i spent all of yesterday doing imc stuff that i really hope you go and look at because i spent all of the day before that, sunday, out in the streets of richmond with thousands of other folks yelling about how much war sucks. i think amanda lewis's account is a lot of fun to read, and i will not try to top that. i will only add a few things:
1 the favorite thing i heard shouted all day was when the cops weirdly half-heartedly sprayed a little mist of um pepper spray into the air and after one person yelled dude, what are you doing? and i yelled that is not cool, andrew bourne cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed man, what is on that bottle? man, what is on that bottle, sir? tell me what is on bottle! give me that bottle to read, sir!
2 it is really something to be yelling whose streets? our streets! and actually be walking down my streets, the streets of my hometown... people filling broad street on either side of the road...
3 when i spoke casually with the crowd at the pace center on saturday night, just like they were all good friends i was talking to over dinner only instead i was at a podium with a microphone echoing my thoughts, i leaned in and said it is hard to be home what with this war, but man it is good to be home for this.
it is as if everything dissolved during the eight hour train ride. boston to union station with fitfull sleep between every stop, and a stop every fifteen minutes, after already a full day of transcience.
of course i am happy to be home, of course happy to see my folks and elated to see jonathan by surprise. but rachel corrie got run over the day i arrived and we will go to war in um less than 48 hours now... my new friend aj im's me and i say: stay abroad. america is scary and huge.
so i am sad and sick, stuffed up and distracted by the news... it takes the most monumental efforts of those around me to keep my mind off of it all. i want to get to richmond and help.
alright okay. i am in schipol airport waiting for my flight to BOSTON, not baltimore.
do not ask me how this happened, but it is totally airtech's faulty information. icelandair does not fly to bwi until tuesday, so i am getting into boston TODAY at 5:50pm i think.
um. i do not know how i am getting home to virginia.
so. TODAY = SATURDAY = BOSTON = MUNA = 6pm.
anyone? any takers? i will try checking email in iceland during the connection, though i don't know how much time i'll have.
maybe i will see a friendly face in the totally unfamiliar logan airport -- it would be so nice. but maybe not. i will get home somehow.
i will look and maybe find, but i will at least call from logan one way or another.
i am in amsterdam. wasting time. eating frites with peanut sauce. walking around trying to find everything i found before, listening to the jurassic five on my headphones, talking with strange old men about how sometimes people are afraid to talk with strange old men. i want to buy things (bright yellow hightops!), i do my fair share of window shopping, but i have no money. i have no money and am looking forward to sleeping in the airport tonight.
hey, so did you know that? that i am sleeping in the airport tonight because i am flying home tomorrow morning? if everything works out with my airtech ticket -- which still remains to be seen because even though i did as told and went to the icelandair office to work things out, the nice icelandic woman there said i must just go to the airport tomorrow and see -- i will arrive at bwi around 6pm your east coast morning.
i like to be here, at the internet, reading the news, reading song lyrics. my richmond imc makes me both so sad and so insanely happy that i must work hard not to cry here at such a public terminal. did you know my friend bill is in jail for six months? did you know that there are way too many way cool things happening in the name of peace in my town? you are going to come, right?
ha. so i am in barcelona again after a twelve hour bus ride from granada. i have found my room at the mariluz pension right next to the palau where amanda and i stayed... i will be living there in a triple with greg will and anna thomas! which is exciting, which i am so looking forward to, looking forwar to being around friends again. but i have yet to see them! we keep exchanging electronic and real notes... it will work out, and we will go out for tapas at some point.
so i will write all about paragliding and alhambra, but this computer is not so good and really i oughta eat something and take a shower... so later, later. i have bought a lot of time and i will tell you all about being in odd wholely unique places in the world, like a thousand feet about a flock of sheep.
as i have somehow illicited wonderful literary emails from folks like steve hsu and alison titus (two of my favorite names lyrically), i spent a lot of yesterday writing things down in the little notebook with an upside-down map of the ocean around portugal pasted to its cover. but the computer was full up all day long, so here you go today... (and since this is going to take forever for me to write, will all those owed literary or at least informative emails bear with me as i spread my in-front-of-a-projecting-light-screen time throughout the day in order to be better able to bear it.)
a description of granada now that i have changed rooms and am content to stay a few more days:
i arrived exactly a week ago on el dia de andalusia, a holiday, a quiet day with the streets emptied out and the shops closed. it had been a victory -- a close call, uncomfortable night full of surprises like suddenly no travel companions and no tickets in hand, as well as a confusingly late midnight actually half past one train and a big angular armrest wedged between my exhaustion and any decent kind of sleep for an entire eight hour ride.
nine in the morning at the train station alone and blinking, i faithfully follow amanda lewis's directions, my only knowledge of this town. i trace the tiny river that flows down from the mountains and pass the ancient stone constructions of the moors and maybe the romans and certainly the catholics, one foot in front of the other lugging my luggage up a steadily steeper climb and trying to keep from being distracted by the ever increasingly beautiful view.
cameron the hardcore kid from california with orange hair and freckles checks me in -- the only one awake in the place except for salihah making an omelete cheerfully -- and i take a hot and then cold shower and climb into my top bunk for a couple hours of sleep. when i wake up with the noise of everyone else, i am immediately greeted with fresh apple crepes and a view of alhambra that is like a postcard. i sit there, stunned, struck by the urgent yet calm luxoriousness of this place. i don't know how to approach it... so i just decide to relax, let it approach me, and appreciate whatever i am offered.
consistently, throughout my time here, my thoughts begin with: granada is just too picturesque. so much so that i have a very hard time taking pictures of anything, because everything is so over the top totally naturally. i know i am not doing a good job at describing this... and i know i will take pictures one day before i leave of all the important things that have sifted down from just being scenic to becoming now meaningful to me....
anyway.
i am a bad sightseer. this much you know. i still have yet to actually go to alhambra. i stare this thing down every day, challenging the fortress in my mind to be anything other than... uninteresting. i said it today while sitting in the sun: i just can't bring myself to be interested in the big things built by rich old men. which is of course a simplistic take on it... but an honest one at least. to me, alhambra is just like the citadel, coincedentally the last thing i saw in cairo -- an enormous ancient muslim fortress.
the only interesting observations i can draw, as i'm never actually that impressed by these shows but after careful introspection i can summon up some worthwhile ideas:
power is the same everywhere, at least it looks the same in the end... big and dead and gone.
there is something to realizing how old these structures are and how they indicate how similiar people are, have always been, in their accomplishments, their goals, their vices and abilities... they build the same things.
the most interesting thing i can imagine about all of this is the process of building, the work of physically making something... hands and stone and wood and work. constructing. and doing it over such a long span of time that the one who begins such a project will not the one who sees it completed. this is why i think i must go back to barcelona and see the sagrada familia in its massive undoneness.
so.
granada is good for me. i take the hills more and more easily, am better at being myself even around all these strangers, and even feel my writing creeping back, though at least for certain my reading. i have finished camus' south american journals and spent a lot of yesterday trying to decide what to read, what to do next. i spent a lot of time yesterday debating all the options... but really all i want is to find a train (though most likely i can only afford buses) to amsterdam in a few days, via barcelona where greg will and anna thomas will be; to read a good thick history of the spanish war which is of course endlessly intriguing, poetic, and tragic; and to write my sister a letter about the sadness we have in common, that really i just have four extra hard-fought years of experience fighting.
i make these decisions, along with little rules like no more descending down into town -- i will only stay up in albayzin, the old muslim quarter of the city with its tiny cobblestone alleys, whitewashed walls, houses made of caves guarded by messes of cacti, ancient churches that are actually mosques, and excellent graffiti everywhere. together, these conclusions give me comfortable space to enjoy things and go grocery shopping. still, in the afternoon, i notice the mosquitos circling in the center of my new room, the distinctly felt metal springs in the mattress of my new bed... and can't help but regard them as little ominous omens with the message that i must leave soon.
the most interesting thing today (yesterday): the sounds of the neighbors below us stomping and tapping -- they practice their flamenco all day long.
(but this i wrote yesterday afternoon, well before the evening developed as it did)
so the story of last night really: tyler the kid who runs this place, from whom i'll buy half a kilo of saffron the way one would buy drugs -- with the same certain special relish and subtlity -- learns of my plans to go out for tapas up in albayzin, because as you may remember i don't leave the albayzin anymore, and immediately says: yes, yes i'll go with you guys, you guys like snails? to which i of course i smile and say yes, yes of course.
so guillermo the wonderful boy from france who wants to study architecture and dance (when he told me this i said: ah, of course, since they are both the study of beautiful form, and wow, did his face ever light up), spencer from vancouver who is buff like you wouldn't believe and shy at the same time in his lou reed and iggy pop t-shirts, and tyler and i... we four trouped to the place nearby that begrudgingly serves us foreigners bowls of land snails in a murky peppery sauce. we pull them out of their slippery shells with toothpicks and their whole brown bodies dangle there, antenna and all, before we eat them up and chase them with beer.
we talking amazingly about body building because spencer was a body builder -- ! -- and paragliding because guillermo and tyler have both taken it up -- ! . ha. i am fascinated by it all, i ask about what it is like to change your body so, what it is like to land, to take off, to fly... to fly! and guillermo at the next bar for the last beer and last tapas of the night looks at me tipsily and asks if i want to go. to which of course i smile and say yes, yes of course, how could i not... it is flying, how could i not want to.
so that is what i will do. that is the one addition to the plan: flying on monday. ha. and you guys were surprised when i went surfing.
conversation with the kid from canada who works here at the hostel after coming home from a lovely lonely lunch in the sun of san nicholas square:
m: it must be hard... all the energy it takes to meet so many new people. k: well, yes.... m: after a month of traveling, i get tired of the same conversations. i try to avoid asking where are you from, how long have you been traveling.... k: well, yeah, but it's an easy starter. a way to get people talking. m: ... i think i'd prefer just saying "so what do you think of physics?" k: well, if you asked me that i'd have to say fuck, i don't know a thing about physics. m: well, what about outerspace? everyone thinks outerspace is cool. k: ha. yes. yes!
i have written some things, about things that have happened, which are on the whole good. but typing it all into the computer is for when it is dark outside and there is no sun to be interested in.
i write to amanda and cut and paste here because inside it is cold and dark and outside the sun exists:
you are right -- granada is for relaxing. reading and walking and writing and drinking.
last night i was the only girl up for the bar where shots cost only one euro each. me and six boys all of varying interest... a diverse bunch and eight, no, nine rounds.
they were all getting these sugary shooters -- kiwi and banana and all sorts of different colors stuff -- and when it came my turn to buy a round (in theory the last) i said: listen, have you got cuban rum? havana club, seven years old? no? well then just give me seven shots of the oldest rum you've got in the house.
the girls here are the most interesting of course... i must groom myself better to talk with them more. there is this girl from philly -- she looks like all our friends -- whose parents are converted sufis and we traded poems outloud and talked excitedly about puppets and puppet shows.
i like to sit reading albert camus' american journals, which are great of course. the copy's all damp and moldly, derelict for some time now. so i turn the thick pages carefully and take care to read it in the sun as much as possible next to the mess of cacti, looking out at alhambra.
people ask me what i'm going to do today and i say: little things, only little things.
