A Tramp Through Europe

For the past week and a half, I've been out of town. Fall break ended yesterday so I've just come back to Berlin, my second home-away-from-home. We started in Paris, made our way to Brussels, then Amsterdam, and finally Copenhagen before returning to Berlin. The entire trip included two airplanes and three trains. In the hours of transit in between destinations, I found myself entirely immersed in journeys of another kind - I would simply open up Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad and find myself in the Swiss Alps, beside the castles in Heidelberg, or drifting on a raft through the Black Forest. The entire story is constructed as a narrative. It is simply a record of anecdotes and experiences that Mark Twain had gathered while he traveled through Germany and Switzerland one summer. He hires an agent to travel with and guide him, and together they go through all the highs and lows of traveling abroad.

What struck me as I read this book was how much I could sympathize with Mark Twain. Each time I picked it back up, I was either coming or going from a city. On the way to Brussels from Paris, Mark Twain jumped onto a carriage to go to Baden-Baden. On the way to Amsterdam, Mark was hiking by foot up mountains, wanting only to see a glimpse of the legendary Alpine sunrise. Every moment that Mark Twain captures in his accounts strikes me as so detailed and crucial that I can see exactly what his town looks like.

I really hope that some day, I’ll look back on my journals from Berlin – both this one and my actual paper one – and I’ll remember exactly the circumstances behind each event that I have recorded. I spent a weekend in Paris with the same friend mentioned in the last post. At every chance I got, I would whip out my trusty little Moleskin and scrawl down some fast notes or thoughts. Places where this was particularly useful throughout the whole trip were museums. I know that whenever I open my notebook now, I’ll find the names of artists and pieces that I loved. I’ll look back on my journal entries and know exactly what it was about that moment in the Van Gogh museum that struck me. I’ll see my sketches of Van Gogh’s paintings and the names of the pieces, I’ll see the pages I wrote after Paris, I’ll see the endless notes I made about what on earth we were supposed to do in Copenhagen on a Sunday. Mark Twain always understood where he was and remembered every gripping detail of the beautiful places he had been. I hope that my journals, physical and online, become testaments of my tramp abroad in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Copenhagen during that one fall of 2009.

Amsterdam: So beautiful, it looks like a painting Half liter of Grolsch, tobacco, rolling papers: crucial elements for a successful European trip