Connections

I planned to write about my perspective on Mixed Martial Arts today, but I’m not as revved up about it this morning in my office as I was Saturday night at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif., watching a mentor of Rob’s getting his arm broken. It was awesome. I’ll get there.

Instead, let’s talk about travel. In continuing my read-a-thon in preparation for India and Nepal (there’s no way I can finish The Moor’s Last Sigh, Love and Death in Kathmandu and Slowly Down the Ganges by April 10), I’m working on Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar. As you might imagine, it’s about trains. Reading it, sitting in the airport bar, with Rob engrossed in his video iPod, I was “awash in memories of innumerable train journeys,” to plagiarize from a review on this page.

Literally, I couldn’t read more than a page at a time without getting distracted by a flashback of a travel experience. Moments that mostly had nothing to do with the scene I was reading, although I did travel with Theroux yesterday through a European region I’m fairly familiar with. The flashbacks were as vivid as they were vague, and they weren’t even necessarily about trains, although usually a train was how I got there. What kept taking me out of the reading experience was that I couldn’t remember exactly what country I was in, and even whether I was with someone (my mother? a friend?) or alone.

Specifically, I kept thinking of a modern-looking restaurant, I want to say sushi, but that didn’t seem right for Central/Eastern Europe (was I in Russia?), and it was closed the first time I tried to go, but I went out of my way to go back the next day. I kept picturing the restaurant …

Right. As I wrote the above paragraph, about not eating sushi in Central/Eastern Europe … I remembered. We did eat sushi, didn’t we, Chelsea and Matej? And I’m thinking you even recommended this particular restaurant and it had a funny name. Googling makes me think it was “Flying Sushi,” although I don’t find much else about it.

It was Salzburg, Austria. I even blogged about it, although sadly, not about Flying Sushi. Still, it’s all flooding back.

That’s a pretty good endorsement for blog-keeping, even if you don’t have a huge readership and it often amounts to little more than navel-gazing. Isn’t it?

So there’s that, and all kinds of associated excitement about the upcoming India and Nepal trip. And what should happen today, but a friend/coworker from my job in Prague messaged me via Facebook. Someone with a common enough name I never would have thought to search, and whom I hadn’t thought of in years, and probably wouldn’t have ever again if he hadn’t “run across” my Facebook profile.

Awash in memories, indeed. Now I’m having flashbacks of assorted work-related social activities, including having a drink with this particular friend/coworker (really more of a coworker/supervisor, actually) at a newly opened martini bar close to my flat just before I moved back to the States.