The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

“Okay, then we’ll add Kenya to our list.”

  My sister had unknowingly made our news much easier for my parents to accept, and the rest of the conversation went fairly smoothly. We laid out our plans, our country list, and our anticipated return date. My parents’ biggest concern was the length of the trip. They wanted us to travel for three months or maybe six months, but not twelve.

  “But then we come home in the middle of the school year,” Cassie pointed out. “If we travel a full year, we come home before next school year, and I can find a job easily.”

  The rest of my family registered varying degrees of objections and endorsements to our travels. Hadas, my twin sister, was all for it. She and her husband, Jay, had spent five months in Vietnam a few years ago, so they were practically ready to travel with us, if not for their infant son and the financial and medical demands of parenthood, not to mention the custom leatherwork company they had just started. Tamar was excited that she already had her first family visitor and began making preparations posthaste, even though a few months separated us from traveling and her from Kenya. As expected, she worried about our safety and sent us messages across all forms of digital media about preparations she felt were judicious and precautions she felt were necessary.

  My brother Erez, eight years older than me, was the most stringently opposed to our travels. He kept asking the same question, “What will you do for work when you get back?” varying the verbiage ever so slightly each time to make it seem like he was posing a different question. “How will you find a job when you get back?” “What about employment when you get back?” Every question ended in “… when you get back?” He asked the same question so many times in so many different ways that I began to wonder if he stayed up late at night writing down ways to phrase what was effectively the same query. To him, it was neither the journey nor the destination that was important. It was the nine-to-five job I would find after I had completed the journey and reached the destination that should be the ultimate achievement of our trip.

  When I told him we didn’t really care about finding a job after our travels when we hadn’t even started them yet, he always said, “All right,” in a tone of voice that sounded like he was rolling his eyes, even if his pupils remained stationary. From the very beginning, I had no doubt we would not see him anywhere on our trip.

  With a little more finessing and a lot more blind guesswork, we finished our rough itinerary. We didn’t need to know every detail of the trip; we needed a vague outline and a list of cities. We would figure out the minutiae on the fly, planning about two weeks ahead on the road. We knew we would have to book some short flights in Europe to get between, say, Ireland and Hungary, but there was no pressing need to worry about that yet. Much to my dismay, Australia and New Zealand were not on our itinerary. Our round-the-world ticket had a cap of 39,000 miles; with the addition of Kenya, the Outback and its neighboring islands would have to wait. At least I thought they were neighboring, until I checked a globe and realized New Zealand wasn’t all that close to Australia and was, in fact, more closely aligned with the Pacific Ocean’s version of the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about getting there. We booked our flights.

  At 8:15 on a Monday morning, we touch down in Rome—thirty-five minutes early—swapping countries, continents, and lifestyles.

  We hit the ground running in Rome, almost as if we’re using the inertia of the airplanes to propel us through the small tasks we have to finish before we can start exploring. Grab a shuttle to the train station. Store our luggage at Roma Termini. Grab a SIM card for our cell phone.

  We could take the metro for a quick ride to the Colosseum, but we walk instead, soaking up as much of the Italian culture and language as we can in our first twenty minutes in Rome. We learn two critical words immediately: grazie and Nutella.

  Even from a distance, the size of the Colosseum is breathtaking, especially for something built two thousand years ago. It is as beautiful as it is intricate. Above ground are the arches that support the massive structure and seats. Below ground are the maze-like pathways that led gladiators and animals into battle and, in most cases, death. It’s easy to imagine the roaring crowd, cheering on the warriors and thirsting for the mixture of sport and violence that played out on the arena floor.

  History radiates from every building and every street in this area. Nearby is Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum, steeped in millennia of antiquity. In America, if something is three hundred years old, it’s considered historically significant. Here, if it’s only three hundred years old, it’s junk, not even worth a footnote in Fodor’s. The stories of past centuries echo off the walls and cascade down the streets, washing over us in a breathtaking waterfall of history. You don’t see history in Rome so much as you feel it surrounding you. You breathe it in with each step as you walk through the capital of the Roman empire. The structures that still stand—the Colosseum, the Forum—are a testament to the greatness of Caesar’s realm and what man could accomplish before the invention of business meetings and paperwork.

  By this point, we are exhausted and jet-lagged on our first day of travel. Given our lack of sleep on the flight, we are at a solid twenty-six hours without anything that qualifies as rest. If we had any idea at this moment that we wouldn’t sleep for another nine hours, we might simply collapse. But we don’t know that, so we keep moving, fueled mostly by adrenaline since we have decided not to splurge yet on our first Italian coffee or gelato.

  We take a few back roads to the Pantheon, intentionally avoiding the clogged tourist streets. We get happily lost once or twice and wander around Rome for a bit, drinking in the culture and the coffee. Starbucks, take note: the coffee here puts your eighteen-dollar latte to shame. It’s comforting to know that in Rome, you can always find an equally lost English-speaking tourist who can help you find your way. Or you both get lost together, which is just as fun.

  Our meandering route takes us through back alleys and narrow pathways, high walls and clogged streets, bringing us to the Pantheon from behind the famed structure. This building holds a special place in my heart, because the Rotunda at my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is based on the Pantheon. But as much as I love UVA, the Jeffersonian imitation doesn’t quite compare to the real thing. The beauty of the Pantheon is worth looking at from every angle—outside and inside, close up and far away. The piazza out front is a great place to sit and admire the Pantheon while sharpening your pickpocket avoidance skills.

  We visit the Trevi fountain, marveling at both the mythical statues and the seemingly infinite number of people crammed into a noticeably finite space to stare at the mythical statues. We wrap up our day with a walk through some of the famous piazzas here—Popolo, Spagna, Repubblica, and San Pietro—and a look at the Spanish steps, which is apparently the afternoon meeting spot for most of Rome.

  Finally, after thirty-one hours without sleep, it’s time to meet our couchsurfing host. Our accommodations for the first month on the road rely heavily on couchsurfing, a network of strangers that pairs travelers with hosts. A registered traveler reaches out to a group of similarly registered hosts in a town or city and asks if any have a spare couch or bed for a few nights. Generally, the traveler and the host are complete strangers, and the two read reviews from other users to figure out if the other person is trustworthy. No money is ever exchanged between host and hosted. Instead, the guest will (or at least should) bring some sort of small gift or do a chore for the host.

  Knowing that we would couchsurf on our trip, we registered through the website a few months ago and started hosting travelers. In the three or four months before we started our own trip, we hosted six people: a French-Moroccan guy, a Chinese guy, a Dutch girl, a Chinese girl, and an Israeli woman. We thought our open show of hospitality and faith in the rest of humanity—or at least the segment of the rest of humanity that travels internationally—would inspire our friends. In fact, most of them thought we were batshit crazy. They peppered us wi
th a barrage of passive-aggressive questions to try to convince us to cease and desist any and all couchsurfing–related activities.

  “So you have strangers sleeping in your house?”

  “Do you feel safe?”

  “What keeps them from robbing you?”

  “What keeps them from killing you?”

  Those questions aren’t totally unreasonable. A quick Web search for “Couchsurfing nightmares” leads to the following top five results: 1) “A Traveler’s Nightmare: Couchsurfing in NYC,” 2) “Couchsurfing Sucks Couchsurfing Horror Stories,” 3) “Madrid—The Worst Couchsurfing Experience in the World,” 4) “’Rape’ horror of tourist who used couchsurfing website,” and 5) “An opportunity or a nightmare? The Truth about Couch Surfing.”

  But if we were afraid of what might happen when we stepped out of our comfort zone, we would never have gone on this trip in the first place. Every action, with the possible exception of “stay in bed all day with only the minimum number of trips to the kitchen and bathroom,” involves a certain amount of risk, and you can find a reason to dismiss something as “too dangerous” or “too risky” if you look hard enough.

  In fact, a quick Web search for “chocolate cake nightmares” leads to the following top five results: 1) “Weight Watcher’s Nightmare Chocolate Cake recipe,” 2) “The Chocolate Cake Nightmare | Hellgirl: Clever Mommy Blog,” 3) “Chocolate ‘can give you nightmares’” 4) “Does eating CHOCOLATE CAKE and ICE CREAM before going to sleep........?????,” and 5) “Clues: A Paranoid Schizophrenic’s Detective Story.”

  We were happy to accept the risk of inviting strangers into our home so we could meet new people, swap stories, and share experiences. In many ways, we had begun our world travels without ever leaving our living room. Most of our couchsurfing guests cooked dinner for us, and a few brought us small gifts, such as an Eiffel Tower keychain from Paris. They showed us pictures of where they grew up, told us what to see in their country, and invited us to stay with their family.

  Now, for the first time, we are on the other side of the relationship. Instead of hosting, we are traveling, and we are to meet our host at 8:00 in the evening at Piazza Repubblica.

  Gianfranco picks us up in the piazza along with another couchsurfer he is hosting—Louise from France. Gianfranco is somewhere in his late thirties or early forties. He is not too thin and not too tall, but neither is he not too fat and not too short. His hair might once have been described as thick and dark, but it is only a shadow of its former self; he is thinning up top and in front, a few steps ahead of my own mutinous pompadour. He sports a short stubble and a quick smile, and he offers to help Cassie with her backpack and daypack immediately. He welcomes us to Italy and to Rome with only a hint of an Italian accent, making his English very easy to understand.

  Louise looks to be in her mid-twenties, a student who finished some degree of education, left her native France, and is now moving to Rome to add another degree of education. She has short cropped hair, and she makes it look great with her thick-rimmed glasses. I would describe her hair and clothing as Euro-chic, even though I have barely any idea what that means (though I suspect those who use the term far more frequently also have barely any idea what it means). I wonder if the similarities between Louise and Cassie—young, attractive, female—help explain why Gianfranco was so willing to host us.

  The four of us sandwich ourselves and our luggage into what passes in Europe for a car but in America would barely qualify as a functioning golf cart. We head for Gianfranco’s apartment near Castelnuovo—a small town outside of Rome built around a castle. The night is about to begin. Sleep will have to wait.

  We pick up pizza on the way to meet Gianfranco’s friends, who live way off the beaten path. To be fair, everything looks way off the beaten path when you’re speeding along small, unlit roads in a foreign country with a stranger who believes speed limits are more suggestions than enforceable laws. At their place, out comes fresh pasta and beer and weed to go with small rectangles of pizza, which we couldn’t help but notice were heretically “sliced” with scissors. We are strangers here but are welcomed as friends. By the end of the night, we are part of la famiglia. We traded in the comforts of home and a living room and a bed. Instead, we have a train and a backpack and a couch. This is our new life. This is our new home.

  Gianfranco pulls out a guitar and starts singing. Soon the guitar is passed around the table—anyone who wants can sing and strum. Gianfranco’s friend even pulls out a harmonica for accompaniment.

  The night progresses into a whirling cyclone of music and friendship. After Gianfranco sings, he recharges with beer and pizza while Louise sings. Gianfranco’s friend opts for a slightly different and less nutritious fulfillment, a marijuana joint that’s passed around as liberally as the other snacks and libations. We don’t smoke—we didn’t before and we’re not about to start—but especially on the first night of our adventure, it seems so unnecessary. The songs are a mix of Italian hits and English classics, and we sing along when we can. The day is special for so many reasons—our first day of travel, seeing the Colosseum, etc.—and the night is magical.

  For just a little bit longer, Cassie and I are able to put off sleep. We are sitting with six people we’ve never met, and we’re all laughing and singing as if we’ve been friends for years. Language barriers fall away. Nationalities don’t matter. We all have one thing in common at this very moment—we’re all happy, enjoying every moment in our present company.

  When Monday finally turns into Tuesday, we call it a night and head back to Gianfranco’s home. We haven’t slept in thirty-five hours and are still fighting jetlag. But our first day in Italy is without equal—a day we will never forget, and a night that will always be special to us.

  We are asleep before our heads hit the pillow.

  Two days later we catch a morning train from Rome and head to Florence, then keep going north along the Ligurian coast. Towns on the Italian countryside fly by in a blur of blue and white train station signs—ALOSSIS, ANDORA, DIANO MARINA—their inhabitants no more aware of our existence than we are of theirs. We call ourselves travel bloggers, which is a fancy term for vagrants.

  Sometimes we sleep. Sometimes we write. Sometimes we stare out into the hinterlands of whatever region we’re passing through and daydream. Out here, we are on our own plane of existence. Back home, our friends are at work or at home—doing what people normally do in life, or rather what life normally does to people. We miss weddings and baby showers and birthdays, reading about all these events on our Facebook newsfeeds and adding our “Congratulations!” and “Mazel Tovs!” For the big events, we add our “Like,” as if another click on the World Wide Web is a decent substitute for us being there.

  We live in a state of travel—an imaginary place somewhere between Valhalla and Elysium—where we can pretend time stands still. We don’t age on this trip—we experience. Hours and minutes and seconds don’t affect us like they do other people, unless they’re on a train schedule, in which case they affect us in a very real and concrete way. It would be nice to think we can pick up our lives without interruption when we get back, but that’s not the truth. What is? What will we come back to? We race toward that answer with each flight and every train ride, blissfully ignorant of what the future has in store.

  Chapter 5

  November 13, 2013

  49°34’36.0”N 19°50’08.0”E

  Spytkowice, Poland

  One must glimpse a busload of passengers halfway through a seven-hour trip traversing the Eastern European countryside to fully understand the contorted positions in which the human body can sleep. Our Orangeways bus—nothing like the bright, shiny mass transportation vehicle we had seen online—pulled out of Budapest at 7 a.m., destined for Krakow by early afternoon. The bus is probably half full, and couples split up to spread out and take advantage of empty seats. I imagined sleep would be easy to come by once we got on the highway and were cruising through northern Hungary, Slovak
ia, and southern Poland. But through an abundance of poor planning, either on the part of our driver or on the part of the local transportation authorities, we never come by any highways.

  Zsdrabrweg, as I imagined his name to be (or some other combination of seemingly random letters that always starts with one or more Z’s), sticks to back roads the whole way. The countryside is beautiful. Or at least I imagine it would be if we could see any of it. From the moment we leave, the sky is covered in a low, gray overcast of uniform color and opacity and a light, constant drizzle that obscures anything more than a few hundred yards away, sometimes much less. Oftentimes, we drive through valleys that climb so steeply I can’t see much more than the road and the ominous gray that we keep driving toward and receding from—always there, yet always slightly out of reach. Even the yellows and greens and reds of autumn seem somehow monochromatic in this atmosphere.

  The weather is appropriate, given why we’re heading to Krakow. I can’t imagine Poland ranks very high on any traveler’s “Must See” list for Europe, but I had two requirements when we started planning our journey. One, I have to stop and see my family in Israel, even though we’d been there fairly recently. And two, I have to see Auschwitz. The omnipresent grayness fits the purpose of our visit. Dark and forlorn. Cold and wet. We will find nothing uplifting in Auschwitz—not in the skies above or on the ground below—nor do we expect to.

  The Polish countryside (or is it the Slovakian countryside? I didn’t see the border crossing) looks much as I had expected it to appear. Vastly empty with sporadic houses along the streets. There is no single design or style that dominates construction, except maybe the liberal use of concrete. Multicolored is not a word that comes to mind. We don’t see many people outside, and if not for the smoke drifting upward from some of the chimneys, the few homes we see would look completely deserted. It occurs to me that even the smoke looks like it’s trying to escape.