I’ve been to these countries …


… some of which I haven’t conquered yet!

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

It was raining. I felt as if everything was brighter, more real. No, that doesn’t really describe it. What I felt was that everything suddenly had a feeling attached to it, like when I was a kid. I was walking down 48th street, lifting my umbrella up everytime I passed someone else and their umbrella. I got to the revolving door on the south side of my building and stopped. I saw a woman smoking, talking on the phone with her back to me. I smelled, suddenly, a rich, sweet cigar smell of a particular flavor that brought me back to my childhood. I hadn’t smelled this since I was ten or eleven years old. A large convention hall of some sort filled with old men smoking these things, and rows and rows of model train paraphenalia, the smell of the oil and slight burning of tiny electric motors. I was next to my dad, who was engrossed in these bits of plastic and metal and brass, or bargaining with some old man with glasses, a large protruding belly, and a vest. I was there but he didn’t really notice me at this moment. I think my mom and brother and sister were walking around somewhere too. My dad was eyeing the model train, or part of one, with a squint that an archeologist searching for some rare stone in a large pile of them out in a desert dig somewhere, might. There in front of me, was a booth with old cardboard boxes of items, wheels, tracks, tiny trees, tiny houses, just like another booth full of boxes of items next to it, in a row of booths, in a hall full of booths and old men haggling over them, and small boys watching and looking for that next, exciting new toy. All of these parts and items’ geometry, again and again, endlessly repeating brass circles, and rods, plastic boxes, wires. Trains, trees, houses, and little people. The afternoon went on and seemed to never end, and I never thought about whether it would.