The rollercoaster ride

By the end of spring break, it was hard to see the beginning. The end was Istanbul, hearing the call to prayer from the Blue Mosque while drinking tea from glass cups, wondering what it would be like to return to my studies. I hadn’t felt so disoriented since the fall of 2006. The beginning was the airport Holiday Inn in Dublin for an overnight layover between Edinburgh and Prague. Between Prague and Istanbul, I could recall Budapest and Vienna. My passport got some fresh ink during this trip, but by the end, I felt a bit more dislocated than I’d been before.

The Dublin motel was on the more luxurious end of my accommodations for the trip. For instance, I stayed in a Prague hotel where the beds appeared to be several small cushions pushed together. Each desk clerk there worked a 24-hour shift. In Budapest, I stayed in an austere post-communist hostel where, when I left my bunk at 12:15 to check my e-mail, a scraggly, earnest clerk asked if I was drunk. Both hotels were near restaurants I returned to often—in Prague, a “traditionally Czech” inn where a fortysomething waitress in lederhosen tried to up-sell us to the “traditional” Czech mixed grill and in Budapest, a heavenly, greasy little Greek restaurant. I’m always trying to find regular spots. I’m not sure why these details in particular stick out in my memory—perhaps it’s that the things I assumed I’d find most memorable have blended together into a mass of churches and vaulted arches, just as I miss Absolute Bagels more than any fixture near Columbia’s campus.

Europe was not all hotels and restaurants. There was the infinitely photogenic Prague Castle as well as a large public bath in Budapest rife with Eastern European swimwear. But after the pace of these two cities, it was a relief to get to Vienna. I went for one night by myself, leaving my friend behind. If I could recall Daisy Miller better, I’d compare myself to James’s heroine—I went to Vienna to sleep and eat at least one good meal. My sanatorium-like hotel in Vienna wasn’t really near anything aside from a small cafe where I sat reading Alan Hollinghurst with a strong coffee in hand.

Vienna was perhaps my favorite of the cities I visited, but in another way it was my least favorite—Vienna was the only one that did not challenge me. Its placid streets had none of the narrow twists of characteristic of Prague, and its opulent-looking buildings lacked the spiky jolie-laide quality of thoise in Budapest. In these two cities, I remembered what it had been like as a new student at Columbia looking at subway maps (or tram maps). Vienna was what I needed after a week of travel, but I realize now that the exhaustion associated with Prague and Budapest was part of their reward. Traveling is something everyone ought to do, I suppose, but I realized in Eastern Europe that I’d had perhaps more experience than I originally thought.

Onward and eastward I went, towards Istanbul. The hostel there was unusually cheery—the hotel staff, as in Prague, worked incredibly long hours but still tried to make friends with us. One young man, who worked behind the desk, told us he had a movie in production—he would have shown me the screenplay, he said, but it was in Turkish. We played backgammon nightly while looking out over the Golden Horn.

I felt anxious throughout my trip, despite everything, about somehow missing the key thing, the crucial part of each city, just like I still worry about not having gone to Brooklyn enough. I was in Prague for a day too long, perhaps, but spent so much time worrying about everything I wanted to see that I wasn’t really relaxed until dinner on the last night in a small tapas restaurant that could have been in Barcelona, New York, or anywhere. I left Vienna sated by my day but wishing I had three extra hours for another museum—I’d lingered over Freud’s house and hadn’t gotten to the mysterious Liechtenstein Museum. I even considered going out during my layover in Dublin, though my Irish passport stamp just signifies sleep and a continental breakfast. It was only when I got to Istanbul that I began to relax. Knowing that I didn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to see, I waited for President Obama’s motorcade. I strolled the streets. I wrote in a small cafe where the waiter called me “Broadway!” when I told him I’d come from New York. I went, twice, to the Blue Mosque, leaving my camera behind the second time. The sheer mass of it, the giant space covered in lovingly engraved tile, was too big to be converted into a JPEG. I guess that was the point of it all.

Daniel D'Addario is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies. He is spending the semester at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The State I Am In runs alternate Fridays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com