“Move the Knight,” says the kibitzer. He could very well be an umarell, but I guess he’s happy with his kibitzer role. I stand behind him; I’m just a hodophile, always thirsty for one-liners. Am I rubbernecking here? Probably yes. But this doesn’t matter that much. What actually matters is: why on earth am I thinking all these random words?
“Let that horse gallop, man” -the kibitzer sounds more demanding now. There’s a battle taking place in his head here in this park of Lviv, Ukraine. I could potentially shoot one hundred photos and remain invisible. All three men remain focused on the chessboard. And I just click and click and click.
I’m not any good at chess, I just know the basics. But I think of interfering, even though I’m just an interloper in the scene. It’s not that I care that much about the game itself. But some light intrigue always seems welcome. Trolling online is unacceptable nowadays, but in the analog world, it’s still a thing. The impact is smaller, but the joy equal.
“I guess he’s just worried about the Queen,” I say. And it almost feels as if I didn’t say anything. For several seconds there’s no reaction. The players seem occupied, the kibitzer follows the tension. And then, out of the blue, the kibitzer just states:
“I’m a national master.”
A hodophile in search of interlopers
A hodophile is somebody who loves the road, and subsequently, the journeys.
As the years go by, it becomes something like a bad habit. Wherever I travel, I’m attracted less by monuments and more by stories. Promise me a good story, and I’d skip a visit to the Colosseum. And what can better epitomize a good travel story? A one-liner. A witty, bizarre, unforeseeable, often irrelevant remark. It comes from a unique someone who stands out from the crowd. He’s not a witness anymore; he’s just that guy ready for that one-liner.
One day, at the fish market of Catania, the smell is intense. People bargain the price of fish in the improvised corridors of the open-air market. There’s something like a veranda on one side, and there the older men observe the continual coming and going. Most of them remain silent, but one older guy behaves like this is some outdoor stock market.
“Don’t even consider buying that -can’t you see the eyes?” he says. Or: “come on, people, what’s wrong with you, eight euros for a kilo of these?” And he can easily become ironic: “As if we don’t know that this guy sells frozen fish.”
How can somebody stay away from these guys? I mean, how can you ignore these verbal haiku? I stand behind him -and once again, I could shoot one hundred photos unnoticed. These guys are always so dedicated to their roles. Even though I’m in Italy, he’s not an umarell. One could also call him a kibitzer or even a meddler.
“It smells good here,” I just say. I don’t want to provoke him, but, you know, I need that one-liner. But the guy doesn’t react. I can feel, though, that he wants to say something. He’s just killing time there (me too), and of course, he’ll reply something. And indeed he does:
“There’s no fresh fish around here after Fukushima.”
Catching up with a proper umarell
The term umarell refers to men of retirement age who spend their time watching construction sites. It’s an Italian-born word that I came across in Bologna, and it’s still stuck to my mind. And whenever I see an umarell, I all of a sudden feel the urge to observe him. Umarells seem more discreet, though: they’re enjoying the scene silently. No witty remarks, no talks. You can see in their eyes how they imagine the completion of the construction.
One day, after cycling around Athens all day long, I end up at Nea Filadelfeia. That’s where the AEK FC home ground once was before an earthquake destroyed it. Almost twenty years later, at the same spot, the new stadium is being built. All around the big construction site, you see people observing the process. The older ones among them are anxious if they’ll ever see a match there. A generation of fans passed away without seeing it complete.
That afternoon, I see a man trying to get a glimpse of the stadium. He wants to know the process. The entrance is blocked, and he can only observe the development through a window on the iron fence. It seems to be a prime spot. Unfortunately, he has to bend slightly, and I assume that this might give him a backache. He stays in the same pose for several minutes.
“How’s it going?” I ask him. He seems surprised, and he probably didn’t even think that somebody was there all this time. He takes a deep breath, and then he exhales slowly.
“It’s still under construction, son.”
A hodophile crossing the Rubicon
Slowly, I become a patchwork of all these one-liners I overheard. I had to provoke people for half of these remarks slightly, but the rest were offered to me for free. In every journey I go, I feel more and more the urge to add new witty remarks to my collection. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Cities, exactly like life, never fulfill promises.
But I still remember the day I arrived in Glasgow, Scotland. It was still a pre-pandemic world, and spending time outdoors was not prohibited. I wanted to visit the Kelvingrove Museum, and I daydreamed of my return to Edinburgh after almost fifteen years. I was also curious to do some street photography in Glasgow and have beers in a proper pub.
And yet, I remember that the first thing I did was stop in front of some roadwork. It was nothing impressive but something attracted me. It seemed like a black hole in the middle of the city. I remained there mesmerized. Did somebody just leave it open? Or was there a man working under the ground? And then a bunch of irregular thoughts began. Is this a black hole like the ones in the universe? Could our planet disappear just by entering a black hole?
“Stephen Hawking would love that hole,” I mumbled.
And just like that, I felt that I crossed some Rubicon. The moment you, as a hodophile, catch yourself commenting on a construction site somewhere abroad is the moment you become both an umarell and a kibitzer. It’s actually a moment of a harsh realization. No, I’m not talking about how a Xennial is not that young anymore. It’s just that at this moment, you become a really weird traveler.
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Last Updated on May 15, 2021 by George Pavlopoulos