MY TRAVELS WITH EWOUT
by Peter J. Schwartzillustrated with such pictures as aren’t stored in boxes somewhere.It all began at Kibbutz Afikim, in the Jordan Valley, in the summer of 1986. I was there because a friend in New York had volunteered at a kibbutz the summer before and had ended up with a Swedish girlfriend. I wasn’t that lucky, but I did meet Ewout, which was luck of a different kind. We were friendly on the kibbutz, but what led to our lasting friendship was the decision to take off for Egypt together. We took a bus from Tel Aviv through the Sinai to Cairo, and spent twelve days in Egypt. Tel Aviv: the goulash place where I first understood that if you insisted you weren’t hungry, it didn’t mean that you wouldn’t eat half my food as well. Cairo: The Lotus Hotel, 12 Talat Harb Street. Great wallpaper, central location. Dusty streets, crazy traffic, hot as hell, intestinal chaos, so many people and everyone’s uncle had something to sell. The Cairo Museum, tea houses, hookahs, souks, the mosque of Mohammed Ali, on horse round the pyramids; our inadvertent visit to a slum outside the center with a self-appointed ten-year-old guide, where we were stupid enough to argue about the name of the country next door, then accompany him to a street fair with a shooting gallery, where I worried he’d turn the gun on us. Then a plane to Luxor, which was just too fucking hot. Early by donkey with one Mohammed to the Valley of the Kings – temples, tombs, Ozymandias, children selling things, then afternoons in the hotel room, with air conditioning. After which, Alexandria: French tea houses and the beach. On the advice of Let’s Go, we knocked on the door of the Patriarchate for permission to stay in one of the Coptic monasteries in the Syrian desert. When we got to Wadi al-Natrun, the cab driver took us to the wrong one (St. Bishoi) because it was closer. Father Sidrak was nice and let us stay anyway, in sleeping quarters with two young Copts considering the novitiate; you chatted with the sane one, I got the religious nut. Evening meal of mallow soup, coarse bread, marmalade and beans (fast day). Mass in the morning, then back to Cairo, where we splurged for an Italian dinner at the Hilton (at least it wasn’t falafel). Bus back to Tel Aviv, then to Amsterdam on separate flights. In Zaandam I acquired a second set of parents, Henk & Anneke. I’d decided to visit Poland, but was very nervous about it. They calmed me down and made me feel at home, you showed me around your life in the Zaanstreek, I went to Poland and came back. End of first summer.
That Christmas you visited me in the States. We visited Washington together, and attended a New Year’s party in New York, where I tested your priorities by distracting you from the conquest of an attractive yet impossibly stupid young lady from (the state of) Georgia by getting filthy drunk, attacking the piano and puking in the punch bowl. Friendship won: you took me home.
Second summer together (1987): By train from Amsterdam to Istanbul and back: Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Lake Balaton, Belgrade, Bar in Montenegro (the trains to Dubrovnik and Split were full), Belgrade again, Istabul via Bulgaria, Corfu, Rome via Bari, Amsterdam via (breakfast in) Basel. I was mostly in an unbearably bad mood, for postadolescent reasons plus something had gone wrong with my contact lenses and I couldn’t see very well, but you were mostly patient with me. Highlight: the train ride from Belgrade to Istanbul. We hadn’t been able to reserve seats the night before, as inflation was so high that the company didn’t want to sell tickets until the day of; when we arrived at the station, there were no couchettes left, which was a worry, as the ride was supposed to take 24 hours. We reserved seats, but when we got there there were Turks in them who wouldn’t move. At the station we had somehow attracted a too-friendly man with part of his right index finger missing who had insisted on helping us find a café to wait in and then to buy feta for the trip; now he volunteered to help us bribe the conductor for seats. But the train began to move and the man jumped off with our bribe ($3). We wandered dejectedly through the train, and stumbled on a completely empty sleeping compartment, which turned out to have been reserved by a Hungarian travel club, who were prepared to let it to us, with three meals included, for $35. We accepted. The food was amazing, Hungarian, served on real china to us and two Austrians (next compartment, same story) by a fat and hairy Hungarian in a black bikini bathing suit, hard to see on account of his belly. It was very hot – a heat wave was on that had been killing people – and all the Hungarian men were wearing black binikis. They would pile out at every station and douse themselves with water, fill bottles & pile back in. The trip ended up taking 36 hours, so we were glad of the berths and the food. In Istanbul: Hagia Sophia, the ferry, the Galata bridge, Topkapi and the zoo outside with goats and chickens and loud tinned music, the Grand and Egyptian Bazaars, the Turkish bath with marble walls and an old guy who wiggled his thing at me, tea and nargiles, and the bottle of Johnnie Walker we were surprised but happy to find.
Two summers later (1989), we travelled again, this time with Michael Idema. We arranged to meet in a hotel in Van, in Turkish Armenia, following your attempt to climb Mount Ararat, which turned out to be a military zone. We made our way east to Cappadocia and then southwest from there, mostly by very long bus rides: Van, Tatvan, Diyarbakir, Malatya, Avanos, Adana, Iskenderun, Antakya; after which they peeled off to Aleppo while I flew north to Athens to deal with the end of a failing relationship.
Highlights: the Rock of Van, tea with Kurds nearby:
the tingel-tangel in Malatya (this isn't it, we didn't take pictures);
the hostel in Avanos (“Not today possible; maybe tomorrow possible”):
the caverns of Cappadocia (“Laat mij eruit!”):
Public Enemy in Adana;
seeing the Tigris; shot(above):
reverse shot:
I was teased mercilessly for always insisting on buying water before the bus trips; on the way to Syria without me, you finally saw my point.
When that relationship finally died in Greece, I crashed on your floor in the NZ Voorburgwal for a few months to sort myself out. I had some trouble watching enough football and drinking enough beer to be sociable, but I did my best. A typical scene (with Ton Maanicus on the left):
Eventually, the Berlin Wall came down, and I decided to go to graduate school, leaving Europe but returning every so often to say hello.
Spent 1996-97 in Berlin with Silvia, where you visited us in the spring of ’97, at a point when her pregnancy with Jacob was becoming apparent:
Thus began the next phase of our lives: wives and kids (not necessarily in that order). You and Henk had showed up in NYC for my wedding in 1995; I flew to Amsterdam for yours. When Jacob was born, you and Anneke caught the first jet from Schiphol to visit us in NYC. We managed to swing by Europe every few years for a while, even taking a short vacation together,
en famille, to Zeeland:
You met me once on a research trip to London (2004), where we hooked up with Ben Herman:
on my next trip to London, I spent a weekend in Amstelveen, where we saw Jon:
And then you moved off to Singapore, which made it harder to visit, the dollar plummeted against the euro, and my nose got stuck a bit tighter to the grindstone. I’d like to think, though, that our travelling days aren’t over. We still haven’t done that
Mare Nostrum tour...
Happy Birthday!
Peter
New York / Boston
Lieve Ewout,
