Wanderlust

I tell you what I'd rather do.
I'd rather buy a last-minute WizzAir flight to Athens for about ten euros. I'd rather spend the next couple weeks on various beaches in Greece with a big stack of Graham Greene novels and maybe Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. I'd like to drink cold, fruit-filled drinks and wear bright shirts and sunglasses and lay on the beach reading, getting a tan (unthinkable!), and watching bare-breasted European women frolicking in the Aegean.
I'd rather get word from the Uppsala Association of International Affairs that they've finished planning their spring trip to Kenya and Uganda, and that it costs twelve dollars and they want me to help them plan it and organize a sustained exchange program there. I have a hell of a lot of free time, it'd give me something to do. I'd rather spend three weeks in that miserable, blighted part of the world, feeling the monolithic misery on which our civilization is built and feeds. I'd rather gain that perspective, which I feel I currently conspicuously lack.
I'd rather walk down to ICA right now and use the ATM there to clear out my bank account. I'd rather take the bus to Arlanda and get a flight to Mumbai. I'd rather disappear into the desperate shantytowns of that city, to drift to Calcutta and then to Delhi and then take the godforsaken bus to Katmandu. I'd rather stay in a dollar-a-night hotel there, befriending deranged Maoists and opium smugglers, and perhaps grow a grizzled, scraggly beard. I'd rather go by one of the ragged yak and camel caravans toting secondhand knockoffs to Kashgar, in the Uyghur province of China, on the edge of the great Taklamakan desert.
"Taklamakan" is Turkic for "Go in and you won't come out." Honestly. Kashgar itself is a bigger city than Uppsala and is the heart of Muslim China. It has stood against the unforgiving black sandstorms for nineteen hundred years, and it is said to have the largest bazaar in all of Asia.
I'd rather be there, in that desolate place, among that crushing poverty, on the windswept ceiling of the world than sit here in this little room, listening to the rain trying to beat its way inside. It's taken me five months, but I have gotten tired of this place--its only utility to me is its relative proximity to other places I'd rather be.

I have begun making vague overtures to a couple women. I have begun reading for my class, although it will consist of three hours of lecture or seminar a week (every Wednesday afternoon), so I have no illusions about how effectively it will fill my days. I have taken a brief break into the realm of fiction to systematically work my way through every novel Graham Greene ever wrote.

And I am reading Tournament of Shadows, which is an excellent book mainly about the British and Russian imperial explorers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; guys who spoke eight or nine languages and who were given money and diplomatic titles and sent as unofficial spies, disguised as pilgrims, to explore the great uncharted expanses of Central Asia. It does not make me more domestically inclined.

I plan three-day trips to Riga and Helsinki in the near future, since my once-a-week school schedule can accomodate them at any point. Piotr has suggested a guided tour of Poland, primarily on his dime, and I'll go anywhere if free lodging is waiting for me. I'd like to get to Copenhagen, but I've made no plans for it. Ashley has talked about a trip to Greece. And, since I pay no rent for the latter half of June or the month of July, I plan on using that rent money for a final spasm of European travel: Rome-Florence-Venice-Vienna-Prague-Berlin-Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris-London-Stockholm, and then back home by my birthday.
Yet I have nothing to do for these interminable January weeks except sit here, reading about warmer, more interesting places and waiting for the snow to start falling.
Tiresome.