Barcelona in Six Square Meals

There was the tortilla in La Boqueria, jetlagged and with an empty belly. And how I pointed because I was afraid to say things in Spanish or in Catalan or in anything that wasn't English. And I ate it standing up amidst the stalls of hanging pork legs and lanyards of chiles and wide-eyed staring fish. I thought it was the best market I'd ever seen -- no small feat after Provence, after the strawberry sellers in Paris and the guys with tables of mangoes and coconuts halfway across the Pacific. But I liked this better, the colored glass and the narrow lanes and the candy sellers and the intricate sea creatures with spiny, spindly shells.



There was a baked piece of brie encrusted with pistachio nuts and a raspberry dipping sauce, and a sliver of pork loin on a little piece of toast with a chile pepper and a toothpick, and a salty piece of seared cod with chutney and there was beer. And endless little pieces of bread rubbed with tomatoes and olive oil and garlic. And outside the restaurant beforehand, C______ passed out cold on the sidewalk and I ran next door and got her the Spanish equivalent of Gatorade, which was predictably bright yellow in a bright orange bottle. When she felt better, she said, "How did you know that would help?" I said things about electrolytes and then our table was ready.



On the flight over, my foodstuffs are divided by a solid wall of mashed potatoes made from potato flakes. It stops the river of gravy from spreading across the little aluminum plate. The potatoes feel solid and inevitable. The vegetables can be counted on a single hand, and they're incomplete, the shaved-down insinuations of carrots. Something shaved off a bigger carrot. A dismembered carrot.



I go to McDonalds. Fuck everything, I go to McDonalds. Because it's predictable and because the results are consistent, the whole world over. Because I am too tired from stomping around the city in flat shoes, from staring agog at Gaudi's creations, to fish through a guidebook for something recommended. I don't want a meal. I want fuel to keep seeing things. I order in English and sit on the bottom floor amidst noisy families and write in my notebook. The McDonalds is on the Passeig de Garcia, one of the most fashionable streets in Barcelona, near the Casa Batllo with its arched dragon back, its bones and scales. I sit in brown and orange familiarity in the basement with the kids, and I write in my notebook. A full third of the bun on each of my cheeseburgers is fully, undeniably stale.



At the restaurant that everyone recommends, we get a heap of slivered, fried baby artichokes, which are like French fries only made of artichokes. Their flavor is so delicate that it's like eating fried air. We share plates of sliced meat and more brie with nuts and patatas bravas and when the bill comes, our only thought is that we should have ordered more.



Me and C______ sit in a seafood restaurant by the port on a Sunday afternoon in winter and in the sun, it feels like summer. Or like some strange version of summer where people get sunburned in their heavy coats, where the breeze soothes and chills all at once. We get paella, which comes in huge metal pans with huge spoons. The yellow rice glistens. We chug sparkling water and talk about men, and after, we walk down to the beach. And over to the W hotel, which is shaped like a giant post-apocalyptic taco. In the lobby, we ask to see a room but the guy isn't there, so we wander past the LEDs, past the mod fountain and the dumpling-shaped chairs and we walk on the boardwalk around the outside of the taco, which overhangs the ocean. What must it be like in summer, with full-strengh sun and everyone tanned and dazed from a day on the sand. Instead, it's just us taking pictures, trying to imagine it, watching the sun set and pretending that it was June.

Paris: The Thing That Everyone's Seen

On the last night in Paris, I visit the Eiffel Tower, because no one can be cynical about the Eiffel Tower, even in February. I went up once, but not to the top. It was closed because of the wind. But I have never really needed to go up, to get the true bird's eye. Once you have done it from the Tour Montparnasse or the Sacre Coeur, you don't need to do it again, to see miniscule Paris. Or maybe I'm just leaving things, setting aside Paris experiences to have later. I never want to run out.

I always do the same thing, on that last night. I get off the Metro at Trocadero and I buy macarons at Carette, and I go see the Eiffel Tower, like paying a visit to an aging Aunt. There is no point in going during the daytime, when it is beautiful but not magical, when the tourists nearly injure themselves, tumbling over the steep wall, to get their thumbs-up photo. They do that at night too, but you can't see them as well, which helps.

This time, I do what I always do. I snap photos in the cold. I wait the requisite 15 minutes for it to begin its pre-programmed shimmer—the thing that never fails to conjure a surprised gasp from the assembled crowd, like they had no idea it was going to happen. But then, maybe they truly had no idea. The people who gather at Trocadero to stare at the tower are the typical hodgepodge—businessmen in town for a night, weekenders from Italy and Belgium, elderly Japanese women on a tour. Maybe they missed that line in the guidebook. Or maybe they read it and the reality of it is still stunning—that sudden shimmer of sparks on the tower's surface, the closest it will come to straightening up its bowlegs and doing a little dance, and all for no reason. For amusement. For the sake of being lovely. An iconic monument puts on a show. You can understand why people applaud.

The last time I was in Paris, I observed my little tradition. I got off at Metro Trocadero and crossed the nutty streets that loop around the square where people drive like they're trying to kill themselves, or you. And I walked between the long wings of the Palais de Chaillot, the collection of museums and government buildings that crown the hill above the Eiffel Tower in grand fashion, all of it done in sleek art deco gold. In the open space between the two sides of the building, this is where people come to view the Eiffel Tower, and where men come to sell their wares. They are the famous, ubiquitous trinkets of Paris—Eiffel Towers on keychains. Eiffel Towers in metal with felt under their feet so you can sit them on a desk or in a cabinet. Light-up plastic Eiffel Towers for children. Eiffel Towers that play “La Vie En Rose” when you touch a button.

The men are mostly from north and west Africa, and they keep the keychains—a hot seller, no doubt—threaded on a big silver ring, which they then loop over an arm. They advertise by shaking the ring so that the whole thing jingles like a Christmas bell. This noise fills the square, and the sellers call out to you as you pass in heavily-accented English. Every once in a while, an ambitious trinket seller with add a new item to his inventory. One I've seen a few times is a little light-up helicopter that flies when you wind it up. At Trocadero at night, you are likely to see them before you even arrive from the square, little blinking rainbows dipping down and up in the dark.

This time, I decide to buy something. I approach one of the men. He has not been hassling me or calling out at the top of his lungs like his colleagues, which is probably why I choose him. For an instant, as I approach, his eyes dart around him, terrified. Clearly I am not a cop, but it makes me wonder how many times each week, each month, these men get busted by the French police, how quickly they need to throw their wares into a bundle and run. This man looks like he's about to.

“How much for the little one?” I ask.

“One Euro,” he says, so quietly I can barely hear him.

I pull out my wallet and fish for a coin, and he unhooks the loop on his arm. He hands me five little Eiffel Towers—two gold and three silver, each molded in chintzy pot metal that will undoubtedly start to turn colors before I get them back on the plane.

“No no,” I say. “Just one.”

“Yes,” he says. “The price is five for one Euro.”

I am taken aback, but it makes sense. Every vendor has the same stuff. There can be no real undercutting or competition. Everything is priced to sell, and at rock bottom. I wonder at a life built on twenty-five cents a trinket, of how many tiny Eiffel Towers it takes to buy dinner, to pay for a room.

While I wait for the real Eiffel Tower to switch on, to shimmer and do her dance, I touch the replicas in my pocket, feel the hard-but-delicate edges of them. Inside and under the fabric, they make a noise like bells, but muffled, as though I have caught the air of the square, and the vendors, and the sparkling tower itself, and put it away, made it ready to transport home.

Meanwhile, In a Fishing Village Outside of Copenhagen Called Dragor

In Copenhagen in winter, I try to escape. The amusement park is closed. The weather barely crests the freezing mark. The guidebooks tell of other islands, of tiny coastal villages. I want to get to them but don't have the time to make the journey, and even then, the cold will follow along with me.

Dragor gets one line in my guidebook. The internet tells me a little bit more, but only a little. I take a risk and get on a bus in one of Copenhagen's central squares. Trains in a foreign country are one thing. Busses are quite another. I mess up once, getting on the bus in the wrong direction. Once I get off and re-board, half an hour later, I'm not entirely sure that I've paid the correct fare. The gods smile. No one checks.

The bus pulls up in front of a red brick bus depot in Dragor, the end of the line, although it's not very far from Copenhagen. The sun blazes as hard as it can, which is to say, not very hard. The bare, knobby trees with their stocky limbs don't budge in the wind. I've written everything out – bus numbers, times, the current exchange rate for Krone. I have no idea what I've come to see until I see it.

I walk toward what I think is the sea and am swallowed by the town – by a village of little houses that only the very rich can afford to live in – that time left alone because it was too pretty. The buildings are low and thatch-roofed and sit on the neat cobblestone streets like a cluster of cakes set out for a party – all of them the color of butter cream, the orange and green accents like vines of icing.

I try not to stare into the windows of the houses, but so many things on the ledges and windowsills catch my eyes – ceramic cups, vases of flowers, glass bottles and spheres, statues of animals. Some houses even sport an ancient contraption on the outside – two mirrors angled in a V and attached to the house with a metal bracket, so the people inside could see what was happening up the street. Bicycles with woven baskets site idle in gardens. Watering cans wait on doorsteps. The slate tiles that lead to rounded front doors have not felt the pressure of footfall in hours.

The town is silent. It's early and a Sunday, but still. My feet on the cobbles make the only noise. The fishing boats sit idle. I walk the entire village -- see every winding street, every lonely, standing water pump -- in 25 minutes. I cannot bear to leave the color or the quiet, so I sit down in a restaurant by the harbor.

The wood-paneled room is covered in nautical-theme movie posters – The Hunt for Red October, U-571, The Perfect Storm, Jaws. I order coffee, a Coke, a cheeseburger. I let the waiter refill my water. The whole time, I write. I stare out the windows. I give myself permission to be entirely outside of my daily life in New York. This is what it means to travel alone, to let yourself be something entirely other than your typical daily self.

The cheeseburger is perfectly cooked and enormous. I eat it, clumsy, with the fork and knife offered. In my notebook, amazing things happen. I glean new insights, learn stuff about myself, solve the entire universe of my problems, all on ten lined pages, with a blue Bic pen. Wrapped in my shawl, I escape Denmark's cold for the first time in four days.

As I pay, I tell the waiter that the cheeseburger was really good. He smiles and nods and I leave and head back to the bus. I snap a few photos, but they don't do the place justice, don't capture the slant of the winter sun, or the perfect piles of thatch on the roofs. The only thing that can hold the memory of Dragor is the place itself. I make a note to come back, with company, so I have proof, an affirmation that it existed at all.

Rungsted Kyst, Denmark: Solace in Unpronounceable Places

In the cafe at the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungsted Kyst, Denmark, I hit the sweet spot. I have spent my last $4 on a bottle of elderflower soda in a bright green bottle, the brand name of which I cannot pronounce, and can hardly write thanks to the unfamiliar amalgam of consonants.

I cannot pronounce the name of the museum either, as it turns out. Or the name of the blue-and-white seaside town – Rungsted Kyst – where it an be found. I learn this – of my lack of lingual accuracy – on the way, in the blank, blinking silence of bus drivers and conductors who ask me to repeat the name, again and again. In Italian, I'm fine. In French, I can make myself understood. In Danish, I'm dumbstruck.

Before venturing out to Rungsted Kyst, I spend the morning freezing at Hamlet's hulking castle. Or rather, it is the castle that people think is Hamlet's castle -- Kronborg. Perched on a cliff above half-frozen seas, you can see Sweden across the bay, and not much inside the castle itself save a few poorly-translated exhibits, a tapestry or two, and lots of peeling paint.

I leave craving something warm, or at least bright.

In the Blixen Museum, I am asked to kindly cover my feet, and spend the rest of my visit padding around in the provided linen boot covers. I am tempted to slide across the wood floors, to choreograph impromptu figure skating routines. Because I get my brightness. It floods the whole house through tall windows and pours through sheer curtains. I vow to paint my whole life the green color in the living room – neither turquoise nor grass, but something clear and in-between.

The woman herself, the English-speaking, Danish-born, fashionable and droll authoress, seems to be everywhere. In the masks she carried back from Africa, in the rows of books that occupied her personal library, many of which were written by her friends and acquaintances – Truman Capote, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemmingway. It is a dream of a little house full of books and flowers and paintings and light.

I stay until the last instant, until they kick me out, sitting under a Warhol-like edit of the famous portrait of Karen, her strong, wrinkled profile half-hidden under a bell-shaped hat. I sit with my elderflower soda, scribbling in a notebook. Whatever is written in a great writer's house feels sacred. The words pick up something in the air that surrounds them. It is maybe a prayer or a to-do list. Or maybe just something about finding some blessed warmth in the brightness of a Danish winter afternoon.

Go there: Kronberg Castle is located at Helsingor, Denmark, which is about an hour by train north of Copenhagen. The Blixen Museum at Rungsted Kyst also reachable by train from Copenhagen, or from Helsingor, but it requires a transfer. From the Rungsted Kyst station, hop on a bus to the Blixen Museum, but make sure the driver lets you off in the right place. Once you see the ocean, know that you're close.

What Gets Caught Between Paris and New York

I visited the shops at the Parc de Bercy in the rain in the spring, which is how I saw so much of Paris. Because of that, I tend to remember the city as an upside-down place, reflected most clearly in the streaky puddles on the street, green from the fallen buds.

My feet got wet that day.

I tend not to love the places in Paris that feel as though they're somehow trying to be like New York. The Marais feels that way to me sometimes -- a neat row of clean-lined boutiques with black-painted walls and half-empty shelves, impossibly sparse and chic but too much like SoHo, or the galleries on the West Side. France without arcs and curlicues is hardly France to me. I want to see a breath of Versailles, of the lavish, even if it's done with no effort. I liked the old stuff in Paris better than the new. Or maybe the New York-ized Paris just made me homesick.

The shops at the Parc de Bercy are of this sort. Bright and glassed-in, and built into old stone storage warehouses, the shops capitalize on a modern idea -- put new stuff in an old space, and leave the old space as unmarred as possible, so it can exude all of its original charm and character. It's well done, but it's boring.

I skipped the travel store and the soap store and the gift shops. There was nothing I wanted to buy. My sandals were soaked through. Plus, I could do the same thing in Chelsea Market -- hell, in Faneuil Hall.

I ducked under a stone arch to get some shelter from the rain and lowered my umbrella. That's when I saw it.

There was a photo exhibit on one wall -- large-format, vertical black-and-whites, all of them rather moody and dark -- of street scenes from New York. I stopped in front of one, aghast. The photo was of a prewar building in the West Village, the typical fire escapes clinging to the brick like spiders. The ground floor was occupied by a shop, a dry goods store that sells coffee. The barrels were clearly visible through the front windows.

The shop in the photo -- and that prewar building -- stood exactly two blocks from my apartment in New York. I passed by it every day, smelled the coffee, watched the patrons shuffle in and out on weekends. And there it was, in an art exhibit in Paris.

I took a picture of the picture. I could not resist. A thing to take back with me, to restore to its rightful place on a quiet tree-lined block. A block where there once passed a French girl with a camera, who aimed her lens, and thought, "This looks like Paris. Only more so and less so, and maybe not at all."

Go there: Bercy Village, a patch of new shops in old buildings, is located at 28 Rue François Truffaut in Paris. To get there, take metro 14 to Cour Saint-Emillion.

Christiania: There Are No Photos Allowed, So There Are None Here

I find it by following the crowd, by keeping to an imprecise line on my map, and then suddenly I am standing in the midst of it, under a bright-painted mural, beside an enormous sculpture of a seashell covered in a mosaic of mirror shards. Like I have popped through the rabbit hole into a patch of ground covered in art, twigs, piles of firewood, hand-painted signs, and pale brown dirt.

I go to Christiania because I want to better understand how I feel about it. Because I cannot feel any particular way about it just by reading about it. I follow this same process for entire nations, so this tiny patch of land, in this tiny city, on the edge of this tiny nation, is no different. The only real difference is that a lot of people have a lot to say about Christiania, this ragtag squatter community in the center of Copenhagen.

Wikipedia details its political struggles, its years of on-again, off-again legal status. My tourist map labels it as “eccentric.” My pot-smoking friends at home think it's wonderful.

The morning is so cold that I can feel the air seeping through my gloves and under my scarf—cold to the very bone. The sun tries to nudge beyond the clouds and can't. I have no idea what I'll do there by myself. The drugs hold little appeal and the coffee shops serving tofu dogs only look fun if you're with friends, if the goal of the day is to share and participate, not to watch and think and make up your mind about things.

I head up Pusher Street because that's the only straight path, the discernable way in. The little stands sell drugs in the open, but it's more hash than pot, laid on in neat, amber-colored bricks. Oil drum fires burn high at the intersections, throwing off heat genies against the outstretched palms of dirty-looking teenagers. Signs painted on walls warn tourists against snapping photos. A banner hung across a building proclaims, STOP GLOBALIZATION; OUR WORLD IS NOT FOR SALE in bold English.

Before I arrive, I imagine that the dealers will look like California hippies with dreds and sandals and woven ponchos—old guys held over from another era who grow their own tomatoes. They don't. Instead, the stalls are manned by tough young guys in dark hooded sweatshirts, their fists stuffed into the front pockets, legs splayed in defiance like soldiers. The army camouflage draped over some of the stalls—a holdover from the last government crackdown—doesn't do much to soften the image. Instead of peace-loving hippies, these guys look like what they almost certainly are: Drug dealers who could really hurt you if they needed to. I don't linger long.

In one of the coffee shops at the top of the street, a dreadlocked girl plays a guitar and sings in English. Crowds gather around the tables. Beers are served.

I reach the end of the street and hang to the right, wondering if this is it—some tables selling drugs, a coffee shop, murals. But the dirt path narrows and twists, and the ruckus on Pusher Street dies away. This is still Christiania, but another Christiania. The stalls and coffee shops give way to little structures done up with knick knacks—a pretty tile, a statue of a gnome, a pot of early-blossoming crocus. Neat piles of firewood sit waiting next to doors. Bikes lean against trees, unlocked. Some of the houses look like tidy little bungalows with arty affects like diamond-shaped windows and brightly-tiled walkways. Others look like heaps of kindling—the only evidence to the country, the only sign of life, being a single flapping curtain, or a feeble chimney poking through.

Away from Pusher Street, you can sense the brackish water all around, but it's just beyond view, over the embankment. The only noise is the crunch of my boots on the pebbly ground. I pass a wooden fence with a half dozen ponies penned in behind it. They much grass, toss their heads, and eye me sideways when I stop to watch them. On the way back, a young family will pause before the fence, and a malt-colored pony with a spotted nose will wag its head in their direction. A tiny girl will squeal in delight, raise a hand to pat its muzzle.

On the way out, I walk on the elevated path above the streets. Everything smells like pot and wood smoke. I pass purple houses, back yards filled with unfinished projects. A dog trots up and barks at my ankles until I pass his property. The neighborhood below seems tiny and tangled. This is what absolute freedom looks like, how it shivers behind a wall, barely protected from the freezing sea beyond—and tax free. This is humanity left to be what it wants, the art of the collective.

To leave, I pass under a sign that says, “You Are Now Entering the EU.” I enter the EU. I take every inch of myself with me.

Christiania, Copenhagen's squatter community, is located in the Christianshavn neighborhood. Walk behind the church with the twisting spiral, and you're there.

Europe: The Yellow Houses

Venice


Crete


Croatia


Denmark


Bruges