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Tarantino flashback post

  • ccw824
  • Jul 30, 2021
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jul 31, 2021

July 25


***Dmitri: I’ve been digging this angsty Millennial singer named K.Flay. I have no earthly idea why since I’m not female, stressing over why men don’t like me, or particularly angry, but whatever. The girl has pipes and a style. Why bring her up? She has this song that has been stuck in my head titled “Not in California anymore.” It’s a fun nod to “Not in Kansas,” of course, but we’re from the Sunshine state, which is a massive brand everywhere we go. Kids, teens and adults are sporting California and Los Angeles shirts everywhere we go. And yet, these places are just so not California.

I offer as exhibit A this sign, which we saw throughout the interior of Croatia warning us of (I think) warthog-like creatures. We saw the usual leaping deer signs as well, but this one sticks out. Fortunately (?) we did not run into (or over) said beasties, though some Hakuna Matata jokes were cracked when we passed eateries advertising roasted pig. Anyway, it’s a visual cue that, hey, we are not in California anymore.




In fact, we are a month and a half into our travel. Wait, what? I thought you were like, posting when you left. For reasons not worth mentioning, we haven’t been able to post until now, and so there’s an effective backlog that is now going to roll out. This is also an opportunity for some perspective-taking, a month and a half in. I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Cambridge, England, having been effectively homeless for a long while now, wondering what daily life is. We aren’t homeless, not really, but we aren’t on vacation, either. I’m doing lots of work (and should probably do less), and we’re in a bizarre limbo of outlier status.

How so? In the fluctuating and erratic twilight of the pandemic, travel is just not normal. Daily life isn’t vacation but it’s not home and work either. Everywhere we go, the experience is marked by Covid. Sometimes this is a big benefit, and sometimes the opposite. Witness Cindy and Mia traipsing around the Acropolis, virtually empty. Prices are low and tourism-dependent locals everywhere are unfailingly polite even as prices are lower (except Switzerland, good God, but more on that later). Witness also an insane web of shifting regulations about who can go where, when, with what documentation and testing, from which place, with which citizenship. This shitshow of regulatory red tape is the yin to the yang of the empty Acropolis. It’s a first-world problem to be sure, but a problem nonetheless. As these posts will show, we’ve had to pivot our plans an unknowable number of times, and “where will we be next week?” has become a recurring hum of background activity.

In a way, it’s nice. We’re free to pivot and have the pleasure of anticipating a changing lineup of travel treats. Today we look forward to some place in Scandinavia, and tomorrow we swap to Portugal, etc. As long as we don’t focus on the loss of borders shutting on us, it can be entertaining. It’s a bit time-consuming, though, and I’d sure like to enjoy the now rather than

deal with the tomorrow all the time. An analogy, and a source of some tension with the occasional family member: do you stop and just enjoy where you are, or do you need to pull out your phone and document it, thinking of the future rather than the moment? You want to remember it and have pictures, of course, but you also want to enjoy it right now, rather than prioritizing the photo for later. There have been any number of “just put the phone away” moments as we’ve looked out on some beautiful thing to have our thoughts interrupted by “can you take a photo of me over here instead?”

Anyway, outliers. There are no Americans around, really. Sure, a few overheard accents here and there, but it’s so hard to get places that it’s more locals everywhere. Locals may mean “Europeans” in Europe, but it still means no Americans. And, maybe even more strikingly, no Asians. No Chinese, in their massive tourist numbers. No Japanese. No tour buses. Sitting here in England, they mostly think we are Canadians when I ask them to guess where we’re from. We take it as a compliment, of course, given that what they’re really saying is “well you could be Americans or Canadians, but you seem polite so we’re guessing Canada.” Maybe we should toss in some “eh’s” to our dialogue? Nah, we have some serious ambassadorial work to do.

The world thinks—knows—that our country is a carnival of the absurd. Thanks to years of He- Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, it’s hard for any local to not ask us, in the nicest possible way “Seriously, WTF is going on over there?” They largely view the US as entertainment, glad that they aren’t dealing with our mess. We have been trying to cast a better light on the US simply by not being assholes. I think we’re doing OK, but would we know?***

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"No road is long with good company" Turkish Proverb
Annnnnd.......away we go.  
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