Disappearing with Warning

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.