Where to go tonight

Author: Chen Danyan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: On a night of chance encounter, an unfamiliar bed, the frost-like moonlight on the floor before the bed: Where do you want to go tonight? If you want to indulge tonight, tonight you can follow Chen Danyan—tonight you can have no thoughts. You will no longer understand the pain of thoughts, tonight you can be sad or not sad, floating and sinking in the layers of people and things. This book is a collection of Chen Danyan's travels over ten years, from Munich, Long Road No. 11 to St. Petersburg, Lenin Street No. 8, from Berlin, Airport Road No. 4 to Bonn, Beethoven Square No. 7. In this book, you not only savor the mood of travel but also more deeply drink in the culture and charm of foreign lands. With her profound cultural heritage, the author uses delicate and penetrating brushwork to show us a colorful foreign world and her feelings of facing the world alone. Sweet as love, bitter as life, black as death—this is coffee, this is life. This book is one of Chen Danyan's travel essays on European culture, a collection of texts filtered from her 11 years of traveling in Europe, introducing her travel experiences around the world. Illustrated with images, it is pleasing to the eye. Reading such beautiful prose in your leisure is like holding a cup of "sweet as love, bitter as life, black as death" coffee—a rare enjoyment. In Europe, add a small bed In the past eight years, time and again, with my Chinese passport, my blue thick canvas backpack, and motion sickness tea diphenhydramine tablets bought from the Changshu Road pharmacy, I traveled to Europe. Sometimes it was winter, sometimes summer—Europe's summer has golden and long evenings, warm winds blowing from Berlin's (sacred trees) all the way to the high grasslands of northern Spain, where unknown wildflowers sway in the wind, looking somewhat sorrowful. That plateau, in the 11th century, was seen by someone as a place where a great star fell every night. Following the traces of that great star falling straight from the night sky, people found the grave of St. James. Sometimes it was spring, sometimes autumn—when the gray-green elegant olive trees on the slopes of Tuscany are covered with black, ripe olives under the blue sky, in Moscow's New (Virgin Cemetery), the pale yellow first snow has completely covered the long-neglected path of the monastery, and the white headscarves of the nuns sway in the snowflakes. In the eighth year, I arrived at Frankfurt Airport in October, and while waiting to pass through the immigration checkpoint, I suddenly realized that I had experienced all four seasons of this continent during my travels in Europe. The small bed laid with clean sheets for my arrival always carries the fresh scent of laundry detergent. The square pillow, when patted, suddenly flies out a small white fluff. From which duck raised in a green tree-surrounded lake in Europe? I don't know. In autumn, I once saw wild ducks flying across the highway; they had gone to Italy for the winter. For a moment, the blue sky was filled with their tiny black wings. That day, I followed them, wanting to travel along the highway to Weimar, to see the place where Goethe wrote "Faust." That night, I stayed in a room along the street, and from the window, I could see a small square opposite the tavern wall hanging a yellow sign that read, "Goethe also drank here."