I don’t remember when exactly I first read about Transnistria, but I do remember exactly how it made me feel:

Oh, I want to go there.

That was at least 20 years ago. Back then, I had already developed a healthy fascination with those weird, self-proclaimed countries that periodically pop up, trying to claim their bit of sovereignty on the map, if not in real life. The Italian Regency of Carnaro dreamed up by that poet-proto-fascist d’Annunzio? The Republic of Minerva built on an artificial island by an erstwhile Vegas real estate magnate? Even when they were nothing more than an artist’s provocation or some ponytailed dude’s tax protest, I loved the way these quixotic, imagined countries compel you to think about identity, and what it means to be a nation.

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By then, I had been enamored by travel for almost as long as I could remember. In my late teens I had already imbibed every one of Richard Halliburton’s books, and had acquired a habit of searching Oxford Books in my hometown of Atlanta for those decades-old, dog-eared paperbacks with the groovy fonts that promised to lead you safely across Afghanistan on the Hippie Trail or explain how you could cross the oceans cheaply by freighter. I knew I wanted to see places and experience cultures that were new to me, and so much the better if they were not (or not only) the European capitals and Caribbean islands that everyone else went to, but more mysterious, harder to reach.

So when I heard about this tiny, breakaway nation that practically no one I knew had ever visited, that was hard to get to, wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, trapped in a Soviet-tinged past, and officially recognized by no other government in the world? It might as well have been called the Federation of Lisa Abend Travel Fantasies (FLATF, for short, with Nostalgiana as its capital).

And in Chisinau, at long last, I had my chance. Technically, Transnistria is part of Moldova, which itself used to be part of the USSR. When Moldova left the Soviet Union in 1991, the predominantly Russian-speaking population that lived in its Eastern strip running along the Dniester River, decided–with a decent amount of ‘help’ from the KGB– that they would rather not go with it. The Soviets came to those holdouts military aid in a 1992 war of independence, then never left. But Russia itself apparently decided Transnistria was more appealing as a thorn in Moldova’s and ( because the country is trying to enter the EU) Europe’s side than incorporated into the motherland. And so Transnistria exists as this in-between place, neither Moldovan nor Russian nor, despite its official name (the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic) truly independent.

It is, however, open to tourists. The Yevgenias at the Chisinau tourist office were united in this information: it was a simple day trip so long as I took my passport, brought cash because I wouldn’t be able to use the ATMs there and remembered not to take photos of anyone or anything that looked even vaguely military.

Where the Yevgenias differed was on the question of whether I should go. One of them basically pushed a brochure into my hand while the other—the grumpier one, it must be said—seemed miffed that Moldova’s most popular tourist attraction was a region that had broken away from it. “I don’t know why everyone wants to go there,” she said. “To see a statue of Lenin?”

When I asked for directions anyway, she rolled her eyes at me. “You take a bus. Central Bus Station.”

Technically, it was a van, not a bus, that I needed to take, but we won’t quibble; they are called marshrutka, and in Moldova, they are the primary means of intercity public transport, even if they only seat 12 or so passengers. To locate mine, I started by telling the vendor at the station that I wanted to go to Transnistria; she handed me a ticket with the destination ‘Tiraspol’ marked on it, along with the humiliating knowledge that I had made the rookie mistake of requesting a ticket to a country rather than a specific place within that country. Or so I hoped. It was likely that Tiraspol was a city within Transnistria, but since I couldn’t look it up online, I also couldn’t rule out that the vendor had misheard me and sold me a ticket to some farflung village in the Moldovan countryside.

I decided to trust the process. For about 40 minutes after the van bus marked ‘Tiraspol’ departed, I tried to deduce from the position of the sun whether we were indeed headed east toward Transnistria, but eventually we arrived at a little kiosk that looked reassuringly last-century Iron Curtain. There, we were all made to disembark and declare ourselves to a scowling officer whose only question was “one day?” Assured that I was not smuggling myself permanently into her glorious homeland, the official stamped a piece of paper and slipped it into my passport. The other passengers and I re-boarded the bus, and we ushered through the security gates. We were officially off the map.

The road signs were entirely in Russian now, and the local flag hanging limply from atop some institutional-looking building had the hammer and sickle on it. We passed a tank parked in the middle of a traffic circle, and a convoy of army trucks.

Before long, we entered Tiraspol, which you will be as relieved to discover as I was, is the capital of Transnistria. When we pulled up alongside a market, everyone else on the bus piled off, but since it didn’t yet look like we were in the heart of town, I stayed put. “Center?” I asked the bus driver.

He gestured to me to stay onboard, then asked in minimally recognizable English where I was from. When I said USA, he replied with ‘No English.’ At the next light, however, he ventured a tentative ‘Italiano?,’ at which point we realized we could at least make ourselves mutually intelligible. He told me his name was ‘Leonardo’ and when I responded ‘como da Vinci?’ he laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

Leonardo deposited me in the center of town, and gestured to a bus stop across the street, saying he would be stopping there at 5pm for the return trip to Chisinau. “A presto!” he cried “Ci vediamo alle cinque!”

Finally, I was on the ground in my long-held object of desire. My first impression was of broad avenues lined with a few shops and lots of faded, peeling apartment blocks painted in shades last seen at your local Sherwin Williams circa 1978. I passed some extremely Soviet-looking buildings, including one famously fronted by a statue of Lenin, that I’m sure were meant to inspire awe, but from this vantage point seemed far more ironic than impressive. I had a very Soviet-esque experience changing money at a bank that involved waiting in several lines and much stamping of various papers and concluded with the issuance of a handful of bills utterly without value anywhere else in the world.

I wandered through a grocery store (owned by Sheriff, the same company that owns all the grocery stores, the gas stations, the Russia hotel and casino, the country’s football team, a publishing company, and basically the entire Transnistrian economy) and found it ghoulishly lit, but well-stocked with local cognac and Barilla pasta. I had lunch at a decent restaurant next to a group of 12 whose table was absolutely smothered with party-size platters of piancinta and sausages, yet who seemed unimpressed and maybe even a little depressed by the bounty. I came across a life-sized statue of a boy meant, I think, to alert children to where they should wait before crossing the street, but which looked as though it hadn’t encountered an actual child in decades. When I got to the park on the other side, I found it overgrown with weeds, and nearly empty.

Actually, I found the whole city weirdly empty, and not only in the physical sense. Tiraspol was unnaturally quiet and unanimated, devoid of any kind of urban energy and really much human spirit at all. It seemed empty of purpose.

I realize that’s a ridiculous–perhaps offensively so–thing to say for someone whose encounter with the place lasted roughly as long as it would have taken to watch the original Star Wars trilogy. Maybe if I had had better luck finding someone I could communicate with, I would have learned that Transnistria is in fact full of delightful if not readily obvious charms; that it is inhabited by a people bound together by strong sense of community and a distinctive culture. Perhaps I would have learned that Transnistrians have a deep sense of national identity. But to me, the place just felt shallow somehow, and forlorn.

So, for that matter, did I. I had been drawn to Transnistria by my own romantic illusions of it as some kind of geopolitical Never Never Land, a destination where time stood still, where there was still a whiff of Cold War intrigue, and where merely reaching the place still bore some trace of adventure. But as I watched tourists pose for photos in front of a mural of a USSR cosmonaut painted expressly, I’m guessing, to give tourists something to take a picture of—or as I descended to a grim canteen tarted up with a few old posters and television sets to give those same tourists a suitably Soviet-looking environment in which to consume their sad cabbage roll lunch, I thought about Yevgenia back in the tourist office, so mystified by the allure of this flimsy, even cynical, scrim. Especially when thought about the very real missiles falling just a few kilometers away, on the opposite border from the one through which I had entered Transnistria.

It was only 3pm when I caught the bus back to Chisinau. I was sad to miss Leonardo, but I was ready to leave.

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Do Moldovans see restaurants as shady places for sketchy people to do vaguely disreputable things? It was hard not to draw that conclusion after coming across so many that were either hidden down in basements behind solid doors or wrapped in that one-way plastic that makes it impossible to see inside. All of this scrambled my usual cues for choosing a place to eat, so I make no claims for the relative superiority of what follows. Except for the semi-clandestine, unassuming place I stumbled across, that took a tiny bit of courage to enter, and that I’m pretty sure appears in no guidebook or well-manicured influencer’s Tiktok. That place I’ll make a claim for.

Read on for that, and all the other places I ate, drank, and slept in Chişinǎu:

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If, like me, you’ve been charmed by those kilt-clad Scots bellying up to the bars of Boston, or Norwegians rowing in Viking unity in Times Square and other delightful World Cup displays of patriotism, I’d like to introduce you to the sucking black hole of their antithesis. We’re going to call him Mihail, because he asked that I change his name, for reasons that are about to become clear.

“Moldovans,” said Mihail, who is in fact one of them, “are stupid, lying, savages.”

Even before I arrived, I suspected that Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, was going to be hard to penetrate. For one thing, I knew almost nothing about it, beyond the fact that it was somewhere near Romania, had a thrillingly illicit breakaway region (more on that in a later newsletter), and had recently elected a young, Eurocentric, female prime minister that the guys from The Rest is Politics are very keen on.

Throw in the linguistic and cultural obstacles, and I spent much of my time in Chisinau worried about how I was going to find a way into a story. You can imagine my relief when, on my last day in the city, it finally came in the form of a foul-mouthed, pony-tailed, restaurant supply salesman with absolutely nothing good to say about his fellow citizens.

But let me back up.

The impenetrability was evident from the moment I landed. The severe young woman with stars on her epaulets sat expressionless behind the plexiglass at passport control, her lipstick bleeding into the corners of her mouth. I gave her my most winning smile. Her face did not move.

Attempting to take out some cash at the airport ATM, I realized I had no idea how much the currency, the lei, was worth, and there was no conversion provided on screen. A quick swipe of my phone would have of course provided that information, but instead I took a middling swing, and hoped I hadn’t just emptied my bank account.

An inquiry into how to get to the center got me a one-word answer (“Trolleybus”) and a vague gesture toward the parking lot.

I found the bus parked nearby and, in front of it, a woman in a light blue shirt that may or may not have been a uniform. I asked her. In English, if the bus went to the center; she responded with something that did not appear to mean yes. Just then a man who was clearly the driver stepped onboard. When I repeated the question to him, he pointed to the woman in the blue shirt (aha! So it was a uniform!), who, it turned out, was selling tickets, or at least that’s what I assumed when she showed me a roll of old-fashioned paper stubs–the kind a skeeball machine might spit out for you to redeem.

By this point, we were all on the bus, but I still wasn’t sure if the bus was going to the center. The woman in the blue shirt must have interpreted my hesitation as my not having any cash, because she then pointed to a QR code on the wall. When I shook my head ‘no’ to that (your periodic reminder that QR codes are the bane of unplugged travel and should be resisted at every turn), she then pointed to a card reader mounted on the wall behind us. It took me a few times attempting to swipe my card to figure out that the sticker laid over the machine’s face said it was not working. At that point, I looked at the woman, and she looked at me. Simultaneously, we decided that I wasn’t worth the trouble. I sat down for the ride into town.

Chisinau struck me as an odd place. It is sprawling—I could see apartment buildings spreading far over distant hills—but also weirdly sparse, with large tracts of green separating developed areas. There was no shortage of towering Soviet-era monstrosities, and the main streets were broad and straight, the kind of boulevards that are good for driving tanks down. But when I stepped a block or two away, I suddenly felt like I was in a village, leafy and overgrown, with crumbling sidewalks and low, plastered homes.

In its architecture, Chisinau was the opposite of Utrecht. If the latter was a voyeur’s paradise, the former was closed to all comers, utterly lacking in street-level windows that might give a glimpse of how people lived. For that matter, there were no views into restaurants or shops either. Many of the latter were located in basements, down stairs leading to closed, unmarked doors, and even those at street-level frequently had some kind of treatment on their windows that prevented passers by from peeking in. Unable to read the signs, and with no visual cues to guide me, I walked into what I hoped was a drug store only to find it filled with intimidating looking orthopedic devices.

Chisinau also lacked some of the homogenizing signifiers of our globalized world. There was, as far as I could tell, no Zara or Starbucks, nor were there hipster natural wine bars or vinyl shops. Most disorienting of all, in this age of rampant consumerism, there was literally nothing I wanted to buy.

I don’t just mean that there weren’t any fetching little design shops or alluringly fragrant sourdough bakeries. I also didn’t come across any shops selling the kinds of “traditional” wares that normally get me excited. I did find a couple of shops specializing in colorful and intricate embroidery –aimed as far as I could tell, at Moldovans, who wear it on special occasions– but although the stitchery was beautiful, the fabric being embroidered was cheap polyester.

Even the market wasn’t all that enticing. Wlthough it did boast a row of stalls selling some healthy-looking root vegetables and ferments and an entire hall devoted to the many subtle variations on white cheese, it was otherwise stocked primarily with imported tomatoes and bananas. And I was permanently traumatized by the seafood section, where fish were packed into tanks like sardines even though they were not sardines at all but full-size carp.

This resistance to being easily ‘consumed’ endeared Chisinau to me, and made me a little more appreciative of the small graces I did find. I liked the chain of outdoor park cafés hung with papier maché flowers overhead, and the ladies who sat for hours on street corners selling real lilacs. I liked the galleries at the art museum filled with Moldovan artist Eleanora Romanescu’s Hockney-esque landscapes (although perhaps we should be calling Hockney’s landscapes Romanescu-esque). I also liked that the whole art museum came to a shuddering stop so that a princessy bridal party could take their wedding photos. I liked the satisfied flourish with which the elderly docent opened the door at the homely Pushkin museum to show–ta da!--the writer’s bed.

But I definitely felt like a lot of important information wasn’t getting through, and never more so than when I entered the cathedral right as Mass was getting underway. Two women’s angelic voices were emanating from a chapel off to the side, so I moved toward there. When a priest in a heavily bejeweled frock stepped to the altar, everyone in the congregation genuflected vigorously, though the men went at it with particular gusto. Many of them kept bowing so low that they touched the floor, and I got the definite sense that I was witnessing a Pete Hegseth-esque display of performative masculinity, spiritual edition.

When it came time for communion, the priest distributed the wafer on a spoon inserted directly into each supplicant’s mouth, at which point he or she would cross themselves, and rush over to a table near the entrance. There, a nun handed them one of the four plastic cups she kept refilling with water without cleaning them in between. My first thought was: what, the wafer is too dry? My second thought was: Covid must have been a disaster in Moldova.

The nun also handed each person a little baggie filled with cubes of bread. Was it insurance, in case the first transubstantiation didn’t quite take? Was it a snack? And what to make of the woman who marched her young son over with her hand clamped firmly over his mouth, as if he might spit it out if she didn’t get an (unrinsed) glass of water in him first?

The closed architecture, the absence of familiar signifiers, the curious communion rituals, to say nothing of my lack of Moldovan and everyone else’s lack of English: in its unknowability, Chisinau was making it even harder than I expected to find a story. I was resigning myself to trying to weave something around The Three Yevgenias, my title for the not terribly interesting coincidence that both women at the tourist office, as well as another whom I met at my hotel’s breakfast room after first seeing her the night before in a wine bar (that traveler’s synchronicity again), shared the same name.

But that was before I found the one hipster coffee bar in Chisinau, and in it, the most vituperous man in all of Moldova.

I went there on my final day in Chisinau specifically because I figured I would have better than average chances of finding someone who spoke English well enough to impart some insight into something—anything—that would make a better story than the Three Yevgenias. So I was mildly disappointed to learn that the barista’s did not really extend beyond ‘flat white.’

But as I sat there reading a magazine on Moldovan culture, helpfully translated in both languages, I came across a line that said there was no autochthonous Moldovan literature. I turned to the dark-haired man sitting next to me, and asked him if it was true.

Mihail, needless to say, confirmed that his countrymen were utterly lacking in literary finesse. He then launched into a discussion about how everyone in Moldova used to speak Russian but now there are very few Russian schools left.

“Is that a good thing?” I asked.

“It’s a very, very bad thing,” Mikhail replied.

Mihail explained that his job took him to trade fairs all over eastern Europe. The colleagues he encountered there were from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Serbia, and they all communicated via Russian. All, that is, but the “stupid Georgians who had to make a point and only speak Georgian.” He paused to take a sip of his coffee and gather steam for the onslaught ahead. “And that’s going to be us soon.”

I asked if entering the European Union, which Moldova is currently trying to do, wouldn’t mean better opportunities ahead. He scoffed. “You really think that’s going to happen? Why would anyone in the EU invest here? The people are too stupid. There are maybe 100 smart people in the whole country. The only way to get something to work in this place is to send in a bunch of Germans to run it.”

He proceeded to tell me that in a country of what was not very long ago 4 million people, 1 million had left for Europe, and 1 million were dead. (Later I looked it up, and this count turned out to be more or less true, if by ‘dead’ he meant rapidly falling fertility rates. From a high of 3 million in 1990, Moldova’s population has shrunk, mostly via emigration, to 2.2 million today). “The rest depend on money sent from emigres,” he spat. “That’s our whole economy.”

But wasn’t Moldova positioning itself as a wine producer? I asked. The look of contempt that crossed Mihail’s face could have frozen the scalding air cooking the houseplants in some poor Parisian’s zinc-roofed apartment right now. “Why would Europe buy that crap?” he responded. “When the worst, cheapest Spanish or French wine is better than Moldovan?”

When I told him I was about to head over to the national history museum, his scorn grew, unfathomably, even sharper. He dared me to name a single famous Moldovan, and, mortified, I had to admit that beyond the prime minister I could not.

He drew his index finger and thumb into a circle and held it aloft. “Zero,” he said. “That’s because there are none. “They have to put the same guy on all the bills because they can only come up with one.”

He meant Stephen the Great, the medieval prince who defended Moldovan independence from a host of opponents, including the Ottoman Empire, for 47 years.

“But I thought he was great?” I ventured.

“No, he was a small man. Very small. That’s why they had to put his statue on a pedestal.”

I was beginning to ascertain the limits of Mihail’s perspicacity.

He must have seen the shadow of skepticism cross my face. “Okay, so maybe he won one battle,” Mihail allowed. “But after that, he couldn’t beat the Ottomans so he went to Russia and married the ugliest of all the emperor’s daughters to save us. That’s all he did: he married an ugly girl.”

As for the museum itself? “Full of lies,” Mihail responded. “They’ll try to tell you Moldovans are descended from the Romans–there’s even a statue of that wolf and whatchamacallit out front.”

“Remus and Romulus?”

Yeah. Them. But it’s all made up. They’re trying to create this grand history, because without it, we have no identity. Except for collective stupidity.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that a descent from two wolf-suckling twin boys might not be exactly accurate for the Romans either, but I took his point. And once I got past the sculpture out front, I had to admit that the history museum was not exactly riveting (also that Stephen did look a bit on the short side).

But it did explain a place I had never before been clear on: Bessarabia. The name sounded familiar, and although I knew it no longer existed, I suspected it was of those regions that changed hands so many times in the pre-, and during-world war era that it wasn’t even worth trying to keep up with it. If pressed, I would have guessed that today Bessarabia was incorporated into Russia, or maybe Ukraine. But no, I now learned, it made up two-thirds of what is currently Moldova.

In one of the final rooms of the museum, I came across a wall-sized photo of a schoolroom filled with girls in stiff white collars, seated at their desks. The photo appeared to be from the 1910s, and the girls all looked to be around 8 or 10 years old. There was something about their grave little faces that reminded me of my grandmother. And then I remembered. Years earlier, I had done a little genealogical research to try and figure out from which Eastern European shtetls my grandparents had emigrated. I recalled now that my grandmother had been 12 at the time, when, together with her mother, and sisters, she arrived at Ellis Island. Where it was duly registered that she came from Bessarabia.

So it turns out I am one of the moronic Moldovans of whom Mihail had spoken. And that the place that had seemed so fiercely resistant to my attempts to gain traction was in fact the one—out of all the places in this world I’ve traveled— to which I am actually connected.

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The sexiest scene in all of cinematic history—and I will fight to the death any fool who benightedly chooses to argue otherwise—is the one in which Ralph Fiennes’ terminally melancholic László de Almásy recites to Kristen Scott Thomas’s very married Katharine Clifton the names of the winds.

You’ll notice that he doesn’t mention the Mistral. That’s because László would never have gotten into Katharine’s pants had he told her about the coked-up bully of an atmospheric phenomenon that batters Marseille.

I am not a complete stranger to powerful winds. While I was living on the Catalan coast, doing the reporting for my book on elBulli, there were one or two nights when the Tramuntana was so strong that the restaurant was forced to abandon its pre-dinner snacks on the verandah, and even contemplated closing altogether. And Copenhagen, where I live, is plagued by a sneaky shapeshifter of a headwind that blows over your handlebars and into your face every single time you get on your bike, regardless of the direction in which you are headed. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a name, so I will give it one here: Asshole.

But the Mistral was unlike any wind I had ever encountered. It was freezing for one, turning the deceptively sunny spring days into something akin to early January, and forcing me into an emergency scarf-shopping expedition. More than anything though, it was strong. This was not a wind that playfully mussed your hair or coyly tipped the vase of flowers on the table of your outdoor café. This was a wind that smashed the vase, turned over the table and all the chairs, and upended the massive stone planter with an olive tree growing in it a few meters away. It was a wind that doused you in a spritz of monkfish-scented water because you made the mistake of walking not by but across the street from the fish market. It was a wind that alternated between blinding you and strangling you with the ends of the scarf you had just bought purportedly to protect yourself from it.

Later, I would learn that the Mistral is what results when an area of high pressure in froms in the Bay of Biscay while low pressure gathers in the Gulf of Genoa: it creates a kind of corridor that draws in a current of cold air from the north that barrels over Provence. And that it has thoroughly shaped Provençal culture, from architecture (farmhouses were traditionally built without north-facing windows) to folklore (it is said to always last an odd-numbered amount of days) to artistic representations (what did you think those swirls were in Van Gogh’s Starry Night?)

Also, it has a reputation for making people crazy. This was confirmed to me by Enzo of the soap shop. “Literally,” he said. “It makes their animals crazy too. Dogs, cats, chickens—they all go crazy.”

Certainly it was not entirely sane of Mary Alice and me to decide to climb up to the Basilica while it was blowing. The climb up from the café with the excellent croissants and the rogueish waiter was not terribly long or steep but there was enough of a headwind to make it feel like a workout. And once we were at the top of the limestone crag where it overlooks both city and port, the gusts were strong enough that we had to cling to gates and press ourselves against the walls in order not to get blown over.

But the most amazing part came once we were inside. This is a massive church, built in the 19th century and coated in gold and mosaics in a fetchingly Neo-Byzantine style, with ex-votos dangling from its ceilings not only of the normal ships (gifts from sailors saved from storms or battles at sea) but also of propeller planes (from lucky aviators, I guess). I pointed one out to Mary Alice, but she could barely hear me because it sounded like a locomotive was coming at us. And although you would think that thick stone walls would be impervious to even an enraged Mistral, I swear we could feel them move. Later, I would learn from Christian Letourneau’s newsletter about the bullet holes, so maybe the wind was coming through them. But rather than feeling protected inside that great stone structure, I actually found myself wondering if it might crumble around us.

The Mistral’s effects weren’t entirely negative. Although it tragically reduced our St-Germain-spritzes-at-outdoor-cafés opportunities, and eliminated entirely a planned excursion to the calanques, it also cleared the skies of any trace of haze or even moisture. The resulting shade of blue (see above) was astonishing in its depth and clarity.

As was the sense of calm that settled once it was over. Traveling without your phone means no weather forecasts at your fingertips, so I had resigned myself to the idea that the wind would never end. But on my final morning in Marseille, the Mistral was gone, leaving in its wake skies now streaked with the barest wisps of clouds.

It was a relief to be able to drink my coffee outdoors without worrying about it going rogue and scalding the face of the person at the table next to me. But there was also a tiny part of me that missed it, and as I recalled how many Marseillais we met spoke of it with respect and even affection, I felt a glimmer of understanding. It was a brute and it drove you crazy, but for as long as it lasted, we were all in it together.

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A highly-opinionated guide, only for paid subscribers, of everywhere I ate, drank, shopped, and slept in Marseille. The comments are open, so you can let me—and everyone else—know what I missed.

Drinking (in its various permutations)

Mon Bar, 2 Rue d’Aubagne. The quintessential French dive bar, the kind of place where every person in it would benefit from dimmer lighting and that makes you wish you liked Pastis. Me, I stuck to beer, smiled goofily whenever anyone nodded at me, and tried to recall my previous life before I lost my job in the tobacco factory and took to drink.

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From the beginning, it was one of those trips where every little thing that can go wrong does. Nothing catastrophic, mind you, just a series of small hiccups that made me think maybe the universe was trying to tell me something about the advisability of getting on the plane.

My normal trick for obtaining a window seat without paying for it failed due to a glitch in the airport check-in machines. At the gate, the desk agent testily agreed to change my middle seat, but sought revenge for the extra work by making me check my carry-on. The bench where, now frazzled, I plopped down to wait for boarding wasn’t stable, and my coffee crashed to the floor before I’d had the chance to take a sip. Somewhere in all this, a much-loved silk scarf that was a gift from a much-loved Turkish friend disappeared from around my neck. And the slim little guidebook to my destination that author Duncan Smith had kindly sent me months ago—which focuses on the unique features of a place and which I had planned to deploy experimentally on this trip1—remained forgotten on the dining room table where I had placed it prominently the night before so I wouldn’t forget it.

And all that was before I got to Marseille.

The bus from the airport deposited me at the train station, perched above a grand staircase that cascaded down to the city center and was bedecked by lions and nekkid ladies. If, after a few blocks worth of trying to get my bearings, I had any doubts I was in France, they were quickly resolved by the sidewalk vendor whose books, instead of the normal collection of self-help and dog-eared copies of 50 Shades of Gray, consisted of Camus, Foucault, and the complete works of Claude Levi-Strauss.

The erudite bookseller directed me to the tourist office where, from behind the desk, a beaming, bald man in a sharp blazer greeted me effusively. His name was Johannes, and when I asked him what he thought I should see in Marseille, he whipped a map from the stack, opened it with a flourish, and began rapidly drawing X’s: basilica, market, calanques. Asked if he had any hotel recommendations, he suggested one a few blocks away, noting there were two or three others on the same street. “You won’t need them though,” he added. “It’s a Wednesday in March. You won’t have any problem finding a place.”

Johannes, I regret to report, was wrong.

I found the hotel he recommended, but it was fully booked. I asked the receptionist if she had any other suggestions and she named the one to the left. “Not,” she emphasized, with a sideways glance that communicated the full panoply of hotel-related horrors, “the one to the right.”

I had just missed snagging the last available room at the one to the left, a loss made more devastating when I learned that Georges Sand had once stayed there. That receptionist, however, helpfully suggested another hotel across the boulevard and around the corner. The one across the boulevard helpfully suggested the one right in the port. The one right in the port suggested I try their sister property across town, though that one was less boho digital nomad and more straight up youth hostel. I assured him I didn’t mind, but when he called, it too was fully booked. It was then that we both learned the root of Johannes’ fatal misapprehension: there was a gardening trade fair in town. Every hotel in France’s second largest city had been snapped up by people contemplating that year’s addition to their hydrangea collection.

Normally, I would be getting nervous about this point. But somehow, there in Marseille, as I continued to ping-pong from one unavailable hotel to another, it didn’t matter. My morning of small mishaps had turned into a long afternoon of fruitless searching and I was facing a potentially bedless night, but I didn’t care because everyone was just so darn nice.

In France.

I don’t want to engage in broad national stereotypes, so I’m just going to draw on my own experience here and say that in my experience, many of the French people I have met in my travels through their country have not been especially warm, even when you do all the things you’re supposed to do, like trill Bonjour, Madame at them like a crazed cockatoo every time you enter their shops. The language part is especially tricky because even though you know you are expected to speak French, no one seems especially pleased to hear you do it.

But that was not the case in Marseille. Not only did every single person listen patiently as I inquired, with the linguistic prowess of a French kindergartner newly awakened from his nap, about a room; they also conveyed their sorrow at their inability to supply one, and tried to help me rectify the situation. We weren’t in a full-blown Amy situation, but it came close. They called other places. They looked things up online. They suggested I jump in a taxi and go to the extremely overpriced Sofitel way out on the edge of things because they always have a room. And, in the end, one of them called the place near her apartment, and after a quick exchange of pleasantries, found me a room. A very expensive room, but the gardeners had left me not in a position to haggle.

There was something else nice that happened on that first day in Marseille: I met up with my dear friends Mary Alice and Max, who are excellent company and very good sports and have now joined me on unplugged trips for three years running. After we finished exclaiming about how glad we were to see one another, and solved the pressing issue of where we should go for an apèro, we compared initial impressions of the city. “I can’t get over how nice everyone is!” Mary Alice said. “In France!”

The word that everyone uses to describe Marseille is “gritty,” which is usually code for some combination of crime, immigrants, and graffiti in a quantity that seems disproportionate to the user. I can’t speak for the first, and while it is true that the bus into town from the airport passed over a raised highway from which I could look down on an apartment balcony where two police officers stood over a man who looked quite dead, I can’t vouch for the cause of his demise.

It is also true that we did not venture much beyond the central arrondissements, so I’m aware we got a highly limited sense of the city. But in the parts we did see, it seemed like the large North African population has gifted Marseille with a lively, souk-like neighborhood around Noailles, full of shops, an open-air market, and bakeries selling all manner of pastries dripping in honey and orange blossom water. And the graffiti has given the Cours Julien neighborhood, well on its way to hipster-town, an air of whimsy.2

More to the point, there is so much to Marseille for which ‘gritty’ in no way applies: The stately Hausmann-esque streets, and the De Chirico-esque Vielle Charité.3 Alleys lined with small jungles of houseplants and the occasional Jane Birkin illustration. The juice stand that, although it wasn’t open when we were there, I loved anyway because, when it is open, it sells grape must. Which, apparently, used to be a thing in Marseille.

And yes, there is the sea, and a sky the color of sapphires, and almond trees in bloom. But the thing that really did it for me about Marseille was the people. Theirs wasn’t the smiley, ‘have a nice day,’ American variety of niceness. It was more engaged somehow, and ever so slightly flirtatious, as if the person not only saw you but liked what they saw. We encountered it over unusually good croissants at a café where the waiter had his hands full with breakfast customers and their demanding Jack Russell terriers, but still found time to ask about what brought us to Marseille. And again, at the Musée Cantini,4 where the lady at the ticket desk seemed absolutely delighted to inform us that admission was free.

At an adorable cave of a shop in La Panier, Enzo explained how true Marseillaise soap5 is made of only four ingredients. At a bakery around the corner, Etienne plied us with many variations on the boat-shaped cookies called navettes, detailing the history behind each one, and promising as if this were a good thing that they would last at least a year.

And after the food at an obviously tourist trap restaurant (lots of mentions of grand-mères; waiters dressed in old-timey uniforms, that sort of thing. We ended up there because the place I had wanted to try was closed despite the sign on its door saying it was open) where we had lunch one day turned out to be shockingly good, we were all so delighted that we introduced ourselves to the owner, Antonin, who in turn was so delighted that he told us about the guillotine that once stood in that very square, and showed us where Napoleon had lived upstairs.

When I got home, and was searching for exact address of the restaurant, I learned that Antonin, in addition to being a restaurateur, is a French reality tv star. Which, when you think about it, kind of proves my argument about the Marseillaise being uncommonly nice.

It all made me think that Marseille was the place where everyone should have their first Gallic encouter; France for beginners, as it were. How many visitors would have avoided that characteristic anxiety they associate with France, the low-grade worry over what should I wear?; do they hate me?; will I remember that it’s a café creme, not a café au lait, and if I forget, will the waiter laugh at me? had they postponed Paris until after they had built up their tolerance by immersing themselves in sunny, laidback, warm-in-every-sense Marseille instead?

There are whole cadres of sociologists out there doing research on the importance of what they unfortunately insist on calling ‘micro-encounters.’ Ordering a coffee, asking directions, striking up a conversation while you wait in line—those deceptively routine moments, they have found, can be powerful contributors to one’s sense of well-being. I’ve certainly found it to be true when I travel. I think a lot of us walk around with this imaginary ideal that connecting with locals means being invited to someone’s home for dinner where you subsequently form a bond so significant that you return for their kid’s wedding a couple of decades later. And sure, that happens sometimes. But far more common—and just, I would argue, as salutory— are the times when a stranger will look you in the eye, return your smile, and reach for a tiny, fleeting moment of connection.

I don’t know how you teach an entire city to do that, but let me tell you: it’s powerful stuff.

On my last day in Marseille, I met Mary Alice and Max for early morning coffee at a football-themed café that was the one place we could find open at that hour. After tentatively planning for next year’s meet-up (stay tuned, Tblisi!), I sadly said goodbye to them as they departed for the airport. I still had a few hours left before my own flight, so I started to wander in a way I thought was aimless but somehow landed me back at the Cours Julien area.

The main square was nearly empty. I was feeling pretty melancholic—this frequently happens when I travel with friends; after spending time so intensely with someone, their absence feels more acute in the transition back to solitude. No sooner had I sat down at the one café that was open, than a trio of pigeons started casing my table. They all looked like they had seen better days, but the most brazen and bruiserlike of them—he looked like a pigeon Marlon Brando—had some kind of terrible deformity on its leg. As the waiter put down my coffee, he noticed me staring at the misshapen bird. ”“Je pense que c’est une tumeur,” he said. “Je le plains en peu.”

“Moi aussi,” I replied. “I feel sorry for him too.”

We smiled at each other sadly. And that was it. But as I walked to the hotel to grab my bag and head back to the airport, I felt lighter. And convinced—something I can’t truthfully say about all of the places I visit for this newsletter—that I would return to Marseille.

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On my way to having my Quasimodo fantasies dashed, I passed a strange round building that looked like small, dowdy bullring. Kitty-corner across from it was a grand neoclassical building that would have been imposing if it weren’t decrepit and there wasn’t a string of Christmas decorations hanging forlornly across an archway despite it being February. And tucked behind that was The Butter Museum.

Jesus, Mary, and the wee donkey.1

My excitement at an entire museum dedicated to the paragon of fats (pace, you lard lovers) was temporarily tempered by the fact that it too was closed. Unlike the church, however, the museum would at least open on the weekend. And so, on the morning of my departure from Cork, I arrived ten minutes or so before opening time, determined to avoid what I assumed would be crowds.

There was no one there. As I waited to enter the doors to this veritable paradise of spreads, I killed time by circling the weird round building, only to discover, at the end of my second lap, that a wiry Spanish guy had somehow slipped in and taken my spot at the front of the otherwise nonexistent line. I figured we would at least bond over our shared enthusiasm, but he avoided my gaze.

The ticket vendor inside was surprisingly unecstatic for someone who worked in a Butter Museum, brusquely insisting that both I and the Spaniard watch a video before we proceeded through the collection.

Now, I did learn a thing or two from the video. It turns out that from the late 1700s all the way through the first part of the 20th, Cork was the center of the butter universe. It was here that Ireland’s most important export (can we pause for a moment to imagine how nice it would be to have a creamy force for good as one’s main important and not, say, those dopamine slot machines with surveillance tendencies that we call ‘technology’?) was traded. The decrepit neoclassical building next door was the Butter Exchange, where farmers from across southern Ireland would bring their product, packed into barrels called ‘firkins,’ to be sold and buyers would ship it on to Europe and the West Indies. The weird round building across the way was the Firkin Crane, which is where the barrels were weighed.

But after that interesting historical introduction, the video quickly turned into what appeared to be an internal marketing review for Kerrygold, so I moved on to the exhibition proper.

It was not, I am devastated to report, the most scintillating museum I have ever been in. There was a collection of churns and milk cans. A few old photos with accompanying recordings of women talking about their butter-making days. I did enjoy the handwritten accounts of neighborhood crones who would turn themselves into hares to steal milk from other people’s cows, and all the other ways that witchcraft might impede the butter-making process. And I was very pleased to learn that as far back as the 1700s BC, locals were burying butter in peat bogs in order to preserve it or placate the gods, no one is really sure which.

But otherwise, the butter museum was a disappointment. No one was making butter, for one. At a display of vintage butter wrappers, there was an interactive station where you could make your own, but this consisted of a few rubber stamps, some starting-to-dry-out inkpads, and not even waxed paper, just some sheets of regular A4.

And in the mother of all missed opportunities, there was no butter to taste or purchase.

“You should really sell some butter,” I said to the ticket vendor on my way out.

“Well, we’re not a shop, are we?” he said from behind a counter lined with butter-themed souvenirs for sale.

The one surly man in all of Cork, and he tends the butter museum. Some people don’t want to be happy.

No matter. I loved Cork anyway, and perhaps no butter museum in the world could ever live up to its name. I bought some butter postcards, and headed for the airport bus.

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Hello Unplugged Travelers!

As mentioned in my last post, I’m trying out something new here, which is to send out the listings of where I ate, drank, shopped, and stayed as a separate post for paid subscribers, rather than paywalling the information at the end of the already pretty long destination pieces I’m sending to everyone. I’ve beefed up the entrie…

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I did not know I harbored Quasimodo fantasies until I learned, partway through dinner on my first night in Cork, that I could satisfy them.

I learned this from Celeste and Dave. They were deep to the wine list when I was seated next to them at what would quickly prove to be a great little Italian restaurant, but no sooner had I ordered and pulled out my book, than I could feel their gaze on me. I lifted my eyes, and we embarked on a dinner-long conversation that veered from first dates to Mormonism to cheese to the Black and Tans, before finally rounding on what I should do with my three days in Cork. Celeste ticked off a few ideas, then made the suggestion almost as an afterthought: ‘And of course you can go ring the bells at Shandon church.”

Are you kidding me? I was on it like white on rice. Early the next morning I stopped briefly for coffee at a café languid with the ennui of the teenage girls in green school blazers and miniskirts who huddled in the corner. Properly caffeinated, I then headed up the hill and through a pelting rain toward the church, guided by a vision of myself gazing out over the city from high in the belfry, maybe even pulled gently into the air by the weight of the heavy ropes, as I coaxed a deafening but surely melodic peal from medieval bells. I was thoroughly soaked by the time I reached the top of the hill. Where I was promptly greeted by a boarded-up entryway, and a sign announcing the church and its belltower were closed indefinitely for restoration.

So, it turned out, was the Crawford gallery that is the city’s main art museum. When I went to the Hi-B, which Celeste had promised was an iconic pub where I could happily while away an afternoon with my book and a pint so long as I didn’t at any point pull out my phone, I discovered three bartenders busily putting down placemats. After one rather rudely demanded to know who I was, she quickly realized my confusion, and apologetically told me the bar was closed for a whisky tasting. A tasting that, she quickly interjected before I could even form the question, had been fully booked since September.

On top of that, the city is not especially attractive, its famed English Market doesn’t hold a candle to counterparts in southern Europe, and the weather, if I’m being diplomatic, was absolute shit.

And yet, I could not have loved Cork more.

As an introvert who needs long stretches of time to herself in a way that feels biological, I’ve long been fascinated by the way that different cultures teach social engagement. Here in Scandinavia, where I live, people are reserved in a way that runs from mildly-averse-to-small-talk (Danes) to practically catatonic. (How do you tell when a Finn really likes you? He looks at your feet when he talks to you.)

In Spain, where I lived before moving to Copenhagen, it was the opposite. There, I was always struck by how easy it was for strangers to talk with one another–waiting in line at the market, standing at the bar for coffee, sitting next to someone on the train. These weren’t the superficial niceties of Americans–the “have a nice days” and “Sure is hot, isn’t it?” that I grew up with. Rather, they were real conversations, about politics or sports or whether tortilla should or should not have onion in it. It was as if there was some secret school in social fluency that everyone attended.

You spend enough time around people like that, and even an introvert like me acquires some skills. Once, after I had moved to Denmark, I went back to Spain for a story that would have me flying into Malaga and taking a taxi from there to Gibraltar. Initially, I panicked, imagining the awkwardness that would ensue as I tried to keep a conversation going with a stranger over 134 kilometers. It took about two minutes in the taxi for me to realize I needn’t have worried: the driver was Spanish, after all, and I just had to follow his lead. We talked nonstop for the two hours it took to make the journey.

And yet, Ireland–or at least the part of it I encountered in Cork—has even Spain beat.

Admittedly, my first conversation was with a Spaniard. Daniel worked at the hotel I found about a hundred meters from where the bus from the Dublin airport let me off, and it turned out that everyone else working there was Spanish too (thank you very much, Brexit). But we had a fine conversation about what brought him to Cork, and when I asked him what I should do while I was in town, he told me I definitely wanted to go hear some Irish music, and he recommended a place down the street called Sin é, which he said means “that’s that” in Irish–”like ‘se acabó.”. Which is funny, he chortled, because it’s right next door to a funeral parlor.

Daniel also recommended a restaurant across the river that turned out to be fully booked, as were the next two places I tried. I was resigning myself to a snack in the hotel winebar and had crossed back, over water that tides and rain had brought suspiciously close to the bridge, when I passed the Italian restaurant. It wouldn’t have been my first choice–Italian food in a non-Italian city always feels like a bit of a cheat to me–but pasta sounded better than a bowl of salted almonds, so when I spied what was was clearly an empty table in the corner by the window, I made an exception. It was there that, as an opening gambit, Dave asked me how the book was, and I tried to summarize On The Calculation of Volume in a way that didn’t make it and me sound ridiculous. And we were off.

He was from Cork and worked in IT; she was a chef from Provo, Utah. They met on Tinder, but she had been looking for a guide, not a date. “I was traveling around Ireland and wanted someone to show me around Cork,” Celeste explained. “Good thing I didn’t go to Galway, or we wouldn’t be here.”

When her new guide invited her to dinner at the very place she had eaten the night before, she figured he at least had good taste, and decided it might be worth re-evaluating his status. Within a year they were married. That was eight years ago.

I learned a lot during dinner. That Celeste had left her Mormon family to travel, working first in Alaska, and then in some Michelin-starred places in Australia; that Dave had been just as adventuresome, living in San Francisco and Dubai before deciding he belonged back in the land of his roots. That they had first lived together in Kinsale, which is adorable but too touristy in summer, so they moved. That the couple’s first argument was over the cheese platter Celeste once served as the centerpiece of a dinner for friends. “In some ways, I’m not a good Irishman,” Dave explained. “I don’t drink and I hate cheese.”

He seemed a very good Irishman to me. Dave volunteered as a lifeboat rescuer. He told me about how the Black and Tans had burnt huge swaths of Cork in 1920, and how he was an Army reservist whose unit was based out of the very same barracks (albeit renamed after Michael Collins rather than Queen Victoria) from which they and the Auxiliaries had launched their attacks.

Today, the couple own a catering business called Spoon and Scallop that puts on dinners and special events primarily for visitors–families in Ireland for a reunion, couples traveling to celebrate an anniversary, that sort of thing. “I’m the chef,” Celeste explained. “And he’s the charm.”

She was pretty charming herself, but I knew what she meant: Dave was in a twinkly-eyed, conversationally-gifted class of his own. I had felt awkward intruding on their date night, and tried on a couple of occasions to politely give them an off-ramp, but the conversation continued through their mains and mine, dessert, and even the limoncellos at the end.

By the time they left, the restaurant was almost empty. Which is when Mirco, the owner of the restaurant who, I learned, had moved to Cork from Italy 30 years ago, came over for a chat. After another 30 minutes or so, and a thorough discussion of American politics and why Italians didn’t want to work in hospitality anymore, I realized that, in Cork, I was going to have to pace myself.

Yet the conversations kept coming. At the fast-food salad place I ducked into to avoid a downpour, I sat next to two men who would almost certainly describe themselves as ‘blokes,” and got pulled into their conversation about how, after one bloke’s wedding at “the poor man’s Ballymaloe,” his bride got sick on the first night of their Spanish honeymoon; we all agreed it was the stress that did it. At a matchbox-sized coffee shop I joined the banter between the moon-faced barista and a clearly smitten customer with an equally smitten terrier over why she hadn’t given him a taste of the day’s special brew, considering how good it was.

At one pub I talked with a retired train mechanic who was glad he got out when he did because “the AI is going to make slaves of us all.” At another, after watching a Goth couple lug a massive suitcase up to the bar and onto a stool, and begin extracting from it some witchy-looking paintings that they then hung around the pub, we talked about artistic inspiration. (“It’s my inner Goddess who speaks to me,” the artist explained, while her boyfriend nodded his man-bun appreciatively). I followed that with a chat with the owner about how both Guinness and Beamish had recently raised their prices, and how he was trying to not pass that on to customers by convincing them to drink more.

I went to a lunchtime concert in the Dark Academia-looking Aula Maxima of the University, and sat next to Pat, who was there primarily because her husband wanted to be. “Music’s not really my thing,” she confessed. But she liked being back in the Aula, a long hall lined with appropriately heavy bookcases on one wall, and portraits of severe-looking former rectors on another, because it was where she sat her exams when she was a university student studying chemistry some 50 years earlier. When she learned I was from the U.S. she told me about her grandmother, who had moved to Boston in 1890 with her two sisters, until their dad insisted they come home. One of the girls had already met someone, though, so she stayed on, working as a maid. The family had split apart after that, and Pat didn’t know what had become of her great-aunt and her children.

All this in the roughly five minutes between when I sat down, and the fiddle player stepped on stage.

Not all the conversations touched on the personal. At dinner in an open-kitchen restaurant that same night, the couple seated next to me apparently felt self-conscious about leaving early, so they turned to me and explained that they were going to watch the rugby; Ireland was playing France. A server overheard us.

“On a Thursday?” she interrupted.

The man nodded. “Yeah, because of the Olympics.”

The server turned to the chef behind the pass. “Did you know Ireland’s playing the rugby tonight?|

“What, on a Thursday?”

It wasn’t long before the whole restaurant was murmuring at this apparent glitch in the time/space continuum.

Look, I know that this is a cliché: the good craic for which Ireland is famous. And there were other things that I loved about Cork, from the abundance of live music pubs and good restaurants, to the sunlight that finally burst through just as I sweatily reached the top of Patrick’s Hill. I loved the case in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel that displays the walking stick Michael Collins left behind in his room on the day he was assassinated, and the flea market that was a) named after native daughter and renowned labor organizer Mother Jones and b) doing a sturdy business in holy water and ecstatic mermaids. I loved the unabashedly working-class vibes, and the city’s underdog pride.

But I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to know that simply by sitting still and looking open to it, I could find myself in meaningful conversation with strangers. It seemed to me the antidote to so much that ails us, and I say that as one of those people who now prefers texts to phone calls. Technology–everything from the proliferating delivery apps that keep us from having to speak to waiters to the AI that we use as therapists–is actively eroding our social interaction skills. But this, I reckon, is where we can resist.

A few days in Cork is a good way to remember how.

The Addresses

Normally, what follows is where paid subscribers find a list of the places where I stayed, ate, and otherwise entertained myself on this trip. But we’re going to try something new. Since these posts are already on the long side, I’m going to separate the information on hotels, restaurants, etc. into its own post for paid subscribers, and will send that out in the next week or so. Let me know if like this approach, or prefer to go back to the way it was.

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By the time you receive this, I will be in my next unplugged destination. Which means that if life feels incomplete without a postcard from Ireland’s second-largest city, this is your chance to rectify that situation.

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Now, back to our previous destination. Picture this:

You turn off a canal-side road busy with restaurants and shops onto a silent street, lined with row houses and empty except for your own footfalls. It is night, and the sky is a blueish-black. Jutting out curiously from the homes at regular intervals are what look to be round street lamps, which cast a glow so enchanted it makes you wonder if this isn’t the Utrecht version of Platform 9¾.

As you approach the first lamp on the right hand side of the street, you realize that there is writing on it and that rather than a lamp, it is in fact an illuminated sign. The neat script, black against a parchment-colored background, reads “Evening Time is Reading Time,” with a little circle above the words.

As you are wondering at this message, you look to the next sign and see that the same message is inscribed on it, but that black descends incrementally behind the words on each one. The circle at the top of the first sign becomes clear: it is the pull of a blind gradually drawn as you proceed down the street. By the time you get to the end of the block, the final Evening Time is Reading Time is posed against an entirely black background.

There is more: across the street, a similar row of lighted signs juts out from the houses, but these have vintage-style illustrations and text on them. Some of them appear to be advertisements: There is a sign for a café, and another promising “Bait For All Kinds of Fishing.” A hula girl heralds “Exotic Atmosphere” on one, and a severe-looking man with a gavel insists “You Be the Judge.” Others are more enigmatic. A sign with two chickens reads “Don’t Start Something You Can’t Finish.” One features no text at all, just a drawing of a baby chick with a fish tied like a cape to its back.

When you get to the end of the street, you look back up, and see that the sets of signs have switched places, with the illustrations now running on the left and Evening Time on the right. The signs, you realize, are double-sided. The blind progression runs in both directions, up and down the street.

Is it just me? Or did you too not fall immediately and deeply in love?

I had to know more. There was still no one on the street, so I went back up to the canal. On the corner, I came across an intimidating woman with a thick mane of silver hair washing down the windows of her antiques shop for the night.

I approached her nervously, unsure of how to frame my question. “Do you know what the signs on that street are for?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “It’s art.”

The antiques lady was not interested in having a conversation with a philistine, but I did manage to extract one critical piece of information from her: the work had been up for a long time. “At least 30 years,” she said, as she packed up her squeegee and headed back indoors.

That evening, and in the ones to come, I would discover other pieces of light art in Utrecht. All of them were part of Lumen, a route of illuminated works that the city puts on each winter. I found most of them uninspiring: colors flashing on the underside of a bridge only reminded me of the scary boat ride in Willy Wonka. If I were a toddler, however, you would not be able to pull me away from the full-scale projection onto the exterior of the Nijnte museum, with its perching birds and falling snowflakes and Miffy herself opening the door for a peek.

In any case, none of the other pieces had the effect of Korte Smeestraat on me, and I kept finding myself drawn back to it. Each time, I would lurk along it, trying to catch someone coming out of one of the houses so I could interrogate them about it. Results were spotty.

Anouk, who was in her 20s and walking a highly adorable beagle, had only lived on the street for about 8 months admitted somewhat embarrassedly that she hadn’t a clue, then hazarded a guess it was for a literacy campaign. “Maybe it is to encourage people to read?”

An older man in a smart wool coat who clearly thought I was trying to sell him something couldn’t get away fast enough. “Nay, nay, not interested,” he said as he brushed past.

Lotte, coming home with her two kids, told me that she thought the signs were from old businesses that had once operated on the street. “But I don’t really get the chicken one,” she admitted. “Maybe they sold eggs?”

Pawel, who was a captive audience due to him fixing his bike chain when I approached, provided the most insight. He had moved onto the block 20 years earlier when he immigrated from Poland and the lights were already there at the time. He too thought that the illustrations represented former businesses on the street, and he appreciated the sentiment on the reverse side. “Evening is good for reading,” he said.

He also directed me toward a plaque at the non-canal end of the street that explained the work, and then, having by now adjusted the troublesome chain, accompanied me there. We were both somewhat disappointed to discover that the ugly blue plexiglas did not, in fact, explain the work, or even the year it was created. But from beneath a swath of spraypaint I could at least make out the artist’s name: Allen Ruppersberg.

Possibly confirming the antique lady’s (and yours?) suspicions, I had never heard of Allen Ruppersberg. But when I got home I did some research and learned that, in addition to being 81, American, and a pretty big deal in conceptual art circles, Ruppersberg created Evening Time is Reading Time for a show for the Centraal Museum in 1991. When it was over, the city bought the work, and it’s been there ever since.

I also came across an interview with him in which he explains that the illustrations are based on what the street’s residents told him about their occupations. That helped with the judge, and I could imagine how “Open All Night,” with its picture of a crying baby, probably referred to a sleepless mom. But I’m still wondering about that chick with a fish-cape.

None of the people I spoke with on Korte Smeestraat got its origins completely right. But, 35 years later, it hardly mattered. They loved living in a piece of art. “The city can never take it down,” Pawel said as we stared at the disappointingly uninformative plaque. “I think the neighbors here would all revolt.”

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I came down with a terrible case of sonder on the train from the Amsterdam airport.

‘Sonder,’ you may recall, is a neologism from John Koenig and his exquisite Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (which I learned of from the equally exquisite Mike Sowden of Everything is Amazing). Its definition:

sonder

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Though I didn’t know the word for it back then, I’ve been susceptible to sonder for as long as I’ve been traveling. I have a very clear memory of the peculiar feeling that came over me on my very first trip abroad at age 19, when as I descended from the airport bus in Madrid’s Plaza Colón, and realized with a shock that all the people around me who were rushing off to work or out for coffee had been there all along, living their own lives, without me ever once really considering them.

They are profoundly disorienting, these moments when you recognize the fragile construction that is your own protagonism, and most of us, I reckon, can’t sustain the awareness for very long before we go back to asserting the primacy of our own narrative. But every now and then–mostly when I’m in transit–the perspective slips again, and I find myself pulled into the currents of all those other protagonists and their narratives, swirling simultaneously next to mine.

It was coming up on late afternoon when I boarded the train at the Amsterdam airport for Utrecht. Maybe it was because I was so so-evidently behind that lighted window at dusk, or maybe it was the peculiar loneliness of a commuter platform at rush hour, but as we traversed stations in those depressing conglomerations of glass-fronted highrises that cities perversely insist on call “parks” (as in “Science Parks” or “Innovation Parks”), the sonder came upon me. I could almost hear the internal dialogue of the woman with the mousy brown ponytail who looked like she still had to pick up groceries on her way home, or feel the pinch of the backpack’s weight on the wiry man who looked down the tracks in a way made me think he did not love his job. Too much of this can feel like slipping beneath the waves.

The announcement that we were arriving in Utrecht snapped me back to my own reality. But I suspect that something from the episode lingered, and that my railway bout of sonder had primed me for the voyeurism to come.

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On my first night in Bratislava, I went to dinner at a fin-de-siècle-looking café near my hotel. It was a warm September evening, and all the outdoor tables were filled. The interior, however, was nearly empty, and so I took a seat far from the door, ordered a beer and some chicken paprikash, and pulled out the book I was reading.

About halfway through dinner, a man walked in. He was lanky, and probably in his 40s. There was something about him that made me think he was an academic, but he wore hiking boots, and that pointed to the natural sciences: maybe a geologist in town for a conference on Central European vulcanology or something like that. Anyway, when out of all the empty tables in the restaurant he chose the one directly next to mine, I figured he wanted to chat. And since we here at The Unplugged Traveler are all about spontaneous connection, I put down my book, and smiled at him in a way that I hoped was encouraging.

He didn’t notice, however, because he was looking at his phone.

The waiter came to take his order, and the man spoke to him in English with an accent that sounded Spanish, or maybe Catalan. I tried again to make eye contact, but he turned back to his phone immediately after ordering, and did not, as far as I could tell, raise his gaze from it again. So I finished my dinner, thanked the waiter, and walked out into the Bratislavan night.

Two days later (and inspired by Chris Arnade), I set out on a 10-mile walk that would, according to my map, follow the Danube to a castle destroyed by Napoleon’s troops. The walk started as a broad promenade in the city center, then became a fitness trail of sorts, until finally narrowing to a path that led through woods and past small wooden houses. And then, after about four miles, it abruptly emptied onto an extremely busy road. There were no sidewalks, and not much of a shoulder either. What there were were enough cars speeding around tight curves to make walking seem reckless, even to me.

Just as I was contemplating turning back, I noticed a bus stand directly across the way. I sprinted across the road, and looked at the schedule taped to its side: a bus would be arriving in eight minutes. I felt bad to abandon my walk, but dead on the side of a Slovakian road would probably have felt worse, and this way, I would at least get to see the castle.

The bus arrived exactly as scheduled, and I boarded. There, seated in the front row, was the man from the restaurant.

Now, I am wilIing to entertain the idea that I had misjudged: that this man was not a geologist attending a conference on Carpathian sediment transport and was instead an ordinary tourist like me. I can also allow that visiting a ruined castle some 10 miles outside of Bratislava might be the kind of thing that tourists to Slovakia routinely do. But even if both those things were true—and here, please note the subjunctive– I think we can agree that running into the exact man from dinner halfway through the journey on the exact bus that I had not at all planned on taking was a rather remarkable coincidence.

This kind of shit happens to me all the time when I travel.

Jung called it synchronicity. He coined the word to refer to unconnected events that have no causal relationship but occur together in time and have emotional resonance for the receiver. Coincidences, in other words, that feel meaningful.

Synchronicity is what happened to me on that week-long hike through the Cotswolds that I wrote about last year. I had intended the trip as a birthday present to myself, and had invited a friend to join me. But that friend had to cancel at the last moment, and the friend who had stepped in as a replacement to meet me for a celebratory dinner in Bath when I was done with the walk pulled out at the even later last minute. Throw in some missed turns, a lot of rain, and boots that literally disintegrated beneath my feet, and by the day of my actual birthday, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.

So when a series of tiny, random events—some retraced steps; a woman stepping into her garden; a shouted greeting—combined with perfect timing to deliver me to a stranger whose birthday it also was, and then together we ended up in a café in an English village where a dozen or so other strangers sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to us, it felt like magic. Actually, beyond magic; it felt cosmically intentional somehow, as if the universe itself had decided to take my hand and give it an encouraging squeeze.

That was the most profound instance, but it’s happened to me other times as well. A few years ago, for example, I flew to Paris for a story that would have me taking the overnight train from there to Vienna. To get to the station, I took the RER into the city from the airport, and ended up sitting across from a gay American couple who spent the ride sniping at each other in a way I suspect they would not have done had they thought another English-speaker was in earshot.

In any case, I got into Paris, boarded the train that evening, woke up the next morning in Austria, and then spent another day in Vienna to report on a different story (about sponge cities, if you must know). There were no direct flights for my return to Copenhagen, so on the way home, I had to change planes in Helsinki. And there, on the second leg of the flight, seated directly in front of me, was the same couple I had last seen in Paris bickering over who had booked the crappy Airbnb.

I was so gobsmacked by the coincidence of running into my seatmates in Paris on a flight from Helsinki to Copenhagen that I actually asked them if they had a message for me from, like, the universe. (They did not. But I did learn that they had only been booked on the Helsinki connection at the last minute when their regular flight back to the US was cancelled. Make of that what you will.)

When I ran into the man on the bus in Bratislava, I again got that goosebumpy feel that it had to mean something. We disembarked together, and even chatted a bit about how we were both headed to the castle. I wanted to invite him to walk with me there, but he had already opened his Google maps. Holding his phone in front of him, he let it lead him down the street.

I don’t know what any of these encounters mean. I know the logicians out there will label what I see as unusual coincidence as simple probability: every now and then you’re bound to overlap randomly with someone you’ve already seen. Or maybe it’s not unusual at all, and we are constantly crossing paths with the same strangers without recognizing it. Maybe it’s only during travel, when we are especially alert to our surroundings, that we notice them.

Yet that still doesn’t explain the way that these encounters make me feel. According to Jung, synchronicity hits powerfully because it provides a moment’s connection –a portal, even– to the collective unconscious. That might not be exactly how I’d describe it. But I know I’ve stopped believing these encounters are about the specific individuals with whom I coincide (turns out I’m not meant to be lifelong friends with the man in Bratislava, or the couple on that flight from Helsinki, or the birthday boy in Painswick). Instead, they feel like a reminder that there is something out there larger than ourselves. Some mysterious and consoling connection, if only we stay open to it.

Maybe that sounds hopelessly woo-woo. But when I was leaving the Ars Electronica center in Linz that I wrote about last time, I found myself on the stairs behind a young couple with whom I had crossed paths in the museum. They were talking about what had happened to their third friend who, last time any of us had seen her, was stretched out on a bench taking a nap in the AI and Music exhibition. The boy assured the girl that their missing third would figure out how to find them, as she was an adult after all. “I’m glad someone is,” his companion replied. “Although I guess that will be me soon; I turn 21 in eleven days.”

I did a quick calculation in my head: she meant September 24. Which, of course, is my birthday too.

Happy holidays, everyone. I hope yours are full of magic.

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I boarded the train in Bratislava without knowing where I was going.

I mean, I knew I was going to Austria; I just wasn’t sure where in Austria. Ever since I had conceived of a two-part trip that would allow me to take advantage of the Vienna airport’s proximity to several different countries, I knew Bratislava would be stop #1. But Stop #2? I was torn between Salzburg and Linz. (And, briefly, maybe Graz.)

Salzburg, obviously, is Salzburg. The Alps. Mozart. Those little foil-wrapped chocolates named after Mozart. The fricking Sound of Music. I knew the place was supposed to be cultured and charming and beautiful enough to induce at least one headstrong nanny to burst into song at every turn. In fact, I had heard Salzburg described on several occasions as the most beautiful city in the world. The latest had happened just two nights earlier in Bratislava, as I eavesdropped on an awkward dinner between some visiting Korean factory owners and the florid-faced Slovakian businessmen trying to woo them.

Linz is…what? Home of the Linzer torte, I assumed, though I did not know this for sure, and had learned, in similar situations, that it was just as possible that the cake had been invented by a certain Frau von Linzer who had come up with the recipe for a 1960s baking contest sponsored by a jam manufacturer.

I could make some further assumptions. Even with high season over, Salzburg, I suspected, would be jammed with Mozart-loving, chocolate-eating, Hills Are Alive twirling tourists, and after my run-in at the Bratislava konditorei, I didn’t think I could tolerate just then another place emptied of meaning. Linz, I assumed, would be largely free of the hordes, but what if that was because it was one of those horrid industrial cities that no one in their right mind would visit? I didn’t think I was up for a serious bout of depression either. Also, it felt kind of arrogant to purposefully choose against a place that so much of the world had decided was exquisite.

I’m not sure why I was having such a hard time making up my mind, but it felt existential somehow: beautiful and touristy vs. presumably less beautiful and less touristy. The semi-known vs the entirely unknown. In any case, the two cities are on the same train line which allowed extra time for tormenting myself with indecision. At Bratislava Central Station, I bought a ticket to the farther destination in order to keep my options open, and then continued to put off making up my mind as the train crossed the border back into Austria, and, about an hour later, as it pulled into Vienna station.

Here, great hordes of people boarded, all of them headed to Linz or Salzburg or even Innsbruck, which was a possibility I hadn’t even contemplated and now had to push quickly from my mind so as not to become undone. A young couple who were–I am sorry to say this, but it is true–markedly unattractive threw themselves and their abundant outerwear into the seats next to and across from me. They each put on headphones and as the train pulled out of Vienna’s Hauptbahnhof, I went back to staring out the window and trying, as we gathered speed, to make up my damn mind.

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A few nights ago, I was far above the Arctic Circle, reporting on a Sámi ballet (you can read the result, and admire the gorgeous photos and video that David Torch shot, here). As the dancers were still peeling off their costumes after the final performance, one of them got a text urging them to go outside. They ran out of the dressing room, and into the deep snow. And there, they saw it: the great swaths of luminescent green swirling against the night sky that are the Northern Lights. As they huddled together, snapping photos and punctuating the awed silence with little gasps of ‘wow,’ one of the dancers, Luca, made a suggestion. “What if we all put our phones away for two minutes and just be?”

Yes, what if?

In some ways, this whole newsletter is an attempt to do just that. And one of the things that I’ve learned from it, is that just being while traveling can make you not only more observant and probably happier, but more curious too. Because when you let go of the mediator between yourself and experience that is your phone, you find yourself with a lot more questions. Or at least I do.

Which brings us to the Wrestler of Bratislava.

As I mentioned last time, Bratislava has a lot of statues. Many of these are lifelike, life-sized bronzes that depict people famous and not, and that few can resist posing near.

But on my first day in town, as I crossed from the Old Town into an area near the university, I came across one that didn’t fit the mold.

Despite being carved of stone, and not especially good, the sculpture caught my attention. It also raised some questions. Who was it meant to represent? Who made it? And what was a sculpture of a wrestler doing on the steps of a restaurant that appeared to cater to a young, professional, I-want-some-nachos-with-my-roast-duck-leg crowd anyway?

Luckily, there was a sign next to it, created by the restaurant itself. It identified the statue as a tribute to Dávid Unreich, who, it said in its English translation, preferred “the boxing ring to a career of a rabbi.”

Actually, it was the wrestling ring he preferred, but I would learn that later. The text also noted that Dávid, who was Jewish and went by the nickname ‘Dufi, put his fighting skills to use on the streets of Bratislava against pro-Nazi thugs, and that, bruiser that he was, he had a bit of a side gig as a freelance bouncer, called in to restaurants to eject unruly guests, where he was paid back in food and drink. But what really piqued my interest, is that apparently, David Unreich once challenged Hitler to a match.

Obviously, I had questions. I went into the restaurant which, at 3 in the afternoon, was empty. I asked the bartender if he knew anything about the statue outside, like why had a restaurant would install a sculpture of a wrestler.

“Sculpture?” the bartender asked.

‘Right there, out front?” I said. “Looks like a wrestler?”

“Ah, yeah,” the bartender replied. “I think it’s a wrestler.”

I persevered. “Do you know why it’s there?” The restaurant didn’t look like the kind of place that would have been around in the 1930s, but I asked anyway. “Did he work here or something?”

“I don’t know; you’d have to ask the owner,” the bartender said.

“Is the owner here?”

“No,” said the bartender, and walked away.

So there I was, with all those questions, and no internet to answer them.

But a couple of days later, as I walked up to the castle, I passed a door marked ‘Museum of the Jewish Experience.” Normally, I am allergic to Jewish museums–there are only so many menorahs and torah plates a girl can look at her in life–but now I was on a mission.

I was all geared up to try to explain my quest. But there was no need: right at the ticket desk was a small display of items for sale, including some David Unreich refrigerator magnets.

“Ah! You know him!” I exclaimed to the sturdy-looking woman behind the desk.

“Yes, we did an exhibition on him not too long ago,” she replied.

And so, between the woman and a pamphlet that she dug out, I learned that Unreich had grown up in Bratislava’s Old Town. A big dude, he and his brother joined a local wrestling club, where he competed in the heavyweight category. He won his first regional championship in 1929, when he was 22, and from there, he went on to win at the national and international levels, including the 1935 Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv, and the 1937 European championship in Riga. When he went professional the following year, he took the name Ben Shalom.

But Son of Peace or no, it was around this same time that he and his buddies in Bratislava turned their local Jewish wrestling club into a militia of sorts, and started protecting their neighborhood from those roving pro-Nazi thugs. (They must have been pretty daunting; one of his colleagues in this little anti-fascist endeavor was Imi Lichtenfeld, who, years later in Israel, would take what he had learned on the streets of Bratislava and create the martial art Krav Maga.)

As he was piling up championships, David came to the attention of wrestling promoters in the US, who booked him for an American tour. While he was there, Slovakians declared independence from Czechoslovakia, one complicated result of which rendered David a foreigner. He would never return to Bratislava.

But he was quite popular in the US, where he won 100 matches in a row, and in those months that were catapulting toward the outbreak of war, his promoters couldn’t resist positioning him as “the Jewish Giant.” After winning one bout against an American-German wrestler who started the match with a robust Seig Heil, Ulrich pointed to the crowd and shouted, “That’s for Hitler.” He went one better in an interview later with a newspaper, which reported that Unreich ‘would like to offer at least one solution to a Jewish problem by challenging Hitler to a fight in the ring.”

So it was true, the lady at the museum told me: Unreich had challenged Hitler to a fight. I asked her if she knew anything about the sculpture outside the restaurant, and it came as news to her that it even existed. But the family’s house–where David lived with his parents and seven siblings–was just across the way. “All the boys emigrated,” she said. “But the parents and the sister….” Here, she made a noise like ‘pffft’ and flicked her hand about 45 degrees toward the right.

I could have looked all that information up online, of course. But then I would have missed out on her gesture, so casual and so freighted with meaning. Because although she never named it, I knew which direction her hand pointed toward. It was to the northeast, where Auschwitz lay.

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“You can take a picture.”

I was staring at a case full of cake slices, which were, in fairness, exceptionally beautiful–all sharp-cut sponge and shiny glazes. But I was trying to determine which one to put in my mouth, not which one I wanted to line up in my viewfinder. So the fact that the waiter had assumed I was there for the photo op should have been my first red flag.

Actually, that’s not true. My first red flag should have been the velvet rope that had temporarily prevented me from entering the cafe. The second should have been the waiter himself, dressed as he was in a slightly too-tight green velvet vest. The third should have been the sign, placed prominently by the velvet rope, that informed me there was a 13-euro minimum. That the green-vested waiter, after assuring himself of my intention to spend at least 13 euros on cake, assumed that the first thing I would want to do is photograph them was actually like red flag #27.

And yet, because it was the most beautiful historic café I had ever been in, I let him lead me to a table.

My arrival in Bratislava had not been without complications, all of which were entirely self-inflicted. In the interest of cutting down on flights, I had planned a double-header: fly (to Vienna), to catch the train first east to Bratislava, before turning around and heading west to either Linz or Salzburg, I hadn’t decided which. But I had barely left the airport when I learned the hard way that in Vienna, the central train station is not at all the same thing as the main train station. And once I had finally arrived at the Bratislava train’s final destination and barrelled off along with everyone else on board, I was inordinately pleased with myself for ignoring an arrow funneling everyone through an underpass and instead effortlessly locating lockers to stash my luggage while I looked for a hotel, effortlessly withdrawing money to pay for said locker, effortlessly buy a bottle of water to make sure I had the proper change, and then even using the leftover 50 cents to tip the bathroom attendant, because they still have those in Bratislava.

Only, I wasn’t in Bratislava, not really. The train had dumped us in Petrzalka, which is a suburb, I guess? Unclear, but definitely on the wrong side of the river. The underpass arrow, it turned out, led to a bus stop from which, after I retrieved my bag from the locker I had just paid 3.5 euros to use, I caught a bus that took me to the actual main station, 6.5 kilometers away.

All that hassle was forgotten, however, when, leaving the station area, I came across this:

Because nothing says Welcome to Bratislava like a hut-shaped vending machine stocked with string cheese.

The back and forth between aargh and delight characterized my entire trip to Bratislava. My first impression of the city was that it was a curious mix of fin-de-siécle ornament and Soviet brutalism, some of both left to crumble, and none of it, not even the recently-built stuff, looking like it knew what year we were in.

But near the presidential palace, I lucked onto what turned out to be perhaps the most charming street in the whole city, and found a place to stay. And from there, armed with a map I picked up at the hotel, I made my way to Bratislava’s Old Town.

Where I promptly ran into my familiarly conflicted feelings about Old Towns. On the one hand, Bratislava’s had all the stuff I love: the pastel-stained buildings with graceful façades and hidden courtyards; the winding streets that opened suddenly onto grand squares; the onion-domed churches and a stately town hall with checkerboard tilework around its dormer windows. Here as in other Old Towns, the intricate craftsmanship—the wrought iron, the carved wood, the patterned stone that served no purpose other than beauty—made me lament the ways in which, on the way to modernity, we seem to have lost the knack for the exquisite detail.

In terms of crowds, Bratislava’s Old Town was far from the worst I’ve seen, and it was punctuated with charming elements. There are the Baroque palaces, which, on the edge of the neighborhood, give way to more Art Nouveau extravagances. Statues are dotted all over town, including ones of a Napoleonic soldier and a worker poking his head up from a sewer pipe to look up women’s skirts in a way that a lot of people apparently find cute. The shooting targets at the history museum inside Town Hall, which were painted with portraits of the king and authority figures, amused me. The promenade along the Old Town’s southern edge that contained many of the city’s more extravagant buildings, including the Slovak National Theater, felt like people actually used and enjoyed them.

Yet a lot of the area felt hollow. When I stopped for a beer in a Jules Verne-themed bar late one afternoon, Viktoria, the bartender who herself lived in the neighborhood, having moved to the capital from Slovakia’s rural middle, swore that their clientele was usually only 50% tourist. “Except today,” she said, looking around at tables entirely filled with English speakers. “Because it’s raining.”

Inside the beautiful exteriors, there didn’t seem to be a lot that someone who lived would actually use (beyond the Starbucks, of course). I found myself wondering once again how it came to pass that cities across Europe surrendered all that beauty–their most beautiful parts, in fact– to the global banality of chimney cakes stands and rubber duckie stores and bars that promise BIG PARTIES EVERY WEEKEND. FREE WINGS.

And that was before I got to Konditorei Kormuth.

As I mentioned, the café was extraordinarily beautiful. Every inch of its vaulted ceilings had been painted with vibrant frescoes of saints and other important-looking people. Stained-glass windows punctuated the walls, rococo clocks kept time, and intricately carved chairs gathered around the marble tabletops. The cakes were just as ornate– thin layers of almond sponge layered with marzipan and jam; a shiny shard of caramel atop a Dobos torte, even choux pastry swans filled with cream (a dessert that my mom, newly graduated from a gourmet cooking course for housewives, used to make for dinner parties). They were served on even more ornate porcelain plates, alongside coffee in impossibly delicate, gold-rimmed demi-tasse cups.

Now, there are few things I love more in the world than a good historic café, and as I took my seat in the main salon and waited to give my order, I happily occupied myself by imagining the place in its bustling heyday and trying to figure out just how old it was. Some of the frescoes of saints—Lucia with her eyeballs; James with his scallop shell— looked late Renaissance but seemed inordinately vivid for something that old. There were also portraits of Burgermeisters and the like whose wigs placed them firmly in the 18th century. Some of the porcelain looked First Empire, some of the stained glass Victorian.

It was confusing, and not only for the decor. I should have realized it as soon as I saw the rope and the minimum charge, but there were no local customers at all: no businessman on a quick espresso break on his way back to the office, no fiery young radicals arguing about politics on a table strewn with the day’s newspapers, no ladies meeting up for their weekly coffee date, no dreamy student making a cup of tea last as long as possible as she read her novel. It was all, without exception, tourists. Tourists with phones.

I watched the waiter move from table to table, efficiently taking orders and reminding any apparent cheapskates that cake alone would not get them across the minimum, so they better come up with a drink preference. He brought a pastry swan to a Japanese customer who made him re-approach her table (“more slowly!”) because she wanted to video him as he set down the plate. When one Australian asked if there weren’t other rooms to see, the waiter turned weirdly cagey, at first denying it, and then, when the customer insisted he had seen something online, saying he (the customer) would have to take it up with the owner. Who was not, alas, there.

I drank my coffee (fine, and definitely made better by the porcelain) and ate my cake (also fine although, if I’m being honest, a little dry), then tried my own hand with the waiter. I buttered him up by complimenting him on his flawless English, and learned that he had acquired it from playing poker. I asked him how old the place was, and he told me the building was from the 16th century.

“So it was already a café back then?” I continued.

Not exactly. It had been founded as a cake shop in the 1930s, and after the war, it had been taken over, Soviet-style, by the state for several decades where it mass-produced pastries. Then it was essentially abandoned. The current owners bought a building so thoroughly neglected that it required over a decade of restoration.

“And they discovered all these frescoes when they started restoring it?” I asked breathlessly.

He paused and looked around to make sure no one was nearby. Then he leaned in. “They’re by some students from the local art school,” he whispered.

They had been painted in 2015, just before the café opened.

The scales, as it were, fell from my eyes. Suddenly I noticed that one of the waiter’s female counterparts was in a full-dress velvet pinafores, like a medieval bar-wench, and that none of the guests were doing those two defining activities of good cafés: talking animatedly and/or loitering. Instead, they sat down, ordered, took some photos, ate and drank in silence, paid, and left. Ideally as quickly as possible.

This was not a historic café that had been gradually drained of its local audience by crowd-controlling velvet ropes and overpriced cake, I realized. It was a historic-looking café with some antique furniture and plates: a stage set made whole-cloth to look like someone’s idea of the elegant Austro-Hungarian past.

I looked at the menu again, and reading more carefully now, saw that it described the work as “Renaissance style.” The furniture and china was legitimately antique, but bought, hodge-podge, rather than passed on. Whatever impression the konditorei gave of having been there all this time—and I’m still not sure if this was cultivated on the part of the owners or my own romanticism run amok— was an illusion. It was café as cosplay, because that, apparently, is what tourists will pay for. My bill, for a slice of marzipan cake and a cappuccino, came to 16 euros.

The word ‘cynical’ came to mind.

And so, I left the Old Town, and spent the rest of my time in Bratislava elsewhere. I found another beautiful–if much plainer– café inside a florist shop where the sunflowers made up for the lack of frescoes and the pastries were 3 euros.

I went to an opening in an art gallery where the work on display consisted of a series of plain white shirts hung on hangers. Looking around at the hipster crowd clutching glasses of what proved to be typically terrible art-opening white wine, I figured the work itself was some kind of avant-garde statement on the conformity imposed by late-stage capitalism or some such. But then I noticed a beautiful woman with a pixie cut staring intently at a small figure pinned to one of the shirts. The art, it turned out, were the brooches attached to the white shirts; the garments were just there as frames.

I strolled through some physically unlovely parts of town that felt pleasingly alive with their trams and cosmetics stores and takeaway piroghi windows. I looked at some objectively beautiful buildings and some objectively crazy ass ones. I found a buzzy natural wine bar where the clientele included the same beautiful woman with the pixie cut as I had seen at the gallery the night before. I climbed up the hill to the imposing white block of a castle, but when I saw cruise ship passengers streaming in single file behind their tour leader toward the entrance, couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I strolled along the Danube, which is lined with still more statues, plied by low barges, and overhung with bridges that look like they belong on a 1960s sci fi series. And I marveled at its water, a green deep enough to make me question Johann Strauss’s sanity, or at least his eyesight.

On my last night in Bratislava, I stopped for dinner in a place that was more pub than restaurant, centrally located but in a decidedly unfashionable part of town. There were tourists there, but not only tourists; there was also an older couple having a companionable dinner, and a group of male buddies drinking beer, and one harried mom with two young kids who clearly didn’t want to have to cook that night. I ordered a plate of bryndzové halusky, which tasted like a really good macaroni and cheese, and then, because it was the season, I tried my first glass of burciak, which is lightly fermented must–not quite grape juice, not quite wine. It was cloudy and totally delicious.

As I was sitting there, enjoying my dinner, a well-dressed, middle aged man came in. He went straight up to the bar and ordered a glass of red wine. He turned over a few coins for the glass, took it to the table, sat down, and pounded it in one gulp. Then he got up and left.

It was that kind of place. The kind of place you would go because you just really need a drink. In other words, someplace real.

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The Addresses

Below, paid subscribers will find a list of the places where I stayed, ate, and shopped in Bratislava. But, a gentle reminder: wouldn’t it be more fun to find your own?

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I hadn’t walked 20 meters into Visby from where the airport van dropped me off when I saw my first Gotland sheep. It wasn’t alive, mind you. But it was life-sized, if you don’t count the lack of anything resembling legs, and like sheep everywhere, it was not alone. Everywhere I went in Visby, I saw them, these large, concrete ovines, with the curling horns that identified them clearly as Gotland sheep.

Actually, as I would learn at the national museum, they were Gute sheep, which is what the original landrace brought to Gotland by the Vikings is called (just like the original human inhabitants). Early in the 20th century, they were selectively bred with two Russian breeds so that they lost the signature curling horns, making it easier to access their silky, long-haired, silvery-gray fleece that, when cut, looks like Keri Russell’s tragic post-break-up curls in the 1990s series Felicity.

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I was meandering through an alley lined with hollyhocks when up ahead, a mossy-looking cobblestone twitched. It was just past sunset, and the gloaming was blurring the hard edges of things, so for a second, I thought that maybe it had just been a trick of the light. But the cobblestone twitched again, and then got up on its little legs and ran to the other side of the street. I inched toward it cautiously, and found a prickly critter nosing a patch of weeds, thoroughly unperturbed by my presence. It was a hedgehog.

I had never seen a hedgehog in the wild before, if a city of 25,000 can be called ‘the wild.’ But then, I had never been to Visby before either, and thus far, it seemed entirely plausible it was the kind of enchanted place where adorable woodland creatures carouse the streets at dusk.

Visby is the capital of Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. It is considered (by urban heritage experts) the best-preserved medieval city in northern Europe, and (by me) totally captivating: Narrow streets of neat stone houses with prettily contrasting window frames and collections of odd knickknacks on the sill. Hollyhocks and wild roses growing with abandon. Viewpoints along the city’s upper streets of corrugated red tile roofs and soaring black steeples that spill down to the sea. A sunset so striking that, come time, seemingly half the city heads to the waterfront to watch it. A self-serve honey shop where the light glows from the open door like nectar itself.

Admittedly, there is one long street with the usual glut of self-consciously cute tourist shops, and more ice cream vendors than any one city needs. Yet somehow, even at the tail end of summer, the city managed not to veer over into cringey Ye Olde Thymes territory. And every permanent resident I spoke with told me that even when the season was long past and all the vacationing mainlanders had left, Visby still had life to it.

There have been people here for a long time. At the Gotland history museum, they’ve recreated a couple of the graves that archaeologists have unearthed, including one for the Stone Age ‘Hedgehog Girl,’ who was buried 5000 years ago with five hedgehog jaws resting delicately on her chest—tribute, no doubt, to that glorious age when hedgehogs were properly worshipped as the majestic and omnipotent gods they are, and not left to roam the streets aimlessly at dusk. (There was also a large pile of cod bones buried near the girl’s head, but the hedgehogs would prefer not to talk about that.) And there is an astonishing collection of picture stones from the first century AD through the Viking age, their drawings so vivid that you would think the Druid tattooist down the street had done them.

But the real action is medieval. In the 12th century, Visby became part of the Hanseatic League, the northern trade alliance that brought merchants from Hamburg to Novgorod together to corner the market on salt, fish, timber, and beer, and to build city-states that operated like corporate franchises. The League, which had its own armies, wasn’t shy about blockading ports or bullying kings if someone messed with its profits. You could think of it as a mashup between a multinational conglomerate and the Mafia, just with more cod.

Visby was at the center of it, the dominant hub for trade in the Baltic Sea. All that money translated into a prosperous city of merchants, evidence of which is still there in the warehouses that have since been turned into restaurants or coffee roasters; in the evocative remains–like soaring upright skeletons–of the many, many churches, and especially in the stone walls, erected in the 13th century and still sturdily intact, that ring the city and once protected the wealth inside it, albeit not necessarily from foreign marauders.

“The thing about the walls is that they weren’t built to keep out foreign invaders,” Ulrika, the co-owner of the hotel where I had the good fortune to land, told me. “They were built by the merchants to keep out the farmers in the countryside.”

Just before my hedgehog encounter the previous night, I had walked past a stretch of wall that bordered the sea and marveled how, in good Nordic fashion, the city had managed to turn this once purely defensive structure into something that served its residents in more hedonistic ways, adding not just a strip of parkland that offered prime sunset viewing, but hammocks, wooden lounge chairs, and fire pits that no one thought to defile or destroy. So I was interested not only in how a bunch of bougie citydwellers kept the pitchforked masses from their streets, but in how, more generally, people in Visby today thought about the past that remained so visibly present.

At the time we had this conversation, I was seated at breakfast, on a grassy terrace outside the hotel, overlooking the remains of a 12th-century hospital. Ulrika was shooing off the crows that brazenly stole entire slices of cheese from anyone foolish enough to leave their plate when they went inside for a coffee refill. But she took the time to tell me how she had come to own the oldest inn in Visby (its main building dates to the 1200s), a story that involved no previous hotel experience, a long distance relationship with a professional poker player, and some extremely good timing.

And she also told me how much the city’s history figures into why she loves it. “Even just cleaning a room here, or walking through the streets, you can feel the past,” she said. “And people here really care about tradition. Christmas, Midsummer’s Eve, Medieval Week–they take it really seriously.”

I learned just how seriously later that morning when I wandered into Christer Mattson’s glass blowing studio. He opened it in 1996, and today it is both workshop and shop, where he shapes and sells the delicate oil lamps, vases, and beer mugs that he crafts from recycled glass (also known as bottles) that he collects from the Black Arms pub down the street. When I entered, he was blowing a molten glob into a delicate, red-hot bubble before his assistant cut off the piece with a pair of scissors and placed what was now a perfectly formed lamp in the kiln for overnight annealing. I told him the piece was beautiful, but he told me it was too early to tell. “You have to wait until the next day to find out if you’ve made anything good.”

During the annual Medieval Week, all of Visby dresses in historic costumes as they go about their business. During his first year in the city, Czech glassblowers visited to demonstrate historic techniques. Learning from them, Christer became obsessed with the loops, knobs, bubbles and miniature sculptures—”even wild boar heads!”— they could create. It gave him inspiration for his own work, and since he was now using some of the techniques of a medieval glassblower, he figured he might as well join his fellow citizens and dress like one. So now, each year when the festival rolls around, he dons the robes and turban of a 14th-century craftsman who was as much alchemist as artisan. “It adds,” he said, “To the authentic medieval traces that the city already has.”

On the wall of his studio, I noticed a couple of baseball hats are for sale, embroidered with the number 1361. I was about to ask Christer what it meant, but then I remembered something else I had learned at the museum: in 1361 Gotland was invaded by the Danes, who fought the local population at the Battle of Visby, killing 1800 people, and bringing the whole island under the control of the Danish king Valdemar IV. To avoid being sacked, Visby agreed (in a manner not unreminiscent of certain companies attempting to placate certain other avaricious ruler) to “donate” a few literal barrels worth of gold and silver coins. And even so, the Danes still plundered the churches and monasteries.

The hats, I realized, were the Gotland version of ‘Never Forget.’

Which is something for a battle that took place nearly 700 years ago. But if that trauma was frozen in local collective memory, it may have something to do with the fact that, for Visby, it was basically all downhill from there. It never recovered economically or militarily, and thanks to some vicissitudes that included pirates with the excellent name of the Victual Brothers (fallback career: Americana band? Barbecue joint?), the city was eventually expelled from the Hanseatic League in the 1470s. When the Protestant Reformation rolled in some decades later, the remaining population didn’t even have the energy to raze the old Catholic churches: they just left them to decay.

And that, ironically, is why Visby is so beautiful today. During several centuries of unimportance, it was pretty much left as it was during its heyday, stone houses, churches, and all. Until Stockholmers in search of the perfect summer holiday discovered it and started buying up all the houses.

Today, plenty of Visbyites consider those vacationing mainlanders another invading force, even if they depend economically on Gotland’s status as Scandi Summer Central. But that hasn’t erased the memory of the older invasion. When Adam, a well-tanned Gotlander who spent all of his 30 years on the island and currently works for a car rental company, learned I lived in Denmark, he started right in. “You know that their children are the slowest to learn to talk, don’t you?,” he said. (I did know this, and have frequently deployed the same statistic myself in defense of my own pitiful skills in the language.)

“I take it you’re not a fan of the Danes?” I asked.

“Let’s just say there’s some history there,” Adam replied.

I ruminate a lot these days on how, a century or two from now, our descendants AI overlords are going to think about the era in which we currently find ourselves. Visby may give one answer.

Because Adam wasn’t referring to his own personal history; he was referring to Gotland’s. Rapid decline may guarantee some pretty streets; it may even mean your town stays intact enough to one day become an absolutely entrancing summer idyll. But like the hedgehogs who have been leaving their jaws around this island since at least the Stone Age, the trauma of it survives.

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The Addresses

Below, paid subscribers will find a list of the places where I stayed, ate, and shopped in Visby. But, a gentle reminder: wouldn’t it be more fun to find your own?

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I was walking along the river when I noticed them. Pressed into a corner of sidewalk across from the river were a pair of small footprints. Not childsize, mind you. But certainly not the footprints you would imagine of a man who looms in certain European nightmares like some kind of malevolent Yeti. Definitely not the footprints of the man who changed the course of history.

In the last issue of this newsletter, I wrote about Sarajevo’s still very present ghosts of the Bosnian War. But of course the city was also a crucible in another war, one that, for all the destruction of its successor, was far more devastating, and had far greater repercussions.

Those ghosts are there too. But like the discreet plaque that commemorates the footprints of Gavrilo Princip as he fired the shots that would kill Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophia, they are harder to see.

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Adem unwrapped the first of three chocolate bars that he had pulled from his backpack and, well-mannered child that he is, offered me a piece. It was barely 9 am in the morning, and we were dangling perilously in a gondola over neatly tended homes and vegetable gardens as it made its way up the Sarajevo mountainside, so I was not hungry. When he devoured all three bars in rapid succession, I suspected we were both grateful for the rejection.

Adem was 12 years old, and his English wasn’t nearly as good as he thought it was. But with the help of Google translate, we managed to keep the conversation going for the slow ride up the mountain. I asked him what he was going to do once we arrived, and he responded “sailing,” which surprised me since I didn’t know there was a lake up there. But then, I didn’t know much of anything about Sarajevo before I arrived there, except for the three events that most of us picked up in high school history or on 1990s television news: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the 1984 Winter Olympics, and, of course, the Bosnian war.

I asked him what he thought about the war. “I do not understand,” he replied, and I thought he meant he didn’t understand my question. But no, he shook his head impatiently at my misinterpretion. “I do not understand why there is war.”

Fair enough. I couldn’t understand how this lovely city could be the site of so much war either.

It had been an enlightening few days. Upon arrival, I had immediately run into trouble, because if you think you’re going to just la di dah your way into Sarajevo on a Wednesday night in June and find a hotel room, my friend, you have another thing coming.

The first eight or so hotels I tried were all full, and that included the glass-panelled tower I initially avoided because its interior looked scary in a 1978 kind of way but had to sheepishly return to when no other options appeared. Mystified, I asked the receptionist if there was some special event going on in the city, only to find him snippily mystified by the question. As in: what did you expect, you clueless tourist who shows up without a booking in high season in this obviously popular destination? (To learn how my accommodations saga “resolved” itself, see The Addresses section below.)

What draws all the visitors? Sarajevo has the feel of a mountain town, with alluringly crisp air, a burbling river running through its center, and lush green hillsides swaddling the spires, domes, and steeples that populate the streets. Not that long ago, it was the most multicultural of capitals, with a history that veered from Ottoman to Austro-Hungarian to Soviet to post-; and an ethnic and religious blend that included Bosniak Muslims; Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews; Orthodox Serbians and Catholic Croats.

I’d love to say that it was that complexity, Sarajevo’s former status as a veritable model of the multicultural city, that was drawing all the tourists today. But that, I think, would be a lie. Because as far as I could tell from my ambles through the narrow streets of Bascarsija—the old part of the city, which retains the feel, if not the quality of a bazaar— there are two general categories of tourists in Sarajevo, and neither of them are there for the Kumbayah vibes.

I don’t mean to be schematic, and indeed, I could see for myself that sometimes the two groups overlapped. Strolling through Bascarsija in the evening, for example, feeding the pigeons, laughing at the antics of the Turkish ice cream vendor: in those places, it was a mix of Saudis and Swedes, halter tops and burqas.

But in general terms, the divisions were pretty stark. There were the Middle Eastern tourists who come in part for Sarajevo’s mosques and Ottoman history, but perhaps more for the refreshing temperatures and– if the line of ladies crowding the aisles of Cosmetic Market at 9pm on a Saturday night are any indication—for the shopping.

And then there were the Europeans and Americans who, if the results of my constant eavesdropping were any indication, were almost uniformly there for the war. And not the Great War, in which of course Sarajevo also played a starring role (and which I’ll write about next time). They were there for the more recent trauma.

In case you need a refresher, the Bosnian war began in 1992 and was one of the conflicts during the breakup of Yugoslavia and pitted the mainly Serbian (and Orthodox) Yugoslavian army against (Catholic) Croats and (Muslim) Bosniaks. It included ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns on all sides, but was perpetrated with special brutality by the Serbs, whose atrocities seemed all the more horrific for being broadcast nightly on television just months after the European Union had been officially established. As the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo was hit especially hard, blockaded by the Serbian military for nearly four years–the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. When it was over, nearly 14,000 Sarajevans were dead.

I knew that this year marks the 30th anniversary since the Dayton Peace Agreement brought that war to an uneasy conclusion. What I didn’t know was just how present that war would still be.

I didn’t notice the ghosts at first. The low brick domes of the former bathhouses, the elegant façades of Austro-Hungarian mansions, the smoky scent of grilled meat billowing from the cevapci joints; the courtyards coated in graffiti hiding hookah bars; the row of crouching babushkas near the market selling fat bunches of elderflower; handknit socks, and little tubs of rose petals; the graduation parties with high school girls so glam they made me think I had taken a wrong turn over Austria and wandered into the Oscars pre-game: there was a lot to take in.

So it wasn’t until the following morning that I noticed the bullet holes and shell craters pockmarking a downtown apartment building. And once I had spotted them in one façade, I saw them everywhere. There were buildings that looked totally bombed out; others with just a light sprinkling of holes; in some blocks it seemed as though every third or fourth structure bore the scars.There were other kinds as well: the plaques along Sniper Alley or other once perilous streets commemorating the citizens gunned down there; the “Sarajevo Roses” in the sidewalks, painted red and fossilizing the shrapnel from exploding shells.

Later I would read that a weak economy and a gridlocked government had made funding the restoration of all those damaged buildings difficult. And like many places that have undergone unspeakable trauma, there was an ongoing debate over whether to commemorate or rebuild. But one other factor seemed undeniably to play a role in the presence of all those ghosts and scars. Sarajevo needs its Western tourists, and what Western tourists want, it seems, is war.

How else to explain the tables of bullet casings, some glued together into little toy tanks and all of them imported from China, for sale in the souvenir shops of Bascarsija. Or the placards erected in the square across the river from city hall, with large-scale black and white photos whose accompanying texts–written in English–gave eyewitness accounts of the most baroque atrocities? Or the proliferation of trauma galleries: The Siege of Sarajevo museum; the War Childhood museum; and the Crimes Against Humanity museum, which is not to be confused with the Genocide Gallery, which at the time was very prominently advertising its “special” exhibit on the Srebrenica massacre? All of which, as far as I could tell from their brochures, are rather sparsely and haphazardly curated and all of which, more to the point, are privately owned. Someone even told me that there was a guy who ran a hostel out of his house where, for the equivalent of 20 euros, the “guest” could have the experience of spending the night in a makeshift bunker, complete with hardtack rations and, thanks to a looping soundtrack, the noise of artillery fire just outside the door. But when I finally tracked down the house where it was located, there was no longer any hint of accommodations, just a sign warning it was private property.

Every tour guide I passed who was speaking a language I could understand, from the young man gesticulating to his Italian flock as they descended from a bus near the Latin bridge to the severe-looking woman noting a plaque on a downtown shopping street commemorating a shooting to a posh British couple to the curly blonde explaining what a sniper was her Spanish troops to the utterly charming woman who interrupted her discourse on how to make Bosnian coffee to point out a Sarajevo rose to a boatload of American cruise passengers, was feeding the impulse.

“Of course, we want people to understand what happened,” a security guard named Saumir told me. “But if you ask me, it’s too much. War, war, war, all the time war.“

Exactly. At breakfast one morning I listened to an Australian woman tell her friend how Bosnia felt like a “Third World country–you can see the trauma.” At dinner another night, I overheard an older American man—who I at first took for a spy, then for a diplomat, before finally realizing he was just an professor of International Relations—explain at length to two younger colleagues how “US complacency was misinterpreted as the will for Yugoslavia to fall apart.”

I went to one semi-public (the docent explained that the same ethnically divided government that couldn’t agree on paying for building restorations also couldn’t agree on heritage funding) museum that included a half-hearted installation on the war. But otherwise, I couldn’t bring myself to pay someone to capitalize on the trauma.

Besides, it’s not like Sarajevo needs anyone to invent memorials to that conflict. One day, as I headed on a long walk up the hill to try a restaurant a waiter in another place had recommended, I came to a cemetery, where each grave was marked with a white engraved post. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, stretching in long rows, and although the birthdates on each pillar varied significantly, the death dates did not: every single one fell between 1992 and 1996.

As the road climbed, I passed more cemeteries. One was overgrown, with weeds sprouting among the roses. Another was just for women. A third seemed more like a repurposed backyard than a formal cemetery. In all of them, the gravestones bore those same final dates. I’m not sure what else you need to know.

When I finally and sweatily reached the restaurant, I was ushered upstairs to a pretty, garden-like dining room overlooking the city. The place was empty except for one other table containing a slick-haired man speaking loudly into his phone about deliveries to Zagreb, and the two women with very long nails who accompanied him. So the server, Nina, had time to talk with me.

Having picked up a few Slavic-sounding words from the other table, I asked her if Bosnians today still learned Serbo-Croatian along with Bosniak; I think I expected a Danish-Swedish situation where the languages are technically separate but the two groups can still understand each other. But Nina scoffed. “The nationalists–the Serbs–want you to believe that they’re different languages. But they are the same,” she said heatedly. “In some ways, I wish Yugoslavia hadn’t collapsed because we are the same. We speak the same language. You look at our DNA, we are the same people. It’s only the religions that are different.”

She was just getting started. “I’m proud to come from a place that has so many cultures. I’m proud that during the Second World War, Muslim women veiled their Jewish neighbors to disguise and protect them. We should celebrate that!” And noting that Serbia still had designs on Kosovo, which it had once captured for the Ottoman Empire, she scoffed again. “Who cares what happened 500 years ago? Or 30 years ago? We should look ahead.”

Which brought us, naturally, back to the war. Nina was 7 when it broke out, and said she remembers all of it. “But I think we all have PTSD.” A PTSD that never heals, she added, because the past is kept in everyone’s faces. “It’s what interests tourists,” she said. “And what makes money.”

Nina’s words were in my head on that gondola ride. I had taken it because on my first day someone had recommended the hiking trails at the top of the mountain, and I was looking forward to a morning out in nature. But as we climbed up, the patches of white–-one cemetery after the other–came multiplyingly into view. I wanted to know what someone born well after the conflict ended thought about it. And so I asked my question.

I had taken Adem’s reply on not understanding to be the answer of a budding young sage. But just as the gondola neared the top, he pointed to the ruins of a stone house down below, on the edge of a forest. “It belonged to a Serb,” he said. “They burned it. I think.”

I got the distinct feeling he was trying to placate me, offering this bit of information as obligingly as he had offered the chocolate bar. It made me queasy, and I was relieved to disembark, and start wandering in the fresh air. Not far down the trail, I came across the bobsled track–long abandoned and covered in graffiti–that had been used in the Olympics and now lay crumbling in the forest, like a ruin from an ancient civilization. One more piece of Sarajevo frozen in the past.

It put me in a melancholy mood. But as I returned to the gondola station, I ran into Adem again. He was standing by a bench on which he had set up a row of powdered drink canisters. Something clicked: it wasn’t sailing he was doing up there; it was selling.

I ordered a peach-flavored cup of sugar water, paid him two marka, and felt better for knowing that for one entrepreneurial 12-year-old in Sarajevo, at least, the future seemed full of possibility.

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The Addresses

Below, paid subscribers will find a list of the places where we ate, drank, and stayed in Sarajevo. But, a gentle reminder: wouldn’t it be more fun to find your own?

Read more

The line was half a block long. Given the hour, my first thought was that this was a bunch of tourists waiting for whatever the Thessaloniki equivalent of an Antico Vinaio panino or a Juno cardamom bun is. But on closer inspection, there didn’t seem to be any food on offer. Peering through the window, I could see an old-fashioned pharmacy-style counter, and behind it, shelves of mysterious metal flasks, each the size of a Stanley cup, and identical except for the numbers on their labels. Most astonishing of all, everyone in the queue seemed to be Greek.

I am not normally a shopper when I travel. Once upon a time, I had this idea that I would grow into the the kind of cosmopolitan citizen of the world who furnishes her home with the artful, well-curated treasures she has picked up from her global wanderings: carpets from Morocco; handcarved end tables from Uzbekistan; bed linens from France, tea pots from Japan. But it turns out that shopping stresses me out, and that I have the interior design sense that God gave a meerkat. Also, I hate to schlep.

So I don’t usually buy souvenirs. But there was something about Thessaloniki that had me reaching for my wallet on several occasions. There was the kilo-bag of pistachios that were also triggered by a line outside the shop (the Thessaloniki equivalent of a Juno cardamom bun? Nuts). There was that guidebook to the city that I mentioned in my last post, and that wonderful set of postcards depicting The Greek Monsters.

Once I had met up with Mary Alice and Max, and we had we giggled our way through a candle shop that sold not only the ornamented but otherwise normal candles that are used in Easter celebrations, but had an entire wall plus a picnic display of ones made to look like lamb chops, turkey legs, and freddo coffees, I totally caved there too. Do not ask me what I plan to do with a candle that looks for all the world like a freshly grilled stick of souvlaki. It did, however, come very nicely wrapped.

I can’t really explain this sudden spree of souvenir buying because, as I also may have mentioned, Thessaloniki was not a city that I was especially keen on remembering. But that evening, when the three of us passed the shop filled with mysterious flasks that I had stumbled on that morning, it was clear I wasn’t done yet.

It was after dark, but the line was even longer than it had been earlier in the day. What could have all those people queuing up?, I wondered. Was there cut-rate Ozempic hiding in those mysterious bottles? Tickets to Oasis’s Wembley show?

We asked a trio of boys waiting in line. They were 17, and the one that answered had braces on his teeth. “Perfume,” he said.

“Really?” I said, gesturing to a queue that stretched around the corner. “All this for perfume?”

“It smells very good,” he said.

It was a balmy Friday night in Greece’s second largest city and teenage boys were lining up to buy perfume because it smelled good. What sorcery was this?

I did not need perfume, and I definitely did not want to wait in that line. But the sight of all those eager customers made me think that the scents must be extraordinary. I imagined the parfumiers inside meticulously blending rare essences into formulae that had probably been passed down from Aristotle himself. I imagined an impossible range of aromas, each one derived from exotic plants probably hand-picked before sunrise by blind monks on nearby Mount Athos. I imagined customized fragrances concocted by the sage alchemists inside to perfectly express the soul of their wearer. I decided to return the next morning, when the shop opened and the lines would surely be shorter.

At 9am, there was no line at all, just a dozen or so of those young alchemists dressed in black. As we entered the atelier, I pulled out my phone to take a photo, but was politely reprimanded; that cameras weren’t allowed seemed entirely reasonable for a place that dealt in alchemy. I approached one attendant, and learned that her name was Lisa too, which I took as a good sign for someone who was about to concoct the perfume that would best express my deepest self.

She asked what aromas I liked and I started by mentioning oud, which smells delicious, despite being a kind of wood produced when a certain kind of tree becomes infected with mold.

I was just getting started, having planned to mention several more aromas that I favor. But Lisa was already looking something up in the big catalogues they kept under the counter. She jotted down a number on a slip of paper and disappeared for a few minutes. When she returned, she held one of those mysterious metal flasks. She slipped a tester strip into the bottle, and handed it to me to smell.

“Oud,” she said. “By Tom Ford.”

The scales fell from my nose. The shop was not some kind of alchemical atelier staffed by expert parfumiers who drew upon a vast and enigmatic library of exotic oils and essences. It was a store that sold knockoffs of established perfume brands, an emporium of scented dupes; a fugazi olfactory factory.

It also, it turned out, sold individual oils; Mary Alice took home a lovely rose scent. And probably you could have them mix something personal according to your specifications; on this point Lisa wasn’t too clear, having only started working at the shop that week. But most customers just told them the brand they wanted to copy. I bought a small vial of knockoff Oud by Tom Ford, a scent I admittedly love and have never before purchased because it is so expensive.

This one cost me 7 euros. And it reminds me of Thessaloniki every time I wear it.

What about you? Do you buy souvenirs when you travel? Let me hear your trinket stories in the comments.