Life on the Road
Dear reader, you now find me back on my home continent, but not quite home yet. Instead I am nestled amid the many pleasures of Montreal. I decamped here from Sweden, after a conference in US and an indulgent weekend spent in New Bedford, being very normal about whales. (Pro tip to future sabbatical-ers: while they still exist as such, get ivy league universities to pay for your trans-Atlantic travel, especially in a post-Hormuz era of jet fuel price hikes. Then use that coincidence of geography to embark on any literary pilgrimages that may be welling up inside you).
There are many ways to explain why I'll be spending May in Montreal. There's a Civil Society & AI summit set happening in the middle of the month that I'm looking forward to joining, and which should be an interesting space to take the pulse of different Canadian constituencies/maybe find future participatory action research partners. It's only two days long, but it overlaps with an obnoxious once-a-year extremely fast car racing event that seems to have bought out all the hotels in town, making it very tricky to just pop into Montreal for a short while. Instead, it accidentally endorses the budgetary strategy of a one month sublet. But that's just a retroactive excuse; I knew I wanted to have a good pause here anyways while waiting for my tenant/housesitter's lease to conclude in Peterborough. Let's say, to borrow some ironic words from a curator friend of mine, I'm on the 'self-funded writing retreat' part of the journey.
And it has been a journey. It's been five months since I left my home and family (which is to say, my bandmate and two cats)---five months on the road. I thought I might gather a few reflections on solo travel here, in honour of my teenage self that would excitedly read magazine articles on exotic and 'mature' travel topics, such as negotiating Eurotrail ticket systems or how to dine alone in restaurants.
That said, I did not practice this doctrine equally. I never got terribly far with Swedish lessons, and was astonished to find that pretty much everyone in Sweden is fluent in English. What's more there is absolutely no risk of offence at responding to anyone's genial "Hej" with a fully English reply.
This goes against the ethics and legal regimes I know from Quebec, where language politics are freighted and (as I explained to the mild horror of European audiences) sometimes actually policed. It is illegal to have public English signage of equivalent size to the French, even in heavily bilingual Montreal. To only have English, well---no this is unforgiveable. The government employs civil servants to audit such things, to phone random businesses to check that they answer dutifully in French. The CEO of Air Canada, a fully private and federal company, recently faced a chorus of calls to resign when he delivered a public apology only in English. The appropriate thing to do (I would pantomime to Europeans) is to bear the back of your neck, and always make the attempt in imperfect French (even if you both collectively speak more English).
Yet here is a country whose orientation towards the linguistic other is entirely different: a pragmatic acceptance that its relatively small linguistic population would be better served by meeting the world where it's at than waiting for it somewhat halfway. It reminded me of the privilege of being a native speaker of a global lingua franca, and also perhaps the transient character of that status in an era of imperial ends and beginnings. I can not shake the certainty that, in fifty years, all of Sweden will suddenly switch to Mandarin as a second language. It's an incentive to keep learning and yearning in more than one tongue.
Part of this comes down to the admirable social acumen and ethics of these individuals, but when you see it unfolding enough times, you can also perceive the pattern of a learned skill. There's many ways to come by the art of being a good host, and also (I was so delighted to discover) a set of workshops a few had actually embarked on to cultivate this deliberately. It's something I also want to cultivate in myself and pay it all forward.
Post-pandemic, it's nice to affirm that you can simply move through the world, armed with only a few weak social ties and rumours, and build them up into something rich and nurturing, even if destined to remain temporary. I have been sitting with this fact, which still seems quite astonishing, and all the ways it encourages one to soften towards the world. One way we could describe this is as a 'miracle' that keeps happening. To quote a recent reflection by Kevin Kelly[1]:
In the past five months I have, absurdly, enjoyed four haircuts in three such places. My minor side fade does not demand such maintenance, even according to the most high-performing of sartorial expectations. Instead, it's just a simple joy to seek these places out and in them receive exactly the right kind of care. It's something we lack in my hometown and I was glad to pursue it abroad.
I have had my hair cut at La BarBer in Berlin twice, once at the pay-what-you-can hairdresser who operates out of a corner of the community run gay bar in Bochum, and once at Haircuts for Anyone in Montreal. The first was a full service salon, full of competent femmes and thems who are entirely game for 'lesbian fashion mullet' as keyword and directive. The second resulted in slightly crooked bangs (tip: when your barber is cutting your hair in a nightclub with low lighting and no mirrors, and has to stop to bring his ear to your face to hear what you've saying, keep the chitchat to a minimum) yet still a delightful experience of queueing with the other queers discussing their hair needs and wants. Worth it. The third was the opportunity to pick up the trail of a rumour I'd heard a full decade ago, of a legendary place called 'Lesbian Haircuts for Everyone -- $15' that operated out of a Montreal bike shop. Inflation, a move to a properly code-compliant facility, and a gender transition for the proprietor resulted in some shifts in the name, but it was still quite enjoyable. It turns out my current sublet was an easy stroll away.
It suuuuucked. I'm not sure if my bug was of a Corona-adjacent nature, or just a nasty cold. Either way, I was flattened. Most days I would slowly migrate downstairs, pedal pathetically to a pharmacy, and try to negotiate my way to some sort of adequate medical mitigation. This was largely unsuccessful; the country has banned the good cold meds--you know, the ones that you can use a precursors to making meth. Fair, but also not fair.
Adventurous and worldly protocols must be abandoned when you are churning through a box of tissues a day. I drank a lot of boring soup and juice. I marathoned both seasons of The Pitt (I recommend btw), and tried and failed to sleep enough amid the coughing and snot.
Bring sick is a rest and reset for the body, but also one's cultural appetites and achievements. In my post-viral haze, released from my apartment, I was still pretty tuckered out and unable to do a lot of the Swedish jazz evenings I'd hoped for. My horizons for independent adventure were narrowed to convenience store lunches (7-11 is a treasure in Sweden) and a bit of bird watching in parks (we're talking gulls of unusual girth). You don't win them all, but even still there's a bit of consolation prize in there somewhere.
A few particular highlights: Cevapicici in Berlin, beerhaus duck in Bochum, smoked herring in a park Stockholm, mocktails in a listening bar in Copenhagen, and Cape Verdean breakfast in New Bedford.
--
[1] To overstate it, my life is devoted to cataloging and contesting the side effects of the projects to which Kelly has devoted his. It is thus quite odd to find this moment of great concordance here, and on quasi-spiritual matters, no less! What can I say except that the bike saddle is a neutral zone in our political disagreements
(I want everyone to know that whale captains had a sweet whale stamp they would use when their ships got a whale in their ship logs)
There are many ways to explain why I'll be spending May in Montreal. There's a Civil Society & AI summit set happening in the middle of the month that I'm looking forward to joining, and which should be an interesting space to take the pulse of different Canadian constituencies/maybe find future participatory action research partners. It's only two days long, but it overlaps with an obnoxious once-a-year extremely fast car racing event that seems to have bought out all the hotels in town, making it very tricky to just pop into Montreal for a short while. Instead, it accidentally endorses the budgetary strategy of a one month sublet. But that's just a retroactive excuse; I knew I wanted to have a good pause here anyways while waiting for my tenant/housesitter's lease to conclude in Peterborough. Let's say, to borrow some ironic words from a curator friend of mine, I'm on the 'self-funded writing retreat' part of the journey.
And it has been a journey. It's been five months since I left my home and family (which is to say, my bandmate and two cats)---five months on the road. I thought I might gather a few reflections on solo travel here, in honour of my teenage self that would excitedly read magazine articles on exotic and 'mature' travel topics, such as negotiating Eurotrail ticket systems or how to dine alone in restaurants.
On Languages
I've been continually living in anglophone-ish institutions which exist inside non-anglophone nations. From within the security blanket of the office, I've enjoyed my time as a linguistic minority. It was a joy to parse the shapes of a new grammar in German and now to return to a familiar stranger in French. Being put in a position where you have to extend yourself inelegantly, through every verbal and non-verbal conveyance available to you, to express a sincere desire or regret to a stranger is both humbling and deeply rewarding. It gives you some faith in the enduring generosity of people and a shared need to understand and be understood.That said, I did not practice this doctrine equally. I never got terribly far with Swedish lessons, and was astonished to find that pretty much everyone in Sweden is fluent in English. What's more there is absolutely no risk of offence at responding to anyone's genial "Hej" with a fully English reply.
This goes against the ethics and legal regimes I know from Quebec, where language politics are freighted and (as I explained to the mild horror of European audiences) sometimes actually policed. It is illegal to have public English signage of equivalent size to the French, even in heavily bilingual Montreal. To only have English, well---no this is unforgiveable. The government employs civil servants to audit such things, to phone random businesses to check that they answer dutifully in French. The CEO of Air Canada, a fully private and federal company, recently faced a chorus of calls to resign when he delivered a public apology only in English. The appropriate thing to do (I would pantomime to Europeans) is to bear the back of your neck, and always make the attempt in imperfect French (even if you both collectively speak more English).
Yet here is a country whose orientation towards the linguistic other is entirely different: a pragmatic acceptance that its relatively small linguistic population would be better served by meeting the world where it's at than waiting for it somewhat halfway. It reminded me of the privilege of being a native speaker of a global lingua franca, and also perhaps the transient character of that status in an era of imperial ends and beginnings. I can not shake the certainty that, in fifty years, all of Sweden will suddenly switch to Mandarin as a second language. It's an incentive to keep learning and yearning in more than one tongue.
On Being a Guest in an Academic Community
One great pleasure of my sabbatical has been being the new entrant to a continuously revolving set of scenes. It have had many introductions, many enthusiastic coffee chats, and a lengthy and wonderful set of reading recommendations come my way. I have also been actively hosted by a set of talented and generous conveners, who went out of their way to make me feel welcome and who have engineered occasions for those rewarding exchanges to take place.Part of this comes down to the admirable social acumen and ethics of these individuals, but when you see it unfolding enough times, you can also perceive the pattern of a learned skill. There's many ways to come by the art of being a good host, and also (I was so delighted to discover) a set of workshops a few had actually embarked on to cultivate this deliberately. It's something I also want to cultivate in myself and pay it all forward.
On Being a Guest in a Normal Community
The magic of hosting continues beyond the walls of collegial connection. You also find it in the gift of strangers' life stories on night trains, in shared laughter in absurd situations, and--most recently--the collective effervescence of watching the women's hockey playoff games at a queer sports bar.
(Sometimes a perfect image presents itself)
Post-pandemic, it's nice to affirm that you can simply move through the world, armed with only a few weak social ties and rumours, and build them up into something rich and nurturing, even if destined to remain temporary. I have been sitting with this fact, which still seems quite astonishing, and all the ways it encourages one to soften towards the world. One way we could describe this is as a 'miracle' that keeps happening. To quote a recent reflection by Kevin Kelly[1]:
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways. When an offered gift is accepted, then the threads of love are knotted, snaring both the stranger who is kind, and the stranger who is kinded. Every time a gift is tossed it lands differently – but knowing that it will arrive in some colorful, unexpected way is one of the certainties of life.I have not lived with that certainty for a lot of my life and often struggle to trust its endurance from one ephemeral flash to the next. Yet perhaps that's what makes it all miraculous. Perhaps that's the grounding of a new kind of faith. Faith begins where we are unable to give ourselves to certainty but insist, contradictorily, in trusting the gift regardless.
On the Pleasures of Eternal Spring
Here is my great geographic hack: if you plan your cards right, you can see spring come at least three times in a row. You must time your travel and destinations correctly though. Start in the interior of Europe in the winter, and slowly move west and north as March and April arrive. Coastal currents and latitude changes will rewind the clock whenever you've found peak bloom. Then, make the jump to Canada in May. While you are a temporary feature on the landscape, these flowers will be relatively stable fixture in your own. It is like the chapter in Le Petit Prince with the 44 sunsets, only a lot more cheerful. It is a rare chance to saturate yourself in magnolia blossoms.
Another (albeit more site-specific) sign of spring: the emergence of snow-plow mangled bike ruins on the streets of Montreal)
On the Pleasures of Queer Haircuts
Another delight of life on the road is the many opportunities you may find to have different haircuts (or whatever other ritual of social grooming and self-making you hold dear) in many gay-ass salons and barbershops (or whatever subcultural constituency from which you draw succor).In the past five months I have, absurdly, enjoyed four haircuts in three such places. My minor side fade does not demand such maintenance, even according to the most high-performing of sartorial expectations. Instead, it's just a simple joy to seek these places out and in them receive exactly the right kind of care. It's something we lack in my hometown and I was glad to pursue it abroad.
I have had my hair cut at La BarBer in Berlin twice, once at the pay-what-you-can hairdresser who operates out of a corner of the community run gay bar in Bochum, and once at Haircuts for Anyone in Montreal. The first was a full service salon, full of competent femmes and thems who are entirely game for 'lesbian fashion mullet' as keyword and directive. The second resulted in slightly crooked bangs (tip: when your barber is cutting your hair in a nightclub with low lighting and no mirrors, and has to stop to bring his ear to your face to hear what you've saying, keep the chitchat to a minimum) yet still a delightful experience of queueing with the other queers discussing their hair needs and wants. Worth it. The third was the opportunity to pick up the trail of a rumour I'd heard a full decade ago, of a legendary place called 'Lesbian Haircuts for Everyone -- $15' that operated out of a Montreal bike shop. Inflation, a move to a properly code-compliant facility, and a gender transition for the proprietor resulted in some shifts in the name, but it was still quite enjoyable. It turns out my current sublet was an easy stroll away.
On Being Sick
Ah but it is not all fun and gay haircuts on the road. Despite diligent efforts at vaccination and masking, I got pretty sick for the middle of my month in Sweden. As a result, after spinning wheels during Easter and then fucking off to Berlin for a cool conference, I spent the bulk of the time in which I could have been researching and networking in Stockholm in bed instead.It suuuuucked. I'm not sure if my bug was of a Corona-adjacent nature, or just a nasty cold. Either way, I was flattened. Most days I would slowly migrate downstairs, pedal pathetically to a pharmacy, and try to negotiate my way to some sort of adequate medical mitigation. This was largely unsuccessful; the country has banned the good cold meds--you know, the ones that you can use a precursors to making meth. Fair, but also not fair.
Adventurous and worldly protocols must be abandoned when you are churning through a box of tissues a day. I drank a lot of boring soup and juice. I marathoned both seasons of The Pitt (I recommend btw), and tried and failed to sleep enough amid the coughing and snot.
Bring sick is a rest and reset for the body, but also one's cultural appetites and achievements. In my post-viral haze, released from my apartment, I was still pretty tuckered out and unable to do a lot of the Swedish jazz evenings I'd hoped for. My horizons for independent adventure were narrowed to convenience store lunches (7-11 is a treasure in Sweden) and a bit of bird watching in parks (we're talking gulls of unusual girth). You don't win them all, but even still there's a bit of consolation prize in there somewhere.
Ok Sure: Eating Alone in Restaurants
It's true that travel with company is often nicer, but I've found an enjoyable groove for being out alone. I had some minor trepidation about this at the start! Meals do seem to stir anxieties around social misrecognition. Will everyone stare at you if you're at a table alone? Will you be shunned by the waiter as some sort of probable social plague victim? Clearly not, but also, there is some strategy to be had in having a better time.My advice to anxious single women (or men, or whoever feels interpellated by this social type) is to study up the ways that you enjoy being in your own company. Do you want to spend time with just your thoughts and a book? With a particular kind of ambience? People watching? Being cared for by a talented server or bartender? Or being happily ignored?
Different environments support such goals, and some are easier to come by than others. I really appreciated campus dining halls ('the mensa' in Germany) where, contrary to my North American experiences, the food is usually pretty decent and cheap. It's a functional space set up to achieve the work of nourishment, and so, solo or in a group, you are easily accommodated into its Bauhaus logics. See also: hipster food halls and beloved outdoor food stands.
Elsewhere, I've taken a fondness for seats at the bar and tucked in booths in off-hour restaurants. There's a sweet spot where you can enjoy the ambient regard of servers moving through unbusy work rhythms and be equally unhurried in your own. There's also much to recommend about time in park benches with a bag of market goodies. Look for good food you can't find at home, not necessarily dishes of national significance at every occasion. Don't be afraid to ask for recommendations, or conversely to stick with your first impulse at a menu.
Different environments support such goals, and some are easier to come by than others. I really appreciated campus dining halls ('the mensa' in Germany) where, contrary to my North American experiences, the food is usually pretty decent and cheap. It's a functional space set up to achieve the work of nourishment, and so, solo or in a group, you are easily accommodated into its Bauhaus logics. See also: hipster food halls and beloved outdoor food stands.
Elsewhere, I've taken a fondness for seats at the bar and tucked in booths in off-hour restaurants. There's a sweet spot where you can enjoy the ambient regard of servers moving through unbusy work rhythms and be equally unhurried in your own. There's also much to recommend about time in park benches with a bag of market goodies. Look for good food you can't find at home, not necessarily dishes of national significance at every occasion. Don't be afraid to ask for recommendations, or conversely to stick with your first impulse at a menu.
A few particular highlights: Cevapicici in Berlin, beerhaus duck in Bochum, smoked herring in a park Stockholm, mocktails in a listening bar in Copenhagen, and Cape Verdean breakfast in New Bedford.
Misc Travel Tips
When I was in junior high we took a spring break trip to France. It was the first time I'd travelled out of the country, and an object of collected and excited projection. To prepare us, the teacher running the trip insisted that all her teenage charges would take a semester-long class on how to travel well. We presumably learned many assorted practical lessons but the one that was drilled into me in an enduring way, and which I carry forward on this trip and now emphatically repeat to you, is: you must under no circumstances pack more than a single bag. Things are a considerable burden. Your freedom of movement depends on your physical mobility with your luggage. You should weigh that freedom judiciously against the acquisition too many books or tchotchkes. Send everyone postcards instead of bringing them souvenirs.
Train travel, when you can find it, is far superior for its connections to transit, downtown hubs, boarding protocols, scenery, and company.
Rome2Rio remains a decent way to weighing multimodal and international travel counterfactuals. I've found them to be reliable in everything except for seasonally-contingent ferry schedules.
Always buy time- rather that ride-constrained transit tickets when you can. It'll lower the stakes of taking a side trip, or getting lost. Municipal or regional transit apps are often the best (sometimes the only) way to buy fares.
Every now and then, make sure that you splurge on hotel breakfasts in Europe. They're often maximalist in scope and quality. (There is even a maxim in German: "Frühstücken wie ein Kaiser, Mittagessen wie ein König und Abendessen wie ein Bettler" / eat breakfast like an emperor, eat lunch like a king, and eat dinner like a beggar). Who are we to ignore the wisdom of food-related maxims? Ah, but conversely, never do this in North America. The hotel eggs and 'pastries' are never worth it.
Try to stay in neighbourhoods, not the 'theme parks' that a lot of downtowns can become (either for tourists or bankers).
Take some time online perusing for interesting bookstores, parks, libraries, bird watching spots, jazz clubs, art galleries, bakeries (or whatever floats your boat), and catalog these with pins on a map. Then, you can organize excursions spatially, devoting a day to a plausible looking lap. Just keep note of the days things are open or closed. Give special consideration to community-run events listings, when you can find them. Be suspicious of the overly instagrammable.
xoxoxo
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[1] To overstate it, my life is devoted to cataloging and contesting the side effects of the projects to which Kelly has devoted his. It is thus quite odd to find this moment of great concordance here, and on quasi-spiritual matters, no less! What can I say except that the bike saddle is a neutral zone in our political disagreements
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