Just finished reading my last book of the year. As always, it’s time for the top-five roundup! This was last minute and hard to choose.
Maybe one day I’ll actually explain why they were my favorites.
Until next year!
Cicadas compete with mockingbirds in the south and, largely, they win. Or do I not hear cicadas at all? Mockingbirds mock, after all, and who’s to say our bird-friends aren’t hidden by the hundreds in branches, crouched low, green eyes alight, and letting out ZZZZZT-ZZZZT-ZZZZZTs of insectoid mimicry?
It’s too hot and humid to care.
For I mirrored the cicadas, all red-eyed from jetlag and droning out dismay every time I walked into the sun. Every hour threatened thunderstorm, on and off, during my week in Auburn, Alabama. I was in from overseas as a one-week college student; the kick-off to a grad school program where my presence skewed up the town’s median age of 26. I’d be gone before the proper students arrived. The only other presence during my Residency week were the young and hopeful sorority girls, all grouped together with matching-hair and posing with their Tooman’s milkshakes, their teeth bright and smiles large, even as the humidity ate at the back of all our necks. There must be some parallel to these young adults descending upon Auburn as the similarly aged cicadas came out of the ground to scream and parade about campus. Our Sisters were sugaring up for Rush Week, a concept completely foreign to me and vaguely menacing in title.
Who rushes in the summer? It’s winter that quickens my step, with my head low and coat up, thinking fuck-fuck-fuck as I walk as brisk as possible from one heated dwelling to another. Though, even those sharp winters are coming to an end.
Life is changing for me.
Moving lingers and I need to start thinking about where I’m to roost next. You know it’s time to go when you start looming over a map and letting your finger trace state borders and tap-tap at cities. Thinking: Denver, Atlanta, Portland, or Seattle, but not home, not yet. Maybe one day, but not yet.
I’ve chained myself to grad school and I want to chain myself to more once I finally touch back down stateside. My years of float are ending. I’m Alabama-bound thrice a year for the next two years, circling Residency then skating back online for a weekly class from one to three am. I’ve set a commitment.
No sooner was I in Alabama, that I turned wing to head to Boston for a brief stopover before flying back to Europe.
My book of choice was Christian Cooper’s Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, if you’re wondering why my post is so bird heavy.
I arrived in time for my mom’s sixtieth surprise party and spent the morning setting up, then smiling as people stopped to tell me that my mom was going to be so surprised that I was here too. Though she wouldn’t be; she knew I was up, she only didn’t know about the party. Two-surprises would be far too much for my mother. It’d go from something pleasant to a burden of her trying to figure out where to house her eldest car-less daughter for five days. Still, we surprised her perfect, mostly thanks to everyone else. I did little but show up, take in the cake my sister lovingly made, and man the grill for thirty people.
From the moment of shouting surprise at my confused mother to her quick draw of her sunglasses to hide her tears, I sped through a New England summer. I cracked lobster with her fellow 55+ neighbors and struggled to keep up with an arthritic man who had consumed lobster for long he could do it with ease, shaking hands be dammed. My friend came up for leftovers the next day, we went down to the beach, then did a drive-by of Plymouth rock. A day a later and I was back taking the commuter rail on route to Boston, listening as Cooper told me of his exploits as a comic-writer, 9-11, and his birding community in Central Park. I piggybacked off Cooper’s obviously personal spiritual journey of seeing four wonders of the world by lazily staking down a green flag of ‘Want to Go’ right atop Uluru on Google maps.
At South Station, I became nostalgic while walking the same route to the park that I’d walked a hundred times before, some ten years ago, when I was commuting to Suffolk thrice-weekly on the Worcester line.
My old migration route. My old stomping ground. The streets and buildings were long-rooted, but most of the storefronts were stamped out and replaced with new fads. Summer street turned to winter street. I looked around, startled by how small it all felt. How short the walk was. When I first walked this road, back when I was a young and hopeful highschooler trying to pick a college, I had gone silent at the sight of Downtown Crossing. The buildings dazzled me with mass and connection. It felt so alive, so populated, so not-like-the-suburbs. I thrived in Boston, then I grew tired of Boston, so I left.
I went to Europe, where my first sight of a castle made my eyes water and my mind feel ice-skating clear with delight. I moved to Germany and walked the cobbled streets, listened to church bells, and ate Doner at 11 pm on a muggy summer night after a beer festival. Until it started to fill me with less and less wonder. Until one castle became the same as a thousand others and I started thinking that, as much as I love the city I currently live in, in fact, as much as I love Germany, it does feel rather small – doesn’t it?
Small?
How do behemoths shrink? How can a cathedral that took eighty years to build and cost the lives of workers become the backdrop of my picture of a cute dog? When do museums start to blur together? Why does life go stale as bread? I don’t want to lose that wonder. I catch it in glimpses now, whenever I’m hiking, and I pray that at least nature will stay – that nature, if nothing else, will keep me gasping.
So I want to move to a state that’s full of nature.
When will nature feel small? What comes after nature?
I’m going to be chasing that feeling all my life, I suppose. That, or I will eventually realize that novelty doesn’t bring anything but a brief bit of drunken happiness that soon fades away and leaves you hungover. But how can anybody fight against it? I want to be the kind of person that, one day, is happy staying put. The only thing is, unless something comes at me, I’ll have to break my own wings to stop myself from going, going, and be gone.
That’s the tradeoff – when you stay high and distant, you risk seeing things to small. You risk losing out on the day to day of your family, your friends, your home. Just as my Uber driver lamented to me about. He hadn’t been home for more than a handful of times in the past decade and his family was older now, rooted now, and changed now. His father was buried now. But where was he and where was I?
We were in a car at night leaving Logan airport, both of us looking out the window and thinking of what it means to be home.
With billions of people on the planet, there is no longer such a thing as a hidden gem. The earth’s only realms left untouched are the inhospitable deepness of the ocean or the exalted heights of mountain peaks. Any landscape that doesn’t tell of immediate death is saturated with humanity in one way or another.
Thus, Hallerbos is not a hidden gem, though it is not as well-trekked as other European flowering events either. Compared to the chaos that is the Keukenhof, Hallerbos is a sparse glen populated with only horseback riders, bike herds, and meandering walkers (by the hundreds). I found out about it from a small, aside-passage in Sara Maitland’s Gossip from the Forest, where Maitland detailed an old trainline that once cut through Hallerbos to Brussels and dazzled all of its passengers with a sudden burst of hyacinth blue. It made me think of something abandoned, where I could only reach it by following a rusted rail line out of town and take its curve into the unknown forest.
In reality, me and my friend took a commuter line from Brussels to Halle, were herded to a free seasonal shuttle specifically routed for Hallerbos, were driven to the forest’s entrance and handed a brochure by a kindly, French-English-Dutch-German speaking retiree in a purple vest.
We got our own brochures. He pointed us to a neatly marked path and a gift shop.
It’s for the best that humans have put a tourist stake in Hallerbos. Without conservation, the woods would likely have lost its flowers entirely, as is happening to many bluebell forests across Europe.
Regardless, Hallerbos is magical.
While many fairy tales tell of gates to the fae realm through cues of light chiming bells or distant, laugh-filled music, the real herald should be the scent of flowers. Not the light, breezy scent of perfume or a candle, mind you, but the dizzying scent of fields of pollen, which assault the nose instead of tickle it. The hyacinth, or bluebell, is the true chime of fae. The clang of horse hoofs secondary. The click of a shutter-frame third. And fourth, perhaps, a group of spandex-wearing bikers.
The hyacinths of Hallerbos hurt. They army the forest for miles, bringing pain to the eyes of their visitors through allergen and magnificence. The flowers are coy and refuse to be captured, for it takes a high-end camera and photoshop to keep them from bleeding out of frame. It leaves most people holding up their phones to others later, claiming that they were honestly gorgeous, only cameras can’t capture what it’s like in person. That others don’t understand. They weren’t there to see it.
It touches deep on the fae wild.
Come summer, the fields vanish without a trace. Never mind the cloying scent they once choked the forest with. Never mind all the sneezes and eye scratching. Or the millions of flowers swaying together, as woodpeckers tah-tah-tah- above the canopy unseen.
They are there and gone again.
Me and my friend came back, early, from the Hyacinth garden.
We ate in Halle, watched a First Holly Communion come spilling out of the church in pleats and gelled hairs with the antsy energy of children let loose, then we packed our bags and rode the tracks back to Germany.
I’ll never fly over the Dolomites without fearing for my life. The first time was going to Milan at night during a storm, where the woman next to me whispered in a lilting, terrified tone that she couldn’t die yet because she had kids at home. This time, the day was clear, but it was exceptionally windy coming into Turin. I’m sure we weren’t in mortal danger either time, though when you’re on a plane that is getting knocked about by gust after gust of wind, it makes all passengers question their safety at least once. I got so nervous I closed my eyes and hummed quietly to myself. It was better than the Milan flight, where I dug my nails into my wrist so tightly that they left scratch marks.
We lived and landed. I walked out with wobbly knees and feeling cartoonishly dizzy, stars and all. The wind might have made the journey harrowing, but it led to a supernatural air to Turin. Dust devils blew through block after block, kicking up leaves, napkins, and dirt. I wasn’t the only one who stopped to admire them, for they spun through every couple of minutes. The wind itself had whipped everyone’s hair into nests and kids ran with the gusts, holding out their hands as they went into the mini cyclones, which made me think of bad luck, but made them laugh as they kicked at the leaves.
It was a fitting air for the city. I’d come to Turin for three reasons. Two cultural and one silly.
1. One of my favorite authors, Giorgio De Maria, was from here.
2. I wanted to hike Sacra di San Michele, a monastery 30 minutes outside of Turin that’d been the inspiration for Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
3. Turin was my favorite level in Assassin’s Creed.
My accompanying book was Ramon Glazov’s translation of Giorgio De Maria’s The Transgressionists and Other Disquieting Works. Giorgio De Maria himself is a complicated man, who was a union socialist in his youth but became increasingly religious, troubled, and conservative as he aged. I’m purely speculating, but he gives off the markings of somebody who suffered from Bipolarism which makes his title story, the Transgressionists, interesting to read as a story of a man suffering from a manic episode. De Maria is not well known in the US and I’m not even sure if he’s well-known in Italy. Ramon Glazov’s translation and introduction was top notch, though the stories themselves were disorganized and a bit choppy compared to De Maria’s most famous work, the Twenty Days of Turin. There’s some beautiful passages in each story, though De Maria’s earlier writing is not as polished as his novella, where I feel he really came into his own in terms of style and voice (very briefly, that is, since De Maria gave up writing fiction shortly after).
Turin is a fascinating city. To be able to read short stories that take place at real locations made it fun as a tourist and also hinted at Turin’s more secretively history, that of a city associated with mid-century occult. I’ve never been to a city with so many covered sidewalks either. It felt like the entire downtown was a roman forum, for every sidewalk was shielded with porticos of varying width and make. The squares were well hidden and there were many old-fashioned cafes throughout the city, giving it a uniquely distinct air.
It’s a city where hidden things can happen. All twists and turns of streets, with the alps crowning it with snow-capped peaks, far off in the distance. The streetcars looked unchanged from the early nineteenth century and the buildings were old and close together, all four-stories high and unending.
The train I took to my hike was an equally old model, though not so antique as the streetcars. The hike itself was a five-hour affair, leading up from a small town to the monastery high on the mountain. I’m not religious anymore, but this was the most religious destination I’d been in a long time. I got trapped in a mass the day prior, having spent too long looking at the Shroud of Turin, and was only able to slip out halfway through. The hike was peppered with Stations of the Cross all the way up the mountain. The carved crosses both guides and rest points with water.
I saw a deer, then a woodpecker, then a rainbow at the end. I went through the church and found out from an old sign that it was apparently on the lay line.
Perhaps that was my ode to De Maria.
Turin is not a city where you can ignore Christianity. It’s in every stone, every plaza, and every street. It is also a place full of spiritualism and the occult, even if the movement has largely left modern day Turin. It’s a place where lay lines mix with a church, nature is lined with crosses, and children dance in dust devils on their way to the market.
The valley dips and weaves through reality and unreality. There’s snow in the distance in spring, while city itself is warm. There’s always something out there in the shadows, watching and slipping down the streets, and turning the air sweet with the scent that anything might happen, it a place like this.
Sometimes, a doomed trip can be a beautiful trip. Malta was not supposed to be a solo travel destination, but both my travelling companions’ tickets were cancelled last minute by airport strikes. By flying out a day later, I kept my trip but had to figure out what to do last minute.
The advantage of traveling alone is that you can be entirely selfish in when you wake up, what you eat, and what you do. I am a big fan of hikes, so I looked up a coastal hike from Marsaskala to Marsaxlokk. I was one of the first people at the hotel breakfast, then I took an Uber to Marsaskala just in time for morning mass. It would have been a true pilgrimage to start my travel with a sermon, but I got a coffee instead and walked for four hours to the next town.
The coast is winding, beautiful, and covered with hummingbird hawk moths. There were pockets of stray cats too, which made for mandatory rest points. I would have made good time, had I not gotten lost in private gardens for an hour, and I reached Marsaxlokk by noon. I was there for the fish market; I forgot it was Carnival weekend.
The music was so loud that I could hear it all the way up in the hills. I walked down into town listening to the banter of two children’s performers and breaks for dance numbers. The square was full of children in costumes, dance troops, and an overpriced cannoli for me. What it also had was a lot of traffic, which made getting a bus or uber to my next destination, Hagar Qim Park, next to impossible. I redid the schedule to go to the Park before the airport the next day instead, then took the first bus I could wherever it lead me, which was back to Valetta. Carnival was in full swing there – the floats barely squeezing down the street, people drunk in the afternoon, plenty of restaurants packed, and everywhere something to do.
I wasn’t expecting to love Malta as much as I did. But it’s so God damn beautiful, especially Valletta. Watching the sun set there actually made me tear up. It was overwhelming. The white buildings going gold and rosy at sunset, people perched on every roof and gate, and the air full of confetti blown wayward from the parade.
I didn’t read much in Malta, though I’d planned to. I even brought one of my favorite authors with me to really savor it. Helen MacDonald’s Vesper Flights is pure honey. A single essay sustains me for hours and the language is so rich that I can only digest it in parts. I’d read a chapter and close my eyes just to linger with it.
Birds, nature, travel – it’s candy to me.
I reached her chapter on Migraines by the time my trip was mostly over, which ended up being quite the omen. I read it after ordering a protein-loaded meal, which I usually do after a hike, but found that the food nauseated me. I picked at the rice and a few vegetables, and I avoided the searing, marinated pork belly after numerous half-hearted nibbles.
In her chapter, MacDonald told of how she could feel a migraine coming on.
I did not feel sickness coming on; I figured the meat was probably a little off and went back to the hotel instead to turn in early for the night. Sickness woke me up hours later. I was all chills, nausea, and fever. The simple action of walking across the room had me throwing up water.
I’ve never been so sick on vacation, nor have I missed a flight, but there was no way I was well enough to travel the next morning. The downside of traveling alone means that you have to take care of yourself when you’re doing terribly. There’s no pharmacy or convenience store runs that friends can take for you. There’s only you using the last of your strength to stock-up before throwing up multiple times in your hotel room from the exertion of walking for ten minutes.
Getting fever-aches after a day of hiking is a bad combination.
I was too sick to read or watch TV. I spent the entire day in darkness. Too sick to even worry about how I would get back to Germany. Too sick to even care.
Next to me, MacDonald’s migraine chapter was bookmarked.
It was fine, in the end. The fever ebbed and I booked a flight the next day. It’d be a few more days before I could stomach anything but toast and rice, but the stomach flu usually only ever comes on hard and quick.
I never got to see the ruins, but that’s not too bad – it means I’ll have to go back.
I’ve been travelling a lot, which means I’m lucky. It also means I’ve been procrastinating more, as I’ve self-imposed homework on myself with each trip I take. My third trip to Berlin had a school project vibe to it in general since I went there with the sole intention of going to museums.
Berlin is in the habit of blindsiding its tourists with the sheer number of things to do. While, on my prior two trips, I kept Museum Island on the To-Do list, I never got around to visiting any museum there. My first trip to Berlin was with my mother and sister, who grudgingly allowed me one museum to take them to, and I chose the DDR museum for its interactivity (I come from a family of go-getters and athletes. Their need to be constantly climbing, running, or moving is antithetical to an art museum, which features a lot of old people plodding along slowly). The second time I went, it was for pride and there was no way I wanted to do anymore walking after eight hours on foot.
I made this trip in January, knowing the cold would force me to seek heated museums, since there isn’t a lot of activities in Berlin when it gets dark by five and it is freezing outside. Thus, I went to the Pergamon, the New Museum, and the Bode-Museum. I didn’t go to any of the other museums on Museum Island, let alone throughout Berlin, though that’d been my initial plan.
After seven hours of museums, it takes a special person to not feel mind-numbed from the sheer volume of a collection. I’m not even an art historian, so most of the finer details that somebody would admire in portraiture are mercifully skipped over in my interaction. Still… Seven hours. I get dreams after a day at the museum like I get dreams after a day at the beach, with the feeling of wave after wave crashing into me, but instead I picture endless corridors, stifled coughs, echoing steps, faint coffee tucked into some faraway café, and the many painted faces of the long-since dead.
I’ve burned myself out on museums for the foreseeable future.
The book I listened to during my museum day, Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, was likewise an exercise in the educational. I devoured a love story to moss while spending hours inside, completely separated from forest, lichen, and leaves. I paid to see other people’s representations of the natural world instead, watching as its complexity was reduced to the picturesque, with great swaths of snowy fields, ruined forests, pastureland, and harbor docks decorated by felled tree-frames. All the while I listened to the pretty Latin phrases of moss in my ear; all the while I read placards for artists and art movements I know very little of.
Thinking that, I’m only understanding a fraction of each of these things.
At one point, Kimmerer told a story of her time as a consultant to an anonymous elite who wanted to relocate wild moss throughout his property, claiming it was a conservation effort, when in reality he defaced a cliff to create a showpiece for visitors. At the Pergamon, I listened to Kimmerer’s frustration and sorrow at seeing the pillaged rockface while I stood staring up at the Ishtar Gate.
The Ishtar Gate is an ancient structure pulled from Iraq and reconstructed in a museum with fire exits, freshly painted walls, and spotlessly clean floors. It removes what made it great from its natural habitat and sanitizes it; ridding it of the nesting pigeons, the dust from the road, the hot climate, and, perhaps, whatever type of moss can grow in a desert.
Strange, the things men claim for their own. From moss to gates. All of it under the guise of protection and conservation, instead of ego and ownership.
Strange, for me to be both awed by standing at the gates and guilty knowing that it doesn’t belong in front of me.
When I travel, I like to walk.
I like to walk until my heels blister and my head aches and I’m suddenly dehydrated and stuck out of the tourist zone in a residential neighbourhood, needing water and the bathroom and to get back soon, since my phone is down to ten percent. I like sitting down at that point and feel the waves of good-ache radiate upward from my boots, while I catch my breath and look about, then slide out my ebook to read a chapter or two of the book I brought along.
An ebook is good. It makes people think you wanted to be sitting on the gum-covered steps of an administration building, so they leave you alone. Meanwhile, you can zone out and read a bit of a story before snapping the ebook closed and continuing on.
In Madrid, I read a book about Poland.
I read a book about an old woman who takes care of homes during brutal, biting winters on the Polish plateau. I flicked page to page and read about murders, cruelty, found family, and how animals do not deserve us. It was unseasonably warm, even for Madrid, and I was sweating in January while reading about thigh-deep snow. It made me wonder when the last time was that I’d seen snow that deep – Boston, 2015?
Olga Tokarczuk’s novel takes a crime story, which is typically not my genre, and slipstreams it into fairy tale and nature writing. It takes all the Thriller and Courtroom Drama out of it, which suits me quite well, because that’s usually what I dislike about crime fiction. It was a great compendium to the trip and I got to read an entire section of it while sitting in front of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son at the Prada. There is something so lucky and privileged about getting to match up a book’s mood to your setting. It makes you appreciate it.
I had a great time in Spain. It was a short trip, my foot bled, and I was exhausted by the time I got back to Frankfurt. There isn’t much more to say.
Trip Highlights
– My mom texted me and asked me if I got to try authentic Spanish nachos. I had to break it to her that nachos are, in fact, not a national dish of Spain. Though I also didn’t have Iberian ham the entire time I was there, either. Instead, I went to Jollibee. Fast food in the heart of Spain? It’s not the worst thing, I don’t think. Jollibee is Filipino and Spain would never be as rich as it is today without leeching from the Philippines, so I’d argue there is a cultural element to the fast-food pasta. Not to mention I followed up on my Jollibee meal by seeing art from Juan Luna, a Filipino painter whose art Spain likewise refuses to give back.
– While at Jollibee, I went to throw away my meal and a homeless man yanked my tray from me before I could throw it away. He scoffed that I’d eaten everything and shoved the tray back at me which, like, yeah dude, the food is good here. Of course I’m going to pick the plate clean.
– El Retiro park was crazy beautiful. I got to hang out with a flock of Quaker Parrots and helped them open up chestnuts. I did that for an hour and a half.
– Seeing Goya’s art. Seriously, that shit is insane. He’s my favorite artist, so it was cool as Hell to see it in person. This is probably what a lot of people felt at the Van Gough Museum in Amsterdam, though I was mostly bored there, since his stuff doesn’t resonate with me. Two people beating each other to death with clubs in a field though? I love that.
What’s there to say about Tamsyn Muir? Essentially nothing that hasn’t already been said. I read a lot of books, maybe too much, and it’s a myth that you have to be a prodigy to publish a successful, solid novel. You have to be talented, persistent, and lucky as Hell, but you don’t have to be the next Tolkien to write a great story. For Muir though, she really is a prodigy. The Locked Tomb series is on par with Dune, LOTR, His Dark Materials, The Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, ect, in terms of setting a genre precedent. It’s not just smart, it’s brilliant. It’s a series that you have to go in trusting that the author will take you on a wild ride but that’s alright, because you aren’t going to understand a lot about what’s happening until far later in the book. You have to be a brilliant writer to keep people hooked while also leaving them confused. Her books are thus both easy to read, because they are engaging, and very hard to read, because there is a lot of shit going on and the narrators aren’t always the most reliable.
You know a book is good when you think about it all the time and I do think about Muir’s books, particularly Nona the Ninth, all the time (I even bought a limited-edition poster of the cover art). It’s funny, it’s found family, it’s world ending space drama, it’s slice of life, it’s Cthulhu blue light, it’s wartime life commentary, and it’s got lesbian necromancers.
What else is there to say?
Now for Nebraska, what is there to say about Nebraska? One, it takes a Hell of a long time to get there from Europe, which left me with a lot of reading time. Two, I didn’t see much of it, because I was there for a work conference and I stayed in downtown Omaha the entire time. And three, my take away is thus – Icy, empty downtown Omaha; a place with cool antique stores, sweet people, and surprisingly good restaurants.
It is not, however, the easiest state to read an LGBTQ book in and compare it to. When I think of the Midwest, I don’t think of a utopia of inclusivity, though their steak does live up to the hype. The politics are bad in Nebraska; however, the people were all nice. That being said, I didn’t grow up in Nebraska. I don’t come off as outwardly queer either, so I blend in pretty easily to the Midwest (blond white girl with no tattoos. It doesn’t get more lowkey for the Midwest). Therefore, I’m the last person to ask about what growing up queer in the city is like.
What I do know is that it is pretty surreal to read Nona the Ninth in a state where conversion therapy is still legal. It makes me appreciate there being an openly LGBTQ store downtown in the city and selling cute clothes and novelty items. Some not my style, humor-wise, but I found the store pretty brave for existing there. Kudos to Raygun, which I have since learned is a chain and unionized, so good on them!
It made me wish to leave Nona the Ninth downtown for somebody to pick up, but I sadly only have an ereader and that is too expensive to put on the sidewalk. Maybe next time though!
(If I go back to Nebraska… That’s not exactly on my visionary board for the future)
Time for the yearend roundup! It was a hard choice. I decided to start dumping books I didn’t like and I ended up with so many 5-stars! Here’s the top five.
Until next year!
First off, thank you Travis Baldtree for being my follow-up author to Ottessa Moshfegh, because I needed something cute and touching and full of nutty coffee after reading the bleakness that is Lapvona. I loved the medieval fiefdom shitshow that was Lapvona; it’s also up there with one of the most fucked up reads I’ve ever read (that grape throwing scene – why? Just why?). Originally, I’d wanted a nice beach read for a coastal city, but I must have brought the weather with me, because it was only thunderstorms and rain the entire time I was in Valencia. It left me with a lot of downtime and I powered through the entirety of Moshfegh’s novel during the weekend, though I’m not sure if it’s a novel you want to power through. Some scenes in it left me so disturbed that I couldn’t conceal it on my face, which led to a few concerned side glances on the train and at the airport.
Maybe it’s a good thing to read a bleak, depressing book on vacation. It definitely makes you appreciate the city more, as it becomes a haven for not having to think about what you just read. You can, instead, lose yourself in the beautiful sights.
Despite all the rain, Valencia is a beautiful city. I only went to the old town at night during a merciful break in the thunderstorms, but I got some fresh-squeezed orange juice and got lost in the old side streets. It’s a good walking city, actually, mostly because the subways are so old and crowded that I was encouraged to walk instead.
I walked until my feet blistered and my jeans were permanently wet with the rain splashback. I walked until my hair frizzed and I got hungry and had to stop eat. You know a restaurant is good when there’s one tiny, boxed TV from the 90s on top of a dessert freezer BLASTING a Spanish fishing show and an old woman comes in halfway through the meal to try and sell lotto tickets to all the patrons. I ate enough seafood in one sitting to be done eating for the remainder of the day. It was a shrimp-centric weekend.
The main tourist attraction to Valencia is their aquarium and I made sure to go early, though it wasn’t too packed in the off season. I love to read in aquariums so I spent the better part of the Saturday there, waiting for the rain to pass while I watched the seals fight for thirty minutes straight or read in front of the ocean tanks. Lapvona is a fucked up pairing to a family-fun day location, but reading while surrounded by sharks and manta rays and the wavering blue light does put one in a sunken, dismal mood.
One ending note – El Cabanyal is a cool spot! I don’t think I’ve ever seen architecture like that before and all the colourful building and squeezed-together houses were so pretty. I took most of my pictures from the trip in the neighbourhood and even stumbled across a tiny concert in a tiny square tucked into a tiny section of the side streets. I was too shy to sit down on one of the folding chairs so I listened at a distance instead. It was a charming, classical concert. And something you really only stumble across when walking instead of taking tour busses or transit to the big sights. It makes the blisters worth it.
Livejournal + 