In the morning I was checked out of my room by Ingrid Klamminger of Priesterseminar and I wheeled my Petrol case of gear and my box of books and junk down to Operncafe, across the street from the Flixbus stop. I had an amazing coffee there with the largely retiree crowd of mid morning. They were gyrating caffeinated conversation.
Flixbus to Vienna International Airport, time kill and Vueling flight to Barcelona.
I spent the 21st to the 2nd in Cornellà with Vanesa’s family. The weather was unusually warm worldwide; even Prado Dorado had only rain. We had Buena Noche dinner with Esther’s mother and friend; Imet with Anabelen, Sara and Artur, and Teofil; we traveled to Zaragoza and met Teresa and Jorge; we went for walks around Cornellaà. The vocabulary word of the year: el cuñado.
I was filled with excitement to get back to NYC during the week in Spain. In part I was tired of the smattery relationship to place that one first finds exciting in travel; equally I was tired of having concluded the filming stage, but wa in limbo before I could properly edit the footage. I was also profoundly tired of superficial things: clothes, coats, shoes, food, mattress, desk, or shower. So for that week in Spain, on holiday (cuando esta cerrado cerrado, sobre todo esto), I was already restless.
My enthusiasm for NYC correlated quite accurately to my altitude: at 30,000 in a Dreamliner, LED rainbow ceilings, even after an 8 hour flight and little or no sleep, circadian midnight, I felt upbeat and positive; in the final descent into Newark I gawked at the high rises that I’ve seen so many times. Still, I felt eager to get back. At sea-level I was waiting through customs, elongated by the new computers to first enter the customs; collecting my physical belongings, waiting through a customs exit line, and compressing my three parcels of 20 kg, 20 kg, 10 kg into one murderously heavy rolling suitcase. In the Meadowlands, waiting for NJT, the train that finally arrived, I saw the dingy, aged sliding door between cars, dysfunctional and ajar. The smell of body odor and the dust that every passenger saw but the cleaning crew had somehow overlooked for a decade. In the subway connection at Penn Station, below sea-level, I found myself utterly depressed, hauling the suitcase up and down stairs, since the MTA and New York State continue to combat the American Disabilities Act and install functional elevators; at the connecting D train, which was exponentially later with each announcement, we finally gave up and took a cab. $28 for a 20 minute drive. Welcome back to New York City. Fuck You.