Goals through Rose-Coloured Glasses

Travel Writing with In-Laws

The following excerpt from Living With The In-Laws includes almost as much travel writing as it does drinking around Europe. I never had a drinking problem, but when I drank it was a problem.

Summer of 2017

After three months of living alone in a luxurious Vancouver townhouse with my mother-in-law, Susan, it was time to see her daughter living in a mould-ridden apartment on the outskirts of Nuremberg with the words “Fuck off” spray painted on the entrance.

I wrote for eight hours a day while Siena brought home the bacon working at Puma. I had published a short story in a sci-fi anthology, a travel article, and like most amateur writers, a short story about a guy who commits suicide. I had made a whole $40 and updated my LinkedIn profile to “professional” writer. So, I thought I should celebrate by getting intoxicated enough to only speak in sentences as short as Hemingway’s. There was no better place to do that than at a German beer festival.

If I say the words beer, Germans, and festival, most people will think of Oktoberfest. But what if you don’t want to wait until October to fulfil your heart's desire for beer, dancing, and lederhosen? What if you’re a writer, cheap, broke, and don’t want to pay Munich’s inflated hotel and Airbnb prices?

Then you gotta go to The Berch (which means mountain or hill); it’s the local nickname for Bergkirchweih, Erlangen's annual beer and fair festival. Men try to get their lederhosen as filthy as possible with pig grease, the women over fifty wear traditional dwindles that reach their ankles, but those under thirty wear dwindles you might imagine seeing in a German porn video. And the people in their forties? Well, as always, they’re either stuck to their phones trying to keep up with the youth, complaining about the youth, or getting drunk enough to blend in with everyone.

After Siena and I filled up on bratwurst, Franconian sausage, chicken on a spit, and pork loin, we thought our stomachs were coated with enough fat to handle Bergkirchweich beer. What type of beer is this? Nobody really knows. It’s slightly darker than weißbier (wheat beer), but it’s not quite a German Dunkel. And when you drink several of them, you end up dancing on tables with a bunch of German people (including children, but they’re usually not too drunk).

Siena ended up on a table with her bosses and managers. The tables were twice the size of your average picnic table, leaving enough safe room for four average-sized Europeans or two average-sized Americans to dance. Our table had six people, sometimes seven, if none of us were out grabbing beers—the server only came around every ten minutes or so, which apparently wasn’t keeping up with our beer-drinking turnaround time. 

Even though we were dancing at one of the most packed tables, we also had one of the best dancers—an African-American who owned some fitness consulting business that Puma had hired externally. We had the broadest shoulders at the table, but unlike mine, his dance moves were worth moving out of the way for. He was also the only one at the table—possibly the festival—who could sing along to the English music without sounding like Hans Gruber,¹ Major Heinrich Strasser, and Frau Farbissina wasted and trying to one-up each other. 

The fitness consultant, along with a few other people who still had salvageable reputations, left when the sun had set. Siena and I did not. And neither did her bosses. By this point, we were no longer a segregated Puma employee table. Everyone at the festival was your friend that night, and no matter who the person was, you could put your arm around them. Sometimes you had very little choice in the matter. Everyone hugged and laughed and loved, and Siena really had to pee. 

“I have to pee!”

“That’s great. You should.” 

“I will.”

Five minutes or so later, she returned and motioned me to step off the table. Down there, where the servers walked, it was still possible to move around. Siena pulled my face close to hers, and this time she whispered, “I peed__ _____ the lineup ___ so big.”

“What?”

“I ___ my pants ___ was so big.”

“You peed your pants!” I said, looking at the lineup that would have taken no more than three minutes. 

“Well, don’t tell everyone, asshole.” 

“So, do you want to leave?”

“No,” Siena said as her manager grabbed her hand to pull her back up onto one of the tables.

At some point, Siena’s voice must have grown weary from mumbling to German folk songs and singing along to English top-forties from the seventies to the present day. We were walking away from the festival, and at some point, Siena screamed, “Then fuck off.” 

I don’t remember what led up to that moment, but apparently, I listened—which wasn’t the best idea. I took a cab and left her looking for me throughout the night. The next morning, I found out she had to fight off an old man who leaned in to kiss her and deal with a forty-minute train ride filled with other people that smelled like piss. Apparently, I was sound asleep like a content baby, and so she smacked that smile right off my face. Excessive drinking never did us any good, but that didn’t stop me when we went to Berlin a month later. 

---

Meeting Siena’s cousin Will and his girlfriend Zaza was a refreshing break from racism. When you come from Vancouver, you’re not used to people complaining about Muslims and mosques. One of the most popular questions middle-aged Europeans asked us was, “Do you have mosques in your town now, too?” 

“Yes,” we’d say, somewhat confused. 

“Well, aren’t they stealing your culture and jobs?” 

To which I would usually respond, “I think the situation might be different where we come from,” and then Siena would say what I’m actually thinking, “Of course, they fucking don’t,” and then she’d look at me with a reddened face and say, “Let’s get going.” 

Fortunately, Will was a migration and immigration researcher, and so he knew that if done with the correct planning, opening your borders could be both socially and economically beneficial. He also knew all the most delicious and affordable restaurants (which were often owned by people racists didn’t like).

After we finished eating, it became obvious that Zaza and Will were not only liberal when it came to immigration but to drinking as well. All I remember is going to a convenience store and drinking several beers on the street, which is common in Berlin. Instead of scanning the premises for cops, I was able to drink casually and slowly; however, the result was the same. 

“What time does the club open?” I asked the bouncer of an outdoor techno haven situated on a canal (I can’t remember which), but what I do remember is several people whispering, “Want speed?”

“Ten,” said the bouncer.

“And when does it close?”

“Saturday or Sunday.”

“What?”

“Saturday or Sunday.”

“Saturday or Sunday?” I repeated, emphasizing the or.

“Yes, this is what I say.”

“Did you hear that, Siena!” I said as I turned to face Siena. “We could stay till Sunday!”

“We’re not staying till Sunday,” Siena said, grabbing my hand and leading me away from the club. 

“But we could.” 

“You’ll end up doing speed, and I’ll end up dumping you.”

“Speed isn’t laced with fentanyl in Berlin, Siena. That’s just a Vancouver thing.”

“You’re not doing speed,” she said, dropping my hand. 

“No, I’m not doing speed.”

Instead, I drank. I jumped up and down on the dance floor and then blacked out. When I woke up next to Siena on a deflated air mattress in Will and Zaza’s living room, the first thing I asked was, “What happened last night?”

“You wanted to stay, and I didn’t because it was already four in the morning. Then we got into an argument.”

“But you stay out with your friends till six in the morning. Why can’t we do that together?”

“Do you want to see why? Because I have it on camera.”

“I don’t want to see why.”

“But you really should.”

“Fine.”

Siena took out her phone to show me rolling around on the concrete, heaving with uncontrollable sobs and saying, “Rejection! Me life. Yes, Rejection. Rejection for who I am. Rejection for what I do,” and then I’d yell at the top of my lungs and emphasize the word “rejection” some more, but turning the “tch” sound into a soft “sh” as in “Rejeshun!” Oh, woe is me, so much rejeshun!

After the word was worn out, I moved on to something equally unoriginal, but much easier the repeat: “I hate me!” Which eventually started to sound like, “I ate me!” due to my drunken slur. Then I started to repeat the word “her,” and my sobs turned to frustration when Siena didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. What I think I must have been referring to was “Her,” with a capital, as in the movie Her, because the quote, “Sometimes I think I've felt everything I'm ever gonna feel and from here on out I'm not going to feel anything new—just lesser versions of what I've already felt,” wraps up a depressive state quite nicely, but unlike a man that quietly jacks off to his computer and Scarlett Johansson’s voice, it seemed that I was more interested in letting the world know that “I ate myself.” 

After watching myself mumble some more unintelligible ramblings, I finally said, “Okay, I get it, Siena.”

“You should keep watching. It gets worse.”

“I get the picture,” I said, trying to grab Siena’s phone, but her reflexes were faster. Embarrassment is a rare emotion for me. My face didn’t redden, and my heart didn’t beat faster; instead, my heart sank into my stomach, shrivelling in its acid and leaving me with an overwhelming sense of shame. 

“You should go see someone, Nol. This isn’t the first time you’ve hinted at suicide.” 

“Meh, I was drunk. It’s no biggie, Siena,” I said, standing up as though I was ready to take on the day. “Trust me, I’ve been through depression, but I’m the happiest I’ve ever been since meeting you.”

“You didn’t seem happy last night.”

“That was just the alcohol whining.” 

“I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy, Siena. You make me happy,” I said, searching for my phone and patting down every inch of my body—even where I didn’t have any pockets. “Where’s my phone, Siena?”

“You lost it last night.”

“Fuck… That’s depressing.”

---

A few weeks later, we booked a Ryanair Flight to Charleroi Airport, an absolute shit-hole in the south of Belgium. Half of the gates and security lines weren’t in the airport but in plastic tents. Oh well, I thought, at least we don’t need to go into the city. Wrong.

We had booked the cheapest flight, which meant we landed at one in the morning, a time when the trains and buses didn’t run. We had forgotten that Belgium’s public transit system is a joke compared with the rest of Western Europe. 

The city itself was even worse. Rundown, customer-free stores and neon-lit bars frequented by a few flabby drunks filled the grey city. A miserable stench cloud created a soul-sucking mist throughout the streets, but fortunately, my cousin had booked us a three-star hotel the second he heard we were stuck in Charleroi—he didn’t want his little cousin to be found murdered in a hostel ridden with bedbugs. The next day, he drove across the country (a two-and-a-half-hour drive) to pick us up.

“Thanks for coming all the way out here, Wouter,” I said.

“Oh, no problem. Is it okay if I smoke it in the car?” Wouter asked as he put out a cigarette with his shiny dress shoe. 

“It’s your car…”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be a bother.”

Your Axe body spray is much worse than cigarette smoke, I wanted to say, but since the guy just bought me a hotel room and drove across the country (something I’d only do for someone who was terminally ill), I decided against it. Instead, I hugged him.

Two years later, Wouter came to visit me in Vancouver and ended up spending the day with Susan. She drove him to Steveston Village, an old fisherman’s port that is now full of rich Asians and white people who drink cocktails and eat organic ice cream. After they returned from their margaritas, the first thing Susan said to me was, “Wow, that cousin of yours is a people pleaser. It’s almost not normal how generous he is”—and this was coming from Susan, the woman I had been living with for free the past two years. And the first thing Wouter said to me was, “Je hebt een geweldige schoonmoeder.” Wow, you have an amazing mother-in-law. “Ik kan niet geloven dat ze zestig is.” I can’t believe she’s sixty. He seemed to have a little crush on my mother-in-law, but that’s okay; in a few years, he’d be coming to my rescue again. 

Once we made it north into Flanders, I could finally give Siena a lifestyle similar to what her parents had given me. Well, I didn’t give it to her—my family did. My cousin William was getting married, and Cam (my best friend—a risk-craving, illegal-activity-loving semipro skier with the voice of Thor) and Siena were invited as well.

The suits and dresses were designer, the cars were German or Italian, the cheeses were imported, the venue’s property spread past fields and creeks, and to our pleasant and unfortunate surprise, the champagne was bottomless, which meant I was exuberant until Siena stormed off yelling. My little cousin and brother patted my back in a drunk yet soothing manner. Who knows what the hell we were arguing about, but fortunately, the quarrel ended as quickly as it started, and before we knew it, we were dancing again.

For a guy who has never owned his own vehicle, television, laundry machine, or dress shoes, and has owned the three same dress shirts for five years, reused the same five Ziploc bags for three years, and stole toilet paper from his gym, I sure enjoyed showing off the wealth I didn’t work for. And thanks to my uncle and aunt bringing us to Marbella, I had the opportunity to do just that. 

My grandpa was in the chemical gas business, which meant that he made just enough money to have a grandchild who could afford to complain about the environmental destruction of chemicals while pursuing an acting career. That grandchild was me; the other grandchildren ended up working in the family businesses (which meant they didn’t really work at all) or pursuing real careers. What brought the family together more than anything else was the asado.

When my grandfather returned from Argentina and grilled his dad a steak, it was the only time he heard the words, “I’m proud of you, son.” Maybe that was what led him to create a multimillion-dollar business—that and the excessive discipline that runs through my veins. The difference between his disciple and mine is that he had something to show for it.

On a clear day, we could stand on the terrace or float in the infinite pool while overlooking the Atlas Rif Mountains in Morocco or the iconic Rock of Gibraltar, where monkeys and English lads sling poop at each other. The white stone flooring was covered in carpets, and the kitchen had an island large enough for a Mormon family to stand around. The gardener still landscaped the palm trees and flower gardens, and the maid still lived in the attached suite with her kids and husband. I use the word “still” because my grandpa had passed away. 

When I walked upstairs to his office, it was as though he could appear at any second. The pictures of his children and grandchildren were in the same place as always. The only picture that had moved was one of his latest girlfriend (my mom had knocked that one over a few years before). His telescope still pointed out toward the sky (where the hell else would it be pointing). And the room still had the same smell of sunbaked furniture and the full, comforting musk of my grandfather. When I looked at his immaculately organized desk, I couldn’t bring myself to sit in his chair. It was as though I was waiting for my grandpa to say that he’d come down to join us, and when his voice didn’t come, the emptiness of the house flowed through me.

As I listen to the crackling of burning coals,

nostalgia creeps up inside.

With every desired drop of fat that lands on the fire

The Asador is heard without uttering a single word.

A man who passes down his wisdom lives forever,

and I will never forget when I was told,

‘We create our own reality.’

The Asador told me this.

But if this is true and I hold the paintbrush for life,

the opulent canvas I paint on is a present of the Asador.

'Be strong as I and do not cry,' he tells me.

He tells me this on the day I have to say farewell.

I swallow my tears until I feel an ocean forcing its way down my throat.

Then I realize that my tears are just

a waste of salt.

When I walked down the spiral set of stairs, across the welcome hall, and through the first living room, I finally made it out onto the balcony where Siena, my uncle, and my aunt sat. Only two of us would return to the house that would never feel full again.

---

After Siena met part of my family, our travels around Europe continued. When we went to Christiania “Freetown” in Copenhagen, Siena had a panic attack, not because she smoked pot, but because we ran into drug-dealing losers instead of free-loving hippies. Instead of smoking weed, we explored the streets by bike, eating fish and coarse, dark bread along the way. 

Once we had had enough of the Scandinavian alcohol prices and fifteen-hour sunlit days, we moved back down south to explore the laid-back Sicilian lifestyle where servers served you when they felt like it and taxi drivers only picked you up when there wasn’t a football game on.

From the Sicilian beaches and old towns layered in Moorish, Greek, and Roman architecture that blended the dark lava stone roads and white limestone houses, we went to London before finishing our journey. 

We used our Oyster cards on the Tube at night and rode bikes by day. When it rained, we spent hours in London’s free museums, and when the sun shone, we went to the parks and took pictures of all the attractions with the thousands of other tourists standing and staring up at majestic buildings through their cellphones. We learned, we explored, we drank, and we were always on the move. This was the summer I realized I had found the greatest travel partner.

I had flown from Heathrow to Vancouver dozens of times in my life, but this was the first time I had no desire to sneak into business class until the flight attendant said I had to leave (something I used to do as a kid). With Siena’s head on my shoulder and my hand on her lap, the nine-hour flight went by faster than a night on ecstasy—something I was no longer interested in doing every couple months thanks to Siena. 

When we arrived in Vancouver and walked into the arrivals hall with several dozen people packed together, we had no problem spotting Susan. She was the only person jumping up and down, aside from a seven-year-old girl—and Susan out-jumped her by a long shot. When Susan got hold of her daughter, she bawled as I would have after a mickey of gin and a Pixar movie. She opened up her arms, and the three of us stood in the arrivals hall as Susan blubbered until she eventually formed intelligible sentences such as “I missed you. I love you. Never leave me for that long again, you fucking brats.” 

I no longer drink or have an ego like I did in my early twenties. Part of this is thanks to maturity, but a larger part is thanks to the healthier drinking culture in Spain.

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1. Hans Gruber: German bad man in Die Hard. Major Heinrich Strasser: German bad man in Casablanca. Frau Farbissina: German bad woman in Austin Powers. This list could also have included Dr. Christian Szell (Marathon Man), Major Arnold Toht (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger), and, well, the list of evil Germans portrayed in Hollywood is endless.