Hi. Today is my birthday. It´s not a great reason to post, but it´s not a horrible one either. I don´t know how my birthday will go. It´s an hour old. So far, it´s involved me eating two bananas and microwaved heart-of-palm pizza while watching a Cowboys-Giants (American) Football Game. Dubbed in Portuguese. Which is interesting, because words like ´´fumble´´ and ´´tight end´´ and ´´Tony Romo´´ are spoken in English, and they´re pronounced with Southern twang . . . just barely detectable in the small time it takes to pronounce them. Were these announcers originally Paulistas (people from São Paulo) who were dragged to the Wild West just after achieving proficiency in their mother tongue? And, more importantly, is this observation gifted just to me, as one of the five people in Brazil who care enough about American Football to watch it? And isn´t this an auspicious way to start my 23rd year of life, or what?
I haven´t really talked to anyone since I turned 23, to be honest. So this is a new experience for both of us. I guess I should tell you about Brazil, about this huge sleek sprawling cosmopolitan city I´ve been sludging in the past few weeks. The most I can say is that São Paulo feels like a City of the World -- a huge throbbing mixture of people from disparate cultures colliding off one another. (It´s home to biggest population of Japanese people of any city outside Japan.) The office buildings are towering, the subways are clean and efficient, museums world-class (I went to one that had a massive exhibit dedicated to Brazil´s resident football god, Pelé, that seemed at times to want to mimic the sanctity of a Hindu temple). Yet behind it all . . . you still see construction workers laughing with each other on the streets as they eat their dust-tainted lunches, you see people in line having casual conversations with one another, you see the chain-store phone company salesman give a high-five to a returning customer. You don´t see strangers meeting and hanging out as they pass each other on the streets -- and my cousin Aldo is quick to say that there are plenty of nasty folk in the city, if you stay here long enough to find them --but São Paulo hasn´t gotten to where New York is, where most people think of the greater public strictly in transactional terms: Can I help you? What can I do for you? Please move along, thank you. No no no, there´s a value for human interaction I´ve found here, it´s valued enough that people seek it out and are open to it in situations that are surprising to me. It´s not something I saw in Buenos Aires, or in Lima, or in Quito . . . so I´m hesitant to say it´s South America. It must be Brazilian, then. Whatever it is, it is lovely to see.
And I can only see it, because I can´t speak Portuguese. I can tell my baby cousin Lucca to come here, and ask if everything is OK, and say the equivalent of ´´cool´´. The rest is me speaking Spanish while trying to fit in some ´´OW`` and ´´AI´´ sounds, with every other vowel going through my nose. The way it sounds, though (when spoken correctly), is beautiful . . . it´s impossible not to speak even a little bit without singing it somewhat, as well as (for me) putting a little bit of swagger behind it. According to a CouchSurfing friend and his companions, my examples of this approximate how people speak in Rio de Janerio (which is where I´m headed later today to tick down my final days in South America). I can fake an awareness of how Spanish differs across the continent, but the truth is that Brazil is a whole different animal . . . and my desire to understand it is strongly undercut by my lack of time.
Do I want to come back here and learn Portuguese and burn off a nice chunk of my youth with these fabulous, gorgeous, open-minded and open-hearted people? Yes. Do I want to go back to a small city and teach English and push my Spanish up to fluency? Totally. Do I want to travel around alone, somewhere else in the world, like I did in Argentina? Have to. I don´t know, I think dreaming of doing something again, while you´re still in the act of doing it, can be poisonous . . . because the dream becomes a reason to ´´take it easy´´, to know that next time around it´ll be just right. And so you sleepwalk through the days, make checklists of what will be different come The Return . . . I think that the more vivid a dreamer is with what he does, the greater of a curse it can be on his physical course. Unless he can dream without attachment, dream independently of pride and gratification, dream for something greater than himself . . . dream so wildly that the possibility of reality actually paralleling it becomes funny, in the same way a baby laughs when he´s tickled without having the words or the experience to know why he´s laughing . . .
You know? Okay. Stories fade for me behind this curtain of feeling I´m twisted up in. I´m about to see my family again, love them intensely, then fall into that mild insanity that I know and love so well. I´ll sweat Jewishly. Then head north to the United Kingdom for a month in the middle of January, to make a close friend for the first time again. And somewhere in there I hope I´ll think upon my time on this continent, smile a bit, and give my experience a little bit of credit . . . before New York City demands my aggressive output of Something.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Good Good Good Good Good Good
November came, and I was out of money. My debit card was eaten by a machine in Huaraz, Peru, because I took a few seconds longer than I should have in putting my newly-collected money away; my final Soles were spent in Trujillo, buying a High School Musical III movie ticket and subsequent fast-food dinner for a professional salsa dancer with two-feet-long eyelashes. And so I crossed the Peruvian border into Ecuador in a strange state of temporary poverty, toting a loaf of bread and jar of pineapple jam that would serve as my next two meals, hoping that I would not have to break into my emergency fifty-dollar bill until I got to Vilcabamba -- where I would be working on an organic farm and thus be devoid of expenses for a time, as well where I would be meeting back up again with Nate and the gang and and perhaps borrowing enough money to keep going afterwards.
As it happened, the $50 needed to be pulled out sooner than I thought. I arrived in the nighttime in Loja (the biggest city in the province containing Vilcabamba) bus station and had just enough to check my e-mail, get the number of my CouchSurfer for the night, and give him a call. Well . . . actually, I had ten cents less than what I needed, and the phonebooth cashier wasn´t about to break my fifty for a seventy-cent chat. So I gave my first IOU in Loja, Ecuador, just minutes after I arrived. And it was not my last. My next challenge was to find a taxi driver who would take me to meet my CouchSurfer (a man named John that had an immensely heavy accent I could barely understand over the phone) at an English school where he teaches; the first three cabs turned me down out-of-hand, but the third let me in for long enough to beg. And that´s what I did. He said it was a counterfeit bill; I told him No, It´s From The Freaking United States Of America, My Mother Gave It To Me And My Mother Is A Good Woman And I Have Absolutely No Money To My Name Except For This, So Please God Believe Me And Just Break It. He then told me there is a tax for breaking large bills at the bank, so I told him I´d pay six dollars for the ride even though I know it only costs three (I found out later that a buck was pretty standard). I was against the wall. I was scared senseless and exhilarated, I had to make this sale. I begged him to trust me. And, egged on by a fat tip, he eventually did.
And that´s how my relationship with Loja, Ecuador, began. It turns out John´s accent was Nigerian, and John turned out to be the first of a long string of kind and invigorating people I met in that little city that made me not want to leave. So . . . I didn´t. I was introduced to a man named Diego, who owns an English school called the Canadian House Center, and the day after I arrived in Loja I was offered a job teaching English until the end of the month. Partially out of desire, partially out of necessity, I had been handed the opportunity to feel what it is like to live in a South American city, and to earn my keep at the same time.
What followed was a bizarre and beautiful month, educational in all of the traditional as well as in all the esoteric kind of ways, full of machismo and libido and Spanish slang and subtle Gringo fetishizations. And a new way of thinking about travel, for me . . . namely, that traveling for the sake of Staying can be infinitely more complex and gratifying than the compacted vista-collecting of the traditional backpacker trails. I felt the rush of teaching, of having a classful of people nodding in a way that you know they actually understand . . . I made a new close friend, a true friend, one who says things like ´´I´m gonna take the Mick out of you´´ and ´´You should flog that´´ and will freestyle British-style one moment and talk with me about cultural discrepencies and White Guys Thinking Too Much the next . . . I started singing along to the more popular Ecuadorian dance numbers, even if their choruses didn´t have more than five or six different words in them . . . I felt like I made a life for myself, with all of the necessary friends and interests and activities attached.
Then I had to leave, of course. I gave the phonebooth cashier at the bus station fifty cents on my way out (interest included), donned my backpack awkwardly once again, and went up to Quito to spend a final three days with Nate. It was my swan song with the Spanish language (f0r now), and a month of lessons had made my companion a capable conversationalist. My Adios For Now came after we watched a long movie about the whole world going blind, which made my contacts very dry and thus made me thing more optimistically about the benefits of such a thing happening.
Things are different now. I feel at home, but in a different home, with a different language and with family I have never had the opportunity to really know beforehand. I´m in Brazil -- São Paulo for now, Rio de Janeiro later -- until the middle of the month. Things changed drastically, again, predictably and with varying degrees of sadness and interestingness. The distinctness of this place deserves more words than I can give it right now . . . for my mind is still back in my little South American hometown, sweet tiny Loja, and my memories mimic my students as they mimic my own kneejerk response to a correctly-answered question in class: Good Good Good Good Good Good (et al)
Snippets of tales to come. A picture of my Loja boys to leave on: John on the left, James (my freestyling British companion) on the right . . .
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Brief Pictoral Recap
Hey Everybody-
We still haven`t gotten most of the Machu Picchu pictures up yet, but luckily for me my travelling companions have digital cameras and haven`t been afraid to use them. So here we go. (With a few older photos I haven`t put up yet, for good measure.)
. . . this collection of young men. (From left to right) Nate, Andy, Mario, and Joe in the background trying to start "YMCA". Mario is from Lima and is Andy`s friend via their joint participation in the online computer game World of Warcraft, which I suppose is a step up from CouchSurfing because at least you have a background of mutual strategizing, which comes in handy for planning trips and whatnot. We recently went back through Lima (from Puno, a city on Lake Titicaca, which I`m getting to) and stayed at Mario`s for three days. We watched movies and went dancing and stuffed our faces on Chifa (Chinese-Peruvian food, which is fabulous) via the benevolence of Mario and his older sister. Their house was beautiful and adorned with keepsakes from Japan that their grandfather had brought back decades ago. There was a mall just down the street. It was three days of my old U. S. of A. lifestyle . . . but without you. I miss you.
We still haven`t gotten most of the Machu Picchu pictures up yet, but luckily for me my travelling companions have digital cameras and haven`t been afraid to use them. So here we go. (With a few older photos I haven`t put up yet, for good measure.)
A little flashback here.
This is me with my CouchSurfing host in Salta, Argentina - Gabriella. Just before I took a bus northwards (which, Andrew Marker, was quite comfortable - reclining seats, dulce de leche to spread on your rolls, and cheesy dubbed action flicks . . . although most colectivos I have taken smell like they`ve been inhabited for long periods of time by sweating immobile people, not surprisingly) to San Salvador de Jujuy, hoping to head onwards to Chile. But I had to return . . .
. . . which was great because I stayed at this funky hostal owned by an expat German and played a fiesty match of ping-pong with the man to my right there (he was a techie for a Buenos Aires rock band on tour). The girl on the right is Leah, who is a University of Denver student and sent me back to a world from the distant past . . . one of Chipotles, saxophone lessons at the DU music building, and English. I just about completely lost my voice around the point we started talking about Adam Sandler`s performance in Spanglish. I consider the timing to be a form of linguistic justice.
This is the Argentinean-Chilean border. My thumb is also involved. I noticed that coca-leaf tea was on sale here for the first time, which has since become my staple Peruvian beverage. Pleasant and mild, with a physiological effect that`s pretty similar to yerba mate. The first time I tried it (in Cuzco) I drank five cups, however, and upon meeting up with my companions I was told I seemed a bit excited. You supposedly need pounds of coca leaves to make the substance we all associate the plant with -- for me, dropping in a few with hot water is just fine thanks.
This is the only picture I took in Chile - in the city of Calama. It seems to be a llama fountain. (I should mention here that llamas are ubiquitous and wonderful in Peru. They were grazing inside Machu Picchu, and they are led down Peruvian sidewalks by colorfully-dressed Quechuan women. And I have such affection for them. The way they hold their long necks and head is like they`re mock-royalty, but their body is oblong and their legs short and spindly and their fur coat is spiky and unruly. Pure adoration.)
My first city in Peru was Arequipa, and like I said earlier it was Tourism Weekend, which meant parade, which meant a lot of colorful skirts moved around in various circular patterns. Most of the tourists there were NOT international, they were from other parts of Peru. Which makes logical sense, but for some reason had not occured to me. I had a great regional dish here - roccoto relleno - which was this hot red pepper stuffed with beef stew and drizzled with cheese, potatoes on the side. Other than that I was waiting, biding my time, for . . .
. . . this collection of young men. (From left to right) Nate, Andy, Mario, and Joe in the background trying to start "YMCA". Mario is from Lima and is Andy`s friend via their joint participation in the online computer game World of Warcraft, which I suppose is a step up from CouchSurfing because at least you have a background of mutual strategizing, which comes in handy for planning trips and whatnot. We recently went back through Lima (from Puno, a city on Lake Titicaca, which I`m getting to) and stayed at Mario`s for three days. We watched movies and went dancing and stuffed our faces on Chifa (Chinese-Peruvian food, which is fabulous) via the benevolence of Mario and his older sister. Their house was beautiful and adorned with keepsakes from Japan that their grandfather had brought back decades ago. There was a mall just down the street. It was three days of my old U. S. of A. lifestyle . . . but without you. I miss you.
This was on the way to Machu Picchu from Cuzco. We took a van to a train which took us to a little overpriced over-touristy town named Aguas Calientes, where we slept for a few hours before hiking up to Machu Picchu itself for (supposedly) sunrise. The hike is pretty much entirely a winding steep stone staircase - which, combined with the altitude (somewhere around 10,000 feet), made me regret all those Argentinean steak sandwiches of the past. I did not make it up in time for sunrise, needless to say, but I did make it up. And I`ll describe it more once my friend uploads the photos he took for me.
After Machu Picchu I stayed for a while longer in Cuzco, then met back up with the gang in Puno, where we went out to an island in Lake Titicaca for a one-night homestay. It was awe-inspiring . . . there`s something so private about islands that really appeals to me. We were surrounded on all sides by deep-blue water, glimmering extravagently from the strength of the sun at our altitude (Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world), leading out towards snow-capped peaks scattered in the distance. This picture is from the summit of the hilly island we slept on, where subsistence farming was common and tiny little sweet potatoes were served with lunch. Andy and Joe and Nate talked about Chinese foreign policy on our walk back down to the boat that took us back to Puno, and the sun made an intense yellow streak upon the water that seemingly pointed directly towards me, like a road.
Now I`m in Huaraz, just north of Lima, and we are heading to Trujillo (beach town!) on an overnight bus tonight. My three other companions went on a four-day trek through the section of the Andes that surrounds the city, but I decided to stay back and indulge in a little (self-defined) Argentinean Time: reading, writing, studying some Spanish, hoping to stumble upon a few conversations. It`s been wonderful, and a nice big deep breath for me amidst the recent flurry of activites and TOURISM I have been engaging in with the gang. My pocketbook tells me I have another organic farm close on the horizon, somewhere in Ecuador and sometime within the next week. Then it`s Brazil about a month from now, until the middle of December and another section of the world calls . . .
I hope all of you are doing well, and thanks for looking over this. And . . . if you read this and know cool people in Brazil, I would love to meet them! And I will probably be calling you soon about it.
Monday, October 20, 2008
America
What is America? A week ago, it was an answer filled with switchbacks of doubt and elation. Now more than three months removed from my native soil -- a three months that coincide with perhaps the weightiest period of US change and deliberation in my lifetime -- I would have expressed deep pride in the wealth and individualistic empowerment within my culture that has allowed me to explore my world and my thoughts like it has. I would have expressed profound doubt about the ideological rifts that are part and parcel of such a nation filled with empowered people, people who are entitled to their beliefs and their possessions and their religious convictions but who I think should be considering the future of their children first and foremost. I would have told you that I am traveling right now with three brilliant young men, two of them who have studied political science at top American universities, and even after listening to their even-handed considerations and anaylses I still think that one politician running for President has the potential to be someone I can look up to and admire and be proud of, while the other one seemingly does not. I would have told you that I`m happy that American politics has not interfered that much with my life, anyway, but that I couldn`t say that for all the people in the world, no way. I would have told you I loved barbacue (the Peruvian barbacue I had a few days ago had some good shish kabobs and green garlic-y stuff but is otherwise worlds apart) and that jazz (pronounced ``yazz`` in these parts) is the kind of free-flowing individual-showcasing wildly-exploratory music that draws a perfect metaphor for what America potentially offers its people. Southern accents are hilarious. Love them. New York is the best city in the world and I am prepared to be incredibly presumptive in saying so. The Rocky Mountains are not the Andes (blanketed in forest, wreathed with clouds, families of behemoths) but doggone it you can ski on them like you wouldn`t believe. And such babble, on and on . . . I mean, it`s AMERICA, how can you make that concise?
Well, a week has passed. And I am proud to say that all the obliqueness has disappeared. I know America. I can describe America. I can say with confidence that America came to help me in my time of need, came to rejuvenate me and put a smile on my face and restore faith in my world. And the greatest gift of all was that America understood me, too.
I met America in Cuzco. At a juice shop named Yajùù!, its logo a blatant rip-off of the Internet company. America gave me a chicken-avocado-and-cheese sandwich for seven soles and smiled at me. I smiled back. Has America ever been interested in me before? Would I have been aware if America had been? Certainly America had never been about five foot six, dark brown ringlets down to below the shoulders, slender and straightforward, eyes so full of interest and excitement that her whole face elongates when she opens them wide. And America certainly does not speak English, God no, that`s a myth if any myths have ever been told. America speaks Spanish and I didn`t know the word for ``busy`` but somewhere in the distance Simon and Garfunkel were humming and singing a certain tune and combined with my friend Andy`s little melody entitled ``You`d Be Stupid If You Didn`t Talk To Her`` I started thinking that maybe America is not something to study or ponder or expostulate but rather someone to talk to. In broken language and eye contact. Which all seemed simple enough.
I guess I was taught as a kid that America was named after some Italian mapmaker and that United States-ians (there is no word for this in English like there is in Spanish, estadounidense) are as much American per se as Central Americans or South Americans. But this is false, ridiculous, preposterous and brainwashing, because I looked out from a concrete plaza over the entire city of Cuzco with America and I can say with total confidence that there is but one American alive on this planet. North, south, east, west, up or down. And the land around us was distinction-less, no labels or signs in sight, beyond America`s ability to describe its landmarks to me (as America is studying tourism at university) and the smiles that passed across her lips as she gazed silently over her home city. From Incas to Spaniards to starlight, no textbook has ever taught so thoroughly. No election necessary.
America dances salsa, America warms your hands when sitting in cold Incas ruins dwarfed by eucalyptus forest, America helps you take your luggage out of sardine-packed buses, America tells you you can trust her, America makes you eat every last french fry because you haven`t had a good meal yet that day, America says good-bye forever. And now you know.
Well, a week has passed. And I am proud to say that all the obliqueness has disappeared. I know America. I can describe America. I can say with confidence that America came to help me in my time of need, came to rejuvenate me and put a smile on my face and restore faith in my world. And the greatest gift of all was that America understood me, too.
I met America in Cuzco. At a juice shop named Yajùù!, its logo a blatant rip-off of the Internet company. America gave me a chicken-avocado-and-cheese sandwich for seven soles and smiled at me. I smiled back. Has America ever been interested in me before? Would I have been aware if America had been? Certainly America had never been about five foot six, dark brown ringlets down to below the shoulders, slender and straightforward, eyes so full of interest and excitement that her whole face elongates when she opens them wide. And America certainly does not speak English, God no, that`s a myth if any myths have ever been told. America speaks Spanish and I didn`t know the word for ``busy`` but somewhere in the distance Simon and Garfunkel were humming and singing a certain tune and combined with my friend Andy`s little melody entitled ``You`d Be Stupid If You Didn`t Talk To Her`` I started thinking that maybe America is not something to study or ponder or expostulate but rather someone to talk to. In broken language and eye contact. Which all seemed simple enough.
I guess I was taught as a kid that America was named after some Italian mapmaker and that United States-ians (there is no word for this in English like there is in Spanish, estadounidense) are as much American per se as Central Americans or South Americans. But this is false, ridiculous, preposterous and brainwashing, because I looked out from a concrete plaza over the entire city of Cuzco with America and I can say with total confidence that there is but one American alive on this planet. North, south, east, west, up or down. And the land around us was distinction-less, no labels or signs in sight, beyond America`s ability to describe its landmarks to me (as America is studying tourism at university) and the smiles that passed across her lips as she gazed silently over her home city. From Incas to Spaniards to starlight, no textbook has ever taught so thoroughly. No election necessary.
America dances salsa, America warms your hands when sitting in cold Incas ruins dwarfed by eucalyptus forest, America helps you take your luggage out of sardine-packed buses, America tells you you can trust her, America makes you eat every last french fry because you haven`t had a good meal yet that day, America says good-bye forever. And now you know.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Communists Make Me Hungry
APPETIZER
The gang and I spent some five days in Lima, and the equivalent of two-and-a-half days wondering what we should do in Lima (and surfing the internet). It is interesting how each person has such a different conception of what travel means . . . is it relaxation? Contemplation? The tourist route? Trekking and physical activities? Put four intelligent, independent, college-educated young men together and you`ll see right away that there is no real answer. (Not that there would be for four unintelligent, dependent, elementary-school-educated people either.) So between Lima and Lunahuana (a little tourist town just outside the capital) we patched a bit of everything together -- cardgames at a restaurant overlooking Limeñan Chinatown; watching the Vice Presidential debates in a hostal sideroom with a slightly-psychotic expat improvisational dancer; dodging tamales filled with pigskin (hairs still on the skin) before getting stuck on a bunch of rocks in a river while attempting to raft; fratboy-style jokes a dime a dozen, disgustingly freed by the language barrier; philosophical conversation with one of my best friends as we look out over a massive McDonald`s across the street; and a Tashlich ceremony I will never forget: tossing breadcrumbs that represent my shortcomings over the past year into the Pacific Ocean, watching the waves claim each one with a dull roar, as Lima`s nearly-perpetual fogginess distorted the line between sea and sky.
THINKING THAT THE WAITER IS BRINGING YOUR MAIN COURSE TO YOU, BUT THEN SEEING THAT IT`S ACTUALLY FOR THE PERSON SITTING AT THE TABLE NEXT TO YOURS, WHO GOT THERE AFTER YOU DID AND SEEMS TO REALLY REALLY ENJOY THAT FIRST BITE
I went to Machu Picchu yesterday. I`m not going to write about it just yet.
MAIN COURSE
We took a bus that was supposed to take sixteen hours from a city just outside Lima to Cuzco, which is the traditional jumping-off point for Machu Picchu and a host of other archaeological curiosities. We found one that cost seventy soles (about $25), by far the best deal in the land. So we hopped the Wari -- I had a feeling that this company`s name automatically evoked the anger of some ancient god, and as a matter of fact it is the name of a pre-Incan empire that lived here in Peru -- and proceeded to sleep very, very little. Most of it was because each bump in the road felt like a jackhammer, but there was also one point in the night where a loud noise and a dramatic swerve woke me with a start. Well, the next morning we discovered that the right headlight had been replaced with a . . . hole. Via basic translating skills (the word ``burro`` being said by the locals over and over again) we deduced that we ran into a late-night donkey. A donkey in the headlights. A slow donkey in the headlights, because I imagine he must have saw us coming.
And the show had just begun at that point. The four of us were discussing some conjugation of some irregular Spanish verb when the bus came to a stop. This is not unusual (in my experience) on Latin American bus trips -- just as my not knowing the reason for stopping is not unusual -- so we paid little heed. For the first half and hour. Then we heard a collective yell from a little further down the road, and Joe craned his neck out the window to see what the matter was. He reported that there were trees in the road, so we all automatically assumed that some had fallen over the course of the night and that some teamwork was being employed to lift them out of the way. Furthermore, Joe is 6 foot 8 (quite a bit taller than the average Peruvian) and we imagined him lifting the tree off the road with his bare hands, saving the day for the long line of buses and creating a legend of the Tall Man that would be perpetuated in this lush Andean valley for centuries to come.
Well, it was actually a Communist Revolution that was stopping us. And no, they would not let us through just because none of us had eaten breakfast (someone asked). We were to wait for two hours and listen to a long line of stump speeches, with varied levels of anger and intellectual sophistication, while a highly-apparent subgroup of the rural farmers wielded machetes or poles with sharp wooden fragments coming out of them. I obviously understood very little, but I did catch that they are very low on water and that the government needs to change because it is not working for the People. Which, from what I learned in my Latin American Politics lecture from Junior Year, sounds juuuuust about right. You could tell who was a part of it by who applauded after each speech (they scattered around the group for the sake of coverage) and who looked confused and a little bored. I found myself vacilating between two feelings: a strange sense of disappointment that these people were not inflamed by the Cause (``No history, no Castro is being created here, bud``) and an occasional freak-out because the kid standing behind me was a little restless and rustled his feet around in the brush every so often. After looking at some people further down the road sitting on some jagged boulders (also part of the Communist Traffic Block) the feeling that this Revolution was making me hungry began to build. So I returned to the bus and waited. If it wasn`t for the women selling maize and little cheeses about a half-hour before we started up again, the Revolution would have surely put me to sleep. But then I felt better, and we saw the Communists on the left as we passed them and Nate exchange a little wave good-bye with a few of them. Thank You For Participating! We were back on the road.
And then the Second Communist Revolution came, which was pretty much just obnoxious. This one involved a few logs burning in the middle of the road, right next to a little local foodmart that experienced a sudden surge in business. (Interesting how the Revolution increased revenues, huh?) The group of us got a bottle of Coca-Cola (soda is drank like air is breathed in Peru) just at the point when the Second Revolution let us all through again. So we chugged and ran down the line to find our bus, which was when we realized that there very well might be more than one Wari bus and we had no idea which one was ours. Which led to me bolting down the road, chasing a bus that had three people hanging out of it motioning to me that I had the wrong one. But who could we trust? What was their Cause? And one of them was attractive, wasn`t she? Anyway the right bus was just behind and we boarded without issue. And at around 7 PM -- some 24 hours after the first boarding -- we arrived safely in Cuzco, freshly constrained by
political turmoil yet freshly rejuvenated by our mutual first cups of coca-leaf tea.
DESSERT
``Drew`` is hard to say in Spanish/Castillian, and when I introduce myself I find it easier to say that my full name is Andrew, which is like Andrès in English. The man whose couch I am surfing here has simply taken up Andrès as a name for me, which is about the third or fourth time this has happened. Which means you all might have to update your contact entry for me, real soon. Because this Andrès is something of a maverick, and he is on a team of mavericks, so you can expect him to you know disagree and also be appealing if you like that kind of thing.
The gang and I spent some five days in Lima, and the equivalent of two-and-a-half days wondering what we should do in Lima (and surfing the internet). It is interesting how each person has such a different conception of what travel means . . . is it relaxation? Contemplation? The tourist route? Trekking and physical activities? Put four intelligent, independent, college-educated young men together and you`ll see right away that there is no real answer. (Not that there would be for four unintelligent, dependent, elementary-school-educated people either.) So between Lima and Lunahuana (a little tourist town just outside the capital) we patched a bit of everything together -- cardgames at a restaurant overlooking Limeñan Chinatown; watching the Vice Presidential debates in a hostal sideroom with a slightly-psychotic expat improvisational dancer; dodging tamales filled with pigskin (hairs still on the skin) before getting stuck on a bunch of rocks in a river while attempting to raft; fratboy-style jokes a dime a dozen, disgustingly freed by the language barrier; philosophical conversation with one of my best friends as we look out over a massive McDonald`s across the street; and a Tashlich ceremony I will never forget: tossing breadcrumbs that represent my shortcomings over the past year into the Pacific Ocean, watching the waves claim each one with a dull roar, as Lima`s nearly-perpetual fogginess distorted the line between sea and sky.
THINKING THAT THE WAITER IS BRINGING YOUR MAIN COURSE TO YOU, BUT THEN SEEING THAT IT`S ACTUALLY FOR THE PERSON SITTING AT THE TABLE NEXT TO YOURS, WHO GOT THERE AFTER YOU DID AND SEEMS TO REALLY REALLY ENJOY THAT FIRST BITE
I went to Machu Picchu yesterday. I`m not going to write about it just yet.
MAIN COURSE
We took a bus that was supposed to take sixteen hours from a city just outside Lima to Cuzco, which is the traditional jumping-off point for Machu Picchu and a host of other archaeological curiosities. We found one that cost seventy soles (about $25), by far the best deal in the land. So we hopped the Wari -- I had a feeling that this company`s name automatically evoked the anger of some ancient god, and as a matter of fact it is the name of a pre-Incan empire that lived here in Peru -- and proceeded to sleep very, very little. Most of it was because each bump in the road felt like a jackhammer, but there was also one point in the night where a loud noise and a dramatic swerve woke me with a start. Well, the next morning we discovered that the right headlight had been replaced with a . . . hole. Via basic translating skills (the word ``burro`` being said by the locals over and over again) we deduced that we ran into a late-night donkey. A donkey in the headlights. A slow donkey in the headlights, because I imagine he must have saw us coming.
And the show had just begun at that point. The four of us were discussing some conjugation of some irregular Spanish verb when the bus came to a stop. This is not unusual (in my experience) on Latin American bus trips -- just as my not knowing the reason for stopping is not unusual -- so we paid little heed. For the first half and hour. Then we heard a collective yell from a little further down the road, and Joe craned his neck out the window to see what the matter was. He reported that there were trees in the road, so we all automatically assumed that some had fallen over the course of the night and that some teamwork was being employed to lift them out of the way. Furthermore, Joe is 6 foot 8 (quite a bit taller than the average Peruvian) and we imagined him lifting the tree off the road with his bare hands, saving the day for the long line of buses and creating a legend of the Tall Man that would be perpetuated in this lush Andean valley for centuries to come.
Well, it was actually a Communist Revolution that was stopping us. And no, they would not let us through just because none of us had eaten breakfast (someone asked). We were to wait for two hours and listen to a long line of stump speeches, with varied levels of anger and intellectual sophistication, while a highly-apparent subgroup of the rural farmers wielded machetes or poles with sharp wooden fragments coming out of them. I obviously understood very little, but I did catch that they are very low on water and that the government needs to change because it is not working for the People. Which, from what I learned in my Latin American Politics lecture from Junior Year, sounds juuuuust about right. You could tell who was a part of it by who applauded after each speech (they scattered around the group for the sake of coverage) and who looked confused and a little bored. I found myself vacilating between two feelings: a strange sense of disappointment that these people were not inflamed by the Cause (``No history, no Castro is being created here, bud``) and an occasional freak-out because the kid standing behind me was a little restless and rustled his feet around in the brush every so often. After looking at some people further down the road sitting on some jagged boulders (also part of the Communist Traffic Block) the feeling that this Revolution was making me hungry began to build. So I returned to the bus and waited. If it wasn`t for the women selling maize and little cheeses about a half-hour before we started up again, the Revolution would have surely put me to sleep. But then I felt better, and we saw the Communists on the left as we passed them and Nate exchange a little wave good-bye with a few of them. Thank You For Participating! We were back on the road.
And then the Second Communist Revolution came, which was pretty much just obnoxious. This one involved a few logs burning in the middle of the road, right next to a little local foodmart that experienced a sudden surge in business. (Interesting how the Revolution increased revenues, huh?) The group of us got a bottle of Coca-Cola (soda is drank like air is breathed in Peru) just at the point when the Second Revolution let us all through again. So we chugged and ran down the line to find our bus, which was when we realized that there very well might be more than one Wari bus and we had no idea which one was ours. Which led to me bolting down the road, chasing a bus that had three people hanging out of it motioning to me that I had the wrong one. But who could we trust? What was their Cause? And one of them was attractive, wasn`t she? Anyway the right bus was just behind and we boarded without issue. And at around 7 PM -- some 24 hours after the first boarding -- we arrived safely in Cuzco, freshly constrained by
political turmoil yet freshly rejuvenated by our mutual first cups of coca-leaf tea.
DESSERT
``Drew`` is hard to say in Spanish/Castillian, and when I introduce myself I find it easier to say that my full name is Andrew, which is like Andrès in English. The man whose couch I am surfing here has simply taken up Andrès as a name for me, which is about the third or fourth time this has happened. Which means you all might have to update your contact entry for me, real soon. Because this Andrès is something of a maverick, and he is on a team of mavericks, so you can expect him to you know disagree and also be appealing if you like that kind of thing.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Connecting Some Oddly-Shaped Dots
I left Tilcara relaxedly but with a desperation: I wanted to return to a solitude that I had grown to love and hate in just the right ways, and I realized that being around people you can´t communicate with correctly is really what loneliness is. Then I tried to take a bus into Chile from a scruffy city named San Salvador de Jujuy, but the next border-crossing trip wasn´t for another two days, and so I dragged myself back (tail between the legs) into Salta and checked into a hostal. I had CouchSurfed for a while there before, and the city showed an entirely new side of itself to me: I met a rock band from Buenos Aires which was on-tour, along with a University of Denver student studying-abroad in Argentina named Leah, and we all shared dinner and slang between our languages for two lovely nights. I learned a traditional folk-dance with a French girl and one of the hostal workers played me folk music from five or six different cities in Northern Argentina . . . each with its own speed and style and intonations. My last night in Argentina saw me speak more English than I had for the entire five or so weeks before, talking with Leah over empanadas. The next day I arrived in Chile, and I had no voice. I was in Chile for two-and-a-half days and I did not have my voice for any of it. I drove through the only real touristy destination I could have gone to for the sake of moving. Every person I had a real conversation with was either Peruvian or going to Peru. I was on a quest to reach Lima on the 28th of September, to meet my good friend Nate Allen and start a new chapter to my trip. As a result, Chile felt like a sort of comfortable pit, a satin-lined one, that I fell into and clawed my way out of rapidly. The city I stayed in was Calama, and it was comfortable and clean even though it was not huge and mostly an industrial town. After a night-bus and an early-morning border crossing followed by another seven-hour bus I found myself in Arequipa, Peru, and my voice returned to me. Only to need it for denying a before-unseen group of beggars and goods-hawkers setting their sights on me . . . I am more obviously a foreigner here than I had been at any other point before. It was two days of ceviche (a sort of delicious cold shrimp dish) and watching confusing Peruvian Tourism Weekend parades before I hit Lima right on the dot -- arriving early-morning on the 28th -- and checked into a dusty hostal filled with old oil pantings and crumbling busts right across from a Franciscan monastery and there I waited.
The past week in Lima has been different. I feel relaxed and natural, and enjoyment is always on the tip of my tongue with my three new companions. But I am not contemplative. I enter the world we have created and have a hell of a time, but the difficult confusing chaos outside of us has started to become more and more distant from me. And that chaos is something I crave, it is something I want to toy with and something I want to hurt me and it is the very thing I have left my life behind for. It is all yet another billboard telling me that yes, it´s true, I really do not have the constitution for being comfortable. These people are my friends, for sure -- one of them is one of my best friends in the world -- but returning to the world of my mother tongue left incomplete some mission I didn´t know I had. My Spanish was beginning to blossom, my sight was more piercing, I had a wingspan like an Andean condor . . . and the English language was a little secret I tucked away at every moment, only to reveal it to myself delightedly when I could. That has all fallen away.
But kickin around with these brahs, we have done some hard hard chillin for real. Throwin round soles like Benjamins and dissin my loud snorin and speakin like Sarah Palin. Dontcha know. When you start laughin, the little details and parts of stuff that some dorks think about you know it all dont mean nothin to me. You talk chill, you think chill, just chillin out. Vacation. Relax, man. Tranquilo. ´´Travelling is as much about being away from where you were as it is about being where you are.´´ Right on man. Thats the sermon, and this guy right heres the son of the preacher man. The guy youre listenin to. Now lets be goin to catch ourselves a good time cuz we dont have forever now. Hop on board and blow your whistle and chugchugchugchugging along now and we dont stop and hop, hop on, hop on, for the love of God man hop on Im waitin for you. We´re all waitin for you here we dont got all day and you know you dont wanna be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind here, hell no. I know you wanna go, I won´t listen to you sayin you dont wanna go. This is the party of a lifetime. Nobodys gonna wanna be stranded.
The past week in Lima has been different. I feel relaxed and natural, and enjoyment is always on the tip of my tongue with my three new companions. But I am not contemplative. I enter the world we have created and have a hell of a time, but the difficult confusing chaos outside of us has started to become more and more distant from me. And that chaos is something I crave, it is something I want to toy with and something I want to hurt me and it is the very thing I have left my life behind for. It is all yet another billboard telling me that yes, it´s true, I really do not have the constitution for being comfortable. These people are my friends, for sure -- one of them is one of my best friends in the world -- but returning to the world of my mother tongue left incomplete some mission I didn´t know I had. My Spanish was beginning to blossom, my sight was more piercing, I had a wingspan like an Andean condor . . . and the English language was a little secret I tucked away at every moment, only to reveal it to myself delightedly when I could. That has all fallen away.
But kickin around with these brahs, we have done some hard hard chillin for real. Throwin round soles like Benjamins and dissin my loud snorin and speakin like Sarah Palin. Dontcha know. When you start laughin, the little details and parts of stuff that some dorks think about you know it all dont mean nothin to me. You talk chill, you think chill, just chillin out. Vacation. Relax, man. Tranquilo. ´´Travelling is as much about being away from where you were as it is about being where you are.´´ Right on man. Thats the sermon, and this guy right heres the son of the preacher man. The guy youre listenin to. Now lets be goin to catch ourselves a good time cuz we dont have forever now. Hop on board and blow your whistle and chugchugchugchugging along now and we dont stop and hop, hop on, hop on, for the love of God man hop on Im waitin for you. We´re all waitin for you here we dont got all day and you know you dont wanna be left behind. Nobody wants to be left behind here, hell no. I know you wanna go, I won´t listen to you sayin you dont wanna go. This is the party of a lifetime. Nobodys gonna wanna be stranded.
Friday, September 26, 2008
9/19 and 9/20 -- Tilcara, Argentina
The mountains were wrinkled and modest around Tilcara, and the buildings were single-storied and cracked earthtones. The sidewalks often rose several feet above the ground -- steady and level, as the dirt road beneath it dipped and twisted -- and it could make a Quechan baby girl and her pre-pubescent brother the same height. Perfect for walking lessons. I found myself tripping over edges and missing sections of pavement here, as I did in Buenos Aires and as I will do when I burrow my way through Chile and into Peru. In this place, though, everything around me just looked too much a part of itself to have to worry about my feet.
I was walking towards another basketful of empanadas when something in the sidewalk halted my thoughtstream. It was seated on a stoop that was carved out of one section of the sidewalk I was swaying down, and if my eyes had been more cultivated by the earth (like these peoples` are) I might have at first thought it needed to be swept away. But no, this was a stiff-billed hat like coddled topsoil on top of a dusty face with a scorched-tan jacket and pants like roots. It was a man, but it was a man who looked as if he had come directly up from the ground below, the ground that his feet could not even graze from his perch. And I barely realized I was staring at him until I was gone, on the other side, my rhythmic feet being unburdened from my attentions.
I thought little of the man for the rest of the day, mostly about my plans to go dancing with two Buenos Airean girls who worked at homely little Tilcara Hostal. It would have been better to think of good things to think about, though, because once we arrived at our little dinner-and-live-music joint my friend the Language Barrier showed up once again, and with an impressive collection of unnoticeable little knives. The music had a beat and the beer kept my throat lubricated enough that swallowing my saliva was a perpetually winnable battle. And then the hour passes and the Man From The Earth comes up to our table, from some corner or some ancient trap-door, I didn`t see him come in and I didn`t see him in my neck-craning glances of solitude either but I am immensely glad to see him. He is a state of belonging that I have lost in a maze of spontaneously-elected locales. He is anywhere from 45 to 70 and thus seems nowhere between the two. He stands next to the girls and tells them stories with a voice that`s misty (on top of the amplified acoustic guitar and patterned xylophone improv) and the girls laugh and dart glances to each other with the silent conveyance of offbeat amusement that I think must be shared between females of all cultures throughout time and the earthman strings them along as if he has been a part of all cultures throughout time and pays their looks as much mind as distant bolts of thunder. They call him Chiqi. Chiqi Chiqi Chiqi. I smile at him discreetly and excuse myself to a bathroom made of pipes with exposed walls.
Then that`s done and I come back to hear the man at the microphone ask Chiqi to come sing. The room erupts in cheers, even the corner filled with cigarette smoke and soft-bearded old boys with berets wants him to sing and so he does. He comes up to sing one song and is urged into singing three by his local groupies and their touristic copycats. He sings tango, direct and pure, as the leadman paws along with his guitar. It is not the tango I heard in Buenos Aires . . . it does not dip and sink with orchestral flourish, it does not incite flesh to meet flesh out of hazy necessity, it does not outline the shape of a beautiful woman far away who must twirl her loss towards her even as her hands grow cold . . . this is different. It is a goodbye in musical triptych. Shadows from the microphone he holds slices down the center of his face. The room is darker, for him, or maybe because someone turned some lights off. Ten minutes of obscurity, of the deep delight of a child under a table-clothed dinner table full of legs and secrecy, and I am returned.
He walks back over to our table and I tell him: ``Me encanta la voz.`` I love your voice. But no, that`s not exactly right. I love the voice. In Spanish, your voice and your hands and your head don`t belong to you. They just are. I think that When this man pieced himself together from the elements, in his instinctual mission to Make Simple, he must have brought along some grammar with him too.
I saw Chiqi one last time. It was the next night and I was walking around the dark square alone, trying to avoid a distant voice that cried for the necessity of me needing to be around people, even if they were people I would know little about. He was backlit by streetlamps, a sharp shadow against the dull gleam of the church across the plaza. He recognized me and told me he knew where the hostal girls were. We walked for two blocks; he wheezed with each step, and I asked him questions that fit the space between immense curiosity and scant language. He told me that Chiqi is a nickname, My actual name is Roberto Carlos (something something) and I am from Tilcara and this block here, it used to be owned by my grandfather. I asked him ``What was your grandfather`s work?`` and he said ``Yes, work.`` I couldn`t agree more with that answer. Then we entered a little peña, a little dance-bar, and I had to be alone. Chiqi took the couch and the attentions of the Tilcara Crowd and I took a seat facing a wall pasted with old Argentinean political pamphlets mixed with pseudo-pornography. The girls showed up a half-hour later and we didn`t talk. Just before leaving I spotted Chiqi propped up against a wall on a wooden seat, the bill of his hat pulled down over his eyes, fast asleep. And I thought to myself . . . well, perhaps underground is a lonely place to go.
I was walking towards another basketful of empanadas when something in the sidewalk halted my thoughtstream. It was seated on a stoop that was carved out of one section of the sidewalk I was swaying down, and if my eyes had been more cultivated by the earth (like these peoples` are) I might have at first thought it needed to be swept away. But no, this was a stiff-billed hat like coddled topsoil on top of a dusty face with a scorched-tan jacket and pants like roots. It was a man, but it was a man who looked as if he had come directly up from the ground below, the ground that his feet could not even graze from his perch. And I barely realized I was staring at him until I was gone, on the other side, my rhythmic feet being unburdened from my attentions.
I thought little of the man for the rest of the day, mostly about my plans to go dancing with two Buenos Airean girls who worked at homely little Tilcara Hostal. It would have been better to think of good things to think about, though, because once we arrived at our little dinner-and-live-music joint my friend the Language Barrier showed up once again, and with an impressive collection of unnoticeable little knives. The music had a beat and the beer kept my throat lubricated enough that swallowing my saliva was a perpetually winnable battle. And then the hour passes and the Man From The Earth comes up to our table, from some corner or some ancient trap-door, I didn`t see him come in and I didn`t see him in my neck-craning glances of solitude either but I am immensely glad to see him. He is a state of belonging that I have lost in a maze of spontaneously-elected locales. He is anywhere from 45 to 70 and thus seems nowhere between the two. He stands next to the girls and tells them stories with a voice that`s misty (on top of the amplified acoustic guitar and patterned xylophone improv) and the girls laugh and dart glances to each other with the silent conveyance of offbeat amusement that I think must be shared between females of all cultures throughout time and the earthman strings them along as if he has been a part of all cultures throughout time and pays their looks as much mind as distant bolts of thunder. They call him Chiqi. Chiqi Chiqi Chiqi. I smile at him discreetly and excuse myself to a bathroom made of pipes with exposed walls.
Then that`s done and I come back to hear the man at the microphone ask Chiqi to come sing. The room erupts in cheers, even the corner filled with cigarette smoke and soft-bearded old boys with berets wants him to sing and so he does. He comes up to sing one song and is urged into singing three by his local groupies and their touristic copycats. He sings tango, direct and pure, as the leadman paws along with his guitar. It is not the tango I heard in Buenos Aires . . . it does not dip and sink with orchestral flourish, it does not incite flesh to meet flesh out of hazy necessity, it does not outline the shape of a beautiful woman far away who must twirl her loss towards her even as her hands grow cold . . . this is different. It is a goodbye in musical triptych. Shadows from the microphone he holds slices down the center of his face. The room is darker, for him, or maybe because someone turned some lights off. Ten minutes of obscurity, of the deep delight of a child under a table-clothed dinner table full of legs and secrecy, and I am returned.
He walks back over to our table and I tell him: ``Me encanta la voz.`` I love your voice. But no, that`s not exactly right. I love the voice. In Spanish, your voice and your hands and your head don`t belong to you. They just are. I think that When this man pieced himself together from the elements, in his instinctual mission to Make Simple, he must have brought along some grammar with him too.
I saw Chiqi one last time. It was the next night and I was walking around the dark square alone, trying to avoid a distant voice that cried for the necessity of me needing to be around people, even if they were people I would know little about. He was backlit by streetlamps, a sharp shadow against the dull gleam of the church across the plaza. He recognized me and told me he knew where the hostal girls were. We walked for two blocks; he wheezed with each step, and I asked him questions that fit the space between immense curiosity and scant language. He told me that Chiqi is a nickname, My actual name is Roberto Carlos (something something) and I am from Tilcara and this block here, it used to be owned by my grandfather. I asked him ``What was your grandfather`s work?`` and he said ``Yes, work.`` I couldn`t agree more with that answer. Then we entered a little peña, a little dance-bar, and I had to be alone. Chiqi took the couch and the attentions of the Tilcara Crowd and I took a seat facing a wall pasted with old Argentinean political pamphlets mixed with pseudo-pornography. The girls showed up a half-hour later and we didn`t talk. Just before leaving I spotted Chiqi propped up against a wall on a wooden seat, the bill of his hat pulled down over his eyes, fast asleep. And I thought to myself . . . well, perhaps underground is a lonely place to go.
Friday, September 19, 2008
PICTURES!
Okay family and other people I don`t know that are reading this and haven`t already seen these on Facebook, I`ve got some fresh visual evidence that I actually am in South America. Sorry about the shoddy quality of the scanning, once again . . .
And here is from the main church in Salta on the holiday I talked about in my last post. A lot of people praying, a lot of people chatting, a lot of people standing around and chilling. So there you go.
This is from the top of a hill that overlooks Salta. The man`s name is Gustavo, he works in the IT Department for a major tobacco company that has prominent fields in the area (and is US-owned), and he was an active and gracious host to me for five nights. We walked the 5k-long road up the mountain and talked about the following things: how cool the iPhone is, basic meditation technique, the fact that there was exactly one blossoming tree on the whole earthy-toned hill and that it was the most lovely shade of pink.
Here`s the main street in Tafì de Valle, a gorgeous little town located in a valley that I stayed at a while back. As you might guess, there wasn`t a lot of rushing around in this here pueblo. Hopefully you can also get a sense for how majestic the valley setting was.
And now we have a vineyard outside of Cafayate. Again, real pretty. The mountains in this area are entirely different from in Colorado . . . much more modest in size, but more rugged and welcoming. They felt like raised, wrinkled lumps of earth. Easy on the eyes.
And here is from the main church in Salta on the holiday I talked about in my last post. A lot of people praying, a lot of people chatting, a lot of people standing around and chilling. So there you go.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Whack Link, Political Ink
Okay, give this one a shot.
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444
You should be able to see the pictures from here. I´ll write more soon, still in Salta but I think I´m leaving tomorrow. Saw a ton of people come into the main plaza today for a holiday special to this city, where the icon of the Virgin Mary is carried around the town in procession as a way of remembering a miracle that occurred here some 300 years ago. What I hear is that a huge earthquake ripped through Salta for two straight days, destroying the church, and the people brought the icon of the Virgin out of the rubble and prayed to it . . . which prompted the earthquake to quickly abate. I saw groups of teenagers passed out from exhaustion after having walked from as far as 200 km away for the festival. Serious business. That aside, the most exciting thing I´ve done in the past week is go to the local supermarket and admire the infinite varieties of pasta and yerba mate for sale. I feel privileged to have met two such stand-up people as Gabriella and Gustavo, but I also feel like it´s time to find 2nd gear again.
Finally . . . I wanted to say real quck that my original plan to go to Bolivia in the coming week needed to be amended, due to an outbreak of political-related violence in the country. I am most definitely out of harm´s way here in Argentina, although most of the shaking has been happening in the southern part of the country; much of the Bolivian-Argentinean border has been shut down at this point, and even if it wasn´t I´m not quite up for trying my hand at freelance conflict journalism right now (tools-wise or balls-wise). I do think it´s worth taking a few minutes to read about what is motivating the fighting there right now, though, because it is not an issue foreign to us first-world citizens either . . . when a few people have access to a majority of a greater area´s wealth, is it their duty to share it with people whose lands have considerably less intrinsic riches? And is a moderate consensus possible in such a charged issue? I certainly don´t know, but I do know (via an especially inspirational college professor of mine) that a human life is more valuable than all the idealisms humanity has ever created put together. Including ´´-ocrats´´ and ´´-ublicans´´ and all the stripes, circles, and squares of all the world´s nations. An affiliation should never be confused with a person. That being said, I hope in a month or so I´ll be able to march into that pretty little country with my American dollars and unavoidably feed the ´´ism´´ of travelling that makes what I´m saying right now perhaps a little more interesting than if I was, say, working at your neighborhood Chili´s. I guess the fear is mostly mine, that adding layers of identity obscures something more basic in the human heart.
If I had a Republican to kiss, surely I would feel a little better.
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444
You should be able to see the pictures from here. I´ll write more soon, still in Salta but I think I´m leaving tomorrow. Saw a ton of people come into the main plaza today for a holiday special to this city, where the icon of the Virgin Mary is carried around the town in procession as a way of remembering a miracle that occurred here some 300 years ago. What I hear is that a huge earthquake ripped through Salta for two straight days, destroying the church, and the people brought the icon of the Virgin out of the rubble and prayed to it . . . which prompted the earthquake to quickly abate. I saw groups of teenagers passed out from exhaustion after having walked from as far as 200 km away for the festival. Serious business. That aside, the most exciting thing I´ve done in the past week is go to the local supermarket and admire the infinite varieties of pasta and yerba mate for sale. I feel privileged to have met two such stand-up people as Gabriella and Gustavo, but I also feel like it´s time to find 2nd gear again.
Finally . . . I wanted to say real quck that my original plan to go to Bolivia in the coming week needed to be amended, due to an outbreak of political-related violence in the country. I am most definitely out of harm´s way here in Argentina, although most of the shaking has been happening in the southern part of the country; much of the Bolivian-Argentinean border has been shut down at this point, and even if it wasn´t I´m not quite up for trying my hand at freelance conflict journalism right now (tools-wise or balls-wise). I do think it´s worth taking a few minutes to read about what is motivating the fighting there right now, though, because it is not an issue foreign to us first-world citizens either . . . when a few people have access to a majority of a greater area´s wealth, is it their duty to share it with people whose lands have considerably less intrinsic riches? And is a moderate consensus possible in such a charged issue? I certainly don´t know, but I do know (via an especially inspirational college professor of mine) that a human life is more valuable than all the idealisms humanity has ever created put together. Including ´´-ocrats´´ and ´´-ublicans´´ and all the stripes, circles, and squares of all the world´s nations. An affiliation should never be confused with a person. That being said, I hope in a month or so I´ll be able to march into that pretty little country with my American dollars and unavoidably feed the ´´ism´´ of travelling that makes what I´m saying right now perhaps a little more interesting than if I was, say, working at your neighborhood Chili´s. I guess the fear is mostly mine, that adding layers of identity obscures something more basic in the human heart.
If I had a Republican to kiss, surely I would feel a little better.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Muchas Cosas, Dudes.
Okay it´s been a while so I´ll do this up the best I can. First, check out this link below:
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444
You´ll find a series of poorly-scanned photographs of me hanging out in Rosario, Puerto Iguazú, and Resistencia. I got another disposable camera that´s just about spent, so more snapshots are on the way.
Every city is a different world, a different experience, a different feeling . . . and I´m five cities behind. Here we go.
Resistencia
I wanted to check out some museums at around 1 PM the first full day in town. I found out that I had made my way into siesta country, and couldn´t find anything to do until 3. I dropped into a museum that focused on indigenous cultures, where I found an interesting sight upstairs: a room with some eleven statues of popular local spirits, with branches hanging down from the ceiling over each of them. Thin and winding, with small lights shining down too, and a wall-to-wall mural of thick green foliage. One wall had painted Spanish descriptions of each spirit, and the only thing I could really pick up is that they were all referred to generally as ´´duendes´´. So from there I made my way back to my CouchSurfing host -- a girl named Cecilia, who is finishing up a degree in journalism at the local college and is an aspiring writer just like myself. At one particular point (of many) in which I was fighting heavily with communication in Spanish, she asked me why I couldn´t travel for longer than my itenirary calls for. I said that I needed to return to the US because I had a lot of debt . . . well, I mean to say that, but instead of saying ´´deudas´´ (debt) I said ´´duendes´´. So I told her I had to return home because I have many goblins. This prompted an explosion of laughter and a joke at my expense that continues to this day over e-mail. Later on she told me that Gabriel García Marquez has famously said in a speech of his that he has many duendes, and that they play a role in his writing . . . so maybe my accident was correct.
Tucumán
My weekend in this city was a continuous torrent of raucous laughter and fervorous dancing and passionate people from all over the world. I fell in love five different ways in this city. I don´t have any pictures from it, but if I did they wouldn´t do justice to it and I also don´t think any of you would really want to see them either. It kind of became my little enclave of perfection in the world and I am just as happy that I left it before it became too real as I am sad that it was so fleeting.
Tafí de Valle
Tiny, sleeply little town in a gorgeous valley. I went to Quilmes, which was a nearby ruins of an indigenous fortress. It was a 5-meter walk down a dirt road to and fro . . . on the way back I was encountered by four little mutts barking ferociously. Not a person was in sight, either direction. I walked straight ahead with nary a glance in their direction, and each of them quieted down in turn and trotted beside for a little ways. I was, obviously, the leader of the pack in this city.
Cafayate
Surrounded by vineyards. Went winetasting with an Argentinean man I met in my hostel, which consisted of me listening to elaborate Spanish explanations that I probably wouldn´t have been able to understand in English, tasting a wine, and saying ´´muy bueno´´ repeatedly. I don´t know if you dig wine, but the torrontés here was excellent. They also had a place that sold wine ice cream, which is something I would recommend with a small list of caveats. For example, after a few bites it feels like somebody has put Icy-Hot on your tongue. And once you get down to the cone, it´s just wrong. Just wrong.
This city should have just been made with empty wine bottles, probably. But it was nice.
Salta
YES!!! This is my first deep breath of my trip. I am CouchSurfing with an unspeakably wonderful couple, and I have barely moved from their house over the past two days. I have my own bedroom and computer to use -- which has allowed me to catch up on such minor things happen elsewhere as, oh, I don´t know, the United States Elections -- and I´ve been helping one of my hosts (Gabrielle) with creating a travel itenirary proposal in English for her schoolwork. So I can´t really tell you what this city is like, but I can certainly tell you that I am enjoying it greatly.
So how are all you doing?
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2020107&l=e7276&id=28600444
You´ll find a series of poorly-scanned photographs of me hanging out in Rosario, Puerto Iguazú, and Resistencia. I got another disposable camera that´s just about spent, so more snapshots are on the way.
Every city is a different world, a different experience, a different feeling . . . and I´m five cities behind. Here we go.
Resistencia
I wanted to check out some museums at around 1 PM the first full day in town. I found out that I had made my way into siesta country, and couldn´t find anything to do until 3. I dropped into a museum that focused on indigenous cultures, where I found an interesting sight upstairs: a room with some eleven statues of popular local spirits, with branches hanging down from the ceiling over each of them. Thin and winding, with small lights shining down too, and a wall-to-wall mural of thick green foliage. One wall had painted Spanish descriptions of each spirit, and the only thing I could really pick up is that they were all referred to generally as ´´duendes´´. So from there I made my way back to my CouchSurfing host -- a girl named Cecilia, who is finishing up a degree in journalism at the local college and is an aspiring writer just like myself. At one particular point (of many) in which I was fighting heavily with communication in Spanish, she asked me why I couldn´t travel for longer than my itenirary calls for. I said that I needed to return to the US because I had a lot of debt . . . well, I mean to say that, but instead of saying ´´deudas´´ (debt) I said ´´duendes´´. So I told her I had to return home because I have many goblins. This prompted an explosion of laughter and a joke at my expense that continues to this day over e-mail. Later on she told me that Gabriel García Marquez has famously said in a speech of his that he has many duendes, and that they play a role in his writing . . . so maybe my accident was correct.
Tucumán
My weekend in this city was a continuous torrent of raucous laughter and fervorous dancing and passionate people from all over the world. I fell in love five different ways in this city. I don´t have any pictures from it, but if I did they wouldn´t do justice to it and I also don´t think any of you would really want to see them either. It kind of became my little enclave of perfection in the world and I am just as happy that I left it before it became too real as I am sad that it was so fleeting.
Tafí de Valle
Tiny, sleeply little town in a gorgeous valley. I went to Quilmes, which was a nearby ruins of an indigenous fortress. It was a 5-meter walk down a dirt road to and fro . . . on the way back I was encountered by four little mutts barking ferociously. Not a person was in sight, either direction. I walked straight ahead with nary a glance in their direction, and each of them quieted down in turn and trotted beside for a little ways. I was, obviously, the leader of the pack in this city.
Cafayate
Surrounded by vineyards. Went winetasting with an Argentinean man I met in my hostel, which consisted of me listening to elaborate Spanish explanations that I probably wouldn´t have been able to understand in English, tasting a wine, and saying ´´muy bueno´´ repeatedly. I don´t know if you dig wine, but the torrontés here was excellent. They also had a place that sold wine ice cream, which is something I would recommend with a small list of caveats. For example, after a few bites it feels like somebody has put Icy-Hot on your tongue. And once you get down to the cone, it´s just wrong. Just wrong.
This city should have just been made with empty wine bottles, probably. But it was nice.
Salta
YES!!! This is my first deep breath of my trip. I am CouchSurfing with an unspeakably wonderful couple, and I have barely moved from their house over the past two days. I have my own bedroom and computer to use -- which has allowed me to catch up on such minor things happen elsewhere as, oh, I don´t know, the United States Elections -- and I´ve been helping one of my hosts (Gabrielle) with creating a travel itenirary proposal in English for her schoolwork. So I can´t really tell you what this city is like, but I can certainly tell you that I am enjoying it greatly.
So how are all you doing?
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Rantflections
I´ve been on the move lately. After spending four nights in Rosario at Sergio´s place I took a night bus way up to the northeastern tip of Argentina - landing in a place called Puerto Iguazú. I stayed there for a couple days and saw some awe-inspiring waterfalls down the road (which I´ll write about when I can scan the photos I took and post them up for you all to see). I was also hogtied with beaurocratic red tape by the Brazillian Embassy in the city . . . I wanted a visa to go see the other side of the waterfalls (they are situation right on the Brazil-Argentina border) as well as visit Brazil at the end of my trip, but they told me that the thirty-day period for tourists starts upon the first entrance so too bad bud. Which would have prompted me to just get two separate visas if they didn´t cost $130 (!!!) for US citizens - about three times the amount as they do for nationals of any other country. My receipt had the answer to the obvious question: the charge is in receprocity for the same amount that the US charges people from all countries of the world as a ¨processing fee¨ for visa applications. (And they don´t refund it if they deny the person entrance, which I hear is quite common.) At first I started thinking like this: ¨Uh, Brazil, I wasn´t in Congress that day when the bill about those fees came up, and I agree with you and all . . .¨ but the more I thought about it the more I applauded it as the sort of blunt government-mandated middle finger that deserved my respect for its pure honesty, if nothing else.
Okay, from there I landed in a little city named Resistencia, where I´m writing from right now. The city´s claim to fame is that they have over 300 statues scattered over the city. They´re obsessed with them. There´s even a law that if you put a statue in front of your house you don´t have to pay taxes for a year. The statues themselves . . . well, they´re nice. But seeing a bust of Albert Einstein´s rusty face in front of Banco Colombia doesn´t really provoke any sort of aesthetic bliss, you know? I should also mention that they are horses and carts here that are actually being used for practical purposes - like, carrying building materials. Which is just the kind of exotica I didn´t know I was looking for . . . since, lately, I´ve been needing some camaraderie in my internal battle against Progress.
Okay, from there I landed in a little city named Resistencia, where I´m writing from right now. The city´s claim to fame is that they have over 300 statues scattered over the city. They´re obsessed with them. There´s even a law that if you put a statue in front of your house you don´t have to pay taxes for a year. The statues themselves . . . well, they´re nice. But seeing a bust of Albert Einstein´s rusty face in front of Banco Colombia doesn´t really provoke any sort of aesthetic bliss, you know? I should also mention that they are horses and carts here that are actually being used for practical purposes - like, carrying building materials. Which is just the kind of exotica I didn´t know I was looking for . . . since, lately, I´ve been needing some camaraderie in my internal battle against Progress.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
CouchSurfing
Okay, picture this as a potential travel package:
Lodging at a residence 30 minutes outside of Rosario, Argentina, surrounded with lush gardens and tastefully decorated interior spaces with a minimalist feel. A private bedroom in the corner of the house with personal bath, living room with TV/soundsystem and a wide variety of international movies and music available (with a focus on tango and modern tango). Full kitchen stocked with Argentinean teas and snacks, and an aspiring cook to prepare dinner for you. Chauffer service to Rosario in the morning and from Rosario at night; also, convenient bus service to the downtown area three blocks away.
Price: Free.
This is where I´m at right now. But it´s not a travel package. It´s better. It´s called CouchSurfing. And it comes with one major caveat:
You have to trust a stranger.
Now I´ve been told since I´ve been a kid that ooooooooh, that´s not a good idea. I think we all have been told that. And it´s valid. To an extent. And over the past week I´ve started to realize that the extent to which it´s true is not that expansive, at all. Trust the drunk man on the train staring at me with his eyes on my bag? No. Trust someone who volunteers to make things easier for people travelling through his area? Well, for me, it´s changed my experience for the better to say ¨Yes¨. Maybe trust is something that is too precious and valuable to negate through an all-encompassing axiom (one that implicitly assumes dangerous behavior is normal behavior). Maybe it should lie somewhere more in an honest evaluation and gut-check of each person you meet. Maybe I´m becoming dangerously idealistic.
What I do know is that Sergio - a science professor at the big university in this town - has provided me with all of these amazing things, and keys to his house, because he trusted me right away in the same seemingly-illogical way. My Spanish is improving, I´m living luxoriously, and ´m full, but most importantly (by far) is that I´ve been given the opportunity to get to know a really wonderful guy who is interested in where I come from and the things I believe in as well. Sergio is the first person I´ve spent a lot of time with who speaks Spanish exclusively, which has made staying with him even more valuable for me. (My recent improvements have made me feel better for saying the word ¨diecicinco¨ to a vendor in Buenos Aires a few days ago - which is something like saying ¨twoteen¨ instead of ¨twelve¨ and rightfully provoked an aghast facial expression from the man.)
So CouchSurfing - it´s an incredible way to travel, and incredibly frightening until the precise moment you kiss your next host on the cheek. Before Sergio I stayed with Federico in Buenos Aires, and after Sergio I will certainly seek out others. If I can break the tourist-resident barrier in any way I will try to . . . I´ll try to think of the money I´m saving on lodging and food as little extra rewards for my tiny leaps of faith in humanity.
Lodging at a residence 30 minutes outside of Rosario, Argentina, surrounded with lush gardens and tastefully decorated interior spaces with a minimalist feel. A private bedroom in the corner of the house with personal bath, living room with TV/soundsystem and a wide variety of international movies and music available (with a focus on tango and modern tango). Full kitchen stocked with Argentinean teas and snacks, and an aspiring cook to prepare dinner for you. Chauffer service to Rosario in the morning and from Rosario at night; also, convenient bus service to the downtown area three blocks away.
Price: Free.
This is where I´m at right now. But it´s not a travel package. It´s better. It´s called CouchSurfing. And it comes with one major caveat:
You have to trust a stranger.
Now I´ve been told since I´ve been a kid that ooooooooh, that´s not a good idea. I think we all have been told that. And it´s valid. To an extent. And over the past week I´ve started to realize that the extent to which it´s true is not that expansive, at all. Trust the drunk man on the train staring at me with his eyes on my bag? No. Trust someone who volunteers to make things easier for people travelling through his area? Well, for me, it´s changed my experience for the better to say ¨Yes¨. Maybe trust is something that is too precious and valuable to negate through an all-encompassing axiom (one that implicitly assumes dangerous behavior is normal behavior). Maybe it should lie somewhere more in an honest evaluation and gut-check of each person you meet. Maybe I´m becoming dangerously idealistic.
What I do know is that Sergio - a science professor at the big university in this town - has provided me with all of these amazing things, and keys to his house, because he trusted me right away in the same seemingly-illogical way. My Spanish is improving, I´m living luxoriously, and ´m full, but most importantly (by far) is that I´ve been given the opportunity to get to know a really wonderful guy who is interested in where I come from and the things I believe in as well. Sergio is the first person I´ve spent a lot of time with who speaks Spanish exclusively, which has made staying with him even more valuable for me. (My recent improvements have made me feel better for saying the word ¨diecicinco¨ to a vendor in Buenos Aires a few days ago - which is something like saying ¨twoteen¨ instead of ¨twelve¨ and rightfully provoked an aghast facial expression from the man.)
So CouchSurfing - it´s an incredible way to travel, and incredibly frightening until the precise moment you kiss your next host on the cheek. Before Sergio I stayed with Federico in Buenos Aires, and after Sergio I will certainly seek out others. If I can break the tourist-resident barrier in any way I will try to . . . I´ll try to think of the money I´m saving on lodging and food as little extra rewards for my tiny leaps of faith in humanity.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Buenos Aires
What a crazy city. I think I´ll be back later in my trip, so I´m not sure I´m done with it, but I had a kaleidoscope of experiences and viewpoints of this city. It had so many sides to it, and personalities. The Centro area a bustling mass of businesspeople and antique banks; Recoleta a slice out of ¨Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous¨complete with mansions and lavish malls hawking sleek modernist designs; San Telmo a hodgepodge of old colonial buildings rising up to the sky and an assortment of corner graffitti artwork and thumping nightclubs down at ground level; La Boca a rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood with crumbling sidewalks and a futbol stadium that´s bright yellow and filled to the brim with passionate fans. And I only really experienced those parts of the city . . . there are dozens of other barrios in the area. I find myself on my way because a) I want the time to see other places and b) It is utterly exhausting to be here. I´ve discovered that, for me, having too much I could potentially do can be just as tiring as actually doing one of those things.
The owner of the Hare Krishna farm I stayed at - Mark - gave me a frank and bleak analysis of Argentinean culture: he said that there are two strong currents within the culture, one of entitlement and one of shame. He says there is entitlement because Argentina used to be one of the richest countries in the world at the first part of the 20th century (there was actually a saying at the time that an immensely wealthy person is ´´rich as an Argentine´´), which was mostly due to its serving as a breadbasket for much of Europe before and during the World Wars. Look at Argentina´s flag and you see two strips of sky blue (celeste) and a sun in the middle . . . the farms and pastures in this country are its main resource. According to Mark, Argentineans today are the heir to this land of plenty . . . it´s just that it has been squandered away over the years, and Argentina is now in a period where some goods have increased in price threefold since 2004. Their economic instability is the cause of their shame. Again, this is all according to him, but he says that these two things explain why Argentineans have the reputation of being haughty and stubborn and all about appearances (I admit that the vast majority of people here wear designer clothing and generally look immaculate) - they want to retain the illusion that they still have a way of life that´s just not there. Like I said, a very bleak analysis.
I like the version that was presented to me by a man named Federico, a 30-year-old college professor I stayed with over this past weekend. It goes something like this: there is no stereotype for Argentinean behavior because they´re all people, and people are different, and it´s best to think of each person you meet in terms of who they are individually instead of connecting them to certain stereotypes. Federico was the one porteño (citizen of BA) that I really got to know well: he is soft-spoken and brilliant in his knowledge of the area´s history, he made maps for me every day so I knew where to go and how to get back, we discussed the differences between our languages amusingly over a couple of Quilmes, and ate empanadas while watching a movie from New Zealand about evil sheep. He let me stay in his house for free for four nights, and was endlessly generous . . . I´m siding with his take of the Argentinean people right now, and I´ll go ahead and say that - in a specific non-specific kind of way - they are wonderful people. And I will miss them, indeed.
The owner of the Hare Krishna farm I stayed at - Mark - gave me a frank and bleak analysis of Argentinean culture: he said that there are two strong currents within the culture, one of entitlement and one of shame. He says there is entitlement because Argentina used to be one of the richest countries in the world at the first part of the 20th century (there was actually a saying at the time that an immensely wealthy person is ´´rich as an Argentine´´), which was mostly due to its serving as a breadbasket for much of Europe before and during the World Wars. Look at Argentina´s flag and you see two strips of sky blue (celeste) and a sun in the middle . . . the farms and pastures in this country are its main resource. According to Mark, Argentineans today are the heir to this land of plenty . . . it´s just that it has been squandered away over the years, and Argentina is now in a period where some goods have increased in price threefold since 2004. Their economic instability is the cause of their shame. Again, this is all according to him, but he says that these two things explain why Argentineans have the reputation of being haughty and stubborn and all about appearances (I admit that the vast majority of people here wear designer clothing and generally look immaculate) - they want to retain the illusion that they still have a way of life that´s just not there. Like I said, a very bleak analysis.
I like the version that was presented to me by a man named Federico, a 30-year-old college professor I stayed with over this past weekend. It goes something like this: there is no stereotype for Argentinean behavior because they´re all people, and people are different, and it´s best to think of each person you meet in terms of who they are individually instead of connecting them to certain stereotypes. Federico was the one porteño (citizen of BA) that I really got to know well: he is soft-spoken and brilliant in his knowledge of the area´s history, he made maps for me every day so I knew where to go and how to get back, we discussed the differences between our languages amusingly over a couple of Quilmes, and ate empanadas while watching a movie from New Zealand about evil sheep. He let me stay in his house for free for four nights, and was endlessly generous . . . I´m siding with his take of the Argentinean people right now, and I´ll go ahead and say that - in a specific non-specific kind of way - they are wonderful people. And I will miss them, indeed.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Here are some details.
Spent the day outside of the narrow strip of Centro Buenos Aires that I had gotten accustomed to in my previous days here. I took Av. Florída all the way to its end, which led me to a large park-ish area called Plaza San Martín. A sloped grassy hill with a lot of people on top of it (a few of them coupled and making out, which is a common thing to see in parks and sidestreet enclaves here - but not as common as it was in Mexico); a little plaza area with statues featuring your typical BA fare: heroically-posed men with or without horses, or Greek/Christian figures; a recycling bin that had the mulched-up pale-multi-colored look that recycled material itself has, quarter-full with plastic bags; a huge Claro! building (Argentina´s main cell-phone service provider, they even advertise on top of the street signs here) in front of me, and a majestically-built cathedral behind with a homeless man between its gated entrance and some portal that led underground. Took a left and walked down Av. Santa Fe, which led me into the heart of Recoleta - the uppity portion of BA. Immaculate hotel lobbies, rows of private mansions, and ultra-botique clothing stores (as opposed to the standard clothing stores in this city, which are boutique, and the thrift clothing stores, which are used boutique). The street emptied out into a quaint and (thankfully) unpretentious little crafts fair, selling yerba mate cups and Cuban cigars and animals made out of folded-up subway passes. When I found the sidewalk again I walked through gates which said ¨Rest in Peace¨ in Spanish above them, and I was in a cemetary unlike I had never seen before: about two square blocks full of sarcophagi of immense sizes and elaborateness. The paths were paved with tiles and the tombs themselves were made of stone, with sculptures of their inhabitants and Christian iconography abounding. It was simultaneously disgusting and fascinating - never had I thought before that a house of the dead coud feel so much like a shopping mall, what with crowds of people looking through the individual sarcopho-windows at what´s keeping the coffins company (a closed shopping bag here, a painting of an apostle looking upwards there) and taking the occasional chat-break while sitting atop a slab of marble. Evita is buried there, I didn´t see her. I did see a massive bust of an old Argentinean general that was surely once a pure and glistening bronze but now has rusted his face to a pale white, with patches of a sickly-green running down his eyes. The word ´´Argentina´´ comes from the Latin word for ´´silver´´, and the people who named and then conquered this area of the world certainly got what they came for. But I suppose many of those faces from the past haven´t aged as handsomely after death as they might have hoped. At least not in my mind. So then I walked back through what looked like an elementary school getting out (which I think are called ´´collegios´´ here, which is confusing but also pleasantly reminds me of those beautiful, juvenile, ´´oh-god-do-i-have-to?´´ sentiments that bond students of all ages to their institutions, to some degree at least). I took the subway back to the Primera Junta stop in the Caballito barrio, where I´m staying with a immensely kind man named Federico who teaches economics and plays the djembe in an Afro-Brazillian workshop band. A little girl handed out what my friend Amanda said are called´´valentines´´ in Spain, which are cards that ask for a little bit of money to help her eat; she then goes back around and collects the cards, which gives you the choice of either consciously handing her nothing or giving her a few centavos as well. After collecting every card I saw without any coins, she went to the back of the train and watched the subway tunnel fly behind us into the same darkness. She giggled. I was hungry, I got back to Federico´s apartment, I am still hungry, and now I will make myself a cup of tea.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
August 19th, Nueva Vrindavana Farm, 4:00 PM
¨How can I see God in all that´s around me when all of it is an illusion? That is your belief, yes?¨ Srayam is stringing metal wire together ten feet away, further down the bamboo fence we have planted. He bends the ends of the wires into loops and locks them together. A simple system.
¨This is also part of the God. Maya, illusion, it also is. It is under the God´s feetsies.¨
Through his Peruvian accent I hear ¨feces¨. I think, The Godhead shits out reality? Well, I bet we all make pretty good compost mixed up together -- but I clarify.
¨His . . . how do you say, foots?¨
¨Ahh, feet. His feet.¨
¨Yes. Come.¨ I walk through grey piles of dead anthill and horse manure to help him hold the wire taught. He strings it through a hole in a metal post and roughly wraps it around; suddenly, the bamboo line is snug against the barbed wire behind. I savor the feeling of order more than the feeling of having aided the plants in their battle against the considerable winds out here - but I pocket them both.
¨God is in everything,¨ the 28-year-old monk continued. ¨When you stop being your own god, you see that. I was a strong atheist for most of my life, but then I saw that people with faith were happier. A friend of mine, his father died of cancer and he was happy - well, not happy, but okay - because of his faith. Happier than me, and I have not suffered much. So, I decided I wanted to believe.¨
His decision had landed him in an orange scarf-bonnet, his bed a concrete floor in a Hare Krishna youth convent with two free-minded bulls and a rock-minded American. I silently watched him link the final expanse of wire.
¨The desire is all it takes . . . it doesn´t matter what God is to you. Jewish, Muslim, Christian . . . when the religions fight, it´s like children arguing over toys. The fight that matters is inside you, and it is one noone else can be part of.¨
The clouds just barely scrape the sky night overhead, but condense to a light grey over yonder. Light wind, but sunny. Won´t rain. Hungry. I´m never full here, not after two full plates of fried pumpkin and breaded tomato-carrot dumplings and sticky peanut rice.
¨What is God for me may not be God for a Jewish man. But it is about belief. I believe, and I must not be concerned whether you or other do or do not.¨
I chanted the first few lines of my Bar Mitzvah portion to him earlier. Oo-Mosheh-eh-eh-eh ha-yah ro-eh-eh-eh-eh . . . He picked out two words: Adonai and Eloheem. I told him what the first meant, and made up what I thought the second meant: ¨we¨. Seemed neutral and vaguely profound.
¨But once you put faith into your God, it is done. And faith is something everyone has. Faith in themself, the things they can do well, a loved one, drugs . . . it´s just where you put it.¨
I looked at the horizon: clumps of stale green grass, small square farmhouses flanking brown beds of hidden plants and rusting machinery. And the dominant sky. I had seen each part before, taken note of it so clearly, but now they began to strangely coalesce. I saw a picture of a place, and I smiled, and when I smiled I became a part of the picture. I haven´t had faith in myself as a Well-Intentioned Lost Object for some time, but I found the first true dot on my travel map when I let myself think - for a moment - that I have a vast collage of worldly visions to put my unadulterated trust in. And that most of these visions are still to come.
I look back, and Srayam is finishing tying the wire around the final pole. Just enough to keep every bamboo plant upright - not an inch of the coil we brought went unused. His face is soft to the sight like a child´s, and the space under his nostrils glistens softly. He smiles.
As we walk back to the farm my eyes slowly unglue until they are turned inwards, into my Godbrain, once again. I sit alone in a monk´s bedroom to write, minutes later, to extoll the greatness of something I refuse to believe. And as I complete my work, I become aware of the fact that each word I write is something of an idol to Myself.
¨This is also part of the God. Maya, illusion, it also is. It is under the God´s feetsies.¨
Through his Peruvian accent I hear ¨feces¨. I think, The Godhead shits out reality? Well, I bet we all make pretty good compost mixed up together -- but I clarify.
¨His . . . how do you say, foots?¨
¨Ahh, feet. His feet.¨
¨Yes. Come.¨ I walk through grey piles of dead anthill and horse manure to help him hold the wire taught. He strings it through a hole in a metal post and roughly wraps it around; suddenly, the bamboo line is snug against the barbed wire behind. I savor the feeling of order more than the feeling of having aided the plants in their battle against the considerable winds out here - but I pocket them both.
¨God is in everything,¨ the 28-year-old monk continued. ¨When you stop being your own god, you see that. I was a strong atheist for most of my life, but then I saw that people with faith were happier. A friend of mine, his father died of cancer and he was happy - well, not happy, but okay - because of his faith. Happier than me, and I have not suffered much. So, I decided I wanted to believe.¨
His decision had landed him in an orange scarf-bonnet, his bed a concrete floor in a Hare Krishna youth convent with two free-minded bulls and a rock-minded American. I silently watched him link the final expanse of wire.
¨The desire is all it takes . . . it doesn´t matter what God is to you. Jewish, Muslim, Christian . . . when the religions fight, it´s like children arguing over toys. The fight that matters is inside you, and it is one noone else can be part of.¨
The clouds just barely scrape the sky night overhead, but condense to a light grey over yonder. Light wind, but sunny. Won´t rain. Hungry. I´m never full here, not after two full plates of fried pumpkin and breaded tomato-carrot dumplings and sticky peanut rice.
¨What is God for me may not be God for a Jewish man. But it is about belief. I believe, and I must not be concerned whether you or other do or do not.¨
I chanted the first few lines of my Bar Mitzvah portion to him earlier. Oo-Mosheh-eh-eh-eh ha-yah ro-eh-eh-eh-eh . . . He picked out two words: Adonai and Eloheem. I told him what the first meant, and made up what I thought the second meant: ¨we¨. Seemed neutral and vaguely profound.
¨But once you put faith into your God, it is done. And faith is something everyone has. Faith in themself, the things they can do well, a loved one, drugs . . . it´s just where you put it.¨
I looked at the horizon: clumps of stale green grass, small square farmhouses flanking brown beds of hidden plants and rusting machinery. And the dominant sky. I had seen each part before, taken note of it so clearly, but now they began to strangely coalesce. I saw a picture of a place, and I smiled, and when I smiled I became a part of the picture. I haven´t had faith in myself as a Well-Intentioned Lost Object for some time, but I found the first true dot on my travel map when I let myself think - for a moment - that I have a vast collage of worldly visions to put my unadulterated trust in. And that most of these visions are still to come.
I look back, and Srayam is finishing tying the wire around the final pole. Just enough to keep every bamboo plant upright - not an inch of the coil we brought went unused. His face is soft to the sight like a child´s, and the space under his nostrils glistens softly. He smiles.
As we walk back to the farm my eyes slowly unglue until they are turned inwards, into my Godbrain, once again. I sit alone in a monk´s bedroom to write, minutes later, to extoll the greatness of something I refuse to believe. And as I complete my work, I become aware of the fact that each word I write is something of an idol to Myself.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Cows For All My Senses
Well, I´m coming up on a week here in Argentina . . . and I´m lightyears away from being able to explain it.
I spent my first three nights in downtown Buenos Aires - an airy and spacious mixture of tall office buildings crowned with billboards, colonial-style joints with your standard banks and government buildings, and mounds and mounds of boutique clothing stores. I spent a day walking up and down Av. Florida (the main commercial artery of downtown B.A.) and got lost in the army of immaculately-dressed and straight-faced. Adding to it all is the surreal beauty of the average Argentinean (both male and female): pale skin, black hair, black eyes, well-proportioned faces. It felt like I was in some sort of movie where me, the protagonist, had been caught in some twisted version of my dream-word without my knowing - fascinating and gorgeous, but with an unsettling twinge in my gut.
I wrote some angsty poetry while eating chicken empanadas and danced deliriously to intricate hip-hop beats by myself in a club for three hours and got my camera stolen in the B.A. subway (sorry, guess those pictures and video won´t arrive after all). That´s how I kicked off my trip.
Then, I went from a hostel (where I shared a room with three Californians who wanted to score some Mary) to a Hare Krishna farm on the outskirts of the city. From juicy steaks to the constant company of regal bull brothers (and a strictly vegetarian diet, of course). From a relaxing glass of Quilmes to scientific inquiries into physics´ incapability to understand human consciousness (delivered to me by the farm´s owner, a British man named Mark who inhales oxygen and exhales concepts). I´m here until Thursday, doing various jobs in exchange for food and board, and hopefully by then I´ll be able to better understand the bizarrely intricate and passionate world I stumbled upon while trying to save a few pesos.
I´d love to hear from any of you . . . I hear you have to sign up to post, which is a bummer. So e-mail me instead, I would love to hear how you´re doing or answer any questions you have or the like. Take care, I´ll write again later in the week.
I spent my first three nights in downtown Buenos Aires - an airy and spacious mixture of tall office buildings crowned with billboards, colonial-style joints with your standard banks and government buildings, and mounds and mounds of boutique clothing stores. I spent a day walking up and down Av. Florida (the main commercial artery of downtown B.A.) and got lost in the army of immaculately-dressed and straight-faced. Adding to it all is the surreal beauty of the average Argentinean (both male and female): pale skin, black hair, black eyes, well-proportioned faces. It felt like I was in some sort of movie where me, the protagonist, had been caught in some twisted version of my dream-word without my knowing - fascinating and gorgeous, but with an unsettling twinge in my gut.
I wrote some angsty poetry while eating chicken empanadas and danced deliriously to intricate hip-hop beats by myself in a club for three hours and got my camera stolen in the B.A. subway (sorry, guess those pictures and video won´t arrive after all). That´s how I kicked off my trip.
Then, I went from a hostel (where I shared a room with three Californians who wanted to score some Mary) to a Hare Krishna farm on the outskirts of the city. From juicy steaks to the constant company of regal bull brothers (and a strictly vegetarian diet, of course). From a relaxing glass of Quilmes to scientific inquiries into physics´ incapability to understand human consciousness (delivered to me by the farm´s owner, a British man named Mark who inhales oxygen and exhales concepts). I´m here until Thursday, doing various jobs in exchange for food and board, and hopefully by then I´ll be able to better understand the bizarrely intricate and passionate world I stumbled upon while trying to save a few pesos.
I´d love to hear from any of you . . . I hear you have to sign up to post, which is a bummer. So e-mail me instead, I would love to hear how you´re doing or answer any questions you have or the like. Take care, I´ll write again later in the week.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Guadalajara
became something of a mirror of the inevitable reality that lurked all along behind my ideas of grandiose world-trekking. Once Dora and her family left the picture (after being unspeakably kind and helpful in setting me up), I was left alone in a city I didn´t really want to be in. Which gave me lots of time to think. I had four long days of facing the music, and this was the chorus - I´m a college graduate, I´m travelling alone through countries that speak a language I don´t know, and I am without solid direction in any physically concrete sense until further notice. Not even when I was in India two years ago did I feel like such a foreigner - both to others and to myself.
I wrote this as I left Mexico on a jetplane yesterday:
For me, and for now, Guadalajara was a city of shadowy glances and impenetrable sunlit corners. Moving like a machine, waiting like an injured vulture. My silences in Guadalajara were fathoms depers than my American pauses, and even my English was mangled by my Spanish´s utter disapproval. I was whipped in the face daily by a vine hanging down from the patio next door, and when it happened at dusk last night I realized how downward my gaze had been all along. I am happy to leave like a turtle is happy to swim back to see after laying its eggs: its functional purpose fulfilled sans climax, and mostly grateful for the shell on its back.
(That last metaphor is ridiculous, but I did see an enormous turtle go back to the ocean after laying its eggs while I was in Puerto Vallarta and I can´t tell you how epic it was. I kept trying to touch it as it entered the sea and it kept jolting away. Those slimy-looking stumps have immense strength.)
Okay, all that is part of the truth. Two other parts of Guadalajara were great - the four days I spent with Dora and her family involved me seeing just about everything Guadalajara had to offer, and undoubtedly eating everything it had to offer. (Try guanavana, a fruit that tastes like manna from heaven; avoid Tehuino, a drink that I guess is made of spoiled corn but is utterly inexplicable to me and my face.) My first-ever Spanish conversation (albeit horribly broken and at least half-English) was had with Dora´s Tío Jorge over some breakfast tacos, and he even helped check me into my hostel after Dora flew back to Colorado. Check out our glamour shot.
The other thing is that I met a guy from Melbourne named Todd while eating delicious chicken molé alone at a birriería near my hostel and had a ton of fun exploring the city and its nightlife with him for three days. Main highlight? Going to a Chivas (Guadalajara´s team) soccer match. I have a video of Chivas scoring a goal on a penalty kick - I don´t have enough time left at the internet café to post it, but I´ll do it next time I´m here.
Also don´t have time for more pics, but I´ll put up one with my favorite faces - the people on the bench at the Guadalajaran Cultural Center are me, Dora, and the newlyweds (Dora´s sister Veronica and her husband Christian). More pictures forthcoming, as well.
So Guadalajara was pretty much as exciting as it was painful, and useful as it was pointless. As it is for a lot of things in my life, it seems, I just needed enough distance from it to realize that.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Beginning: Puerto Vallarta & Sayulita
Hi Everyone!
Thanks for visiting - this is going to be the space where I ramble and post some pictures as I travel from Mexico (where I am now) to South America to Israel to Europe over the course of the next year. I hope you find it interesting, and I hope it becomes a way we can connect over increasingly great distances.
I spent the first week of my trip in Puerto Vallarta, which was something of a quaint tourist beach town on steriods. (The sophisticated man on the left is obscuring a section of the main Puerto Vallarta parkway.) There was a sprawl of beachside resorts and timeshares - with McDonald´s and Bubba Gump´s sprinkled in amongst the streetside taco stands - yet it retained a sort of quaintness, which was helped by the fact that I stayed in a place that was directly on the beach and a few blocks away from any sort of real bustle. I came because my dear friend Dora (who I´ve been close with since my Denver School of the Arts days) invited me out to see her older sister get married, which happened last Saturday and was a blast. It was a perfect multicultural celebration: her roots are Mexican, and he lives in Germany. So a mariachi band came by and played, but not until after a German wedding tradition involving the forceful shattering of an obscene amount of plates - with the cleaning left to the new bride and groom, as a sort of symbol of the camaraderie they will embody in their union. The Germans are realistic, though: it´s also a tradition for the wedding contingent to scatter the shattered plate fragments and generally make it as difficult as possible to clean up.
I´ve been taking my siestas for the past two days in a gorgeous little beach town called Sayulita, where I´ve been staying in a rooftop bungalow with Dora and her older brother Reggie (that´s them walking down to the beach on the right). We´ll be here until the end of the week, when we will make our way to Guadalajara and hopefully have a more authentic Mexican experience. In the meantime, the warm sea and cool breeze is more than making up for the tourist-y itenirary.
Love to all! Please feel free to comment, or send me an e-mail if you´d prefer.
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