Lazy Students » Chris Stokel-Walker

TYSKAB #2: your feet will disintegrate

Chris Stokel-Walker — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:03:42 +0000

The backpacker's nemesis

I’ve only just come to terms with this one, actually. For some reason, facing death by a large Irish man was acceptable; it’s something that can happen any day of the week and has done since we first tried to cow the Celts under British rule. However, the notion that my feet were left looking like a bombsite (literally) left open wounds, and it’s only now that all the scars are healed that I feel alright to warn others about it.

Backpacking is almost by definition an exercise in cutting financial corners. You slum it around Europe or the world for a few months in an attempt to see the world without becoming so debt-ridden that you can’t experience life when you get back home. Clothes get washed in bathroom sinks and ‘clean’ gets redefined as ‘not smelling quite as much’. You sleep in dorm rooms in hostels because it’s cheaper than double beds in hotel rooms, and ignore the fact that there is a drunk Irishman wanting to take out his disagreement with an Australian on you. You try to take in culinary delights of each region but end up getting poor-quality versions of what you want because you’re loathe to spend more on the real thing. Supermarkets become your restaurants: you learn the astute differences in bread between countries.

So by backpacking you’re less willing to pay money on taxis, buses and metro fares. And, because space is at a premium when you’re packing for your jaunt away, you get rid of shoes and replace them with that perennial standby, flip-flops.

I wore my flip-flops from day one. As soon as I was in my room in Paris, I put them on and set about walking the city. The first night was amazing: we walked from Il Marais across the river and back again, a sort of lazy promenade which gives you the best impression of the city and its lifestyle.

The second day I put my flip-flops on again, bright and early. The problem was that I hadn’t counted on being out on the streets of Paris from 9am until 11pm without really sitting down. Things felt bad about 3pm: my ankles ached and every time I put pressure on the bottom of my feet my brain shouted at my body to stop moving. You ignore that, it’s part of the backpacking credo.

So when I (honestly did) limp back into the hotel room I knew things weren’t going to be pretty, and I had a plan. I’d wrap a towel soaked in cold water around my ballooning ankle to stop the swelling and fill the bin with water to bathe my feet in. That all went great, apart from the fact that the bin was too small and had holes in it, and to get your feet anywhere near the water involved arching them, which I couldn’t do for the amount of scar tissue that was forming on my feet.

The medical student travelling with me actually flinched a little bit when he saw my feet. I didn’t willingly show him my soles: I knew it would be a bit awkward when he saw that I’d ruined my feet on day two of our travels and would give me actual informed medical advice – and that’s not what backpacking is about. But he demanded it, and went “Ah, yeah, well. That’s not good.” In fact he was worried that I’d not make it onto the plane (our one bit of luxury on the trip) down to Seville the day after.

I did, even though he refused to sit next to me on the flight for fear that my feet might actually explode over him with the change in pressure. And, after a night slept on the floor of the room, with my feet above the rest of my body on a chair which became sodden with water dripping from my soaked-towel cold compress, I managed to carry on for the rest of the trip without collapsing in pain with every step. It still hurt like hell, and I thought about scaling back on the walking, but that’s not the backpacking way.

TYSKAB # 1: you will meet psychopaths

Chris Stokel-Walker — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:52:09 +0000

The end of summer can mean only one thing: thousands of students about to go away for two months, or four, or twelve to far-flung places and meet brilliant new people, experience new things and come back with a skin complexion three shades darker than it used to be and a billion stories to non-gappers when they get to university.

Those brilliant new people might not be so brilliant, however.

I went to Madrid this summer. It was fun. I beat the owner of the hostel at Pro Evolution Soccer (twice), ate the best tapas at a local bar which was crammed to the gills with people then wandered down the street and stood in a square with lots of homosexuals dancing to Michael Jackson songs. They gave me free condoms

Unwittingly joining in with one of Europe’s biggest LGBT parties in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world was definitely a highlight; something to bore people with on cold Autumnal days back in Britain. What happened when I got back to the hostel probably wasn’t a highlight.

I’d been sensible, having a train to catch the following morning and gone back to get some sleep, deciding not to boogie on down with lots of hand-holding men and women, a vibrant DJ and a bunch of equally-puzzled, equally-enthralled tourists. Only I’d entered what could have been my last night on Earth..

An Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian walked into the hostel. Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Not quite. They’d been travelling separately for months but met up somewhere in Eastern Europe, got on quite well and decided to go along together for the rest of their trips. Initially all seemed well, until they got liquored up.

I was on the top bunk of my bed reading a book when the tubby Irish guy came in and punched the locker and shouted “Fuckers!” as loud as he possibly could. At that moment my life flashed before my eyes and I tried to figure out how to fight off an eighteen-stone drunk Irishman with a pillow, my mobile phone, a blunt locker key and a copy of ‘Maggie Cassady’ by Jack Kerouac. He sat down on his bed and was out of sight, which was slightly more concerning. (By now I’d decided that it was best to fling the pillow at him then try stabbing him in the carotid artery with the key, in case you were wondering). The fact that he was breathing like some sort of minotaur, squealing “those fuckers” and making a sound which sounded like someone punching themselves in the head didn’t help, either.

The Englishman came in and started talking the Irishman down from his rage, which was quite nice. It turns out that the Australian was only interested in collecting notches on his bedpost while the Irishman and Englishman (owing to their inferior genetics, presumably) were after a good time partying in the various bars of Europe. They only eventually realised I was in the room, holding my pillow in front of me like it was a bulletproof shield, when I couldn’t hold in a cough anymore. “Oh, hey mate. Dara, we’d better go. The lad’s trying to sleep.”

No bed, no trains, but drugs and hookers

Chris Stokel-Walker — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:35:21 +0000

Barcelona is meant to be one of the best cities in Europe: modern, cosmopolitan and edgy enough to keep bleary-eyed twenty-something professionals packing out their bars at 5am yet still trudging into work, inexplicably fresh-faced, just a couple of hours later. It’s popular enough to keep tourists clocking in and out of its airports, sea ports and train stations and parting with their money willingly (and not so willingly – but more on that later). And I don’t get it at all.

I don’t have great memories of Barcelona. Sorry. It’s not a great thing to say, but a lot of the city really sucks. It’s filthy, and overcrowded, and full of people who want to steal the contents of your pocket or have sex with you for money. It’s also full of homeless people who will sit next to you when you sleep in a train station for a night and suffocate you with the musk of urine, faeces and the cumulative smell of what must be years of not washing.

La Sagrada Familia: one of the few good bits of Barcelona

Barcelona was a bad luck charm to me. Every time I went to the city something went wrong. The first time I didn’t have a bed in a hostel in the Barri Gotic. Eventually, after much arguing and some very English sarcasm, they found a place. The second time, I couldn’t actually leave the city – trying to get a train from Barcelona to Valencia on a Friday is seemingly impossible: everyone must want to get out of there. So I slept in the train station, until that closed at 12.30 on a Saturday morning. Then I wandered the streets for four and a half hours until they opened the doors again and let in the unshaved, unwashed backpackers and the slightly loony local homeless.

That morning wasn’t great. At about five past five, I sat down on the cold metal seats (presumably so you can’t sleep on them overnight, even if the station were kept open) and listened in to a conversation between a local homeless woman and an American female tourist. The Barceloneta was quietly mumbling to her about “la problema femenina”, and the American could only reply loudly and awkwardly “Yes. I know.”

Barcelona likes its graffiti, even outside five-star hotels

The third time was better. I’d learnt that Barcelona was something to be tolerated, rather than enjoyed, and had learnt that you don’t go to the train station first thing in the morning, you get to your hostel early to make sure they keep your booking and you do everything you can to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as humanely possible.

You don’t walk down Las Ramblas ever (despite what everyone will tell you about it being a Barcelona must-see: if you enjoy the backs of people’s heads, dirty, wide-spaced cobbles and a rat run of inconspicuous beer sellers leaning into you and offering you weed and prostitutes forcibly taking you by the arm and trying to drag you to their bordello, then maybe it’s worth visiting), but especially at night. Everything around it is amazing: the Barri Gotic, the true old city, with narrow, vaulting streets and a complete lack of Burger Kings, McDonalds and KFCs; Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, a candlewax cathedral on one side and a Las Vegas casino frontage on the other, and his Parc Guell, a play park on a hill with views over Barcelona – where pickpockets and dealers and prostitutes and pimps become insubstantial ants; and the Diagonal, a great incongruent street in the middle of the city. But ultimately, it’s somewhere you watch your wallet – and your watch, counting down the hours until you get to move on to somewhere else.

Fees to rise to £7,000 after next election

Chris Stokel-Walker — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:13:29 +0000

My old school offers places to ex-pupils on their school trips. It’s a simple arrangement: you come along as a responsible adult, and they drag you around the finest Roman ruins in Italy for a week or so, half-board, for a decent price. Realistically you’re there as a spare body, someone who can, if needed, help out in herding a bunch of 14-18 year olds who either have their noses burrowed in their guidebooks or stuck up in amazement at a truly capital Doric, well…capital.

A by-product of spending a week on coaches, in restaurants and around a foreign country with GCSE students is that you get to know them. It gets awkward if you’re four or six years older than the majority of the people around you and simply don’t talk; you have to in order to get by. Which is why I feel sorry for them right now.

Over plates of pasta they told me what they’re studying, and what they want to do with their lives. Some (not many) wanted to be doctors – this was a classics trip, remember. Most were keen on teaching, writing, some sort of liberal arts career. And most of them will begin university, if their lives work out as they’ve planned right now, in September 2011.

Thanks to the freefalling economy and a yearning by both major political parties to get more working-class kids into tertiary education, it looks like they’re going to be taking on even more debt than I am right now – and that’s too much in the eyes of many.

The man who will increase your tuition fees, Peter Mandelson

Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, indicated in a speech on Monday to many leading vice-chancellors that universities needed to become more welcoming to vocational degrees as well as the more traditionally academic subjects usually taught – and to open up such places would need an increase in university tuition fees. The current legal limit of £3,225 (the figure every student has ingrained on their mind at this point in the year, filling out forms for loans) would almost definitely be raised by 2013, and theoretically could be done by 2011. The magic figure which most vice-chancellors have settled on as being the new glass ceiling is £7,000 per year.

This would allow whichever political party wins the election early next year to slash spending on higher education while allowing the restructuring and opening up of universities to more working-class school leavers. The fees would plug the money gap quite comfortably.

One of the people I talked to on that trip this past Easter had it all planned out. Breezing through GCSEs and A levels (which looks likely for her) and into Oxford (admittedly more difficult). With the basic fees rising across the board to £7,000 by the time she applies through UCAS to universities – and with the news that “research intensive” institutions (Oxford and Cambridge likely to be the first two names on the list) could potentially charge even more – this looks like a plan which could end up with double the amount of debt being taken on that a university graduate this summer would incur. With fees set at £7,000 a year, think tank Universities UK calculate that the average student would leave university with £32,400 of debt.

The potential high watermark for those elite research institutions could be up to £15,000, experts say, including a £2,000 bursary levy to fund places for those who can’t afford a place in tertiary education.

Paul Wellings, Lancaster University’s vice-chancellor and soon-to-be-chairman of the 1994 Group has spoken of a “valley of death” of students priced out of universities; or worse, students who take the risk of incurring high debts in order to get an increasingly devalued degree.

Would it be worth it, then? Many students of the classes of ’09 are finding it impossible to find a job which the university graduates of 1989 were almost assured of. The opening up of universities to attain New Labour’s aim of getting 50% of school leavers into tertiary education has meant that many degrees from all but the best universities are worth less than they used to be. No longer are university degrees an all-access pass to the job ladder; nor are they necessarily value for money anymore.