Postcards Around The World

Travel Stories? Check

Samples? Check

Heckin Good fun? Double Check

Read Through the Following "Postcards" and see what I can Do!

A Budapest flea market contains red-clothed tables muddled with local handicraft treasures, ice sculpting, hot and fresh and oily langos, and vintage Hungarian wines. Men on tall stilts with long pants and black and white striped shirts make red balloon animals for small, eager children. My favorite artifacts are the Putin refrigerator magnets; statuesque against rugged mountain landscapes, grizzly face solemn, a novelty to me. The market vendor says no pictures.

Nice, France: Isn’t it? White roses and shaved green stems; a cerulean sea lit by mid-summer sun. Elegant blue, white, and red letters spell COURAGE on the cement, but heat and time mirages names and messages. A boy in a wheelchair squints to read small print – L’amore Triomphera Toujour –while his father squeezes his shoulder. Hard-faced young men point assault rifles at Gucci purses. Snipers lean over pink-topped roofs. One year after, the doctors say the boy will not walk again.

-Bastille Day, one year after the attack

Google Translate says she has cancer. Inoperable. Of the brain. We meet in a pre-dawn kitchen, bringing in the hostel’s laundry from summer rain. She clutches my phone and grabs my damp cheeks as if to say I’m Marie of Spain, please help me. Tears or rain in her deep amber eyes, she offers Marmite on toast, a banana that isn’t hers, free packets of butter, and she doesn’t look like she has cancer. Fifty years old, and she asks where I am going, how long I’ve been traveling, who I am with. She is with her brother, and she is afraid.

Seven-dollar gelato and no restrooms for customers. The sun is merciless, and everyone is old or too attractive. Chinese grandmothers stuff Ponte Vecchio diamonds inside fake leather bags bought several blocks down, while herds of headphones and tri-colored flags echo a “follow me!” The tour guide will shoo you away: fork over euros for WIFI, hospitality, sitting, standing, waiting, learning.

The cement trail along Manarola’s coast is closed. The orange sign reads “Maintenance” but the permanent-looking steel barrier sends spikes down rugged cliff to meet the sea. Tourist beware, indeed. A thousand locks locked on the closest of the spikes, reminiscent of Ponts De Arts bridge in Paris.  She looks closely at a new, bright pink padlock: Jules & Arnold.

The same view from the Santa Justa Elevator can be yours for free and a short walk. Portuguese is easier to read than Croatian, and the grocer clerks don’t evil eye you in Hamburg Aldis as they do in Paris. Remember: if the ferry ends in Anconda, don’t exchange for 35% of market value. Save your cash until you find Carlo or Marco on the South Side of Palazzo Vecchio.

Watch Shrek in an AirBnB in Florence. Choke down tea. Step into farmacias, asking in English for cold and flu medicine. Green-plus signs hang over their doors, two every block, but no one can translate Sudafed. Somehow make it to a doctor’s office on the third floor, where the secretary asks you to repeat what’s wrong four times. Too expensive anyway. Sit, alone and ill, on dirty stone and blackened bubblegum, and stare at the puke-green Basilica. Italians and their healthcare rights.

            High fashion photographer, self-made with a smooth black portfolio and jean beret. Alfie Roberts straightens his blue neck scarf, clutches his right hip with his left hand, purses thin, aristocratic lips. “Peace and love, baby, that’s what I’m all about,” he says, eyeing the American girl. She’ll attract flies like honey. “And you, love, you can work for me. Americans trust other Americans. You hold this” – his portfolio, but she obviously wouldn’t know the difference between soft lighting and hard – “And do you know what the Louvre is?”

Bern is glossy. Magazine-esque. Glass and stone buildings, red trolleys, well-groomed poodles. . . even the glass-room that houses the ATM outclasses her scuffy tennis shoes. She passes ornate stone fountains of naked women. At one drinking station she washes away the taste of a whiskey-infused truffle and remnants of a bad night in Budapest. Painted, impossibly green mountains. Can it be real? Monopoly money. Incredibly attractive and blonde business women and men in dry-cleaned suits with pocket kerchiefs. She can’t even find cigarette butts.

Italian olives, Italian olive oil, black and green. Pitted and beautiful on the tongue. You want both for sure. Do you look like a person who knows anything about olives? You want them because you’re hungry, and nobody should be hungry in La Spezia, and the old man spent his life farming olives and making olive oil. His oily black hair and tanned skin practically oozes olive expertise. Here, have some olives, try some, and how about a small bag for 3 euros? 

Hot, blazing sun. A nameless fortified-citadel turned church in Lisbon.p – hodgepodge of Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque styles, some Neoclassical – it all looks very old and medieval. We enter darkness. Japanese teenagers dressed in white blouses and shirts sit in wooden pews. They are singing an English song – HOssaaanna, HOOOOsaaanaa! –  and we feel the ethereal. We lift and bounce off moss-green, pewter gray arches.  A male and female student stand at pulpit, eyes shut, the female clutching her stomach. Her voice penetrates our breastbone, transcending the others, and we hum hooossaaannna, hooosssaaann and think this church – out of all the medieval, free, old churches in Europe – is the most special.

Repeat after me: If they die – we die. The French know when to cross busy Parisian streets. Long strides, quick looks, graceful. Unimpressed by taxi drivers brushing their coattails and pant legs, undaunted by the curves and tangles of poor city planning. Cough exhaust and follow: If they die – we die. Do it with confidence – just like une bageutte s’il vous plait, the only words you know – and slip through headlights and taillights. Look for the briefcases, the grungy youth that smokes, the cellphones to ears, the lonely little girl. They always make it to the other side.

Broken train, Croation wilderness, darkening sky. No English, but they can’t just leave us here, right? I rest my head on the pull-out tray. I need to pee. Five minutes later, a nudge, and I look at the white-haired grandmother holding her phone to me. A little cherub of a boy. I wish I knew how to say “ahh, so cute!” in Croatian, but Google translate doesn’t work in the middle of nowhere. I smile; old ladies and their grandkids. She smiles, presses play. The toddler puts his diaper-butt up, curly blonde head down, and bangs, bangs, bangs his head on the floor. She pantomimes sleeping on the pull-out tray. How crazy! She seems to say. Ow! We start laughing, and I replay the video.