Adventure – Rant and Roll

Parting is such sweet sorrow

And thus, we have reached the end of our journey.

I, wrapped in blankets; my mother, asleep in the bed next to mine.

We are party animals, but only in the hours betwixt 7 AM and 9 PM.

Tonight, a large glass of red wine has left me slightly light headed and doubly giddy, but mostly content.

Copasetic.

The past ten days have been so filled with magic and adventure, with brilliance and awe. I am beyond stuffed with memories and am bursting with dreams.

We arrived in Stockholm yesterday morning.

After dropping off our luggage at the hotel, my mum and I spent the morning walking all around the city, beginning in the Norrmalm district, before moving on to Galma Stan.

We visited the parliament and the royal palace and the king’s garden esplanade. The Stockholm triathlon was taking place, and we had a chance to cheer on the athletes as they completed the running portion of their races.

I love being able to play bystander to athletic events: watching competitors is always so incredibly inspiring, and it reminds me about the amazing travel opportunities afforded to athletes who compete in different events around the globe.

I really need to start looking into the international half-marathon circuit, stat.

From the race we strolled along the many waterfronts, marvelling at all of the beautiful streets and outdoor restaurants.

Stockholm truly is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever visited. I have such a hard time describing the effect it has on me and the way it makes my heart quiver and quake.

The sunlight on the Riddarfjorden is like a million tiny fireworks exploding in unison.

The apartments and hotels that border the waterways are all unique and breathtaking in their architecture and colour; they are small but timeless castles, cloaked in history. One might imagine that their inhabitants do not age, they only grow cleverer with each passing day.

The people are tall and beautiful.

The men have amazing beards. Then women have amazing hair.

Everyone rides bicycles in suits.

After eating lunch outside of the city library, we slowly strolled back to the hotel, and I purchased a dress and a skirt.

This morning, I woke early and strapped on my running shoes. The moment I caught my first glimpse of Stockholm’s waterfront, I knew that I would regret if I left never having had the chance to run throughout the city.

My route took me twelve kilometers, across the downtown core, along waterways, and through parks. The entire time I was out, I had to keep reminding myself that my life was real; that I was here in this glorious city, doing one of my most treasured loves.

I wish sometimes that I ran with a phone, even though I know I never will. I want those moments to exist exactly as they should: transient and fleeting, gone in a flash and yet exquisitely burned in my memory and heart.

Today my mum and I walked the entire length of Djurgarden, an amazing public garden the boasts canals, amusements parks, palace residences, sprawling greenspace, running trails, and much more. After walking for over four hours, we replenished our spirits and energy stores with cookies, cake, and tea.

Afterwards, I dropped my mother off at the hotel, and I continued on walking the length of the city.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the entire trip. All of the places we visited, all of the things that we did, all of the ideas we shared, all of the laughs we laughed, and most importantly all of the memories we made.

I thought about how we are made up of infinitesimal moments, seemingly too small to comprehend, and yet more powerful than we could ever know.

Life can seem arbitrary, or meaningless. I sometimes struggle with the systems and processes we have set up to govern society, and the enduring institutions that control those systems.

But to be so privileged to travel. To see the world. To open my heart to new places and people, to expand my mind and breathe new life into the spaces when existential cobwebs have grown sticky and dull.

What is such a life.

And to be able to do all of this with my mother – a woman of strength, intelligence, and bravery; who is a little bonkers, and a lot brilliant, and who says things like, “They must have a lot of big furniture here – like long beds and stuff. There’s definitely a demand for it” after seeing a particularly tall Swede walk by.

I will never take this time for granted.

I am the luckiest girl in the world.

Mach schnell, Mann!

Berlin is the coolest city I have ever visited.

Mum and I began our day to the sad strains of a 5 AM wake up call. A coach would be leaving the port at 6:20 AM to take us to the city, and being as it were that we were located some two hundred and thirty kilometers north of Berlin, it was imperative that we shake a leg.

The drive into Germany’s capital was beautiful. Wide, undulating fields of wheat reflected the early morning sun’s golden rays, while wind-powered turbines stretched skywards, standing a start white against the turquoise of the sky.

I read and dozed while my mum, card carrying member of the intelligentsia, practiced her bridge game. It really warms my heart to know there are enough players out there to warrant the monthly publication of the literary piece known as ‘The Bridge Bulletin’.

When we arrived in the city, we met Andrea, our intrepid guide who would accompany us throughout the day.

After biking across two cities, my mum opted for a less-exercise intensive introduction to Berlin, so we walked and drove about as Andrea recounted Berlin’s history, beginning in 1237, and all the way up to unification.

The city was a-buzz in football fever, with some 100,000 Berliners heading to Tiergarten park to watch Germany play Slovakia in the Euro Cup.

We visited the Brandenburg Gate, the Bundestag, and passed the CDU and SPD headquarters (where at the former, I said a silent, but emphatic, hello to Angela Merkel.) Humboldt University is astoundingly gorgeous, and just standing out outside of the buildings one can understand how brilliant it would be to attend as a scholar, or be employed as an academic.

The tomb commemorating those who have fallen in wars and armed conflict stands just across the street and was equally affecting, though for, of course, wildly divergent reasons.

The sculpture, housed inside of a building that was once a guard house for the German royal family, is a mother weeping over the body of her dead son. There is a hole cut out in the ceiling so that no matter what the outside elements, the sculpture stands firm. In the fall, leaves fall through the roof, in the winter snow. Yesterday, it is a solid stream of sunlight, illuminating her cold grief.

At the East Side Gallery, we saw Brezhnev kissing Honecker, kaleidoscopes of colour, and calls for peace. There no better place to take arty-artsy photos of yourself, than this wall.

We slowly walked through the Holocaust memorial, and I quietly lost my mind at the family of tourists who were playing hide and seek amongst the installation, and even more so at the couples making out and sun tanning on top of it. Afterwards, we walked to The Topography of Terror, where along the way we passed the German Finance Ministry, that was once the seat of Hermann Goering’s Luftwaffe, which incredibly, was one of the only buildings not hit by allied missiles during the war. On the east side of the building, there is a remarkable display of DDR propaganda that depicts utopian socialist ideals: the happiest workers you could ever meet.

Kreutzberg is cool. Just the coolest. And we didn’t spend nearly enough time in this neighbourhood. Alas.

Checkpoint Charlie is insane and made me feel really weird to see a place with such incredible historical significance turned into a three-ringed circus. How insanely ironic that this place, once the border crossing into a communist country and a symbol of its citizens’ loss of movement, is now a shopping centre where once can pay to have their photo taken with fake American soldiers and then eat their lunch at KFC.

The mind boggles.

Did you know that Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport is now a space for citizens to use as they like? That people come to bike, run, fly kites, have picnics, and spend time together on sunny days? That the government put its use to vote by Berliners to see what they wanted done with the space and they overwhelmingly chose to keep it as it is, and to keep using it as a communal space?

To keep it for the people.

Sometimes I can get carried away about countries that I have read and read and read about in novels and textbooks and what I’ve seen in movies and plays. I try to live by the narratives that I have loved, but not lived. I try to imagine Grass and Boll and Remarque and Timm and Wolf and in the end I need to relinquish and let go.

Coming to Berlin was amazing because I was there with my mother. A woman who has shaped my narrative and my stories. A woman who will walk with me for two hours instead of sitting down to lunch because she knows that I want to see Alexanderplatz station even though she knows we won’t make it in time, but we’ll stumble over to the Berlin Concert hall instead, and goodness is it ever grand.

I will undoubtedly come to Berlin again. I’ll rent a bike and see Marx and Engels; I’ll go to the symphony and visit museums and I’ll eat curried sausage in Kreutzberg and dance at some club.

But today was for mum.

Who likes Angela Merkel as much as I.

And who undoubtedly also said hello, as we passed her by.

She sells, sea shells

Okay. So cruises are crazy.

Did you know that people come onto these things and just, like, make a new life on the boat? For years at a time?

How is this even a thing?

Tonight my mum and I decided to partake in a little pub trivia, and the two couples who joined our team had already been living on the boat for sixteen days! SIXTEEN DAYS!

I feel like they that might be able to lay claim to some sort of squatters rights.

Also, full disclosure: Team “The Queen Is On Our Money” claimed top spot. We were originally two Canucks and two Aussies, and we had little time to accommodate our last minute New Jersey draft picks, who, luckily, remained unperturbed by the royal reference.

This morning I was again up at 4 AM, awoken as I was from my sweet bed of rest by the evil triumvirate of: a rocky engine start, a mid-night spectre looking for her lost bathrobe, and the sweet sounds of said spectre’s symphonic sinuses.

I beginning to think I will never sleep longer than five hours ever again.

I tried my absolute hardest to stave off wakefulness, but in the end acquiesced and resigned myself to the day. I stole about our darkened stateroom for an hour, ordering (and devouring) a coffee and a cheese plate – the only thing on the 24 hour room service menu that wasn’t a burger, a dessert, or a Caesar salad – and just generally feeling like the depraved Gollum figure that I am.

What’s in my pockets? Oh yeah! It’s my sense of majesty, ready to be incinerated in the fires of Mount Doom.

After satiating myself, I threw on some workout garb, and again found myself exercising at the crack of dawn with all of the other crazies.

The saving grace? That I was able to watch the sun rise over the water as I sprinted my cheese-coated guts out for forty-five minutes.

By the time I arrived back to the room, my mum was ready to motor. We got ourselves ready, and at 8:30 AM we were heading to the beautiful and quaint seaside town of Helsingborg, Sweden.

We knew that we wanted to rent bikes to explore the city, and were nervous that it may not happen. Today was the holiday after the shenanigan and booze-heavy Midsummer celebrations and absolutely nothing was open.

Luckily, we were able to find a small bodega inside of the central bus terminal that had two low-rise bikes to rent. Call it serendipitous, or call it weird as heck, but somehow we made our way to the most random of renters and we were able to procure our rides.

Thus, we spent a glorious four hours peddling around Helsingborg and its different environs.

The town is itself a study in contrasts: long stretches of seaside, punctuated by art installations and pungent sea salt air; its roadways flanked by octogenarian bathers and million dollar (turn of the century) mansions.

The main cycling path is approximately 20 kilometers long and takes you from beach, to town, to university, to industrial wasteland, to quaint sea side village. It’s a veritable personality disorder of aesthetics, and yet at the root of it all, everything is grounded in a simple beauty. A red brick and ancient stone; areas that once stood for so much more than e-commerce parks and paper packaging plants, that despite it all, remaining standing.

Defiant.

Beautiful.

We visited parks, and castles, and ponds. We dipped our toes and hands into the sea, and we burned our arms in the bright, blazing sun.

We laughed until we cried over pistachio cannoli and blood orange spritzers. I bought Swedish candy which we ate as we marvelled at all of the flags waving in the late afternoon breeze.

After returning our bikes, we continued to explore the downtown core, traipsing about cobbled sidewalks and sun bleached piers.

When we arrived back to the ship, we stole away to the library, where we ensconced ourselves in another world of make believe.

Because isn’t that so much the root of travelling? Letting everything go that has come to define your day to day? Your character and your arc? What you need and want (and what you think and want?)

We are nothing but small bit parts, showing up at a Swedish beach town, ready to rent bicycles and steal away into the sunshine.

Everything else is but a dream. And what an exquisite dream to be.

We depart at daybreak!

Twenty-four hours of travelling and I’m all folded limbs and a parched mouth.

My mother and I meet up at Gatwick airport. We literally stumble into each other’s embrace, just outside of the South Terminal’s monolithic duty-free. It’s a harrowing gauntlet of Lancôme perfumes and jumbo packs of Haribo candy, but somehow we emerge unscathed.

Our flight to Copenhagen is scheduled to leave at 1:40 PM, but we are delayed for two hours. We slowly walk through Zara and Ted Baker, running our hands over the garments we particularly like. My mum has purchased a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich and would rather sit and munch than window shop.

So I carry on solo.

I must keep moving my stiff legs forward. I am afraid that if I don’t, they will turn to stone.

On the flight from Vancouver I dozed and read from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. He is my travel go-to and I figure it’s always good to immerse myself in these stories. Some might say that’s grim, but nuts to them.

These are the tales we must never let die.

…

I write this from a darkened hotel room just outside of Copenhagen’s downtown core. I slept maybe all of four hours last night – my restlessness born out of a combination of excitement, jetlag, epic thunder and lightning storms, and my mother’s rhythmic and punctuated breathing.

(One can only assume I would have done very, very poorly in the Gulag.)

It’s 5:30 AM and the sun has been up since 4 AM. She is a good writing partner, but mostly I am reading news coming out of the UK and looking up places to rent bikes.

The coffee I am drinking is instant.

The energy kick I am supposed to be getting from it, is not.

A little Rainy Day Taxi and the tap tap tapping of my fingers is the gentle counter refrain to my mother’s sound sleep sounds.

…

How NOT to have an anxiety attack in a Danish hotel gym:

Simply don’t go. Try to sleep more or just simply rest.
Don’t immediately begin competing with the woman running on the treadmill next to you.
Or at least don’t compete so that that it’s obvious, so that she then starts to compete back.
DO NOT watch the BBC news coverage of BREXIT
Do change the channel when Nigel Farage comes on and begins speaking about what a victory this is for the UK populace.
Momentarily lose consciousness whenever you hear someone say that the British have voted to “take their country back.”
Try and remember that there are still good people everywhere, it’s just that they don’t sell newspapers, or drive viewership ratings.
Shower up and walk around the sunny cobblestone streets of Copenhagen.
Eat a chocolate pastry and drink a latte.
Breathe, breathe, breath.

…

At present, my mother and I are sitting on a bed (soon to be two twin beds) in our cruise ship room. We are looking at photos from the day and drinking a glass of vino verde. It’s my absolute favourite wine and we scored a great deal, procuring a GIANT bottle from the corner store just around the block from our hotel. No joke, it had a big sticker advertising ‘33% MORE!’ across the label.

No one ever said that the Gillis women weren’t classy as hell.

Today we rented bikes and biked all over Copenhagen. For almost six hours, we visited the Little Mermaid, and Tivoli Gardens, as well as the King’s gardens (where we saw a bit of the changing of the guards) and the Parliament and the National Library and everything in between.

Copenhagen is rad as heck. Very, very beautiful and clean, and populated by very, very beautiful (and I would wager a guess) clean people.

The biking is amazing because of the amazing infrastructure. You are never riding on the street and everyone is so cognizant and respectful of bikers. Scooting about all day with no helmet was a total breeze and we just put all of our stuff in our front baskets.

My gut reaction was to be all, “Really goes to show how utterly ineffectual Good Ole Gregor is in Vancity!”, but the city is flat, and perfectly designed for the bicycling set, and as cute as I felt on my push bike all day long, I knew that this would not fly for a second in New West.

Give me my twenty-one speed and my urban greenway, or give me death.

(Greenway please.)

Stay tuned for further adventures!

Tomorrow we take Helsingborg, Sweden by (biking) storm.

Live Out There Exclusive: “Going to the Birds”

I have always, always loved the expression “having a bird.” It really doesn’t make much sense and it’s now super antiquated, but every time I hear it I laugh like a drain.

I also really love birds, so when Marc asked me if I wanted to go on an afternoon date to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, I knew that it would be a perfect fit. For my last post this month with Live Out There I wrote about this amazing spot and two other places, perfect for a day with the ducks.

Going to the Birds

One of the great things about winter on the West Coast of Canada is that, unlike most of our Canadian countrymen and women, we are not buried under multiple feet of snow. In the absence of this seasonal staple, we are afforded some fantastic, though lesser thought of seasonal activities.

For instance, birding is often seen as something specific to the 60+ age set, when in reality it is a fantastic way to spend a crisp, sunny winter afternoon here in the BC Lower Mainland. In fact, Vancouver and its environs are home to a number of amazing places perfect for a long walk, hike, or bike ride, spent spotting and marveling at our feathered friends.

Continue reading about three areas perfect for an afternoon of birding about here.