Every day, I run down the stairs with excitement to unlock my letterbox with great anticipation, awaiting postcards from around the world.
Every day, all I get is another disappointment. I can’t even remember when was the last time that I received a postcard. Probably some time in the last millennium.
So, when I was in Montenegro, I embarked on the most desperate thing that a person can do: to write a postcard to oneself. It was my last day. I had just come back from climbing the fortress in Kotor and visited an exhibition about Jan Karski, when I bought one postcard, wrote a short message to myself, went to the small post office in Kotor and hoped that the girl at the counter wouldn’t notice.
When the postcard arrived at my home in Târgu Mureș in Romania a few days later, I was most excited about the positive and friendly words that I had bestowed upon myself and my journey. Finally, someone had thought of me.
But I didn’t fail to notice that even the gentleman on the stamps seems to wonder: “What is this guy doing?” By the way, you can see from the stamps that Montenegro – like Kosovo – uses the Euro as official currency although it’s not a member state of the European Union or the Eurozone. Maybe Greece can get some advice there.
Do you know this feeling: when you hear a song and it gets stuck in your head somehow, it remains connected to good memories and you would like to listen to it again, but you can’t remember the name of the song, the singer or the band? Many people will then simply hum or sing it until someone (or an app) will tell them what song they were looking for. Well, I can’t sing the least, so that’s not an option for me.
It was in the summer of 1996. I was in Israel on a youth exchange program and every day on the bus we listened to a rhythmic, South-American-sounding song which was played on the radio several times a day. It seemed to be a big hit that summer, or the station preferred by our bus driver just didn’t have many CDs to choose from. After a few times, we chimed in and danced to the song each time it came on.
Ever since, I was hoping to hear that song again. I didn’t even remember what it sounded like and I had no idea if I would still enjoy it now, but I knew it would bring back beautiful memories of a trip that went all the way from the Golan Heights to the Negev Desert, from Tel Aviv to Jericho, from Akko to the Sea of Galilee.
It took 19 years.
Two week ago I was in Băile Tușnad in Romania. As I walked back to the guesthouse one evening, the song sounded from the radio of a parked car as I walked past. I recognized it immediately, and this time I wrote down some of the lyrics to look them up on YouTube (an option not yet available in 1996).
To my surprise, the song is from Brazil, where I will move to in November 2015. Even more coincidentally, the video clip shows exactly the kind of boat on which I will travel from Belémto Manaus and further upstream on the Amazon. But please don’t expect me to dance!
In Germany, on your first day of school your parents prepare a “Schultüte”, which is full of sweets and pencils and crayons and other useful stuff for school.
This must have been in 1982.
Links:
More about education, because I’ve come a long way since then.
Whenever I walk through a mosquito- or fly-infested forest or swamp, I light up a cigar. A strong one preferably. It keeps these rowdy little animals at bay.
Tobacco was embraced by Ming soldiers, who disseminated it as they marched around the empire. In the southwestern province of Yunnan, one physician reported, Chinese soldiers “entered miasma-ridden (malarial) lands, and none of them were spared disease except for a single unit, whose members were in perfect health. When asked the reason, the answer was that they all smoked.”
So now ISIS have also captured Palmyra, the antique oasis town in the Syrian desert. Another cultural heritage faces destruction.
The world community will be more agitated by this than by the civilians killed in Syria every day. Old stones arouse more compassion than Syrian children. If the Roman columns could make it onto a boat to Europe, they would probably be warmly received.
But I want to use the impending pillage to tell you about my trip to Palmyra.
It was a few years before the war, I believe in 2006. I had just spent Christmas in Beirut, had taken a taxi across the mountains and through a fierce snowstorm to Damascus. I had contracted a serious cold on the way, because the three smokers in the taxi had left the windows open during the whole ride. My plan was to spend a few days in Syria, which was less dangerous than Lebanon back then. How things change! Nowadays, anybody who can walks, drives and flees in the opposite direction.
From Damascus, I wanted to take one of the colorful buses welded together from different models for a day trip to Palmyra. About 250 km one way, so I could get there and return on the same day. Except for the ruins, there wasn’t much to experience there anyway, particularly if one doesn’t speak Arabic.
The Lonely Planet guidebook had pointed me to a travel agency which dispatched a bus to Palmyra once a day, leaving at 10 am and returning to Damascus in the afternoon or evening. Perfect. The day before, I walked to that travel agency in one of the larger roads leading away from the Old Town. Of course I have forgotten its name after so many years.
There was a small office with a desk, a lot of paperwork and calendars and maps pinned to the wall. Two men sat in cane chairs, one of them with a plate of meat and rice in his lap. He was having lunch, so I guessed he must have been the owner or an employee of the agency. In Arabic, I couldn’t say more than “salam aleikum”, so I added “bon appétit” in French. A grim stare and a grumbling sound indicated that I had mistimed my attempt to pay my respects.
So I buggered off and hung out in the street for a while, before returning half an hour later. One of the employees, now happily fed, sat behind the desk. In English I asked him if he spoke any of it. In Arabic he negated that. Strange that people always understand each other when they pretend not to. I stammered something with the words “ticket”, “autobus”, “Palmyra”, but received incomprehension instead of a bus ticket. It went back and forth like this, with words in English, Arabic and French flying across the desk and being bounced back like tennis balls, until the Syrian ran out of patience. He got up, walked into the road, shouted into the crowd and returned with a nicely dressed gentleman of medium age who spoke English. He looked like a lawyer or a manager, but for a moment he readily interrupted his business affairs to interpret the purchase of a bus ticket. Very nice.
That was when I finally learnt that the Arabic name for Palmyra is Tadmur, which explained the communication problem. Progress was still slow until it became understood that I wanted to take the bus the next morning and return the same evening. Again and again I was being shown a calendar in which I should indicate the dates. In elementary school we are being taught that our numbers are Arabic numbers, apparently to spice up the otherwise dull math lessons. Complete bollocks. Arabic numbers are just as strange as Arabic letters. At best, one could identify the 1 and the 9.
With the friendly help of the gratuitously laboring interpreter and with great efforts, we managed to fill in a ticket in a way that I couldn’t read it. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was something between 1 and 2 $. For a distance of 500 km. I was told to show up at Harasta bus station the next morning at 10 o’clock.
Filled with pleasant anticipation, I spent the evening reading about Palmyra’s history: caravans, oases, Syrians, Babylonians, Romans, the Silk Road, religions of which I had never heard before, battles, architecture.
The next morning, I overslept.
That way, Palmyra joined the list of places which I have almost visited. Now it’s too late. Damn terrorists! Damn alarm clock!
If you have been putting off your trip to Africa because you are afraid of aggressive and large animals like elephants, lions, gnus, hippos or giraffes running you over, here’s a solution for you: Go in summer when the marula fruit is ripe. It knocks out the animals and you can wander through Africa without any of the animals running after you.
Well-rested, with enough sleep and an empowering breakfast behind you, you get to the office. Your desk is still empty, as is the e-mail inbox. Slowly and with a relaxed pace, you start yet again from zero. Another week, with only 37 and a half hours of work to put in.
– – –
Not so for the self-employed and freelancers among us.
This is how my desk looked this Monday morning. A tangled mass of unfinished jobs. A to-do list from last weekend, hardly tackled at all. Notes which only make sense again after re-reading them several times. Thousands of unanswered e-mails. Reminders of past trips to write about and of future travel to be planned. And more and more issues pile up every day.
(If you have a boring, non-fulfilling job with an insurance company or in some kind of marketing department, you are welcome to use this image as your desktop background. – Zur deutschen Fassung.)
When the postcard arrived at my home in Târgu Mureș in Romania a few days later, I was most excited about the positive and friendly words that I had bestowed upon myself and my journey. Finally, someone had thought of me.
The Happy Hermit 