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My Internal Soundtrack for Europe

For some reason, a lot of the places I´ve been queue up some kind of “theme music” in my head while I´m travelling.

For instance, Amsterdram had “Lady Marmalade” going through my head, mostly. (Think red light district.)

Then, visiting the small Dutch countryside town of Lunteren, “Provincial Life” by Belle in Beauty and the Beast wouldn´t stop playing in my head. (A little town, a quiet village, a provincial life style…) I visited an open-air musem of Dutch history and couldn’t help but think of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof after walking into so many of those barns.

After a couple of restful days there we took a not-so-restful and delay-filled train hopping extravagana that landed us in Paris.

After that I spent a day in Paris and saw the Notre Dame cathedral. (Disney again, of course: “The Bells of Notre Dame” from Hunchback.) It got much better while wandering the (lovely) streets on the way to our train station: the lovely accordian music from Amelie. (One of my favorite sound tracks.) And the streets of Paris really are all they´re supposed to be. We stumbled across a small plaza, just a turnabout really, with cafe on every side, and people sitting at 10:30 at night smoking and drinking coffee. I wish I could have spent more than six hours there. (Train was delayed, so that´s all we got. It was unplanned.)

Our not-so-restful overnight train took us south to the border of Spain and France, on the northern coast.

Next came the small seaside Basque town of San Sebastian. (That’s it’s Spanish name… it goes by something else in Basque.) Half the city is very touristy - but for good reason: it’s a lovely place to walk around. It sits right on the ocean, has a beautiful beach, and a castle up a hillside you can hike up to. Fun fact: the pointy finger of the large statue of whom I assume must be Saint Sebastian also happens to be a cell phone antenna. I´ve got a picture that hopefully I’ll remember to post once I get back. Oh, ¿the music here? Um… nothing from what I’ve heard before, so I’ll go with the street music (accodian in a couple of places) that we heard while walking around.

After another not-so-restful train ride through the countryside of Spain we arrived at Madrid.

At first I wouldn’t have given Madrid a sountrack. More like a raucous foley track of buses, construction, people talking, vendors hawking, motorcycles, scooters, and more construction. After being here for a few days the caucophony has died down a bit and music is emerging. In general the soundtrack here is anything Latin: salsa, reggaeton, bachata, you name it. (But maybe that’s because I’ve gone out salsa dancing the past two nights, too…)

But I also have to give space for the numerous street musicians. I’ve heard an amazing bass and baritone opera singer by the opera house, a four-string quartet playing Mozart on a busy sidewalk, the Japanese fiddle instrument (sorry, don’t remember the name from my ethnomusicology class) in the subway hall, and a jazz saxophone by a department store. My favorite, though, was a man playing acoustic guitar (amped) and singing (covers, mostly, like of “Guantanmera”) in his wonderful tenor, at night, outside the Palacio Real. Lots of people were sitting around enjoying the night, the lights around the palace, the music, and one another’s company. Lovely.

So why this music? My guess at this point is because at first my brain needed a way to cope with all the different stuff I was taking in: new cities, new smells, lots of new sounds, and a lot of feeling very not at home. So what does my brain do? It starts playing things that are familiar, similar, and from home so I don´t feel quite so alone.

Maybe I’m doing it a little bit less now because I’m more used to travelling. I don’t know. But it’s interesting how much I link sound with memory and image. There have been more than a few moments so far where I’ve wished I could remember the sounds and the smells around me.