Travel and Writing

Since coming back from the Travel writers conference I felt so many conflicting thoughts...of course there was the sheer wonder of it all borne of my final permission to let myself be in the company of other writers. But as I find more and more time between me and that experience, doubt, of course creeps in, like an old drunk trying to cajole the barkeep out of a drink. The barkeep and the drunk both know the tired and pathetic set-up...it's a well-oiled tale...an exchange of resources for oblivion. For the inebriate there is always the possibility that the debilitating and familiar abuse can still be sustained...that the habit of failure will remain comfortably unchanged.


So here I sit at the bar, considering what to order.

For arguments' sake I allow myself a little sip of Madeira...

Amsterdam and why I think I am a fake
Everyone knows that writers don't make any money...Especially the good writers. And of course if I'm only a hack, the corollary is that I'll really not make money with a vengeance. But (and here I pull myself up off the saloon counter to make a point) here's the thing. I must, I'm ashamed, yes ashamed to say, must write. It is a compunction...a distraction, a thing in the back of my mind that will not be banished. It is at this moment the filthy addiction that I cannot shake, my private pornography. If I could just not want it so much, perhaps I could live my already established sedate and settled life and not yearn for a change that I have no idea if I have the endurance for.

Most writers I know are spunky and independent...driven by the raw creative power they possess. I write in secret, even here under a pseudonym, so shamefaced am I that I aspire to more. And I am ill suited to such an exploit. For example, in gritty Amsterdam, as guileless and transparent a country as you can get,I was trying to find an original angle...any angle that I could construct that would justify my urge to write about my travels in an innovative, fresh way...because of course, my visceral reaction to the grimy place, my instinctual American recoil from a city so earnestly itself could not be the angle. How can I be squeamish with a country and a populace that acknowledge woman and mankind in such a basic way? Making drug use as legal as coffee and tobacco use, legitimizing the sex industry, permitting gay marriage, making bicycle transportation a truly integral part of their infrastructure rather than just a sound-bite worthy alternative...these people have a handle on the funky reality of humanity. I felt my prissy viewpoint at odds with both my respect for the place and my nascently commitment to BE-A-TRAVEL-WRITER.

I managed to get up enough courage to go talk to a kid who was selling spray paint cans...obviously to "graffiti aficionados"...and I found it hard to come up with enough questions to generate a 10 minute conversation. After a few words back and forth...I had nothing else I to ask him, even though he was keen to tell me anything that I wanted to know. Who, what, why, where...these queries simply refused to be remembered. Here I was trying my best to be a swashbuckling travel writer in one of Europe's most unapologetically candid cities and it so-o-o-o wasn't working. That night, looking over my notes, I took a deep draught from my cup of failure. Who, really, was I trying to fool?

Navel Gazing at food in Mumbai
In Michael Shapiro's "A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration", Paul Theroux comments that "Travel is a form of autobiography" and perhaps that is why I am obsessed with both travel and writing...it's almost the ultimate in navel gazing, the crowning self-conceit. It's no suprise then that I feel so mortifyingly swollen-headed about it all. I also tick down the list of travel writers I know of beside Theroux and Shapiro...Tim Cahill, Jan Morris, Elliot Hester, Arthur Frommer...mostly men, all interested in the thrill of adventure. I'm about as anti-adventurous a soul can get.

Why am I not trying to be a food writer instead? Food is less tricky for a woman...and can still be rather incautious. I remember well an experience in childhood when on a trip to Mumbai (then Bombay) my family took a taxi with an Indian friend to an ashram 50 miles outside of the city...he said to the "real India". After the usual fearsome taxicab ride where the floorboards got so hot we had to put our feet up on the seat, we stopped at a stone gated entrance and were led to a spare wooden hall to rest. No sooner than we sat down at a benched table, our eager, sweaty host brought us some metal plates piled high with a dark saffron-tinged curry,immaculate white rice and peppery nan, sans eating utensils. All travel literature to India in the 70's said uncatagorically "Do not drink the water, nor eat any food that has not been prepared in the kitchens of a major hotel". As this refrain echoed in my brain, my mother leaned over to my sister and I and hissed..."Eat all of this food. They have little and they are sharing with us. Do not insult them and us by refusing it."

As it turned out, despite our germ-laced fingers and the very questionable hygine of the ashram kitchen, the food turned out to be expertly seasoned and very tasty. My sister and I suffered little as a result of that culinary outing (it was unfortunately to be my father that was felled by teeth-chattering, stomach shattering diarrhea the next day). In fact as the years have passed, I've grown to enjoy the recounting of that tale immensely. But that story is not genuinely about food per say, it is about food eaten in the context of a culture...and perhaps that is where my egotistical writing future lies. Indeed the most structured note taking I've done during my trip was of the restaurants. It is also a story about me, about my furtive delight with risky business as long as it has been risked free. If I'd have gotten sick from the food, my parents would have cared for me...would I have undertaken a similar tack had I been travelling alone?

But who wants to read about my experience of restaurant eating during my latest summer vacation? I'm sure not even I do. I'm not a trained chef, have no special abilities in the kitchen. But I do like to eat and eat well. Perhaps that is all that is needed initially...only time will tell.

I'm still unsettled about whether I have the license to call myself a writer of the travel or food persuasion. I think the most benevolent thing that could be said about me is that I'm a seeking (and writing about) a trust fund princess experience on a fixed income...surely only disappointment and disillusion can be the outcome.

Amsterdam Redux...the Luxemburg Cafe
Possibly the best thing to do to end this entry would be to recount a joyous experience of mine in Amsterdam...the meal I had at one place called the Luxenbourg Cafe.

The Luxenbourg Cafe (Spui 24,1012 XA Amsterdam, P: +31 (0) 20 6206264
F: +31 (0) 20 6385175, email-info@luxembourg.nl) is one of those places one goes to for that crystalline experience. That defining memory that you can picture years later when you're indulging in a restrospective moment. Located right across from a well traveled square, it is on a crossroads corner in the eastern part of the city (at least I think so), flanked by diminutive streets meant for autos, generous thoroughfares meant for bicycles, tracks for the ubiqutous at-grade rail and pitted, narrow goat paths for those weary travellers on foot.

My companions and I arrive at the restaurant after a wholely unsatisfying walk around the city. Two hours earlier we had set off from a very stuffy and mosquito friendly hotel room hoping to enjoy ourselves. Instead we are off put by the sunless weather which is by turns cold then humid and by the overall dingy nature of the streets. After a 3 hour train ride from Paris that morning, we want tourist satisfaction...beauty, comfort, some gleaming example of how Europe outshines what we've got back home on the farm...but it's either too expensive or non-existent. My CEO sister wants to go to the ostentatiously posh 5 star restaurant down the street. I want to get food and get home before the damp drug-dealing darkness swallows us up. And my partner, perhaps the most reasonable of our trio wishes a simple meal that won't turn her stomach and at the same time give us a good people watching vantage point.

Thankfully, the Luxemburg is the middle ground we stubblingly compromise upon before we all come to blows. It's not a place that turns on ceremony. The best seats and tables tumble right out into the sidewalk, first come first serve. Smokers share airspace with non-smokers. No one is there to be at your beck and call, a waiter or waitress must be wrested away from their endless duties to take your order and when your food and drink come you are left abandonned for an hour. But what an hour it is.

Besides the fact the food is delicious (a succulent meatloaf sandwich mascarading as a lowly hamburger, pitch perfect pomme frites pretending to be a simple side of fries, a delicately nuanced mustard salad merely listed as a slaw) and the white beer lager just the right sort of alchohol one needs to rub the edges off of coarse-grained reality, our perch is an ironic one. We are wayfarers stepped out of the road watching others on their travels. Young women, too many to count, wing and jingle by on ancient granny bikes, their short mini's defying the principles of gravity and Calvanistic decorum. Short squat little SmartCars, found through most of Europe skitter and swoop down the avenue, their passengers separate, jolly, untouched and differentiated from the rest of us like curdled milk and coffee. At the end of the street a proletariat railcar snakes it way along its course. I can just make out the dim faces of commuters turned pallidly to the windows. How many times have I been that self same strap hanger, returning home after having the marrow sucked out of me at work? But from where I sit somewhere between lunch and dinner this tableau is artful, provocative, perhaps simply because I am not among them, instead having the luxury to watch.

The square, to which we also have an exquisite view is full of the ragtag and bobtail masses that we have just quit. Lunatics yelling at women dressed from the pages of Vogue are wedged in close proximity to children and ice cream carts, couples moseying with the intimate footfall of lovers, dogs walking with their matching owners, shoppers emerging triumphant from the nearby flea market and multi-language bookstore, nomad backpackers with head bandanas and slouchy socks occupying benches next to suited academics armed with battled scared leather cases. A more perfect mise en scene of Amsterdam could not have be found and certainly would not have been found had we not first allowed ourselves to be exhausted and been brought completely to our knees by the city. A meal at the Luxemburg Cafe, saved our souls this day and gave us the hope and sustinance to continue seeking out our travelers tales for better or for worse.