Train to Avignon, March 2009

Every time I listen to this song, I have a vision of driving open-top in the middle of nowhere, not too fast, not too slow, preferably right next to the coast or something. The wind would be coming in from the sea and the crisp air would keep me awake. There aren’t any other cars on the road and the road just stretches on and on. Maybe there’s someone else in the car with me, maybe there isn’t. It doesn’t really matter because it would be quiet in the car. The landscape would be flying past and it’s easy to let your mind drift while your foot’s on the gas. Thinking, not thinking, wondering, blanking out. Whatever you call it, it’s heaven. It takes you out of yourself and isn’t that what most people want once in a while?

On the way to Gordes. March, 2009

It was the definition of serendipity, our story. Boy is on holiday, boy meets girl. girl brings boy around her city. fun. laughter. connection. boy leaves. boy keeps in touch online and with letters and girl does the same. girl saves up to visit boy, twice. boy puts girl up, takes her around his city, puts up with her anal-retentive crap.

What could be more perfect? We all think we know what perfection is, but the fact is that it’s so rare, at least in my life, that I probably wouldn’t recognise it even if it were to slap me in the face. We are often told that perfection is hard to come by, impossible to attain, even. But no one’s ever talked about how to hold on to it, should it ever come knocking on your door. Besides perfection is just a point of view, isn’t it? What’s perfect to you may not be perfect to someone else.

We have a connection, a real one. He knows what I’m saying before I finish, and I him. We read each other pretty well. All the elements of the classic love story are there. Except the love bit. I’m the romantic, he’s not. I’d like to believe that I can do anything if I put my mind to it; he says it’s impossible. Plus, we are 6611 miles apart. If you list them down, the cons are almost as long as the pros.

It was the definition of serendipity, our story; I guess I got enchanted by it myself.

View from the train to Avignon. March, 2009

God. The French have apparently not heard of escalators. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve dragged my luggage up and down stairs today. The flight was pretty uneventful; there was a 2hour delay and it made me so tired I slept most of the way through. It turned out to be a good thing though, the delay, since I have to wait *just* 3 hours for the train to Avignon.

It was worth it though. I love train rides. I love looking out the window and seeing everything roll pass in perfectly composed panels. I especially love the big ass power structures that seem to be resolutely holding up the colossal blue sky. It’s really hard to tear your eyes away from the different shades of green and that impossibly blue blue sky. The butterflies in my stomach settle down a little as the train rolls on and on and I remember thinking: a smoke would be perfect right about now.

The station is quiet. Not many alighted here in Avignon; most were heading to Marseille further south. There isn’t a soul in sight. He promised he’d pick me up from the station. He even called me a stupid bitch for worrying so much. I drag that deadweight of a luggage across to the other side. Sunlight pours into my eyes, blinding me for a second and when I focus my eyes again, I make out a figure stretched out on the seat on the phone. It has to be him; there’s no one else around. I walk towards the figure, he’s still on the phone. And when he finally looks up, he jumps up and envelops me in a big bear hug while still on the phone. “Work,” he mouthed.

And work is apparently all he does. Even after we dump the luggage at his place, he has to run errands for work. He wakes up every morning at 10 and heads in to work, comes back for a nap in the evenings, goes back in and only comes home to sleep at 3 in the morning. You’d probably have to give him credit for doing this for as long as he has, without dropping dead somewhere at work. It’s been a year since I last saw him in Paris but already so much of him has changed. He’s put on some weight from all the junk food he eats. His face, which once used to be so open and light, has taken on a web of fine worry lines and a slight case of eczema. He’s apologetic about the situation; he had wanted to take some time off to show me around but could only snatch some time from work to drive me to somewhere and then pick me up when I’m done.

I don’t really mind actually. Maybe it’s cos part of me still can’t believe that I’m actually here. In Avignon. In his house. With him. But then I never really care about tourist attractions. To me, a holiday is about getting up when you feel like it, climbing onto the mini balcony to have a cigarette while trying to decide if it’s going to be cold that day. It’s slowly walking along the streets maybe popping in to get some pastries from the boulangerie or the supermarket to get more substantial supplies. Maybe walking to the Centre for a couple of hours and on the way back, a kindly looking man says bonjour while you squint into the setting sun. It’s talking rubbish with him–the easy vibe that’s been with us from the beginning has thankfully not changed–eating microwave dinners and playing with his cat. It’s figuring out how things work. It’s doing everyday things in a different way. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life.

Les Bouquinistes. April, 2008

I’m back on the same street again. It’s one of the main tourist spots in Paris but other than the souvenir shops, life here next to the Seine looks pretty authentic. There are wooden stalls set up all along the river selling old books and posters, knick knacks and of course souvenirs. I look up to see a kindly old man smiling at me and I feel obliged to buy some of his stuff. He asks me where I’m from and in my broken French and his broken English, we begin a little pas des deux. It doesn’t last long of course but I’m grateful for the little human contact.

What a difference a day makes. You wouldn’t have recognised me just yesterday. I was light and full of joy, ecstatic even. I also wasn’t alone. We met up at Gare de Lyon and walked around Paris. He hadn’t been in Paris for years but he insisted on being the tour guide. He scorned my maps and guidebooks, calling me “la touriste”, but he was the one who got us lost the whole time. Actually, that’s not very fair. We didn’t actually have a destination to begin with. We simply stood in front of the massive “orientation maps” outside metro stations and I pointed somewhere and on y va! We talked about everything, anything and nothing. We stopped when we want and changed our minds so many times that I had no idea where in goddamn Paris I actually was yesterday.

Usually I love wandering around the streets of a foreign city, admiring the buildings and observing how people go about their daily lives but this time, I didn’t do any of that. I vaguely remember us walking past Notre Dame and laughing at the snaking queue of tourists and the Luxembourg Gardens but it was still a little chilly this time of the year so we didn’t stay long. He made me order food in my horrible French and laughed as the guy behind the counter tried not to spit in my face in disdain. It was the best 16 hours of my life.

I’m walking up from Notre Dame now on the way back to my hotel and as the sun sets behind the building it begins to feel a little surreal, especially when you are wearing new shoes that you’ve just randomly bought and the cobblestoned street you’re plodding on seems to stretch on forever. It’s starting to get late and as the little cafes and restaurants fill up with human warmth, the streets get increasingly deserted and I remember thinking: why in fuck’s name are accordions associated with Paris when all you see are boarded-up storefronts rampant with graffiti and people’s faces are hardened and closed up? Where is the charm? and where is the romance?

And then I remembered: all the charm and romance had just left in a train earlier that day.

Gare de Lyon. March, 2008.

The mechanical flipping of the arrival board updating itself made me look up. It would probably have been a good idea to ask exactly what time he will reach and where he will be coming from but I was too excited on the phone yesterday to bother with details like that. I’m still early but the butterflies have already gathered at that spot in my stomach, rendering me physically useless. The rhythmic flipping of the arrival board, together with the beginning notes of an impending announcement, also distracts me from anything I’m thinking about.

I should probably also scout out a good meeting place. This place is cavernously huge! There are two major areas in the Gare de Lyon – the international and the domestic but the place is so densely packed with people with big ass luggages, screaming children, people yelling on their mobiles, or frantically waving at someone getting on/off the trains, hordes of tourists blocking every possible way that it’s very easy to miss each other. I look around at the people standing around alone with their masks of inscrutability and wonder what they are thinking about. Are they happy to leave this place, waiting anxiously for the train or praying that they don’t miss that someone who had braved the traffic just to say bye? Standing at the edge of it all (just maybe 2m before it’d be too cold), it’s interesting to watch people come and go. Train stations are places of transit and not many would want to spend a morning here, but unlike the airport with its big, almost sterile spaces, you get to see the joys, tears, frenzies, anxieties, sadness all mashed up in the urgency and chaos of the here and now. It’s in your face and very palpable. One can easily get swept up in this mass display of emotions.

My stomach is hurting like crazy; the millions of butterflies fluttering around are pulling me apart inside. I walk outside for a cigarette; I need to calm down. It’s even more chaotic outside. Cars stopping haphazardly to pick up or drop off their human loads, luggage hauled up and down the pavements and the cacophony of screeching car wheels, horns, luggage wheels and heels on cobblestones is not one easily forgotten. The façade of the train station stands almost fragile with its intricate carved figurines while its giant clock tower lends a certain stateliness and brevity amidst the madness that goes on.

It’s now 12:22pm. I had better dive back in and pray that we don’t miss each other. I have been waiting for 9 months, 8 days and 10 hours now.

Jean Chatillon. Street in Budapest, March 2009

From a distance, like a miracle that’s come from above, the neon lights beckoned. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief.

“Do you want KFC?”
“Holy fuck I’d eat anything right now,” I growled.

I began to feel better after the third hotwing. I can focus. I can speak again. I didn’t realise that we had been silent for so long. We picked up where we left off. We talked about the people around us and made up stories for them. We were laughing so hard that people were staring and we tumbled out onto the cold, cold street again.

It’s quiet outside and we immediately regretted stepping out into the cold. Damn, it cuts right through whatever you’re wearing, doesn’t it? We had to seek refuge in a pub and when that got too loud, we stumbled around for another and another until everything’s deserted and dead.

There’s something magical about slumbering foreign cities. As the city lies asleep recovering from the toils of the day, I can’t help but feel like we’re the last two humans on earth.

So why do we travel? We travel to see things we have never encountered, to get out there. Sometimes it’s scary when you don’t know what to expect and perhaps that’s where the excitement lies. For me, it’s never really about seeing tourist attractions; it’s about taking a holiday from my everyday routines back home; it’s about being invisible in a sea of people or just watching people walk past. It’s going in search of something and finding something else. It’s roaming around with no destination in mind. It’s taking a holiday from myself. It’s breathing someone else’s air for a change.

Even if that means struggling with 13hr plane rides, unfamiliar languages, 24hr clocks, the waiting and its attendant agony, the not-unknowing, the looking-for-toilets, the fatigue, the sometimes inevitable change in plans, the excitement at that spot in your stomach that hurts so bad, I’m still gonna go. This time, I’m heading to Provence-Budapest-Békéscsaba-Paris so there wouldn’t be any soundscapes for at least 3 weeks. Wish me luck. Maybe sometimes one needs to leave home to find out that everything he needs is already back there.

Eastbourne, 2007

How does one describe utter desolation, the kind that robs one of speech? All the clichés about the world whirling around is crap, at least for me anyway. I feel a kind of stillness that is almost eerie. It feels like I can almost stumble upon a solution or see a way out if I squint hard enough but it’s not quite it. I clutch the ticket in my pocket and take a deep breath as I turned the volume in my ipod up and up again to try and drown out the voices in my head.

Strange happenings are underfoot. The leaves rustle and by the time you figure out where the sound is coming from, you turn your head to see a shadow slipping away.

That shadow, in metaphorical and perhaps a little tenuous terms, is my work week in essence. Everyone of us has weeks like that, don’t we? We start the week off fine and by the time we get to Wednesday, we think it’s Tuesday and Thursday as Wednesday and the worst of them all: Thursday as Friday. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. I had an epiphany the other day (by epiphany, I mean it’s probably in some drink-induced form) that instead of putting out shitty episodes of soundscapes week after week, I should just come up with a lite version that would buy me some time.

I don’t know why I’m coming up with a whole new monster instead of maybe working harder at the usual soundscapes but here it is: a diet soundscape soundbite where I try to describe snatches of moments I wouldn’t normally notice.

*Regular soundscape episode should return next week…

Travelling in a train looking out the window and watching all the big ass power structures resolutely holding up the colossal blue sky. The sun would be coming up at this point and as I fumble around for my sunglasses, Badly Drawn Boy’s The Shining would start to play. And the butterflies in my stomach would begin to settle down as I fidget a little and think: a smoke would be perfect right about now.