a rambling post, and I suppose that's both a product of its lateness (memory growing fuzzy and less ordered as time passes) and perhaps why it was late. This was a good week, but a sleepy one. A short update on Whitby will get us up to speed and get us to SCOTLAND, where life took a really excellent turn for the social and new and exciting and grand and adjective adjective adjective.

A cuppa

This is yet another far overdue post that I scrawled out back in Yorkshire (something like two weeks ago?) but set aside until I downloaded my camera's photos. Which I've FINALLY done. So, this has nothing to do with my current adventures (mostly riding a reindeer around yelling about lutefisk and humming Grieg tunes). That's right: we are living in the past.

I thought I’d toss up a quick post about tea. Read on, old beans, read on, knowing that while I will adopt the tone of somebody who has Done Research And Knows Things, I in fact know nothing and am guessing or wildly conjecturing at everything. (This is a good disclaimer for the blog and my life as a whole.) Tea: after the jump!

Yr humble author awaiting his friggin' TEA. (Note: the can of Irn Bru was offered as a gesture of "welcome to Scotland, if you haven't tried this you are obligated to, but if you have tried it, please do not drink it, for it is nasty." It was not consumed at this ultimately-classy event.

One of the more wonderfully thoughtful things that Kate and Stuart did for me on my Bristol visit was to immediatelyput out a spread of All Foods British. (Save Marmite, because my friends love me and do not want to hurt me.) Pork pie, an array of English cheeses, Scotch egg, local ciders and ales, the whole bit. And the first morning I woke up in their place, Stuart had a cup of tea waiting for me, as well as scones with cream and jam. (It was the fastest I'd ever gone from awake-to-breakfast, and made me feel Deeply Loved. Thanks, Stuart!)

This past week, in York, I revisited tea and scones at Betty’s, a storied tea shop in Yorkshire (though I think they’ve expanded beyond) in a traditional afternoon tea. And oh, kittens. This is what we’re here to discuss.

The afternoon tea consists of a pot of tea (OBviously; at Betty's it's looseleaf with delightfully intricate pouring tools), a series of small sandwiches, a scone with clotted cream and jam, and small cakes or sweets. It looks a bit like this, only pretend the photographer had remembered to take a photo BEFORE he started digging into the sandwiches:

The beauty of the afternoon tea is this: working the plates from bottom to top, your food gets sweeter and richer as your tea continues to steep, getting sharper and more tannic. So the sandwiches are accompanied by a light, toasted, nutty brew, the scones by a richer and more bracing one, and by the time you reach the sweets, the tea is a perfect counterpoint, a bracing, tongue-coating pinch counter-punching the velvety sweetness of the tarts, chocolates, cakes. It's a perfectly calibrated trajectory.

Afternoon tea is lovely, but it's hefty and not, for me, an everyday affair, because I am not a dowager countess or aggressively rotund (any more). Take away the sandwiches and the sweets and you’re left with a cream tea, the centerpiece of the ritual: scone, cream, jam, tea. And this by itself is a glorious thing.

There is, I have learned, a raging (by British standards) controversy over the proper assemblage of the cream scone. Stuart was quite firm on this point: after slicing the scone, the clotted cream goes on first, followed by the jam. This is then reassembled into a kind of sandwich. However, when I set to this ritual at a café in York, before even trying the sandwiching, my waitress goggled at me and said “That’s quite the long way round of doing things, innit? Strange man…”

Turns out it’s a regional thing, with additional disputes breaking out over the kind of cream used (never aerosol, but clotted versus heavy whipped seems to be an actual debate) and the reassembly is a thing often disputed as well.

Tea at home in Scotland! Not my home, not my tea. Good golly this was swell too. As I type this I'm realizing that "swell" and "golly" are probably the largest words in the word-cloud version of this blog. OH WELL GOODBYE FOREVER

After a week and change of cream teas (and one afternoon tea), I think I can definitively say that the Correct Scone Method is: scone sliced in half, clotted cream first, followed by jam, and (crucially) no reassembly. Each half, coated with the proper ingredients, makes a perfect bite, and once again, the Yorkshire tea nicely balances the potentially cloying flavors of the cream scone. (Though places that make their own clotted cream and jam present almost universally perfectly-balanced scones, so the tea is just a nice sparring partner and not a corrective.)

So, that’s tea, by which I suppose we really mean “the food that comes along with tea.” Frankly, even the cream tea can usually very adroitly stand in for lunch (and has done almost every day that I’ve had it here). The drink itself is a bit less ubiquitous at least from what I’ve seen – not in terms of being on offer, but locals certainly seem mostly to opt for espresso drinks when out at the cafes – but this is a place where tradition is held in very high regard, so tea isn’t going anywhere. I KNOW YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT TEA GOING AWAY IN ENGLAND, IT WAS SOMETHING WE ALL WORRIED ABOUT BUT DON’T BE SCARED, TEA’S STILL A THING.

More to come on Yorkshire, but given that I have largely avoided obsessive food-centric posts on this blog (really, didn’t we all expect a lot worse?) I hope this entry on “things I’ve eaten and my Opinions About Them” has been deeply spiritually enlightening. G’bye for now, chumps!

The American Who Went Up A Hill And Fell Down A Mountain

We are busting up chronology here in a big way - today's post is about Edinburgh and I've STILL not written about Yorkshire. Or afternoon tea! Or other things! But as I eat my porridge I figured I'd share a TALE. After the jump!

Well, ok, sometimes I DO take selfies. I contain multitudes.

Some days you go to a park to climb to the peak, to Arthur's Seat, but you decide to go up a set of makeshift stairs that aren't on the map. As you climb the stairs give way to a makeshift path, and then the path gives way to rocks and suddenly you realize you took The Difficult Route as you climb hand over fist, scrabbling for footholds as your trip goes vertical. You become increasingly aware of how steep the drop is and how far the fall from here would be. You mutter to yourself "this is a mountain, I don't care if it's technically a mountain or not, it's a MOUNTAIN." (Later you'll look it up and it IS a mountain, chump!) After a while you're only climbing because looking down to retrace your steps is a bit too dizzying. You keep going up because SOMEbody has been here before, and so even though you can't see where this route rejoins the main path, you trust that it will.

You reach the main path just as it opens up onto a plateau one climb short of the peak. The wind buffets you and you think "is this what wuthering means? I think it's something to do with this." It's strong enough to push you off your feet, to blow your skin back like a dog with its head out the window on the highway. You think about not doing that last climb but you've come this far. You could be content with this - you WOULD, but you might as well look.

The last climb is wild. Not as steep as the vertical climb, but with wind that feels like how it looks when people are on the wings of airplanes in The Movies. You reach the top and it's slightly terrifying and slightly terrific. You remind yourself that this is worth it while simultaneously cursing yourself for NEVER REMEMBERING that you have a fear of heights.

You sit at the top, bracing yourself on a rock against the wind. Edinburgh is all around you. The sea is just over there. The wind is howling but the sun is shining. For a minute, you're just there. Nothing in your head. Totally still. A part of the landscape. You feel connected to something ancient and powerful.

And then, on the way back down, you try to follow the map provided and you fall head over heels. TWICE.

THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR BUT IT'S PROBABLY VERY REVEALING OF SOMETHING

Glaswegian Growth!

I'm guessing anybody reading this blog is friends with me on Facebook (except for Mom: HI MOM!) and so this entry might be redundant, since I've posted a version of it over there. But as the blog is also a public journal of sorts, it felt useful to plant this marker here; as a bonus, it means my dad will see it, since he's sworn off of Facebook until after the election due to Trump's nomination. (Have I mentioned that my dad is the best dad? It's true, sorry Other Dads. Your day will come! [Your day will never come, but keep trying, it's what your own dad would want if you too had the Best Dad])

ANYHOW, introspective post after the jump as usual! Read ON, cats n kittens, or skip it because what do you care?

I'm a work in progress, but I'm also making progress, is the tl/dr of this entry.

While I certainly hope I have much more growing and learning to do – ever pushing for more kindness, more empathy, more peace within and without – today felt like a very, very good milestone on this weirdzo little journey I’m on. That’s what today’s post is about.

All day long, my plans were a bit off track: I got up later than I’d planned, missed breakfast, arrived at a distillery just too late for the tour I'd planned around and had to wait for a later, more expensive one. Had to scrap a plan to visit The Lighthouse. Three spots I stopped for a meal were closed. A museum that I’d been looking forward to was… also closed. And eventually I missed the last train back to Sarah and Mark’s flat.

Typing that up, it's kind of: small, simple, easy. Made-up problems. The thing is, last year, in the thick of an insane amount of stress, anxiety, and depression, small things like this - smaller than this - threw me off a cliff and I had no sense of how to climb back up it. Faced with the knowledge of how tenuous my financial situation was, how precarious my academic progress felt, eventually how precarious my marriage felt, these little failures or missteps felt debilitating, an in-the-moment confirmation that Things Really Are Spiraling Out Of Control. I have a sense memory of how helpless and frustrating that felt. 

But you know – today, this was all fine. Being in the world was enough – every dopey setback and pointless 30 minute side trek was just A Thing That Happened. I didn't need to be in control of anything; failures were funny little detours. And somehow, even amidst all the misfires I never lost the sense of Glasgow being a special place, someplace that instinctively seems right to me. It was now – though it has not always been – easy to see the day through the prism of all the moments of joy and discovery and fun rather than the bits that didn’t go off just as I thought they would. That feels like a core part of myself that I’m getting back, and it’s great to find it there again.

And the day ended beautifully: sampling Scotch whisky with two fantastically lovely Canadians (Francis and Amanda) who asked to share my table at the crowded, totally superb Pot Still. They turned out to be generous, thoughtful conversational partners. They’re just a couple of days into their own travels, touring a ton of distilleries in Scotland before hopping over to the continent for a bit more travel, and had much to say not just on whisky but on travel, on Trump and American politics as viewed from Up North, on how we organize our lives, and much more. They were superb, and the decision to have one more dram with them was well worth my inadvertently missing the last train home.

And that’s the thing: I missed the train, but it meant I had a beautiful walk home with barely a car on the road. My lunch plans fell through (twice!) but that meant I got to see an adorably polite French Kristen Bell trying to negotiate for Indian food with no spices while a horrified British woman two tables over tried to lecture her – entirely out of concern – on what you must expect with Indian food. My museum was closed, but that meant I got to inadvertently see a horde of Glasgow Uni students rushing nervously to final exams in their Harry Potter-esque classrooms. My distillery tour was delayed and a bit more pricey, but it meant that I got to know my guide and chat about how he and I came to where we are now. (It also led to a few extra tastes, and the Pot Still recommendation that led me to my evening with Francis and Amanda.)

And somehow, with patience, the love and support of friends, and the world-expanding work of this trip, I am finding my way back to who I like to be. And to a mode of experiencing the world that insists on joy and possibility. It feels good. I’m excited to keep building that muscle as I tumble and flail through these coming final weeks of the trip. Wah, but also hoo, y’know what I mean?