Mike Welch Comes Home

Day 14

I am exhausted. I was able to get Netflix streaming on my Kindle last night, and watched Sherlock. It was the best part of my day, being so tired. I have been walking the city today for what seems like hours. I don’t want to sit down for some reason. I would feel like a loiterer. Finally, I have a beer at a sidewalk café, and converse with a Norwegian business woman about this and that. There is no romance in the air, and I am sad. Vienna by yourself can be a downer, even in November.

In another bar, a guy and his wife are eyeing me. For a threesome? He seems effete, a fop, wearing a too fey scarf ascot thing, and she has on a leather skirt and sexy stockings she should have stopped wearing 20 years ago. Finally, he comes over and explains he manufactures little writers’ notebooks like the one I am writing in. He gives me one.

Day 15

On the train back, I get a Polish girl in my compartment whom I find eyeing me suspiciously every time I look up. I wish I knew how to say I am not a pervert or a rapist on Polish, but I don’t. Weird dreams, even without the Slavic political arguments, and then we are back in Katowice. 5 am I get off the train, and take a wrong turn and end up in the red light district. People are still drinking, and one vomits in the street outside a club named Sex. Now that is creative. Somehow I get back on a street I recognize, and make it back to the hotel. If you lug a back pack a long way, you get sore in weird places, in your hips, feet and shoulders. And if you walk around in sweaty clothes you get chafed in some surprising spots too.

Spent the whole day in my room. Everyone else is in Warsaw at some Chopin concert. I have to admit to myself I think it is pretty cool I went off by myself like that. I know, I know, it wasn’t like I went into the Heart of Darkness or anything, or like I survived in the jungle with a compass and a Swiss army knife, but I did it. Have to go back to normal life tomorrow. Another eight hours crammed into a seat made for a human half my size. And I will have to make my own meals again. No room service, waiters, tour guides—I’ll have to guide myself through life again. This has been fun—I don’t know if any great lessons have been learned, but fun. I do see that there are other ways to live. More economical and ecologically minded, more thoughtful and slower-paced, with more of an emphasis on beauty. And maybe less assurance of our very rightness in the world. They say that a journey without is also a journey within. I don’t know, that is kind of a cliché, but I did learn that I have a taste for travel, and that I enjoyed the quirky comfort of my companions more than I thought I would. Maybe when I retire I will do more of this kind of thing, but like a Hobbit, I think I am going to enjoy the little comforts of my hidey-hole of a home when I get back.

Today, Lufthansa went on strike. I am glad. I don’t want to go home. I like being a stranger in a strange land, and I like being part of this merry band of weird pilgrims. At home, I will be back to the old grindstone, and being ground down with the loneliness of being a 53 year old bachelor. I know, there are a lot worse things, but still, it sucks.

Been back at work for two days now, exaggerating my adventures. It has been fun having people ask me about them. Like it has been fun writing for this blog. Life does indeed move on, both when we want it to and when we don’t.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Vienna

Day 10

I have decided to take the bus to Vienna. It is only about $40 round trip. And I found a room in Vienna for $56. I hope it is not too horrible. I just wanted to see one of those classic European cities. This is more like Pittsburgh on the Polish Plain or something. I don’t have any German, so it will be an adventure, but I am game. I leave at 11 tonight, and get there at 7 am.

I needed a caffeine fix, and so found a kind of 7-11, mini mart gas station convenience store behind the hotel. They have a lot of the usual stuff, beer and soda and junk food. They also have vodka. I got a lot of Pepsi, they don’t have diet, usually, and when they do it is called “lite.” I don’t know if it is comforting to know you can get caffeine, sugar and alcohol along with your gas in Katowice as well as Albany. I’d like to give the world…….a coke?

Drank a lot of beer today. Reminded me of college. You start out thinking this is great, I can drink as much as I want, and then you realize you didn’t want to drink all that much. And then you get a hangover anyway. It seems like everyone has a little English in their arsenal, even though I have no Polish in mine. The weather during the day is quite nice, although the temperature plummets as soon as the sun goes down. In the early morning, a fog that is not quite a fog, but something perhaps more synthetic and pernicious, covers everything. Seems like everyone walks on takes the Tram. I keep being surprised by all the odd foreign, tiny cars. I guess us Americans think the whole world is supposed to choose to be just like us. They are really tough on jaywalking here. Everyone waits patiently for the pedestrian light to change. Some of us have gotten impatient and gone against the light, only to have the cops stop us and yell at us in Polish. We got off by pleading ugly American ignorance. Matteus says he has three unpaid tickets sitting on his dresser at home.

Day 11

Off to Vienna tonight. I changed to the train, which is still only $60 each way. I am a little afraid, to be honest, Stranger in a Strange Land, not knowing where the traps and lairs and snares are, but I can’t pass up this opportunity. The romance of Vienna, the third man, John Irving’s novels, etc. I think a train is more cool than a bus. When I was taking the bus, I had this image of people sitting on the roof and chickens running around, but that must be South America or Mexico. You would freeze to death riding on top a bus in Poland. We go through Czechoslovakia to get there. And they even have Wi-Fi! What could be bad with Wi-Fi?

Day 12

I turned 53 on this trip. November 1st. All Saints Day. A big deal in Italy, All Saints day. And in Poland too. The tour guide explained the night before, our Halloween, is the time to go out and party, and then you go and visit your dead relatives with a hangover and some flowers at their gravesides the next day. That is, unless you did something like drinking and driving and got killed and joined them here in the cemetery.

I am staging a rebellion. I am not going to see one more statue or painting or old monument. I am going to Vienna, to sit in a café and write like some real writer. Or at least like a guy who wants to be a real writer. And besides, familiarity is breeding contempt. David, whom I love dearly, asks the tour guide stupid questions, has more special requests at dinner than Meg Ryan in When Harry met Sally, and always manages to somehow hold up the plane or the tour bus. Our other friend Ted is loaded, and always talks about how he is going to give his money away to some charity at the same time he is trying to cadge free beers off you. Don, who is a good guy, is bright, but intense and worried. He has been talking about his colon and Metamucil and a possible blockage for three days now. I want to take a plunger to him, or a snake. Roto rooter the guy into silence. Oh, and the singers don’t get along with the piano player, and they don’t like to take direction, and yada yada ya.

Day 13

Took off last night on the midnight train to Vienna. Trapped in a compartment with two Slavs (Poles? Russians?) who I could not decipher. They talked loudly for the whole six hour trip. I could make out Beider Meinhof, Roosevelt, Churchill, realpolitik, agitprop, Ben Gurion, Palestine, and not really anything else. Politics, but it could be of the far right or far left variety. From the volume, I don’t think it was right down the middle of the old plate. While they expounded and expatiated, I dozed fitfully, dreaming I was in a movie, or movies, and it had something to do with Truman Capote and In Cold Blood, and I had to run up a very steep hill like in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I kept reminding myself it was only a movie when it turned into something like Carnival of Souls, where I think I am alive and can only stay out of the graveyard until I realize I didn’t survive the car crash I thought I did.

We got to Vienna late—two minutes late. Pretty good. It is a pretty crappy part of town, looks like. The Banhoff Meidling Station. It’s pretty cold outside, and I set off with my heavy back pack and my money belt around my waist, savvy and intrepid traveler that I am. I get a map but four attempts to find the city center by Tram and bus failed, so I begin to fret. A bus took me to an industrial area and then a rural one, and I figured I could either stay on and get more lost, or stay on and find the city again. I gamble on staying on, and soon we come to an “underground” stop (the subway) and I am golden. There are only six lines, and even I can figure out how to get around.

By now it is not freezing at all, I am sweating. I order a beer in a café and sit for twenty minutes waiting for the bartender to come back and see if I want another one. I wander out and look at St Stephen’s square. I am exhausted. They have horse drown carriage rides, and I feel bad for the horses, like I always do when I see them in Central park. Like the comfort and romance for the few must be paid by the blood and brute labor of the many.

I don’t want to miss check in time at the Ramada on Greisinghoffgasse, so I set off on the subway again. Did I mention it takes .50 euro to take a pee? This is the only way Europe does not seem kinder and gentler to me. People walk around and take long meals just for the heck of it. They push babies in strollers. There are bike paths everywhere. Public transportation is a viable option. Store owners stand outside their stores sweeping the sidewalk with care.

My neighborhood is a little Greenwich Village, an open air market right across the street, with book stalls and restaurants that are little more than shacks. You can get beer everywhere (I will find out later you can even get it at the movie theater). Kids play basketball in a little park. They are OK, but would get slaughtered in Bed Stuy or Harlem. They play soccer too. There are betting parlors, and instead of what I called a candy store as a kid, you buy candy and cigarettes and gum and the paper in a Tabak Shop. A lot of these are run by Muslims.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Proceeds to Poland

Finally made it to Katowice, not Krakow. Don’t ask me how to pronounce the name of this place we are in. It has about as many people as Newark, 300,000. It’s an old mining town, trying to resurrect itself by turning to service. They host the European Handball Championships soon. Here in the hotel are the National Hockey teams of Poland, Norway, South Korea and someone else. They are having a tournament. Finally, I can get some laundry done. Had a good old traffic jam at a toll booth on the way here. Progress. I think we are here because it is near Warsaw, where we are going to a Chopin concert. I am ashamed to know so little history. I think I could point out Poland on a blank map, but I know I could not point out Warsaw of Krakow, much less Katowice. The hotel is very nice, and you can get a lot for your good old American dollar, translated into the local currency, which is the zloty.

People are uniformly white and pale here, and I don’t think I have seen any fat people. Maybe it is because the portions at the meals are so small. I wonder how many zloty they will charge me for the coke I took from the mini-bar. We go to a salt mine today, and a brewery. Took a walk through the city last night—it was freezing. Found a mall very much like American malls. And a McDonalds. And a Foot Locker. This is what they have decided to adopt from us? The TV has English channels BBC News and CNN. The internet connection sucks. Goes in and out.

Looking forward to the brewery tour. Don’t know what there is to see at a salt mine. Salt? The treadmill is weird, as the speed is measured in kilometers per hour. The chicken wings are only nominally so. This is port city, on the Baltic, I think. Or the Black or the Caspian. Who can remember? People in Poland seem more friendly than in Rome. They had unisex bathrooms in Rome. Met a mother and daughter from Vancouver in the Munich Airport. The boy of the family was in the world hip hop championships. I didn’t know people from Canada knew what hip hop was. She said she was dismayed to see how America lets religion infect politics. I pointed out the George Bush took his marching orders directly from God, who was in the habit of calling him on the red phone. I wonder what the Pope thinks about that. The people in Rome were just wild about him. I told him, when he held a personal audience for me, to allow women to be priests, so my mother would stop carping about it.

Day 9

Walked all around Katowice on a big tour. Our tour guide, Matteus, was saintly in his patience. My friend David kept asking him dumb questions, over and over. Believe me, there is such a thing as a dumb question. Or an irrelevant one. Or weird. Or all three. David is the same guy who objected to a clerk at the Vatican touching his post cards and getting thumbprints on them. That guy Don seems to have echolalia. He repeats everything the guide says, and then asks him if he has gotten in right. I’ve got only one English channel on the TV, BBC News, and boy is it depressing. Katowice is in Upper Silesia. Silesians, at least some, see themselves as separate from Poland, ethnically, culturally and even linguistically, and have a history of being taken advantage of, bullied, by the authorities, kind of like Poland itself has been bullied by Germany on the West and Russia on the East.

Matteus (no matter how many times he tells David how to say it, David butchers it) explained the difference between the Russians and the Prussians by saying the former drank vodka and didn’t like to work and the latter drank beer and did like to. We went to the old village where the coal miners lived. It looked bleak and Dickensian, sooty dark brick, filthy, depressing. Matteus says there is a mixture there of the poor and young artists trying to make their marks there, those with lives ahead of them, and those who feel like they never had one to begin with, maybe like Greenwich Village.

Two little kids, a toddler and his three or four year old sister, came to a window to stare at us. Anne, she of the Israeli husband, went to take a picture. I told her the mother of the filthy kids might not want to be the subject of a National Geographic documentary. The kids looked terrified and yet wild to make contact with something more than the grinding monotony of their poverty, or maybe their TV was just broken.

Street art, Katowice

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Rome, Days 4 - 7

Day 4

Saw the Borghese Gallery. That Bernini guy can make sculpture that is not statuary in the sense of standing still, but seems to actually be moving. For a second, I thought David was going to sling his shot at me. Caravaggio, who apparently was a bit of a prick, has got some pretty great stuff too. I liked St Jerome writing the Vulgate the best.

There is dissension in the ranks. We were told, or at least everyone thinks we were told, that transportation to and from Rome was provided. Apparently, now, it costs twenty euros a day. And the pool is filled with algae, and the gym is a couple of dumbbells stored under a tarp in a storage shed. Lots of grumbling all around. The weather is beautiful. Sunny and in the low 70’s. Took a double decker bus tour around the city. Weird, and great, how the styles from all the centuries are stacked higgledy-piggledy next to one another. The Termini (their Grand Central Station) is chaos itself. The vendors in the shops range from the brusque to the outright rude. I saw two beggars, and one homeless person. Dinner at an outdoor café (spaghetti Bolognese and some sausage dish) was nothing you could not have gotten in NY. Tomorrow we take a walking tour. We have figured out how to get trains and cabs, and have given the bus company the big raspberry. They are always late anyway. People are starting to talk about Italian time. And the singers have decided they are not chipping in for the bus in any event.

Day 5

The prostitutes park on the shoulder of the road on the way to the train station. Quite out in the open. Some of them look quite beautiful, but I think I will abstain. I guess Rome is a city of both pagan excess and Christian asceticism. I don’t tend towards the latter, but have a feeling an assignation with a hooker would not turn out well for me.

There are regional differences here as in America. I heard our tour guide refer both to Northerners and Southerners, Florentines and Venetians and Sicilians. I am not sure what the differences are yet, but I will keep my ears open.

Day 6

OK, I am getting tired of statues and paintings, statues and paintings. Enough. Some of Caravaggio’s stuff is pretty impressive. It is hard to explain—they are so bold and hit you so hard. But in a good way. Finally had a really good dinner. At an outdoor restaurant. Or an indoor outdoor one. Most of them are like that. It was Halloween, and at night the little beasties and goblins and Ghoulies were out in force. The drivers really are terrible. And you take your life in your very hands when you cross the street. My friend David is driving me nuts. I love him, but he is very OCD and very particular. One of those people who always wants things in a special way, off the menu, off the map, off the wall. He got mad at a store clerk for getting thumbprints on his post cards. And we went to a café where they were selling different things by the pound, and he wanted them to mix everything together for him, a little of each.

There is a revolution brewing. Or at least a minor uprising. We’ve decided the tour manager ripped us off on the tours. On one of them, he charged us each $92. Later we found you could go on that one (the Vatican) for fifteen Euros. So there has been a lot of complaining on that count. The internet works only on the sun porch outside the main office (sometimes). People are pissed. Day after tomorrow it is up at 3 am to head for Krakow. Why Krakow? That is probably what the members of the party that settled it said to their leader.

Day 7

Quite a day. One of the guys, Don, an older guy who is a math teacher, and I went off on our own. The subway has as much graffiti as NY. I think graffiti was originally a Latin word. I took a cab, and the cabbie took offense at the driving of another car. He pulled alongside and let loose with a string of invective, real juicy expletives. I joined in. I caught imbecile and mongoloid. I tried y tu mama tambien. That was fun, kind of a cleaning of the emotional pipes. Kind of like NY.
We found an Irish pub, of all things. They were playing saccharine American music, though. No Pogues, no Chieftains, no Irish Rovers. I didn’t say anything, keeping in mind the cabbie’s titanic tirade. They have an Italian beer called Peroni.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Rome - Days 2 and 3

Is Italy one of those countries where everyone is late and nobody worries about it? I think it might be. Our bus into town was an hour late on the way into town and then a half hour late coming back.

We wandered around the Vatican, and it was OK. I am not an art kind of guy, but our tour guide, Ellen, gave us the history of Italy in a nutshell as we wandered around. I liked looking at her as much as I enjoyed the paintings. Our fearless leader, Carmella, who runs the nonprofit that sponsored the voice contest and then set up this concert tour for the winners, is forever wearing a jaunty hat, and has a way of putting her fist on her hip which is very Mussolini like. I think she is a little whacky. Hard to say why. Not Mussolini whacky, but maybe arty-whacky, like not too concerned with mundane details like getting us a hotel that isn’t out in the middle of nowhere, or making sure the bus is on time to take us back from Rome when we are standing on the street in the rain at 11 pm. We are dinner at 11 pm, after travelling back on the late bus, and paying twenty euros for a bus that was supposed to be paid for as part of the tour package.

I hung out at a sidewalk café, outside a gelateria, or ice cream shoppe, where I had a few draught Spatens, a German beer. It was good. I said slainte (Irish for salud or cheers) and the fellow at the next table pulled down his shirt to show me a tattoo on his shoulder that said the same. He ended up being from New Hampshire, and thought we had some kind of deep connection, the kind you can only have with complete strangers when you are frighteningly drunk. He started to talk about racial mixing, and I couldn’t tell if he was for or against. I was grateful when he wandered off to buttonhole another group at the next table. I wonder what kind of deep connection he felt for them.

I guess Italy is still a pretty Catholic country. I saw a number of handbills on walls protesting attempts to pass a law legalizing gay marriage. I thought Europe was supposed to be more enlightened than we are. No one has called me an ugly American yet. Tomorrow we see the Borghese gallery.

Day 3

Today we are going to take the train into town. Supposed to be 70, and it is absolutely gorgeous right now. My fellow travelers are not exactly extras from a production of the Canterbury Tales. They are opera fans the way some people are Star Trek fans. Fanatics, and able to conduct social intercourse only when they are with other fans. We went to a concert last night, and the performances induced a lot of tears among the fans. I was dry-eyed, but I was impressed with some of those impossible notes they hit.

I could appreciate the love for a discipline, an art, these young acolytes have. They were yelling and bellowing and emoting all over the place, and I could see they had put every bit of nerve and sinew they had into practicing and performing their pieces. One fellow, Galliano (does he have a brother Amaretto and a sister Anisette?) is apparently a real prodigy. The whole thing reminded me of a high school theater production, but like I said, the dedication to an art, to love something that is beautiful, unattainable, and is probably not going to love you back, is something I can appreciate. I could have cried for that, for these young and hopefuls who are willing to give, with the ascetic dedication of monks, all for art.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Mike Welch Goes to Rome

I wished, when I was younger, and then as I got older, to be able to travel to Europe and do The Grand Tour. It seemed like a lot of kids did it the year after they graduated college. But it is pretty much rich kids, or poor ones much more adventurous than me, who end up doing such things.

The Grand Tour is a tradition wherein, and, as a way to complete your education before you begin a lifetime of work (or at least of exploiting the working class), you spend a year, and Daddy’s money, wandering Europe in the way the idle rich do, learning about how Western Europe came to dominate everything (and pretty much screw it up). It’s the kind of thing you would do if you were a character in a Henry James novel (along with reading a lot of Henry James novels), or if you were one of those loveable young nitwits like, say, Lady Mary on Downton Abbey.

I will be 53 this Sunday, and I never thought I would get the chance to do such a thing. And yet, as I write this, I am sitting in a 16th Century Roman villa outside Rome, in Pomezia, a kind of suburb Mussolini had hastily erected in the years before WW2. Yes, here I am, and I am going to see Rome, and perhaps Prague, Budapest and Vienna, in the next two weeks.

My friend David loves Opera. Nevertheless, I like him quite a bit. He belongs to this group of opera buffs who go around to all manner of these bellowing fests, and the group organized a trip to Rome and Krakow, of all places. I signed on for the ride, and will be going on some tours with these people (who are a little bit out there, I think I can say without fear of being contradicted, but who seem harmless enough) in the mornings, and then escaping in the afternoons to wander Rome and the above-mentioned cities, learning what I guessed I should have learned a long time ago.

If I was doing this when I was 23, I would be hoping to fall in love, a love which would probably break my young heart, teach me about the ways of the world, and which would remain something I could throw in the face of the woman I eventually married whenever she fell short of the ridiculous expectations I had for her after the love itself was long a bittersweet memory. But I guess I won’t be doing that. Especially with a much older woman, like in those coming of age movies, because women much older than me are pretty much already dead.

There are two candidates I have found so far for the role of tragic lover. One, whose name is Anne, is a tenor, a lovely tenor, as delicate as a flower but who apparently has lungs that could blow your windows out. Unfortunately, she is married to an Israeli fellow (aren’t they all in the military, and they know how to kill you with their bare hands in a depressing number of ways?), and from the way she talks about him, they are copacetic. Oh, well.

The other is named Simonetta. She is apparently a real big deal in opera circles, and is very pretty, in a dark Italian way—olive complexion, big eyes that look always ready to fill with tears or light up with the wonder she seems to still feel for the world even though she must be familiar with the darker side of life, if not in practice, then in theory, for all these operas are filled with passion and deceit and double dealing and tragic and poignant circumstance. Her English is not too good, but then again, neither is mine. Stay tuned.

The trip down to JFK from Albany was uneventful, just the way I like it. I sat all the way in the back corner of the plane in a seat that was made for a kindergartner. The woman next to me was German, and she had a kind face, and would occasionally look at me and say things in German that I think were kind, although most things in German to me seem somehow less than kind. Eight hours, and my butt was hurting after four, and asleep after six. Finally, I fell into a fitful doze, dreaming that my lower legs, completely asleep from the awkward position I sat in, had been amputated in some freak accident in Italy, a place where freak accidents are expected to occur.

Things went relatively smoothly when we got there, although it was raining hard in Rome. I thought of A Farewell to Arms, where the hero, Frederic Henry, is always drinking grappa and a cold rain is always falling and the boredom of his life is punctuated by the violent death of battle. And he falls in love with that nurse. Simonetta is not a nurse and I’m not Frederic Henry.

On the way to the Villa, I am astounded by how so many ancient buildings are preserved here, as well as how much the Roman suburbs look to me like West New York, NJ, a Cuban enclave near the George Washington Bridge known for bodegas, graffiti, and old men sitting outside on the sidewalk playing dominoes, and talking about the extremely macho exploits of their youths. Anne talked for the last ten kilometers about how wonderful her husband and kid are. Blech. Simonetta talks in animated Italian on her cell phone, and I don’t think she notices me beyond noting I am an ugly American (I hope only metaphorically so).

We stop at a bank to get some Euros, and I am surprised to find you must enter a bulletproof tube and be fingerprinted before you can enter. Are these Italians masters of the bank robbery? I know they specialize in homegrown political terrorism on both the extreme right and left, and kidnappings and strikes by the continually disaffected workers, but I didn’t know bank robbery was on the menu too. I have been looking at all kinds of Italian women but have not been struck by the thunderbolt yet. And I don’t seem to have particularly struck anyone myself. The Villa is as beautiful as advertised, but seems awfully remote from everything. The only things nearby are goats and cows. Tomorrow is another day. We visit the Vatican.

© 2015 Mike Welch