So I shall settle down on the waiting bench and write, with Ben Fold's upbeat songs blasting in my ears, with faint melancholy of having left Ireland and the wonderful company of Robert, and having to get used to a new country again. Except that England isn't so new after all - did I not grow up with all the Enid Blyton books, describing the English countryside and its adventurous children, the little fairies and pixies and gnomes? Which is to say, there is no question at all that England will let me down, especially when I am going to stay in urban London most of the time, but perhaps Oxford will redeem it a bit. But one can never be too sure, as I liked Paris although I was quite certain that I wouldn't.
It is quite bizarre that my two-month trip in Europe is actually drawing to an end soon. Where did all the time go? Time slipped through the opening and closing of subway train doors, through idle moments of easy jokes and laughter while thumbing rides, through sighs at the beauty of nature, through hugs of hello and goodbye with friends and strangers who later became friends. From country to country, my sense of time became completely warped, as I entangled myself in lives of my friends and tasted a sliver of what it means to be Italian, German, Swedish, Estonian, French, a Spaniard in France, a Dutch in Ireland... Add in the urban, suburban, rural, nomadic lifestyles; the friends, the siblings, the parents, the grandparents, the random people you meet on the street; the music, the culture, the language... and then the inevitable disentanglement, as it is always time to catch the next bus, ferry, train, or flight.
Difficult. It will be difficult to describe this trip to people who will naturally ask how my holidays went (or even, where the hell I was), because I can't condense all of this into a ten-second answer. It will most likely sound like "Oh it was awesome," or something to that effect, betraying no sign of the weight of what I actually want to say, about what I liked and did not like about each country, about the similarities and differences between them, about the overwhelming kindness that I have received from almost everyone that I have met, about how I can count in five different European languages now (German, Italian, French, Estonian, and er... English), so on and so forth. Not to mention the sights, on how pretty the wheat fields in Estonia looked under the golden sunshine, as the breeze created little waves; or the collective sighs from the public when the Eiffel Tower sparkled after twilight, every hour on the hour; the double personality of the Irish countryside, beautifully green and lush on a clear sunny day, mysterious and misty when it rains. And the people! I so badly want to see them again, and relive the good old times, and share new ones!
Anyway - I am zipping along the English countryside, nodding off occasionally as I am prone to. I should close this post now and get some shuteye before I meet John, who's receiving me in Oxford. Met him in the Berlin conference, and he generously offered a couch to me in Oxford and to arrange a discussion about my research with his colleagues. A prime example of random acts of kindness that befall me.
***
***
