Writing – Page 7 – Rant and Roll

Always best to start at the beginning

The day after leaving Berlin, we spent a day sailing the Baltic sea.

We were knackered from the first three days of travelling and didn’t wake up until 10 AM. This was a welcome surprise, as it meant I was freed from roaming the ship like a homeless vagabond simply waiting for the sun to rise (and the gym to open.)

That afternoon, I ran and mum practiced yoga and then we met up with our trivia team for another hour of putting all of our strange and extraneous knowledge to good use.

I almost keeled over with laughter as we tried to figure out what animal is thought to represent long life in Korea.

When my mum suggested the duck I knew I was a total goner. Frank from New Jersey, known already for his serious side eye, nearly knocked over his beer. Good thing for gentle Queenslander Wendy, who quickly suggested that it might be the bear.

Turns out that it was the deer all along.

Afterwards, we returned to our room and laughed ourselves silly sharing hilarious stories, including a real doozy from Bath, New Brunswick, wherein on the way to a New Year’s Eve dance at the legion in Woodstock, NB (Bath being too small to have a legion of its own) both my mum’s boots and stockings melted all over her legs, coagulating into one gooey, goopy super pant.

As my mum put it: “Buddy’s heat in his car was all messed up. I kept telling him that I was cold so he kept turning it up. Turns out, he turned it up a little too high. I got out of the car and I had these big, big holes in my pantyhose and this goo all over my legs. I had to take them off and was left with nothing but my melting boots. That guy really liked me too. He kept telling Noreen that he was thrilled to be with me. All I wanted to do was get away from him. He was supposed to be the coolest dude because he had this stupid damn car. I didn’t care at all.”

I am actually crying with laughter just writing this down. Also, should you ever want to know why I am the way that I am, it’s because of this story. Period.

We capped off the day with dinner out on the terrace, drinking white wine and talking with the sommelier, who is a dead ringer for Novak Djokovic – just with better glasses. I am, of course, completely biased, but hey, they were good, good glasses.

As we snuggled down to sleep, we watched Iceland go up one goal over England, and I swear to goodness, even this far out from the island, I could swear we heard that entire country lose its collective mind.

Alas, that night I was back to the insomnia, and was up at both 1 AM and 4:45 AM. Standing at the rail of our balcony, I let the Baltic wind blow through my hair. Let it whip through my clothes. Let it rip through me, and into my bones.

I watched as the colours of the heavens shifted and blurred; magentas bleeding into royal blues; the yellow of a daisy’s eye; a blossom pink.

In the silence, everything softens. Everything cools.

Night rolls on, but the light.

It persists.

By 5 AM, the sun was wide awake, breaking through three layers of curtains into our room.

I again crept outside, and watched it burn a path across the morning seascape.

…

I have wanted to go to Riga since reading Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga when I was 19 and in my second year of my undergrad. I was taking a Northern European film and literature class and it was the last book on my class syllabus. That year I had read 92 pieces of literature (books, novellas, plays, graphic novels – just for school alone), and by the end of the semester I was burnt out.

The Dogs of Riga was sitting on my bookshelf and I was debating whether or not I would be able to get through the course without cracking it open.

One night, instead of writing a paper of his own, Marc read the entire thing in one sitting. The next morning, the first thing he said to me was, “Babe you really need to read this book.”

And so I did. Also over the course of one day.

It was that book that set off a twelve-year love affair with Mankell. I read, and re-read every Kurt Wallender crime novel, and most of his other fiction. It was the catalyst for this trip. It is what is taking my mum and I around Northern Europe and into the Russian motherland, as I had passed on my love (and my collection of dog eared paperbacks) to her the last summer I lived in Halifax.

So today we adventured around Riga. We learned about the city and its history, marvelling at the incredible architecture of the new town, and the warmth and magnificence of the old town.

Did you know that that legend behind Riga’s flag is that in the thirteenth century there was a mortally wounded Lavian warrior who was wrapped in a white sheet? The part of the sheet on which he was lying remained white, but the two edges were stained in his blood. During the next battle his soldiers used the bloodstained sheet as a flag.

The country has been occupied by the Swedes, Germans, Russians (Russian empire) and Soviets (USSR).

In the fourteenth century, Swedish soldiers hated having to walk from their barracks to the beer brewing district, so they raised money to cut a gate into the city’s walls which would allow them easy access from their homes to the streets of beer.

In 1991, as the country was fighting for its independence, and Soviet tanks were rolling into the old town, the TV station fell, but the radio building stood strong.

The Russian orthodox church that stands in the city’s Esplanade was a planetarium under Soviet rule.

The building that once housed the Soviet agriculture institute was my favourite thing from the entire day, and is today the Latvian Academy of Sciences.

We visited the market, and the national opera house, and the museum, and the outdoor market, and the independence monument. We had a delicious lunch in an outdoor square and basked in the late afternoon sunlight as we walked back to the ship.

I would very much like to return to Riga. To meet more of its multilingual inhabitants and learn more of its fascinating history.

Because this city is in my heart.

And its beat is strong.

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.

A farewell to arms

Today, I say goodbye to my running shoes.

This is very hard.

Since August of 2014 they have been my consummate companions, joining me on every run, race, bike ride, and hike.

And I love them.

I bought them in response to the death my last pair, which, despite an absolutely valiant effort, died a gruesome death the second time around doing Tough Mudder (otherwise known as Tough Mudder II: Tough Mudderer).

However, I didn’t want to buy them. I had just read Born to Run and was a new student to the school of thought that one should never buy new running shoes unless absolutely necessary.

Gone were (and still are) my days of thinking that there is some arbitrary six-month expiration date on shoes. I wanted to wait as long as possible to take the plunge.

So, reluctant as I was to purchase anything new, I started using a pair of Marc’s old shoes instead. They were a little too large and ugly as hell, but I was steadfast in my commitment to make them work. I only threw in the towel on them after completely shredding my right leg on a hike in Hawaii. They had absolutely zero tread, and after a solid two hours of slipping and sliding all over an incredibly treacherous trail, I lost my footing and cut myself badly on an old, rusted water main.

Sitting there in the wilds of the Hawaiian jungle, as Marc and our friends poured water over my wounds, I tried to remember the last time I received a tetanus shot, and patiently waited for the lock jaw to set in.

When I got home I drove to SportChek and bought shoes.

My new Asics were immediately magic. They fit my feet perfectly and took no time to break in.

At first I lamented their muted colour palette, wishing that I could rock the hot pinks and flashy neon so in vogue amongst other runners. But I quickly came to appreciate their simplicity. I often thought this as one of the reasons they were so perfect a bridge between my legs and where my legs ached to go.

For the entire fall of 2014, I woke up at 5:30 am to run the New Westminster waterfront. Greeting the sleepy sun, I would watch as mountainscapes transformed from Mount Doom to Mount Baker and I would marvel at a sky that was both mottled blue and cherry rust.

IMG_20150121_013324 — Mornings, running to the water.

That November, my shoes carried me to my very first race victory when I won the Boundary Bay Half-Marathon. They helped me push through when, after eighteen kilometers of headwinds and incredibly tight hips, everything in my being was telling me that I should just quit and never run ever again. Instead, they allowed my feet to keep propelling me forward, and quieted the negative refrain inside of my head.

That following January, they were there again when I placed fourth in the Chilly Chase Half-Marathon. My Little Sister Melissa came out to cheer me on, and she spent the morning with Marc and his parents, as they chilly-chased me around False Creek and Stanley Park.

download_20150125_113301 — Melissa and I

In April 2015, I completed a long-standing life goal and ran the Hapalua Half-Marathon in Waikiki. My shoes were up with me at 4:30am as I trekked to the start line and nervously prepped for a 6:30am start. They were there as I poured cup after cup of water over my head in an attempt to cool myself against the ever-worsening heat of the day. They were there as the never ending hill between kilometers fourteen and nineteen ate my legs and left me for dead. They were there as I sprinted across the finish line and cried under the comforting shade of a nearby banyan tree.

10439390_10155639535800179_5571865280071216631_n — Hang loose shoes!

They were there when I ran my very first trail race last June and placed third.

11111128_10155870240270179_7364216653780990822_n — Irish Tom and non-Irish me

My shoes have been left at Sunshine Coast cabins and they have stunk up gym lockers. They have run in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park and along the Toronto waterfront. They’ve bounded up steep forested trails and pounded long stretches of unforgiving pavement.

They have dried out over heating grates and in the searing sunshine. They have ground up Grouse Mountain and adventured all around Brooklyn.

This year they ran with me almost every day from January to May, as I trained for what would come to be the hardest thing I have ever done. They carried me 42.2 kilometers in 3:35: from Queen Elizabeth Park, to UBC, to Stanley Park, to downtown Vancouver. They watched as I flew, and as I broke, and as I broke through.

I really did think that I would throw out my shoes after the marathon.

My friend John urged me to get rid of them. A committed distance athlete himself, he was flabbergasted to know that I was refusing to part with them.

I calculated the rough number of kilometers I had completed with my shoes strapped to my feet.

Probably around 4,000 I wrote.

Get new shoes, was his reply.

But I didn’t. I kept running and training and pretending I couldn’t smell them on days when it rained.

Only this weekend, I finally acquiesced.

I ran a fifteen kilometer trail race in an absolute torrential downpour. My shoes, already hanging on by a thread, weren’t coming back from that morning’s trifecta of water, dirt, and no discernible and immediate drying method.

As a last gift to me, my shoes helped me place third in the race. Perhaps cognizant of their imminent demise, they gave me all that they had, one last time.

And I’d like to thank them for this. Thank them for all that they have given me over their almost two-year tenure in my life. For all of the love, grit, determination, happiness, incredulity, strength, and awe.

My next pair have a lot to live up to.

So they better use those 4,000 kilometers wisely.