part 1 - part 2 - part 3

ZÜRICH August 8 - The train station is so... so Swiss. Very clean, lots of informative signs, German-looking people everywhere, and it costs 2 Fr ($1.30) to go to the bathroom.

It's a short walk up the river to Theater-Atelier Stok where Erica Hänssler still lives amid hundreds of masks, puppets, posters & gadgets. I was last here 15 years ago when Zbigniew Stok was still alive. Everything is as I remember it except Erica's new partner & colleague Peter Doppelfeld.

They took me on a morning tour: their semi-industrial neighborhood, the river full of swimmers & swans, the old churches, the park by the lake, etc. Near the park were some half-finished buildings & tents for a theater festival that was supposed to start tomorrow - Peter wondered how they would ever get them done in time - turns out it's really a week from tomorrow. Oh well.

From 1 to 7 I was on my own, mostly going in circles in the old downtown area northeast of the train station. Old houses, twisty streets & stairs, lots of cafes, everything very very expensive. Bread, yogurt & fruit were still cheap though. So was an old paperback book of Topor drawings, but I can't carry around any more damn books. (There's also a good comics store.) I left another give-away, The Land of Oz, on a bench in front of Spiegelgasse 14, which boasts of being Lenin's former address, and now contains a nifty little toy store. Then figured I should see some museum stuff at some point so I went up to the Kunsthaus. There's a big Giacometti show including every sketchbook scrap or scribbled-in library book they could find. Then a pretty random assortment of medieval & Renaissance art, some decent 19th c. French stuff, some Pop & Op art that leaves me cold, and a fantastically good painting by Mattia Preti from 1635, "Christ and the Adultress." Hard to say why this one caught my eye but the storytelling & emotional quality of it are startling. It's the moment when Jesus is writing in the sand - everyone's in various attitudes of "What the hell?" but it's a quiet moment and you can see peace starting to be present in some of the faces. Jesus looks perfectly at ease with an expression of both clarity & curiosity - as if he's reading what he's writing for the first time.

I saw just about everything there is in the Kunsthaus & eventually headed back down to the river - stopped to hear some chamber music - went on through the big endless shopping mall of Bahnhofstrasse, then across the train tracks into the newer (1970s?) suburbs which are ugly & boring... or maybe I was just crabby from sore feet & too much art. Back to the Atelier feeling like I really have seen enough of Zürich for now.

Dinner with Erica & Peter, then we sat up on the roof with wine. The river - sunset over ugly industrial buildings - a blimp cruising around (getting ready for a big parade on Saturday which sounds like something I should miss) - & a series of beautiful girls riding bikes over the bridge. (When I was here before, the bridge was a disused railroad track. It's been made into a nice footpath, but Erica is sorry that the people have scared away the foxes & other animals that used to run across the bridge.)

Peter says it's crazy to travel through Europe before doing the same in one's own country. He may have a point.

August 9 - Decided to leave early & try to get to the S. of France tonight - feel rude doing so but after the extra days in Rome, I don't want to end up rushing through the last part of the trip. (Also it turns out Tom's friend Fafé is in Nice, a little further out of the way but I'll try to go there.)

Last-minute panic, couldn't find my wallet, called the museum, searched the house - it was up on the roof. I guess I had stuck it in my front pocket (bad) & then it fell out when I was slouching & drinking. Next time I probably won't be so lucky. Train to Genève...

GENÈVE - Never mind, I was only here for an hour. Ate falafel, then was lured in by a bookstore (argh) & ended up with a copy of Mme. Bovary - also broke down & got a big French guidebook which convinced me to go to Marseille instead of Avignon.

Train to Lyons - wanted to take the TGV to Marseille but it's sold out. The only other train gets into M. at 11:30 PM. Oh well, at least this time I know I have a place to stay (managed to call from Lyons & speak French with no phone jitters at all). Goofy pictures in the photo-booth. Left another book, American Dreams: Lost and Found, on the platform.

Marseille is just about as much fun to arrive in at night as Philadelphia. Not exactly scary, well kind of scary but just dark & depressing & you feel that urban pressure to keep moving. Plus it had just rained & I almost fell down the monumental staircase. But I found my little hotel with no problem, paid for 1 night (the concierge had to coach her mother(?) through the task of making change) and fell asleep fast with the sound of rain.

MARSEILLE August 10 - It really is kind of like Philly. Medium big, but not tall, some great old buildings here & there, a touristy waterfront, a big shopping street & many beggars. A big N. African population, seems like more so than Paris (or maybe it just seems that way because Zürich was so much the opposite). I didn't notice any drunken sailors. Sure looks a lot better in the daytime.

(Forgot to mention, last night on the train I was half-asleep in my empty compartment & a slick Moroccan/Algerian-looking guy came in saying something I couldn't understand about the conductor. After a few formalities he asked me for a cigarette & seemed incredulous that I didn't have one. He left & returned a while later, smoking. Introduced himself: Karim; & determined that I didn't live in Marseille. Asked if I had a joint. No. Did I want some. No thanks. He threw his cigarette on the floor & took off.

I figured I would stow my pack in the left-luggage room at the station, walk around town & decide whether to stay another night at some other place (my room was OK but I'd rather not pay extra for the privilege of sitting in a room by myself, if I could find a dorm.) But after I walked back up the huge stairs to the station, I found out that the left-luggage isn't 2 or 3 Euro like my 2001 guidebook said, but more like 20 Euro. (Maybe their giant X-ray machine was expensive.) So I slogged around town, or 3 or 4 streets of the town, with a ton of crap on my back for a few hours. (First I went back down the stairs & had to climb up them again to get a train ticket. Oy.)

(Snack-bar girl at the station: "Where are you from?" N.Y. "Oh... I thought maybe you are a slave." Do I look that tired? "You know... like from my country, Czech." Oh, a Slav...)

Anyway I can't think of anything to say about Marseille. I think Jo tried to tell me not to go there. Oh well.

My French is returning inasmuch as it ever does - I'm getting by OK & understanding people better than usual, but sometimes I still have these brain meltdowns where I can't process anything for half a minute & just proceed on autopilot looking like a stoned idiot. This can happen even if English is being spoken. I greatly annoyed a snack vendor by giving him 5 Euro for a 50-cent boiled egg... after he started arguing, the word "50" finally had gotten through & I knew I had change in my pocket, but somehow I just couldn't alter my course. Not really a language problem, just the usual anxiety thing.

I got in touch with Fafé in Nice & got a 1:30 train there - oddly it's a TGV (high-speed train) which takes exactly as long as the regular train. Despite my 1st-class Eurail pass, 2nd class is the way to go for people-watching (backpackers; elderly Arabs; a pregnant lady trying out different leaning positions against her husband; little English girl insisting "Mummy, it is not bedtime"). Suddenly the sea was right outside the window.

NICE - Not such a good idea to arrive at 4 PM when all the backpackers in the world are here, but once again God went too far in protecting fools & I got the last bed in an incredibly nice hostel (Hôtel des Orangers). Roommates, 2 giggly Americans, a Québecois & 2 silent unknowns who left soon.

At first glance Nice is an incredibly touristy place but I felt oddly very happy & at home. Maybe just because it's not so big nor expensive, and the tourists are less obnoxious than elsewhere (also some of the French have stayed there for the holiday). It's sunny but cool, a tiny rain now & then. I didn't expect the palm trees - Cannes is right nearby but I never figured out that there's a Palme d'Or because they have palms. There's an "old city" with twisty little streets & signs in both French & Provençal(?) - I imagined the medina in Fès if everything were bright shiny clean & French - again super-touristy but again I didn't mind.

The underground comics store that Fafé & her friends just opened this year, B Deux Pointes (B:), is in the old city - I was very proud of myself for finding my way there & it was a kick to see such a cool little place amid all the snack & gift stuff. Heaps of great books & zines and an exhibit of good rude scrawly drawings by some area guy. It's got a basement-apartment vibe - a little kitchen in the front, & the studio where they put together Phacochère (anthology whose title means warthog) is upstairs.

Fafé was instantly recognizable from her hair which is just as she draws it, & she is a sweetheart. My French continued to hold up OK as she talked my ear off about Nice, comics, Tom & Leela, Alban, the store, etc. & made tea in the store kitchen. I gave her 2 of my mini-comics & bought some (light) zines. Also unfortunately I recited my usual rant about how I want to draw comics but I never get anything done - it sounds just as lame in French.

Before meeting Fafé & her guy Cyril for dinner, I had an hour or two to wander around. I wasn't in the mood for any strenuous wandering though, & soon it was 7 PM and almost everything in town except the bars had closed. Didn't remember until then that I should've picked up wine or flowers or something for my hosts - oh well, I'm rude again. Cyril is another very pleasant character, who for some reason looks like he should be in an English band. My language skills started to fall apart after some beer, but we were talking about comics which makes no sense anyway. I saw some slightly peculiarly but lovingly translated English versions of the books they publish - not for the U.K. market (which doesn't exist) but for Sweden... hmm.

Stuffed full of pasta I walked back to my room around midnight. Most of my roommates were still out which made me feel like an old fart for going to sleep. What the hell (sings "J'M'En Fous Pas Mal").

August 11 - L... a... z... y... Got up around 9:30 and for the next 4 hours what did I do... got bread & coffee, looked at a bunch of closed shops, wrote postcard & did my laundry. Well as Fafé said, Nice is a pretty good place for doing nothing.

(Beach Boys & Jacques Brel on the radio. I should get a Beach Boys record soon.)

Eventually I walked down to the beach & finally saw the water. Good Lord it's blue. Blue, blue, blue. Should've gone in but it kept sprinkling & breezing as if about to storm. I just stretched out on the pebbles for a while, watching some little girls throw pebbles at pigeons & at nothing. Then walked along the water on Quai des États-Unis, past the huge war memorial, around the port, turned around & got very lost. There are a few smeary illegible spots on the photocopied map from the tourist office, and I was in all of them. Would've been more pleasant to wander around if there had been any people out or shops open & if I had had more to eat than a piece of chocolate (from the candy factory gift shop by the port - unfortunately no Willy Wonka machines in sight, but some good candy). Ate some pizza in the old city & had a couple of glasses of wine which got me amazingly buzzed, I was bursting with good will to all on the way home.

First time ever went out drinking with hostel travellers. Sabina & Sarah are two Canadians who met at the hostel & found they sort of knew each other from McGill, though they never did figure out exactly where from. Both are in the middle of 3-4 month travels all over everywhere... makes my 3-week adventure look a little silly but then again I have no idea how they can afford it (graduate students!?). Sabina is a fiery & talkative (compared to me) psych student from an Indian family - with a Swiss German boyfriend, which seems strange to me but stranger things have happened. Sarah is a relatively mild-mannered studious type working on her MBA, wants to get into "risk management & derivatives." And what am I? An entirely harmless person who knows how to walk downtown. We got some crêpes in the old city, with great effort because the guy would bring one of ours & then lose the other orders each time. We stood around for quite a while as Sabina caught up with an old grade-school friend from Toronto who appeared out of nowhere with her family (almost as impressive as when Dave from Seattle came to Brooklyn & ran into 3 old friends in 3 blocks). Finally sat in a pub & drank one pint each while an acoustic guitar guy played Tracy Chapman & Metallica. It was nice to be making conversation in English... I just open my mouth and friendly clear sentences in English come out. Anyway no one was in much of a partying state & after 1 pint all went home & to sleep.

August 12 - Woke to a much sunnier day (front page of Le Monde tells of increasingly insane weather throughout Europe) & I was resolved to swim at the beach. Also was to meet Fafé again at the studio - I had a gift bag of chocolates for them. But moving in slow slow motion I got to the studio after F. had left. Then spent 2-3 hours on the beach after which the chocolates were a shapeless horror...

The beach took some getting used to - all small rocks, not bad to lie down on but painful to walk on while being crushed by huge waves. The shocking blue water was fizzing with bubbles from the surf - you couldn't see an inch through it but it felt all clean & lively. First it was only little kids in the water (a little alarming since there was a very steep drop-off just a few feet out) but finally some other adults jumped in, including a few bouncy girls showing off their breasts (the temptation to stare was reduced by my near-blindness without my glasses).

Feeling pretty dazed & famished, back to the hotel, & met a new batch of roommates - one American (a techie with copies of Maxim & The Fountainhead) and a bunch of Australians, and a cheerfully incomprehensible Japanese girl who had been tagging along with 2 of the Australians (teachers living in England) since Prague. One of the Aussies had a bad cold & it turned out that the only one with any medicine was the Japanese student (sorry I never learned her name & she told me 3 times) who was a walking pharmacy - she managed to explain what all her other pills were for, in broken English & charades (headache, cramps, constipation) & we decided the remaining one was cold medicine. The rest of us went out for Italian food somewhere in the nearby outdoor mall, then I led them to the old city (which none of them knew existed) searching for ice cream since we were all too full to drink beer. My snobbish resistance to being in a crowd of English-speaking tourists was entirely defeated by their sheer niceness. The cynical mood of Simon (who resembled a young & bitter Al Gore) was more than balanced by the delight that the Japanese art student (whose favorite artist is Egon Schiele) took in everything about the city. When we passed a guy who was charging 10 Euro to take your picture with a huge tropical snake, she froze in awe for half a minute, then darted forward & touched the snake with one finger as if it were Jesus' robes, & hurried away with a primly hilarious expression. I could've talked to the teachers all night & was sad to hear that they won't be in London till after I'm gone. Well I must get used to that if I'm not going to be completely antisocial. Almost, almost decided to follow them to Spain (that is if they'd shown any interest in picking up another tag-along) but I've still got this plan of trying to meet up with 5 or 6 people in Paris & England. Probably would've been better to go without all these plans & commitments, well not better maybe but different. Next time.

Oh yeah - what about Barcelona. Well after Rome I just don't feel like going to a big city & being alone & hot - at least not if it's just for 2 days. So I'm chickening out. TGV straight to Paris tomorrow.

Amid all the snoring & coughing I slept like a baby. Haven't been remembering any of my dreams during the trip but this time dreamed I had just accepted a marriage proposal from John Goodman, arranged by my sister, and we improvised a celebratory dance to a small cheering crowd while I thought about my future acting career.

August 13 - Morning train, takes about 6 hours. Sea then hills out the window. I'm reading Mme. Bovary with moderate success.

PARIS - Coming into Gare de Lyon there's no mistaking that you're entering another big city. Well I had a chance to do something different if I really, really wanted to. Anyway there is something comforting about a big anonymous place where non-holiday life also goes on. And I love to take the Metro - though the youth hostel is just a healthy walk from the station (big institutional place this time).

Felt like seeing college students so I took the Metro to Cluny-Sorbonne & wandered around a while. Restaurants, food food food food. My favorite junk food now is an egg & cheese crêpe or else a banana crêpe. I could just sit around eating them. But so far what I mostly want to do in Paris is watch movies. There are hundreds of them and it's a good reason to be in a big city, isn't it. Tonight in a little place in the Latin Quarter I saw Pasolini's 1001 Nights. A dozen or so people in the audience - I wasn't in New York: no one was giggling! And it does have some giggly moments but who cares.

Everywhere in the neighborhood, dozens & dozens of young couples. Well I guess it's the place for them to go. I could try to either revisit or avoid all the places that I might have sad memories of, but this trip is too short. had a beer in a pleasantly dark bar with chirpy French folk-pop music. The seats were diner seats with the cushions all ripped up, not sure if this was a permanent condition but a sign in front said benches for sale.

This hostel has 8 in a room & they're the snoriest yet. Also I'm getting a cold. I see this notebook is now pretty consistently negative in tone. Oh well.

August 14 Up with a vague plan: see Montmartre, some movies, and places mentioned in that Piaf song e.g. Bois de Vincennes. Amazingly, I sort of did all of those things. Bois de Vincennes is a litle park in some disrepair (a sign says it's because of a huge storm in 1999) and I resisted going to the nearby zoo. There's a lot of joggers (back in Zürich, as we walked down the bridge footpath in the morning, Erica glared at the joggers and asked me, "Ah... you're not... sportive, are you?"). In Montmartre I wandered in the cemetery. I like cemeteries. Of the various famous people listed on the directory, they're all identified with their profession except for Alphonsine Plessis - La Dame Aux Caméllias.

Things left on François Truffaut's tomb besides flowers: a handsome young photo of him smoking, a Metro ticket, a note in Italian: "Thanks for having made me love the movies - Emilio," and a tennis racket.

Instead of going up on the hill, I ran down to St.-Lazare to see La fiancée de Dracula, a movie that someone at Libération had really liked. Vampires and crazed nuns and many silly silly things, but with some beautiful image or hilariously random idea every few minutes. I think I would've loved it if the pacing weren't so limp. Well, maybe not loved but liked it.

By this time I was sneezing badly. For some reason I thought I would like standing in an art museum, but after 30 minutes in the Pompidou I was miserable & had to leave to get some hot outdoor air. (It was an annoying exhibit of so-called modern figurative painting, i.e. anything that still has a face in it. Most of the artists didn't seem particularly interested in faces or figures & didn't try very hard to do anything except - according to the catalog - "interrogate" various concepts. But I love the nude Cary Grant picture, tan line & all, and Glenn Brown knows how to paint.)

Next door to the Pompidou another movie theater was showing Polissons et galipettes, a collection of short 1920s porno. So I saw that. The stories were just as dumb as they are today but they had more of a sense of humor, and the actors in those days were better-looking too. The pseudo-scholarly captions & the faux-scratchy music recording were annoying, but the cartoon segment ("Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure," which shows up in some festival here every few years) was worth it all.

Walked in the Marais - all looking very familiar, made me a little sad. Big expensive vegetarian food at Piccolo Teatro, remembered going there once before & was sure I remembered the very cute waitress - unfortunately embarrassed myself by telling her so & being wrong.

Out for a drink with Gregg and his new girlfriend Vanessa. Strange to think this is only the second time I've met Gregg since we started corresponding 4 years ago. I didn't remember him being so tall - probably because Kaze once drew him as a little troll. Vanessa doesn't speak English - I got by OK. They gave me a rum drink, "'ti-punch," for my cold. Gregg is busy with his computer work and some more translation for Cornélius; Vanessa works in a school library, has a ton of vacation time & is raising an 8-year-old girl (we agreed that at that age they have "strong ideas." I'm worrying that Greta's daughter, for whose stamp collection I've been sending postcards, maybe threw out all her stamps last year and now hates stamps).

(Gregg on La fiancée de Dracula: "Oh no, a Jean Rollin movie. You have to understand, in France if you do one thing over and over again for a long time, eventually Libération will say you're a genius." Gregg on this terrible-looking cartoon "Tchô" that's on all the McDonald's ads: "It's not really a good comic, but it's good for kids - better than the Belgian comics, which would never mention sex and so on. I like how he puts a little toy or gadget inside the pages.")

August 15 - No more Paris, I'll go to Dover. That gives me a good week in England - and I just found out (thanks to Alban) that the Caption comics convention is happening in Oxford this weekend. I met with Alban in the train station - kept him there forever as I had to get a reservation to Lille - then we got some food. He's planning to come to New York soon to go to SPX - the last time he tried to do that, it was last year and he arrived in New York on September 10...

Today's a holiday but neither Gregg nor Alban had any idea what it's about. "Uh... it's August 15."

1st-class TGV to Lille, then 99th-class SNCF in a boiling hot box to Calais. In the ferry terminal a large English woman held up the ticket line with an amazing series of complaints: the snack machine is broken, the entrance doors are confusingly located, there was a customer service man who didn't speak English... the poor ticket lady begged: "But that is the terminal! I am just with one of the ferry companies!" Might as well argue with the tide. "Well you're here in the terminal aren't you, and I'm your customer so in the end it's your problem. You can tell your manager that I'm seriously considering never traveling through Calais again." I thought that might be best for all concerned.

The ferry is like a small floating airport - I guess I had in mind something like the Staten Island ferry but they could use this thing to steal the Eiffel Tower, if the boat weren't all full of cars and shopping. It's a beautiful sight being out in the middle of the Channel - land just barely not visible (hazy) & the moon out early - 3 or 4 other ferries crawling here & there.

part 1 - part 2 - part 3