Europe, Day 4: The Stockholm Retrospective

Midnight again. I am in Sweden. This fact is not lost on me; it drifts about, echoing with bass tide, thumping from the techno lounge downstairs. I am in a tiny room of all black and red and silver things – I am swimming in a steel martini.

Cold blues and abrasive chromes flirt with cigarette smoke and procedurally-painted pressboards and the result is City, version one-point-one. For some reason, I have no desire to know this hotel any better than I already do.

The literature about light and colors, filled with professional “edgy” photos and quotes from designers I’ll never meet is not comforting. I’ve seen this motif before. It is hiding something.

“Part of it is,” Dave says on the taxi ride in, “I go to these places and it feels like home. I don’t want it to feel like home.”

He’s right. The road corridor up ahead has familiar lighting – the lit sky paths curve in familiar ways as the road takes gentle turns past semi-commercial zones, residential areas pulled just beyond the crest of the greenbelt and away, leaving off-exit fast food and Suzuki dealerships as the only evidence of life.

It is the geometry of home. Why can’t I feel at home here?

Just hours ago I was in Belgium, in a hotel very similar to this one. Modern. Small. Hotel Ve, in Mechelen. And yet, it was very different. A converted fish-smoking factory, the smell is still there if you take the stairs. The hallways are cramped. I even scraped a chunk of my hand off on the unfinished door jamb –the wood splinters left over still irritate whenever I find them.

And yet I felt genuinely at home there. I felt a compulsion to spend the rest of my life in Mechelen, Belgium. It was a city that kept history – kept itself – and still made room and time and respect for the modern and contemporary, and for that concession to both the past and the future I felt grateful enough to want to pack up my belongings and stay forever.

Still, paradise has a price. Today’s session felt difficult: the Belgian audiences are sharp, reserved, and difficult for a person like me – me who feeds off of the energy of the crowd – to integrate with. Each session was an attempt to win new hearts and minds, and while I did not get the outward response I was hoping, ala Milan or Dublin, the evaluation forms coming in are indicating very good news.

So, it’s cultural.

“You must not be happy with how your dollar is doing,” Hans says as we try to check in. The Nordic Sea Hotel’s Ice Bar is well-known. Cyan light refracts through the open window into the icy room and cracks across the floor. I study it, and wait for Hans to finish. He’s not done yet.

“I travel to the US quite a bit,” he says proudly. “It’s so cheap there.”

In Belgium, as now, I realize, sometimes in a harsh way, that I am just a visitor here. I do not live in these countries. I am not afforded the rights of those that do; I am at the whims of the host countries and their inhabitants first and foremost, and it is their attention – positive or negative – that makes for my success, or my failure.

In a nod to Hans, it’s like this: my cultural currency doesn’t buy much here. I am an American, and that’s an outsider, and as a Microsoft employee, a potential technical enemy. It’s frightening to consider it from that perspective, and in microcosm, it’s humbling to see both ways, cultural differences aside: either the group fosters your growth in them and accepts you – or they don’t.

And I consider all of that, here in my temporary bed in Stockholm, and realize: these past four days I have been fortunate beyond fortune to speak to some of the warmest, most welcoming, most excited and inspired people I have ever met. They didn’t have to give me their attention. They didn’t have to give me their time.

But they gave it anyway. In Ireland, in Austria, in Italy, and now in Belgium, they listened. They opened up, they gave up their time and their pursuits to give me a chance. I was thrown to the mercy of that crowd, and they set me – an American and a first-timer in Europe – down gently.
For those that are reading this, and I know there are a few – I’ve even gotten comments from some of you – I’ll say this, as I said it to my Milan audience:

Grazie.

Danke.

Merci.

A million times over. Thank you.

Halfway there.