Traveling

[Lucky]

Did the author get this right? Have you felt this in a foreign city that seems to have charms your hometown does not?

"I waited on a park bench under the shades of some trees in the nearby Blahtpark, just a harmless-looking tourist taking in the sights and sounds and smells, savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes from solitary sojourns in strange lands, where all the everyday things seem subtly wondrous and different and new, where there's no one to please or disappoint or explain to, or where the traveler finds himself suspended between the beguilement of the comforts he left behind, and the allure of an imaginary future he senses but knows he can never really have."

[lookin]

Did the author get this right? Have you felt this in a foreign city that seems to have charms your hometown does not?

Indeed he did, inspiring this recollection from my own modest travels.

"I settled down on a park bench next to the late-night riverwalk cafe near the Chain Bridge on the Pest side of the Danube gazing toward the nearly hidden benches where a dozen Romanian hustlers sat trying to look available but not too available, just a lubricious rather mature American tourist leering at the tight fit of their blue jeans and smelling the cheap Russian cigarette smoke wafting towards me, feeling below my belt the twin bulges of lust in the front and forints in the rear heralding the freedom that is sure to come from striking up a strange conversation in a strange land, looking forward to burying my face between sequential pairs of buttocks where yesterday's shower is but a distant memory and only a pink musky ripeness remains, where it taint nobody's business if I do, and where the lascivious wanderer finds himself temporarily relieved of the astronomical prices he paid for half the indulgence little more than a day ago, eager to fulfill the promise of an exceptionally salacious fortnight awaiting him amidst the outskirts of the former Soviet bloc and hopeful that the tour bus will manage to retain its headgasket climbing over the Carpathian Mountains toward the promised land."

[AdamSmith]

To Lucky: Yes yes I said Yes!

To lookin: Lubricious!!! In college a professor giving us a semester on T.S. Eliot (talk about a flu shot - The Waste Land is only too aptly self-deferentially titled. Etc.) translated "vieux lubrique" from one of old Tom's French poems as "old wet-leg." I loved that teacher from that moment on.

[AdamSmith]

"Self-referentially," that is.

[lookin]

. . . translated "vieux lubrique" from one of old Tom's French poems as "old wet-leg."

Ha! Ha! Both my legs were wet by the time my sentence finally rounded the bend and came to rest just west of the period I worried might never appear during my lifetime.

[AdamSmith]

Just when one thought your sentence could not get better, it manages "headgasket" and then, wonder of wonders, "Carpathian"! What more could we ask?

[Lucky]

So glad to be of help! I have been both in the park and near the Chain Bridge.

The park made me want to stay, the Bridge allowed only temporary comfort!

[RA1]

Very literate and esoteric, however, my personal answer is likely one does not "go downtown" in one's own city and therefore is ignorant of what treasures lie therein.

As one who does almost nothing except travel and someone who enjoys it immensely I will fall back on an old axiom and that is travel broadens and, unfortunately in my case, I mean calorically.

Best regards,

RA1

[BiBottomBoy]

My favorite is the way James Ellroy frames this sentiment.

"My city. My wonder."