The other weight I’ve lost–maybe five pounds–I think is mostly due to the eastern European drinking fashion (all alcohol and coffee and no water). So I’m not exactly becoming fit and trim: just ‘beef jerky’ on my way to ‘mummy’. I am getting much better at callus maintenance, and am leaving small, dead bits of foot wherever I go. (Note to foot travelers: emery boards are worth their weight in gold.)
And while I weigh less and am carrying less, I also have less weight to throw around. The guy shows up alone, grey at the temples, sandals, guitar sticking out of his backpack, asks the difference between the $7 bed and the $9 bed–he gets a different reception from the group of Boston journalism majors on summer vacation asking the same question. I don’t think I have the air of a desperate person, but depending on the time of day and the location, I go from ‘interesting’ to ‘creepy’. As a white male, technology professional, approaching middle age, I’m not accustomed to having people question whether I should be in a place: I ought to be welcome wherever I go. But drinking my lunch out of a yogurt container in the shade of a quiet residential street in Krakow, when the woman walks by with her dog I feel like I might blow away in the wind.
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I don’t have everything I started with. Gone is the pair of volleyball shorts I took with me to Berlin. Large parts of my Eastern European phrasebook (Slovenian, Russian, ) are in the bin in the Orange Hostel in Krakow. ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’ (which was great) now belongs to the collection at the Stara Polana in Zakopane. ‘An Army of Davids’ (which looked like a great book about how to work and contribute value to society outside of the corporation) is composting in the Tatra Mountains (a fate it doesn’t even deserve: I tossed it after reading a section where the author explains that individual citizens can be tougher on terrorists because they are less likely to be accused of racial profiling than government agencies are). I inadvertently made a more symbolic cut in weight when I attempted to reduce the length of the recharging cable for my phone. I thought, I’ll just cut and splice the ends together and save the weight of 4 feet of cable. I envisioned a simple two-wire cross section to the cable which would be duck soup to splice with my handy roll of duct tape. After making the fatal cut, when I saw the coaxial design, my first thought was ‘now, that’s an efficient way to make a charging cable’. Oh well: now my phone is off except when I’m taking pictures and sending them. That should buy me a few more days until I find a way to charge it again. Two significant pieces of my expensive winter trekking backpack are no longer with me–leaving me looking a bit ragtag but also decreasing my sense of need to fill the additional (now absent) exterior compartments. The guitar (my companion until Lomo comes) made it with me across the height of the Tatra, I’m thankful to say.
Posted by borogoves @ 3:49 pm
