the sun here is relentless

Nomad Cafe, Holmbladsgade

The sun here is relentless, and with my body disbelieving we are not still in Brooklyn, I barely slept in the five or so hours of paltry night.

Left the sour sheets and my first-night digs at 7 this morning, so ready to get to a better way of being, and trudged forty minutes to upscale Amagerbro, where I will wait out the hours until I may collect flat keys from an Inga who will trust me to care for her cats and sleep in her bed while she enjoys Paris for some days and nights.

A small cafe that is making the most of the light and was empty of people and manifest evidence of food service had that look like You’d better come in here, and a proprietor — bearded sweetly — appeared and welcomed me in English and said back that my mondo pack will be fine at my feet, that if the place fills up we’ll put it elsewhere.

Now I am having a latte that is the best and realest thing to pass my lips in two whole days, maybe longer. The sandwich board-advertised croissants and pains au chocolats have appeared in the pastry case, two of each, hot from his oven and exhaling fresh pastry smell, and now a lady with a baby has come in and bought and borne away one pain au chocolat like she knows something, and so I will ask for the other, quick quick, because I want to know something, too.

borrowed bike

May 19 / København

on finding a good piece of cardboard

June 15 / Bruxelles

He said,

How are you?

I said,

I’m so many ways

Um

I love Brussels

I think today is the day that I go out and sit in the park with a sign that says FREE LISTENING

i.e. the advent of this project that is maybe my raison d’être

or raison de voyager

or whatever

But it’s predicated on finding a good piece of cardboard

And all I have is an empty toilet paper roll

WHERE CAN YOU GET CARDBOARD IN BELGIUM

There really should be an app for this

I don’t know where to start

Probably the thing to do is start making some lists

/stop drinking coffee

Barcelona is trying

August 2 / Barcelona

I said,

I like it here.

Barcelona is trying.

but not too hard.

I talked with a local — actually a native of Venezuela but I guess she’s been here for a while — who said very vehemently otherwise.

said it with clarity, and texture, and substance.

but still.

I just watched a street sweeper spend several minutes going after a leaf.

I think it might be hotter than what you favor.

but I also think you’d like the way the food and drink are good without making a Thing about it.

there’s a G&T obsession — did you know this already? — and pretty much every dive offers vermut de la casa…which I guess means house-made vermouth.

I had such terrible coffee all throughout France, and it took me getting to Spain to even realize, consider my perspective legitimate, give it voice.

I said this to la patrona at the Basque B&B where I worked for a while

and she was like, “Well, yeah.”

“French coffee sucks.”

“Everyone knows that.”

(except she said it in Spanish.)

here, I’ve figured out how to order what I want, and it’s so consistently excellent and so cheap, and then I sit and watch the old hombres have wine and snails for breakfast.

my last twenty euro notes

August 7 / Tangier

This morning I surrendered my last twenty euro note to the Western Union employee in exchange for 214 dirham so I could buy breakfast. For only 28 dirham I have gotten, holy moly, two eggs sunny side-up, bread, olives, some kind of spreadable white cheese, a boisson chaud of choice, which the waiter turned from an espresso to a café au lait tableside, here on the sidewalk, and this fabulous Moroccan orange juice. This augurs well for how well — how much better — I’ll eat while here, and also I have to be very careful until I sort out the apparent unusability of my debit card. And even when I find some way to retrieve tangible tender from my electronic accounts again, I must remember that I don’t have as much money as I think I have, because there are still my illegal subletters back in Brooklyn’s deposits to protect.