A meditation on travel through the medium of some Pizzas I’ve eaten.
Everywhere looks the same nowadays.
Wherever you go, there are the same coffee shops, with the same Edison light bulbs, with the same wooden counters, and the same stoneware cups and plates and bowls. These places serve the same avocado toast, make the same cortados, and all have the same books on their bookshelves. Maybe as a nod to their location they do something ‘local’: bagels in New York, bao in Beijing, or croissants in Paris. But as a rule these spaces are interchangeable, and you need never know you are in a foreign country.
It’s the fault of algorithms, blending places together. Without our global communications network, the subtext goes, what would instead be available to us is authentic experience. We could see our destination clearly, unsullied by outside influences. Here, the hope is that we can finally be rid of ourselves, find ourselves, and connect with The Real. Through technology we have tamed adventure’s animal spirit, so only by returning to a world dominated by Fate can we truly know what it is to experience the Other.
So the story goes. At a party a friend of the family threw when I was a teenager, a geriatric caver told me not to read guidebooks if I wanted to travel to India. Instead I should go to the nearest Gurdwara and ask for food and my whereabouts. Only that way would I experience the Real India. I’m old enough to say that this was before the internet.
Before Instagram and Yelp there was The Rough Guide and before that was Baedeker’s. We think our problems special, and our vantage points unique.
New York
I stay in a hostel on the Upper West Side but they don’t have the same bed for me for the whole nine days I spend there. So every night I pack up my things, head to the front desk, and then switch over to somewhere else in the hostel. One night I spend in the bottom bunk in a cramped for person room with a guest who plays WoW until 4am, and another night I am in a dorm with twenty other guys who all come in after midnight. They drink cheap beer and I can smell the chemical malt next morning at breakfast. Afterwards I trudge around the city in May, but I brought the wrong clothes and everything sweats. I wasn’t used to to how hot it is here. Walking through Central Park and the colours are psychedelic, then I visit MoMa on the Friday evening but rest in the sculpture garden next to a Henry Moore form. I can’t filter out the outside. The sky is hallucinogenic and too close but too far away. It’s all too much so I that evening I eat a slice of pizza bigger than my head. It’s greasy and cheesy and simple and has just the right amount of bite int eh dough. The sauce is mostly sugar and there are no herbs. It’s at a deli a block south of my hostel. The guy in the deli serves it in a paper plate that soaks up the globules of fat. I feel whole again once I’ve eaten it.
When we are oriented we face people, places, things that help us find our way. We retrace our footsteps only so that we know where we are and where we’re going.
When we travel we have chosen a direction, sailed into the headwinds, but we find ourselves lost. When we travel we are dis-oriented. I once cycled from Amsterdam to Bremen, and when I got there the first place I visited was a Starbucks. Not from any Romantic longing: they had good wifi, clean toilets, and I needed a map to my hostel.
The things is: these generic spaces are comforting. They are what orients us to the experience. Let us know we are here, and that there is out there. Outside the door of the coffee shop, the hidden speakeasy, the AirBnb.
We need bland places, as they orient us in our new situations; without them, we couldn’t make sense of the rest of the trip.
Lanzarote
We went on a family holiday when I was twelve, staying in a white apartment far from the beach. We visit a lava cave and then, across the road, a house that carved out of the rock. Jatos del Aqua. We pass through a subterranean cavern to reach the museum and auditorium, complete with a wide cerulean lake. The surface of the water is preternaturally still and smooth, there are no ripples here. We take the bus back to the town where our apartment is, but there is no air conditioning and we drank all the water we brought this morning so by the time we arrive home we are in no mood to cook. We find an Italian restaurant tucked in a back alley, and you have to descend a few semi-circular steps to enter. The steps are just wider than my mothers feet, and are made half of white concrete with seashells and half obsidian ceramic tiles. Inside there are a few wooden tables and low beams, and the air is cool. I am adventurous and order a pizza with tuna, red onion, and anchovy, and I fall in love with the saline tang of the anchovy on the first bite. Nowadays I eat anchovies straight from the can, as a guilty pleasure, and am transported to a cool lake in a cavern underground as I walk out into white light, brilliant sunshine overhead.
We want something that is sort of the opposite of the uncanny valley when we travel. If our destination is too different, we don’t know what is going on. We turn in all directions, looking for something to grasp, to hold onto. But the experience is more like falling from a raft into infinite water.
And if it is too similar the place horrifies us. We feel that everywhere is essentially the same, if only because everything is changing from place to place. It’s only by facing the horror of reorientation that we can go on to the rest of the journey. Out into the bright shining light. And we do this in boutique coffee shops.
Venice
On a school trip, the first holiday I took without my parents, a small party of kids and our music teacher walk through the Doge’s palace instead of taking a gondola ride next to the fecal water. It is absolutely too hot, and we emerge overwhelmed by art, medieval weapons, and prisons. A tour guide told us not to sit down in the piazza San Marco, so we wander side streets looking for ice cream. We head to the Rialto bridge and on a side street there is an open window selling Pizza by the slice. There is a bronze apparatus next to the vendor, but I don’t know what it does. I order Margarita and like everything else in Italy it is the Platonic Ideal of food. Somehow the cheese tastes fresh and the sprig of basil tastes fresh. I finish it with a peach that tastes like distilled sunshine, the single most perfect bite I’ve eaten in my lifetime.
You might pretend that you are above all this. That you, enlightened you, do not go to these coffee shops. Instead you visit foreign cities and peruse bookshops on your first day. Or instead find a bar that has an uncanny sense of home, tucked deep down a side street you’ll never find again. You stay in rooms with beds, and showers, and tables when you could have cycled across a continent and slept under the great skein of the moon.
Berlin
At a talk about recommender systems, the chief scientist of a takeaway service mentions that sooner or later everybody orders pizza; just that the company can’t push it on their customers because then they complain about a lack of diversity on the site and stop using it. So, the algorithm is hacked to be artificially favourable to everything else, to stop people’s latent preferences overwhelming the site, making it unusable. On just about every street corner in Berlin there’s a Späti selling pizza by the (square) slice. The flavours are always the same, Margarita, roast vegetable, blue cheese and walnut, pepperoni. It’s better to get a slice from the middle of the pizza, as the corner slices overemphasise the cardboard quality of the dough. Still, you eat a slice to mop up the beer you’re about to drink, and make space for the Döner later in the evening. You can’t complain.
Travel is as much about the departure as it is the destination. We go to reinvent ourselves, to unburden ourselves of our habits. Our mind is as wide open as our eyes.
Bristol
There is nothing refined about this pizza. The place does an offer, pizza, a drink, and a side, but to get over the line for free delivery you have to add a couple of toppings and a stuffed cheese crust. The result is a red onion and pepperoni pizza with extra sausage, smoked ham, and too much processed mozzarella to be ‘good’ for you in any sense. It fills you up after three slices, and you haven’t even gotten to the spicy wings you ordered. You can stretch it out through breakfast and lunch the next day, but you hate yourself for what you’ve eaten. You realise that the guilt is part of the pleasure, so order another one on a Sunday night a few weeks hence. It still tastes as delicious and forbidden as the first time, but you cycle for forty miles the next day to burn it off.
If we had no need to leave, why would we ever go?