30 years ago, I lived in London and worked at a Pizza Hut near Trafalgar Square. During my breaks I’d go to the National Gallery and sit in front of a painting of a lady in a white dress. The Gallery has all its catalogue online, so I thought it’d be easy to find it. It wasn’t.

30 years is a long time. I have a certain memory of the painting and when I asked the museum they couldn’t find it going by my description. It is very possible that my memory has been affected by all the art I’ve seen since. Still, after looking at their whole catalogue again...

I might have found it. This painting isn’t exactly as I remembered it, but it conveys the beauty and the feelings I recall. I’m trying to confirm with the museum its location, because I do remember how I usually got to it during those breaks. This is it: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-marie-dubufe-the-surprise

This is the painting the good folks that manage the Gallery’s Instagram account found for me (lady in a white dress). But it’s definitely not this gorgeous lady in a white dress by Klimt, although it easily could have been: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/gustav-klimt-portrait-of-hermine-gallia

At some point in my search I found this beauty, but she lives in Scotland. I wouldn’t have minded staring at her, too. https://www.instagram.com/p/BshvyTHgcOf/?igshid=1awvmr89b1s9h

Wherever this search ends up, it has already taken me to wonderful places. I began with being infatuated with a lady in a white dress. Now I’m infatuated with many more.

Some months after, in the Spring of 1990, I was working at Regent’s Park lake, renting boats. One rainy day in the middle of the week, a very fashionable couple dropped by. They was no one else on the lake. They had no change, so I gave them a free ride.

They spent about two hours rowing under the light, London rain. She was gorgeous, most probably a model. He was shorter, and wore smudged red lipstick and crazy, anarchic, dark, stylized hair. He was white as a ghost.

The last day of my year in Europe I went to Crystal Palace with a Mexican friend who came only for the summer, and tried to score tickets for a The Cure concert. We were broke; two smokey-eyed, skinny scalpers wanted 50 quid per ticket. We just couldn’t.

We sat on a grassy corner to commiserate and overheard another group of teens speaking in Spanish. We said hi and shared our dillemma. “Guess what?,” they said. “There’s a camping ground behind the concert area, and they’re only divided by a four feet fence.”

“Just make sure that when go in, you ‘look’ as if you’re staying there.” My friend and I debated it for a while, but because of the moral implications but for the fear of being caught. After several minutes, we went inside the camp ground with our best “I’m staying here” face.

We kept walking, looking ahead, and bumped into the short fence. Took us all of three seconds to jump to the other side and, once there, we kept walking past concert goers clad in black. And kept walking. And walking. Until we got to the front of the stage.

Robert Smith came up and stood above us with his smudged red lipstick and crazy, dark hair. They played for 3.5 hours, all my favorites songs, which we danced and sang along all the way. Not a bad trade off for the price of a middle-of-the-week, wet and romantic boat ride.

Incredibly enough, there’s video of the concert:

In between my two stints in London I travelled a bit in Europe on my way to Israel. Left London in December 1989 on my way to Italy to meet with my platonic, teenage, love, a girl who had always given me ambiguous signals, enough to make me travel half the continent to meet her.

On one of our letter exchanges weeks before, we had seemingly agreed to travel together in the holidays. So I took off without confirming it. Landed in Pisa and got the feeling I was too early and maybe she wouldn’t be ready to leave. My teenage mind was playing me tricks.

The truth is that I was terrified of traveling with her. So I waited it out in Pisa for a couple of days and then started moving closer to Florence, where she was studying. On the way there I stopped in a town called Lucca, left my backpack in the station and went for a walk.

When I came back, the station was closed. It wouldn’t open again until the morning. The hotels were either closed for the season or full. So I sat on a bench at the top of the city’s ancient wall and tried to sleep. It got colder every minute and had to wrap myself in my coat.

I’ve never felt cold again. In the morning, the carabinieri stopped me. I thoughts they knew I had slept on the wall (teenage mind). I just looked disheveled, and they wanted to see my papers. Left Lucca with no idea that my triumph over weather would be long-standing.

I finally arrived to Florence and found the courage to look for my platonic love. Went to her school and asked for her. The receptionist asked a teacher who asked the principal. “She left more than four days ago”, they said. She wasn’t really expecting me to come, she said later.

With no plans, I left for Greece, to the Penepolese peninsula. Stayed a few days and left for Athens with the intention of boarding a boat to Israel. Unfortunately, the boat sailed only once a week and had left that morning. So I went back to the Penepolese.

In the Greek peninsula I had met a group of French and Spanish fruit pickers and thought it'd be a good idea working with them for a week. We'd wake at 5am and wait in front of a store until a farmer hired a crew. The group was super nice to me, even when I wasn't great at it.

When picking oranges you have to twist them before you pull. If you only pull you're going to break the skin at the top. The broken oranges rot, which is not good. I did prove useful climbing trees but, guess what?

The thorns at the top are longer, and they always find a way of getting under your nails. When they pierce the skin they tend to break, leaving the tip inside. After a couple of days my hands felt like sandpaper.

I spent Christmas with the group. A French couple cooked a delicious stew over an open fire. Glorious. On day seven, I woke up at 5am again, said my goodbyes and boarded a train to Athens. Got there hours before the boat to Tel Aviv would sail.

The ferry was empty and once on board I thought it'd be a good idea to ask about the length the trip. 62 hours, with two stops in Rhodes and Cyprus. I didn't plan for that and, being low season, the restaurants were closed.

So I ate chips and cookies, the only things available, for almost three days. Slept under a table, where I camped out for the whole trip. When we arrived to Haifa, the immigration officer asked me what I was going to do in the country. I didn't know. I was terrible at planning.

(This is all happening as East Germany opened the Berlin Wall to crossings in November 1989; a few months later Roger Waters would play a concert in the city. Before the days of 24/7 connectivity, this news had little influence in my day to day misadventures.)

When I got off the boat in Haifa, I was shocked by how many guns I saw everywhere, hanging from people's shoulders. Later I learned that anyone who lost their weapon would land in jail, so they just took them everywhere. On the waterfront, somebody handed me a leaflet.

It was for one of the two kibbutz offices in Tel Aviv. After two days in the port, I travelled to Tel Aviv and went directly to the office. They signed me up to a kibbutz two kms away from the border with Gaza. I left a note on the bulletin board for my friend Alfonso.

Before leaving London, we had talked about the possibility of meeting at a kibbutz but there were - obviously - no fixed plans. I left it there like throwing a message in a bottle at the ocean.

The kibbutz was better than I expected, specially because I was able the gain back all the pounds I lost from eating crap in London (remember Pizza Hut?). I worked the kitchen and the dining room from 6am to 2pm. After, me and the other volunteers would mostly hang out.

One night while having dinner a Kibbutznik told me I had a phone call. Who could be calling me, if I hadn't told anyone where I was? I had sent a letter back home, but back then letters would take up to a month to get to Mexico.

Maybe you don't know, but kibbutz are utopian communities where everyone worked for the benefit of the others. One central aspect of life in the kibbutz is that all meals were served at the big dining hall. My job was to swipe the floors, get the food out, and clean the pans.

But that night, maybe a week into my kibbutz experience, I was only dining. I don't remember what I ate, but I do remember my plate looking like the model mountain in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." I had not taken good care of myself the months before.

Sitting with my new friends, a lady told us I had a call. I must had made a particular face, knowing I hadn’t told anyone where I was — except for the letter in transit to Mexico — because my new pals asked me if everything was ok. “I have no idea who could be calling me here”.

(Something interesting: the kibbutz made available to all volunteers dozens of sheets of blue paper. They had one and a half blank faces and space for the address. You had to fold and seal with saliva on the sticky edge. If not for these I wouldn’t had written home.)

The phone booth in the dining hall was in a far, dark corner. The phone itself was a rotary with a slot for coins — when I made my own first call, I had to carry a bucket of shekels that bought me about two minutes to call Mexico.

But in this first call, one I hadn’t initiated, I had no clue who was on the other end. “Hello?”, I said. “Hola, Gabo”, I heard, in Spanish. Gabo had been my nickname since childhood, courtesy of my Colombian family, but not as common in Mexico growing up.

(THE Gabo, by the way, has always been Gabriel García Márquez; in the kibbutz no one called me that.) “Hola”, I replied, “who is it”, as I didn’t recognize the voice. “Soy yo, ‘cabrón’ ”, she said, stressing the last word, mockingly, playfully.

While she had left Italy before I arrived, my platonic infatuation had found the note I left at the kibbutz office: “Cabrón, estoy en kibbutz Niram — Gabo”. She was also in Israel, as she had planned before leaving Mexico, although I had no idea or expectation of finding her here

When she found the note, she placed a bet that there might not be that many Mexican Gabos in Israel, so she jotted the name of the kibbutz and rolled the die. Under very small odds, she took a chance and called to make sure I didn’t forget her, even when I constantly tried.

When I left Israel with my friend Alfonso, we crossed the border to Egypt by foot at Taba. When we arrived, the one daily bus had left about 30 minutes before. So we went inside the only cafeteria, planning to wait for 24 hours for the next one.

We sat at the bar and bought a couple of things. We were the only clients. A young, burly guy gave us our drinks and snack. He spoke no English, but was a good communicator. Somehow, he told us we could sleep outside on a pair of benches.

At some point we exchanged names and we asked him how he’d spell ours in Arabic. Before we left, he gave us an express lesson on the Arabic alphabet, with shapes and sounds. I think I still have the sheet of paper somewhere.

(By the way, my Mexican friend also found me and the kibbutz I was staying from bumping into the same note that Platonic Love found at the kibbutz office. This is all before smartphones and the internet, kids.)

Back at the Egyptian border, as we got ready to sleep outside it starting raining — the first time in many years. It got super cold and we had to put on almost all our shirts (we were not carrying any coats). It got dark and we dozed off.

At about 2am, my friend woke me up and pointed at a large figure wearing a long, white tunic that was slowly walking towards us. We were so tired that we didn’t move, but kept uncomfortably seeing the man come closer. The moon was shining on him, but his face was under a hood.

By now it was obvious he was coming toward us. We cowered under our makeshift beds and I held tight to the pouch holding my passport and travelers checks. When he was less than four feet away we both sat up and looked at him. He was holding something on each hand.

He extended his hands towards us and made us jolt. He was carrying two small brown bags. We grabbed them, nodded and he left. Looking at each other we opened the bags. They had a few pieces of bread and cheese. Early breakfast.

Suddenly, after a few hours wait but not nearly the 24 hrs we had braced ourselves for, a bus came. We didn't really understood where it was headed, but the driver insisted we board when we said "Dahab." So, groggy but fed, we boarded.

Before leaving to the Red Sea, before spending a night at the border, I did see my platonic love one last time in Israel. One mild Spring day, my friend and I left our kibbutz near Gaza and headed north to find her.

On our way we stopped at the Dead Sea, where we floated for hours. (I dove in with my eyes open & felt needles of fire. My pal thought it was funny to tell me to paddle backwards. When I opened my eyes I saw, in a blur, that he had sent me towards the middle of the lake.)

We headed towards Masada and found a tiny canyon. There was no one around, so I took off my shirt and we shot Dune-inspired pictures, trying to be one with the surroundings (they still exist). As the Sun set it got very cold, and there were no hotels in sight.

We saw an office and knocked. Two American girls, about our age, opened. "Can we stay here the night." Kindly, they let us set our sleeping bags in the hall and we slept.

The next morning we headed north. When we arrived at Platonic-Love's kibbutz she was not there. Thinking fast, my friend told the volunteer organizer that we wanted to work there. Incredibly, she said yes.

She also mentioned there was another Mexican in the kibbutz (Platonic Love!) and that she'd come back from an excursion the next day. She gave us a room, and told us to wake up early for work.

Most kibbutz those days had three types of work: services within the town (kitchen, cleaning), factory work or field work. This kibbutz grew grass, and the job was to clean the field from ivy.

For a reason I don't recall, we were the only ones on the field that morning (it was early). I guy gave us a rake and quickly explained what to do. We had to clean about three hundred yards of weed.

Even been gracious, we were terribly at it. It looked easy, but as with most field work, it wasn't. I was hard, and it got hot real quick. We had no idea if the guy would bring us water, or if we could stop at some point to rest.

Then the water sprinklers turned on. My guess is that there were not expecting anyone to be working that day -- which shows they didn't really knew what to do with us. It got muddy real quick, and we made an absolute mess.

When the guy came to give us a break, he looked down the field and compassionately asked us to stop there and then. We were not even a quarter way done.

We grabbed lunch, took a long shower and started waiting for PL to come back. Meanwhile, my friend got hold of some beer (Goldstar) which made the wait easier. I was a nervous reck. She wasn't expecting me, and had no idea how she'd react to the surprise.

The Sun fell, the same Sun that'd seen us destroy the kibbutz gorgeous grass field. My friend and I were chatting and drinking, but I was mostly writing a speech in my head. I felt so brave, yet so insecure.

I had met PL in middle school. We'd gone out as part of a group in HS and became confidants. We would promise to look for each other "in our thirties" and have kids if life didn't work out for us. But she had a bf, and I was completely unreliable.

Back in her kibbutz, my friend went out for a stroll and came back a few minutes later. "They're back. I saw her and told her we were also Mexican and that she should come to 'meet' my Mexican friend." (They didn't know each other.)

I drank the rest of my beer and felt an uncomfortable rush. How would she react when she saw me? What would she say? What would I say!?

My pal went back looking for her and they came back together. When PL saw me, she hesitated for a second and then threw herself at me, hugging me intensely.

"What are you doing here?" I told her I was about to leave for Egypt and was hoping she could join us. She didn't answer, and changed the subject.

We then excused ourselves and went alone for a stroll around her kibbutz. Even when I had seen her a few weeks earlier, it felt like we hadn't seen each other in years. Even when senior year was only nine months away, it felt like like part of someone else's life.

I had changed a lot living and working in London, traveling alone, picking oranges, exploring Israel. I was not the same guy I'd been in school, in Mexico, except for insisting on finding her, looking for her approval, hoping for something to happen.

When we started walking in her kibbutz it was already dark. I don’t remember the shape of the moon, but I like to think it was in a half crescent smiling down on us. Don’t remember what we talked about, either, but I imagine she was asking what the heck I was doing there.

We sat on a bench under the moon. It was getting cold (yes, it gets cold in Isreael) and my guess is that by then we were reminiscing about our high school days and talking about our plans for the immediate future.

I'll have to finish this story, eventually...

I remember PL was wearing a big, dark jacket. I wonder if she already knew Israel would get a bit chilly when she was packing her luggage in Mexico a few months before. I was still carrying the huge coat that saved my life that cold December night in Italy.

Still, we were both feeling cold, so we embraced. The moon was right in front of us, maybe at a waning crescent, because I am sure the stars were smiling at me.

After crossing the border into Egypt, a few days later, my friend A. and I landed in Dahab, a hippie beach in the Red Sea.

There was a vegetarian restaurant popular with Australian backpackers, and we went there for dinner one night, sitting on the sand and eating by candle light.

The night was very starry, but the moon wasn't out. Looking into the horizon, we started seeing a weird orange glow where the Sun usually sets (at least in the Mexican beaches on the Pacific, the ones I grew up visiting).

The orange glow turned into a bright red dot, and the dot turned into an incandescent, red globe. For a moment I thought the Sun was rising.

But no. It was the moon coming out, bright red, out from the Red Sea. It was a full moon, and it lasted majestic and red for a few minutes, but still moving up. It started losing the color, and once it was higher it turned white, so bright that it illuminated the whole beach.

Never seen anything like that again. I haven't asked, but I assume that's where the Sea got its name.

A. and I spent a few days in Dahab, and then travelled to Cairo. On the bus we met a Colombian man, a bit older than that. He had an extremely thick accent, and could barely understand him.

Still, he tagged along. Once in Cairo, we went directly to a hotel recommended on "Let's Go," the travel book we all carried. The description was very precise -- and very true: "Looks like the Turkish prison from Midnight Express." It was dirt cheap, so we booked a room for 3.

The Colombian gentleman stayed with us a few days. We never understood a single word he said.

Cairo was very similar to Mexico City, but more underdeveloped. Very few traffic lights worked, and we had a ball watching the European backpackers on the corner of the street, unable to cross. Cars wouldn't stop, and they honked a lot.

Buses also didn't stop, so you had to jumped in while the vehicle was moving. If it was full, you had to figure out how to hang from the door.

Giza was a nice surprise, just by the shear size of the pyramids. What was unexpected is that the site is on the edge of the city; it just happens that all the pictures are shot towards the desert in the back, not showing the shanty towns in the front.

We spent about two weeks in Cairo, all the time in the Midnight Express hotel. Then, we bought a ticket to Athens, visited a few (closed) islands, and then I flew back to London, for my second stint in the city. This was March of 1990.

From Sept. to Dec. 1989, we lived in Bayswater, which was contemptuously called Brazilwater for all the Brazilian immigrants. It was very central, and had great transportation options.

A local sport was looking for broken pay phones. They were easy to identify: They'd always have a line of immigrants waiting to use them. Once I called back home for an hour in one of those, saving lots of pounds.

When I got back to London, my remaining acquaintances had moved to White City (W10), home to the BBC. It was a little more suburban, but now we had a larger, cleaner house. At some point, there were thirteen of us there.

I found a job at Regent's Park, in charge of the kiddie boat rentals. It's the best job I've had in my life. Being Spring, it rained constantly in the city. It wasn't the showers I was used to in Mexico City's Summers, but a constant drip-drip with a solid gray sky.

The Sun did come out, and the flowers were in full bloom. The birds were also doing their thing. A family of geese lived in the kiddie pool for a while. One day they were gone, having left behind a little runt that wasn't able to jump the edge and was crushed by the boats.

The weekdays were extremely slow and desolated. I'd sit in the hut were we stored the register and read. Or I'd go to the bigger lake and row, alone, for an hour or two. Sometimes, an older couple, with cotton hair, would sit on a bench nearby.

He was a doctor, and they were both lovely. I remember them being very curious about Mexico, and asking me personal questions, which didn't happen often. I don't remember their names, or their faces even, but graciousness is difficult to forget.

The park rangers were in charge, among other things, of controlling the bird population. One morning, when I arrived to work, a ranger was picking up geese eggs from around the kiddie boat pool, and he gave me one, the size of a fist.

I brought it back home and cooked the only thing I knew how: scrambled eggs. The egg was so enormous it fed most of my dozen roommates. Most probably it's not a good idea to cook a wild egg, but many of the things I did that year were -- most probably -- not good ideas anyway.

After a day's work, I usually enjoyed taking the tube to Leicester Square and buying a bowl of Chinese rice with meat ("meat"). It was the cheapest thing I had found, and London wasn't known for it's cuisine, anyway. I liked walking downtown, making sure knew every single street.

On March 31, 1990, I finished my work and headed downtown. It was a Saturday (I worked all weekends). After buying my Chinese bowl, I went for one of my long, expeditionary walks.

There were a lot of people, everywhere. But they were not the typical tourists, or office workers. These people were agitated, and they were running away from something. But I kept walking.

I turned a corner, and saw a Renault car shop with it's windows completely smashed. Further up the street I could see a group of people moving really fast (not running, but advancing briskly).

From the mass of people, I could also make out the bins and projectiles flying out of the crowd. Some bins would bounce off the glass. Someone in the group would pick them up again, and throw them back until they smashed the window.

I turned the corner again, and bumped into a car on fire. Some people were just observing -- like me -- standing as close to a wall as possible, just waiting. Instances later, two policemen on horseback passed us, riding towards the street I had just left.

I grew up in a Mexico City suburbs, so even in that protest-happy city I had never been in one. The Poll Tax Riots where my baptism to social unrest.

Living in a suburb in Mexico was very similar to living in a suburb anywhere else: we hanged out at the mall, penniless, mostly killing time. We biked, roller skated and mostly had the place to ourselves, except when we pissed off one of the "witches" in the neighborhood.

The unifying characteristic was that they never returned our balls when they fell inside their walled homes. Also, they'd call the police on use every so often -- and if they had kids, they couldn't play with us.

You'd think my friends and I were horrible, but the witches would get upset even if we were just playing outside their homes, in the common areas. I appreciate that they made me understand from an early age that regardless of what I did, not everyone would be an ally.

Still, I was shocked when a cab driver in London bamboozled me out of 50 quid, or when a guy in Italy offered to give me a ride, threw a gay magazine at me once inside his car and tried to grab my thigh. Nothing against them; they helped me learn how to fend for myself.

In that year in Europe, from August 1989 to August 1990, I also began to hone my artistic taste, not only by falling in love with the woman in the white dress (read above), but also by having to choose very wisely which films to see, as going to the movies was almost prohibitive.

That year, I saw all of 4 films: Andy Warhol's 8-hour shot of the Empire State; The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover; Cinema Paradiso & The Big Blue. Except for Warhol's, the rest have in common a love for colorful shots, few words and passion for visual storytelling.

I saw the Sugar Cubes at the Brixton Academy in London in 1989. It was an amazing show. At some point, my feet stopped touching the ground; the crowd moved like a spiral, so I found myself in front of the stage every couple of minutes. Amazing energy.

It was obvious that Bjork was going to become a super star. There's no city like London when it comes to music (Paris = film). I also saw Jethro Tull, Youssu N'Dour, Philip Glass, etc., and, on my last weekend in Europe, The Cure.

As I mentioned in the beginning, museums also played a big role in my year in Europe, specially the National Gallery in Trafalgar. Ironically, where I grew up in Mexico City can be considered a cultural desert. It was a suburb with movie theaters and nothing else.

In the early and mid 80s, concerts were banned in Mexico. But little by little, a music scene started to bubble up on the heels of a movement called Rock en tu idioma (Rock in your language) with Latin American and Spanish bands.