Brock { Abroad }

My next movement, at approximately 11.30 p.m. was through more mountains- except I was now hurtling downwards into an actual city. “This is Bilbao?” I ask the guy sitting next to me who I’ve been talking to for most of the ride. He’s been telling me about his city when I prompt him, otherwise he’s been asking me a lot of questions about the United States. He finally arrives at the most common question I get from foreigners. “So, do you prefer Europe or America?”

“ Let me put it this way,” I tell him, “I’ve learned to say the grass is always greener on the other side in a lot of different languages.”  Read the rest of this entry »

My first reaction upon my arrival in Spain was: “Wow! I’m finally hot again!” My second reaction was:  “Wow! People are actually in walking in the streets past 10 p.m.!” I had arrived to San Sebastian, a laid-back resort city on the beach with grande glasses of wine gorged with tiny tapas by tourists that still existed well into November. I sat down in a swanky hotel bar near the bus station and helped myself to a copy of El Mundo, ordered a glass of rioja priced at slightly more than 1€, selected a pack of lucky strikes from the machine next to me at a cost of less than 3€, and sat down at the bar as I lit my cigarette, took a sip of the vino, and remembered just how good the Spanish life is.

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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.

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