It is amazing, certainly amazing, how many people have told you that to travel with these chests is impossible. On the third train out from Nice, crawling across Italia via the walking speed regionals that are the only ones the chests fit on, all alone in the last car on the train, the ticket man walks in, looks at the chests and says “It is IMPOSSIBLE, absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to travel with baggage of this size!!” It is hard to restrain the response “we’re on a train. it is moving. I think we are traveling.”
But the dramatic mystery always works out in the end. It is the word “Circus,” that almost always proves magical. As soon as any official sees the print “Marmalade Circus” on the side of the behemoths that you’ve privately come to call Mass and Inertia, they seem to come to the internal conclusion that whatever we’re up to is alright. Some even smile and laugh.
It took two full days of travel to get to Venecia from Nice. Granted the first was spent mostly in the tiny border station of Ventimelia trying to figure out which trains could hold the chests, and which could not. The night before you had arrived there well prepared to get on a sleeper train strait to Venice, but no luck. Only Gaelyn and Darla got on that train with beds in stead of chairs, on account of having bought tickets that they could not afford to lose. The other three stayed that night outside the station, sleeping in the shadow of a spreading palm tree under the waxing moon, and the smell of the over-full dumpsters ten feet away lulled you to sleep.
Shortly after the encounter with the ticket man, who had stomped away mumbling “mumma mia” (yes, they do actually say that) the reginal train broke down, and the five of you, three men and two chests, spent two and a half hours waiting on a graded track in the sunlight, and leaning against the leaning walls that lilted sideways.
In the end you made it to Venice in the late evening, just after midnight, and just after the last trolley to the camp ground, where the other two waited, left the port. So you spent your first night in Venice sleeping by the light of the full moon as it reflected off the grande canal, and listening to the radio of one of the other stranded travelers who shared the train station’s veranda with you.
Come dawn, you were awoken by a security guard, and took the first boat back to the mainland, there to gently wake the other two. The rest of the day was spent wandering Venice, looking for pitches and enjoying the countless shops of Venician Masks, and Glass.
Though the island of Venice is one of the largest tourist traps in the world, there is something that subtly distinguishes it from places like the Eiffel Tower or the Tower of London. Most such traps are a place within a city – a little area that surrounds something of great fame, where countless thousands of Indonesia-made stickers and baseball caps are sold. Venice though, is itself the attraction. The entire city exists almost exclusively on the sustenance of tourism, which gives the stuff of the place a different quality. The glass, the masks, even the gelatto, it is all incredible. To go there again, would be completely worthwhile. But more money would be better. It is unfortunate that you could not stay there longer, but it was so expensive, and in order to perform it was necessary to acquire a pass from the government. The representatives of that government were almost unbelievably friendly, and apologized profusely when it became clear that you did not have the necessary visa. Despite this, the experience of Venice was worth the days of travel and trouble.
Now you are headed for Rome, and will be spending the night in front of the station in Florence before you get there. Everything is well, and life is good.
Train station, somewhere between France and Spain. The air is hot, dry, heavy, bright, and still as a desert night. Everywhere the sun hammers down on the dry sand and rock of the rolling almost desolate hills, reflecting and refracting and slowly boiling away any sense of comfort. The only mitigation to the unrelenting brightness is the whisper of a breeze that slips in between the hills and over the shoddy half-wrecked town from the sea – a thin wisp of blue against the horizon. Every hour and a half a train rumbles by. Some of them stop for a moment to pick up harried looking passengers whose faces grimace relief at their opportunity to leave. No one ever gets out of the trains.
The train station has one single deli – a tiny, vaguely air conditioned cave where sandwiches are sold at inflated prices. You spent your last eighty euro cents on a plain croissant, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. After the last weeks training you could have lived a week on that eighty cents, but you were just so damn hungry.
It was Barcelona that broke you. The living expenses were so much higher then the earnings on the street, and it was a tough, tough crowd. Twice as much work for every laugh, and the smile on your face got more and more strained as you grew weary. Leaving came too late by a long time, but finally the risk had to be taken. In a last bout of desperate optimism you chose to visit the Dali Museum before you left Spain behind, and that may well have been worth it, despite the various problems it caused.
Las Ramblas Barcelona, a tough crowd.
Barcelona Darla
Barcelona Geoff
Surrealism is definitely an interesting artistic movement, and one certainly best appreciated through direct first hand experience. There is no where on earth better to have that experience then in the museum designed by Salvidore Dali, the museum that is the tomb of Salvidore Dali, the museum in which every line, every angle and every brick is set to enhance less the particular beauty of the individual pieces of art, but rather to engender and empower the complete sensation of surrealism. To be in that place seemed like it was to walk through a human mind and watch in glimpses the various forms and shadows of its subconscious, its morality, its memories, and its dreams. You arrived for the evening opening at nine, and left at midnight with a headache, and having fallen for a cunning trap.
It was not until you arrived at the train station in the tiny town that you realized that a museum that opens at nine and closes at midnight closes at the same exact moment as the train station, thereby forcing all foolish tourists to spend their money on a hotel. You were wily and unwincing in your approach to defeating this trap. You were also broke, so you and your troupe slept on the ground outside the train station.
The events of that night were many and varied. There were British backpackers camping there also, and they became your allies in the face of police inspections, drunken gangs, the middle aged gay stalker man, and the hours and hours and hours of muffler-less moped driving teenagers doing circles.
Then, after a night that was restless in its truest meaning, you caught the nine a’clock train here. Here is desolation, dubbed “desperado ville” by Gaelyn, a concrete platform in the middle of dry desert that bears more akin to an old western film then to real life. There are no tumbleweed.
The problem is that the chests do not fit on trains. It is a real problem.
The other problems are hunger and thirst and heat, which make thinking hard, and movement unpleasant. In the end, you grin, bear it, and hammer you unwilling chests in through the upper half of a not quite large enough doorway while making sure the train attendants aren’t looking.
An hour or so later they find the chests and kick you off, but by then you’re at a train-station that has more then one train and you manage to find your way north and east, heading for Nice. You have to change trains twice more, and once requires a change of station too. Here the chests are too big for the commuter buss between stations, which is no surprise, so you set out to walk the five kilometers on foot, and it is then that you receive some aid.
Half a mile down the dark and winding metropolis roads you suddenly come upon a group of colored men, laughing and talking and walking together, by all appearances just out for a friendly walk in the evening. You pass them in the street and only a few hundred feet later take the care to glance back. One of them has broken with the others and is approaching Darla. He exchanges a few words with her, and then suddenly begins speaking loudly in french. His words are foreign, however his meaning is clear. He says he will escort you to the train station, because the way you are going is very dangerous. He says not to follow the signs – they lead through a section of town where gangs operate, a place that is not safe for five tourists pushing three hundred pounds of wooden chests at night. You share suspicious glances with your friends, but there is something about this man that you, not trust precisely, but you are willing to give him a chance. He takes the lead, smiling and chatting in french. At one point he tells Darla to stay close, to stay in the middle of the group and hold hands with someone. He smiles when he talks, and there is nothing about his smile that is unwholesome. His eyes are bright, open and kind. He seems genuinely concerned for you. If he is acting, then he is very good at it.
The winding streets unfurl before you. The stranger leads you through quiet, middle class neighborhoods where parents are walking their children by the side of the road. Your chests are the largest moving objects you see. You keep the pace up, knowing that you have only about an hour to make it to the station before your train is gone. After leading you in a large arch, presumably around the danger, the stranger stops under a bridge and with another open smile points to the highway above you and gives a few final directions. You are almost there, just a little further. Then he gives a final handshake and wave and walks away into the night. It turns out his directions were accurate. You arrive at the train station just a few minutes later and catch your train. There will be one more stop before Nice, but you’re almost there.
Was it really so unsafe? Were the gangs so bad as to warrant such extreme caution? Who was that gentle stranger, and why did he go so far out of his way to help us? Questions to which the answers will probably never be known.
The train deposits you in a train station in yet another city whose name you cannot remember. Immediately as you disembark a security guard tells you in unequivocal terms to leave the station. Now. You try to ask him when the train will come in the morning and he merely crosses his arms in front of him in the universal symbol for negation and says firmly and angrily “out!” You try to ask another guard as you step out the front door if he knows of a cheep hotel and the first nearly shouts at you “this is a train station not a hotel! Get out!” You are already outside, you cannot believe his attitude.
For the second night in a row you are obliged to sleep on the concrete outside a train station. This night is better then the first, perhaps you are getting used to it. At five in the morning you wake up and catch the train that actually goes to Nice. Arriving there in a dull stupor, you find your way to a hostel 16 euro a night, and crash. The next day you wander the city and spot a few pitches. You are still broke but the apartment the hostel gave you has a kitchen and you discover that you can spend the 16 american dollars still in your bank account to buy food at the monoprix, so you have something to eat.
The next day you do two performances and earn a total of two euro and fifty cents.
Feeling awful, you try to find a new pitch, and then, walking through the crowded city center, you come face to face with Mariam. You knew she was here, but you’d been unable to contact her. Her face lights up, and laughter fills the group. It’s her birthday, and she had planned to spend it just rollerblading around the city. The rest of the evening is surreal. Gelatto occurs. The best you’ve ever had. Rose and ginger and passion-fruit and Irish-cream and many others. At last you make it back to bed, and sleep.
The next day you do six shows and feel great about them, tying your record for the most shows you’ve done consecutively, and earning a record of a one hundred and thirty five euro, which is almost thirty each. It looks like you’ll stay in Nice for a little while longer.
It is the following morning that you update your e-journal. Life is good.
