Leaving Britain is a particularly strange feeling.  In so many ways, it feels close to home — not just the (mostly) shared language and history, but just the feel of the place.  The green and the trees hearken back to my earlier life, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana or living in the Northeast.  The intermittent misty and sunny weather that remains temperate through the summer evokes echos of the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Rockies, where I came of age.

More than that, it has been a year of personal growth and change.  I have had some excellent research interactions, of course, and have learned a great deal scientifically.  I had some valuable time to think and experiment and hack a bit myself.  I have a stronger sense of some directions to explore.

But much more than that, it has been a year of learning about the greater world and our place in it.  History, art, culture, language, politics, religion.  Food, fashion, fun.  I feel that I have a fuller or richer sense of the tides of culture.  Countries all face the same problems, but different countries resolve them differently, and we both have some better senses of what the spectrum of choices is.

In flight, now, the great steel flying machine boring a hole through the sky above Ireland, heading for the North Atlantic.

Moments and memories flit through me…

Arriving in Spain eleven months ago, now.  Confusion and panic, plunged into a world we didn’t fit into, uncertain if we could even pay for our apartment.

Snow in London, paralyzing the city.  Two days later, a train through the fairy-gilded countryside.  Sunlight gleaming on snow in the trees and on the fields; a Dickensian scene.

Treading the streets of Hardy, Halley, and Hawking; Tolkien, Carroll, and Lewis.

A whirl of castles, fortresses, and palaces: El Escorial, El Palacio Real, El Alcazar de Segovia, Alhambra, Pembrokeshire, Warwick, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Versailles, Castle Howard, Schloss Marienburg, Earl’s Palace, Edinburgh.  Centuries of might, power, prestige, wealth, fear, and blood.  Some standing still proud and strong, some crumbling and struggling against tides of time and entropy.  All showpieces, now, for adventurers, curiosity seekers, history fanatics, and tourists.

Snippets of history assembling.  Fitting together growing fragments of the great mosaic.

The sense of wonder and excitement as cafés and headlines in Madrid were filled with Obama’s victory.

The awe of touching stones laid down a thousand years ago by the cathedral-builders…

… or laid down two millennia ago by the Romans, as they grasped the world in their palms.

… or five millennia ago by the now-nameless neolithic farmers, circumscribing the heavens with stone.

… or eight millennia ago by the mesolithic hunter-gatherers, laying their treasured dead into barrows for reasons now lost in entropy and age.

Plays in London’s West End and English-language movies at the foreign film theatre in Madrid.

The ocean surging against cliffs in Scotland and Wales; mist above the sea.  The sea, the sea, the sea, stretching out before us, a reminder of how small these islands really are, for all of their deep history and vast influence.

The whirl and bustle of the great mercados of Madrid, a foodie’s heaven, if only you can speak enough Spanish to order the jamon.

The decaying Victorian majesty and grunge of the London Tube, its subterranean labyrinth inviting visions of fairies, just beyond sight in the hidden recesses, driving the trains, or sometimes not, at their whim.

Jamon and pisto manchego.  Fish and chips at the pub.  Chocolate con churros, merluza, cochinillo, cocido, and the best calamari in Madrid.  Steak and kidney pie, cumberland sausages, scones and cream tea, Victoria sponge cake. Ordering Indian and Chinese for delivery.

The gleaming modern efficiency of the Madrid Metro, jewel of Madrid’s recent public works and their charming, self-aggrandizing pride in it. Posters of the Sphinx or the Statue of Liberty peering excitedly down the steps of a Metro station: “El Metro que todos quisieren tener.”

The green, green, green of Britain.  Trees and grass and flowers and rolling farmlands.  Even in the concrete jungle of London, the locals have striven to set aside greenspace.  And the greenery fights for itself: grass springing forth from every crack or crevice in the concrete, moss or ivy spreading over every wall, unless vigilantly fought back.

The grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Madrid, evoking Nineteenth Century splendor and imperial power.  The arid clime, so achingly reminiscent of Albuquerque and the desert Southwest of the US.

The digital map informs us that we are over the coast of Greenland now.  Halfway to Chicago, or thereabout.

But, really, what has mattered most are the people.

The kind and enthusiastic woman across the courtyard from us in Madrid.  Discussions in our halting Spanish about sharing the clothes line and the state of the weather, and her pledge of friendship on the day we left Spain.

The supervisor at the Manor House Tube station in London, who cheerfully sorted us out, from helping us get to our house in the first place, to helping us find our way to the New Year’s celebrations in the city.

The Nicaraguan expat we met in Spain who hated the US for its role in the Contra-Sandanista civil war that destroyed his country and his family.

The Kosovan taxi-driver in London who loved the US for its role in the Kosovo war and stopping the horrors of ethnic cleansing.

Elaborate Christmas lunch at the warm and welcoming house of my postdoc’s family.

The brusque but secretly friendly proprietor of the corner store near our place in London, who just smiled when we returned for the fourth time in a day for something forgotten, saying “It’s ok — this is your store.”

The delightful B&B hosts in Pembrokeshire, who welcomed us into their house and shared their joy in Wales with us.

Gaming with friends back in the US — a touch of familiarity and comfort for expats far from home.

The shopkeeper in Spain who sold us pillow cases when we had no Spanish whatsoever, who cheerfully passed the dictionary back and forth with us to help us through the transaction and who, at the end, complimented our Spanish, “¡Su español es muy bueno!”.

A group of hostellers in Orkney, with whom we stayed up too late dissecting the state of the world and the best travel destinations on five continents.

And all of the beautiful, wonderful, warm friends we found in London: Writers and musicians and gamers and engineers and hackers and teachers.  Who, most of all, made London feel like home, at least for a time.

Over the North Atlantic again, closing in on the coast of Canada.  The flight attendant brings us a snack of fruit and crackers and lovely stinky cheese.  We marvel a bit at the luxury of flying business class.

I titled this post “Leaving the Shire, Mr. Frodo” because I can empathize with some of Sam’s feelings.  For one thing, the echos of Middle Earth are all over Britain — you can see Tolkien’s roots in the thatched roofs and hedge-rows, the towers and spires, the barrows and standing stones.

But it’s a deeper feeling than that.  Sam was leaving home for the first time — first setting foot beyond his native lands, starting out on a grand adventure that would change him deeply.  We are returning from a grand adventure — admittedly not as grand, nor as hazardous, as Sam’s — but I can feel some of the wistfulness and conflicts that he did.  Transitions are potent.  We return to familiar places and people that we love, but we leave behind fascinating places and discoveries and new people to love.

But more opportunities to return, to visit new friends, and to explore further.

The road goes ever on…

Passing over the Great Lakes now.  We are close.  They feed us again.

It has been such a strange year.  There were plenty of stresses, from discovering the failure modes of the international finance system, to wandering lost at Barajas airport in search of our cats, to staying in touch with friends and colleagues five thousand miles away, to planning the next bit of local travel and tourism, to trying to pound a new language into our aged cortices by exposure and sheer force of will.  At times, we were exhausted by the overwhelming intricacy of life maintenance when your home isn’t really your home and every transaction has to be coordinated across two continents and up to five countries.

Landing gear down.  Seats and tray tables up.  Machines off.

But it has also been an incredibly… Fulfilling/enriching/educational/exciting/exploratory/wonderful/creative/social year.  All wrapped up in complex feelings — joy, loss, excitement, fatigue.  The sense of our perspectives stretching, like muscles, sometimes a little bit too far.  Homesickness for two homes.

Landing in Chicago; back in the US.

We are home.

One of my personal favorite bits of touristing is doing the museum tour, and there’s plenty to choose from in Europe.  The grand cities have some of the greatest art musuems of the world, collecting over a millennium of masterpieces (mostly from Europe and North America, granted, but also some from further afield).  In our time here, Susan and I have been privileged to explore the Prado, Reina Sophia, Thyssen, Louvre, d’Orsay, National Gallery, and Victoria and Albert.  And that’s not counting other art museums that we’ve seen on other occasions or the vast amounts of art accumulated in palaces, cathedrals, churches, mansions, and random other tourist destinations.  It brings alive all those dusty memories of art movements that (for me) date back to high school, making them vivid and setting them in context.  Still, with all of this art trekking, we’ve noticed a few other features that aren’t mentioned quite so often.

For one, why is Jesus always pictured as having shoulder-length, wavy brown hair and a beard?

Jesus and his hairdo

For most of us, this is an image we’ve seen all our lives — so much so that we probably don’t even think about it.  There is always the observation that Jesus was, of course, almost certainly Semitic, rather than Caucasian (as he is usually pictured in Euro-derived art).  But I have never really heard anybody discuss this artistic convention about his hairdo.

I mean, really — where did this notion come from?  It’s everywhere — in art going back at least a thousand years, J.C. is drawn this way.  It’s there in medieval paintings, stained glass in cathedrals, Renaissance statues, and everything since, up to and including modern neon light displays.  You have to look hard to find a rendition of Jesus that doesn’t have those features.  But, as far as I know, we have no actual evidence or description of how he really looked.

So who came up with it?  Somebody had to have been first to draw him like that, and it has stuck ever since.  But who?  And why?  I suppose that it sticks because it has become a set of attributes that we use to identify J.C.  In the same way that the crescent moon and the third eye are attributes that identify Shiva to Hindus, Christians know to look for the coiffure.

Saint Sebastian (as rendered by Crivelli)

Another thing we’ve noticed is an overwhelming fascination with certain specific saints.  While the Catholic church acknowledges an incredible number of saints (over 10,000 according to the Wikipedia article), only like five or six ever show up in European art.  One of the favorites is Saint Sebastian.  The story is that this poor bastard managed to piss off Emperor Diocletian and got his ass filled with arrows for his trouble.  Miraculously, of course, he didn’t die, but lived on to work other miracles and harangue Diocletian some more.  (Not surprisingly, this did not sit well with Diocletian, who decided that he must not have done the job thoroughly the first time and had his soldiers drag Sebastian out, beat him to death, and toss his body into the outhouse.  Yum.)  Anyway, Sebastian is all over the place.  Everybody seems to love to paint him.  We’ve seen dozens of images of this poor fellow, all recognizable by the arrows.  (Sometimes only a couple, sometimes a porcupine’s complement.)  Usually, he has a far-away expression that is probably intended to represent his holy fixation on the heavens and his unconcern with paltry physical ephemera like being pincushioned with broadheads.  Unfortunately, too few artists can really capture “ethereal”, so it usually comes out feeling like a cross between marijuana mellow and constipated.

Salomé with the head of John the Baptist, as rendered by Caravaggio

You see a similar sort of ambiguous facial expression in the omnipresent images of Salomé.  So this chick either deliberately, or at her mother’s behest, requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter as a present.  Most teenage girls don’t get such extravagent gifts from their dads, but when your dad is the king, special rules apply.  (I would have gone for the red sports car myself, but hey — no accounting for tastes.)  So Herod’s soldiers dutifully brought her the head on a plate.  The funny thing

Titian's version of Salomé and John

is that she’s so often pictured almost completely impassively, or at most with a little distaste or perhaps some smugness.  But a surprisingly underwhelming reaction for someone who has just had a dish of gore dropped in her lap.  I guess I haven’t verified for myself, but I’m pretty sure that the Bible doesn’t say anything about her being clinically psychopathic or having dangerously flattened affect.  Or maybe that was just the kind of thing you got for your daughter in those days and she was used to it — had a dozen in her closet already.  I dunno.  shrug

Little old man baby Jesus

Ugly babies are another popular theme.  Specifically, ugly baby Jesuses.  We can’t quite figure out what’s going on, but our best guess is that it was way easier for Rennaisance painters to get adult female models than baby males.  (Or to get them to sit still or something.)  Or maybe it’s just that the painters are all struggling to make the little guy look simultaneously like a cute and helpless infant and the King of Kings with all the wisdom of the ages in his barely postnatal eyes.  For whatever reason, the galleries are littered with truly fugly baby Jesuses.  Warped little beasts that look sometimes more like a lizard and sometimes more like a goblin.  Sadly, I don’t have the absolute best example of this genre here.  They don’t allow photos in the National Gallery in London, but there’s an absolutely stunningly horrendous baby Jesus in their collection.  The kid is, I shit you not, gray.  And it’s not that the painting has aged — the other people in the painting are relatively normal flesh-toned.  In comparison, the little Lamb of God comes off as, well, a baby zombie.  “Awwww….  Kewt widdle baby zombie Jesus!  Smile for Mr. Painter man!”

Baby Jesus: lord of the pit fiends

Madonna with creepy child

With looks like these, the little guy would have had to have God looking out for him, to keep his parents from drowning him quietly in the night…

George's fish bar, London UK

Unfortunately, the awning doesn’t come out in this nighttime photo, but the full shop signage says:

George’s Fish Bar / Fried Chicken / Barbecued Spare Ribs Our Specialty / We Fry Fresh Fish / Calamari

?!?!

When we first saw this place, we couldn’t stop laughing.  I’m surprised that they don’t advertise hamburgers, pizza, Chinese noodles, and chilled monkey brains while they’re at it.

This is clearly a grease-pit, but we were so amused by the sign that we had to try it at some point.  Eventually, we did and discovered that it’s essentially just “George’s Fish Bar”.  The spare ribs and chicken were dreadful.  Oh well — it’s about what we expected.  Actually, the surprise was that the fish was not too bad.  (Though clearly not what we get at the most excellent local pub!)

But this is really a small reflection of the kind of culture we find in our neighborhood.  We’re living in a neighborhood that’s struggling between ghetto and gentrification, with a healthy sample of immigrants across the spectrum.  Near us, the predominant immigrant groups seem to be Turkish, Greek, and Russian (or the myriad of Russian-speaking former USSR states and satellites that appear Russian to my uncultured eyes, anyway).  We hear a medley of languages on the bus and English is often in the minority.

The local shops and restaurants reflect that melange.  Like “George’s”, many of the store fronts have clearly changed hands many, many times over the years, housing a succession of ethnic groups and their tastes of home.  There’s a Chinese restaurant on the main drag whose plate glass windows still proudly announce fish and chips.  (It’s now defunct; I wonder who the next generation to inherit it will be.)  The local groceries vend everything from kimchee to couscous to salsa, including some vegetables I have never even heard of before.  Within a few minute’s walk of us there are Greek, Turkish, German, and French bakeries and patisseries.  Butcher shops proudly proclaim that they carry halal meat.  There’s a cafe down the street from us that advertises Italian cuisine on its awning, but as far as we can tell it serves essentially British mainstream food.  It’s run by a Turkish woman who spent most of her career as a fashion designer in Egypt.

It’s a fascinating contrast to Madrid, which appeared (at least to our outsider eyes and linguistically impoverished ears) to be much more culturally homogeneous.  In Madrid, you heard essentially one language and most of the shops and overt culture were recognizably Spanish.  (Aside, I suppose, for the massive flux of dubbed Hollywood films.  On which, hopefully, another post another time.)  Granted, there appeared to be a significant number of immigrants from other Spanish-speaking nations, but there did not appear to be such a variety of different origins or ethnicities as we see here in London.  Beyond our neighborhood here in London, we see a high density of Indians, East Asians, Africans, and others.  We run into Nigerians on the subway and hear French on the buses.  The researchers I work with at UCL come from across Europe and beyond.

All of this makes London an exciting, but also a bit dizzying place to spend a few months.  The US is proud of its history as a great cultural melting pot, welcoming immigrants from across the globe.  (Though we’re currently struggling to resolve our own feelings about the current generation of Mexican and Latin American immigrants.)  But there are very few places in the US that approach this density of diversity, I think.  Different regions of the US have different ethnic mixes — Latin American and Native American in the Southwest, East Asians on the West Coast, a mish-mash of Europeans on the East Coast — but by and large, each city will have only a few highly represented cultural groups.  Perhaps New York or Washington DC approach this level of diversity — I haven’t spent enough time in either of them to get a real feel for it, the way I’m just beginning to here.

I suppose this is to be expected of one of the Great Cities of the world.  London is, after all, the capital of what remains one of the most powerful nations on Earth.  It was a capital city roughly 1600 years before Washington DC was a gleam in Madison’s eye.  I suppose it’s not a great surprise that it attracts such a wide variety of people from so many backgrounds and walks of life.  Sometime it leads to serious friction, of course.  Any time cultures (and economies) collide, there are bound to be.

It’s fascinating and fun and overwhelming.  In the short time we’re here, I’m sure we’ll only have the chance to just sample some bits of it all.  But I’m glad to experience what we can of it.

Oh, and the groceries have truly awesome olive oil…

We spent the evening of Dec 30 packing and preparing to leave Madrid.  We really enjoyed Madrid and all the people we met and everything we learned.  At the same time, it was about time to move on.  (Not least because our very basic, “student slums” style apartment had begun to seriously degrade and was accumulating failures.  The prinicipal one of which was that the clothes washer had conked out a couple of weeks before and hadn’t been replaced, so we were running on patchwork remnants of clean and semi-clean clothes.)

Here’s a picture of Susan during our final hours in the Madrid apartment, with our bags packed and ready to roll.

Madrid apartment

We had already dropped our cats off with a local vet who’s boarding them until their paperwork can be finalized and they can be sent.  (Therein itself lies a long and frustrating story.)

We slept poorly that night, worrying about things undone, the cats, travel the next day…  All the niggling things that crawl up in the dark reaches of the night and drive sleep away, leaving only fatigue and stress in its place.

New Year’s Eve dawned clear and bright in Madrid.  We were up early, with our bags arranged and ready to roll.  Our flight was at about noon-thirty, so at least we didn’t have to scream off to the airport before the crack of dawn.  We even had time for breakfast.

More importantly, we had time to say farewell to a couple of our neighbors at our apartment building.  Matilde was the woman who cleaned the public spaces in our building.  We saw her out there every morning, cheerfully sweeping up and mopping spaces, chatting with other residents, fiddling with the plants in the courtyard, and so on.  We had also recently discovered that she’s extremely friendly and helpful and willing to speak very slowly, in baby Spanish to us.  Luisa is the little old lady across the courtyard from us, with whom we shared a clothes line.  Negotiating who had “clothesline rights” on any particular day was one of our great Spanish challenges, because Luisa never did process how to speak to us slowly and simply enough for us to fully get what she was saying.  But she was always very cheerful and nice about it, and always seemed concerned about us and how we were getting along.  (She came to check on us when a random cat was loose in the apartment complex at one point, just to be sure that it was not one of our cats.)

So we got to say farewell to Matilde and Luisa, which was delightful.  We broke out our four words of Spanish to tell them that they had been very nice to us and we had enjoyed living there, and they replied that we were all friends and wished us well on our trip to London.  It was a very touching farewell.

Soon, Mike and Eliana, the apartment agents who had helped us find this place originally, dropped by to pick up the keys and see us on our way.  It was good to see them again one last time.  On the way out, they asked whether we had lost weight, which was pleasant to consider.  Eliana suggested that it was the food.  We think more likely it’s all about walking.  A lot.  (Don’t get me wrong — I have really enjoyed learning about the cuisine in Spain, and we have discovered many new, delicious dishes.  But any cuisine in which lunch can consist of deep fried cheese-and-ham croquettes, fried lamb steaks, flan, and beer is not precisely on the crash-diet short list.)

So, off to the airport.  Where we discovered that our bags were over weight.  Of course.  You would think that 23 kg (50 lbs) would be plenty of weight allowance.  That you could fit all your clothes in there, with room to spare.  You’d be wrong.  Even having ditched belongings in Indianapolis and then sent home a variety of boxes from Madrid and packing everything heavy we could into carry-on bags, we were still over by about 2 kg/bag.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the Iberia check in desk pointed out that we could have another carry-on and that we might be able to shuffle a couple of kilos out of each of our main suitcases into a spare carry-on.  We had a light duffel stuffed into the bags, for just such an eventuality.  So we scooted over to the side and transferred a certain amount of heavy items and dense clothes into it until we made all the weight limits.  It was something of a triumph to finally be able to check our main suitcases through, given that we’d had to pay weight surcharges on them from ABQ to IND in the first place.  And we just ended up with extra weight to schlep around Barajas airport and then Gatwick.

On to Gatwick.  The plane flies.  No events. Thankfully.  Landed, made it past the bored passport control agent by flashing our brand-shiny-new visas at him.  Retrieved suitcases which were, thankfully, not lost this time.  Re-compressed duffel back into suitcases, then on to the train.

Gatwick is South of London and is further out than Heathrow.  It is possible to get to our new London place from Gatwick entirely by public transit.  But it’s considerably longer and involves more changes.  That wouldn’t be such a big deal if (a) we weren’t hauling heavy carry-ons plus suitcases that weighed in at 25 kg each and (b) if the London public transit system were more uniform and more accessible and didn’t involve random flights of stairs between any two points.

Still, we made it.  At the last leg, as we hauled our heavy suitcases up the stairs out of the Manor House station, a passing good samaritan gave Susan a hand hauling her bag up and out.  We were exhaustedly grateful.

And into the new flat — a house that we’re renting from a London couple who are, themselves, on sabbatical.  It is beautiful and far larger and more comfortable than our place in Madrid.  (Pictures presently, we hope.)

After a day of travel and who knows how long of stress, it was heaven.

We fell inside, dropped all our stuff, and collapsed with fatigue and joy for having made it.

Our great achievement for the afternoon was getting laundry done and casting “Summon delivery Indian food”.  (The joys of the Internet and of speaking the same language!)

The big debate, after some recovery, was whether we had any energy to do anything else with the evening.  Whether we could muster effort to try to ring in the New Year, or whether we should just crash at home.

In the end, we decided that this was probably the only time we’d be in London on New Year’s Eve in our lives, so we should do our best to make the most of it.

A little Internet research revealed that the city was throwing a big midnight fireworks display over the Thames.  And one of the prime viewing spots was right near the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, and Terran’s aspiration was to hear Big Ben chime the New Year.  The paper warned that viewing spots filled up early, so we rushed out at a quarter of 10.

We made it to the tube station just in time to hear the PA system announce that all of the viewing areas for fireworks were full.  We were crushed.  It seemed cruel, somehow, even though our other plan had only been to sleep early.

But then fate and kindness struck again.  We needed to put more money on our transit cards anyway, so we dashed inside the station to do so.  In there, we ran into the fellow who was manning the information desk.  As it turns out, he’s the same guy who was running the desk the night that Terran first came through to visit the landlords.  (In between Vancouver and Italy.  Long trip, that.  whew)  And he recognized me, and seemed really excited to talk.

We had a great conversation with him.  When we told him about trying to see the fireworks and the announcement of viewing areas being full, he said, “Oh, don’t pay attention to that.  Those are just the official, roped off viewing areas.  You can get a great view outside them, though.”  He gave us detailed directions on how to get to a great viewing location and cheerfully sent us on our way.

Five minutes to midnight

And it worked out just as he said.  We took the Piccadilly line to Finsbury Park, changed to Victoria line, on to Victoria station, and then out to street level.  Walked down Victoria street — literally down the middle of it, as the police had all the traffic cordoned off and pedestrians were just streaming down it.  How often do you get to do that!?

After a little re-routing around the official viewing areas, we ended up at the edge of a crowd just between Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, beneath the clock tower of Big Ben.  Made it there about 30 min before midnight, so we rested and enjoyed the beautiful, clear night and just watching people.

Susan below Big Ben -- three minutes 'til midnight!

In the end, we both got what we were looking for.  The fireworkswere fabulous and, even if we didn’t get the best seat in town, we did have an incredible view.  And we got to hear Big Ben chime in 2009!

We sang Auld Lang Syne with the crowd (only some of whom were so drunk as to butcher it utterly.) And the feeling of good cheer and camaraderie lasted all the way back through the tube to our lovely flat, where we crashed immediately.

But the night wasn’t quite over yet.  We hauled ourselves to semi-consciousness a7:40 AM local time, which just happened to be 11:40 PM in US West Coast time.  We Skyped over to our friends Tim and Emily, who were throwing their own New Year’s bash, reaching them in time to ring in 2009 all over again!  The power of the Internet — faster than the New Year itself.  :-)

All in all, we could not have asked for a better New Year’s eve.  While tiring and stressful in places, it marked a big set of changes for us — leaving one stage of sabbatical and on to another; on to a new country and new city and new things to learn.  And most of all, it was surrounded by good cheer and much kindness.  We were touched to have had the chance to meet so

Fireworks over the Thames, heralding in 2009

many wonderful and helpful people.  In many ways, our New Year’s eve was a microcosm of all of 2008 for us.

We look forward eagerly to 2009, with as many new and wonderful people and as many new things to discover.

Our best wishes to all for a wonderful new year, filled with joy, success, and kindness.

Travel can be so strange.  I resonate with William Gibson’s metaphor that modern conveyance has outstripped the speed of the soul, so your “true self” always lags somewhere behind your physical presence.

Twenty-six hours ago, I dashed out of my apartment in Madrid, leaving my lovely wife blearily sinking back to sleep.  I dove into the stream of humanity, funneled hither and thither by our travel infrastructure, to be deposited nine time zones and 8,400 kilometers away.  Just like the subway, albeit on a vaster scale, I emerge to different surroundings, different shops and architecture, different sounds and smells, even different languages.  Intellectually, I know that these places are connected.  That if I traveled at a more human speed — say, by foot or horse or bicycle — I would see the change gradually.  In Madrid, you can walk from metro station to metro station and experience the “Aha!” moment as your cognitive maps of the stations click together and you finally see how the small islands of cityness surrounding each station are connected in a greater whole.  But with cities on different continents, it would be an immense struggle to even try to merge them through personal experience.

So I am left with the surreal feeling of emerging into a different planet.  A place so alien to where I started that there is almost no relationship, save for the universality of modern cities.  I have exchanged the early-morning odor of churros con chocolate for the late-night tang of frying fish and nam pla.

All I have for the experience of the travel itself — the getting from there to here — is a melange of impressions.  The sinus ache of flight and the institutionalized tinny blandness of transatlantic meals.  The wash of people.  The rounds of questions at customs bureaus and a handful of stamps in my passport to prove that I had permission to be there.  It might as well be a trip on the tube, for all of the distinctiveness that the already-fading impressions leave on my fogged consciousness.

At some point in life, I realized that certain places accumulate emotion.  Not precisely in the psychometry sense.  More that they are such quintessentially shared experiences that we recognize our own emotions mirrored in nearly everybody around us.  Churches accumulate a somber weight of hope, joy, and fear.  Sporting arenas accumulate hot, adrenaline-driven, competitiveness.

Hospitals and airports accumulate stress and fear.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is an exercise in capitalism run rampant, with a sensory-overloading barrage of shops polished to gleaming, chrome-plated perfection, run by smartly dressed and equally polished and anonymous salespeople.  Throngs of people alternately rush and loiter through its temples of duty-free consumption, pretending to delight while struggling with exhaustion and worries about missed flights and mechanical failures.

For a couple of hours during my interminable layover, I find pseudo-respite by talking my way into the British Airlines executive lounge.  But even in this hushed haven of peace, gourmet snacks, mood music, and free WiFi, there is still an undercurrent of stress.  Nobody is here to be here.  Everybody is on the way somewhere, and their thoughts fly ahead of them.  Will the flight be on time?  Can they steal a few more minutes of comfortable seating before sprinting for the plane?  (Eyes constantly drift back to scrolling flight announcement displays.)  Will they make the meeting, the wedding, the briefing, the reunion?  The submerged tension is amplifed by the mutually-consensual anoynymity.

I think the melatonin has finally hit.  Perhaps in the morning, Vancouver’s silver sunlight will wake me from this haze.