Amsterdam is one strange place. Despite being the smallest of the major cities I traveled to this term– an hour and a half should cover most of the city proper– it’s by far the most confusing. Most European cities have vibes; even their contradictory elements seems to add together, like the elegance of Madrid’s architecture and the sleaziness of its nightlife, or the seriousness of ancient Rome and the joy for living that many locals possess. I could never get my head around Amsterdam. It’s a carnival of lights and sounds that assault rather than sooth the senses. That’s not necessarily a bad thing– it’s certainly an exciting thing– but it will leave you a little disoriented.

In the daytime the city makes a reasonable amount of sense: it’s one of your classic, cultured old European centers, only seemingly more cultured and more old. Charm overflows from the waters in the day. The houses, particularly in December, look like cutouts from a Christmas village, squeezed together long and narrow with their curled roofs. With an colonial Empire of relatively early prosperity, the seventeenth century houses are remarkably well-built and maintained, them leaning being the extent of damage (I loved how many of the most historic houses proudly displayed their dates on their entrance). The addition of three beautiful cobbled market squares make Amsterdam the city where I most felt like I lived in the middle ages. Then, there are far more bikers than cars, so that no canal bridge was complete without the shine of wheels or the choir of bike bells in the air. You can walk with your parents along those quiet canals and think “well gee, what a beautiful little city!”

And then the night. Like a character in an Oscar Wilde play, Amsterdam seems to drop its good-guy disguise the moment the sun goes down.

Continue reading →

A Disclaimer: This is my goodbye post to Paris, it is not my last blog. I still have a lot of aspects to this exchange to think about, like language barriers. But this one needed to be fresh, and half of it was written on the plane home (so you’ve been warned: this is ‘the emotional one’).

Who knew this would be so difficult? Since when was I so unexcited for Christmas, so afraid of finishing those last couple papers and exams? What was I thinking when I thought five months was a long time? When the clouds unveiled Ireland– its soaking green hills– I could almost see the vast continent beyond; I thought I had an infinite amount of time to explore every nook and cranny, every culture– everything I’d ever heard read studied about Europe come to fruition. Whatever happened I would definitely go to Florence and Berlin, and returning to London to visit my Aunt and good friend was no question. In the end none of that played out, because even though this has been the longest five months of my life– crammed full of so many amazing people, parties, and sights that changed my world– in the end it’s only five months: it’s still made up of days, of weeks, I still need to eat study sleep. A special kind of life maybe, but still life in the end. And now the plane’s landing down in Dublin again– like a movie just rewound– before Chicago. I never got to half the places I dreamed about, but I don’t mind, I will eventually.

Leaving Paris? Now that’s a different story. In answer to my first question, I think it’s safe to say that everyone who goes on exchange knew how difficult it was going to be for me. Going on exchange isn’t like any other part of life– if you have the chance and you haven’t done it yet, get on it! Who cares if it’s a so-called “useless” semester in terms of your degree requirements? You’ll find you end up learning more in that one semester than the rest of university. It brings together students from all around the world in a way that we know can’t happen again (the world is small, but never small enough to pool us all in the same place again). Add to that an exchange system that gives us the freedom to take random courses in potentially different languages, and that goes into overload: sure I’ve worked hard this term, but did it ever really feel like work? People I’ve talked to always have a longing for the place they went on exchange– always vaguely hope they’ll live there someday– and I think part of that comes from the fact that this was never exactly ‘real life’– I wasn’t with Parisians and I wasn’t doing work. These four months have been a dream; as much as I can make comparison with exchange students going other places, there is something different about Paris.

Continue reading →

As the final week closes in on me, everything comes together: I’m trying to sleep less just so I have more time– more time for drinking, more time for Paris (for all those last minute things I left too late), more time for friends. With that, and the more scared I get of leaving this place, I’m probably going to throw a barrage of various ‘last minute’ posts at you about life in Paris (and maybe a random Amsterdam one in there, too). In the last week my Ipod decides, you could say, to go on a little hiatus, so it makes sense to do one a little different today: the music on my exchange. It might seem kind of silly to do one based on music– after all, this is talking about things that might have very little to do with places like Paris itself. But music is very important to me: it has a way of capturing moments the way writing or pictures can’t; I already know which songs are going to bring me back, recreate the scene like I don’t even need to be there. These are those songs:

Continue reading →

Does a city’s transportation represent its city? Are metros like the cities they’re made for?

Not really, at least not when looking at London and Paris. It is rather strange, that Paris’s metro is dirtier than most others. After all, above ground, most of Paris is one of the most pristine cities out there: the marble, the statues, the leafy boulevards and criss-crossed streets; go below and it’s the grime, the noise, the police, and the smells. If you go to Chatelet — the largest station in the world–  just try to spend more than ten minutes there, moving past people, going on endless ramps that tell you it’s going one way to lead you somewhere else, or shake off the nagging feeling that you’ll get mugged. Any longer, and a deadening feeling starts to sink in; this isn’t a metro station, it’s purgatory. If you’re going to get pickpocketed, it’ll probably be there, and if you find yourself there after ten PM, get ready for some of the worst smells of your life. Yeah, I wasn’t the largest fan of Paris’s metro when I got here. It didn’t shape up well against the sleek new models in London, and its metro plan– centering everything around the right bank, leaving the left bank disconnected– seemed counterintuitive. Paris’s metro doesn’t become impressive until you start using it on a daily basis. Because the Paris metro benefits your average, day-to-day Parisian more than the London tube does for your average daily Londoner.

It seems to go against the image the two cities cultivate for themselves: on paper, London has always been the ‘business’ city– the orderly the in-sync, the content over style– while Paris is the aesthetic– style always style, beauty and joie de vivre over efficiency. I’ve found these stereotypes more or less true in other aspects, but with their transport these things seem to reverse. Pick a place in central Paris; you’ll find a metro station within a three minute walk of it. Guaranteed. Sometimes you’ll be on the metro for a while, jumping lines because the connections might not make much sense, but you’ll get there. London’s stations are much farther spread apart, sometimes walking as much as twenty minutes away to grab it. The first thing you’re hit with, of course, is the price: in Paris, a ticket is 1.70 euro and 1.30 in a book of ten, while London it’s upwards 2.70 pounds; in Paris a monthly pass for students is 30 euros, in London it’s above 80 pounds. And where does this extra money go? All right sure, it’s very fancy, but does the higher price make it faster, more efficient? Not really: the tube is famous for breaking down, while the worst I’ve seen using the Paris metro has been the occasional slow-down (except the 12– stay away from the 12). It’s funny because I walked away loving the London metro (see blog 4), but the more I think about it, the more I find that London’s is ideal for tourists. Paris, having the busiest metro system in all of Europe, is for the day-to-day.

Continue reading →

It’s been an interesting four months with Sciences Po. When you say the name “sciences po” to an exchange kid, their immediate gut reaction will be a flashback of that awful morning (or noon/evening depending where in the world you were) when we had to register for courses. I woke up at eight after a weekend of the Winnipeg Folk Fest– hungover and exhausted, my nerves were like an elastic band stretched too far, sitting down to register. Now, I suppose to their credit, they did do their registration online (versus the Sorbonne, where everyone lines up and registers on the first day). But there’s no real online portal, everyone registers at once, with everyone wanting virtually the same English courses. So the time to register came around and it’s hunting season: each course must be registered individually, logging back in for the next. Luckily I registered for the smaller courses first, but there was a moment when the whole site crashed and it seemed like I wouldn’t get into my main lecture, thus setting me back a semester for graduation. Not fun. In the end I was able to get all the courses I wanted, but it was a bit of a battle, and it’s unfortunate when that’s the first experience a student gets of their future school. Perhaps that morning affected my hesitation with the school after that.

By this point, the school has taken up a fifth of my academic career, which seems strange to me, since in many ways the school itself has taken up, what seems at least, like a smaller portion than that. Perhaps it’s the class time. I go to class about half the amount I do at UBC, with classes happening only once a week. In the long run, I think this is a terrible system– having a class once a week loses context, and often loses that bond you might have made with the prof and other classmates (sometimes, when class would get cancelled for that week, it would feel like I hadn’t been to class in months). For a four month exchange, this system was fantastic– it meant I was able to see that much more of Paris and the rest of Europe when I didn’t have class Mondays and rarely Fridays. In the long run, the system disconnects the student from academic life.

Not as much, perhaps, as the campus– or lack of campus– itself. I gotta say it: Sciences Po, you’re bad at making friends. Having yourself situated in the middle of one of Paris’s most bustling and influential neighborhoods has a lot of benefits. It also means students move through without an anchor– they come to class and they leave. The public space the university owns is abysmal, and trying to find a spot in the libraries is like fighting over a carcass after the lions are already on it. It doesn’t help that their welcome program cost two-hundred fifty euros, with those that took it saying it didn’t help anyway. All this made it very difficult to make friends in those first couple weeks; if my roommates hadn’t been so amazing, I would have felt quite lost. Gone are the days of res-life bonding and making new friends over an arts-one coffee.

That being said, Sciences Po provides an interesting lesson on regionalism. I’d never heard of the university before coming to France. In fact, I passed over the school the first and second time I went looking through potential exchange options because I thought the “sciences” meant ‘normal sciences’, not political sciences. None of my friends or family had heard of it either– “oh, Paris? You mean the Sorbonne? No? Oh well”. Turns out Sciences Po is the most highly regarded social sciences university in all of France: of their last four presidents, three graduated  from and Sarkozy dropped out of the institution. You can see, upon entering, that Sciences Po takes itself very seriously: all the administrators wear suits, all the profs are published authors, and all the students are the best and brightest. Or best and wealthiest– seriously, the school’s one block off of Boulevard St Germain and some of these kids, I’m sure, are wearing the stuff that could be bought from these stores. Going to the school, I’m told, is the gold card in life.

So does the school measure up to its shining reputation? Yes and no. I’ve had some pretty distinguished lecturers, including one of the foremost French Revolution profs, and a Race and Immigration prof who is often brought on to French media outlets to discuss the latest race riots in France. Having profs who are so evidently passionate about their own work went a long way in maintaining student interest. Plus, courses are set up for maximum class involvement, with most classes having around twenty kids, and all the kids expected to contribute to discussion and give presentations. It made for a great environment, one which the colossal UBC doesn’t have nearly enough of (the original reason I went into English honors was just so I could have classes which more resembled the sciences po model). Sure, this means you get those kids who speak to hear themselves speak (speak for the grades) about absolutely nothing (good future-diplomats), but ultimately discussions were very engaging. Add to that the incredible internationalism of the exchange community, and I had the pleasure of being involved in some very eye-opening in-class conversations. Isn’t that an ideal university environment? And yes, having a campus in the middle of the city has its drawbacks, but is there anything better than finishing a nine o’clock PM class and coming outside to the center of the buzz, to be rocked back into your energy thanks to the lights and sounds of St Germain, fashion central?

I guess in the end there’s something about the atmosphere at sciences po that threw me off. Everyone seems in conflict with each other here. The administration is more like a police force, with students having to fight for the courses they want, or the fact that they force students to miss no more than three classes at risk of failing the course (even if they’re sick, what the hell is that? Can someone say prison? Or better yet, high school?). These admin guys– in their suits and red ties– will even come into classrooms and check to make sure the prof is actually teaching. My favorite prof was really sick one class and since she couldn’t schedule a make-up class, her pay is getting docked. Meanwhile, the students at sciences po have a rigorous edge to them that drives them to succeed, and many of the classes will post the highest grades in the class (and the student’s names) for all to ‘bask in their glory’. Really, the atmosphere is more similar to Sauder, UBC’s business school, than UBC itself. When all’s said and done, I guess academically the two universities are on par. But UBC offers an environment which encourages cooperation,  helping students as much as it pushes them.  UBC, as difficult as it can be as well, is my home. I don’t think anyone can say the same about Sciences Po.

This blog entry is, more than anything, just a footnote to the last one, since it happened in Rome but didn’t feel right to tack it on at the end.

I arrived at the Termini station on the last day of the Rome weekend nearly three hours before I was set to fly. All the shuttle busses towards the airport leave from the central train station, but the cheapest of busses wasn’t set to leave until 4:15, forty-five minutes– well that’s fine, let’s just get some snacks and come back. We come back at 3:50 and this 4:15 bus is already there, already nearly-packed. When did all those people get there? I rush past everyone and my friend– having a flight three hours later– leaves with a ‘good luck’. Luck wasn’t in the picture today. I push up to the front when a mother manages to shoulder in and grab those last three seats for her and her kids. So the bus pulls away– when’s the next bus? Five o`clock. The gate for my flight closes at 5:50.

I sprint across the Termini station, through the mad streams of rush-hour workers, to the other bus company. Guess what: they also have busses only at 415 and 5. In what world is that an economically viable operation? Two different bus companies, going the same place, leaving at the same time— dealing in an industry where timing is everything? This isn’t the place to rant about Italian infrastructure; this is just a story about what comes next. Would the 5 o’clock get me there in time? The woman shakes her head and instead points to the army of yellow and black taxis at the other end.

When I think back to that day, I wonder if it’s as much what I didn’t do as what I did that made everything seemingly fall apart. Call it the remnants of some Irish superstition, but the one thing I was told– by a temporary Roman resident– that I had to do was throw a coin in the Trevi fountain. If I didn’t, there’s no guarantee I would ever come back to Rome. While I’d walked by it my first night, I didn’t have enough time on my last day to toss it, leaving me strangely anxious as we walked towards the train station. Of course, my far more rational friend snapped me out of it with a quick slap to the neck and a classic “you’re being an artsy idiot right now”. Good old Rob. But now the superstitions come back: maybe what happened after he left makes me never want to come back?

I was in such a fluster as I sprinted towards those cabs that I stopped thinking about what it might cost me, what might be acceptable or what I might lose. One man apparently noticed– fed off of– my distress when he asked if I wanted a taxi. He said the Ciampino airport would cost forty euros. I did a quick run to the metro map, remembering reading about how you could take the metro all the way to the end, then a bus to the airport after that. But I was alone: I had no internet, no laptop to grab internet, no friends left. And I was running out of time. So I agreed. Forty euros, not terrible right?

Except his cab wasn’t with the rest. As we walked ten minutes away from the station I started to realize something was wrong, and then he told me to get into his car, his car that wasn’t a taxi. Why did I get in? It’s probably one of the least logical things I’ve ever done. But I felt so lost– airport so faraway– and all I could think about was making that flight, making it home to finish that essay. Then the moment I stepped in the car, backpack in the trunk, I realized I’d made the wrong choice. This car was falling apart– rust on its edges, no airbag in the front– and this ‘cabbie’ could barely speak English. Well better than my Italian. What was to stop him from taking me to some random far-off area of the city? what was to stop him from mugging me or whatever worse was going through my head at that point? I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know the city. I was alone.

As we drove towards, well, somewhere, he manages to tell me that because of this unexpected traffic (yes, traffic at four o’clock out of the city on a weekday is so strange), he’s raising the price to sixty euros. Grasping onto just about anything, I tried to read his desire to squeeze every penny out of me as proof he wasn’t planning to mug me. It didn’t stop me from melting into the seat. Driving past sometimes housing projects and sometimes open fields, I counted the seconds through my teeth. And when the Campiano signs finally began scrolling by, it didn’t stop the dread.

Because his price was going up. I knew– as the price became seventy became eighty– that he would throw me out on the side of the road if I didn’t accept the new scribbles on the pad between us. At one point I even paid the ten euros for his gas. When we got near the airport he gave me his, apparently final, price: 100. Wow, that traffic sure makes a difference, doesn’t it? When I honestly told him I could only pay 85, he pushed me out on the side of the freeway and threw my backpack out the window. I had to sprint and bang on the window to grab my wallet from his seat.

So I ran across the freeway, walked those last ten minutes to the airport, and bought one big fucking white chocolate toblerone in the duty free. Nothing happened; just get me back to Paris.

Now, this is a dramatic re-write of it; maybe I’m making it into more than it should be. I guess what disturbs me about all of this isn’t what happened so much as what could have. It was the first time in Europe I’d felt truly and totally lost– and not that good kind of culture shock lost Lonely Planet guides tell you about. I was lost in a language I didn’t know at all, alone, without phone coverage. It’s not a stretch to say that anything could have happened (at one point I pretended to be texting my friend as if to show I at least had a working phone). I wish I could end this off with  a clean and tidy message about what I learned from this experience, but nothing comes to mind. It’s hard to say, beyond not taking the cab, what I could have done differently: given myself four instead of three hours before the flight? In the end I learned at least this much: clean off the tourist’s veneer, and Rome isn’t North America, isn’t even Paris. Sometimes that’s exhilarating, and sometimes that’s a little too real. Sometimes it’s a little terrifying. I’ll keep that in mind the next trip I plan.

Everyone goes to Rome one day; everyone goes expecting it to be just how everyone else saw it. Everyone comes back feeling a little different.

Okay, so that’s not exactly true– not everyone goes to Rome, and not everyone’s changed by it; they see some ruins, take some pictures and leave. But it’s hard when you’re there not to feel the impressions of everyone who went before you. Rome, after all, is old even by European standards. It’s the city every other city has dreamed of being; when Napoleon shaped Paris, he was thinking of Caesar, when London crafted their empire… Artists, poets, world leaders. Rome and Paris were the only two cities I knew I had to see this exchange. Every other European city would be “nice”, would be “great”, to see– only those two would affect my exchange (would make me regret if I didn’t). I went into Rome expecting to feel what I did for other cities I’ve already seen– excited by the history, fulfilled by the art, coming back to Paris thinking about the great weekend I had. I never expected how painful Rome would actually be.

It makes sense to start at the Coliseum. My friend and I walked the Appian Way, past the crumbling villas or the ones holding it together with duck-tape. It was the main highway–the road Nero strung up a couple hundred burning Christians– now mostly a quiet, leafy Mediterranean road. At the end of the road are a series of stone balconies rising up four levels topped by intricate colonnades broken only here-and-there by broken stone or punctures. If it wasn’t so instantly recognizable it could have been the beginning of a series of trendy new apartments; it might take you a second to realize it’s a stadium. But go inside, look at the broken steps where they sat, down to the passages where they kept the prisoners– listen close and you can hear the rush and the roar, the cheers and the screams.

It seems oddly fitting that Rome’s surviving legacy would be their place of death: their greatest achievement was their television, the violence a little realer than we’re used to. But all places in Ancient Rome start to feel like a graveyard after a while. It wasn’t something I realized right away; I just couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I wasn’t as happy as I expected to be here– where was that historian’s joy? Instead it was increasingly miserable being there, and leaving the ruined area didn’t bring relief so much as it brought exhaustion. It took me half the weekend to discover why.

Rome was the first civilization I became enamored with. Grade Nine classics kept me on the edge of my seat. Maybe it was the glamour and the glory of the ancients, or maybe it’s that the lives of the Roman Emperors more closely resembled a soap opera than history. Either way, I was hooked. It brought me through a full university course on them and made me watch HBO’s Rome twice– never mind it was a second rate TV show and a pretty terrible prof. Rome was enough. So when I went to Rome I expected a culmination, for history to come alive like it did in Paris. Instead, if history comes alive in Paris, it dies in Rome. All that were left were some toothpick columns and some statues rendered faceless by the elements.

That’s not to say I was “disappointed” by Rome. In fact, having such unexpected emotions added to the beauty of the trip. There is something beautiful about the field of the forum, the kind of beauty my camera or your camera or a travel agency’s camera can’t capture. It’s a feeling. It’s a reminder: no matter how great we all think we are, this is where we’ll all end up. Is this what New York will look like? The skeleton of the Empire State crashing against the swallowing sea? Dramatic of course, but it’s impossible not to think of our own lives– of nuclear missiles, of the warming planet– when I’m confronted with something like this. Is this all any of us are good for?

And then there’s that eerie balance in this city– the symmetry and the form, as if the whole city were its own classical structure. For across the river was the watchful dome. If old Rome is death, new Rome is after-death (“new” as in “only five hundred years ago”, get it?). I’ve never seen such a ‘Catholic city’. Churches in Rome are really something else: not only is there one for every street, but each one seems filled with priceless art– here’s one with Bernini’s incredible “Ecstasy of St Theresa”, here’s another with three Caravaggios. Culture pools around the Church– each unique, each taking my breath away. On Sunday we went to watch the Pope’s address from his balcony, and hundreds of thousands of people turned up to fill the square. People screamed like they were at a rock concert, with flags of countries or posters of “we love you Papa” blowing in the wind. And this happens every Sunday? Even just the word “Papa” denotes the proximity: whereas French and English refer to Francis as the Pape or Pope, Papa seems much closer. When he said “hello my children”, and they screamed back “bonjourno papa!”, it gave me a better idea of why the church is still so central there.

So while Rome is labelled the ‘Eternal City’, I think it’s better to say that it’s the city most obsessed with eternity. Eternally searching. And where is it to be found? The Papacy would like to say at St Peter’s Basilica. It towers above everything– at night it could be a marble mountain rising above the rest. Inside, it couldn’t be called a church– a palace? a fortress? It’s cavernous, with pillars like high-rises and saints the size of giants (only looking towards heaven, never down at you). It made me think of the first church I saw this trip to Europe: the one-room chapel on the summit of Mt Croagh Patrick Ireland. Those two structures are so different I have a hard time labelling them under the same religion. St Peter’s is the center of an empire, an empire that’s lasted a millennia longer than the Romans. It also gave me a greater understanding of pre-modern Europe in general: when so much money was given– read: forced– from every corner of the continent, in order to build something much more for the glory of man than God, it becomes easy to see why Luther posted a couple reforms to that wood door. St Peter’s left me awed, but it also left me cold.

Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression of Italy or the Italian people; that would be unfair to my Italian friends. The Trastevere district, for example, gives a very different impression of Rome than what I write here: laundry hanging from balconies, amazing pizza restaurants, people singing in the streets. La Dolce Vita. I understand that many people see this side of Rome, joyfully, for what it is. But for me, Rome is the forum and the basilica; everything in between was just a mix of the two. And that question of what we’re all worth dogged me the entire time.

And then we go to the Vatican Museum. Formerly the main residence of the Popes, the opulence is astounding. It’s probably the best collection of Roman statues in the whole city (which says something). On the top floor, Raphael has painted the seven antechambers, giving visitors a dramatic history of the Church. Near the end is the original “School of Athens”– the one in which Socrates stands around his students and points at the sky. While it’s immediately recognizable on its own, it became relevant to me since a reproduction hangs over the Assemblee Nationale in Paris. What’s so fascinating is that the Assemblee depicts the painting on its own, so that Socrates pointing up at the sky symbolizes reason (a nice sentiment for the French Republic). Meanwhile, in its original form, Socrates pointing up at the sky is actually mirrored in the painting on the opposite wall, where the Pope points up at God. Therefore, in its original form Raphael equated philosophy with theology. That it’s not the same today is just a fascinating example of the way art can shift its meaning over time.

Of course nothing compared to the very next room. They do a good job– these Vatican type– building things up for you, because at the end of the hallway we walked in upon the Sistine Chapel. You know how certain pieces of art need to be truly seen to be appreciated? This one takes it to another level. I walked in and was immediately overwhelmed– everywhere I looked, incredible art. Along the walls, various artists like Botticelli have painted depictions of Jesus, while the ceiling, well, that one’s reserved for Michelangelo. It’s one thing to examine God reaching out for Adam; it’s another to see them looking down on you. In painting the fall of man from the Garden of Eden, Michelangelo isn’t concerned with the Bible– he’s concerned with human nature. And it’s all there, on the walls, as people fight for a place beside Jesus– battling it out as even Mary’s in pain. It’s a masterpiece, and it’s barely changed since the Renaissance. Suddenly humans didn’t seem so screwed anymore; if Michelangelo survived after all this time… well, who knows?

Rome wasn’t the most fun of cities: perhaps there are nightclubs somewhere in that city, but we’d get home so exhausted from travelling we didn’t bother. And when my friend assumed I would love to spend another four or five days there to get to see everything else, I quite honestly replied “no, I couldn’t handle another day here. After three days I was dried out, ready for the rest of something (now at least a little) familiar, in Paris. But no city has impacted me more in such a compact period: three days and I went through a cycle of despair and hope all at once. Rome does that to people– moving through it you see where others were just as inspired, so much so it’s almost a cliché to say so now. And it’s the first city I’ve found myself looking at the pictures I took in class, only three days later, drooling over them, like they’d happened to a different person. Rome the eternal; it’ll stick with me.

It’s raining in Paris. Three hours of sleep after the last minute edits and the emailing of my prof the essay– packing on the go, leaving in the dark. We’re perfect Parisians, chasing the metro. On the bus out of town already the cars are lining up, honking and swaying in the rain. My roommate is shivering; at the airport people are yelling at us.

            Blink and I’m on a mountain, the sun close and warm. Out across from me the houses spread out like intricate colored clay, everything in sync except for that grand Cathedral and its four spires striking up like beach shells. Against that there’s the Mediterranean sea, the kind of blue painters use (not the kind of blue that actually exists). And when I close my eyes there’s the chirp and the clicks of the insects, dirt as I run my hands along the rocks. Hey-oh, Barcelona.

            Twelve days in Spain. Twelve days that could have been three weeks, three months, a whole year. They weren’t normal days, and this wasn’t a normal trip. The best way I could describe it was– clichéd as it is– an adventure. The word ‘adventure’ is misused and exaggerated a lot in our culture– mainly by me. I mean, look at my first blog post: I joked that almost losing my visa was an ‘adventure’. What the hell’s adventurous about sitting in front of a computer screen for forty eight hours, sweating from stress? I understand it now: Spain’s a proper ‘adventure’. Having such a busy week before it, I stepped onto that plane knowing virtually nothing about the places we were going, even the mega-popular Barcelona. Then suddenly me and four friends are renting a car and going into the heartland. For the first time during my trip in Europe, I saw incredible sights which I knew absolutely nothing about– not the history, not the thing itself. Your average North American knows next to nothing about Spain: say Spanish and we think Burritos and Sombreros. So, as we drove further inland, I felt like an explorer, seeing places no one in my family and none of my friends had seen. A part of me was at points slightly, totally irrationally, scared– proving how young I still am, how inexperienced– but then we’d see the places and it would be beyond expectation. And this is it.

            Spain is a country that can’t be generalized. There’s so much fragmented history, so many overlapping cultures, that just to drive two hours is to step into another place, another time.

            Without further ado, here are some generalities about Spain: Spain has some of the friendliest people in the world. There’s a sense of community here I’ve only ever seen in Western Ireland. When a man with a leg brace was seen standing on the metro, two ladies stood up to ‘attempt’ to give him their spot. Upon making a joke in Spanish, everyone around him chuckled, and whatever he’d said made the lady beside him strike up a conversation. Language barriers didn’t prevent me from seeing that something was happening here that never would in Vancouver or Paris. Like the lady who, upon meeting us on top of the mountain near her village, made great effort to tell us all about the history of her village and the random castle perched on it, even though neither of us understood each other linguistically– employing her hands and her expressions– just so I could know about the village she loved. Spain is full of dramatic landscapes, of sandy mountains, rock towers, and orange groves; a place of amazing food– tapas! Palella!– amazing drinks– sangria! Estrella and Cerveza!– and amazing culture.

            One of the most important aspects in understanding Spain is that it’s a night culture. Spanish days are often so hot that shops close between two and five to take siestas, or just relax and have a coffee. There’s an emptiness to every city around three: Barcelona and only four or five cars would be driving, all the shop fronts shut. The flipside of that was their exhilarating nights. Streets are more packed at 9 PM than at any other point of the day: women yelling from balconies, men yelling from corner bars, children running across roads, crowded sidewalks. You know you’ve left Canada, and even France, when young children are still running around in their Halloween costumes at midnight. It’s a completely different kind of lifestyle. I’m not sure if I would enjoy it all the time– too little daylight might make one depressed– but I’ve never felt so alive at five in the morning.

            Between 1939 and 1975, Spain was under the Fascist dictator Franco, who practiced an isolationist policy which kept the country out of world politics. Much, I’m sure, has changed since then, but Spain has maintained its heritage and its roots more than I ever would have expected a country in Western Europe too. Sure, they have McDonalds and Burger King (lots of burger king!) now, but it feels like something to be taken at face value. Many Spanish people, after all, don’t speak English. Every province, every village is different.

            On that note, it’s too unfair to Spain to continue with these generalizations. Here you go, here’s Spain:  

            Barcelona is one of the most popular cities in Europe, and it’s not hard to see why: with mountains, amazing beaches, beautiful architecture, interesting markets, great metro and amazing nightlife, it has everything you can want for a vacation town. But it goes so beyond that. There’s something unique about the city, something which sets it apart from other European cities; it’s more than the sum of its parts. You can see that partly in the architecture, which at first glance might look like the Imperialist style of most of western Europe, only to sneak up on you. Antoni Gaudi, the modernist architect, transformed the city. As my Barcelonan friend said, “he gave this place its soul”. His buildings have a surreal quality to them, with wavy features and sandy surfaces that make them seem plunged underwater, or winding staircases which lead nowhere or everywhere. Walking his park in the north of the city was like living in an Escher painting. They have to be seen to be believed–so idiosyncratic– much like the rest of the city. And one day his masterpiece, the looming Sagrada Familia, is going to give this city its Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty– probably being better, if the ground floor is any indication.

            Barcelona has a way of seeping in; the more time I spent there the more I loved it. Just to walk between the narrow alleys or under the hundreds of balconies, listening to the laughing in those warm Mediterranean nights– I didn’t need to be doing anything to be having fun. Not that there’s ever a shortage of things to do; despite being a sixth the size of Madrid, there’s always new things to explore. Take our day in the Gothic Quarter. If the narrow streets, dark brick and statues of angels everywhere wasn’t cool enough, finding Roman ruins and monasteries that looked like modern skyscrapers really set this place apart. It all centered itself around the sprawling Gothic Cathedral (probably one of the only churches in the world, I’d guess, with its own swan garden). When we reached the front doors a band had assembled on the front steps, playing some very strange instruments– upside-down french horns, sideways oboes, and upright bases made for some pretty odd sounds, but the tune was beautiful. Across the plaza people danced in circles, in which anyone could join; one man leading and everyone following along, everyone understanding and welcoming. A woman in a wheelchair had been placed in the center of one so that she could be as part of the dance as everyone else. I later learned that this was the traditional form of dance in Catalonia, but I never needed a guide to tell me that what was happening here was very old and very dear to the people in that square. It was community on a level so open and so basic I was overwhelmed. I can still hear the music, that beautiful tune on those alien instruments. The next day on the aforementioned mountain I was at peace, after the insanity of Paris. I could hear myself think: did I want this? Was the insanity worth it? (Is it worth writing a blog if I’m just going to contradict myself with each post?). I don’t have that answer–yet– but it made me think.

            As we were leaving Barcelona we all felt we could have just spent our reading break there, but the car was ready and we had a big country to see. Down the coast we stopped in Valencia later that afternoon. We hadn’t heard much about the city beyond the beach, and spent most of our day there, only to discover, once it had already gotten dark, the beautiful old city and its drained moat. In the end, the spectacular part of Valencia was neither near the old town or the beach. Walking along the moat, it seemed like we were being lead to the middle of nowhere, having the place recommended by the girl at the front desk of the hostel. What could be so special about something made ten years ago in a town no one’s heard of? We passed gardens, bridges, and glass conservatories. Were any of these Valencia’s ‘big deal’? Then we saw this:

and this:

Yeah. One minute we’re in an old Spanish city, next minute we’re in Blade Runner. The building is so idiosyncratic it’s almost impossible to describe (so I photobomb you with pictures, how’s that for lazy?). There was nobody around us, not even the sound of cars, just the gurgle of the pool; nothing to make me think we were in Spain, in Europe, in anywhere really. If this place was so amazing, why didn’t it feature in every architecture book, every Lonely Planet guide? Us explorers made our first discovery.

            And it wouldn’t be the last. The very next day we were through the mountains and into Granada, the former major Arabic outpost of Spain. The town crawls up the edge of a mountain, the old city virtually unchanged in the past seven-hundred-or-so years, maintaining its tiny alleys and Arabic influence. Many of the streets sold rugs and fine trinkets, and there were probably about twice the number of hookah bars– adorned with tassels, thick with incense– to regular bars. Walking through, the town was always dwarfed by the very reason it’s a town in the first place: the Alhambra Castle. Looming high above on a larger mountain, the ancient walls glowed yellow in the night.

We went there the next day thinking we’d spend two hours– max!– there before Seville. In the end we had to drag ourselves away after four. The Alhambra, a finalist for the Seven Modern Wonders of the World, is widely considered to be the most significant Arabic structure in Europe. Today you can still visit the armory, the baths, the water stairs, the garden, and the waiting rooms of the palace. All over six hundred years old. The art inside is stunning: the inlaid patterns, the vibrant colors, and the balance to which its employed makes it different from any other place in Europe (as my Lebanese friends assert, far more like the Middle East). It was also built and perfected when Christian Europe could barely hope to keep a couple of rocks together to keep out the rain. Then suddenly they lose to the Christians and they’re erased from history. Isabella and Ferdinand engaged in what can probably be called a genocide when they forced (read: murdered) the Arabs out of the country. Now the castle stands alone, reminding us what Europeans have done such a good job at forgetting. I’ve been to many castles now, but in none have I had shivers like I did here. It was like walking through a room full of ghosts. It’s a lesson a history student can’t forget.

             It was interesting to leave the least ‘Spanish-ey’ city only to immediately go to probably the most. In many ways Seville is the cultural heartland of Spain. It’s the home of Flamenco, Bullfighting, Don Juan, Carmen, and that singing barber. It’s the most idyllic place we went to in Spain: colorful mansions, cobbled streets, palm trees, and the smell of oranges everywhere you go. Its old imperialism and value for beauty makes it the most similar city to Paris, while its atmosphere made it the most peaceful. While Seville was more about the feelings than the sights, it does sport the first bullfighting arena, the third largest cathedral in the world, and this:

The Plaza de Espana, the site where the first Star Wars was filmed (oh, and a lot of important cultural stuff happened there too, I guess). The flamenco show we saw later really represents the city. In a small cellar with a smaller stage, the music was a drifting mix of Spanish guitars and pained wailing– the kind of thing that will lull you into sleep (though not in a bad way). Then the third guy, only clapping his hands up to that point, stands up and begins to dance. The fact that he was a guy, therefore not wearing the traditional red dress, added to the shock of seeing him suddenly tapping his feet at nearly inhuman speeds, arms and face clenched tight. All three were trapped in a performance of sustained passion, skimming under the surface. It certainly sets the context: a dreamy city, beautiful to look at, but there’s always something more– something that’ll bring me back. It’s that remaining drift of mystery which makes me say that Barcelona and Seville are the cities I have to come back to.

             Seville and Granada seemed far away from the rest of the world. The morning we left Seville we strolled along the river in the silence and sway of the palm trees. That afternoon Madrid screamed in: traffic jams, colossal buildings, homeless people practically jumping at you to wash your car, and the myth of central-city parking. Back to the rest of Europe.  If Seville is the heart of Spain, Madrid is the pulse– electric, eclectic. Often lambasted by tourists for having nothing to see, Madrid is the living city; ask a local about their little brother and they’ll say “oh Barcelona? It’s nice, but too touristy”. Madrid doesn’t care about amusement-park attractions; it’s far too hipster for that, and its alt-scene vibe reminded me more of Montreal than of a European city. At the same time, it’s one of the most centralized cities in the world: the shopping, business, nightlife and, yes, prostitution districts are all concentrated in a single road. It becomes so dense, and its imperial buildings so high, that for that one stretch it could be a bigger city than Paris.

It also takes the nightlife aspect of Spain to a whole new level. The clubs are amazing here– probably the best I’ve been to– and you can’t truly understand this city until you see it at eight in the morning. I stumble out of the club and fog cloaks the lights– only the blue of the clocktower lights seen in the distance. But the streets are packed with groups of people my age, laughing so openly they could only be drunk, wearing cocktail dresses and ruffled suits. In the end it’s as memorable as anything I’d seen this trip; as culturally significant, only this is my culture. Madrid the modern.

              We stopped in Zaragosa the following night. Day eleven, the ugliest city in the trip, when everyone is just getting tired. That feeling of almost-over can dog you: you give up, where day eleven of a month trip is nothing. We sat in a Chinese restaurant confused and lost in translation. It played out, almost to the minute, exactly like all of my family trips: that penultimate day, thinking of your flights, when everyone’s ready to go home. So for all the notion of this being a great adventure, some things stay the same. I can’t say what made it so comforting. Maybe it was just to realize some things would always be there for me, something always familiar, even when everything’s so strange. Because Spain had changed us: we got back to Barcelona with it having dropped ten degrees and autumn being in the air. In eight days we’d gone through a whole season and saw Barcelona differently now. You can only see so many castles, go through so many different cultures, before a country starts to change you. Like this exchange in general, it’ll be a while before I realize the extent of how much I’ve really changed.

              Back to Paris, and– guess what!– it’s still raining. Good to know some things don’t change.  

    I suppose it’s the sound. It’s always there; you can close your eyes but not your ears. Noise: it’s the scream of the drunks when I go to sleep it’s the honk of the horns outside waking me up– my lullaby my alarm. The rush of cars is a cyclone around your head, the whooshing following each footstep. It’s the sounds of a real city. And it’s exhilarating.

            It’s always there but it’s always different: sitting on the Champs Elysee now, the rush of the cars take on an echo, as dusk settles in and the arc lights up, as the hollow horns of the marching band blare to the raising of the tri-colored flag– so different from the sticky sounds of summer days, smog and haze. Bringing this many people together creates an overload, so every sense is heightened like an overtuned violin.

            Paris is my first real city. When I moved to Vancouver it was excited just to live near big buildings, but while its metropolitan area has over two million people, the city itself has closer to six-hundred thousand. So it becomes a bit of an illusion, something which becomes apparent walking down Granville street at two in the morning. It’s dead: the high rises become blocks of concrete, without lights or people to differentiate it from the darkness around it.

            Paris has the opposite effect. A picture of Paris will show you lovely boulevards, beautiful statues, and orderly apartments arranged in obsessive grids of triangles and lines. Really, the North American image of Paris is little more lively than a museum (Louvre anyone?). This image gives you nothing of its gritty underbelly, its life, its sheer amount of people.The picture at the top of this blog, which I took on top of the Centre Pompidou, is not the kind of image often associated with Paris: a view of the wing of skyscrapers of la defense, obstructed only by five to six cranes– no Churches or monuments in sight. It certainly hits closer to the truth. Vancouver: a city centralled around its skyscrapers, vacated by people at night as they run to the suburbs (ie, almost every other North American city). Paris: a city where its high rises are banished to the suburbs, as more people than a Canadian can imagine are crammed into these ‘orderly’ apartments. That description of Paris sounds closer to Mumbai than Montreal, and so maybe I’m dramatizing, but rest assured, Paris is no museum.

            A major city like Paris contains a little bit of everyone. Yes I’m looking at the Louis Viton and Dior stores as the exquisitely dressed exit them right now. It doesn’t mean I don’t have to watch my bag everywhere I go. Big city means big responsibilities, and while Gastown allowed me to stumble around extremely drunk, I couldn’t do the same in the Oberkampf here (all right I can still have fun, but no more passing out on random curbsides). Or there’s the things I’ve seen, like homelessness on a scale that rivals Vancouver as an entire city. Like the fifteen year old girl holding her twelve month old baby, cradling her silently not even bothering asking for money, on the corner of St Germain-de-Pres (one of the wealthiest streets in the whole city). Or the Gypsies who engage tourists in all their schemes and scams because they’re not allowed to work in any normal fashion. These are the things I won’t un-see.

            But a city like Paris, as I mention above, engages me in a way a Canadian city never could. Paris sprawls every which way, from the banks of the dirty historic river, to the beating heart of the arc, to the watchful Sacre Coeur on the mont, to the entangled dirty and fascinating jungle of the Bastille district. Every day there’s something new, like today when I decided to bike off in a random direction (find seven new amazing Churches on my way? classic Paris). Every night is a new bar or chance to meet new people, meaning every night holds the possibility of being the best night of my life. The classic phrase “Urban Jungle” really becomes such a perfect term, in that in this connecting concrete glued together by people and noise, each step is a step into something new, an adventure.

            When I chose Paris, one of my goals was to discover whether I could handle a big city– whether moving to a place like London or New York was just the fantasy of an inexperienced Canadian, or something I really had to do. I haven’t learned whether I can do a big city (after all, going on exchange really isn’t living in a place so much as being on an extended four month vacation). What I’ve learned is that I have to live in a place like this. Maybe it would be Paris, maybe it would be– hey why not– Shanghai. It’s not the city so much as a city. Because after these four months, I couldn’t sleep to silence again. 

Have you ever felt like the place you’re in could be very near home? Paris couldn’t be any more different than Vancouver and Winnipeg, culturally, but its climate and vegetation are remarkably similar. It’s strange: where Florida feels like it could be on a different planet, Europe’s landscape makes it feel very close to home. Paris, some days at least, could be just some amazing town I just happened to not stumble upon before.

            Well, at least that’s how I feel until I travel. Travelling, either by bus or plane, gives the context– it’s no longer a dot on a map, it’s a country, a continent. I feel like I’m a blind man in a new house– it doesn’t do to hear other people talk about places, I have to go there to smell it, to feel it, to listen. Understanding a city doesn’t mean looking at National Geographic pictures of it. Travelling to different places can tell me as much about Paris as it can about itself.  

            Take Brussels, which in many ways is Paris’s antithesis. Having similar growth patterns (albeit on different scales), it’s surprising exactly how different the city is. Where Paris is orderly and unified, Brussels spreads out in every way; Paris is expensive Brussels must be among the cheapest cities in Western Europe; Paris has enough pride for the rest of us, Brussels is extremely down to earth. As my friend David pointed out: “look at the two country’s flags– France has the big bright colors, red white and blue, while Brussels has the other end, the black orange and red (dark). The two cities really just mirror that.” And it was great to see Brussels: its attitude was a huge break from Parisian haute couture, and really helped in defining Paris’s place with the rest of Western Europe (its size, its people, its influence). Also Brussels isn’t exactly the ‘no-fun’ city travellers make it out to be (at least not for two nights), as we went to a Medieval Fair, a cheesy but amazing and cheap Irish bar, and a pub with over two-thousand beers available (Guinness-world record baby).

            What makes my two days in Brussels even better is the consideration that I spent next to no time or money to get there. Paris is one of the best situated cities in Europe to go travelling, as it gives easy access to any major city in western Europe, not to mention a number in eastern Europe. Unlike London, training or bussing around is a totally viable option– Brussels, after all, only took 4 hours on Megabus (cost me almost nothing as well, even though I booked it about eight hours before). With busses leaving from central Paris, getting places is easier than I ever could have hoped.

            Flying is a different story, and it’s where the sprawling metropolis of greater Paris becomes, well, a little irritating. Edinburgh is, of course, only accessible by plane, and of course knowing me I go for a Ryanair flight. Well, you get what you pay for. For my North American friends, Ryanair likes to think of itself as an ‘air bus’. I wouldn’t mind the fact that they play their (ad-infested) radio overhead the entire flight, or that the stewarts on board are actually travelling salesmen in disguise, or that you’re in a constant state of stress wondering if they’ll let your backpack on board, if it weren’t for the fact that the airport itself takes two hours to get to. Really? You had to put your airport out there? Beauvais is about an hour outside of Paris proper, making it not even in the greater metropolitan area. Add rush hour traffic on to that and you can give yourself three hours and still cut it close. Where the flight itself is about an hour and a half, the ordeal is closer to six. The experience was a little bizarre.

            At least Edinburgh was worth it. It’s got the kind of regality and class you don’t find in the modern world. Climbing up Arthur’s Hill, I see a stone city broken by the stretch of a hundred spires; it’s a tiny city but there could be one for every street corner. Walking along and they all choose to clamour at the same time. Or standing on a bridge and marvelling at the way the stone grows out of each other, less like a city more like the roots of a tree — the sun falling under the bridges.

            It’s nothing like Paris, except in that both cities stand alone: they seem magical because there’s nothing else like them. Edinburgh balances between its regal and ancient past with a kind of humility you’d find in a tiny English hamlet. It should be a tourist trap, and while there are tourists it somehow manages to maintain both history and integrity (none of the Disneyland fake-snow feel that York now possesses). Perhaps it’s in part because of the fantastic student life imbibed in the city center, keeping the city down to earth and intellectual at the same time. It’s the real deal, and probably the most beautiful city in the United Kingdom.

            I’m living in Paris, which really isn’t the kind of place one runs from. But places like Edinburgh (or travelling out to Fontainbleu– the king’s gardens) gives me a chance to breath (and breathing’s fun, right?). There’s far too much to see in Europe, but a weekend here and a weekend there is the place to start.