Book #11: Around the Bloc

Here’s a disgusting anecdote to start off this book review: I have some brown and tan candles in my bathroom. Yesterday evening, as they were burning, one of the brownest candles overflowed and wax started leaking everywhere. I didn’t notice for about an hour, which meant there was plenty of time for brown wax to accumulate and make it look like someone living in my apartment had severe bathroom issues. I think it was my fish, Alvin.

I start with this gross anecdote about candle wax because I don’t actually have a whole lot to say about the book I just finished, which was written by Stephanie Elizondo Griest and titled: “Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana.” The book covers Griest’s time studying abroad in Moscow, working for a newspaper in Beijing and taking a quickie holiday to Havana. Since they are/were Communist countries, Griest has a nifty little link for tying them all together.

There were some moments when this book was pretty interesting and made me want to pack up a backpack and just get out of town. However, when people in their very early twenties travel the world and write about it, they have the tendency to become annoying very very quickly. Perhaps if I had been a few years younger when I read this book, I would have had more sympathy for all of the writer’s whining about her identity and how she couldn’t witness any revolutions and how people were just not acting like she was expecting them to. It all struck me as very selfish and immature, which is probably what my travel journal would sound like to an outside reader. But hey, I didn’t publish mine, and this girl did. So much of it also felt calculated, because people spoke in incredibly unrealistic profundities all the time and I have the sense that perhaps certain episodes were inflated to serve the author’s sense of who she is/was.

All in all, though, that’s kind of the nature of the beast when you’re abroad at that age, I think. You need things to be amazingly profound and you just think about yourself all the time. I would like to think I was an exception to that rule, though, because when I studied abroad in Italy, I didn’t think about myself all the time. I thought about popes all the time.

Even though I am being kinda negative about this book, I still had a decent enough time reading it. The author did have some interesting experiences and anecdotes even despite all her self-importance. And man oh man, let’s hope this author doesn’t have a Google alert for herself set up! Even though I bitch about travel literature sometimes, it’s still a big weakness of mine, if only for those rare moments in the book that capture the funny and the unexpected of traveling. So if you travel to some interesting places and then plunk your experiences in the travel literature section of the bookstore, I am probably going to get to it at some point or another. For now, though, I gotta go clean up some candle wax.