Selina Xu

Hello friends, here’s my belated first post of 2024 (published a hair’s breadth away from March)!!! I spent the final days of 2023 in Helsinki, Tallinn and Sweden, and the Lunar New Year in Miami and San Francisco. When my physical body travels, I wonder if my brain also goes on vacation: somehow I ponder the world differently—just slightly, wonderfully out of kilter—and everything that ought to be mundane appears significant. Maybe it’s why people take psychedelics; like them, I’m unabashedly addicted to travel.

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Mexico City

• First impressions: Mexico bursts at the seams. Everything overflows. Each bite of tacos, each slurp of guava, every shade of salsa. The streets are full of colors: houses painted in ocher, cobalt blue, cotton-candy pink.

• We don’t manage to get into Frida Kahlo’s blue house. In this land, Frida is the real influencer. Her face plasters more magnets and bags than Our Lady of Guadalupe.
• At Templo del Mayor, history jostles for space. The former Aztec Great Temple — preserved as ruins — lies at the city center, surrounded by monuments of whiteness like the city hall and cathedral. The rocks and mounds have been brutally castrated by the Spanish conquistadors, used to erect colonial balustrades. But the temple in its destroyed form gave me a more debilitating feeling than any restoration could’ve. And weirdly more than at the grand Teotihuacán pyramids, I sense the passing of time.

• In Mexico I can see the crusts of history on the same plain, sliding and converging like tectonic plates. The Olmecs, the Aztecs, the Spanish, the Mexican: a subduction zone.

Helsinki

• “There are only two things Finnish people care about the most: libraries and saunas,” says our guide. “People here are born in a sauna and they die in a sauna.” One for the soul, one for the body: massaging the neurons and cells. A match made in heaven!
• There’s barely any sunlight, so fleeting it’s a luxury—the opposite of the tropical glare in Singapore that I grew up in. Climates shape the character of a place deeply. The minimalism and restraint of the Nordic countries feel faithful to its cold, the snow, the pale sun. No country appreciates summer better than the Finns, my boss says. All the anticipated heat is bottled up and then unleashed in a wild celebration on the summer solstice. (Have I also been shaped by Singapore’s year-long summer?)
• I leave my phone behind in the Helsinki Central Library and only realize an hour later that I’ve lost it. When I go back, it’s miraculously still there—unstolen. Scratch the Big Mac Index, I think, try the You Won’t Lose Your Phone Index. How many countries can compare? My friend and I concur: Maybe Japan, maybe Singapore. In New York, my phone would be gone in a heartbeat. Elsewhere in Europe, it might get taken straight from my bag.

Tallinn

• The Parliament of Estonia (housed in the pink Toompea Castle) faces an Eastern Orthodox cathedral — the irony is stark. I sense Estonia’s invisible ranking of its colonizers, from most favorite to least: the Swedish, the Danish, the Russians, and the Soviets. Is colonialism ever a good thing? Especially when a country remembers its colonizer fondly.

• “We aren’t a Baltic country,” said our Estonian guide. “We’re Nordic. Check Wikipedia.” A few days later, our Finnish guide refutes her claim and points us to this.
• I go around saying aitah (‘thank you’ in Estonian) to everyone because it sounds very romantic (Ai Ta 爱他, or love you). No one seems to understand what I’m saying. “You sound like you’re speaking Japanese,” my friend says.
• When my friend told me we were going to take a ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, I’d envisioned a rickety open-air boat. Instead, it’s a mega-cruise with a whole department store and numerous restaurants, reminiscent of the SuperStar Virgo cruises I went on as a kid. Who wouldn’t be a fan of this commute to work? “Go live in New Jersey,” my friend says.

San Francisco

• Walking along the street, I spot an AI robot-powered manicure station by the street, restaurants advertising tweets by famous tech folks that rave about dishes, bus stop billboards promoting SaaS products, a colorful apartment that turns out to be affordable housing for people living with HIV/AIDS, the City Lights bookstore with a shelf for Beat literature. Some of the wings at the SFMOMA are named after venture capitalists.

• From the ferry, Alcatraz Island emerges into view like by brute force, a giant rock, sparse with buildings. Even decades since its notorious prison days, disembarking still gives me an illicit thrill. Purple dahlias and red poppies bloom defiantly and gloriously among barren brick ruins. I think of The Shawshank Redemption, of hope superseding shadowed histories.

• The city is empty, even though it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Buses flash rolling signs of GO NINERS. Office blocks look like husks of activity, more branded monuments than actually populated. It’s the emptiest downtown I’ve been to, reminiscent of Covid times.
• I’ve finally found my favorite ever bubble tea in the USA!!! Pink Pink Tea Shoppe in Japantown: please order the White Peach Oolong Milk Tea, no ice, lychee jelly, 50% sugar.
• 因为一个人，爱上一座城。I experience SF through Yiting and the images float in my mind like a postcard sequence: tiny crabs by the deep blue sea, wrapping dumplings on palms dusted with flour, munching on wings and talking about men, CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala interwoven with snippets from《声入人心》, ube-flavored noons, soaring colonnades under the sun.