Dear Scrappy

like talking after lights out [ ]

2009-10-22T11:18:00.009-04:00

Infinite Return

2009-09-02T05:14:00.002-04:00

Hokay so. Yesterday marks one year since landing, very small and terrified and determined, in England at the beginning of these things. That is where I slept beside the underground, danced with a dragon, learned about telling stories in yellow places, birthday picknicked with old friends and new Lithuanians not to mention two little plastic giraffes named Icki and Achoo. The things that matter stick and other things slide away, like peanut butter. As for peanut butter, there was another blog once. Shortlived, it ended after just one summer. And this one is ending now too. This will be the last post. As for peanut butter, I miss eating it on a regular basis. Last night I had a piece of toast with the beloved substance smeared on it, which Matthias said had been sitting in his cabinet since March, but there was nothing wrong and everything right with it. I am buying peanut butter this week in Princeton, Brett, if you don't already have some, and I know you don't. Hello, now I am obsessing about the goober goo, but I can't help it, and I am obsessing about a lot of things these days because obsession is a home you can travel with. In the South of France, near Toulouse, I ate good crunchy SunTime peanut butter, which is the main brand to be found abraod as far as I found, on some old stale French bread. I was so happy. It belonged to Pierrot, who also has a funny permanent stash of things like Captain Crunch, boxed green lentils, and chocolate covered peanuts in little yellow boxes. Pierrot loves many things American, though he is funny about it and wouldn't ever say it that way. He is also funny about being ''not Jewish'' and has a Mezuzah hung stick-straight, up-and-down on the inside of the door, so you see it only when you're going out. But he insists since it's his dad who is Jewish and not his mother that he never really will be. His last name is Levy. He plays the saxophone and has the most extensive collection of hardback comicbooks I have seen outside of a certain store in Paris, which is a bomcination of interests I have encountered once before. He also plays the accordion and is an accountant for his normal job. He is Eric's best friend and Eric said Pierre, who was cooking fish while I was there, once went through a hamburger phase, spending months in the kitchen obsessing over the formation of different kinds of patties. He shared some really fancy biological chocolate muesli with me even though he didn't want to. But he teases me like I am a sister and this is how I know he thinks I'm all right, even if after months of practice I suddenly can't understand a word of French around this house and tangly Portugaltanned musicplaying vandriving people who park and unpark in the grassy driveway. Eric and I picked wild blackberries the other day from the brambles around the neighbor's fields. The ones with the most insects coming and going are the ripest. You know the ripe ones too because they practically jump into your hand when you touch them at the stem. I say I am ripe, pick me. I forget the French word for ripe but remember the word for elbow, wrist, calf.

Coude can also mean a bend in the river, which is where we took our bath in Aveyron. Green soap in a plastic Ziploc baggie, la luxe. Where did the baggie go? Afloatin downriver, like us. Mmhmm...

These days I am obsessed less with describing and most of all with listing and naming things that give some order to the last year. Cataloguing. I could catalogue the last year with the names of places and direction words, like this:

Atlanta to Houston, Houston to London. London. Up to Cambridge. London. Down to Brighton. London. Across to Dublin. Tipperary. County Clare. Down to Cork. Rosslare to Cherbourg. Around Normandy. Mayenne. Rennes. Mayenne in that little red car. Paris. Paris to Barcelona. Barcelona the way Dylan says it. to Porto. Porto. to Lisbon. Lisboa to Algeciras to Tangier. Chefchaouen, Fes, Marrakech, Essaouira. Back up and through, to Melilla to Malaga. Malaga. Grenada. Gibralter/La Linea. Cadiz. Malaga. doctors offices. Hlls near Malaga, Torremuelle, and back. Malaga to Madrid and back. Malaga to Barcelona. Catalyunia, Torello. Girona to Florence to unknown hills. Hills to Umbria, Orvieto. Rome. Rome to Vienna to Klagenfurt. Maltschach See, Feldkirchen City. Vienna. Vienna to Paris to Bayonne to St. Jean Pied de Port (slowly, walking, St. Jean, Roncesvalles, Larrasoana, Pamplona, Puerta la Reina, Estella, Torres del Rio, Logrono, Navarrete, Azofra, Gronon, Villafranca, Orbaneja Riopico, Burgos, Hontanas, Boadilla, Carrion de los Condes, Ledigos, Bericano del Real Camino, Mansilla de las Mulas, Leon, Hospital de Orbigo, Astorga to Ponferrada en bus, Pereje, O Cebreiro, Samos, Portomarin, Palas del Rey, Arzua, Monte de Gozo, Santiago, Negreira, O---, Finisterre.) Finisterre. Back to Santiago to Madrid to London. London in the middle of the night to Cork. Cork. London. Cambridge. London. London to Newark to Atlanta, Marietta. Areas around Minneapolis. Marietta. To Princeton, briefly. To New York.

I have to tell something. You know I left New York again to go to London, to Cork. But I didn't make it at first. In London they stopped me, because they did not like my one-way ticket. I was put in a locked fluorescent-lighted room behind a window, where they tried to provide comfort with vending machine tea, fruits, sandwiches, meanwhile setting about the business of my deportation. I was sent back to the States from Heathrow with a big black X stamped in my passport. They escorted me to the plane and put me on it and sent me back. I stayed a night in Brooklyn with Lindsay, lovely feathered lady, and booked on her laptop a roundtrip ticket to Dublin. And left again the next day, which was Father's Day. That is the true story of how I came back to Europe. Determined as hell.

So the next part would go like this:

New York to London Heathrow to New York. New York to Dublin. Dublin to Cork. Cork. Cork. Cork. Cork. Cork. to Paris. Paris almost to Brest, but not. Paris down down down to Leon. Leon walking Alix to the bus station, Leon walking walking to Ponferrada. Ponferrada walking to Villafranca. Villafranca swimming in the river. Villafranca to Madrid. Hot heat of Madrid, sitting sweating behind shades watching movies Madrid. Madrid to Malaga. Malaga. Malaga just up the coast, just barely Malaga to Madrid to Bordeaux to Perigeux to ----- to Aurillac en camion. Aurillac en camion to near Toulouse. Around Aveyron. Beside the river, in the little river with the green soap. On top of the cliffs. At the bottom of the cliffs. Little streams. Wild blackberries. Monsieur l'homme au chapeau driving the van. Making crepes, savory and sweet, in the van. Sweet and then savory again. Sleeping in the crepe-smelling van. Tired, mosquito-bitten and happy and sad, drinking one more coffee outside le plus petit aeroport de Rodez. Rodez to Dublin.

Tomorrow Dublin to Newark.
And that is one way to organize this thing.

Or I could do it with the names of people encountered, befriended, loved along the way, maybe with their places of origin and the places where they lived and showed me their lives, the little names of towns, street names, names of pets. Or how about the foods prepared in different companies, the various platters eaten, or not eaten, at certain times, in certain places. Tea and toast in rural Ireland, cappuccinos and scones in Cork, pastries and espresso in France, tortillas and fruit juice from the Ramblas in Barcelona, the big honking Francesinha in Porto, and so forth. The corresponding size of a certain bellybot. Ther different kidns of wine purchased and uncorked, prices of purchase, places uncorked. The names of grocery store chains where countless apples, spreadable cheese, chocolate bars were bought. the names of farmers markets. Or one of my favorite ways to catalogue, the things acquired and lost or relinquished along the way. Rocks and shells picked up, charms given and received, feathers, drawings, poems said and heard. The everchanging size and shape of a single maroon Osprey backpack. the corresponding changes ina body, muscle size and shape. Calf size. Or how about the lengths of hairs on a head. Or I've thought of listing by the loved ones back home I was thinking of or calling or writing to at certain times. Their stories, motions, losses and gains, of jobs and other things, changes of habitation, pictures and jokes emailed, not emailed, appearances and disappearances in dreams, where dreamed and with what colors. Or books read, films seen, in which languages and in which venues. Beds and surfaces slept on. The ripeness of various fruits, which things harvested at which times and in which fields, and in which plump pick-me colors.

By this time I understand that this is how I move. Leaving, coming back. Going away, returning. Going away before I've left, coming back before I've returned. Returning before I've gone away. Leaving before I've come. Turning and infinitely returning. Passing, passing, passing again. I am very fatigued by this, but I cannot help it. I hope to rest soon, but I know I will rest even by turning, returning. I really cannot help it. As a good friend quoted to me once, I was drawn that way.

See you soon. Time for sleeps.

Villette is a Parc, Rillette a Food

2009-07-27T03:44:00.009-04:00

Hi, bonjour, bienvenue,
I am sipping Lipton tea from a Minnie Mouse mug in Alix's mom's apartment, twelve minutes away from Jim Morrison's grave. Someone told me Jim Morrison is no longer in there, is it true? I saw two teenaged girls nearly in tears at the sight of this gray stone slab and was amused. Who was Jim Morrison again? Okay, just kidding. Pere Lachaise was disappointing, overall, I just wanted to get out of there. Oscar Wilde is blocked by a tree. Gertrude Stein was barely legible. Overall too gray and corner-y and stony, nowhere to sit, or maybe I am over cemeteries. In a place like Marietta they are a refuge; you can sit in peace outside of the house without having to pay for a coffee or consume anything, no parking lots in sight, and you never run into anyone you know. There are old untouched trees, etcetera.

Alix's maman is a photographer with an amazing collection of art books, so sitting on the toilet I am trying to decipher French texts about Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Okay, I am looking at the pictures. Yesterday we completely ignored the Tour de France. We both dreamed about teeth, woke up at noon, cleaned up the debris from Saturday night's dinner party, I made quesadillas (!), and we walked down the boulevard, down down through Menilmontant which is a mixed neighborhood with little cafes, Indian and Lebanese and Chinese corners, halal and kosher delis, Moroccan teas, gatherings of old people standing in the promenades, little dogs wearing clothes; and down to Le Parc de La Villette, which I remembered we learned about in Professor Neumann's contemporary architecture class, but couldn't come up with the architect's name. Bernard Tschumi. There was live music, a bunch of African drummers and singers and it felt good to dance in the grass in paris in the sun, oh yes oh yes! Just a sunny sunday in Paris. There is an outdoor cinema in the summer there, starting to draw people with picnics packed on bikes and walking just as we packed up and were leaving. We walked a long time before we found La Republique, a section of the canal outlined with people eating their picnics with bottles of white wine, little bridges crossing over one side to the other, stone thinks, taking us from one trop-cher restaurant to another, until, starving at ten o'clock, we finally found a little restaurant we could afford and proceeded to eat one of the most satisfying meals of my life. Mon dieu, the French know how to make a delicious food. Duck a l'Orange and a seafood salad with a glass of Bouilly, my goodness gracious I cannot tell you how delicious.

I am becoming more and more blocked again and have only a few words to choose from, which I keep recombining. I know so I will give some pictures now. First, some drawings from Cork, since I have no photos from there. One or more thieves came into our kitchen when Jordan was visiting and took our bags from the chair where I always leave my bag, and the door unlocked. Our bags were dumped in town somewhere later that morning, with everything carefully inspected (they had opened even little notes from friends I had scattered in my journals) but left to return to us. With the exception of cameras and credit cards of course, but overall I think it was rather funny and decent of them. Anyway, here are some drawings.

Tom at his usual pasttime, no hands

our friend Alan at his, with hands

and Anton who used to live in the house there and was down for a week visiting from Dublin.

A self portrait as well.

Friday I met Alix midday at La Defense, where she works, and we took the train out to the 'burbs, which is really the countryside, where her dad picked us up and brought us to his house, a whitewashed old country house which he and his partner Sylvie have fixed up over the last year. Here is Alix and her dad at the dining table after dinner when Alix was singing and being really crazy. I couldn't even get a clear picture of her.

And here is a little corner of the room, with Alix in the mirror

Here is me at the table with funny hair!

There are two separate buildings, actually. Here is a little corner of the loft where we stayed

with another little corner set up for Sylvie's crafts. She makes furniture out of cardboard. We made oil paintings.

And I made some pretty amazing afternoon acrobatics.

And here is what you saw outside the window in late afternoon.

And there is one more thing I will show you. It is my latest acquisition, a very hilarious ratty little braid that Alix gave to me in Cork, and I love it. I love it because it is so euro and makes me feel like I totally fit in with all the really cool euro high schoolers with short punky hawks and long things in the back, mullet style. My little euro-dread. In the States, more or less what is known as a rat-tail. Thanks to Bonnie for the picture and a really nice day in Montmartre.

I'm Not Followin' You

2009-07-15T16:00:00.003-04:00

Today was my first experience busking. Busking is a word I never even knew before I started traveling. It means playing music on the streets for money. Here, in Ireland in general and in Cork especially, it is kind of the norm. Seems like everyone goes out busking at least every once in a while, and on a nice day you'll see a lot of buskers around town. Maybe there are twenty of them at any given time in the center of Cork. Tom goes busking when he's a bit strapped for cash and today I joined him. I took some paper and watercolor pastels and set up a little stand next to him to make portraits of people. I only ended up getting one buyer, but I didn't expect to get any so that's all right with me. I got a fiver for it, and that helped pay for dinner! It's fun anyway. We stayed out for a couple of hours, and Tom ran through a bunch of traditional Irish songs and started in on stuff by Tom Waits and then some old blues tunes. It takes guts to belt out the song while people are just passing by, looking at the open guitar case on the ground and then quickly looking away. You can never tell who is going to dig in their pocket for a second and throw something in. Sometimes it's a young kid walking by, maybe someone who's done some busking of their own. And sometimes it's a proper-looking gentleman walking with a well dressed woman who looks foreign. We met a lot of people, and saw a lot of the Cork regulars who ramble around town every day. There are the tourists too, and a lot of them. Mostly French I think. People who are here for a couple of days with their families or partners, looking for churches and museums to go to, though honestly there isn't much to see by way of tourist attractions. We talked with a German woman and an American woman who were traveling together. They stopped to ask us directions and ended up chatting for a while. Then Luke came along, a musician and acquaintance of Tom's. He's the one who asked me to do his portrait. It turned out okay, though I had trouble doing his masses of perfect ringlet curls.

In the end we only made about twenty euros in a few hours, but it was enough to go to the English market and buy some nice veggies. I loved using these vegetables we had earned that day (well veggies Tom had earned, mostly) to make a nice dinner. Cabbage, carrots, eggplants, and tomatoes under a delicious thick peanut sauce, with fresh seedy bread and red wine. One of the things I enjoy most here is spending time cooking in the little yellow kitchen with the public radio station playing jazz tunes or classical and a constant stream of tea from the kettle. So pleasant.

Busking, however, will not sustain me! I know it is time soon to look for something more. A job or new studies or something like that. To commit something instead of floating the way I have been floating, floating for a long time now. I have too many lives to choose from. In America, I wanted to be back here, and now here I want to go back to something there. But I don't know what exactly. Next week I head to Paris for a week or so, where I'll see Bonnie and stay with Alix. At Vibes and Scribes in the used books sections upstairs, I found a little 3 euro book in French called Viou, about a little girl growing up in a small town in her grandparents' big house after the Second World War. I am really pleased that I can understand about eighty percent of the book. It being written from the point of view of a seven-year-old helps, for sure, but still. I can tell my French has steadily improved. After Paris, I'd like to go and visit Natalie (the French girl I met here in Cork back in October) in her little town on the coast in Bretagne.

But one thing at a time. This weekend, Jordan is coming back to visit! We only saw each other for a couple of hours last time, since she was in transit to Dingle. But this time she'll come and stay in the house with us and we'll get to have a really nice time roaming around town, weather permitting. We've been having a string of real Irish days, which means it is, baffingly enough, sunny and raining simultaneously. How does it work? Nobody knows. Or at least I don't. At least there are rainbows.

I can't believe it is July

2009-07-02T08:35:00.003-04:00

Today in Cork it is wet and gray but I feel peaceful. I went into the bookstore and looked at some nice books. Tom read a short story by Guy de Maupassant to me this morning in the kitchen, and I really liked it. I imagined printing and illustrating this little story, which is probably rarely found by anyone anymore. It was about two men in Paris who don't really know each other except that they spent the last warm season fishing in the same spot outside the city. They talked very little then, only the occasional comment on the weather which was understood to mean ''I couldn't be happier here doing this.'' Then Paris becomes occupied by the Prussians and one day the men run into one another in a street. They go to have a drink together, and then another, and decide to go fishing, despite the occupation. They walk out together to their spot and begin to fish, catching lots of little silver fish and talking about the madness of war, when they are caught and taken to see a Prussian general in a nearby cabin. He accuses them of being spies and informs them they will be dead in five minutes if they don't tell him their secret password. They say nothing. He tries again, with each individually, but they say nothing. They say goodbye to each other and are both shot, one falling on top of the other. They are dumped into the river where they caught their fish.

When I left the house, Alan was over listening to Tom playing ''Blue Skies'' on the guitar in his room. Alan looked very peaceful too, holding a mug of coffee with his old-fashioned black hat on. Rizla was sleeping next to the little stove that Tom lit even though it isn't cold out. He says it keeps the wetness out and cheers him up.

Spoke on the phone with everyone last night and it was very nice. I would like to have a day on the beach in Destin, even if it is a million degrees. I had just gotten back from Dublin, which I still don't like very much. But I made a couple of new friends there and enjoyed some pints.

Looking forward to Jordan coming to Cork tomorrow or Saturday. Not sure what to show her in this little town, but I think we will have a nice time. Should we go and kiss the Blarney Stone?

- - -
Thinking of Ron...

Where Did That Naughty Little Flea Go?

2009-06-26T10:19:00.002-04:00

(Tom this morning was showing me youtube clips of Miriam Makeba, that's where this title comes from, a nice little number by South African singer)

so hello, I am back!
Back from very many places. The Camino de Santiago, the end of the world, the end of my nine month's trip (which ended and didn't end), a short (short) stay stateside. I am back in Cork, for the third ('turd' here) time. Turd time's a charm. And Michael Jackson is dead. Aye, dios mio.

I am living in a house eight minutes' walk from the center of Cork City. My housemates are Tom, Alix, and Gerry. Alix is twenty-two, french, born in the south of France and raised mostly in Paris. She has been living in Cork for the last nine months (yeah we like to do things in lengths of gestation) and is going back to France on Sunday. She sings with one of the most stunning voices you've ever heard. She and Tom play most Tuesday nights in a pub called the Castle Inn, and when she took the guitar and started singing there the other night, everyone stopped what they were doing and forgot what they were saying. To just listen to her. It seems a normal enough thing, but people seemed to stop in a way they'd never stopped before. To listen. Her friend wove long braids into her hair for eighteen hours so that when she travels down into Spain and Portugal and Morocco this summer, she won't have to worry about it. The first night I met her, she was with the gypsy band I fell in love with, sitting in the red common room of the house with all its books and paintings and wooden chairs and old cushions, and she was singing Elliot Smith's Between the Bars, in this smoky voice but she had to read the words from the paper because she can't remember them all. In the Castle Inn she forgot the words and kept repeating the line

''well I'm seeing you there, with your hands in the air
waiting to finally be caught''

She studied philosophy, my beautiful friend, and she has beautiful thoughts in her head. Mostly we understand each other without talking very much. It's Tom who does most of the talking. He is a strapping and pleasant Irish fellow of thirty-two, not from Cork but some small town somewhere. He has been living in Cork for a while, and the house is brimming with his ideas. He has tons of books, old books, in languages he can't necessarily read, paintings done on cardboard, collected little items (postcards, figurines), records, things that have been fixed, patched, pieced together, pieces of things waiting to be used for something, dust and the occasional bumblebee. Musical instruments! A seventeen-year-old cat named Rizla who slept on my bed the first night and to whom I am miraculously minimally allergic. Tom plays the guitar and sings, just like everyone else but me. But I am learning to sing and be happy anyway. Gerry is the music student anyway, or he just graduated university with a degree in music. I don't know him yet, he is usually not around. But we did sit outside yesterday noon when we'd all woken up and Tom made coffee and porridge and read me the crossword clues on a blanket in the yard. That's when he told Gerry who was sitting in the shade with a hat and sunglasses that he looked like Michael Jackson. And this was, obviously, before anyone know that Michael Jackson was dead. He wasn't dead yet.

The other evening after I spent the day in town, set up my cell phone and everything, we took bikes down to a little field by the river. There was a small herd of horses we passed on the way out, a tiny little foal not more than a month old I think that ran right across our path, a lovely little piebald, which is a type of pinto according to the crossword. Tom and Tom (a Scottish artist who makes painting after painting of clowns in a Danielle Steel book whose pages he primed for water pastels) went swimming and Alix and I ate strawberries. We played with a little soccer ball, I looked at Tom's art, listened to them playing music, and we ate a picnic and went into town as it was getting dark, had a pint in the pub where I saw Txutxukan play the last time two weeks ago.

We went to The Roundy again last night. There was a band of four women playing various kinds of folk music, although for one song a man from the audience joined them and sang Shalom Aleichem, which was totally random. I understand a Catholic country slightly better after the Camino. And what else? Outside, just after we heard about Michael, we saw a group of four or five people our age reading a play out loud, wearing costumes, just for fun. We joined them. I played Soldier 3, Tom was Soldier 1, and Alix took pictures because she says she can't read English so well. I can't remember the play or anything I was reading. Tom has a really nice anthology of poetry called Staying Alive, and he and I have been reading to each other from it. The house is full of music and poetry! I am learning about all the jazz greats from the thirties and forties, watching really pleasing old video clips of them on Tom's computer at night before bed. And this morning of course was spent watching Billie Jean, Thriller, old ones of the Jackson 5 when Michael was so little but already his body was starting to move in that funny way that he seemed to have no control over, and some of the news casts.

Last night in the bathroom of another pub, there was a really drunk girl who came out of the stalls crying, a bit wild. She kept saying ''You don't know, I miss him, I can't explain to you, I just love Michael so much, my boyfriend is jealous because I am so upset.'' On and on, uncontrollable sobbing. Alix kind of looked at her and was like, ''Do you want a hug?''

It is good to be here. I am not sure how long I will stay in Cork. For the moment, I have a nice room to myself. Tom's cousin Rosie is in Portugal until the end of July, so I am staying in her place, a big room with wooden floors, big windows looking over the city, her clothes on every available surface, lots of books, big bed, cat. Not a bad setup, all in all. Summer. The weather has been really wonderful, hot and sunny, and today I was even glad to have a cloudier day. I could use a little rain, but not too much.

I am thinking of everyone and feel that I am not so far away, like before. I will miss being at the beach in Destin this weekend. I will miss fourth of July things. But I have free calling to the states and am, like, so connected. You will be hearing from me.

Happy Birthday Hulia :)

Santiago backwards

2009-06-17T00:58:00.003-04:00

the good way

2009-04-30T12:49:00.005-04:00

Today was the eighth day of walking on the Camino. All day long I kept thinking of Jewish holidays. We went alongside a chainlink fence for maybe half a kilometer, and all along it was chock-full of crosses made out of twigs and random bits of Camino debris. Did I mention this is a primarily Catholic walk? We tried to make a spiral out of twigs, but, ah this isn´t what I want to say at all but I don´t know how to describe this thing.

Camino de Santiago.

It was the shortest day so far, in terms of kilometers. Only thirteen, but we spread them out, coughingly and limpingly spread them out so that we ended up coughing and limping into Navarrete at about the same time as the people who left from Viana, the town about nine kilometers before our starting point, the city Logroño. Jenny is coming down with a cold and I have a bum left knee (Dad, some tips please) and so this is why. Jenny--I call her Zhenya--was born in the Ukraine but grew up in Ottawa, she studies insects, particularly butterflies, and we met on the train to St. Jean Pied de Port. She was eating cherry tomatoes and I was eating a panini, and we have been together almost continuously since then. Most of the time we are talking about food (today´s topic: Russian foods her grandparents are going to cook for me when I go one day in the future to visit them in Canada), or eating food. I prepared myself to walk the path alone, really, but so far it only makes sense to walk with Zhenya.

And we have met so many others, it is like the Canterbury Tales. There is Genevieve the beautiful older French woman who bops along with her pack always a little askew, talking to everyone rapidly in French, about alternative routes they might want to take, whether or not we think there is a good supermercado in the next village, or how steep the next climb will be. We shared some peanuts with her early on and ever since she has been our comrade, offering to share her tuna pasta (exactly what it sounds like) with us or pay for our hot chocolates. Then there is Annie, an actress from LA who is one of the leading characters in a documentary that is being filmed of the pilgrims. Zhenya and I have been interviewed a few times by her crew, but generally it´s Zhenya talking and me kind of awkwardly nodding and wishing I had more time to think.

Maybe this will help. Here is a map of the Camino.

We are now just past Logroño, and not quite to Najera. We started in France, in St. Jean Pied de Port. Last Thursday, on the most beautiful day we´ve had so far, we walked through the Pyrenees into Spain. It was a long upward-tending walk, but beautiful. Zhenya told me things about bugs, we lay in the grass because she says this is a good way of being in a place and it was true, and we edged through the muddy snow sometimes pointing at the trees that grow horizontally out from the hills and played twenty questions and sometimes didn´t say anything and sometimes didn´t even think anything. At Roncesvalles, there was a Pilgrims´ Mass in the church, where the priest said a prayer we didn´t understand, for all the pilgrims that were at the beginning of their journey. Or peregrinos, which is what we are in Spain. Each day, except today, we have walked somewhere between twenty and thirty kilometers, stopping at nights in towns fully equipped for peregrinos, with hostels called Albergues that have sometimes eighty or a hundred beds in a big room. Earplugs have become my most prized possession. We buy food along the way and stop to have picnic lunches each day, usually grainy bread, piquante chorizo, cheese, fresh or dried fruit, and the cheapest chocolatey packaged cookies we can get our hands on. At nights we cook in the albergue kitchen, share a bottle of the local red wine (now it is Rioja!), check in with the people we keep running into and meet the new ones, and talk about intentions for the next day.

[Zhenya just asked if ailments is spelled like that or like alements, and we decided that we will now trade in the first for the second, which fits in perfectly with talk of cheap Spanish wine...]

Then there is the French man with the little heart stickers on his wristwatch, saying it´s either hearts or it´s darkness in life, you can choose either hearts or darkness. We were in Larrasoaña and one of a trio of German girls had just burst into tears at the computer and we were eating peanuts with Annie and a French Canadian boy who only brought one pair of underwear but made room for a dictionary of Swahili because he wants to go to Africa, and the French man, who had been walking with his friend for a month already from Arles, also said you must stop and take a shower to changer des pensees. The next day in the morning when it was uncertain whether it would rain or not, we walked briefly with a Danish man for whom it was not the shower but the war in Yugoslavia that changed his thoughts. We are among the youngest on the Camino, I think this is generally because universities are still in session and the weather is optimal for older folks, and everyone we meet is teaching something.

Then there is the Australian guy Glen who first thing in a new town sits down in the nearest cafe and gets a cold beer from the tap. He says you can look at the Camino as a very extended pub crawl.

We have to get to the store before it closes, so I end this here. I will say that I am content here, doing this. Tomorrow we will get up and walk to Azofra, and I really can´t think of a better way to pass the day...

Following in the steps of Greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat Grandpa

2009-04-21T08:18:00.004-04:00

He also didn't keep a blog very well.

I survived meditation and earthquakes. Worked on a very small farm north of Rome with an Italian woman named Lucia, but only briefly because...

it was suddenly time to go to Austria. Julia wrote to say she would be there. I wrote to say I would be there. We ate many EASTER SNACKS! The German term for it is way better. Easter snacks means mostly meat, which before being consumed is put into baskets, which are brought to the little church and blessed by the priest, who makes strangely jolly jokes about Jesus coming to eat meat with everybody. Or something like that, it was in German so maybe nothing like that.

I am in Vienna with Maria now and this is also wonderful

What I mean about old Henry Samson, who sailed upon the Mayflower, is not that he was inept at future information technologies or even that he ultimately facilitated the bringing into the world of someone called Ebenezer and someone else called Dorcas, but that he was a pilgrim. And I will like to be one too. But I guess a Puritan great-times-nine-or-something grandfather wouldn't exactly endorse a great-times-nine-or-something granddaughter who is desiring to embark on one of the most Catholic of all pilgrimages, the Camino de Santiago. Especially if she's a the daughter of a Jew. Hrm.

Yes! This small southern puritan jew is going to walk the Camino. In fact, I leave Vienna for France in just a few hours, and I hope that by Friday I will already be walking up and over those Pyrenees Mountains I keep bumping into. I will try to update the blog, really and truly, because I know there really won't be time now for emails and gchats and all that. I am excited about this last part of my journey. I am even going to buy a real nice walking stick, mmhmmmm.....

Disappearing with Warning

2009-03-17T20:33:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow I exit the Iberian Peninsula, finally. Catalyunia is here, holding me for the last few days. A good friend and his family who treated me like family and not just because they have a son my age who is also traveling, a renewed farmhouse with a little sheep locked up in it, green slopes and tractor trails to walk on, homemade queso fresco, a baby goose hatched in an incubator in the bathroom. The Pyrenees have snow on them, in the distance, I woke up more than three months ago on a train from Paris with the sun coming over their white sides and the air very frosty. I go to Italy tomorrow.

I thought I would have been in France or Italy ages ago. Tomorrow the names Bologna, Faenza. Ten days of silence at the Dhamma Atala Vipassana centre, spelled that way. I don´t know why I feel the need this time to signal a mere ten days of disappearing. I have vanished from this page for much longer before. But oh well. I am tired of constant disappearing! Missing the people who know me best does this. I want you to know where I am. Or in case I don´t survive the silence. In case they find a wild woman screaming in the woods on Sunday, unable to take it anymore. But actually....I am sure I will do just fine there. It isn´t the silence that scares me, but...the painful learning of patience....something like that.

Well anyway. See you in Firenze at the end of the month. Ciao a tutti

ghosts of the posts that weren't made, part one

2009-03-06T17:54:00.005-05:00

I bought a ghost-white camera in Gibraltar, where Aaron and I went for a few days back in mid-January. Gibraltar is a cross between a slightly backwoods small British town and the duty free section of the airport, the main street lined with shops selling huge cartons of cigarettes, discounted liquor, perfumes, and electronics. It belongs to Britain but lives at the tip of Spain, with a big ugly jutting-up rock from the top of which you can see the mountains of Morocco, and also monkeys. We stayed in a hotel in La Linea, Spain, and walked across the border to England and back each day. La Linea had much better nightlife, one elephant, no monkeys.

If You See Her

2009-02-22T20:09:00.002-05:00

It was in Cork, in Port of Cork, below that sign, by the water, by the fire-staired factory buildings, the gray towers, in this silly-named Cork, the bobbing thing, it was in this Irish hilled town that I first mispronounced and misunderstood Malaga. It was there that I first laid the stress on the second syllable instead of the first, first thought Malaga was a southern region of Spain, a vast tract of farmland among hills, below mountains, instead of another port town, a town full of cafes and Erasmus students, a dried up river, a thin beach of imported sand. I know why I did it, misunderstood it this way back then, not caring. The Wwoof Spain website categorizes Andalusian farms according to which city they are closest to: 17 in Granada, 7 in Cadiz, 15 in Malaga, and so forth. I told some Spanish guys in Cork that I was going to farm somewhere in Malaga, you can imagine their confusion. But here I am in Malaga, and I am not farming, I am also not exactly leaving.

Instead. I am living here in an indoor bamboo treehouse. It is a room halfway between the downstairs (living area, kitchen, toilet) and upstairs (two small bedrooms, bathroom) of a dark, corner apartment that never gets direct sunlight. The treehouse was intended to be some sort of common room and instead got converted into a third bedroom to bring down cost, by use of thin sheets of bamboo, the kind you see in every trendy hippy store in the world, and large batiked fabric wall-hangings with Buddha or the Zodiac on them, the kind you find in the bedrooms of most European boys who also have bookshelves stocked with copies of the Tao Te Ching and biographies of Che Guevara. These staple decorative elements amount to this: I have a visually private space, which contains a bed, dresser, table, and lamp, but a space that is aurally distinctly...public. It floats in the middle of the apartment, receiving every sound (splash of sink upstairs, click of laptop keys downstairs) like a kind of bamboo surround sound sponge. Plink, taptap, awake.

Fortunately, the two German girls who live upstairs are moving back to Germany soon so I will have the place to myself. And it is free. The treehouse has been paid through the end of the month by my friend Ale, who went back to his home in Argentina for a while, leaving the room unused. I have a key—two keys—and I come and go as I wish. There is a bathtub with hot water to fill it, a hole in a toothbrush holder that I fill with my toothbrush, a washing machine, a table to hold my books, sheets and pillows, towels. I can make my own cheese quesadillas (in the land where Manchego is the big cheese, one pays dearly for sharp white cheddar but it´s worth it) and my own bed (ha).

I have friends I run into on the street and this is very pleasant. These friends are people who work in, or have worked previously in, or have stayed some time in, or are staying currently in, or are friends with any of the people who are staying or have worked in... a hostel called Picasso´s Corner. Jess and Maria and I stayed there at the beginning of January, and after my travels with Aaron and the stay on Shooshoos´s farm (more on this another day) I wanted to come back and see the people I´d met. And now I see them every day and it is amazingly simple to do this.

I would like to describe these people to you and show you pictures from my new camera but not now.

They know me in Café Con Libros and in Café des Indias! I am a genius at sitting in cafes with cappuccinos reading books. The streets are cobblestoned around the Plaza de la Merçed, which has an obelisk in the center and a bench where a bronze statue of Picasso sits, he is holding a pen and pad and has the look of someone who is exactly one moment from beginning the sketch. During the day he is just on the verge of drawing the pigeons that pigeon themselves around the foot of the obelisk, or the spanish students with their backpacks and skateboards who pack themselves on and around benches not skateboarding and visitors with digital cameras lifted to him who is lifting his pencil to them. At night he is almost, just almost, going to begin the sketches of drunk old hippies, young hippies with dogs, couples clicking to the next bar (never home), the blue lights strung on all the trees and the little shop across the square that stays open late, sells bottles of fanta, bocadillas, cheap milk chocolate bars, cheaper bottles of wine.

This square is most of Malaga for me. I wake up very, very late. I take a walk to the top of the Alcazaba. I stand with my body there over Malaga and the port that doesn't and does point to Cork and feel momentarily certain that Malaga has me, now. I have been here three weeks and that is all.

Wednesday I go to Madrid for five days, and after five days I

don't know.

I return to Malaga maybe, but maybe on I go again.

The coast of Barcelona.

Another Thing This Free

2009-01-13T18:25:00.003-05:00

We drew pictures with crayons at a long wooden table, it wasn´t unlike drawing pictures with crayons last year next to one shiny black typewriter on which everyone wrote a small letter to someone, or something, with flowers in the white vase I found at the abandoned house by the house in the country, on the table Becca and Jeremy and I painted purple one night and the backs of the chairs to match. And how I am looking and not looking these days for things that are familiar and connected, spending hours for instance writing out long complicated stories of material things acquired lost and given in all the different places I´ve been. Today I read such beautiful words, be rain. We are in the Oasis hostel in Granada, Aaron is a friend from Brown who is visiting for a week or so. Last night the bottle of Rioja, red wine, we bought tasted metallic, like blood. Tonight we asked in broken Spanish bueno y barato por favor and two Euros later, an old red corkscrew and there were two Koreans kissing cooking sweet potatoes and I was putting on paper the Rock of Gibraltar, a purple ghost, Spirited Away, an owl perched who is Noah´s special totem and not Adrian or Manu, who I get confused with one another, he told me to visit the south of Spain. Jess is aiming away now, or aiming back, to London, to Atlanta, and I envy her a little. But I am coming back to traveling again. Spent three nights couchsurfing with an Italian guy, Francesco, and his Polish flatmates who were so happy to see each other again after spending the holidays speaking Polish in their families, maybe eating Polish sausage who knows, but they are very slim girls who look Russian, now wheeling radiators back into each other´s rooms, eating homemade lasagna out of little aluminum banana-bread pans. Scrappy you sent me Buddha and brownies in a DHL package at the very bottom of Aaron´s bag, he travels much lighter now, and me too. Granada has a law, free tapas with every cana, every short tapped beer, a plate of sliced white bread spread under thin bacon and french fries. I first came to Granada from Malaga with an Australian guy named Rich and two very beautiful and sophisticated Norwegian girls with chunky knit scarves, blond hair. I shaved my hair off, had it done, in a very small barbershop in Morocco where only men go. Jess took pictures, I floated outside of my body in some corner of the warm tea-smelling shop, pointing to the barber´s nearly-hairless head and then mine, making the buzzing sound with the gesture of my fingers. I bought a colorful hat with long braided earflaps and I haven´t taken this hat off in days, not wanting anyone to know me for the first time this way, I am shorn and learning patience every day in the hostel bathroom mirror. Tomorrow Aaron and I go to Gibraltar, technically English land, but I think the soil will feel Spanish. Morocco left marks on me, its henna still unfaded from my hands, I was thinking most days of booking a flight, but Granada is beautiful. Three days ago Francesco and Alex took us into the mountains to measure the baby trees starting to grow after the fire started by two British men who lost themselves in the woods, panicked, made a signal in the dry, dry heat. Alex is an ecology student but there was too much snow to find the trees. It smelled like the trips Dad took Brett and me on to Colorado in the winter, bright neon ski jackets, square white tags stuck on our zippers for months afterward, a mixing up in the back of the car, which can of film was used and which one raw. Rilke is always writing the same letters, childhood is the treasure house of memories.

Diseased Kittens, Small Thieves, And General Change of Pace

2008-12-29T07:39:00.004-05:00

Time to stop making my posts so painstakingly SERIOUS.

I think I lost touch with being able to present things to people back home as anything other than painfully-wrenched descriptions of things that don't ever actually satisfy me or do justic to them. Time to let go of that, and thanks for bearing with me through the muckier ones. Maybe time to save this blog from becoming a bog.

A little kid came over with a cute, very very cute, little kitten in Fez. This kid couldn't have been one loose tooth over eight and a half, the kitten looked to have about five weeks of life experience, and no loose teeth as far as I could tell. It was a freaking cute one. Little boy is playing with her, putting her on his head, scooping her up, flipping her around, things normal little kids do with really cute kittens. On second though, the cat looked actually kind of sick in a cute way--goopy eyes, irregular fur tufts sticking out. I pulled out my camera, imagining how genius it would be, this rare documentation of Moroccan street kid and cute maybe-hepatitis-ridden kitten. I snap some. Kid wedges himself between me and Jess, puts little diseased kitten on my lap, smiles at me little kitten-playing Moroccan kid smile and eventually he wanders off and I go back to whatever I was doing before, which was soaking up the sun because I am in Morocco and it is very, very, gloriously, sunny.

I look over at our Moroccan friend Taha. He is soaking similarly. I think, hey what a genius picture it will be, my Moroccan friend so luxuriously soaking in the sun like me, with all that Moroccan stuff in the background, you know, mosques and really old falling-down city walls. I put my hand down to retrieve camera.
It is not there.

Camera is not there. It is not in my bag, it is not on the ground where I put it. I know where it is. It is in the hands of a guy who is going to sell it in a nice-looking little boutique, who got it from a guy who was selling it off a semi-legitimate main alley electronics rug, who got it from a guy who had it in a sketchy backalley cardboard box, who got it from a certain little kid we know in exchange for 5 dirham and a piece of crappy Moroccan candy. It has been about 11 minutes since the kid disappeared, but Taha confirms that this is probably where my camera is. He goes off to question some local kids who have been watching us, but they pretend cute little kid innocence and we know it is by now too late, and the camera has changed hands about 756 more times. Ah, well.

What really got me is this. A little while passes, and I notice a familiar-looking kitten, not far away, sitting under an old guy who's smoking a cigarette, looking very cute, still kind of diseased, and very confused. You'd think the kid could at least have the consideration to use the same cat over and over. A horrible thing to do to a poor little kitten. But then again maybe it was saved from a lifetime of crime, only to be a one-time offender. That is if you could even call it guilty, poor little cute sick thing.

2008-12-27T06:40:00.009-05:00

This morning I woke up. It was rather early, maybe eight o'clock, we are in Morocco, the sun was golden coming through fuzzy glass panes. This town is called Essaouria, Jess and I put on our identical Merrills, hers with holes and mine without, and went running down to the beach, running along the beach, where there were small waves breaking, a line of camels waiting for the tourists to start their days, people and dogs, washed pebbles half-lit and half-wet shadow, and rich packed sand under our feet. Yesterday we walked from the Medina back to the beach to watch the sun set, sang whatever songs we could think of that felt good and said poetry imperfectly but it didn't matter. It is the Atlantic Ocean again.

But Morocco hasn't been like this all along. It has been many things. We took the ferry from Algaceres, Spain to Tangier. Tangerines get their name from Tangier, and the tangerines here are the best I have ever tasted. So sweet. The ferry ride was kind of nightmarish. Not nearly the blue and white cruiseship that carried me from Ireland to France, this one was mostly a cold little lounge where people were either vomiting or nearly vomiting. Us too. The sea was unbelievably rough, and by the time we docked in Tangier all of us passengers looked at each other with the camaraderie of survivors, lined up weak and pale by the door like refugees, waiting to be admitted to sturdy land.

Jess and I went almost immediately to Tetuouan, a hour or two taxi ride south. It poured rain when we stepped out of the car, but we managed to find a hotel, hang up the wet things to dry, venture out. Delightful, the first Moroccan city at night! Medina is what they call the old walled-in part of a Moroccan town. Lovely tiles, arch walls, narrow passages, little shops selling thick Berber sweaters, natural soaps, dough-smelling little pastries, typical drugstore fare, fake Converse shoes, vegetables, souvenirs, nuts and dried fruits. And it was a happening place. People--mostly men in long robes with pointy hoods that looked vaguely like the Klan and also wizards or hobbits--swept along the streets and alleys buying, chatting, hanging out. It was a Saturday night, after all. We bought the most amazing sandwiches for less than a dollar a piece. Delicious french bread, warm, with tuna and an egg omelette thingy like a Spanish tortilla, lettuce, olives, carrots, and all topped with mayonnaise and chili sauce and french fries. This is a Moroccan sandwich, and we have been either eating it or talking about it ever since. It may be like going to the States and falling in love with a Publix sub, but we don't care.

On the topic of food, that night we also discovered that this country knows how to produce a damn good nutty cookie, as well as amazing street food. Jess bought something that looks kind of like a flat pie and is served in messy slices like pie but is gooey and salty and tastes like southern grits. Oh yes.

We loved Tetuouan with the kind of wonder you feel loving the first place in a new country, but we didn't stay past the next morning. We took a winding taxi ride to Chefchaouen (shef-SHA-wen), a town in the Rif Mountains. The medina there is painted all blue and white (it is really worth looking up some pictures of this place--I can't show any pictures for reasons that will be disclosed soon) and seems to have first grown organically from the mountainside and then continued growing from itself, sending out shoots of whitewashed archways, sandy steps leading up or curving down and around, twisting narrow alleys that fit one donkey and cart, blue-tiled water spouts tucked in corners. At night it really looks like a hobbit world, or a surreal waiting room to a kind of distorted dream-like slumber party, all the figures walked out of the little archways in their long robes, hoods and slippers. The strange thing about Chefchaouen was not that it was freezing at night, but that they didn't seem to have many facilities for getting warm. We searched the first night for a place, any place, with a warm fire, but really found nothing. The warmest place was a tiny internet cafe that was heated only incidentally by dint of having eight computers working hard in a very small space. We slept under three or four heavy blankets each night, ate soup with garbanzo beans in it, and finally discovered the hamam.

The hamam is a traditional Moroccan bathhouse. For our first time, we decided to forego the public hamam in favor of a private room with massage included. It was a very short old Moroccan woman who came into the room that was not nearly as hot as a sauna. She started dumping buckets of water on the floor and motioned to us to lie down there. She had this laughing old wrinkled face, a few teeth, big soft rolls all around her belly, and a curved but strong back. And she basically washed us like we were little babies, and I can't say that it wasn't really nice. She soaped our bodies, firm and experienced and thorough, and then took this kind of scrubby glove thing you put on your hand and scrubbed us hard so the dead skin came off in gray wormy rolls. We never exchanged a word with our little grandmother, only giggled when she inadvertently tickled us or made a motion for us to wash "down there" and looked at her in cute-inspired wonder, like when, getting dressed again in the upstairs room, she came over to Jess with a badly-fitting bra put awkardly over her t-shirt and turned around so Jess could fasten it in the back. A three-toothed smile, and that was it between us and our Moroccan bubby. I left feeling well-taken-care-of, pink and fresh.

We headed further south, to Fez, but I will have to do this update in a couple of passes. For the next installment: how a little kid stole my camera, more delicious foods, and general clumsy description of sundry things and sundry thoughts about things.

Everything Is

2008-12-10T04:34:00.002-05:00

Yesterday Jess and I took a walk down by the water. It is the Atlantic Ocean. It is ten minutes from her friend Gabriela´s apartment, where we´ve been staying the past week and a half. I can´t believe I have been here a week and a half. By those who know from experience, and there are many who pass through here, the apartment is affectionately known as The Vortex, for its sucking-in tendencies. Gabriela is so warm and lovely, people just unconsciously move toward her. And from the seventh floor balcony you can practically see, way out over the water, Providence.

We walked down by the water, we watched the sun setting in it. It is quite strange the number of sunsets that happen in a life, and the number of sunsets watched. Jess talked about the forgotten beauty of hunting, which is to witness the waking up, the feeding, and the dusking of nature. A ritual like dinner. There is a man she met once who goes kayaking with his wife every evening to watch the sunset. I want to try now to stop each day and watch it too. I think if that is the only habit I pick up on these travels, it will be good enough.

We are leaving today for Lisbon. We have a couchsurfing host there who has been to about a million and a half places in the world. I read some of what the guidebook has to say about Lisbon last night in the bath. It was leveled by an earthquake in 1775, and rebuilt in a late eighteenth-century grid, which is lucky for us because I seem to be able to navigate cities successfully only at right angles.

From there, we are thinking of heading down south and into Morocco for a couple weeks. I really want to go to Morocco, and I think it is a good place to go with Jess since I probably wouldn´t want to travel there alone, but I feel impatience to be on my own again. I guess it feels too easy being with a friend all the time. I guess it´s why I have stopped writing.

More Pastries, and Pomegranates

2008-12-05T12:18:00.001-05:00

From the life of Julien I went to Paris to Melina´s apartment, the most comfortingly familiar place I could have walked into in Paris. Her room is full of things I recognized--pictures of the Baettis, Maria´s jewelry, american products, random Pope and UGA things. Her kitchen full of little packaged things, chocolate cookies, little crusty breads, Pringles. And a general feeling of warmth and welcoming. Melina was such a good host, making sure I saw the Eiffel tower, and the Arc de Triomphe, and Notre Dame, and ate delicious crepes, got on the metro okay, had warm enough clothes. It was nice to see someone from home who has come into her own in the way Melina has, finding and creating this pleasant life for herself, very happy and in love, in her element.

I met up with Mae, my cousin. We ate a bunch of pastries and talked about going to Barcelona or Portugal next. We walked from her friend Kevin´s apartment to the Centre Pompidou to the Jewish neighborhood, where we ate homemade matzah and some kind of dry kosher sausage. We talked about family, which was a bit strange because, despite our being cousins, we had hardly ever had a conversations and it seemed, since these conversations were our first, that we couldn´t have anything as familiar and intimate as our families to talk about. Gossip about, I admit.

Paris was too big. Knowing I would be there only a few days, I didn´t commit to it, and have almost nothing to say about it. The food, of course, was spectacular. That is all.

Mae and I went to Barcelona for a week and a half. I have entered and left Spain since I last posted, I am sorry.
I am in Porto, Portugal.

Barcelona is a city so hip and full of surprises. My delight in it was something like the way you feel eating a pomegranate with your hands. With the bursting juicy bits still lingering in your mouth--lovely--your stained fingers absentmindly peel away a seemingly dead-end little spongy bit, and there, suddenly, is yet another magical little cluster of purple-red jewels. It´s astonishing, the number of times I turned a corner somewhere and found something--a museum, church, neighborhood, set of shops--worthy of days of investigation.

Hmm. I will post this now, so there is something. And write more tomorrow maybe. It´s no fun playing catch-up this way. Porto is lovely and relaxing. The roofs are red, the tiles are falling off, everything is

It was tempting to write this post entirely about French food.

2008-11-15T13:33:00.006-05:00

I am in Barcelona. That song I´m From Barcelona keeps playing in my head. Which is annoying but not as funny as Foux Da Fa Fa, the song from Flight of the Conchords, which was playing in my head literally from the moment I stepped foot in France until I left.

I have been in and left France since the last post, I am sorry.

I arrived safely on the ferry, which was less like a barge (some people had this idea) and more like a small blue and white cruise ship, complete with lounges, cafes, airport-flamboyant carpeting, and a ¨sundeck.¨ Quotations explained by preceding posts about weather. I had bought the cheapest ticket, which was for a seat in a room of seats, rather than a cabin with a bed. This was okay because everyone put their sleeping bags on the floor and slept there anyway. It was actually very soothing to sleep with my body against the rocking of the boat on the gray blankety waves.

Julien picked me up in the sweet little battered red car that was sort of our home for the next week. We never actually slept in it, but it felt that familiar by the time I left it. It was full of his cigarettes and my chocolate bars. His bag full of different kinds of leather to make into different kinds of pouches, my bag full of all my various things, worn-out clothes and poems. And the one windshield wiper always got stuck on the other one.

Here is Julien and you can see little Nanette´s door to the right.

Before going to his town of Mayenne, which has a castle that looks like this

Julien took me to a tiny little town on the northern coast (in the region of La Manche, I believe) and we stayed with friends of his, artists, who inhabited in the fullest way this house. It contained elaborate puppets, hand-made tapestries, old canvas stretchers that were broken up for fire wood, cigarette butts, moules frites in a pot on the stove, and a gorgeous collection of books in french.

The next day we all took a walk along the beach, where I lost my phone and gained a sense of quiet stretches of space and air that Ireland didn´t have. The kids and dogs were beautiful running long-shadowed on the sand, and I found a perfect spiral shell I put in my pocket and have forgotten about until right now.

The beach was not far from where the American troops landed in Normandy. This is a monument to, I think, Canadian soldiers. I didn´t read it, but there was a building with a Canadian flag nearby.

Here is the town where we stayed the night. I had never seen a town like it, and it would be impossible to describe exactly what was so shocking about it. Everything white-stoned and empty on Sunday, even the old Church from some period I´ve probably never heard of.

We also spent a day and night in the city of Rennes, which is in Bretagne and is filled with streets that have the impression in my mind of being cobblestone, but might not actually be. They are lined with cafes, patisseries with the most incredibly delightful pastries and breads you can ever imagine, bars with people sitting at all hours of day, little shops that are lovely and curious without being touristy.

Being with Julien meant being constantly on the go, visiting his friends wherever he happened to have them, making new ones where he didn´t, always arriving there toting croissants, saucissons, and beer for all. There was no telling what would happen, and an unexpected dose of culture shock only made everything seem faster and more overwhelming. But it wasn´t bad, only strange, only a good challenge. I had to retain myself in each new situation, and did. I had the distinct feeling that every day I was living a different kind of life, and I was okay.

Port of Cork

2008-11-03T07:11:00.009-05:00

I've been in Cork for two weeks now. Cork is a town whose center is contained between two rivers. In late October it hosts an annual Jazz Festival sponsored by Guiness. I was here for the festival and saw only a few street performances. Everybody says that no one actually sees the jazz at the Jazz Festival. I think this has something to do with the festival's sponsorship.

You may also know Cork because it is near Blarney Castle, where the Blarney Stone is. You climb up through the old ruined castle and an old guy holds you while you lean backward and kiss it. I told him I was afraid of the rumor that locals go up and pee on the stone at night. He said that was a load of bologna, I thought he said blarney.

My words were bottled up--corked, if you will--for several days and so was I. I was stuck in Cork, if you choose to see it that way. I did, mostly. I couldn't seem to leave Ireland. I felt in a hurry to do something, maybe to become something, and at the same time paralyzed. I could not seem to choose what to do next, and neither could I quite convince myself that it didn't matter.

Things I did in Cork those days: walk around the center of town. Buy soda bread, apples, sausage sandwiches loaded with onions and peppers (yellow, green) in the English Market. Drink cappucinos in a cafe called Puccinos.

Things I do in Cork these days: walk around the center of town. Walk around one or two streets just out of the center of town. Buy soda and other types of bread. Buy apples, cheese spread, sausage sandwiches with onions, peppers, chili sauce, ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise in the English Market. Eat this every day with Natalie sitting on the fountain by where the happy crinkle-faced old Irish man sells vegetables. Drink cappucinos in every cafe in town.

What changed is difficult and silly to describe, but it had to do with standing at the port where the boats and factories are and seeing what it is to observe myself with compassion. It had to do with Rilke's letters and the words of friends and teachers, the music of my friends through headphones on a bus to Kinsale, and meeting no one on my solitary walks but myself.

I met Natalie when she came to stay with the same couchsurfing host as me. She is french and nineteen. She loves food. We get along. She is traveling around Ireland, then living with her boyfriend, then taking a train across Russia, all on a gap year before starting university. She dominated the BAC and is waiting to hear back from Oxford and Cambridge, though I am trying my best to pitch Brown to her, because she reminds me so much of people freshman year at Brown. Before we all got jaded, haha. Oh dear.

Natalie and I stayed about a week with Carlos, but things went sour. There was never any good connection with Carlos The Passive-Aggressive. He spent hours every night watching TV in the tiny space living room/kitchen which was our bedroom, never telling us he was bothered by our talking and doing other things. He never asked us any questions or showed the faintest curiosity in us, other than to ask if we'd buy some beers and if we wanted to smoke with him. We really did try to create some sort of friendly atmosphere, making our best conversation, trying to help with dinner, cleaning up the kitchen and so forth, but Carlos in the end got drunk one night and mustered the courage tell us we were lucky he wasn't kicking us out. We are in a hostel now, and though it's costing us much more than we have been spending, it's worth it. It feels like such a luxury to sleep in a tiny clean twin bed on the top bunk in a warm room with four other people, just because it doesn't involve any tiptoeing around, and because we get to use the huge communal kitchen to make our own food, and there are plenty of really cool people hanging around here. I suppose bad couchsurfing experiences are bound to happen, and that is le story.

I take a bus to Rosslare tomorrow. From Rosslare I am taking a ferry to Cherbourg, France. The ferry takes eighteen hours. I take a bus from Cherbourg to Mayenne. I like the names of places. In Mayenne I meet a guy named Julien, who will host me for a few days. He is a couchsurfing host, but I was given his contact information through another host I had here, so I feel there is a higher degree of connection, of some kind of familiarity, than with other hosts. He is an artist, he wants to do art projects together. He wants to take me on a discovery trip, as he calls it, to a place near Paris where he knows other artists. He sounds full of the little things (joy, curiosity) that I am also learning to fill myself with.

I show it to you in photos

2008-11-03T06:46:00.005-05:00

Some overdue pictures from Drummin. Here is Jon, the grotty old sod, in the tv room where we spent many an hour watching these shows, learning to tie a couple of knots, drinking tea, shifting the cats around, and eating cauliflower cheese (see below).

Here is one of many perfectly formed rainbows. Len drove me to the end of it, where the bus stop was.

And this is an old monastery, a fairly typical thing to find along any drive through the countryside. The colors are almost the same in real life.

Here we are in the ol' workshop, Jon and Len both looking uncharacteristically serious.

And here is Len where I'll remember him best, on his little chair in the kitchen, making us little cupcakes.

This is cauliflower cheese, or cauliflower au gratin, which Len taught me how to make. Now I will get invited to all the potlucks. Yum.

Fewer Teas More Songs Me Ol' Mate (Heaveho)

2008-10-21T15:20:00.005-04:00

If O'Donnell Farm was quiet living at the top of the drive, sunrises and sets, poetry to little foals, and solitude, then Drummin Farm is rambling life in a little green nook, days half rain half sun, rainbows therefore, words, sea shanties and colorful words. Our words sound something like this

L --Who fancies a cupo?
K --Cupo tay!

Len is seventy, but you wouldn't guess a day over sixty. He loves all things seaman: ship, knots, boats. At fourteen he left school and home, went sailing around the world. He makes hundreds of different knots watching tv with us in the evenings. We watch three types of shows: shows about how to make stuff, history shows primarily about wars and weapons, and mystery series. And Mash sometimes. In the grocery store he charms a little girl--Hallo, blue eyes!--and gets shouts of ''Santa Claus!'' He does look remarkably like Santa. He's also British and speaks a lovely little Cockney, so picture that. He whistles and sings from a wide collection of hilarious and scandalizingly dirty shanties and can't abide things like this: vegetarianism, hippies, hunters of animals, religion in general and Jehovah's Witnesses specifically, faint-heartedness, his ex-wife.

J --Cupo? [something in Icelandic] Why, certainly.
K --I'll put the ke''le on!
L --Wait, first. Jon hand me those grips and hammer.
K --Hamma!

Jon is another Wwoofer here, from California. It's so nice to have a buddy. Though we are quite different, he is someone with a relatively familiar background, similar lexicon, identical American hiking shoes. Before this, he was wwoofing in Poland, and Iceland before that. He loves boats, and Len builds boats, so together they make wood into boats here in this little Iglish bowl of sunlight.

It is. It's refreshing to be around people who are having a good time and sharing it around. Len's favorite thing to say is that life's just a big joke and if you're not enjoying it then the joke's on you. He's lovely. Though I miss to some extent my own quietness, I feel sort of lifted up here. There is hardly time to think, with all the silly songs and hammering to be hammered and sung.

L --Jon, let little tiddler--
J --Haha, tiddlah!
L --- get past you so she can hold this--oh not like that, you grotty old sod, turn her around. Okay, good, now bugger off to the kitchen willya love and put that soup on simmer.

Len's partner is Pat. They've been together for twenty years, but they aren't married. She is British too. She is also seventy, and beautiful. I haven't said much about her because she only just came back from the hospital a couple of days ago. She had major back surgery and was still in there when I arrived. Len does all the cooking and cleaning, on top of building boats and making the sweetest little toys for local kids (really). He beats hell out of Pat for staying in bed all day, for drinking instant coffee, for not knowing how to ''boil water to heat her arse,'' and you can tell how much he bloody well loves her. He's like a fussy and colorful mother, worrying over our dinners and lunches, that we'll have enough to eat, that we'll like the way it tastes. He makes excellent food. He gives hugs and tells us his stories and teaches us how to tie a million different knots, what they're for and why. They have had over four hundred wwoofers in the past sixteen years, and I do believe he thinks of all of them (except the bloody obnoxious ones) as his kids. And I bet they all felt at home here too. Good old Lenahd. I told him in passing one day that I wanted to see the Atlantic Ocean before leaving Ireland, and today he drove me around the countryside showing me castles, old ruins, different kinds of boats docked in a little port town. We had a picnic of bread, onion cheese spread, orange fanta by the ocean.

K --Simma!
J --Simma! [cracks up]

It is totally ridiculous, to hear us talk. We use any words we know for anything we want to say. We say it in broken or flawless Spanish, Latin, German, French, Icelandic, Russian, Irish, words we make up. We tell each other all the interested word origins we know about. We compare our words. We say our words like some gibberish that carries nearly no meaning. That's how we say them usually. Though sometimes Jon says things he knows, about palletization, and I find anagrams. Len gives us cockney rhyming slang. And we repeat everything over again in any accent we vaguely know--Scottish, Dubliner, old southern, carrot-cruncher. We are saying all the time and the things are color-changing skipping creatures that make us laugh if we pay them any attention. And usually we don't.

L --Oh bugga this bloody stupid thing. This stuff should be sticking like shite to a blanket...

Finished Mural!

2008-10-21T14:07:00.004-04:00

Brought To You By Horses

2008-10-13T10:04:00.006-04:00

Part I. Horses in fog, pieces of horses, pieces of horses in fog

II. Similarity between horses and dinosaurs.

Putting the Buns in the Oven

2008-10-12T09:51:00.005-04:00

Yesterday we inseminated a pig. Mike called a guy who happens to have a lot of boar semen. A little wihle later he was going down to the gas station in Borrisoleigh to pick up the goods: a white styrofoam box (keep refrigerated) of what looks like little IV bags and some long, surprisingly long, plastic tubes. And not long after that I was busy patting Magella's head while she was busy eating some weeds and getting pregnant. It wasn't as romantic as Magella would've liked, but I think she and I shared a little moment there when she looked at me and let out what sounded like a contented snort. Too bad I won't stick around to take care of the little ones. I'm just a good-for-nothin pigletmama.

Look at the little nose under the door. That's Pippy. She likes to get in everyone's business.

A hug and a slice of toast

2008-10-07T17:15:00.007-04:00

After such a nourishing breakfast, there was trouble in the barnyard. It was a day of separation. The baby goat with one horn was left alone in the pasture. Her mother was tied up on the other side of the barn, near the donkey. Little goat is being weaned, we get more milk for our seven or eight daily cups of tea. The donkey, on the other hand, apparently always feels separated. When he brays it sounds like uncontrollable sobbing, like he will actually die from heartbreak. Maybe he will. He probably wouldn't be the first.

But the most traumatic events of the day belong to the pigs. There are two sows, one pink one, one black one, each with a litter of piglets, curious mud-snouted flop-eared things. Pink lady has three little guys (bonhams) that haven't been sold yet, and the other has six. These young chaps were supposed to be weaned two weeks ago, so it was high time for what happened today. It took a lot of coaxing with barley and odd scraps of food, and several mad dashes at little hooves that squealed when you grabbed them, but at the end of the day each of the ladies was locked up, alone. The sounds made by a mother pig whose last piglets have disappeared are something like an axe murderer grunting just on the other side of the bedroom door.

Mike said I was being too sentimental about it, and this is probably true. For my first time out, though, I think I did okay. How could I help feeling just a bit stressed out when there was a donkey ripping his heart out over here, while the purest white and most unicornesque baby goat bleated pitifully for her mama over there, and an angry sow nearby was trying to hoof herself over the fence to gore me with her pigletless snout, and two gaggles of scared bonhams were bravely and loudly trying to battle pink against black in a dark room in the barn? I could not.

What did I do to calm myself down?

Fed my little horse her foal pellets from the plastic mixing bowl, went inside and made myself an amazingly delicious quesadilla.

Different Places With Different Winds

2008-10-03T05:57:00.008-04:00

I and money disappeared in Dublin. What to write about Dublin? I don't know. I was mostly looking for old things in old places and getting small slaps on the wrists for it, which has done me good. New friends made, but also a renewing of solitude.

I couch-surfed with Brian Cavanagh in Santry, outside the center. His friend Nils was visiting from Germany. We took the DART out to Howthe where the sea is, where the hills and cliffs are. Nils said the delicate white streaks on the water were made by small winds. We decided not to walk all the way around. We decided it was better to look at only one or two things.

We drank Orange County wine from paper cups, eating cashews, Brian throwing rocks down into the deep, narrow cove. I looked at the colors. Nils talked about, I don't remember, jumping from cliffs maybe.

I guess I was never in Dublin except alone. Out in Santry, and in Marino with Barbara my second host, I knew more or less how to measure myself and things. But every time I was in Dublin proper, it was on my own. I guess that's why I don't know how to write about it. Dublin only existed in my mind, I only existed in Dublin's mind, something like that. I walked for very long times. I stood outside the gate at Trinity College, spent some hours in a bookstore, found a bagel place, they toasted my bagel for about two seconds. Took things way too seriously. Got rained on. Looked for Jews on Rosh Hashanah. Found none. Wondered what I'd write on my blog when it came time.

I loved Dublin the day I left. I succeeded at the laundromat, had a really nice tea and talk with Barbara, made it into town in one piece. Sun was shining. It's so nice to be sad to leave a place. Too often, I've been only too happy to go. I am trying not to do that anymore.

* * *

Right now I'm in a little town in County Tipperary called Templemore. The accent here is lovely. They pronounce ''barley'' like ''barely,'' as in ''always remember: oats for the goats, barely for the pigs.'' Solitude was actually quiet and gentle, even cinematic, on the train ride down. The land, the being moved along through it, listening to headphones, late afternoon light. Things golden, myself present and grateful. And when we pulled into Templemore Station there actually was, there on the horizon, the most vivid, most perfectly formed rainbow I'd ever seen. Not kidding.

Mike the farmer is lovely too. It's just him and Diane, his partner, at the farm. And the animals. Turns out turkeys are quite cool little guys. Ducks do not quack they way I think they should. And pigs are very cute and look just like Babe the pig, which makes sense.

I don't know what to make of it here yet. The countryside is so beautiful I can't stop taking pictures of it and they're never good enough. Things are quiet. I am trying to focus on each task and do the work for the work's sake only and be still and have gratitude. It is taking some adjusting. It is only day three, I miss friends, people my age, cafes. But the air is fresh and the animals lively enough company. I am painting a mural on the wall of the barn, pulling weeds when I need to warm up a bit. The best part, of course, is feeding the horses. They aren't broken so I can't ride them, but it's nice to be around them. I look at them and feel familiarity.

Sorry this post is all over the place. Internet cafes are stressful! Not sure when I'll be back for internet. Next week probably.

Darlin' don't you go and cut your hair

2008-09-21T17:11:00.025-04:00

I cut my hair. I was always going to. I had been stuck inside sick with a cold all day, in short left to my own resources for far too long. Here is what it looked like just after, when I ruffled it up. It took two hours to do it, but I suppose some people reading this have had haircuts from me that lasted as long or longer. It's a slow business. And I don't know that I achieved what I wanted to by doing this, but I like it just fine. I left the hair in a plastic bag in the sink for Owen to find when he came home from vacation, haha.

Jess is in London! It is wonderful to see her again. We have seen each other here, across the ocean, probably as much as we did in the last year back home. She put together a little birthday picnic yesterday in Victoria park. After a relaxing morning, during which Owen and I nourished ourselves with his delicious homemade brownies, we headed to Broadway Market to get picnic provisions. Several free samples and hordes of Saturday hipsters later, we were armed with two kinds of beautiful fresh bread, some saucissons, assorted olives, and a bunch of cheese that was marketed as a 'Basket for 4 for a fiver.' Say that out loud. We asked them why it only had three cheeses in it, and they insisted that the three cheeses could feed four people and that's why it said four. We punished them by making them give us samples of everything.

Jess brought enough friends to feed three cheeses to. Rokas (pronounced like the word that means boisterous and disorderly) is her boy, a very tall blond Lithuanian she met on the beach in Finisterre. Looking at him, you can just picture him there, a kind of beach god. He brought two Lithuanian friends who are living with him here in London, Vitaly and Gedas. And Erin is a very cool Kiwi whom Jess also met on the Camino.

Did I mention it was a stunningly beautiful day? It was. And Warm. The warmest day I'd felt since coming here. Thanks for coming to our party, sun. You can have some cheese, too.

The picnic was exactly what we were supposed to be doing that day. We ate and drank copiously and very leisurely, scattered around enjoying the day. It was organic in a sort of crazy classical way, or maybe this is only retrospectively. We were transformed into (ourselves maybe?) these traveled creatures, living moment to moment, fauns with handfuls of late sunlight, tossing and golden. Rokas strummed the guitar, Gedas and Vitaly had their harmonicas, Erin her yoga mat, the grass a miraculous warmth, and Jess face paint. The face paint was the hit of the party, unless you count two giraffes of unkown origins named Achoo and Icki.

It's true, Giraffes love mousse.

A very lovely day. We stayed together, back at Jess and Rokas's, until everyone and the day were exhausted. Tomorrow will be another picnic.

Brighton: Not Just That Store In The Mall With All The Things With Hearts On Them

2008-09-21T16:21:00.007-04:00

Elliot in the kitchen the first morning looked at me and said you just seem so content all the time.

Monday I rode a bus down to Brighton and stayed two days. It was supposed to be only one day, but I think a trend has started here. Things want to extend, I can only let them. Brighton is on the English Channel. Sounds like a series on British television. When I arrived, I walked down the Pier, which was like a small-scale version of the boardwalk at Ocean City--rides, greasy food--except a pier. And not as many Russians. Or people in general, really, but it's the off-season already. The beach in Brighton has no sand. It is made of stones and shells, small and smooth. I picked one up with a groove that fit my finger perfectly. I sat on the stones and it was a little like sitting on one of those things they always have in the nature and science store, a million metal pins that mold to your face or hand and feel really good. Remember those? I sat there for a long time. And maybe took a little nap there. Surprise.

I told Elliot I would be the one with the backpack. He said he is the one with the colorful van.

He drove me to the house where he lives with a bunch of other guys--I still don't know how many of them actually lived there. A guy named Virgile from Provence was also surfing there. He loves Django Reinhardt and plays guitar beautifully, especially this old classic french song Il n'y a pas d'Amour Heureux, there is no happy love. He was very funny, and his English was very funny. We made pasta and meatballs on night two. Elliot is also a really talented musician, with an insatiable taste for reggae beats. These two played together and it was so cool. They tried to get me to play accordion. I played the egg. Actually I didn't. But I drew a picture.

Another good thing that happened was we had a barbeque, though it was not as delicious as some other barbeques I know.

Here is Elliot with his pet snake:
Does he not look like cousin Brandt? I don't remember the name of the Snake. Maybe Martabelle or something. Or Brock. I slept in the room where the two snakes live. I did not carry any little mic in my pockets, and we got along famously.

Brighton supposedly has this wonderful pedestrian area called The Lanes, which I hear has very wonderful and singular shopping that isn't really shopping. I have no iea what this means, but this might be because I never went there. In fact, I didn't really go anywhere in Brighton after getting to Elliot's. We drank tea and watched movies on the couch all day. Purest couch surfing, I'd say.

Though I did go for a walk in the gloaming (a word that nearly knocked us dead when Virgile, who couldn't think of the word for couteau, pulled it out of nowhere) on the second day with Virgile and one of Elliot's flatmates. We walked up into the hills near the house to see if we could see the water, and find blackberries. The channel was hidden by another hill, though the view was still wonderful. The blackberries were hidden by not existing.

But we did find a horse to talk to.

London, I love

2008-09-14T20:43:00.002-04:00

I realize I've begun to read people's emails in my head using a British accent.

A sign I've been here too long? Or just long enough? And I am sorry for the last, lackluster post. I guess I didn't really want to write it. London is kind of wonderful. Today I had a cappuccino that looked like a work of art, though that isn't why London is wonderful. Or maybe it is. I asked the people who work in the cafe what there is to do on a nice Sunday in this town. They said London Bridge, and so to London Bridge I went. And it turned out that London Bridge, and the entire south bank actually, was today the site of the Thames Festival. All along the water, for miles, were stands with delicious foods, crafts that also looked good enough to eat, and live music. And people from everywhere in the world. I was walking and enjoying the sights and smells when I heard the sound of drumming. There was a tent set up with lots of djembes and other african drums. A few people were playing and it turned out they were just random people who had picked up the drums, which were clearly there for anyone to use, and started playing together. I joined them, and soon all the drums were taken up by people who were passing and wanted to join in. It was really wonderful. No one seemed to have any training in drumming, but we all just knew how it worked and fell into a kind of organic rhythm with one another. People stopped to watch and listen, or dance, or wait for a drum to become available. I must have played there for forty minutes or something, until my hands were too sore to hit the poor drum any longer. The woman I sat next to, who had invited me to play, suggested we give our hands a break and we wandered around and chatted. She is a Kiwi who just traveled Europe for four months and is settling in Cambridge to work for some time. She is very beautiful and honest. She invited me to hang around with her and meet up with her Kiwi friends to watch the Thames Festival parade and fireworks.

Mel's friends turned out to be just as welcoming, open, and fun as she was. They've invited me to come to a Bad Taste party they are throwing this Saturday, and if I'm still around I think I'll go. The parade was a lively creature, colorful and dancing through London streets. We only caught the tail end of it, so I didn't see my friends with the dragon (which sadly has no name, Scrappy), but maybe it's better that way. We joined in the parade at one point and danced along for a while there, so free and in the spirit of things. And afterward the fireworks were really the most beautiful I've ever seen, exploding themselves over the Thames and hundred of thousands of people all loving them all at once. Or maybe it was just us, the Kiwis and me. We just grinned helplessly at each other. London, what a place you are indeed.

When I'm Older I Want to be Just Like Banksy

2008-09-12T10:11:00.009-04:00

I am still in London. Remarkably, it is sunny today. And yet, here I am on the blog. I spent the last few days being hosted by a Chilean man named Tito. He lives in a South London apartment full of feathers, books, masks, thin willow branches, onion peels, the illusion of sunlight. The apartment is just around the corner from some very fancy building where Charles Dickens grew up, before his father was thrown in the debtors' prison that used to be across the street from what is now Borough tube station. The area looks updated enough to me. I guess things have changed a lot, and not only for Charles Dickens. Someone I met in the Tate Modern reminded me that the newer buildings around London likely got created because of bombs, and this certainly changes the way you look at a place.

Tito is wonderful. He is literally full of wonder. He loves curiosity for its own sake. He studied metal work in Chile and worked for a long time as jeweler here in London, until the mainstream jewelry companies made it almost impossible for independent craftsman to get any business. He wears a goddess of silver, and he tells me he created it because the objects we encounter all the time are too full of masculinity: 'See, this cooking pot. Made by a man. The window there. This building. Your pants.' His passion is Mayan mythology. He told me wonderful abbreviated versions of the creation stories, stories that actually take entire weeks to tell. It made a huge difference that he loves these stories so much. I couldn't help loving them too. We sat in his kitchen with its yellow shiny tablecloth and the yellow light on the yellow walls full of pictures and postcards, and talked in yellow for nearly three days straight.

But not really three days straight, because there was the Chinese Dragon dance performance. Tito has worked for years with a group called Mandinka that puts on carnival events and gives workshops in different carnival crafts, like mask-making and costume design. They are taking part in the Thames Festival this weekend, a huge event with parades and merry-making on a very large scale. Tuesday evening, Mandinka put on a little preview show, for the festival's sponsors and coordinators, of the performances they will do this weekend. Tito invited me to Monday's rehearsal, and I went. We learned how to create the dragon itself. It will be fifty meters long, which apparently the longest dragon the UK has ever seen. Then we were taught, by a Chinese man who judges dragon performances in Beijing, how to carry the dragon and make it dance. This is really very difficult and it has to be said that I and the British people were horrible at it. We practiced for five hours before we had sort of almost gotten down one or two of the basics. And the following evening, we just dove right in. There were costumes and makeup and everything. I felt like I was a little girl again, getting ready for a dance recital. It was familiar and completely strange, and I just kept laughing every time I realized 'This is where I am right now. This is what I am doing.' It felt really nice to have simply fallen into something so unexpected. It meant I had been open to it, open to whatever.

Here I am getting makeup put on. Scrappy, as you can see I still have my hair.

Here is the front of the dragon in the studio where we practiced. Happy, isn't he?

* * *

And on to a different kind of art. Yes, this is definitely the land of Banksy. The first piece I saw was just around the corner from Owen's flat. The one with the children raising the flag of Tesco. There is a picture of it on Banksy's website. Tito took me to see his work in Waterloo. Banksy, whose work I've followed for a years, and whose identity is still completely unknown (I love this), set up an exhibition of grafitti art earlier this year in a car tunnel that wasn't being used. Huge, beautiful murals covered the walls. Then people came and graffitied over the original artwork. It is hard not to be sad about this, though Tito says this is the nature of the thing.

Sleeping Beside the Underground

2008-09-02T05:23:00.002-04:00

I am safe in London, which is gray. Grey, they would say here, though it looks the same. Owen tells me that last month was recorded as the grayest August in London since records started being kept. That is, not the coldest August, and not the rainiest, but literally the one with the least amount of sunlight. I always picture Londoners holding umbrellas, because I am used to hearing of rain in London. Maybe they should start making umbrellas with UV lights installed in them, like the one I put above Septimus's tank so his little turtle body would get enough Vitamin D. Picture all the Londoners walking around with auras of fluorescent blue coming from under their umbrellas.

Not much has happened here yet, but then I've only been here about nineteen hours. One of those was spent being detained at customs in Heathrow airport. I committed the crime of having vague plans. Airport customs personnel do not like vague plans. They went through my bags and asked for itineraries that didn't exist. It finally ended when I showed them on the internet confirmation of my return ticket home, and proved that I had enough money in my bank account to fund the trip. After that, they were quite lovely to me. They gave me tea from a tea vending machine (I kid you not) and told me Obama should have chosen Hilary Clinton for his running mate. I told them no, and they wished me a safe journey. Thanks, mates.

On the plane from Houston, I sat in the very middle of the very last row. Thankfully, the British guy next to me, named Ray, got up frequently. At one point we spent an hour or so standing in the food prep area in the back, chatting with the american flight attendants. There was one particularly spunky one named Antoinette. She said things that made the other attendants blush. After asking me questions about college, Antoinette turned to Ray and asked him if he would prefer an American Intellectual or a British Tart. As if we were that evening's choices for dessert. I went back to my seat, fed some music into my headphones, and took some sleeps.