True Stories: Part II-Planes, Trains, & Automobiles...

Part II-Planes, Trains, & Automobiles- The middle of the story.
Wednesday April 21, 2004, 12:30 p.m.

After a couple of days of concerts, great coffee and the occasional bottle of wine, I was off to Barcelona, Spain, which was, to say the least, a stop-on-the-fly. I wandered around from one monument to the next. I streamed through new and old art museums. At the end of one day, I even sat and reflected about life while filling out a few post cards wondering what the rest of the trip would be like considering the last couple of days attempting to follow rule #1 for the trip—to not think of school or that bitch of a girlfriend I left at home. It worked for a while, but school would soon be at the top of my thought processing for unexpected reasons.

“Maybe we’ll catch up in Venice,” I mentioned to Marina as we dismissed ourselves in grand Spanish fashion with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. The flight from Spain flew by with interesting accounts of Barcelona’s ‘hipster’ scene and the bombing in Madrid. “A couple of nights in Venice…then Ljubljana,” I thought as I made my way onto a bus heading towards town. In Venice, I met up with my friend and classmate Chris Major almost immediately after I got off the bus. We loosely planned the rendezvous a week previously in London. As in London, we made our way to a café to sit, drink and discuss how our trips had been to that point. In the process, a parade of tourists, locals and students passed by the Stadda Nova—the main street through most of Venice. During our conversation and crowd watching, school and my last experience in the Netherlands made their way to mind. I was able to put school on the back burner being in a good place with company, but the Netherlands incident managed to replay.

Three days previously, I was standing in front of a theater watching my friend Selma make her way home in the rain. The chorus from Cold Play’s Clocks started to play in the background of my mind (…nothing compares…). I was having a sensitive moment, and rightly so. We had passed the earlier part of the evening at a wine café recollecting people and times spent in museums and other ‘touristy’ places on earlier trips attempting to dry a little from being caught in the rain earlier. It was like a the ending scene from Lost In Translation where Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson embrace, whisper a few things to each other and part ways returning to their real lives, leaving the experience behind. Reality was calling, and the rain helped bring me back into it.

There are few times in life when what you think, what you experience and what you feel are all happening at the same time; it’s what I like to call a real moment. And even though the moment was only a few minutes, I knew it would last a lifetime and replay somewhere else, some other time with some other person. I was still chasing after my dreams and would hopefully meet someone to share the rest of my adventures with, but it would not be the Dutch. “There is no distance too great for who ever she is,” I thought even further in the background of my mind. A small reminder that life is bigger than we realize. As the scene closed in my thoughts, I could feel my stomach nagging me for some kind of nourishment. We wandered around Venice the rest of the afternoon hitting pizza places and gelato stands. Towards the end of the afternoon, Chris and I ended up at the local grocery store for dinner necessities.

Italian isn’t much like Spanish when attempting to order turkey slices for sandwiches or deciding which wine container is better than some other. It was interesting at least. Standing in the checkout line was only better due to the new international language of the Euro, which reads like dollars only worth more. You really only need to know how to read the numbers and not bother open your mouth leaving the check-out girl wondering if your having a bad day or just not in the mood to talk. Ha ha ha. We made our way out and ran into a couple of Americans, Sierra & Katie, who had also been standing in the checkout lanes. They were sitting and feasting away on the doorstep of a closed church; so we stopped and gabbed with them for a bit (as you would normally do when you find other people you can communicate to without sounding dumb) extending an invitation for a cup of Italy’s world famous coffee. Later that evening, I met up with the two, not really expecting them to show, in front of Major’s wife’s flat. We ended up making espresso and yapping about things I can’t quite remember. What I do remember was that they were from Seattle and were on their way to Austria the next day.

As I walked back to my room at Archies’ (a back packer type of Inn), the sounds of passing gondolas and traditional Italian music filled the air. I was in Venice. Yet, with all its splendor and history, I somehow wanted to go home. I was trying to make the best of the moment. For about five minutes, I stood on one of the canal bridges trying to identify what was sapping my energy. I needed to give it a name, embrace it and try to understand it. Then after holding on to it, fully separate myself from it. It seemed to be a small shred of emotion left from the day’s earlier recollections of the “girl friend” back home. “Identify it. Embrace it fully. See it for what it is and separate yourself from it,” is what I thought and probably said out loud leaving me to look like a crazy guy on a bridge. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

Old life lessons came to mind as I walked. Time, that intangible substance that connects our current life with our future one, is neutral. One can use it (time) to their advantage or let it be used to their disadvantage, if not conscious. The choice is really one’s own. Decide what the future will be and work to make it so. “I need to get on with my program and make it already to the world stage of business and life.” I had two more days of Venice. Then I would board a train to Ljubljana, Slovenia. ... to be continued.