2023 Travel Notes: I've seen some things, man

Also, some links to new things I've written

I’ve been traveling more than usual this year. In June, I visited both New York City and Iceland for the first time, and Boston for the first time in fifteen years. Then, in September, it was Chicago, Madrid, and Portugal. The travel budget for the year is more than thoroughly busted.

In New York, we stayed in a boutique hotel that had a giant curtain-less window separating the shower from the sleeping area. It was simply not possible to have a rinse without providing a show for anyone else in the room. But as strange and disturbing as that was, the elevators contained something even more unsettling, which played on a loop twenty-four hours a day:

This is, of course, not the only thing I remember from my first visit to NYC. I finally found a good Cuban sandwich place. I gave two people—at least one of them an actual New Yorker—directions, one to Lexington Avenue and one to Madison Square Garden. I rode the subway, which is light years ahead of anything we have here in San Francisco. I even (mostly, sort of) understood how the lines work.

But that video … it haunts me.

I lived in Massachusetts for four years and worked in downtown Boston for two. But I’d never heard of the Mapparium before this summer. A friend of ours who went to school in Boston and lives there now showed it to us; he said he visits every few months. It’s a giant stained glass globe built in 1935 by mapmakers Rand McNally. What makes this different from other globes is that you view it from the inside. There is a walkway that crosses through what would be the center of the Earth at the equator. Visitors stand on this walkway while a light show plays with a narrated soundtrack that reminded me of those already-dated filmstrips we had to watch in school back in the 1980s.

Looking at the world from the inside instead of high above gives a different perspective. The true scale of the distances between places becomes clear. It’s also a whispering gallery; I listened to a man telling whoever he was with about a helicopter rescue he’d been involved with up in Alaska (“seven hours in a helicopter to Barrow”). The guy was maybe forty feet away from me, and I heard him as clearly as if he’d been standing at my shoulder.

(I would have taken pictures but they’re not allowed. You can find some online, though.)

We were in Iceland during the latter weeks of June. That’s probably the worst possible time for an insomniac like me to get that close to the Arctic Circle. The sun does still set, but only briefly, and even then, residual daylight crowds out any encroaching darkness. Birds chirped happily away outside my hotel window at two in the morning, which my brain interpreted as a signifier that it was time to wake up for the day. The constant light doesn’t just make it hard to sleep. It also strips time of its meaning across the rest of the day. I was able to work around it, more or less, but let’s just say that Icelandic hotels seem to have a different definition of “blackout curtains” than I do.

This is 2 a.m. in Iceland

Let’s talk about those Icelandic birds a bit more. The birdsongs I heard there were unlike any I’d heard before. They were fleeting and ephemeral, as they often are, but there was something almost prehistoric-sounding about them, somehow, as if in their isolation from the rest of the world, they’d opted not to evolve as far from their dinosaur ancestors as birds everywhere else did.

Summer in Iceland.

We arrived in Madrid early on a Sunday morning, after a redeye flight from Chicago, and took the subway into the city. We emerged onto an empty urban boulevard at the exact moment a crowd of runners rounded a nearby corner and flowed in our direction. The only sound was the synthetic, suction-cup pucker of a thousand foam rubber sneaker soles smacking on the smooth pavement. There was no crowd to cheer them on, no cars, nothing else. Just that sound, echoing between the glass buildings there in the heart of Europe’s second-biggest city.

There’s a question a lot of people like to ask when they learn I’ve been traveling recently. “Tell me your favorite and least-favorite thing about Madrid.” As if it’s possible to distill an entire place down to that, or would be possible to know anything meaningful about a place from such a scant nugget.

I find it nearly impossible to answer that question. Too general—“the food was incredible”—and I’ve communicated nothing; there is incredible food literally everywhere. Too specific (“the octopus tapa I had at this hole-in-the-wall place in Retiro”), and I risk trivializing the entire experience. Really? You went all the way to Spain just for that?

When you travel, people often expect you to have a checklist of things to see in the place where you’re going. If you’re going to Rome, how could you not see the Coliseum? I have nothing against seeing the Coliseum. Maybe I will someday. But the line is three hours long, ruins often don’t excite me, and my time is limited. And the Coliseum has nothing to do with what it’s like to be in Rome today. I want to know what a place is like right now, what it might be like to live a completely different life if I were to just pick up and uproot myself ten thousand miles away on a whim. Don’t get me wrong: what Rome was like two thousand years ago is also interesting. But it’s not as interesting, at least not to me.

We were in Spain and Portugal last year too. On our way from Lisbon to Sevilla, we stopped in the small city of Badajoz. It’s just on the Spanish side of the border and is widely considered to be the armpit of Spain, mostly because there’s nothing more interesting anywhere nearby. We got there just as siesta time started, so a lot of the city was closed. We wandered through the narrow lanes of the old town—most of which were well-shaded—until we found a restaurant that would serve us some lunch before we got back on the road. The whole place had the feel of a ghost town. I found it eerily charming.

This year, we stopped there between Madrid and Lisbon. Again, we arrived in the middle of the afternoon, just when everyone had retreated from the broiling sun for a few hours. Undeterred, we went exploring again. Almost immediately, we stumbled across the same tapas place, despite both of us having forgotten the name. Only several hours later did the city come to life. At night, the streets and squares are lively, and the restaurants are busy until quite late. 

The Spaniards are almost ready to come out for the evening …

Badajoz reminds me in ways of the let’s-see-how-far-we-can-drive vacations of my youth. We spent a lot of time in the station wagon driving to destinations in the Midwest that often had no obvious draw. (Yes, we visited Gettysburg that one time, and Niagara Falls on another occasion. But also … Peoria once, I think? Cincinnati?) But the important thing is that we went, and in so doing, we saw the country. Badajoz fits with that. No noteworthy sights to see. But it’s a great place to see how Spaniards live outside the biggest cities. I’m not saying one is “truer” than the other. But they’re both worth knowing. 

A lot of the time, that’s the whole reason we visit a place. Just to be, and take in a vibe. Some people don’t get this, and I can never explain it to them. But that’s okay. They’re all too busy waiting in line at the Coliseum.

News and such

I recently published an essay in The Smart Set about how my academic career exploded on the launch pad like a SpaceX rocket. It’s funny, you’ll love it.

I’ve also written a few music reviews for Spectrum Culture. There may be more! Then again, there may not. The future is the most difficult thing to predict.