All posts filed under: Travels

Copinghagen

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First, I suggest reading this: https://goodnightmere.com/2018/11/08/dan-ish/ And then this: https://goodnightmere.com/2018/11/09/stn-cph/ Or just this… “Maryyyy, wakey, wakeyyy!” I hear someone call from the other side of my bunk’s curtain. “Maryyyyy, wake up!” I open one eye and squint at my phone. 10:00 a.m. The last time I looked at the screen it said 6 a.m. and I was just going to bed. “Marrrry?” I squish the lumpy pillow over my head. It’s too early for sound. “Mary, are you alive?” And if this Mary girl doesn’t answer soon, I’m gunna kill her. “Mary, I got you breakfast.” There is a Frenchman in my bunk holding a bowl of cereal. …I’m Mary? “I can’t eat dairy,” I mumble, rolling over. He looks down at the bowl, defeated, then puts a hand on my exposed, bare hamstring. “It’s nice today, you should go outside,” he says. I’m going to kill him. I don’t want to go outside, I don’t want to leave this nook, and I certainly don’t want his hand on my leg. His hands were on me …

STN > CPH

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My flight to Copenhagen is boarding in twenty minutes and I still have to change terminals, legally enter the U.K., clear customs, pass security, and find the gate. How do you say “I’m fucked” in Danish?

Dan-ish

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I saw it in a second-hand book shop one summer. Its pretty cover caught my eye and I know what they say about books and covers, but this felt right. I paid twelve dollars and slipped my new hardcover into my yellow-shoulder bag. “Look what I just bought!” I squealed to my best friend, Natalie, when I met her for lunch. “The little book of Hig-ee, the Danish way to live well,” I recited the title, convinced I had the right pronunciation. “Hi-guh.” She corrected me. And so began our obsession with a word neither of us knew how to pronounce. A Danish word that is as strange as it is familiar – a feeling, rather, one that makes you feel safe and warm and cozy, like a blanket next to a fireplace or Jamie’s biceps on Outlander. Nat and I would tag each other in various Jamie and twinkley-light-Hygge-decor posts on Instagram, dream of travelling through Denmark together, and when my roommate, Sarah, and I hosted a Hygge-themed Christmas party, it was Natalie who …

What Happens in Vegas…goes on the internet

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“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no more alcohol,” the flight attendant announced. We were only half way to Sin City, but full of booze and tiny pretzels. It had been a long, cold winter-spring-winter, and as the plane touched down I could literally hear a teary eyed Kelly Clarkson sing, “some people wait a lifetime for a moment like thissss.” When my best friend suggested Vegas for her bachelorette, there were no questions – other than, “how can I afford this?” – and I promptly emailed my credit card and passport number to a lady from Flight Centre Bowmanville. The bride-to-be did all the planning, I just sat there refreshing my credit card statement, justifying every expense leading up to the trip with a healthy I-worked-two-Saturdays-in-a-row-therefore-I-deserve-this mentality. I don’t deserve anything. What I needed was a break and two miniature bottles of prosecco, thank you. By the time we checked into our hotel, I was both drunk and hungover from the sheer enormity that is the Las Vegas strip. Everything in Vegas is big. The casinos, …

Lost in Translatopn

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My heavy feet dragged their way through Tokyo Narita Airport, my brain was still somewhere over the Pacific Ocean – in the plane’s bathroom where I mistook the mouthwash for soap and scrubbed my hands with it – and would hopefully catch up with me later. It had been a long flight and the free Singapore Slings seemed like a good idea at the time and why is this soap burning my hands? “Konbanwa!” The lady behind the front desk said as I walked through the automatic doors. “Konbanwa!” I repeated back to her like a drunk parrot. I hath not known what I said, nor where I was. I squinted under the bright lights and nodded while she spoke words I would never understand. Then she bowed and handed me a locker key and a bag containing slippers, a tooth brush, and a giant grey night shirt. She placed her pointer finger to her lips, then to a door with  a “quiet, please” sign on it. I bowed back to her, opened the door and entered the …

Forever Day

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As the the morning sun shone over Nairobi National Park, we stuffed our faces with breakfast, stuffed the trucks with bags, stuffed our faces with second breakfast and began our journey into the wild – a road trip split up over two days. Because one does not simply walk to the Maasai Mara. I watched Nairobi’s concrete jungle get smaller and smaller in the review mirror until the skyscrapers looked like towers for ants. Ahead of us, The Great Rift Valley waited patiently for our arrival. What’s a few hours, when you’ve been around some 25 million years. This 6,400 km long crack in the Earth’s surface has stacked up quite the resume over those millions of years. It reaches from Northern Syria to Mozambique in East Africa, almost broke the continent in two, and has some of the World’s deepest fresh and salt water lakes. Africa’s tallest mountains call it home, Astronauts say it’s the most significantly visible detail on Earth from space, it’s lined with active and semi active volcanoes, abundant wildlife, horizonless …

Oshenanigans

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“I wasn’t going to come, but then my friend was like, you gotta live.” No truer words have ever been spoken by my dear friend Danielle. You’re damn right you gotta live. And so every summer we go to a music festival, where we sleep on floors, eat from trucks, sing at the top of our lungs and dance so hard we nearly pass out, sometimes we do. But most importantly, we live…like degenerates, mind you, but man is it ever fun. And by the end of it all, we are exhausted. Reality looms in the distance after escaping it for days. I must return to the land of shirts that cover my belly button and toilets that flush. My back hurts, my voice sounds like Lindsay Lohan in the morning, and I have PTSD from porta potties. All I want is to be horizontal in my bed, but instead I have to spend 11 hours on a bus with no bathroom. Everything hurts. I regret nothing… We arrived in Montreal just as the sun was going down, it …