The Weekend Rambler

Travel Advent Dec. 2: Finishing Books on Trains

December 2, 2020

I’ve spent a lot of time on trains or buses these past years, and several of those journeys have aligned with the momentous occasion of finishing a great book. The plot line has closure, the characters have long reached their apex and fulfilled their path, yet I am still on my journey. I always turn the last page excitedly and look up to celebrate, hoping that some onlooking stranger has seen me turn that final page and noticed my facial expression go from quizzical pensiveness to calm pleasure as the dots connect in my brain. I always hope that someone can be there to celebrate with me, to discuss what just transpired on the miracle hallucination created in my brain by these inkblot symbols on dried tree skins.

But no one cares, no one even looks up. They all peer down, with their noses in their own books or newsfeeds looking back at them with their own entertaining flashing lights. Sometimes I want to shake them and shout “DID YOU SEE ME?! I FINISHED MY BOOK!! DON’T YOU WANT TO ASK ME WHAT IT WAS ABOUT?! DON’T YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE CHARACTER ARCH??” but I just sit quietly, holding the book for a few final moments before another journey enters into my life.
Travel Advent Day 1: Alcohol and Travel

December 1, 2020

Last month I thought long and hard about what Advent Calendar to buy myself for this festive month. Advent calendars make the dark cold Danish winters just a bit more livable. In the spirit of Christmas, I decided I’d try giving an advent rather than receiving one. So every day leading up to the 25th, I’ll present a bite-sized travel story, ramble, or observation for the benefit of myself and my fellow ramblers. I hope you enjoy and share your Advent delights on your respective sites!

I have a love-hate with alcohol. For better or for worse, it has undoubtedly shaped many of my travel experiences throughout the years. It’s been the cause of many headaches and has helped facilitate or perhaps deepen some of my lowest pits in life. Yet, it has also stroked the felicity to some of my best memories, and it is inherently intertwined with my travel as a way to share, learn, and form a connection with your fellow traveler. I’ve been sober the entire month of November this year, so I feel able to reflect on the matter: what relationship should alcohol serve in my life moving forward?

I was properly drunk for the first time at 18. Deep in Bariloche, Argentina, trying to swing up to the level of a beautiful Dutch woman much older than me while simultaneously acting mature enough to hang out with backpackers much wiser than myself. We went out to a local bar with some fellow travelers and the owner of the hostel and her architect husband. The bar, a microbrewery, sold delicious craft beers for less than 10 pesos, which at the time equaled out to about $0.60 a pint. So for only a few dollars, I tried each beer they had on tap, each one tasting better than the last to my underaged North American mind. By 11 PM we were gone, mentally and physically, out in the streets and into an asado restaurant to order mountains of cheap juicy meat and drink as much red wine as we could fill in our nearly bursting stomachs. Hours were spent with these travelers, laughing, drinking, sharing stories, and ultimately creating a bond that would lead me to travel further with one of the backpackers to Chile. Alcohol served as the glue to make for ridiculous conversations that opened us up mentally, and let us engage in a way that I may not have been able to do with tea.

A year later, alcohol drove me to a dark bar on a rainy afternoon in the Faroe Islands. There I met Magnus, a beautiful bearded Icelandic chef visiting the islands for a surfing expedition. What else would a badass bearded Icelander be doing? That night we drew up drunken plans to rent a car and road trip the islands to loud Led Zeppelin albums, stopping in the remote bays to surf and take pictures of lambs navigating the mossy slopes. The next morning, alcohol goggles cleaned, we met sober to act on these plans and rent the car, and have five days navigating the surf of the Faroes.

I have countless tales of how alcohol has fostered beautiful travel memories and fueled the way for beautiful moments and stories to tell and remember. Yet it has also held a destructive power to create not only physical but mental pain. My most debilitating hangovers were in Belgium after long nights getting too merry with eager locals. My first few months in the cold, dark Danish winter saw me in the attic of my host parents’ house, drinking beers all night and writing poetry and songs into a journal, digging myself into a fit of winter depression. Now that I have spent a month sober in Danish winter, I struggle to find much else to do other than drink.

All of my greatest winter Danish memories are spent in candlelit bars or music venues, drinking tall dark beers and laughing with smokey bearded Danes. Without that social lubricant, I would be as I am now, staying up late at night rambling into a computer screen. So where does alcohol sit in my life now? There is no denying that it can be a powerful tool for connection, but it doesn’t have to be one of destruction as well. Perhaps I could have had all of these experiences had I been sober, and maybe they would have been even better. There’s a lot of sanity in living a little, but just to the point where it won’t take all the fun of living a tomorrow.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the answer is. What do you think?
Dansk Liv #2: The Rains

August 6, 2020

Essays and Observations on Danish Existence

— from an expat who knows nothing—

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There is something I must tell any and all individuals wishing to move to Denmark to sample the herring, hygge, and hangovers.

The weather will crush you.

But it is also something that will make you stronger. Living in Colorado most of my life made me accustomed to the challenges (if any) of living in 300 days of sunshine a year. Living in South Carolina and Hong Kong taught me the ability to live under any condition of humidity and heat imaginable. As an expat in Denmark, I have learned to survive five years in a dark, wet, and sparcely sunny country.

I was counting the number of days I’d worn short sleeves last July. On my vitamin D depleted fingers, I counted 5 days.

But all of this comes from too high of standards. I go into July expecting Italian heat, but Denmark just can’t do that. I’ve set my pedestal too high for the Danish weather, and I get disappointed by something that was never physically attainable.

But am I wrong to desire warm heat in the summer? No; but perhaps it is wrong for me to assume this divine gift from the Norse gods that rule this windy land. With time, I’ve come to appreciate the cold, the rain, and to a lesser degree the wind. Rather than have the rain inhibit me, I see myself as a tree or leaf that is simply a part of the rain as well.

Every now and then, I find that the rain allows me to calm down a bit and gives me an excuse to curl up with a book. In Colorado, you almost felt guilty for not taking advantage of the perfect weather. Here, we enjoy our 5 days of summer to the fullest by spending the entire day outside. The rain, if you allow it to, can be a powerful source of restoration for the mind.

Finding some way to appreciate it makes it all go down a little bit easier.

What have you learned as an expat?
Dansk Liv #1: Certainty

July 21, 2020

Essays and Observations on Danish Existence

— from an expat who knows nothing—

Last weekend at a garden goulash party, I had the chance to sit down with one of my few Danish friends, who also happens to be my coworker (it can be difficult to make a Danish friend unless they’re forced to interact with you daily: so most of my Danish friends are colleagues, classmates, and former roommates).

Concerned by her somewhat distant composure, I asked in Danish, “are you doing alright?” because a party filled with drunken Romanians and Americans can be a bit jarring for some. She nodded, but I didn’t really trust her Danish stonefaced silence, so I followed up, “er du sikker?” — literally translating to “are you sure?”

“…Hvad?” She posited back to me. I repeated my little phrase, not receiving any more understanding, and switched back over to English. “Ahhh.” She said, now understanding.

“How would you say that in Danish?” I asked.

She thought, and after a moment said, “I don’t know…it’s stupid to even need to say that in the first place. We don’t really ever need to say that, we always just trust that the other person is telling us the truth the first time.”

This idea absolutely blew my North American happy-masked mind. The truth? From the start? How can that humanly be possible? In the US, it feels that one really needs to dig down into a conversation before actually getting to the emotional meat of the situation. Even in a call with my mother the other day, when she asked how I was I replied: “fine,” even though after 20 minutes into the conversation I revealed how tired I am at work and how tired the societal climate is making me.

So why don’t we just say what’s on our minds from the start? This topic has been on my mind for a good five years now, as my North American desire to hide the truth continually affects my relationships.

Or perhaps more directly, our ever-expanding egos.

The North American mind desires to have a presence, which is something most of the world does not desire to the same degree. In the US, we are told we can be astronauts or senators or actors when in cold reality only a good .01% of us will actually achieve those desires. To become part of that .01%, we’ll throw our life savings into an expensive degree or a shining white smile. Much of the rest of the world is comfortable with just having a house, a Netflix subscription, and a job to pay for these.

They strive for functionality.

I’m not saying it’s bad to dream big, I’m just saying it’s bad to pass through life only striving for superficial gains. Getting back to emotions, we North Americans don’t reveal our emotions right off the bat because we want to appear stronger, happier, smarter, and more composed than we actually are in reality. We are taught to suffer in silence rather than open up, to keep our true selves hidden so that our desired self can stay preserved on the surface like a calm pond.

Of course, I also think this has something to do with our past as a nation. In a country with so many nationalities and so many different cultural backgrounds all melting in the same hot pot, it’s a lot easier to smile and say “I’m doin’ good” than it is to tell the truth and scare away a someone you may need to depend on in the future. We’ve been taught for generations to just smile rather than show our true selves.

In an old European village, you’ve known everyone since you were born and will only ever know these people, so there is no reason to lie to them over something as trivial as “How are you?” There are more important things to attend to, and worrying about keeping up a manufactured appearance is certainly not one.

So regardless of our melting pot of beautiful teeth and high ambitions, let’s work to be a bit more upfront in the future, and prevent our friends from having to pry the juicy details out from us with stupid questions like “Are you sure?”

What’ve you learned as an expat?
Metaphysical Souvenirs

June 6, 2020

Denmark has steadily been opening up, which allowed me the ability to indulge in one of my favorite pre-quarantine activities: thrift shopping.

To my peruser’s delight, one of the largest thrift shops in Aarhus is just up the street from my house. In it is a who’s who of knick-knacks and brick-a-brack and other hyphenated nonsense words that merely sit on shelves and collect dust until a hoarder like myself gives it a new place to collect dust.

Among the wreckage of stained pottery and rotting books was a wealth of souvenirs collected over the generations. Countless Buddha heads from Thailand, wooden Safari animals from all over Africa, and the occasional yerba mate gourd, never used and left for junk. Whether or not these items ever held sentimental value or purpose remains a question, but their current position is certain: on a shelf in the discount section of a Danish suburban thrift shop.

This got my thinking…what useless souvenirs will I eventually end up putting on an anonymous shelf in sixty years?

Luckily for me, the cheapo backpacking lifestyle has afforded me no space in the backpack or wallet to allow for leopard pelts and porcelain tea sets but it has forced me to think outside of the box in terms of what I bring back home from every trip I take.

So I looked around the house, and I encourage you to do the same to see how you live your travels every day in non material ways. How has travel shaped the space you live in?

Going it Slow

Being mindful enough to take my time with life found itself a space in my mental backpack early on in my adventures. By this, I just mean taking a couple minutes here and there to just let my brain daydream or think about absolutely nothing. Simply allowing myself the freedom to wander mentally came from hours of waiting on the road hitching, spending long hours on cramped buses, or generally in times requiring a mental escape. Things just take time, and at the end of the day that concept is useless, and the faster I learned that the faster I could enjoy time.

But time is a strange thing. It’s a completely human concept with no real physical application other than the dying and regeneration of cells and the rising and falling of the sun. At the end of the day, time is a great invention of controlling people. You work from hours x to y and you can relax from hour z, then sleep and wake up in time to work again at hour x the next day.

Understanding time as nothing more than a human concept for which to set our schedules has freed me up quite a bit. It’s helped me deal with everything from waiting for the bus to allowing big life decisions to come my way in their own time.

Cooking

It’s a fact that many of my travels have an afterlife on my palette. I’ve got the Buddha sculpture, yerba mate gourd, and carved elephant on my tongue rather than my shelf. You can live in New York and have access to some of the best cuisines in the world, but I guarantee the best Vietnamese restaurant will never compare to how it tastes on the streets of Hanoi. It’s just not possible. And once you return to your favorite restaurant in NYC, it feels somehow plastic (but still tasty) compared to what you had just experienced.

Eating engages all of the senses, which for me is why it’s made such an everlasting impression on my psyche. The smells, tastes, sounds, textures all sitting beautifully on a plate can last in my mind and mouth far longer than any other souvenir in my opinion. My pantry is filled with homemade kimchi, packets of Ras al Hanout, gooey fish sauce (the smellier the better), bags of corn flour for making tortillas, and everything in between.

Food is my way to transport back in time to a particular moment in travel. When I make spicy Korean chicken stew, Sundubu Jjigae, I’m instantly transported back to a cold December day wandering the streets of Seoul marveling at the shiny buildings and choppy clouds of steam coming from frosty chimneys. When I make sweet milky teh tarik I’m taken back to Borneo drinking tea late at night while two drag queens frown at me over plates of fried noodles. Every time I put my tajine in the oven, I’m taken back to the smell of spicy olive oil dripping slowly from warm bread as the piercing Moroccan sun warms my flesh on an arid morning. And while my renditions pale in comparison to the real thing, they serve as an instant time machine and teleportation device to another time in space.

Listening

Travelers have to give a lot of introductions, and therefore listen to a lot of introductions as well. I’ve met people who eat air, believe in a flat earth, have called me Jesus, and many many former ex convicts. I’ve had to listen to a lot of bullshit, but I’ve always tried to listen with an open mind…

1. because I love stories and want to hear them all —

2. Sometimes they bought me a beer so I had to listen.

The skills of listening are going out of fashion in this Social Me-me-media day and age, so the talent of actually listening to understand rather than to respond is slowly dying.

Many conversations I have with new travelers consists mainly of someone waiting for me to finish so that they can give their own opinions or stories. I’m tired of this, so now I listen and try to fill every nook and cranny of my small brain with as much nonsense from these wary wanderers as possible, to set a good example while learning some funny stories and maybe to get a free beer.

What metaphysical souvenirs have you taken back?

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a positive day 🌞

P.S. I have a Twitter now! I promise not to shitpost, unless I get a bunch of followers in which case I will definitely start shitposting.