Appetite Suppressant

The 3 words, the ones we cannot live without when in any significant relationship, weren't uttered from my mother until I was about 30, I think. I'd imagined I would be more shocked than I was when I did finally hear them. I'm convinced she tried this sentence out on me as a homework assignment from one of her English as a second language courses. I thought she'd get more use out of it than one of the words they were teaching her: roundabout. We don't have roundabouts in Canada. But boy, while in England, did I marvel at how deft the people maneuvered their way around those things. I forgave her teacher for creating a lesson plan around an object my mother would more than likely never use, only by virtue of teaching her how to verbally express a good feeling.

Taking the back of my hand, sliding it up from the base of Fatty's jaw to upper cheek region...

The Comrade: You know what that is?
Fatty: What?

That was how my mother expressed love before entering that class. The other non-verbal way she expressed love was by plying me with food. Somewhere between my mother and the path I've chosen, I've learned that food = love and the removal of ready food = abandon. Goddamned monkey brain.

Now, no matter where I go, be it cottaging, camping, vacationing or working out of house for over a 12 hour period, there is a strange response which flashes its impulse from the nucleus of my simian brain: I don't know when I'll eat again. Panic, panic... I have to eat something now! I could placed in a foreign environment where anything could happen, really. Locusts could swarm in, laying eggs all over my packed picnic basket of assorted meats and cheeses. With one bite of gorgonzola, incubated in active bacterium, I could then be host, sustaining life of a new breed of organism - some biological hazard which looks like a humanoid/crustacean cross with giant, half-cocked robotic grasshopper legs. The scourge would eat like Jared before he discovered Subway, destroy/devouring everything in its banquet wake.

Hm. Seems like the Amsterdam hash has had some residual effects.

As an off-shoot, a more forgiving fact while in foreign lands, is the urgency I have to explore certain culinary phenomena.

Really? You take the lining of a creature's stomach and create soup with it?
This I will say yes to.
Are you sure this is the national dish? (Anything)
Again, yes please.
Ack (the ex-husband/best friend): Hey! There's pig's knee on the menu!
Occasionally a line is drawn.

For me, eating a nation's indigenous dish feels much like receiving communion. This is the body and blood of, well, the land. With each swallow, I am less Hawaiian shirt wearing, zinc applied (on olfactory receptor bridge) or Canon decorated. I hate feeling like a tourist.

No matter how effusive, charming or inquisitive one is, in most parts of the world tourists aren't truly embraced. I'm not thinking of Amsterdam when I say this, because of all the places I've visited in this world, I've never seen this before:

Stopping on a corner for exactly 4 seconds, Fatty and I looked up and to the left once and then to each other.
... Out of the shadows in Amsterdam's Leidseplein District stepped

Random Helpful Amsterdamian: [whose cape was at the cleaners] I am a resident! May I be of assistance?!

This or a variation of this happened more times than I can count. It became almost freakish.

At home I am a practicing ambassador of my city. This was something I learned the importance of years ago while solo trekking in Costa Rica.

About to mount my rented 250cc scooter, I was hand-drawn a map of the region by an emigré (ex-pat); a treasure map showing marvels reserved only for locals. Travelling at 110km with only a sundress on, I caught flies in my teeth that day from smiling so much. This was the trip where I learned how pineapples grow.

Travellers will remember a place not so much from the experience of the land, though this one was laden with experience, as from the interaction of its people. Remembrance good and bad.

Visiting Prague 6 years ago with Ack, the then husband, now ex-husband/best friend:

The Comrade: I don't think they like me.
Ack: Why do you say that?
The Comrade: From all the hate shooting from their eyes.
Ack: You're just imagining it.

Years ago I nearly pursued post production sound editing for film as a career choice. I love sound. Every single sound you hear in a movie has been layered and inserted by no less than 3 different sound editors. When a park scene is shot, a reverberating bounce sound is perfectly synched to its companion basketball dribbling in the foreground. It's inserted along with traffic noise, the sound of a bunch of 6 year olds playing tag and the footsteps of the hero guy just about to step into frame. All of these separate and layered sounds are found in sound libraries. They're as intricate and vast as the myriad colours detectable by the eye. They're all layered together rather painterly.

What I learned in this process was that every city has a unique sound. New York sounds very different from San Francisco which sounds very different from Venice which sounds completely unlike Toronto. What I discovered travelling this time was that every city left me with a different feeling. Amsterdam left me strangely aroused.

Amsterdam is notorious for its permissiveness. Visitors go for the drugs, for their Red Light District. I found the former refreshing and responsibly used on the most part. The latter was a bit lurid for this prude's taste: window shopping for human flesh fantasy. A glint of aureola playing peekaboo behind neoprene. Bathed in black light, the real mannequins' smiles were niet-menselijk. But still they beckoned with their eyes, their smiles, a single vermillion talon. Some would enter. The velvet curtain would coyly close, reading as a cross between ultimate danger and promise of a satisfied customer. The cold white tiled room could be used by a dentist in the daytime. Plaque, or any other self-produced protein, receiving the same disinfectant hosing at the end of business day, after the last panting customer exited and the Open sign flipped to Closed by a soft, manicured hand.

It was all above board. And that's alright.

But it was what I didn't know about Amsterdam prior to going that probably led to its arousement in me.

Everyone rides bicycles. I don't mean hepped up mountain bikes or hybrids. They ride heavy, upright, beautiful town riders. All of them. They are not unique from each other, though they are unique to the place. Single professionals in all age brackets to or from work, on their way to to the ballet. Families of 4 on a single 2 wheeled, non-motorised vehicle; children on handlebars, on crossbars, on after-market footrests positioned just above derailleurs. No man, woman nor child wore a single helmet. They know that concrete is the ultimate teacher.

I saw a kid wipe out. The mother stood there watching for a second. Waiting for the lesson to sink into the child. She then crouched down, hugged her little one and when the tears subsided she explained where her daughter made the misjudgment. And she got right back on her bike, still brave, but a little wiser. I loved the parenting style there.

When I was in Prague this time I saw a family of Japanese tourists. In Prague's core there is no concrete. There is only cobblestone. Cobblestone is like a con-artist. It's a no good teacher. It's too deliberate in its shiftiness. A little girl was holding a plastic shopping bag, one that nearly grazed the ground when she walked upright. She tripped on the cobblestone, wiping out. A shock even to a spectator. Her father walked away from her. She moved in a slow motion as only wounded children do. The only motion in regular speed was the screwed up expression of pained horror on her face. Her mother stepped in, crouched down in front of her daughter and hugged her own knees. The girl, in her 4 years of existence, had learned that her mother's arms made meals, carried loads of laundry, covered her own eyes when napping, but never did they embrace to console. The little girl had to go around and hug her mother from behind; to console herself.

And I wondered why Japan as a nation has so many suicides.

10s of millions of visitors a year.
Prague.
A more beautiful Baroque city one might never see.
The city of 100 steeples
And thousands of ghosts.

I never thought I'd return to the Czech Republic.

Though their beer was exemplary, their food was entirely beige. Their city was beautiful, but their people wore krabice (a Czech word for box-mouth, or an expression-free zone coupled with a look of distain in their eyes). 6 years ago they had 2 separate pricing systems: one for locals and one for tourists.

I didn't think that was fair.

But Fatty, the love of my life, has never been there. And Ack was visiting his mother, whom I'm quite fond of (particularly since she's no longer my mother-in-law). She owns property in the countryside.

I am no polygot by any stretch of the imagination. Ask my mother. Because of my unique route, acknowledging finally that food is the essence of life, the expression of love, I can be placed in most parts of the world and never grow hungry. I speak restaurantese. Talents of any modicum of multi-linguistics have only surfaced from my fierce survival instinct. That and my gift of mimicry.

Much to his annoyance coupled with a secret twinge of delight, I can do impersonations of Ack's entire family. Including Ack.

Wonderful things can happen when you're playing or gently poking fun of your best friend and his family. It took me my return to the Czech Republic to discover that over the better part of 10 years, from sheer poking fun, I'd actually picked up enough of the Czech language to not only prevent myself or anyone I was with from starving, but also to A) explain to a hotel waiter that Fatty had too many Slivovice (a national drink consumed in shots) the night prior to come down for breakfast and B) make a Customs Officer do a double take, asking (in Czech), "What the hell were they teaching in Canadian schools?"

After a most luxuriant bus ride, if that's not an oxymoron, from the Czech countryside to Prague proper, I had tucked a recovering aforementioned hungover Fatty into a king sized bed and took to cobblestone streets alone. To visit:The Museum of Communism.




I expected to see kitschy propaganda posters,
Giant Lenins and Stalins.
I wasn't disappointed.
I wasn't really surprised to see field workers depicted as proud, flag waving, fierce bronze casts alongside soldiers and political leaders.
I meandered into the darkened room where, decorated with the emblematic hammer and sickle, a video portion of the years preceding the Velvet Revolution played on a loop.

Regime after regime taking over their land.
Occupying Prague's castle, a pensive Hitler gazed upon his new land.
Where no money remained for the People to eat, sustaining life,
Funds were allocated for a bronze statue of Stalin destined for a local park.
Which no longer exists.
Which neither Stalin nor the designer saw upon completion.
The former died 1.5 years prior.
The latter committed suicide.

When I was teasing my hair in the 80's
A young student set himself on fire in Good King Wenceslaus' Square.
He ended his own life for the freedom of his People.

From his ashes germinated the Velvet Revolution,
A peaceful demonstration
Which reached a half million in demonstrators.

The tanks designed for enemies
Pointed at their own People.
The military positioned
For Your Protection™
Poised to rid you of surplus supplies
Like life.

The location which I forfeited 5 years of vegetarianism, hunkering down on street dog, was visited again after I left that museum. Where there now exist 4* hotels, sklo (glass) shops and brasseries, tanks rolled. Human rights and life were beaten out of them. Blood still binds their cobblestone like mortar.

I didn't know.

I was a tourist.

We're the locust scum. We are. We come to lands and for an indefinite period of time we take over their streets. With any number of cohorts, we subject locals to customs which may or may not be honed from our respective homes, or worse, inflict them with behaviours we wouldn't dare perform at home.

The weekend we were in Prague, a multitude of Dutch tourists clad in inmate orange coveralls, exited planes and took to the streets. Holland was playing the Czech Republic in an important soccer match. The helpful people we'd experienced in Amsterdam charged, en masse, as Agent Orange.

[Interesting to note, Agent Orange was manufactured by the Czechs]

They took to their streets in mob fashion. Sang their own nation's songs. They came to win. They came to goose their women. And they went home to parade their booty.

But they know their economy needs us, so they put up with the shenanigans.

The last time I remember feeling as much reverence was a practiced one from being in a House of the Lord. This time I was full from the experience. This time I was let in on a secret; a horrible, horrible secret that they don't want to talk about anymore. They want to forget the whole thing ever existed.

But they can't let it pass.

What would it be like if they swept the Holocaust under the rug?

I am happy to have returned to have seen the krabice morph into an easier smile. To see the People less fearful of being taken over by a new regime. To be inquisitive of other cultures. To finally feel free enough to ask questions. To talk to others unfettered by the possibility of being snitched on, because at one time that was their civic duty. Rats were rewarded for their rodent behaviour.

Mostly I learned to be a better visitor. To treat each place I visit reverently. To not be so self-absorbed because sometimes it's got nothing to do with me. Sometimes a nation is so haunted by its ghosts they seep through cracks in cobblestones to remind the very, very fortunate.