Travel Journal Day 3
Live Journal 29 November 2015- yes, posted 3 days late. That's on-the-road connectivity for you.
Live Journal 29 November 2015
Travel Journal Day 3
Travel journals are supposed to start on Day 1, right? But Day 1 was the tedious bit: trans-Atlantic flying has nothing to recommend it, especially when it's trans-continental too. Mr Gloriana is battling an increasing dread of flying, so we indulge in Premium Economy on the grounds that anything which makes him more comfortable is worth doing. Which, of course, gives you the leg room you had thirty years ago, but alas on British Airways not quite the width I'd like. Yet more incentive for losing weight :(
I am also quite happy to skip over day 2, which was a day marked by the lack of sleep from Day 1, combined with navigating three different types of train across London and to Paris with heavy bags (we are on our way down to Spain by train, because see fear of flying, above). There's nothing like 36 hours without sleep to add a layer of rust to any French I had left, but we coped. We even found a tiny kebab house near our unassuming but quiet hotel to get a much-needed food injection at 10pm at night. The proprietor was very friendly and insisted on niceties like laying down paper place settings and napkins on the formica table, and serving tiny glass cups of a mint tea digestif; but it was still a bit galling to pass closed cafes with chalkboard menus advertising lapin chasseur (hunter-style rabbit, we think) and have to settle for doner kebab. Gyros, to the Americans amongst you.
The other two things that struck me - the other three things that struck me, not as novelties since I've experienced them all before, but still; are: how much smoking there still is (I swear, every second person outside Kings Cross was puffing away; I am *so* used to the Californian norm of no cigarettes in any public space); how old things are (not so much the Eurostar terminal - though it is in a lovely red-brick Victorian edifice revamped for the purpose - as the Gard de Nord in Paris where just walking down the platform we passed huge stone columns that looked as if they'd been stolen from a medieval cathedral somewhere to hold up the horrible industrial roof); and how black the average Londoner and especially Parisian is. Where I live in the Bay Area is staggeringly multi-cultural, probably the most racially mixed environment I've ever lived in including London. But it is white, east Asian, Indian and Latino: African and Arabic ethnicities are much rarer. Every second person in the Paris metro had a migrant parent one or two generations away, usually from Africa north or south.
Me, I'm all for the free movement of labour. It would be incredibly hypocritical of me not to be, having moved countries (and continents) twice in my life; who would I be to say that someone poorer or of a different skin colour should be denied the access I have had to new opportunities and a new way of living? But it's also a genuinely-held political belief of mine. Locking people into a single land mass by virtue of what passport they hold is a form of imprisonment that can come close to slavery, or even murder (consider the 10% of homosexuals in Uganda and Nigeria, for example). Letting them free can unleash productive potential otherwise frittered away in inefficient economies; and, via the remittances those migrants send home, it's the most important form of income redistribution from the rich world to the poor, outweighing either government aid or direct investment. Those people on the Metro are supporting entire families back in Somalia, Syria and Congo.
It's also sad that some of the countries who most need that new, young blood are the most resistant to it. Japan, whose population is due to drop by twenty million in the next thirty odd years - that's one generation - is the most obvious of these; but another interesting area is central and Eastern Europe, especially rural areas and smaller towns. There, the younger generations are being hollowed out by lower birthrates but also by migration of the young, educated and fertile to places that will give them a higher standard of living: cities, especially in the west. Angela Merkel's politically bold decision to welcome Syrian refugees might, in another generation, prevent Germany suffering quite the slow strangulation that Japan has been experiencing for the last two decades. Places like Bulgaria, Romania and Poland (the latter of whose population has picked up en masse to provide plumbing and fruit-picking service to Britain) need new young people desperately, but are less culturally capable of absorbing them.
It was interesting listening to some of the analysis on NPR of quite why the Syrian refugee crisis is happening now. The basic upshot was: for the last few years Syrians have fled the war by moving into countries in the Middle East, like the Gulf states, which will offer them work but not citizenship. There was always the hope of being able to go back home, a wad of cash in hand for a house or a business. But now that it is increasingly clear that Syria might no longer be an inhabitable country - that between IS and Assad there may no longer be a space left to pursue an ordinary life - those temporary migrants are seeking permanent homes in a host country to which they can bring their families, and settle for generations. That's relatively rare amongst migrants: most people want, in the end, to go back home, for all the fear-mongering amongst nativist/nationalist groups about being racially overrun. Yes, their sudden movement in such large numbers is dislocating and puts stress on the receiving countries' mechanisms for acceptance and integration. But the end result could be such a boon for all concerned, that it is sad to see countries like the US and the UK be so apathetic in their response.
I am particularly reminded of a panel at the Worldcon in Denver in ... 2008? It was about the world population crisis, and I was astounded to hear a mass of science fiction fans - supposedly forward-looking, supposedly on top of current trends - genuinely fixated on the terrors of the next billion or so to be added to the world's population.
Yet that fate is already written, and is also about to be eclipsed. The truth about population is that our current reality was determined thirty, even fifty years ago; and that the biggest challenge of the next thirty years is our aging and population decline; which is inevitable, even if every woman in the developed world today decided she wanted ten children (and I leave you to judge the likelihood of that). Like the elves, we will diminish and go into the west.
This is true of every continent except Africa; true in the two countries, India and China, which we think of as teeming with people, and which account for nearly half the world's population between them. China will be one of the first countries to have an aging population without reaching developed-world standards of living. India is following fast behind; Russia is probably only held back from preceding it by the plummeting levels of male life expectancy there in the nineties and noughties. How to care for all these elderly people (of which I will be one)? How to sustain current living standards, much less increase them, when there are fewer workers to be productive? How to balance the demands of the elderly against the needs of the generation about to be born? At least we are talking about global warming. If we were discussing what's going to happen after that last extra billion or so are added to the world population, we might be more eager to grab some of those Syrian refugees currently going cheap.
Back off the soapbox: Travelling Day 3
So having had an entire five hours of blessed sleep (except for poor Mr Gloriana who, after passing out like a new-born babe, woke up at three am and stayed up for an hour), we are now on the TGV from Paris to Barcelona, where we will pick up a slower train down to Cordoba. It's odd how going at two hundred plus miles an hour feels just like the usual crawl of a slower-paced train: it was only passing freeways and realising we were easily outpacing the cars doing 70-80mph that our speed registered. We have an upstairs seat (the TGV has two stories), and the first miles south of Paris felt very British: lots of low rolling fields all bright green, and only the cattle white rather than a British brown. We set out just before dawn, and there were patches of mist still gathered from the night.
But now we have reached the Mediterranian coast - the sea is to our left, calm and quite blue now that we have lost the clouds - and the train is slowing. The vegetation is a mixture of a darker green and autumn yellows, scrubbier and drier - more Californian, ironically. By the time we get down to Cordoba, we will almost be in Socal :):) I remember suddenly have a sharp memory, back in the UK after our first migration to California, of climbing a hill overlooking a bay, with white houses behind us covered in bougainvillia. I was desperately searching to work out where in Spain I was remembering, from the three trips we had taken to the south there, and wondering whether I had actually dreamt the place, when I finally realised it was from a day trip to Catalina Island, just off the coast of LA.
I would give you pictures, but the train windows aren't the best to photograph through. Shame, because we are now passing flat sea inlets, and I have seen my first wild flamingoes. Three sets of them, actually. I think we are still well west of the Camargue, where the huge flocks over-summer in southern France, but there are lakes even in the centre of Spain where they nest. Flamingoes are such unlikely things. The zoo we would visit as kids, at the botanical gardens in Kingston, had a pond with a small flock of them: less exotic than the tiger, but fascinating to a child, nonetheless.
So the idea is to try and keep this journal up over the next few couple of weeks, before we go back to England and the social whirl there. After a day in Cordoba, we are spending six nights in a finca: a farmhouse up in the hills north of Malaga. This is all in the nature of revisiting our honeymoon, when we last went to Cordoba and had a house way up in the hills afterwards. This one should be even more isolated: 4km down a dirt track, and surrounded by almond fields. If it rains, as seems increasingly the case, I might spend the days actually sitting around reading and drawing, rather than trying to negotiate the track back and wearing ourselves out sightseeing. You know, have an actual holiday, not just travel.