Passing the sight of water crashing along eroding cliffs, night soon began to shroud the mountaintop farms with grazing goats dotting the landscape. Soon, I drift off. Four hours later, I found myself dismounting a very comfortable bus where I was able to stretch out on the empty seat next to me for a make-shift bed. I find the motion of trains, planes, buses, and automobiles very soothing and can actually sleep much better in them than strange beds and sofas in foreign places. I realize just how comforting I find the act of moving to the point of leaving my home for extended periods of time to do so. Upon my exit from the warm shelter of the bus, I am welcomed to the city of Oviedo by rain; reinforcing the idea that this is no welcome home party. After finding a cheap room, I descend into the street and wander as nostalgically as I can through streets of a country that doesn’t seem at all familiar to me anymore. I find the cathedral, quite a beautiful centerpiece to the city, and watch the scene unfold behind water-blotted spectacles. Read the rest of this entry »
I felt stuck. Not just in the literal sense, but I hadn’t made a great sequence of movements since I began my work in France. London didn’t really count. It seemed more like a vacation where I arrived by air, drank beer, and spent more money than I’d wanted to. Usually, I’m much more, well, cheap, but perhaps making some extra cash on the road working long hours in the middle of nowhere with sick kids made me go a little stir-crazy, I don’t know. Anyways, I fueled my splurging spree by going to see the musical ‘Wicked’ in the West End, buying new shoes, and spending close to the same amount in cocktails in the up-and-coming and very bohemian Brick Lane neighborhood. The museums were free, of course, and I thoroughly enjoyed my days spent at the Tate Modern Museum of Art finally seeing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and spending the afternoon looking at the Mummies of Ancient Egypt with a Croatian girl who taught me just as much about Ancient Croatia. Mostly, though, London just made me want to buy overpriced things, want to eat overpriced food, and in general, want things I was forgetting I really didn’t need.
