Guest Blog Post: August in Europe by Christian Talbot
Documented and written by Christian Talbot
This august I went to Europe. This experience was entirely new.
London is dirty, expensive, strange, and more beautiful than any city I’ve spent considerable time in up to this point. I experience a city visually through the built environment, accompanied by the sound.
Arriving at Bond St station, I had not walked 20 feet before pulling my mother’s old Nikon from my carry-on to capture the unblemished 17thcentury architecture of Mayfair. Walking around New York can be intimidating – steal and glass monoliths of capitalism loom hundreds of feet above you reminding you of the insignificance we all share. Walking in London is the opposite - careful brick soldiering wrapped in white cement with troughs of color spilling out of every window, high enough to be unblemished from the street traffic, low enough to see the change in color of each daffodil pedal. Every Building Is unique, with stories untold behind the brick façade. Upper Brook St is a bookshelf of clay bound biographies with grey embossed lettering from 200-2000 upon the spine.
Making my way to bond street, I felt transported back to America: every square inch of storefront plastered with goods and advertisements, fluorescent yellows and blues, the most unnatural colors illuminating LED signs that hummed like a baseline to a beat of a track with lyrics coming in the form of conversation in different languages.
Walking around Soho I felt the energy of upstart business’ yearning for the day's first customer. The attention to detail in the clothing is inspiring. Particularly the textiles and materials. Every shirt is framed and measured to fit a specific build or body type. The colors are natural. It’s a color palette you’d find in your grandfather's garden in May, not on a default adobe color swatch. It's expensive. Each storefront attempts to stand out and tell a different story, but instead of LED screens with signature athletes donning the latest Nike soccer boot in grayscale, its racks of products that aim to tell the story themselves, to invite the customer in to listen. It's honest.
The cobblestone is black, worn down to a smooth shimmer with cigarette butts and dross outlining the hand cut shapes of each stone. The roads curve and bend, preventing me from seeing from one end to the other. Some might feel uncomfortable in the manmade maze, I find it refreshing to not know exactly what you’ll stumble upon. Rather than taking you to a dead end, taking a wrong turn takes you down a new path with new opportunities, new sights, and new sounds.
The nightlife is a mix between the most formal of affairs, and a casual meetup at a local pub. Floral dresses, silk tuxedos, designer handbags, boutique looks last seen on the runway, corporate uniforms, they all clashed on the sidewalk of any one of the thousand pubs that lined the streets of London. Rather than waiting in lines to pay cover and order vodka sodas for $20, patrons waited patiently, laughed deeply, spoke softly, and embraced one another as if it was a reunion that came all too rarely. The best part of all this is that I knew it was just another evening. It’s as if the plan was actually that simple - enjoy each other’s company.
Leaving London I felt like I barely scratched the surface of what the city had to offer. Covering only a couple of the museums, most of the major tourist attractions, and only a fraction of the parks, I could come back and have an entirely different experience. My takeaway was that the city was like a teenager's messy room: full of character and life, full of passion and curiosity, but messy all the same, anxiety inducing to some. It’s a place that spoke to me in an echo. I can faintly understand what it is, but it's hard to tell what it once was, or what it will become. I am optimistic.
Nice presented something different. So much beauty to discover here, built and natural, the 2 worlds synchronize to deliver a feast for the senses. Every morning was spent plunging into the Mediterranean. The clearest water I’ve ever seen, a blue hue I will not soon forget. With basically no agenda, our experience would be what we would make of it. It would be entirely intentional, and unintentional.
A day trip to the mountain village Eze, felt like a breath of fresh air, a city locked in time that I truly don’t know whether or not had electricity. There's very rare moments in life when you can experience something new unlike anything you’ve ever done or seen before, and feel like you aren’t being sold anything. Like you don’t need a ticket to attend. In Eze, beauty came for free. There were no vendors, tickets, or tours. Walking around a city from the 13th century that had been relatively maintained in its original form with minor changes to make it more habitable was something I will always remember.
Later that evening, a group of Germans invited us to a club - we laughed, we danced, we sang, we discovered who could drink a pint faster, and said our farewells in the early hours of the morning as the night wound down. Special mention to the Snow castles Silk bandana by Pirate Worldwide – by far the most amount of compliments I’ve ever received on any piece of fashion.
The next evening we had dinner with 3 women we had met the evening prior. Hailing from different countries around Europe, I predicted finding common ground and shared experiences could be difficult. This is difficult in Chicago where i've lived the majority of my life, how could it be easier here? I was wrong. Conversations about things that truly matter in life, with people you care about can oftentimes be the best parts of the journey we are all on. These things aren’t politics - They aren’t the parley you’ve cooked up for Sunday football - They aren’t the latest gossip from so and so’s friend who’s engagement just got called off because something wasn’t done correctly. Discussions of happiness and the pursuit of passions, music taste, vocations, regrets, triumphs and heartbreaks, art, the tangible goodness in life. The parts that make you feel. The idiosyncrasies, as Robin Williams would put it. The parts that make the pendulum of life swing so far right and equally left, the good and bad. The pendulum swung right for the next few days in Nice.
In a world where we are so easily connected and contacted, goodbyes are still weird. Will you see someone in a day, in an hour, in a week, in a year, in a lifetime? We all are on the carousel of life, but each person’s ring moves at a different speed, and only rarely do we pass by one another. How will you choose to spend the moments of overlap - Face down in an endless feed of life updates from people you barely know, or embracing the moment and feeling everything each of these moments have to offer? Learning something about someone, and maybe more importantly, about yourself? Or idly watching life pass you by while you wait for the next thing to happen to you.
I spent the return flight journaling, gathering my thoughts and trying to hold on to the high. Writing down memories of nights out, dinners with dishes I couldn’t pronounce, songs I heard at bars or clubs (special mention to Romain Garcia, the soundtrack to the trip), names to faces I’d likely never see again, trying to hold onto everything so tightly, thinking somehow it wouldn’t slip away like all memories do. But because of this I’ve learned what life can be. Flattening the curve of life is no way to live - pull the veil back, experience the color, engage in the weirdness. Allow things to happen to you that you didn’t expect. Fuck an agenda. Feel everything, observe everything, try everything, listen to the dialects, ask for advice. When you get the opportunity to travel like this, take it.
- PIRATE