As Amelia and I said goodbye to our precious dog, as we arrived—stressed and hungry—at the airport, as we sat down in the economy seats that barely fit a child let alone grown humans, I asked myself—what is the fucking point of travel?
Obvious answers abounded. Neither Amelia nor I had ever been to London before. Our friend Kassie lives there now but might not live there forever. It was a chance to make those soldiers at Buckingham Palace laugh.
But still, it didn’t seem worth it. Whenever I set foot out the door, it never seems worth it. Why not keep hoarding those precious vacation days? Why not just sleep?
The plane coasted to cruising altitude and my blood pressure gradually declined, but still, I had no answer. I hoped London had one.
The flight left at 7 PM Pacific and landed around noon in London. I slept the half-dead sleep of a red-eyed economy passenger. I watched Baby Driver, a film I had previously watched on another flight. Baby Driver is a flight movie. Some movies were made to be watched on a plane. Baby Driver is one of those. And it’s great for it.
Touchdown in Great Britain. Everything in our art deco Airbnb had Miami on it. A Miami fridge magnet. A pint glass. I briefly wondered if our plane had made a wrong turn and brought us to Florida, then recalled that the roads were all backward, as promised.
Our friend Kassie threw us a party that first night. It was a combination party — Kassie’s birthday, the end of her semester, us visiting, probably other things too. I stood surrounded by ex-pat Americans and other international drifters and ate chocolate chip cookies. You haven’t really visited a country until you’ve made small talk in a kitchen. You can see all the sights but still know nothing about a place. Yet a nation’s entire history can be gleaned from a kitchen conversation.
The night ended as I watched Eurovision in the living room. I was exhausted. For some reason, Israel and Australia were competing. I stared into the void. The void danced and sang.
Our first full day mainly involved the acclaimed English Premier League team Arsenal. We toured Emirates Stadium in the morning. I spent the rest of the day in a post-tour high, debating on whether or not to spend $500 on tickets to the Arsenal/Brighton game later that day. I waffled for hours. Amelia and I walked into shops and she looked at English-made soaps as I refreshed the Stubhub page on my phone and enjoyed nothing.
To see an Arsenal home game has been on my bucket list for close to 15 years. It would be worth it. Would I ever come back to this godless country? This could be my one chance.
Forty-five minutes before the game, I called it.
“Let’s just watch it in a pub.”
Guilt racked me in the opening minutes. I had made a terrible mistake.
Then, like a good Englishman, I watched my favorite soccer team lose 3-0 at home.
I congratulated myself on $500 well saved.
That night we sat in a sauna in Kassie’s backyard. Sweat poured as I marveled at what a strange world this is, thousands of miles from home in a wood-fired, portable sauna.
On Monday morning, we sat at the Kyoto Garden and watched a squirrel terrorize a child. The squirrel had become civilized in that it had learned the value of cheap processed food. The kid shrieked and bobbled as the squirrel stalked its prey.
I had, until that moment, thought squirrels were an American thing. Like George Costanza or Mormonism or job-dependent health insurance. I had held this belief since early in high school when my friend Sebi was fresh from a summer abroad, living with his extended family in Italy. Sebi, who has lived in America for most of his life, pointed at a nearby squirrel.
“What’s that called?”
“Sebi,” someone said, “it’s a squirrel.”
We were all laughing too hard to hear his response.
Europe, with its devastating lack of squirrels, had robbed my poor friend of comprehension. Or so I thought. As the Kyoto Garden squirrel threatened the child, I realized instead that Sebi had just not spoken the English word “squirrel” for three months and that the English part of his brain was simply rebooting.
Near the Notting Hill bookstore, I ordered a subpar crepe and wondered if that was part of the film. Potentially the entire plot. If I had to write a movie about Notting Hill, it would be about a subpar crepe. At the V&A, I lay on a bench near the Raphael Cartoons and wished that more of my life could be spent in large, dimly lit rooms. Paintings optional but preferred. A few hours later, in a state of near exhaustion, I ate my first Scotch Egg. It was purchased from a fancy department store.
A Tuesday morning visit to King’s Cross station confirmed that this was a godless country run by ghouls.
Arsenal’s recent success as a football team had increased my goal of touring Emirates. Conversely, my desire to visit Harry Potter sites had waned with each problematic statement of its author. So when we visited King’s Cross to see Platform 9 and 3/4, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Harry Potter basically taught me to read. I’ve been meaning to reread the books again, though I’ve refrained, in protest of the entire faction of adults whose entire understanding of literature is just Harry Potter on loop.
What I saw horrified me. A gift shop bustling with Americans, gluttonous for familiar intellectual property. A roped-off line led to a professional photographer whose camera flash illuminated tweens posed under the 9 and 3/4 sign.
We fled.
But as lows lead to highs, so did this lead to the highlight of the trip, possibly my year. Amelia had booked us tickets to see a David Hockney exhibit at Lightroom. It’s a new space, reminiscent of the Van Gogh exhibit that’s been going around the States for the past few years. I thoroughly enjoyed the Van Gogh but this was far superior.
A mass of people congregated on the floor of a theater-sized room and gaped at images and videos projected onto the walls. Hockney paintings and interviews and stock footage played out as a sound system thundered Wagner and chimed in the soft British voice of Hockney.
It was engrossing and ineffable. It felt like a much improved version of church—the room cloisters but also opens up to the heavens. Worship of art and heartfelt reflection and life. The best art, in my opinion, is the art that says not to kill yourself. The Goldfinch. Everything Everywhere All At Once. A key principle of art is to look at the void and say, Yes. There it is. And that’s all right.
After that exhibit, I buzzed for hours, days.
In the afternoon, we gorged on finger sandwiches at afternoon high tea. The place had really crunched the numbers on what to do when copious diuretics are the whole point—go sicko mode on your bathrooms. The lavatories were insane, concocted by addled minds: you pissed in giant eggs. Everything was spherical. The walls needed signs that said not to climb on them.
We ended the day at Daunt Books, which was lovely, and filled with the UK editions of familiar books.
Wednesday continued my frightening run in with monolithic intellectual property. You hear about Truman Show Syndrome where people think their life is being filmed, but you can only imagine the horror of briefly believing yourself in a Marvel Cinematic Universe flop. As Amelia and I stood on a hill in Hampstead Heath, I realized I was at a shoot location for The Eternals.
We fled Heath and ate poached eggs. Poached eggs are very good. One of my favorite parts of travel is walking to the point of absolute exhaustion and hunger, only to stumble upon a delightful restaurant you would never have stopped in before, that you will likely never return to. A place filled with poached eggs.
We took a train that terminated at a place called Cockfosters. For the next hour, I hummed the word Cockfosters to the tune of Rock Lobster. That night I watched Champions League soccer and hoped for the death of Manchester City and felt like a true Brit.
On our penultimate day, we stared into the void at the Yayoi Kusama mirror installation. It was cool but in some ways the pictures made it cooler? Which is not an actual art critique but more me realizing that I hope to someday have a giant studio and assemble something similar but three times as big and to go there and just sit. Everyone has a plan for what they would do if they were a billionaire and that’s mine—to put sensory deprivation tanks in Kusama-esque mirror rooms. It’s not healthy to stare at death, but I do think it’s all right to spend a decent amount of time peering into the void.
Ten years prior when I studied abroad in Australia, my friends and I would spend every Wednesday night at a club and I would drink a thousand vodka red bulls a night and we would all meander to a backroom where the walls were lined with mirrors and my friends and I would dance in front of the mirror as Diplo and Martin Garrix and Flo Rida played and inevitably we took to calling it mirror world.
So thank you, Yayoi, for returning me to mirror world, if only for a moment.
Amelia and I met up with Kassie and her German classmate at the famous Burrough Market. Amelia and I ate four different types of fried food. I pleaded with the German.
“We never eat like this. Ever.”
She was not convinced.
At a church bombed during the Blitzkrieg but left standing, a spot that had recently become a bit of an Instagram haunt, I pondered if I wasn’t seeing some great human cycle. Catastrophe lends itself into mundanity and back, over and over again.
On our last morning, we walked the canals and watched as sleepy Brits woke up in their houseboats and let dogs out to pee. The boatdwellers watered plants and mounted bikes to head into the city. It seemed an ideal life. If not for our precious dog back in America, we might have stayed.
The trip back confirmed Heathrow as one of the worst airports in the world. A travesty. Confusing. Tedious. As is Amelia’s personal policy, she swore at a TSA agent.
“This is fucked up,” she told the man who asked her to sort her liquids into a clear bag.
I did not enter the fight, as is my personal policy.
The last gift from London was an open middle seat. As the flight attendants doled out in-flight meals and as Amelia and I stretched out across a whole row, I felt like a king.
Great Britain indeed.
From my near-lavatory aisle seat, I asked myself again, what’s the point of travel?
It would be dishonest not to bring up work here. Work has been going poorly for me. Most days I am stressed to my gills in a job that asks too much of me, too much of the time. I go to bed thinking about it, I wake up thinking about it. My brain has clouded over with work. And with that fog comes a hellish blandness. Sure this vacation was a cleanse, an escape from Slack. A chance to reset. But I think the point of this trip really was to say yes, ok. This is life. It’s not always good. In fact most of the time it’s quite hard. But good moments come, quite frequently. And travel—that is life well lived. What it’s supposed to be. Life should be art. Life should be walking until your hips tilt askew. Life should be poached eggs.
And life should look at the void. At least some of the time. But life should not be the void.