certification

Sunday 3.7.2016

Traveling last summer had three distinctive parts.

From Istanbul to Budapest, life is a blur.  There are inhospitable moments (and certainly my least safe) but the blur is one of ecstasy and color.  Imagine watching the best movie of your life and, when you’re done, attempting to describe the feeling you felt as the plot exposition was teased out, memorable characters are introduced, and scenes that flavor future climatic moments are displayed for their first times.  Because this isn’t your favorite movie yet, but it will soon be, and as the movie starts you already know the future place it will hold.

The magic in Budapest of meeting Molly Ann Misek was executed on a subway platform below Octagon Square, where we decided (however temporarily it may have been) to separate and never speak again.  The grays of Vienna and Munich are colored so that my memory cannot distinguish bursts of dark-blue cinder from dust-in-sun timberland Gray, and undeniably a combination of intense weariness and intense emotional dissonance colored that leg of the trip.

Then I saw Brussels and happy dogs on leashes and the canals of Bruges and then the Canals of Amsterdam and color seemed to reappear.  I could feel my initial shock at the attention required for backpacking (read: carrying your entire life and any form of legally verifiable documentation on your back and in the pockets of pants you are too tired to remember zipping the fly of) build, be accepted, and then calm to a manageable degree.  By the time I left London, I was ready to continue exploring, and I rode a wave of energy and enthusiasm through Scotland and out of Holland’s Schipporfield (sp?) International Airport.

But the pattern is repeating itself this summer.  We were excited.  And we still are, for sure – but we’re also exhausted, and we scheduled the most travel-intensive and least comfortable part of the trip around this period of time so that we could enjoy Peru with the calloused brains one gets after attempting to budget, sleep, smile, drink, and fumble through Spanish for two months.  

It is within the context of exhaustion that Molly and I arose from our plastic prostitute-frequented Ipiales hotel mattress to board an early morning bus from Ipiales to Peru.  Specifically: we stumbled onto an entire square of yoga pants-wearing senoritas dancing that weird European/maybe Brazilian collective exercising and dancing thing in the square of a city which doesn’t have marginally safe lighting or police presence after 8:00 pm, didn’t even argue when our cab driver charged us that much to go three minutes to the border crossing, and waited in the lines of two different customs bureaus each staffed with approximately thirty underpaid nationals which would rather be doing anything else on their Sunday morning than lending Molly a pen for one god forsaken minute.

Like I said, we were exhausted.

The next portion of the day lasted 8 hours and saw the two of us moving exactly nowhere, as sleep hit us like one of the rockslides infamous for plaguing the road to a major Ecuadorian town.  We sat and slept and turned and slept and adjusted the blinds once and mostly slept. (Side note: real love is letting your partner have the better portion of the arm rest on an eight hour ride to cement roads).

Our AirBnB was in the kind of neighborhood that your tasteful girlfriend manages to just know is a good place for young people to take pictures.  And in Floresta, a neighborhood where a community standard must’ve forbade residence to anyone over 40, Molly and I were looked at like only two sweaty, exhausted, unironed pseudo-hipsters can be looked at in a fashionable if not slightly pretentious neighborhood consisting of many ironed shirts.  La Casa Mutante, the home of several chilly artists who all actually called themselves artists when you ask what they do, was relatively easy to find, and we pretty much just gave up on trying to make any sense of the wonderful place we had stumbled upon and instead decided to fall asleep with the lights on.