The Wake

I’ll preface my writing with a little about the basis of my traveling. I’ve developed a travel philosophy. The gist of it is, be as social as possible when you’re out living or traveling through new places. People are far more receptive than you’d ever imagine. Obviously, there’ll be encounters with non-responsive parties, but you can never let that deter you. They could be behaving in that matter for any number of reasons, and to allow such a response to lower your confidence is asinine. By starting casual conversations with the occasional stranger, or furthering your familiarity with a mere acquaintance, you could end up with breakthrough career connections or a life long friend. At the very least, you’ll open yourself up to an entirely new forum of education. Exchanging viewpoints with someone of an entirely foreign upbringing is powerful way to reinforce or challenge your belief sets.

I applied this philosophy to my daily exchanges while living abroad in London, and it led to my amassing a totally scattered and diversified social circle. I was there for a mere four and a half months, but by the time I left, I had an entirely new life started. I was playing soccer and basketball for Imperial University. I had two internships: one for a top global music promotions company, and the other for a prominent rock n’ roll booking agency. Both led to great friendships, invaluable work experience, and loads of perks. I frequented all the cities museums, and played pickup soccer in each of the major parks several times a week. I made friends with vendors at popular street markets, partiers at all night clubs, bus riders on the way home from work. I

I was freelance writing for a website, whose editor I’d been fortunate enough to befriend. He hired me the same night we met at pub called the Oxford Arms in Camden. Marco Gandolfi was his name. An Italian born, London raised man in his late 30’s. We had similar taste in music and soccer. We were to get drunk together on many occasions. By writing for the website, I saved thousands in all the free gigs I was attending.

I forged another beneficial connection at the Oxford Arms, watching endless games of passionately followed English and International Football. A mid 30’s Nigerian man named Charles struck up a conversation with me. He did so on the grounds that I was a blatant American wearing a Tottenham jersey (Tottenham being the most commonly despised club in all of England.) Fortunately, he was wearing the same jersey, and therefore took no offense. He invited me to watch several games with his rowdy friends over the span of just two weeks. I eventually offered me job bartending at the venue where he worked in Camden, The Roundhouse. This turned out to be the ultimate resource for me. It allowed me to get to know dozens of other students and music lovers around my same age. It also allowed my to finance a month long trip through Europe I had planned for after the semester was out.

While my American flat mates were off traveling at least every other weekend, I opted to stay in the city, and immerse myself in the culture and lifestyle. I left the city only three times, once to Norwich for a rave, once to Bath and Stonehenge, and once to Brighton with some friends. I used this extra time to arrange places to stay during my trip, to save and earn money, and to find discount details and seek reliable advice on where to go. The scope of my journey was to head from Madrid to Oslo by train, spending significant time in 6 countries along the way. The first half of my trip I was to be accompanied by my brother. We were to travel from Madrid to Amsterdam, at which point he would fly back to London, and then back to Minneapolis.

Before we hit Europe though, I spent two nights showing him London. My brother flew in to London on April 19th. I picked him up at Paddington station, and we walked back to my flat in Kilburn. My six flat mates and I were drinking to commemorate our last night in town together. We finished off all our nearly empty bottles that had accumulated over the semester, and reminisced about our great times. My flatmate Jim, who hailed from New York City, went out with us at 1.00 am when all the rest had went off to bed. We found ourselves in a near skirmish, and then an old persons pub. We made the best of it, singing a long with the aging minstrel in the corner playing popular british rock songs from the 90’s. The next day we were forced to move out of our flats, so I arranged for my brother and I to stay the night with my friend Jack Case. I bartended with him at the Roundhouse. He let us borrow a couple of bikes, and led us on a bike tour that afternoon. We covered a lot of ground, making a full circle around the center of London, starting and ending in Highbury and Islington. Jack bid us farewell the next day, and I was finally off on my European adventure.

Our first destination was Madrid. We landed there on the evening of the 21st, and we stayed until the 28th. We were staying there with a family friend of ours. My Mom had attended university with a woman named Becky Prieto in Duluth. Becky moved to Germany after college and met her Spanish husband, who she know lives with outside Madrid. One of her three sons was close to my age. His name is Max, and he turned out to be a real fun guy to hang out with. He took us around his area and introduced us to his friends. He was sadly leaving on the 24th, so we didn’t get to hang out with for too long. However, he is heading to the US this summer to work in Sequoia National Park in California, and I fully intend to visit him.

One of his friends went by the name Dax Santos. He was one of the more interesting characters I’ve ever met. His parents were of the Opus Die sect of Catholicism, and raised him accordingly. There were no overt repercussions of this upbringing though when we talked. He was an alternative music fan, and we spent most of our time talking about bands like Vampire Weekend and Phoenix. After Max left on the 24th, his friends would come and pick me up and take me out to parties and raves. I spent a great deal of time with the youngest sibling, Eric, who was 13 years old. He shared an enthusiasm for soccer that I possess, and we watched many games in the evenings. My brother and I also spent a great deal of time in the Parque Rietiro, the biggest and most beautiful park in the city. On our last day, Eric took us to go see two of three biggest teams in Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Getafe. It was an epic battle that ended in a 1-1 tie.

From there, we hopped on the train headed towards Barcelona. We got there around 3.00 pm and I headed straight for the beach. Our hostel was just a few blocks away. While at the hostel, my brother and I met two girls from Quebec. They were staying at the same hostel as we were, and we met down in the bar area. They’re names were extremely unique. The eldest was named Iris Gagnon-Paradis, and the youngest Cassiopeia Paradis-Gagnon. They attributed the strangeness of these first names and the difference in their surnames to the fact that their mother was into astrology. They were 27 and 25, both working full time jobs in their home city of Montreal. They weren’t originally from the big city though. They had small town roots, just like we did. We went out to the courtyard and chatted that first night. We elected to all meet up the next morning and head for the beach.

The next morning we met for some breakfast and went down to the beach. It was a toasty 24 degrees Celsius that day, a perfect day for such leisurely activity. While we laid there chatting, I mixed the last of the hash I had purchased from in Madrid into some tobacco from a cut open cigarette. I attempted to roll this all into a joint for us to smoke. The resulting product was laughed at mercilessly by the veteran rollers from Montreal. Iris re-opened it, and with-in the minute had a tightly rolled J. She ended up purchasing 20 Euros of hash herself from one of the men strolling the beach in backpacks. After several hours in the sun, we headed out for some site seeing. We took in the ambitiously modeled, half constructed, world famous church, the Sagrada Familia. It’s been under construction since the turn of the 20th century. After that, Iris took us to a market and we bought some supplies for a picnic. We ate back at a café on the roof of our Hostel. That night we went out for some drinks on the west side of town. The next morning, we woke up early and hopped a train headed towards France.

Our first night in France was extraordinarily uneventful. We stopped in a small coastal town on the way to Montpellier, called Cerbere. We checked into a cheap hotel, left our bags, and went out on a mission to find a place that would be playing the champions league semi-final set to air that night. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single place in town that was playing this game. We headed back to our hotel to see if it was on there. It was, but right as the game started, the television went out. The people we encountered in the small town were very skeptical and distant when we talked to them. It was my first time in France, and it gave me an off impression of the people. In the restaurant we ate in, we received endless looks and were the subject of obvious French chatter. Needless to say, we were eager to take off towards Montpellier the next morning.

There were two reasons we were headed towards Montpellier. The first was that my roommate had studied abroad there last year, and knew some people we could hit the town with. The second reason was that I had a friend there named Pierre who’d been a student at the U of M twin cities in 06-07. He was as big a music nut as I was, and we met originally because kept seeing each other at the same shows in Minneapolis. It had been nearly a year since I had last seen him, but he was excited to see us, and took us on a tour of the city as soon as we got in. Montpellier is a beautiful city. Pierre is originally from Marseille, and claims it to be a slum in comparison. The same thing with Cannes and Niece he assured, “It’s a good thing you didn’t go there. There’s nothing to see or do. They are places for rich old people.” Pierre had a job working for an artist promotions company. He had gone to school in Montpellier, and seemed to be recognized everywhere we went. The first night, he took us out to a popular music venue called The Rock Store where he frequently DJ’s. He was putting on a show there the following evening. A band named Why? from California was coming in, and he was promoting the show.

On the second night we were there, we met up with some friends of my roommate who’d been studying there. I contacted them and my brother and I were invited over for some homemade Pizza. There was a dreadlocked man named Will Guyver, a student from Missoula, who was living with two girls. One was a gal named Agnus, a 20 year old from Sweden who’d started working straight out of high school. The other girl was a science student in University named Trini, who was originally from Berlin, Germany. The pizza was delicious, and we drank wine and talked for several hours. Will turned out to be a fascinating guy. We told him about our trip, and he told us about some of the traveling he had done. He introduced me to a website called, couchsurfing.com. The concept is, you create a profile, and you then have access to contacting other couch surfers from all over the world. You can either host a surfer, or become one yourself. After each exchange, you rate your counterpart and leave comments on his profile. I plan to utilize this site in the coming years as I travel the United States, and hopefully other parts of the world.

The next day, my brother and I went sight seeing. I partook largely as a formality of traveling with my older brother. As a graduate with one of his degrees in History, he desired a far more landmark and museum based agenda for our daily activities. I on the other hand, consider myself to be anthropological traveler, whose main interest is to meet and befriend as many people as possible. After the stomaching the sites for my brother, we headed off towards the beach. Later that night, I stopped by the restaurant where Agnus worked and dropped of a CD for her. It was of Minneapolis based band I work for named Radio On. She had expressed great interest after our discussions the night before. She was a tall and blonde, and possessed a confidence I had rarely witnessed in a girl her age. She had lived in several different cities around the world already, and still had no plans to attend college. Should found that “having” to attend University to further your education was an incredibly flawed notion, and she wanted no part in it. We went from there back to the Rock Store where Pierre was helping to set up for that night’s gig.

The band was good, and after their set, we went up to the artist area for the after party. My brother and I embarked upon numerous strange discussions while grazing on free snacks and free Jack Daniels. My most bizarre encounter was with a man from England. He was in the process of writing a four part radio series for the BBC. The story was about a time traveler who’d ended up in the time of fabled England. There were to be numerous run-ins with bridge guarding trolls and tree stomping giants. His personal life was equally as unbelievable. He claimed to have just returned from Barcelona, where he left his long time fiancée. He’d been staying there for a two week vacation with his fiancée, mother, and son. Things got sticky after his mother was beaten and robbed entering her hotel, and lost both she and her grandsons plane tickets and passports. To make matters worse, he was on the outs with his fiancée. “She’s back in London, but I came down here to get away. I’ve really got to start doing some major writing on this piece, and it was all too much of a distraction back there.” I talked later on with the bespectacled front man of the group. I passed along a Radio On CD to him as well. He said the last time they were in town, they’d played First Avenue, and the next time they were back touring, Radio On could open. We partied late into the evening, and took off the next morning on a 5 hour train headed towards Paris.