The key to a successful long-term travel plan is that you have to change travel companions every few weeks. It keeps the Spring-like feeling of new beginnings going for just long enough before you want to shoot someone for waking up at dawn everyday in a continent where the sun doesn’t set until 9:30 pm. I’ve been living out of a suitcase for six weeks now and, as you can see, am happily imbibing lessons from the nomadic life.
The second most surprising lesson is that Baggage Envy is a real thing. For months and years at a time, I can forget that suitcases exist as commercial items – I whiz past them at department stores, ignoring the ads and shunning the deals. Until about five hours before a major flight, suitcases don’t exist to me, and even then I just raid the closet at my parents’ house and run away with one before my mother makes me sign a receipt. Thing is, your luggage defines you on these long-haul trips. When you’re travelling, your bag becomes you; it’s your calling card and your signature; you drag it around, push it on trains and planes, and every hotel judges you on its basis. My paranoia about this has turned the baggage carrousel at the airport into a suitcase runway. My own bag is now on its third wheel, and is usually put to shame by the branded leather bags on either side of it. I kick myself for not having, after all these years, done something as grownup as investing in a good suitcase, something that when you see it reminds you of white linen tablecloths and trips on 19th century ships, rather than a discount warehouse outside Bangkok.
When not doing this, I spend my time imagining radical backstories for the luggage around me. That red shiny plastic hardback coming down lane 3? Owned by Rita and her husband Paulo. Rita has crocodile skin, wears tight lyrca and far too much gold. I think she’s trying to attract attention; she probably worked as a receptionist or secretary before this. Paulo is tall, ambitiously fat and definitely cheating on Rita with someone younger, which is why he’s brought Rita on a guilt-vacay to France, fulfilling a desire she expressed when they were both likely thinner and happier. (I’m convinced that if math questions were worded like soap opera plotlines, I would have done seriously well.)
Rita and Paulo and I were all on the train coming into Paris. (I’m here again after a brief stopover in other realms for no other reason than because I had another entry on my visa and wanted to use it.) Before coming to the city we were trying to find some hotel rooms, which I’ve done before in fifteen minutes on a website. I’m not joking when I say that there now wasn’t a single room in any hotel in Paris. It turns out it’s Paris Fashion Week, which in this city actually runs for three weeks. All the models, designers, editors, buyers, assistants, assistants’ helpers, costumers, celebrities and hangers-on that have anything to do with fashion are now here.
Now I’m staying with a friend’s aunt. Let’s call her Eve. Eve is an Englishwoman who married an as-yet-undetermined number Frenchman, later divorcing him and keeping the family apartment which might as well be in Versailles because it is so cool. To put it into some kind of perspective, the room I am sitting in now (one of many) has three chandeliers and a fresco of clouds painted on the ceiling. It’s not even the grandest study in the house. Clouds!
Aunt Eve, or Evey, doesn’t look like the kind of person who would own an eight-bedroom palace in Paris but unless you’re dressed in a large, corseted ballgown accessorized by a powdered wig, I don’t think anyone could look like they owned such a place.
[quote]Parisian trashcans are better stocked than the Hyperstar in Lahore[/quote]
I hadn’t expected to be back in the city of lights so soon, and having been here a few weeks ago I have thankfully no obligations. Eve and I have been going for walks to the L’Arc de Triomphe and the parks while she tells me how husband number 2 left her for a pin-up model who later died in a routine plastic surgery operation (she chuckles every time she tells the story, and every time the type of surgery changes). Yesterday I was having a picnic next to the Eiffel tower – one of Eve’s haunts (she has remained, despite living for more than two decades in Paris, an enthusiastic tourist) – when I noticed a homeless man rummaging through the trash. He pulled out some baguettes and some cheeses and even an unfinished box of olives (some of these Parisian trashcans are better stocked than the Hyperstar in Lahore). Midway through the rummage he pulls out a half-empty bottle of wine, which he proceeds to smell and sip and swivel in his mouth, breathing deeply. But something wasn’t right, and he grimaced and spat out the wine in the garbage, along with the bottle which he threw in like it had offended him. He dug around some more, found another half empty bottle, this one red, repeated his testing technique and then shuffled off with his goodies. Paris, I thought, the only city in the world where a homeless man would throw a half-litre of wine back because it didn’t pass his criteria. Beggars can be choosers, apparently.
PS I understand that our month of fasting and piety has begun in Pakistan, so I wanted to wish you courage, breath-mints and piles of patience. It was to avoid just such a situation – long fasts and no electricity in a warzone – that I made my travel plans, and so I say with a heavy heart but full stomach, “I miss Pakistan, but not that much.”
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter
The second most surprising lesson is that Baggage Envy is a real thing. For months and years at a time, I can forget that suitcases exist as commercial items – I whiz past them at department stores, ignoring the ads and shunning the deals. Until about five hours before a major flight, suitcases don’t exist to me, and even then I just raid the closet at my parents’ house and run away with one before my mother makes me sign a receipt. Thing is, your luggage defines you on these long-haul trips. When you’re travelling, your bag becomes you; it’s your calling card and your signature; you drag it around, push it on trains and planes, and every hotel judges you on its basis. My paranoia about this has turned the baggage carrousel at the airport into a suitcase runway. My own bag is now on its third wheel, and is usually put to shame by the branded leather bags on either side of it. I kick myself for not having, after all these years, done something as grownup as investing in a good suitcase, something that when you see it reminds you of white linen tablecloths and trips on 19th century ships, rather than a discount warehouse outside Bangkok.
When not doing this, I spend my time imagining radical backstories for the luggage around me. That red shiny plastic hardback coming down lane 3? Owned by Rita and her husband Paulo. Rita has crocodile skin, wears tight lyrca and far too much gold. I think she’s trying to attract attention; she probably worked as a receptionist or secretary before this. Paulo is tall, ambitiously fat and definitely cheating on Rita with someone younger, which is why he’s brought Rita on a guilt-vacay to France, fulfilling a desire she expressed when they were both likely thinner and happier. (I’m convinced that if math questions were worded like soap opera plotlines, I would have done seriously well.)
Rita and Paulo and I were all on the train coming into Paris. (I’m here again after a brief stopover in other realms for no other reason than because I had another entry on my visa and wanted to use it.) Before coming to the city we were trying to find some hotel rooms, which I’ve done before in fifteen minutes on a website. I’m not joking when I say that there now wasn’t a single room in any hotel in Paris. It turns out it’s Paris Fashion Week, which in this city actually runs for three weeks. All the models, designers, editors, buyers, assistants, assistants’ helpers, costumers, celebrities and hangers-on that have anything to do with fashion are now here.
Now I’m staying with a friend’s aunt. Let’s call her Eve. Eve is an Englishwoman who married an as-yet-undetermined number Frenchman, later divorcing him and keeping the family apartment which might as well be in Versailles because it is so cool. To put it into some kind of perspective, the room I am sitting in now (one of many) has three chandeliers and a fresco of clouds painted on the ceiling. It’s not even the grandest study in the house. Clouds!
Aunt Eve, or Evey, doesn’t look like the kind of person who would own an eight-bedroom palace in Paris but unless you’re dressed in a large, corseted ballgown accessorized by a powdered wig, I don’t think anyone could look like they owned such a place.
[quote]Parisian trashcans are better stocked than the Hyperstar in Lahore[/quote]
I hadn’t expected to be back in the city of lights so soon, and having been here a few weeks ago I have thankfully no obligations. Eve and I have been going for walks to the L’Arc de Triomphe and the parks while she tells me how husband number 2 left her for a pin-up model who later died in a routine plastic surgery operation (she chuckles every time she tells the story, and every time the type of surgery changes). Yesterday I was having a picnic next to the Eiffel tower – one of Eve’s haunts (she has remained, despite living for more than two decades in Paris, an enthusiastic tourist) – when I noticed a homeless man rummaging through the trash. He pulled out some baguettes and some cheeses and even an unfinished box of olives (some of these Parisian trashcans are better stocked than the Hyperstar in Lahore). Midway through the rummage he pulls out a half-empty bottle of wine, which he proceeds to smell and sip and swivel in his mouth, breathing deeply. But something wasn’t right, and he grimaced and spat out the wine in the garbage, along with the bottle which he threw in like it had offended him. He dug around some more, found another half empty bottle, this one red, repeated his testing technique and then shuffled off with his goodies. Paris, I thought, the only city in the world where a homeless man would throw a half-litre of wine back because it didn’t pass his criteria. Beggars can be choosers, apparently.
PS I understand that our month of fasting and piety has begun in Pakistan, so I wanted to wish you courage, breath-mints and piles of patience. It was to avoid just such a situation – long fasts and no electricity in a warzone – that I made my travel plans, and so I say with a heavy heart but full stomach, “I miss Pakistan, but not that much.”
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter