Day 2 of the global pandemic outbreak.

When I got on my plane to Czechia was fine, located in its usual place east of Germany and under Poland. By the time we touched down, Czechia was under a state of emergency, restricting all events to sizes of 100 or less, canceling sporting events, etc.  Even our event was affected, halving our 200 attendees into two equal groups.

Group One which would gather in one room and share the Coronavirus with each other live while Group Two would catch the Coronavirus in a separate room while watching the other room’s infection live on a video feed.  This isn’t intended to be a joke.  This is almost certainly what was happening, the virus is insanely virulent, the room was filled with international travelers, some of whom had recently returned from China, and Italy.  At any rate,  Amazon eCommerce is as boring as it sounds, and the only thing on people’s minds was the virus.

One attendee told me a nightmare theory where the virus was certainly stolen from researchers in Canada and re-engineered in China to then spread just as a trial run to see how the world would cope.  Having assessed the global response, [whoever] would then release a more virulent and more vicious version of the disease, and reclaim the planet. Maybe this year. Maybe years later.

Another attendee told me that he’d heard that China was upset for being the scapegoat, and was in fact, restricting the shipment of newly manufactured masks until the West had apologized.  Like when your ex won’t give you your hoodie back and puts your entire family at risk for an awful death, I guess.  Just like that.

Social distancing, proved to be even less popular as I found myself in another conversation with a third attendee from Israel told me that he was never as scared as he is now, which is strange because he grew up in a country where he was constantly being bombarded with missiles.

As we spoke, I noticed that roughly 80% of conversations consist of talking, the remaining 20% of them are just you and the other person breathing as hard as you fucking can on each other. I felt like the world’s most stubborn birthday candle.  Have people been breathing on me like this my whole life? Do I breathe on other people this much? This is disgusting why are we CPRing our way through this conversation, a conversation that is explicitly about the danger of doing this exact thing it feels like maybe my tank ran out of air so now we’re buddy breathing our way to the surface, Jesus we’re so fucked the only people that are going to make it are the extremely socially awkward and the Deaf who don’t have to deal with any of this aggressive exhalation just to get an idea across.

“Oh here’s my business card,” I would say, when the time was right.

We all drank a lot, too much in fact so that I stumbled back to my Airbnb and inadvertently fell asleep on my couch.

At around 2:30 in the morning my phone imploded with text messages and IG DMs.

“PHIL YOU HAVE TO COME HOME NOW.”

Drunk, and on the ‘before’ stages of a hangover, I checked my messages which directed me to the CNN front page which had an article with the headline “TRUMP BANS ALL FLIGHTS TO AND FROM EUROPE.”  Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

Awake now, too fucking awake. I skimmed the article. And another. And another. They were unified, it was real. Trump had banned all flights to and from Europe, the ban would take place Friday.  After that, it’s national musical chairs, that’s where you live now.   Find a wife. Raise a family. Czechmate.

Frantically, I hit google/flights and tried to find a way home.  Sweet. Prague. Oslo. Oslo. New York.   I don’t know what I’d do in New York but I’ll figure it out.  Oh the last window seat, sweet. Book it.  Fuck. Error. What?  Again. Error. Fuck. Oh wait I’ll just use norwegian.com.  Great. Shit my window seat is gone, now there’s just middle seats.  Do I want to sit middle seat for 10 hours transatlantic? Hard No.   Do I want to try to learn the Czech language? Harder no. Booked.

As I tried to sober up and dole out and absorb knowledge from worried friends and family, I packed. This was frustrating and scary.  It was also disappointing.  The last 3 years I’d spent working on one project, and this conference was going to be a great opportunity for me to launch that project to the ideal target audience. But as the hours passed, and my hangover took over, my focus shifted from the business ramifications to political ones.  It seemed my flight back from Oslo was  far from a done deal.  Hungover, exhausted, and scared I tried to find some real source of information, which has been a problem for the last three years, or so.

As the sun came up around 6am, I learned that the president’s speech had lacked a certain amount of what you and I will call “detail.” The president was unclear and when his message hit Prague, it was even more…sigh, vague.  Somehow I made my way to the actual presidential decree on some government website.  The ban was not actually for all of the European countries.  It was for the 26 countries in the Schengen zone, which did not include Countries with Resorts owned by the President, or Countries recently the victim of extortion attempts by the president.  Britain, Ireland, Ukraine, a few others.   Also the ban didn’t apply to US citizens, only foreign nationals.

Still, I grew worried about my return plan… how many flights would Norwegian actually fly from Oslo, if the only people that could board them were American citizens?  I called up the help desk and sat on hold for an hour, behind probably 1,000 people with the exact same concern, and changed my flight to route through London, safely out of the Schengen Zone. (This proved to be a wise move, as 24 hours later Norwegian cancelled all of their flights from Oslo to the US)

By 10am I’d found a solution, a flight from Prague to London, London to NYC, the following Tuesday.  I’d be able to give my presentation, see a bit of Prague, and fly home.   I collapsed into my bed, and disappeared into sleep, after 8 stressful hours.

—

At 3pm I woke up, and was going over my presentation when, absentmindedly, I checked Twitter, and saw that the Czech R… Czechia was trending.

Perhaps frustrated with the Presidential decree from America, the Czechian prime minister had increased the severity of the state of emergency. No groups of more than 30. No movies. Restaurants would close by 8pm.  Also, no visitors from any of fifteen countries heavily affected by the virus. Including Great Britain.  This was to go into effect tomorrow, midnight,  four days before my flight out.

I wondered how likely it would be that airlines would fly empty planes from England just to pick up the handful of eligible people back from Prague, in 4 days, and realized that I was, again, fucked, and needed a new plan.  Kyiv was outside of the Schengen zone, was not banned from flight, and had direct flights both to London (for Tuesday) and New York, in a pinch, if I needed.

I booked a flight to Kyiv, cancelled my flight to London, and within 3 hours was headed to the airport for a 10pm flight to Ukraine.

]]> http://philmccarty.com/blog/prague-plagues-and-planes/feed/ 1 http://philmccarty.com/blog/madrid-the-first-hour/ http://philmccarty.com/blog/madrid-the-first-hour/#comments Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:45:04 +0000 http://philmccarty.com/blog/?p=745 I was in Madrid for a little under 24 hours.

My first impression upon landing was that “This is the quietest country I’ve ever been to.”  The airport, the taxi, the streets, the hotel.  There was a hush from end-to-end.  Fifteen hours later I would beg for that hush when woken by drunken, presumably Spanish, revelers at 4am in my hotel room, but that was later. Up front Madrid was muy quiet.

It’s tempting for me to say I’ve studied Spanish. And in the most superficial way, it’s true.  Teachers have stood in front of me and given me information about the language.  Words, conjugations, irregular forms, the subjunctivo!  I have then reviewed that information, and regurgitated it with varying levels of accuracy when prompted in examinations, both written and oral.  Hell I even -needed- to pass Spanish 201 at the University of Virginia in order to graduate.  201 is “proficient” and a degree granting institution that currently costs upward of a quarter million dollars to graduate from would assure you that I, Phil McCarty, am proficient in Spanish, having studied it.

It doesn’t feeeeel like I’ve studied Spanish though.  It feels like I’ve perused it. Mostly because now as an adult, I know what the fuck studying feels like, and that was. not. it.

It’s March 10th, 2020. The world is at the beginning (maybe middle? Maybe end? Probably beginning) of a global pandemic from the spread of the Novel Coronavirus. This morning the Center for Disease Control tried to suggest that the elderly should simply steer the fuck away from planes but our government said “nah.”  So when the lady sat next to me in an outfit that felt Hazmat appropriate, I studied her.

Surgical mask. Check. Gloves. Check.  Her phone’s language and passport indicated that she’s from Korea*, the country hit hardest from the outbreak.  As with all of my flight seat partners this week, I studied her. I studied her breathing. I studied her skin. I studied her overall health. Unlike Spanish, I really truly wanted to know all I could know about her, and the likelihood that she was going to hook me up with Covid-19.

*This is not why I enrolled. I’m an equal opportunity studier.  If you are near me on a plane I will wonder if you have the coronavirus.  If anything I felt safer with this lady than I would’ve next to your random euro traveller. She seemed like she was taking the kind of precautions that would keep a person healthy.

My Coronavirus independent study program didn’t start and end with the lady in 1C.  She was just an elective I tacked on.  In most things I’m a bit of an early adopter.  The first of my friends with a MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad.  But not just technology, I was the first of my friends to freak the fuck out about the Coronavirus.

My friends told me “It’s just like the flu” and everything I read said that it was just like the flu. Just like the flu but worse.  More contagious. Deadlier.  Longer asymptomatic period. The only comparison with the flu that held up to any scrutiny was that the coronavirus could be transmitted like the flu (except easier, hello airborn virus), and traditional surgical masks wouldn’t stop it.  As I watched the Chinese government literally weld people into their apartment buildings to stop the spread of the flu, my personal level of panic increased.

I bought masks. I bought sanitizer.  I bought a month’s worth of fruits and vegetables from one of those survivalist prepper sites that dudes with Bunkers have bookmarked, and had them shipped to my Mom, along with a month’s worth of meat.  Wait this isn’t about the Coronavirus, this is about Madrid, how did that happen?

Okay. So, much like most of my country I’m going to pretend there’s no Coronavirus pandemic and tell you about Madrid. Oh right. Spanish. That’s where I was. My bad. I’m very sorry. Lo siento muchismo.

Most of my travel over the last year or two has been to countries where I don’t speak the language at all.  Ukraine, Belgium, Iceland, Japan.  I’ve gotten used to just being totally out of my element and incapable of interacting with people. Social distancing.  Oh that’s more Corona stuff isn’t it? Ignore the bit about social distancing.

However, here I was in Madrid, Spain. A country where I wasn’t totally fucking baffled by every single street sign and interaction.  I made my way to the baggage claim, explained my address to the Taxi driver, checked in to my hotel room and asked for a nice place ambular, all without hearing a word of English. Word.

Shit I even bought a thermometer*, try THAT trick in Ukraine when all you know how to say is ‘Sorry’ and ‘Thank You.’ (“Thermometer”, in English just confused the seller, so I followed it with “Measure my sick mouth?” in Spanish).  My relative familiarity with Spanish was not comforting, per se, there’s still a slight panic when you understand -some- of what’s going on around you,  but it was definitely an improvement.

*Did you know that perfect health is 35-ish degrees celsius? Neither did I, which made my sick mouth measurer kinda worthless until I googled it.

Spain doesn’t actually mean much to me.  I mean I don’t know much about it. Tapas. Sangria. Conquistadors. Spanish people.  I hadn’t eaten yet so I decided to seek out some Tapas, so I started walking.  The first four eating establishments I saw were Burger King, McDonalds, Steakmaster, and KFC.  This Tapas thing was proving difficult, and I eventually I wandered found myself in a perfectly lovely plaza.  Plaza is one of those words that you see a million times  and you don’t even think of it as being Spanish until you find one in Spain and it fits you’re like “Oh yeah, that word is REALLY Spanish isn’t it?”  (Same thing happened when I found myself on a street named San Francisco).

The plaza was beautiful.  Really.  I don’t even get off on natural beauty the way that people who  say things like “The plaza was beautiful”  seem to, but it really was.  It was quiet (again) and sunny, there was a calm breeze, and people were just laying down on the ground around me, some on picnic blankets, but mostly just on the grass.   “Oh shit!” I thought to myself, “This is a fucking Siesta!” I got so excited and then panicked when I realized that I was standing in a perfectly cozy grassy warm sunny spot, with nothing to do, and I wondered if I too, could siesta.

(It might not be a verb, fyi.)

You are probably free lay down in the grass in Los Angeles. That kind of freedom is normally reserved for the homeless or the shirtless white dudes with new dreadlocks and old guitars who desperately want to get high with you, bro.  In Spain it was different. There were young people, old people, and people in between just chilling the fuck out in the sun.  And not just, you know, people in siesta appropriate attire.

Yes there were girls in sun dresses, and guys in tank tops but there was also one hombre in a full on business suit.  Seems that not all Siestas are planned out.  Siestas are something that might just fucking happen to you while you’re minding your own damned business just trying to get from point A to point B.  “As I was saying our fourth quarter numbers were looking ….YAWWWWWWWN…excuse me señor this spot looks muy cozy, tu intiendes, un momento…”

I was having a moment of my own. A familiar and not particularly pleasant one. 

It felt exactly like the moment you have before you get in the pool or on a dance floor. Transitions are a motherfucker of awkwardness. Combine that with the incredible feeling that well… it’s nonsensical, of course, but if at that moment someone said “Whoa, hola señor, siesta es not por youuuuu, es for the peeple of Espannnnnnnya” I would’ve nodded and said “Yes, yes, lo siento mucho, I’m very sorry, I know I know” and shuffled away. That’s how much it felt like I was getting away with something. Something indulgent and decadent.  I couldn’t believe that I was allowed, and maybe even encouraged to lay down in the sun and do nothing.

The thing is, at that moment the entire world felt like it was falling apart.  In some countries, people were fist fighting over toilet paper.  Hospitals in Italy were swamped with death and the dying.  And from all accounts, at home it was simply just the calm before the storm with no indication off how bad it was going to get. I didn’t know what to do about it, and wasn’t sure if there was anything I could do. It was exhausting, and terrifying, and the future just felt like an unpleasant thing I was going to have to go through.

So, I took off my jacket, made a makeshift pillow and laid down on the grass in the plaza.  With the sun on my skin and a light breeze caressing my face, it was nicer than I would’ve ever imagined.

We were in London because a film I was involved with was accepted into the Raindance Film Festival. We had 48 hours to kill before the festival so we decided to go to Paris.

That might sound like an indulgent day-trip if you’ve never been to Europe, but it’s literally not a big deal. Yes, I’m using the word ‘literally’ literally,  Europe is astonishingly small.  One day I drove from New York City, NY to Gainesville, Florida and it took about 16 hours, 8am to midnight, (1000 miles/1600 kilometers).

I-95 the entire way.You get to see South of the Border and uh…. South of the Border.

The equivalent trip in Europe is drastically different.

Imagine, one day, you’re at the Eiffel Tower and you decide that you want to get high, but you want to do that in Amsterdam. So you drive through Belgium to Amsterdam and have the most amazing weed. Then you get in your car and you discover a problem.

You’re high.

Too high.

In an attempt to drive back to Paris you find yourself in Berlin, which you love, but mostly because of the Italians.  Still high (it’s weed from Amsterdam, what do you expect?) you get in your car and try to drive home but you find yourself in Prague, at which point you give up, start a new family and a new life, and it’s probably a happy one because if you google “prague+people” it’s almost entirely happy people except for the people who got banged up in that gas explosion.  But that’s not the point.

The point is that after driving from Paris to Amsterdam (through Belgium, where you stopped for a snack, let’s say fries), to Berlin and then to Prague, you’ll have driven through FIVE countries, and across the great majority of Western Europe.

The New York to Gainesville trip would still be going. 

You’d be in Jacksonville. You’d still have an hour and a half left in your road trip, including the crappy stretch through Waldo. That’s how small Europe is.

This makes Europe great for exploring cultures and learning about history, but it also makes it a great place to stage a World War and create new history because every culture you hate is right around the corner. You don’t have to get in a boat or a plane or anything, you can just saunter over and start shit, it’s geographically convenient.

Growing up in America, European culture is hard to get your hands on, so without the benefit of firsthand knowledge we’re forced to learn from the media and hearsay.   There’s a very  predictable menu of French ‘facts’ that every American child gets served, so our ignorance is at least a shared ignorance.

In proper internet fashion,

The 9 things every American is taught about France.

(in order)

1. The French smell and are sexually aggressive.
[5 years old]

It starts here. You’re four or five years old, and your parents introduce you to Looney Toons cartoons.  Bugs Bunny, The Tazmanian Devil, et al. Then one day for the first time in your life you hear a (bad) French accent…. and it comes from the voice of a skunk.

Meet Pepe Le Peu. In the first scene his funk kills a few flowers and insects and before you know a seed has been planted: French people stink.   The noxious fumes emanating from this french skunk kill a few more things, and you’re five years old so your sense of humor is seconds old, so you’re basically dying with laughter. It’s hilarious to you.

Pepe turns the corner and sees what he assumes is a skunk, but is actually a cat.  He falls in love instantly, jumps over and introduces himself to her with this winning line that almost every five year old American hears, and none of us remember.

“Everyone should have a hobby. Mine is making love.”

It’s a good thing you’re five years old because your working memory isn’t good enough to wander over to your parents and tell them all about your new hobby. “Mommy, Daddy, everyone should have a hobby….”

Anyway.

Pepe le Peu (get it? he stinks!) confesses his love. The cat is perplexed, and also, mute.  She never says a word.  But even if she could respond it doesn’t matter because Pepe GRABS her before she has a chance.  She struggles against his grip, but he’s too strong so she kicks him in the face and then she fucking FLEES for her life. He jokes at her failed attempt at self-defense (“I get a kick out of her”), and then Pepe Le Peu then chases her around for the duration of your childhood.  It is extremely fucked up.

2.  The French Apparently Eat Frogs
[5-6 years old]

Earlier in that clip, Pepe’s funk kills a frog, which is a wry joke about the French eating frogs. I’m not completely sure when I was told this, but I’d say 5 or 6 is a safe bet.  At this point I was probably ready to write off the entire country.  “Ew,” I probably said.

3.  The French Also Make Great Food That’s Not Really Theirs
[6-10 years old]

Then you learn about French Toast and French Fries, and you’re back on board with the French. The fact that the French didn’t make French Toast or French Fries doesn’t bother you because you’re six or seven and your need for factual accuracy is pretty much at an all time low. That said I’d like to meet the six year old that says “Excuse me, French Fries are from Belgium.” If only to prep that kid for a long and brutal childhood.

Neal Rowland.

Factual accuracy also wasn’t a big deal for Neal Rowland of Beaufort, North Carolina owner of Cubbies Restaurant (2.5 stars, yelp) who trademarked the term “Freedom Fries.” Neal got pissed that the French Minister of Foreign affairs said that France would not partake in the Iraq war, so he decided to rename the completely Belgian snack to Freedom Fries, to make them even less French than they already were.

Cubbies has long since shut down, and according to his Facebook page now Mr. Rowland sells boats, one of which has a name that I feel causes all of his friends to awkwardly cringe and ask “Well, who’s going to tell him what it means?”

It seems he hates the French so much he has gone out of his way not to go anywhere near them.

4. The French are Pioneers at Physical Intimacy

[13 years old]

There’s a theory that guys go through a “girls have cooties” stage until they’re 13.  Never happened for me. I remember crushing on girls at like 6.  However the rest of my so-called-peers caught up, and in our early teens we learned about French Kissing and we’re ready to forgive everything. You do WHAT with WHAT?

The problem with French kissing is that a lot of adults still French kiss the way I imagine that 13 year olds imagined French kissing would work.

(There’s something disturbing about that sentence. The content is clean but I think there are just words and ages that are too close together. )

Anyway, as a public service announcement, I’d like to point out that the human tongue is a garnish and not a meal.   You should use your tongue furtively… the slo-mo version of the way a … frog uses its tongue, holy shit wait is THAT why we called them Froggies? I thought it was a frog eating thing and not a kissing thing.  Now I have to go rebuild my entire knowledge of the French starting at age 5, and on a Tuesday.

5. The French Have History
[14-15]

This timespan is sort of a blur of French Trivia that you “learn.”  I throw it in “quotes” because can you really say you learned something you can only barely recall? It’d be better to say you’re “told about.”

Napoleon was short – there’s a revolution – a bastille – a wall – maybe they sang a song about it called one more day but maybe that’s something else and, oh yeah, there are a couple of kings named Louis, oh also they had a lot of wars (so convenient!) and their taller guys all got killed in it so they’re kinda short, kinda like Napoleon.  Also oddly enough they really like Ben Franklin.  Seriously though I’ve seen Les Miserables the movie, the musical and read the book and I don’t remember anything about it.

6. The French Gave Us A Gift Once And Will Never Make That Mistake Again

The Statue of Liberty.  They gave it to us.   If you go on the tour they will tell you it was a gift, but they’ll only tell you who the gift was from if you BEG and make a very big deal out of wanting to know.  Americans never, ever, talk about this aspect of the Statue of Liberty, because we are ashamed of it.  Imagine the person you hate at work gives you something awesome that everyone then says is the BEST thing about you and signifies everything you stand for. This gift is your global IDENTITY, and that bitch/jerk is STILL talking about you in the staff room.

7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
[???]

To be fair, I don’t know when we Americans learn this, I just know that we know about it, maybe from a cartoon or a musical or something. The problem is that if you ever ask an American where Notre Dame is there’s a really good chance we’ll say Ireland and it’s not our fault.

No one has ever explained to me why the University of Notre Dame is in America, and why it has an Irish mascot and why that Irish Mascot is Fighting.

Is it okay to suggest that all Irish men are violent? No. It’s wrong. But on top of wrong, it’s dumb to suggest that those same violent Irish men all hang out in Notre Dame. It’s not often that a person can be so wrong and so dumb in such an avoidable way but every weekend hundreds of thousands of Americans cheer for (or against) the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.

(I won’t disgrace myself by telling you how old I was when I learned that the University of Notre Dame is actually in America.)

8. The French Are Sexual Pioneers part II
[16-20]Somewhere in your teens you learn about a menagé a trois.  Some cunning French scientists in a lab were so burned out on sex with two people (yawn) that they asked themselves “Ce qui se passe si trois personnes ont des rapports sexuels?”  The answer?  Confusion, chaos and a Bucket List item that most men die leaving unchecked. (But not nearly as many Women).  So many people have bought this wine and been sorely disappointed, but 2Chainz makes it clear that you just have to get involved.    Our love-hate with the French is so intense, I’m pretty confident that you can’t buy a wine that just says “threesome” in Paris.

9.  The French Hate Americans
[Adulthood]

Before my trip, I mentioned to a few friends that I might go to Paris, thinking they might give me a few pointers. Instead, each person winced like I’d told them I might go on a heroin binge.

“Look, Phil. I know you want to do this but…shit shit shit, okay. Look. Go to the Louvre, check out the Eiffel Tower, eat the food, but be ready. They hate Americans. Get In. Get Out. Do NOT Make Eye Contact, use a safe word. I’ll be here if you need me. Tell the embassy. Shit. I love you man. Really, it’s been great. We had some times, didn’t we?”

The thing is, any trip that could result in being being gifted a large statue, menaging on deux other people before being beat up by a mis-placed leprechaun seems like a trip worth taking so we booked our tickets to CDG.

Obama is normally fairly effusive about stuff, so when the only statements he made about Stonehenge were that it was “cool” and that he’d “knocked it off his bucket list” I should’ve known then to lower my expectations. 

“Cool, knocked that off my bucket list” is just one step away from “Well. Okay. That’s done” and a step past “So…every six to eight thousand miles? Got it.” The article also indicated that he’d spent twenty minutes at the henge, which I attributed to him being Presidentially Busy.  I didn’t consider the possibility that Stonehenge is worth about 20 minutes, and that’s only if you’re being Presidentially Polite.

I didn’t know any of this though and was simply excited, because I was in England and I was going to Stonehenge. In just a few hours I’d be surrounded by the magical rocks, filled with the beauty and majesty of the druids.

Would I have a spiritual enlightenment? Would I feel compelled to pray? Would I cry? Who knew? A few hours ago I called a woman a cunt because she asked me to, so it was clear to me that England is a land of unknowable wonder and surprise.

Our very English host prepared a very English breakfast, which consisted of a number of very English things, including tea. We nibbled on breakfast to be polite, but as soon as she wasn’t looking we shoved everything that wasn’t *completely* liquid into our pockets, bags, and purses for an event only known as “later.”

Apple? Squeeze it in a bag, for later. Crackers? Front pocket, for later. Packet of Ketchup? Hold on to it, it might be useful.  Later. Every traveller I know becomes a post-depression family of ten the second they get off the plane. My fridge at home never has as much food as I do on my person when traveling.

Americans have a stereotype for being rampant overeaters which, to be fair, is hard to deny.

It’s harder to deny when bumping into an American Traveler can dislodge the contents of an entire cornucopia all over the very English ground. “It’s for later” we’ll shriek, crawling over the dirt and Gollum-gathering our food-hoard.

Before we left though, I checked our Narnia-sized wardrobe for a Narnia.

There was no Narnia.

Mostly, I was unsurprised by this, because that’s how life is. There just aren’t any Narnia wardrobes. None that I’ve found anyway. 

However.

If upon reaching my hand into the wardrobe, the back of it gave way and I found myself in a foreign land with a giant talking Lion who may or may not be a Christ figure(‘this doesn’t end well for you lion’), a part of me would’ve shrieked with glee “I KNEW it! I’ve ALWAYS known it!” Is it weird that my life would make *more* sense if something strange and Narnical happened. Narnia makes more sense than (say) adulthood. Seems easier.

(When I wrote “Seems easier” in my mind it sounded exactly like the end of that scene in the social network where Justin “Sean Parker” Timberlake tells him to drop the THE in THEFACEBOOK.COM. “It’s cleaner.” “Seems easier.” That’s the tonality with which to read those two words. FYI.)

The lack of a magical foreign land inside my room shouldn’t have been disappointing, but it was.  In my disappointment I’d now raised the bar for my happiness to such an untenable level that the upcoming visit to Stonehenge was at a distinct disadvantage. “What? No Snow Queen? Fuck ALL of this.” That said, the brochure for Stonehenge was promising.

Look closely.

This is what I was sold.

Stonehenge looks motherfucking AMAZING. Like, this is just as appropriate.

I don’t know if these people are running to Stonehenge or from Stonehenge, but whatever it is they certainly don’t look unhappy.  Obama’s leisurely stroll made Stonehenge seem peaceful and relaxing, but these four are in the process of being thrilled. I made sure to wear shoes that were good for running or chasing or fleeing or whatever the hell this family of four was up to.

There’s a bus that runs to and from Stonehenge, and Old Sarum.  The best four seats in any of these buses are the front seats on the top level because then you get to just watch the countryside unfold before you.  These four seats will always be taken by Americans, I learned (and then did), because we love having the best stuff.

These were the first Americans we’d bumped into (so much food!) since landing in England a short 18 hours before.  Miles away from our home we heard the distinct accent (!) of people who shared, at the very least, the same passport, the same desire to travel, and the same interest in Stonehenge. Kindred Spirits. Ka-tet. The feeling I had upon hearing my countrymen was probably what you expect.

Fear. 

If there’s any sure-fire way to ruin a vacation, a conversation with other Americans will do it.  This isn’t a universal belief.  Studies have shown (okay, so I made that part up) that half of Americans hate talking to other Americans abroad.  The other half love it, and will actively seek it out.

If these studies had gone further they would’ve discovered that the first half only feel that way because they only end up talking to the second half, and if they had just spoken inside their own half they’d find a group of people that they kinda like hanging out with. 

Look, that’s confusing, but the upshot is this: I didn’t spend …eight pounds? eighty pounds? two hundred pence? Whatever, I didn’t spend a ton of money to fly across the country and talk to people that would’ve ignored me at home for free.

That’s the problem with money, it doesn’t have any say in the sort of person that can accumulate enough of it to travel.  In fact, money seems (in my experience) to accumulate disproportionately around the worst kind of people.

That doesn’t mean I would, like, kick puppies in order to get rich, but I bet a lot of rich people would, which basically proves my point.

The 4 guys at the front of the bus didn’t know each other, but they were cut from very similar cloth as they were actively engaged in a conversation that’s almost an American pastime:  The battle over who got the better deal.   Saving money is the secondary goal of deal hunters. The primary goal is shoving that amount down the throat of any person who paid more and makes the ultimate mistake of opening their mouth to say so.  The statement “I only paid $[x] because I did [y]” translates (loosely) to “I hope you and all of your descendants die in poverty.”

So I quietly judged these guys from the background, and made myself the second worst person on the bus (“Dude can’t we just small talk without you sniping us in a blog months later? Also your English accent is garbage, especially when whispered.”)

Finally, the bus parked next to the other fifty buses outside of the Stonehenge gift shop and welcome center.  I could almost taste the majesty.

We handed our tickets and they offered us a little portable speaker thing we could use for the tour.  My cheap-survivor mode kicked in and I smiled and said “Oh no thank you.” She read the thriftiness in my face and added “…it’s free.” Which is generous, but it also seems like such a rookie move, England.

Gift shops are amateur hour.  American daycares have gift shops.  This is Stonehenge! You could sell the speakers, you could sell the shuttle, you could even sell a special “Druid Tour” where you get to wear a robe and walk right up to the rocks and spin around or chant.   You’re just throwing money away, really.

“You don’t get to be a 1st world country with an 18 trillion dollar deficit by giving things away, England, ” Obama thought, but did not say.

There are two routes to Stonehenge from the gift shop. You can either take the shuttle which parks right next to the henge OR or the walking path which goes through a quiet forest and emerges onto the henge.  The shuttle definitely seemed like the golden chalice of choices so we took the path.

 They asked us not to touch the sheep, which was the first time anyone has ever said that to me.  That was probably a sad day when they had to add that to the training regimen.

As we walked along the path I made room in my heart and soul for an experience.  Tears. Religious fervor. Spontaneous combustion, whatever, I was down. The trees parted, and we emerged into a clearing and for the first time I saw Stonehenge, and it really, truly sunk in.

Stonehenge is a place where some people propped up some rocks a long time ago. No one knows why, it’s in a pretty enough field and there are some mounds near it, where some people got buried a long time ago. You can walk on the graves (because they’re “burial mounds”) but you can’t touch the rocks. Also, it’s Disney crowded there.

Sadly, the thing that will likely stick out most about Stonehenge was this moment.

Stonehenge represents the first time I saw a Selfie-Stick, a small stick you buy and attach your camera/phone to so that you can take a picture of yourself, or your entire group of friends, all of whom are collectively pledging allegiance to a flag which asserts your group’s belief that every single person you’re likely to bump into will be absolutely useless, even with a language barrier. Sorta bummed me out.

I listened to the portable speaker just long enough to discover that I didn’t want to know anything about Stonehenge (gotta pick your battles)  so I turned it off.  We took a few pictures in front of the henge, high-fived, and then boarded the shuttle back to the gift shop.

We shared the shuttle with a dozen or so people. Four college aged American girls were having a polite, but stilted, conversation with a man in a wheel chair (left leg amputated slightly below the knee) and his wife.   We asked how the Americans felt about London , and they said they loved it. When asked what we should do, everything they recommend was a shopping trip.

The man in the wheelchair was more engaging and told us that when he was a kid you used to be able to walk right up to the henges, but they eventually stopped that because they were worried a Stone was going to fall on someone, and henge them right into the ground.   We laughed at the idea of them being able to create another mound right there and basically get a new burial mound for free, forcing yet another revision to the training regiment. “Over here you can see two, excuse me three burial mounds that date back to thousands of years and two very awkward weeks ago.”

When I say WE laughed I do of course mean me, my girlfriend, the man, and his wife.  The four girls didn’t enjoy this joke at all.  Maybe if I’d given them a receipt with it…

No one asked us what we thought of Stonehenge which is a shame because I was ready with my punchline.

“It’s cool. I checked it off my bucket list.”

[Thanks to Lauren W. for reading drafts of this.]



	Want to get an email when I post the next entry?: 

	
	




	
I promise that I will NEVER sell or share your email.  If I do, you can come punch me in the face as long and hard as you want. I would deserve it.

I’m a filmmaker living in Los Angeles. A film I made was accepted at the Raindance International Film Festival in London, England.  Having never really been abroad,  I decided to check out a bit of Europe.  My first stop: Salisbury.   Thousands of miles from home,  I decided to have a very English experience and went to a club and went to a very English club and they very much played Beyonce.

This is not an anomaly.  During the course of this trip I will visit 4 countries that speak 4 different languages.  In each country, within minutes of entering any bar or club I will inevitably hear Beyonce.   You can divide the number of minutes you spent  in the club by the number of minutes you waited before hearing Beyonce.  A larger number means there were more songs, a smaller number means there was more Beyonce.  If, upon entering a club, Beyonce is already playing, that would mean the number of minutes is 0, and you can’t divide by zero, without getting infinity. The Infinity Beyonce. Regardless, every club has a Beyonce Quotient, and this number is lower than I would’ve ever feared thought.  It’s not just music though, movies suffer from the same problem.

I went to a Sainsbury’s (CVS) in London and the movie section looked just like the movie sections in the states.  Really.  There wasn’t even a token copy of “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” or anything.  Just Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence as far as the eye could see. Later, the joy I had upon seeing my first double decker bus was immediately crushed when it drove by, revealing a giant poster for The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Then it clicked.

America is the court jester of the world.

We don’t see ourselves that way.  Our self-esteem is uh… healthy.  It’s not like we’re swimming in Flags and Eagles, but we’re not NOT swimming in them either.  If you asked most Americans where’s the best place in the world to live, they wouldn’t hesitate to say “America.”  (And in some of the scarier places they might say “‘Murica”).  Due to the recent influx of Mexicans, Americans have this weird belief that the rest of the world is *also* eager to scale our walls, but don’t because there’s an ocean between us. 

It’s not true. The rest of the world is like Canada.  Perfectly content where they are.

Huge chunks of the world have no interest in any of our Eagles, or Flags and really only check in with us long enough to say “HEY AMERICA, DANCE FOR US! SING US A SONG! SHOW US YOUR FX!”, and, hungry for attention we do, while mumbling “Hey our democracy is up HERE.”

They roll their eyes, point at our education system and our healthcare situation and our not-so-metric system, plug their fingers in their ears and sing Drunk in Love. Touché. <– Also very European.

So I’m here in Salisbury (population 45,000). Spitting distance from Stonehenge and The Magna Carta, if you are a pretty great spitter, otherwise it’s driving distance. Everything is driving distance if you’re patient enough. You can drive across England in the time it takes to drive from Miami, FL to Panama City,FL.

(God, even the concept of spitting distance seems distastefully American.   “Is it close?” One cowboy says to the other “I dunno, can y’spit on it?”)

You know….the British are known to be remarkably polite.  I wonder if that’s just a function of…proximity.  If you make an ass of yourself in Swindon, you can’t move too far away from the scene without changing your nationality.  It’d be inconvenient to have a massive falling out with someone and realize that yes, you can move and start a new life, but yes, that life is going to be Scottish.

If I live in North Dakota,  I can act like an asshole and piss off everyone in North Dakota. Then I can just move to South Dakota and start a new life without learning a new accent or changing my passport. I’ll probably already know my way around town.

Bismarck to Rapid City

Meanwhile, at the club.

The not so Magna Carter’s wife is just killing it. People are singing along, and while the song is cute with an English accent, it’s not the wild foreign experience I’d signed up for. It felt a lot like being in New York. Or Gainesville. Or Las Vegas.  Or Berlin.  Why is Beyonce so popular here, I think, she’s ours! Don’t they have their own Beyonce?  (“We gave you Adele, Ed Sheehan, and Jessie J, so ease up.” – Great Britain)

Just when I reach inner peace with our joint custody of Beyonce, the next song comes on and this one kills them the exact same way and confuses me even more.  It’s not that I didn’t like the song. I did. Everyone did. It went to #3 on Billboard (Both in the US and UK) and was certified gold. I know every word.  It’s just surprising because there’s been a lot of music in the fifteen years since clubs went nuts over Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me.”

In the beginning of the movie Contact, there’s a sequence where the camera pulls out to space and you hear all of the transmissions that Earth has ever sent out.  The first couple transmissions are recent, grunge music, spice girls, etc. By the time you get out to the furthest edge of our galaxy the skips are larger, from MLK’s speech to music from the 20s.  Maybe our popular music is like that.  By the time it’s (SLAP ME) crossed the pond, 1999 and 2014 are basically the same.

I’m immediately jealous.  We place such a high value on newness with our music in the states. If a song isn’t so old that it’s a classic or so new that the artist is still learning the words then we’ll boo or we’ll pout or we’ll climb into the booth and slit the DJs throat for not having the latest s@#t.

It’s a shame though,  there are songs I would rock out to RIGHT NOW that just aren’t old enough to be cool again.  So for a moment it’s refreshing to be in a place that seems to like music without worrying about whether or not we’ve decided it’s okay (or not) to listen to that music.

(The King’s Head Inn. Ever been to a bar where there’s pictures from a history book on the wall? Just portraits of kings. Classy. Not even one girl in a bikini. I’ve been to bars where the walls were JUST naked girls. Ripped from adult magazines. True story.)

We make our way upstairs, and there’s tables and… no bouncers. It’s nice, comfortable even.  No one tells us we need to move. No one says you need to order food to sit here.  No one cares at all.  I want to turn to the Blokes/FemaleBlokes around me and say “Do you know how many pounds it would’ve cost just to sit here if we were in Los Angeles? Well I don’t know either because I’m bad at converting, but trust me, you wouldn’t like it.”

My girlfriend and I hang out for a bit and then decide we need to go someplace even MORE local.  I want someplace British. Some place COVERED in Union Jacks, someplace with people singing “I’m Henry the Eighth I am” while mugs filled with mead slosh in every hand, the menu has nothing but fish, and chips, and bangers, and mash, and fish covered in chips and bangers filled with mash-flavored-fish-chips. A place so British that I’ll worry that they’re going to re-colonize America right there starting with me.

BLOKE:  Hey you, in the dreads. Yeah, you. You just got colonized.
ME:  I’m intrigued, but honestly man that sounds a LOT like Slavery.
BLOKE: It’s not Slavery.
ME: Ok….Does this mean I’m British now?
BLOKE: Right-O, mate!
ME: Hell, yeah! I’m in. This bar is —
Bloke clears his throat in a very polite English way.
ME: — this pub, excuse me, this pub is the best. Hail the Queen! Oasis 4ever.

Clearly I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know it’s not Beyonce mixed with Nelly.  So we soldier on.

The next club looks so much like so many other bars that I take a video just because I know when I get back I won’t believe it.

So very much the same, but so different because there’s a -garden- that the sign is inviting us to go partake in.  Here, come  to the garden… this way. Yonder. Through to Garden. And then we’ll have a bit of tea.  Here… in the Gaaaarden.

American bars don’t have Gardens.  It’s just a sweaty box where you get groped and lung cancer. No Garden.  If you’re lucky there’s a patio.  But it’s never presented as “Through to Patio.”  It’s more “Fuck you, yeah there’s a patio here, try not to puke on anyone.”

We go Through to Garden.

People are smoking, drinking, talking to friends.  We didn’t have friends so we sat at a table and made friends.

The conversation was nice. Having grown up in a small town I’m intimately familiar with the small town list of grievances.  Salisbury, which is lovingly called Smallsbury, is “too small” and “everyone is in everyone’s business” and “I know everyone here” and “there’s nothing to do.”  It’s the exact inverse of the LA list of grievances “It’s too big” and “Everyone is a stranger” and “I think I’m carrying Adrien Brody’s baby.”

Someone asked for a cigarette and when the box of cigarettes appeared I laughed out loud. At that moment I learned that while America might not hate me, England definitely likes her people more.

Cigarettes cause cancer which causes death. This is the warning sign, mandated by the US Government, on the back of a pack of cigarettes.

In England, and much of the EU it turns out, the warnings look like this.

I don’t laugh though because I can’t, in my inebriated state, explain how great it is that these things are so honest about their lethality.  Not to someone who is currently being lethal’ed by them, anyway. It seems wrong, and I put a lot of energy into at least seeming like a nice person.  So much so that midway through the conversation, the lady I’m speaking to interrupts me abruptly and says “You seem like a nice guy.”

The conversation had gotten off to a rocky start. We started talking about relationships, because that’s my jam, and then she said something that I thought meant “relationships get a little rough” but then she said something which made me think that her relationship got physically Rough.

“I am a nice guy.” I say to her, happy to steer the conversation away from domestic violence.

“You’re probably too nice.” she says, except with her accent it comes out as something you want your neighbors to turn down.  Turn down all that NOICE, we’re trying to sleep. You might say.

This was very clearly a trap.  I figured I’m a garden so things couldn’t go that badly. “Too nice for what?”

“Call me a dirty cunt,” she says.

Have you ever studied a foreign language?

The books are filled with chapters on what you should say in common circumstances when you’re abroad.

Chapter 1 is Greetings. (“Hi. What’s Your Name? Where are you from?”).  Chapter 2 is The Restaurant (“I’d like to have some water.”) Chapter 3 The Train Station (“Where is the terminal?”).

I took about dos years of espanol, and un semestre of French, but I don’t remember anything about what to do when someone asks you to call them a cunt, dirty or otherwise.

I give a panicked look across the table at my girlfriend, fearing that she’s hearing all the wrong greatest hits of this conversation “…you’re nice….i’m nice….cunt.”  What could she possibly think?

Furthermore,  I’m pretty clear I’ve never even said that word in front of her at this point.  She’s wrapped up in conversation with DirtyCuntLady’s friend. (In the world of nicknames there is nothing worse than Dirty Cunt Lady. I’ll admit it, but it’s just the only shorthand that works for you and I right now, right? You know I’m not *actually* casting aspersions about any part of this lady’s vagina right? It’s just about the request? Cool? Cool.)

Feeling pressured — I think she’s trying to trick me into getting kicked out of the pub or something,  I try but I just… I can’t.  I just can’t find it in myself to call her a dirty cunt. It seems wrong in every possible way.  I just won’t. I …c(u/a)n’t.

Instead I challenge her, thinking she’ll back off and we can get back to talking about cigarettes, “Okay, you call me a fucking wanker!” I say, feeling triumphant.

I had barely finished saying “wanker” before she says, with glee “YOU FUCKING WANKER!”

Emboldened, I yelled “YOU DIRTY CUNT!”

The table froze. My girlfriend was shocked. She spun and called my name, assuming that this is what it looked like right before you got kicked out of England, on your very first day.

Without missing a beat the lady turned to my girlfriend and the rest of the table and announced “Ahahaha I am a cunt,” then she smiled and added “But I’m a lovely one.”

This is not a garden. This is a patio. This is Salisbury. I fucking love it.

Last Week: The Part before this part.
Next Week: StoneHenge I guess?

Earlier I told my friends that I wanted to find the “Gainesville, Florida” of England.   I grew up in Gainesville and having spent time in a number of American cities, I know how useless some of them are for experiencing America. My presupposition was that visiting London would be fairly useless when it comes to experiencing England.   During my time abroad people will tell me they’ve been to “The States” (that’s how they refer to it, holding on to that colonial ownership ’til the bitter end), and explain that they’ve been to New York.  I tell them that New York is so weird that other Americans go to New York to see how weird it is, and when they get home they breathe a sigh of relief that they don’t live in New York.  Being in New York is just not indicative of anything other than being in New York.

Gainesville, Florida is a nice innocuous city, population ~120k, with a footnote: “Home of the University of Florida.”  Salisbury, England is similar, except the footnote is “Pretty close to Stonehenge.”

Except that’s not entirely true.  This is the problem with Europe.  Even your small ‘nothing’ town is SO old that it is just teeming with history.  Castles, everywhere, religious artifacts, significant wars.   There are people watching TV right now that are almost as old as America.

In addition to being Pretty Close to Stonehenge, it’s also the home of The Magna Carta, which you’ll know of as being something that Jay-Z referred to in his album which you’ve already stopped listening to.  The Magna Carta something something Democracy something Constitution something Church something old document.  To be honest, I didn’t even know that much about the Magna Carta.  It’s weird to think that, decay aside, there exists a piece of paper with my handwriting that proves that in 8^th grade I almost certainly knew a LOT about the Magna Carta (and had to prove it to Mr. Beckmann in US History) but that piece of paper is (unlike the Magna Carta) not in a church, not in a Jay Z lyric, and really no one has asked me about it since.  I don’t have the slightest clue where it is.

Years before Mr. Beckmann’s class, I was at J.J. Finley, which, being kids, we renamed JJ Junkyard.   How did we know what Junkyard was? We were like… seven years old.  This was before we learned that you shouldn’t “shit where you sleep.” There’s something very sad about a group of children making fun of the public school that they’re currently attending.

KID 1:You know what’s terrible?

KID 2: This place where we are creating the academic foundation that will determine the course of our lives?

KID 1: Yeah, it’s not unlike a Junkyard.

BOTH: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Anyway.

JJ (Junkyard) Finley was the first time I’d heard the word Salisbury because of the lunch program.  The way it generally worked at Finley was that white kids brought “home lunch”: a paper bag, which had things like sandwiches, capri suns, and fruit roll ups.  The black kids had “school lunch” which had things that were sometimes edible and always gross.   One of those things was Salisbury Steak, a brown square of something we’ll call “meat” for the sake of argument, that I had exactly one bite of and NEVER ate again.

I never really thought about Salisbury again until I wanted to see Stonehenge.   It’s really a testimony of my own inner flexibility that my reflex wasn’t “Salisbury? No, thanks. Let’s check out Cornwall or something.” Childhood trauma sticks with you. I’m a fighter.

We make it to Salisbury by way of train, and then cab it to our AirBnB.  The car stops, and the cabbie reads off the amount and with a sinking sensation I realize that I don’t have any pieces of paper or metal coins that have that exact number printed/molten onto them. I’m going to have to make change.

The currency exchange problem creates a situation where either I have to overpay people, underpay people. Every time. Also as a result I make every transaction take ten minutes longer than necessary while I try to figure out what coin is worth what, and how to convert that to dollars.   I didn’t want to make the guy spend more time waiting for me to do math than he’d spent driving, so I just ballpark it based on weight and hand over some coins.  “Hmm, this is hefty, have this.”

“You do realize you’ve paid me double the fare, right?”  Just by asking, I feel he’s earned it, it’s only…fair.

The house is super English and adorable.  I’m not sure when architects invented the “closet”, but it was sometime after most of the houses in England were built.  As a result, most of the rooms have a Narnia cabinet in them, because…you know… clothes, right?  The host is super English and adorable and says things like “The English are a bit mad about horses.”

 We see pictures of her (grown) kids who send letters addressed to ‘Mum’.  There are absolutely no pictures or references to a Man/Father/Husband type, so I make a mental note to place him in the Voldemort box, never ask about him and think “Well, at least she got the house.”

By now it’s pretty late, and we’re kind of slap happy tired but it’s also Friday night so we head down to the bars pubs.

The bar scene in a quaint English town is different, and I have to overcome a bit of resistance to the idea.  There’s something strange about discovering a quaint Hans Christian Andersen town with cobblestones and then immediately trying to get drunk in it.  The first bar we go to is called The White Stag or something.  The bartender smiles when she sees me (during our entire stay in Salisbury I see two black people, and none with dreadlocks), and then almost falls apart when I open my mouth to order a Perroni.  WHO HAS THE ACCENT NOW?

I’m halfway around the world, drinking a Perroni with my sick American accent, thinking about what a world traveler I am and how foreign and different everything is, how far away I am from everything and everyone I know when suddenly the club goes wild because the DJ has started the next song.  Beyonce.

Next Week: More Salisbury, probably some Stone Henge,  and why that lady asked me to call her a dirty cunt.

Last Week: The UK Customs Lady tries her best to determine if I’m here to do ruinous things to her nation.

Soooooo…. the customs agent isn’t fucking around.  That much is clear because my usual smile and friendly banter does not engender the same.  She asks why I’m here and I tell her that I’m here to attend a film festival.  Not coincidentally, this is exactly what I wrote on the form.  Is she fact-checking?  Maybe she thinks I wouldn’t be able to remember my lie for the whole thirty seconds between handing her the card and her verbal double check? Maybe she thinks I’ll say “Uhh, wait, what did I write down again?” BUSTED.

(Or maybe she’s making a VERY subtle Monty Python joke.)

The customs form also has a field where you fill in the address where you’re staying. Mine reads “Don’t know. AirBnB.”  Because my girlfriend booked it and I couldn’t be bothered to ask her.  I had every intention of asking but then people around me started being Clever and British and I got distracted.

The customs agent doesn’t like this answer, and asks me, incredulously “You don’t know where you’re staying?”  That’s what I wrote on the form, and why I wrote it, I think, but do not say.

A second customs agent (the one that was talking to my girlfriend) comes over to my agent and says “She says they’re going to a Film Festival, is that what he says?”

Holy shit they are fact checking us!

This is both surprisingly intense and intensely stupid. It’s a level of scrutiny that wouldn’t catch even the FLIMSIEST of terrorist plots.  This method will only stop the old, the forgetful, and the disorganized, which would be a really tasteless name for Clint Eastwood’s very last Western.  If this is how you’re going to fact check people you might as well open up the gates and pass out your giant keys (wait for it).  Do you know how hard it is to pick an address from a map and say “Visiting some friends from uni?”  Very easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do.  “AirBnB. Don’t know” guy is not the guy coming to blow shit up.  The guy who says “626 willowby lane my aunt lives there and I am coming to visit her for two weeks before returning to my home, I will be staying at 626 willowby lane. 626. God save the queen.”  Well, I’d ask that person a few additional questions.

—

There’s a few things you should know about England, should you pop by for a bit.  Keep in mind, I am an anglophile. I love England. If they would have me, I would move there, tomorrow.  Truly.

1. England has Relationship Baggage

Have you ever broken up with someone, and then months later they’ve started dating someone new, and that person is better than you in every single meaningful and measurable way? That’s England.  A few hundred years ago they sent some people to date The New World and create England 2.0. New England.

Those people said “Oh, sweet, thanks” and started their own country, which quickly eclipsed England.  Then said country went on to claim their very language (English) and spread it all over the world, and now when people think of speaking “English” they don’t even think of England. They think of your ex-boyfriend/ex-girlfriend, basically.  It’s rough.

Then, on the rebound.  England dated Australia.  To make this metaphor work you could think of Australia as England’s jump-off (or booty call, or town harlot, depending on your age), but it was the jump-booty-harlot in the sense that Australia was basically a penal colony (like Fiorina 161, for the 1 of you that is *that deep* into David Fincher). Australia was where England sent their worst convicts as punishment.  “Worst” is subjective because back in old-school England there were over 200 crimes that carried the death penalty, including (but not limited to) cutting down trees, or stealing rabbits. Still, they sent some 160,000 people to Australia to teach them a lesson.

Typical day in England.

Typical day in Australia.

The lesson of course is that life in Australia is sunny and really fucking awesome, and there’s a plethora of trees and the rabbits here are huge and awesome and carry baby rabbits in their fur stomach pockets. Have you learned your lesson convicts?

After the 160,000 convicts were sent to Australia for taking things that didn’t belong to them, they pooled their taking ability and collectively took Australia away from England  in 1932. And now, according to Kayak, Londoners have to spend roughly 900 pounds to go to a place that was punishment just 100 years ago.

British people carry this in their heart, every single day.

2. England is a Pirate Economy – #1

Do you see this key? It’s really glorious right? When you walk around with a key like this it makes every day feel like a grand adventure, which is especially important when you live in a place which has had only three to four days of sunshine since Richard the second.

What would you guess this is the key to? A carriage?  A vault of swords? Narnia? You’d be wrong. This is the key to an apartment. Not even a particularly nice one. Three of the four places I rented in England had keys that looked like this.  I’ve lived in apartments, so I know what apartment keys are supposed to look like. They look like this.  Or like this.   British keys look like pirate keys because every single British person’s great grandfather was Blackbeard. True story.

3. England is a Pirate Economy – #2

Change in America has become so meaningless that entire phrases have gone extinct.  Due to the sinking American economy (more on that later) these phrases have had to (ahem) change with the times.

ORIGINAL

“Here’s a quarter, go call someone who cares”

“That and 50 cents will buy you a cup of coffee.”

ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION

“That and 50 cents will buy you a cup of coffee as long as the original “That” was an additional 50 cents because coffee costs a dollar at the *waffle house*”

“Here’s a quarter, go find someone who cares enough to give you another ten cents because that’s what it costs to make a call these days, oh nevermind there aren’t any more payphones are there?”

A quarter is so useless that there’s almost nothing you can do with it by itself.  And a penny?  If I drop one penny, it doesn’t even *occur* to me to stop what I’m doing to pick it up.   Minimum wage in California is 900 pennies per hour, which is 15 pennies per minute.  Stopping to pick up a penny is actually a net loss in the value of time. In America if someone gives you a handful of coins you are completely entitled to tell them to go to hell and stop being such a condescending piece of shit.

The British are socially immediately downstream of pirates and you can see it in their economy.

You could buy a kidney with any *one* of these coins, I think.

In England if someone gives you a handful of coins you can go pay your rent with it. It’s an astonishing amount of money. I will push British people out of the way if I hear a coin hit the ground.

I didn’t say that, and as a result we made it through customs.

Next Week: The lady that asked me to call her a dirty cunt.
Last Week: Why the English accent is the best thing in the world.

We’ve landed, and this is what I scream-whisper before we’ve even left the plane.  My girlfriend does not find this hilarious the first, second, or really any of the times that I say it.  Unfortunately for her, I find it MORE hilarious each time. So I just try repeating it until the hilarity sinks in.  Ultimately I am shushed.  It doesn’t matter. I am in England! I’m Traveling! Well. Not just yet. First I have to go through customs.

For the one friend of mine that doesn’t know, the customs gate is where you kinda state your business, your intent, show your password and basically say “Hey I’m not here to do illegal shit.” You can learn a lot about a country by their customs intake process.   In America, you can go through customs faster if you pay $100.  England allows you to go through customs faster if you’re English.  England has two lines, one for UK/EU passports, and one for everyone else.  They assign about 15 agents to the UK line and two to the Others line. After the UK line is processed they open up the bonus agents but that takes a while.  But it’s okay because… well because of a million tiny reasons:

The restroom doesn’t say restroom it says toilet!

The outlets have different prongs!

The shops have different symbols. No $, just £, How do you TYPE that? Is their Shift-4 – £?

Everything is slightly different, and I love it. I’m in England,  and the coolest thing about this nearly entirely new world is that nearly everyone in the entire world is English. The customs agent. The gate agent. The police.  The old guy who bumps into me and says “Excuse me, pardon me, terribly sorry.” He apologizes three times in six words.  I haven’t heard three apologies in America in my life, cumulatively. It’s so British that it makes me want to run up to every single person I can and engage them in meaningless conversation just so they can… talk to me.  They all have an English accent! And somehow this is enough to make me feel as excited as a kid. Yes, I know everyone loves English accents but I’m a little nuts about them. You could comfortably say I was raised on them. One, actually.

 There’s an audiocassette of me as a baby, only months, (maybe weeks?) old. I’m subvocalizing, just talking nonsense, pretty much the way I am now.  Happy, gurgling, and completely filled with energy. Too much energy, it seems, because Baby Me hasn’t been sleeping.   

Then on the tape another voice pops up.  A young woman, she’s laughing, a bit giddy maybe from lack of sleep, but maybe just giddily enjoying… no, loving her new role as a mom.  My Mom.

My Mom asks “Why won’t you just go to sleep Philip?  Just sleep a little bit,” then giggling at her next thought she jokes, “What would make you sleep? Do you want some alcohol?” However when she says it, it’s hard to understand her.  (Because she’s totally blitzed and now here’s 2000 words about my Mom the alcoholic.  just kidding, just kidding)  The truth is, you can’t understand what she says because she’s speaking with a very thick English accent.

My Mom was born in Jamaica, but at the time Jamaica was still a British colony so around the age of two her family moved to England, where she lived her entire life before meeting my Dad.   As such, while she’s capable of doing a jamaican patois, her natural accent is English. Is this a big deal? It is to me.

My world, before I could even understand words, was filled with her voice, and her accent.   The maternal voice that nurtured me when I was sad, encouraged me when I wanted to give up,  the voice that talked to me in the womb in the secret one-sided conversations that Moms have with their unborn children when no ones around (that turn into secret one-sided conversations when we’re grown) — that voice was an English one. I’m not a psychologist, but chances are Mary Ainsworth would say that this is a very big deal.

*[I say all of these things in past tense. This encouraging and baby nurturing still goes on to this day. Kind of a high maintenance grown man-baby that needs so much fucking encouragement and nurturing that my Mom should’ve held on to the receipt and traded me in for another kid or maybe a pony or something.]

Due to her, and her side of the family, my life was filled with Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Beano comics, Smarties, Danger Mouse (not the DJ, the cartoon), Faulty Towers.  My godmothers who sent me british pounds, birthday cards read “Many happy returns!” Do you have any idea how great Winnie The Pooh sounds when read to you with an English accent? I told a friend about my Mom’s English background and she said “Oh. That makes sense. You seem like you have an English Mum.” I took it as a compliment…?

In my early childhood it wasn’t an accent, that’s just how my Mom talked. If asked I probably would’ve said that’s just how all Moms talk. (Oooh what a cool and crazy world it would be in if that was just the Mom accent? Like, if Childbirth was so intense that it by the time the contractions ended you were all  “Listen dahling I rather think you should consider a few things…”)

In my later childhood I realized that my Mom had an accent, mostly because of the way entire world flipped out whenever she opened her mouth.

“OH MY GAWWWD WHERE ARE YOU FRUUUU-UMMMMM.”*

*(We lived in Macon, Georgia for a while.)

One of my earliest memories is in Macon, actually.  I’m at daycare and some of us are throwing rocks over a fence. It’s the kind of thing that I guess is fun if the world is only 5 years old.  The other kids cleared the fence easily.  Toddler Me, showing the early signs of athleticism that would define most of my life, well Toddler Me didn’t clear the fence at all. In fact the rock just came back down and hit me directly on the top of the head.   It wasn’t a massive injury, but it definitely hurt.  Later that night my Mom noticed me gingerly touching my head and asked me “What’s wrong darling?” and I looked at her and said

“IT’S MY HEYYYY-AAAADD.”

The word head has one syllable.

I pronounced it with two and my Mom pronounced that maybe she didn’t want her kids growing up in Macon, Georgia so we moved.  My shot at my birthright (a bad ass lady killing English accent) wasn’t going to happen but there’s no way my parents were going to let me have a southern accent.  Man. I digress. This was supposed to be about customs.

I should just start over.

These are two very very different things. Traveling with your (girl/boy)friend is like… bringing home base with you. A small little bastion of safety. If you collapse on the ground, you’ll be okay. When you wake up…you’ll be in a hospital. People will have been called. You’ll look around at the concerned faces of people who care about you.

Traveling by yourself? It’s a different experience. When you wake up you’re ..yep that’s still the ground. People will not have been called. People will have gathered. You’ll look around for your wallet (gone) and kidneys (ditto).

So the first 10 days of the trip are TandemTravel and the last 11 are solo.

The first time you do ANYTHING you make a big deal of it, Imagine the divide between the way you felt about sex the first time, and the way you feel about the sex you’ll have next. Yeah. It’s like that. As stated before, this was my first travel. So three weeks before the intentional loss of my travel virginity I was all candles and love trying to do all of the things to guarantee travel success. I called my bank, told them where I was going, got outlet adapters, borrowed a few Rick Steves guides.

My girlfriend was nice enough to buy me compression socks. I didn’t know what they were for, nor why I needed them. Conveniently enough, it’s 2014 so there’s no real need to know pretty much anything. Google says that if you don’t wear compression socks during a flight, there’s an increased chance that you could die.

Nope, no typo there. There are socks that, if you don’t wear them, there’s a greater chance of everything you know ending.

Everything.
Christmases.
Orange Juice.
Cellophane.
Music.
Three ring binders.
Popcorn.
…so on.

Everything… Ending? Consciousness Done? That’s it? Over some socks? I wore them.  Google freaked me out so much that it’s surprising that I’m not STILL wearing them. They felt just like regular socks that were a size too small and a fifteen inches too long.

Google says that Wrong-Sock-Plane-Death is mostly a concern for older people. When you see an old person making their way up the aisle for the fifth time, that’s not a casual stretch of the limbs. That’s a low-speed sprint away from the grim reaper’s ever-reaching scythe. Puts a damper on it doesn’t it? I wonder if anyone has told them about the socks.

My biggest travel fear after wrong-sock-plane-death is jet lag. Partially because I don’t 100% understand it, but mostly because everyone that has JUST traveled won’t stop talking about it.

[Author’s Note: I now realize that this is just yet another way to show off that you were just traveling. “Sorry. I’m a bit jetlagged. You know. So much travel.”]

London is a weird amount of time ahead of us, ten hours.  That meant that when Big Ben struck midnight, our internal clock would think it was 2pm. Let’s say you wake up at 7am every day, if I said you have to wake up a little bit early tomorrow.   How early? Like, say, 10pm tonight… you’d have a situation on your hands.

Rather than wandering the streets like zombies, my girlfriend and I decided that the best defense was a good offense. Our offense: If we just woke up a few minutes earlier each morning, eventually we’d wake up naturally at 4am, and get sleepy at 8pm like old people. Then when we got to London, one morning we’d just have a minor adjustment.

Do you feel like I’ve driven this point into the dirt? Yeah, this is where you get to cry for my girlfriend, who only wishes this had been handled so succinctly.

Being VERY COOL I created an equation to figure it out. And yes, having been out of college for a hot minute, I’m entitled to refer to simple math as CREATING AN EQUATION. In my mind it’s barely one step away from a SOLVING A PROOF.

Need to determine the 10% discount?  CREATE AN EQUATION.
Determine sales tax? CREATE AN EQUATION.

If at the end of a meal I could wheel out a GIANT chalkboard, don a scientist’s robe, only to multiply a number by .2, I would.  

Honestly. Which one seems like more of an accomplishment? Which one are you MOST likely to use ever in your life EVER?

I took the number of days before our trip divided by the number of minutes in the two hours we wanted to skip and determined that we needed to wake up 4.28 minutes early every morning for 4 weeks. After a very unhealthy debate we rounded up to 4 minutes, which I would like to state finally for the record is *very* scientifically inaccurate. Losing my travel virginity was exciting, but it’s a miracle that I ever lost any of it.

It’s a good thing I wrote down this sad little equation because it’s really easy NOT to get up 4 minutes early. It’s the easiest thing to not do. Three weeks before the trip we had to revise our adjustment, because we hadn’t woken up even 4 seconds earlier. In fact we were waking up later than usual. No problem, now we’d just wake six minutes early. Two weeks before we needed to wake up nine minutes. One week before the trip we got nervous and actually committed to getting up 17 minutes earlier each day. Though mathematically correct, it’s not early enough to change your internal clock. It is, however, early enough to make life miserable for you and anyone you’ve dragged into this crappy equation. You will have arguments.

We took the redeye because I had a massive fear of the ten hour flight. I’ve never done anything for ten hours. I can barely sleep for ten hours, so the thought of just sitting in a seat for 10 hours made me cringe-y so I thought “What if we just take an 11pm flight, then we’ll be up for a couple of hours, and then just drift to sleep and wake up as we land. It’ll be magical.”

There’s this special voice in my head that I use to say things that are based on a special blend of optimism, naievete, and ignorance. In the moment the voice sounds authoritative and strong. After the moment the voice sounds like Bambi and I just need to start curb-stomping that voice up-front because that voice is almost never right. Basically anytime I say “Well, if we just —“ STOMP.

Virgin Atlantic gives you a little ‘care package’ that gives you the impression you’re in for some real good sleep. Eye mask, ear plugs, and a blanket provide a portable sensory deprivation tank. Toothbrush and toothpaste provide hygeinic support. A pen in case… well I wasn’t totally sure what the pen was for, I’ve never seen someone while away 10 hours by jotting down a few thoughts with a pen. Ken in 17C isn’t going to be composing a little Epic Poetry, you know?

The ten hour flight from LAX to LGW allows you to sleep much in the same way that waterboarding allows you to breathe. I got just enough sleep to feel like someone was doing it *to* me, and spitefully. I was in, then out, then in, then out. It crossed my mind that the pen was there so you could gouge your eyes out when the eye mask slipped off for the third time. I’d groggily come to just long enough to make eye contact with some older person shuffling through the aisle. We’d smile the “Whaddya gonna do, long flights, right?” smile and I’d add an encouraging nod that said and asked “I hope you don’t die, how’re your socks?”

Somehow I slept through every single meal service.
When I woke up next we were landing in London, England.

I think they are being misused.

This is an unpopular opinion (and maybe even an ill-informed one) . Everyone that I respect who travels (which at last count is every single person I know) swears by these guides. It’s not a question of accuracy or value. His opinion is steeped in one hundred percent experience.  This isn’t your friend who went to Spain once helping you pronounce Gracias with a lisp.  This is Mr. Steves’ thing. Not even like his side job, but his 9-to-5.  He pays the bills by going to places and writing books about them.  It begs the question what he does for his 2 weeks yearly vacation. I hope it’s something like “work in a cubicle and have crappy meetings.”

Although this question-beg begs an additional question, can you really take travel advice from someone who travels for a living?  Even if they tried to dial down their experience to match yours, that’s someone that is still pretending.  Like when you’re playfightingwith a little kid and the kid is trying as hard as they can to destroy you while you’re simply messing around, and at one point they can sense it and they get frustrated and maybe start to cry.  Basically it’s condescending and no one likes that, Rick.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s not his fault that his life is travel-awesome, and that’s not even why I can’t yet swear on a stack of Rick Steves guides, and to be honest, I’m disappointed that I don’t, because I really wanted to.  There’s the obvious reason of “having my travel plans sorted out,” but there was a side perk:

When all of your friends are into something, and have been into something that never crossed your mind there’s the distinct feeling of having been left out, systematically, for a long long long time.  This isn’t “my friends threw a party and didn’t invite me”, this is “my friends have partied every Tuesday for years and never noticed I wasn’t even there.”

I imagined that by embracing Rick Steves full on, I’d become part of a larger Rick Steves community. Me and my fellow Stevians could give each other knowing smiles, maybe even quote Rick to one another. “The Cotswolds are an absolute delight by car!” [“Rick Steves’ England”,The Cotswalds] Later as we rose through the church of Steve we’d become even more cryptic. “England? Page 525? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.” We would laugh in all caps together, just like that. It wouldn’t be quite as menacing as it looks in writing though.

Things between Rick and I started off well initially.  I started reading and it all seemed like exactly the kind of things I needed to know.  Currency exchange? Great.  What time of year to visit? Cool.  Basic local customs? (“Don’t talk loudly on the train!”) and then there was a really great thirty seconds of confusion when I read this passage and thought Rick was making weird hip-hop jokes.

“There’s no T.I. outside the city gates, but just inside there’s a smaller T.I.”

Ha ha Rick, you know there’s no such thing as a smaller T.I., and why do they keep him inside the gates, bring ‘im out, bring ‘im out!

Of course I (not as quickly as I should have) figured out that he meant Traveler’s Information center or something like that, but for a minute Rick Steves was my GUY.

But then… it just got to feel a bit too limiting.  After the basic overview of the city, Rick pretty much has traveled for you and just bumper-bowls you through the country, slapping stars (he uses black triangles because why not) on things that he thinks are good and slapping fewer triangles on things that he doesn’t think are quite as good.  It felt like watching a movie with someone who’d seen it before and insists on evaluating each scene just before it starts. “This part sucks. Oh you’re going to love this. Oh wait til this next line comes, it’s great.”

Then after a few pages he drops the evaluation facade and rolls out his real master plan where he just straight up schedules things for you. “Okay, if you’re going for 7 days, do this. But if you’re going for 3 days, do this, and in this order.” Good intentioned, sure but … it just kinda felt like I was just going to be following Rick Steves’ dotted family-circus-line across Europe.

On paper, this makes sense.  If you’re an American and you only get two weeks of vacation in your life total, don’t screw up and spend 10 days of it having an awful time because you went to the wrong place, and saw the wrong things, but… I don’t know.  There’s a point where that level of evaluation might not be necessary. I’m not sure anyone is traveling to (say) America with an itinerary that says “7 days De Moines, 3 days New York.”     Also. Contrast. I think sometimes, people will appreciate those three black triangle things more because they saw a no black triangle thing the day before.

Monday: Eiffel Tower(▲ ▲ ▲)
Tuesday: Empire States Building(▲ ▲ ▲)
Wednesday: Dubai’s 3 (▲ ▲ ▲) building.
Thursday: Horrible jet lag.

That’s an awful tour, despite it being 100% triple black triangle from end to end.

Also, if I’m going to see (say) Stonehenge, I don’t want to hold my perception of it up against the imaginary scorecard. “‘Henge you BETTER three black triangle me or we are going to have some harsh druid words.”  

I closed the book and took a good look at Rick Steves on the back cover and issue #2 occurred to me.

Rick Steves and I probably don’t like the same stuff.

I’m confident that (if) as I get older, I will age into someone that likes the kind of stuff that Rick Steves likes.  But right now, it’s a safe bet that Rick Steves target demo is someone that is a lot like him, and that the closer you get to being like him the more enjoyment you can wring from his guide about the things that he likes.  Chances are, he will very specifically filter out some things that I like A LOT. The disconnect between us wasn’t immediately apparent, but maybe it should have been.

When he mentioned anti-pick-pocketing strategies  I immediately went to Amazon.com and bought a money belt. You know, a belt with a zipper and a hidden compartment where you can stash bills. The glee and smug satisfaction in the reviews were palpable “I just go to the bathroom and I take out my money for the day and then I’m good to go!”, “I would not use a wallet in my pants pocket to avoid the bulge that attracts thieves.” I feel like these reviewers were all a little pissed that no one tried to pick their pockets on vacation.

My friend was unimpressed what I told him about my money belt.

“Why do you have one?”

“So no one robs me. It’s kind of a theft thing. And if they do, I’ll just give them my mostly empty wallet.”

“Phil. You’re 6’4”, 200 pounds, black and you have dreadlocks.  Any one of those things takes you off the ‘Easy Mark’ list, and you’ve got all four. No one in Slovenia is going to rob you. The people that bought those money belts are buying them because they are scared of YOU.”

I never wore my belt, and was never robbed.  Unless you count the giant-money-suck that being in London is, because $16 USD is a bit much for a budweiser any way you spin it, but don’t spin it, it’ll spray everywhere when you open it because that’s how carbonation works, jeesh you shouldn’t travel at ALL.

Ah. To be fair. Rick Steves is pretty up front with this.  His books aren’t even titled “Travelers’ Guide To Europe” or “Visiting England” or even “100 Things you should see in London.” It’s just the possessive.

RICK STEVES’ EUROPE.
RICK STEVES’ ENGLAND.
RICK STEVES’ FRANCE (2009).

“This is MY England, Phil McCarty, PERIOD. Full Stop.  Because what am I gonna do? Write RICK STEVES AND YOURS, STRANGER WHOM I HAVENT MET’S ENGLAND?”

You could almost rename any one of his guides “A curated list of restaurants, sightseeing spots, hotels, and travel tips for [Country].”  Because at that, they excel, and I will certainly buy them for future trips.  That’s only half of what I wanted out of my Travel though.  The truth is you can have a fantastic trip to Europe eating wherever occurs to you and skipping every single sightseeing spot available.

[Author’s note: Having traveled a bit now, I do have what I think is a much more practical way to make a Travel vacation which allows for more adventure, and also gets closer to the heart of what makes a country right for someone, and not for someone else, , as well as a list of things you should know/do before you travel that Rick has skipped over, but more on that later. Cliffhangers, yo.]

First. England

(also, I really hope you saw TI in the picture of the city gates. So much so that there’s this postscript about it.)