Michelle’s Reviews > The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe, From Finland to Ukraine > Status Update

We put down in black and white a few basic equations of travel. For example, less weight equals more encounters. Pace equals metrics equals story. And above all: the greater the difficulty, the more stories to tell. And who cares if we end up trying to hitch a ride in the middle of the Carpathians? We'll have more things to remember.

Warsaw: "The city I have loved and visited many times seems to have been sucked into the void. Bermuda shorts, ice cream cones, rude tourists, a square invaded by multicolored papier mâché bears on their hind legs with their forelegs raised in the air like fools. The analgesic illusionism of the West appears to me in all of its dementia. After just one day, I'm exhausted."

I've learned in my travels not to ask too many questions. It's better to talk about yourself. Offer something of yourself and your own story so that the dialogue turns into a bartering of firsts.

The bear, he says, is many animals in one. Like a lion, he downs mammals much bigger than he; like any ruminant, he pillages crops; he steals grapes and fruit like a monkey; nibbles on berries like a blackbird; plunders anthills and beehives like a woodpecker; digs up tubers and larvae like a pig; and catches fish with the dexterity of an otter. And he eats honey like a man.

"Come in," she tells her, and she invites her in to see her treasures, all affectionately addressed by diminutive nicknames: taters, carotelles, strawbabies, peasies, and so on. "Explain to your readers that it's a sin not to cultivate the earth," she says to Monika, and her elementary truth startles me. Why don't our priests thunder from the pulpit against this first of all sins?

I repeat the names of the cardinal points in Russian: sever, north, desolate asperity of the Gulag; yug, south, a funnel that sucks you down toward the bottom; vostok, east, like the launch of a catapult; and zapad, west, the sound of falling head over heels.