Kebabs

The last time you heard from me I was sitting on a summer’s evening looking out over an Italian port city and wondering how to spend the rest of my vacation. I imagined I left you in suspense, paused over your keyboard, bagel in hand, nostrils dilated. Now I will dutifully assuage your tension. You can put down your bagel.

After walking around the port of Genoa, wandering its narrow streets, getting a haircut and admiring how, true to all stereotypes, Italy really does have beautiful dark-haired women who zip around on Vespas, I hopped on buses down the coast to Nice, Marseille and Montpellier.

In Montpellier, not for the first time on my trip, I found myself urgently needing accommodation and discharging indiscriminate couch-surfing requests, increasingly desperately. At the eleventh hour, in a gesture of incomparable kindness, a French girl named Alba offered me her bed. She apologised, because she herself was not actually in Montpellier, but she had asked her flatmate if I could stay and it was cool.

So, after a frustrating hour slumped on the floor of the train station trying to access wi-fi and the flatmate’s details, I took a bus out into the suburbs of Montpellier along sinuous avenues lined with trees, insurance offices and service stations, keeping a beady eye out for the street name I had scribbled in my diary. I pushed the red button on the bus, waved a roguish goodbye to the driver and was disgorged in the late afternoon sun and a cloud of exhaust on an unremarkable suburban street. I could feel the dampness of my shirt beneath my backpack as I clutched my diary and followed my directions. After a few minutes of sweaty walking down side streets I found myself in the foyer of a somewhat run-down apartment complex. I had an apartment number, no name and no real idea of what to do.

I buzzed the apartment a half dozen times, climbed the stairs and banged on the door (twice) and then sat down on my bag just inside the door to decide what to do next. I surprised a series of people who staggered past me carrying bags of shopping, none of whom spoke English. After a half hour of puzzled concern, feeling smelly, tired and a little fed up, a small red-haired French girl with a bicycle approached the glass doors, punched in a code, wrestled her bike inside and smiled at me. “You must be Alex,” she said.

What was I even worrying about? Justine, the flatmate of my couchsurfing host, brought me upstairs, showed me where to set down my bag and got me a beer from the fridge. She smoked cigarettes while we sat on the couches in her lounge and got to know each other. We were both 27, had an interest in development and liked travelling. I was exhausted and dirty. “No problem,” she said, “Make yourself at home.”

I showered and that night I shared pizza with her and her Italian friend. The next morning she went to work, but not before giving me her key and the wi-fi code, so I could go out and explore Montpellier at my leisure. Aren’t people friendly? This world may contain war, pestilence, the Taliban and the E! Entertainment Channel, but boy there are some glimmers of pristine kindness.

I spent three nights ‘hosted’ by Alba, going to the beach with Justine, drinking beers and meeting her friends, all without once meeting my couch-surfing host. Then I got another bus and headed further South to Barcelona and down through some of Europe’s most impressive Mediterranean cities.

Gaudi’s wonderful interior of the Sagrada Familia, Valencia’s city of Arts and Sciences, the Alhambra of Granada, the Mezquita of Cordoba, Seville’s Alcázar. All among the most beautiful of Europe’s civilizational achievements and all things I didn’t bother seeing.

In many of these cities my couch surfing hosts would, innocently enough, ask me, “Cool, so which day are you going to see the ____”.

Usually I’d avert their curious, innocent gaze and mumble something like, “Oh I’m not sure yet, I’ll see what I have planned for the next few days.” As if I had a plan. As if I had prior commitments in the city that I just washed up in. The truth was that I had no real intention of going to any of these attractions. I am, you see, a pretty shitty tourist.

In all these cities I developed a little routine for myself. I would find a coffee shop for a morning coffee and pastry. Then I would slip on my headphones, throw on a podcast, and go wandering. Sometimes I would walk up to, or past, a tourist attraction, but rarely would I go inside. Something about the mobs of tourists elbowing their way to the front for their selfies didn’t seem appealing, not compared to the podcast I was listening to.

Ambivalence about tourist attractions has always been a common theme of my travelling. The best thing I saw in Vietnam was a supermarket. This is where Vietnamese people buy their groceries, I marvelled.

I wasn’t completely slothful. I went mountain-biking with Pedro, my host in Granada, and played football in Saint Etienne. In Lyon I actually replaced my host in his team while he studied for an exam the next day. And I don’t believe I ever turned down an opportunity to get drunk with a host and their friends. But cathedrals? I was apathetic in the extreme. Mostly, if I’m honest, I just wanted to walk, listen and eat kebabs.

Now, although you can absolutely criticise my incuriosity about Europe’s cathedrals, art galleries and museums, one thing you can never, ever accuse me of is that I am uninterested in the continent’s kebabs.

I may have missed numerous churches, monuments and basilicas, but I can tell you I tasted kebabs in Saint Etienne, Lyon, Dijon, Berlin, Genoa, Nice, Marseille, Montpellier, Barcelona, Granada, Malaga and Santander. I ate falafel kebabs with peanut sauce with Theo in Berlin and a kebab with goat’s cheese and caramelised red onion with Mikey in Malaga. Beat that, Michael Palin.

The reason I can tell you in such detail about my eating habits is that I bought a little spending book in which I wrote down all of my outlays. That is why I can also tell you that the total cost of my two and a half months of travelling was €1,956.07. I spent €288 on buses, €118 on trains and €102 on flights. I forked out €166 for hostels and €190 for AirBnbs. I spent €34 on French fries and at least €46 on fizzy drinks and juices.

The single biggest culinary expenditure, however, was kebabs. In all, I ate 24 kebabs on my trip. I spent almost as much on kebabs (€112.3) as I did on beer (€113.3). On two occasions I had two kebabs in a day. This is on a trip in which I spent a couple of weeks staying with friends and eating real, home-cooked food. On a continent famed for its cuisine. And it doesn’t include the burgers, pizza, fries and other authentic local cuisine. If I was footloose and unaccompanied in a city, you can be sure I was getting a kebab. It may not be the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, but it was a cultural experience. Of a sort, at least.

Anyway, my Great Kebab Tour of Europe took me down the Spanish coast through Valencia to Andalucia. In Malaga I stayed with Mikey, my relocated friend from Bilbao, and another visiting friend, Kate, with whom I would have morning salons at a nearby coffee shop when Mikey kicked us out each morning to teach his English classes. After a night in Cordoba and then two in Seville I spent a day on a bus traversing the length of Spain to wind up in the pleasant little coastal city of Santander in Cantabria on the Bay of Biscay.

Santander is a much-overlooked city. It doesn’t have an old town due to a fire in 1941 that swept much of it away, but it does have a tidy, contained central business district. After a mid-morning kebab (and nothing says grease enthusiast like an AM kebab) I walked through the port and along the string of lovely golden beaches right in the middle of the city that stretch along the coast.

Santander has a grand old building with verdant, sculptured grounds that juts out into the ocean. You can find a place to sit or lie down on any of the beaches without too much trouble and the water is clean and cold without any of the murky sediment and floating plastic of the Southern coast. Compared to the cigarette butts and littered black sand of Malaga, Santander’s beaches are pristine. More than anything Santander has a pleasant, small-town seaside feel that is really quite pleasant after the heat and clutter of southern Spain.

I was staying in Santander for a few nights before flying to Scotland, my last big hop before returning to Bilbao. On my one full day in Santander I found a friendly little kebab shop on Calle San Fernando, one of the main pedestrian stretches of central Santander. It was €3.90, in case you were wondering.