Bullet Points

I don’t terribly feel like writing a recap post of my past few weeks, but I’ll throw out a few of the highlights so I don’t feel too negligent.

Israel:

Stepping out into the surf at Caesaria, 24 hours after walking home in the middle of a new york blizzard.

The 3 half hour hikes on my “Israel Outdoors” trip.

Running at a dead sprint from our tel aviv hotel into the mediterranean, barely breaking stride to take of my clothes.

Watching the guy behind me not bother to take of his clothes, as he sauntered out chests deep carrying a beer and a cigarette.

The old city in Jerusalem. It’s like a medina with street cleaning.

Cleaning my pants. It might not sound like much, but when you only have one, this can be a highlight.

The West Bank:

Hopping off the 20 minute wormhole of a bus ride to east jerusalem. What’s that saying about not being in Kansas anymore?

Paying one fifth the price for falafel.

Sharing a cab with a 15 year old girl carrying an advanced chemistry textbook.

The sunset on our busride back from Jericho

Eating lots of cheap delicious beans off the street

Actually getting an idea of what the Palestinian state could look like and feeling pretty positive about it.

Jordan:

Not being in Egypt.

Paying what I felt like has to be the source of half this country’s GDP to get into Petra ($75 US are you kidding me?*)

Staying  out in the desert of Wadi Araba. Cooking on a fire, carrying out all our water for 3 days, and sleeping with my friend Ghassab in his cave. I could barely make out the constellations there were so many other stars in the sky.

Smoking Nargilah on the beach at sunset and looking out across the Red Sea to Israel and Egypt.

Did I mention not being In Egypt?

Hiking out in Wadi Rum, ten times as amazing as Petra and interestingly one tenth the price.

Blowing out my quads trying to climb the largest sand dune I’d ever seen. I had jelly legs for days.

Witnessing the true meaning of the word flashflood as the first rain in months created a 2 foot deep river of rushing water that would have gone right through the center of our camp had it not been for some head’s up dam building.

And that about does it. I fly out for India in 3 days (changed my flight after it didn’t seem like I’d make the one from Cairo), and I’ll try and post again beforehand. Maybe tomorrow I’ll even throw in some compelete sentences.

Cheers Y’all.

 

Has Anybody ever been to a tourist site site that’s this expensive? I haven’t heard of one.

Thoughts on the British Museum

I started this almost a month ago in a cafe right outside the museum. Life’s gotten pretty busy since then, and I’ve just gotten around to publishing it now:

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the ancient Lycian city of Xanthos. The site sees relatively few visitors, and the 3 lira admission is only weakly enforced. In the couple hours I was there, maybe 4 groups of people showed up to look around. The city is far from being one of lesser sites in the area though; once the capital of the Lycian Leauge, the ruins cover several acres, and many buildings including an enormous theater are in excellent condition. The main boulevard stretches straight through the center of the town towards the mountains and still bears the wheel ruts and polish of heavy traffic. It’s as broad as anything you will find in Pompeii or Rome and points to the importance of the city in a region of wealth and abundance. The site stretches on for quite a ways down the road, leading past the ancient walls, and wrapping along the hillside towards the necropolis. Despite the number of buildings most are unmarked and only a few single sentence plaques denote the histories of individual monuments.

I was walking around a particularly dense area of foundations, when I passed a man in a newsboy cap with a large mustache sitting on a cornerstone. There was a modern city nearby and locals without much else to do often loiter around archaeological sites. I was staring at a hole in one of the foundations, trying to figure out its purpose, when he called out that it was connected to a still functioning cistern. He proceeded to show me the other holes in the foundations where sewers ran, and pointed out the spot up along the mountains from which the ancient aqueducts, still intact, led water down to the city, explaining through strained English that these Lycian sewers still supplied water for modern town down the hill. Seeing that he hadn’t scared me away yet, he offered to take me around the rest of the site, and led me through the ruins working through limited English to give me the best site tour I’d ever been on. He pointed out the sites of many of the public buildings, mostly unmarked, as well as the former sites of the temple of the Nereids, the tomb of Payava, and a cast replica of the frieze from the Harpy Monument, all now in the collection of the British Museum. We ended out by the necropolis as the sun was setting. I thanked him tremendously and offered him ten of the twenty lira I was carrying on me. He rejected my offer, and as we said goodnight and I geared up to go find a place to camp. I headed off towards the next village and he started down the road to make the several kilometer walk back towards home.

A month later on my way back home to the states, I’d given myself a one day lay over in London, primarily in order to see the antiquities from the regions I’d just been in, mostly housed at the British Museum. For anyone who’s ever been to the British Museum, they know the collection is overwhelming: the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, statues from Easter Island. And in this incredible museum built from artifacts from all over the world, in the center of the room I found to be the most impressive and overwhelming out of all them, stood the Temple of the Nereids taken nearly in its entirety from Xanthos. On either side of this room were two more large rooms each centered around objects from Xanthos. As I walked, hundreds of people came through each room, inspecting and taking in these monuments.  With all the people seeing these monuments, I was reminded of one person who never would: my guide who’d shown me around the city itself. Everyone in London was looking at objects taken from the place he hung around every day waiting to talk to people about his country’s past, and show them the homes of buildings that he would never get the chance to see. Struck with this I lingered around the temple before slowly making my way through the rest of the museum, populated by foreign objects.

By the time I’d left it was dark outside. I struggled through the crowd around the exit, and emerged onto the street. I didn’t feel like hanging around and set out in search of a bar or a cafe, but I was too anxious and kept walking past each place I came across. I kept walking, but the city was more anxious than I was, and the cars and lights did little to calm my nerves. Unable to outrun the city, I ducked into a cornershop, and headed for the basement to recuperate before heading back up to the streets, and one of the last nights on my trip back home.

Hold to the now, the here

The other day a friend of mine who has also been traveling for a while said something that struck me while we were taking a walk. He’d just come back to Istanbul after spending a month in western Anatolia and Georgia. He thought that a lot had changed since he’d left. One of the shops near his old apartment had closed and he’d noticed the streets seemed much quieter than they were in October. As we were talking we turned off the alley we were on and onto one of the city’s main boulevards. “Nevermind,” he said.”It’s amazing to think that every place you leave just continues going on and existing after you leave.”

This was far from a revelation, and he knew it. Of course places remain after you’re gone, and they don’t remain as static entities. They continue breathing, all their dynamic parts jiving and pitching in unconscious concert. It’s easy to project how the individual parts will continue moving. The fishermen will continue to crowd every pier. Kids in Fatih will keep charging tourists with toy guns and chants of “Hello! Hello! Money?” And every young person in the city will still go to drink and dance at Peyote*. Winter will come. People will abandon the streetside cafes which are so crowded right now. The tourist neighborhoods will slow down, and without seasonal jobs, people will return their hometowns until next spring.

New neighborhoods will be developed, rough parts of town will get gentrified. Develop, grow, change; cities are not statues. We know this. They burn and consume all the kinetic energy from millions of moving parts. Every Student, street vendor, and old man playing backgammon in teashops, covered floor to ceiling in white tile. The people only  passing through carry their own energy, and tourist areas try to catch as much of that energy as they can, drafting off the whiffs and snaring it in the form of dollars spent on hotels, carpets, and kebap.

Of course the city keeps on moving, all cities and places keep on moving, but what my friend was trying to say is, we forget this. When we look away they seem to stop and stand still, but that’s not really the case. Just think about them again and all that energy and motion is conjured right back up.  Since May there are so many more of these towns, cities, and landscapes in my head. Thinking of them all at once is an impossible feat of course, and when I try, it makes me shudder. The world is built on a much bigger scale than I will ever comprehend. But when I try now the picture I conjure is so much bigger than it ever was before, and even though I know how far away I am from my goal, it makes me feel better that in a non-infinite period of time, I am able to get that much closer.**

 

 

*Every new friend I’ve met in this city, and there have been many of them – Turks are very friendly to foreigners, has suggested that we go to this bar. Sure… it’s a cool bar, but in a city of 18 million people and in a district of hundreds of bars, I find it hard to believe, everyone goes to peyote.

** Right now I am watching an old man help two little girls play jump rope. Directly across the street, a family of cats are sleeping on the tin roof of the grocery store below. Istanbul’s tamed stray dogs keep passing by the grocer’s looking for scraps in the garbage, and people, dozens by minute, pass, in twos and threes under the balcony I write from. I am going to miss this city.

Homeward Bound

In less than one week I’ll be boarding my first eastbound flight on my slow trek back to the states. I’ll be arriving to a purgatory of sorts, since I’m leaving again for Israel and Africa in January. A month and a half is certainly more than a weekend stay, but it’s not exactly an opportunity to start looking forward. Staying places for only a month or two at a time is really starting to wear on me and it’d be nice to get a little more established somewhere. The drive to be productive has really been striking me lately, but I’m not ready to head back to the US for good yet. I’m worried that I’ve opened a pandora’s box of wanderlust and I won’t be able to satisfy either of these two forces without sacrificing the other.

When I leave again I’m not sure if I want to leave for two months or twenty, and that makes it pretty hard to decide what to do with my time when I get back. Do I look for a job in Neuro? Keep on trying to write?* If I decide to keep writing do I want to do it in the US or abroad? It’d be nice to work on a farm for a full season, but that’ll just leave me displaced again in another 6 months.

This all sounds pretty bitchy, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. Despite all these questions I’ve been feeling really good lately. I just got back from a month long hike along the coast of Lycia in Southwest Turkey. Camping out every night, I made my way along the coast weaving  in and out of the inland mountain range through large expanses of pasture and down exposed cliffs towards towns and isolated beaches below. Most of the towns along the route were small goat herding and beekeeping villages. Steady water is unreliable in the mountains making irrigation difficult and pushing most agriculture down towards the coast taking the people of these small communities along with it. Greenhouses and communities of cheap temporary housing have sprouted up all along the coastal lowlands and produce fruits and vegetable that find their way all over Turkey.

Away from these greenhouses and the boomtowns that have built up around them, the entire coast is littered with ruins. Lycia was a powerful and wealthy area in Greek and Roman times, but hardly at all afterwards leaving many of the ruins undisturbed and largely intact: whole cities shrouded in forest, and fortresses long since gutted on the inside and grown over. Much of what remains are funeral monuments. Lycians were meticulous about burying their dead and giant sarcophagi lurk in the underbrush around almost every turn. One city, Aperlae, has largely sunken underwater and overturned sarcophagi descend from the hills into the water, where some lie half submerged poking out of the reeds near the shore.

One of the more striking things about many ancient cities are there incredible locations. Set up on hilltops and ridges for defensive purposes, they have incredible views of the countryside and the ocean. One night, I camped in the ruins of the city of Belos, which sat 900m above the coast on a ridge overlooking the sea and was used as a refuge from pirates into the 6th century AD. I lingered in the morning, packing up my tent  while I watched the sun rise high over the mediterranean in warm oranges and reds. Another night I was at the eternal flames of Chimaera, a natural gas reservoir constantly burning and shooting flames out of holes in the ground.  Bellerphon is said to have defeated the Chimaera here. It’s easy to see this place as the setting for an epic battle, and it carries with it a strangely foreboding warmth, especially after the sun has set, and the flames light the hillside, dancing along barren rocks in warm eerie light.

The whole trek was a welcome escape from Istanbul, where I’d started to settle into the general malaise that seems to strike me in most cities. I’m enjoying being back for now though. I have some really great friends here, and sadly have already said goodbye to some of them as many people have returned to their hometowns this week for the festival of Bayram. With the city feeling empty it’s clear just how many people have come here to find work. Talking the past couple nights with friends going home to Eskisehir, Cappadocia, and Cyprus it’s clear just how much people feel for their hometowns, but underneath all these conversations lies the implicit assumption that they’ll never go back. The jobs just aren’t there. It seems if you’re serious about making something of yourself, you need to be in the city.

*This has not been going well lately. I’ve only finished 3 stories since coming to Istanbul. I’m pretty happy with the quality, but that’s just not enough output for 3 months where I was supposed to be writing full time. I’ve had distractions including a week in the US and month trekking in Antalya , but that’s still just not enough.

Still Kicking

It’s been nearly two months since I last checked in. Time’s traveled very quickly in those two months and it’s hard to believe all that’s happened in that time. For starters, I’m in Turkey now.  I have an apartment in a pretty hip neighborhood in the heart of Istanbul, and it looks like I’ll be staying here through november. I’m mainly here to try and sit down and write. I’ve had a couple ideas that have been floating around while I’ve been traveling, and it’d be great to get them down before they float away. This has meant a lot of time working in cafes, which thankfully my neighborhood has plenty of , along with antique shops. (Istanbul has this weird habit of sticking all the shops of a given type in one particular neighborhood. There’s an electronic district, a bakery district, even a music district. I happen to live in the antiques district.) Anyway, I’ve been getting a lot of “you’re where?” emails, so I thought I’d give a little update as to what I’m up to.

Since I last wrote here I’ve been on a bit of a whirlwind tour.  I left off in Venice just after leaving the farm, my home for two months. From there I  made my way up to Switzerland to meet up with an old friend before heading down to Milan to visit a new friend who lives there. After a couple days I took an eleven hour train down Naples, and quickly made for Amalfi and the coast, making sure to spend a day each at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Two days here, three days there, these were an exhausting couple of weeks and quickly taught me what pace was too fast for me when it came to traveling. After all this I was relieved to spend almost two whole weeks in Rome, putzing around the city with my friend Aaron, with plenty of time to stretch out my legs and take in the city in the way that I wanted to.

At the end of two weeks my friend J showed up and it was time to get on the move again. Travelling up to Pisa we caught a plain to Marrakech and spent two weeks working our way up North through Morocco, eventually crossing over the straight of Gibraltar and catching a train to Madrid as part of a pilgrimage to see the Prado. We flew back to Rome for a few days, and I picked up my luggage which I’d left at J’s apartment, much to his disgust I’d been travelling with a small backpack carrying 3 pairs of underwear, 2 shirts, and one pair of shorts to go along with what I was wearing the day we’d left. From Rome I caught a flight to Istanbul and have been here since.

There’s more to tell obviously. Morocco’s more deserving of a post than a sentence,  and there are many stories which have been left out along the way, but these and others will all have to wait for another day.

Ave Atque Vale

In the past two months, we’ve gone from laying irrigation lines and only beginning to plant entire fields to being well into the harvest. We’ve cut and bailed most of the property, staked several rows of tomatoes, and prepared for the ever delayed arrival of the new pigs. Obviously this wasn’t all thanks to my work, but I feel pretty good about the role I played in all of it. When I left yesterday , it wasn’t with a sense of accomplishment though, but a feeling of having things left unfinished. The season’s far from over and there’s much more to do. The pigs showed up yesterday 6 hours after   I left and 6 weeks after we’d expected them. My Italian’s finally beginning to shape up, and I’ve established enough of a foundation that I’m starting to hit the spike in that exponential learning curve. I wish I could stay out the rest of the season, but with my visa expiring in less than a month, I’ll just have to wait to resume the pastoral life until I get to Turkey.

On the plus side though, I’ll be travelling around Italia for the next 4 weeks or so before I return to work. Right now I’m writing from my hotel balcony in Venice. I can’t say the view’s spectacular, but it’s still my own personal balcony in Venice. I went touring through the markets this morning and it really made me wish that I had a full kitchen while I was here. The seafood market is incredible and carries so many different types of fish, many of which I could identify and many more which  I couldn’t.

The butchers  in Italia are incredible. While industrial food production has squeezed many less typical types of meat out of the market in America, many of these rarer meats are still readily available in Italy, where laws have protected small stores and their suppliers since the fascists were in power. With less people buying their groceries in supermarkets there’s more variety for all kinds of foods. This is especially apparent when it comes to meats. Since coming to Italy, I’ve been served rabbit, capon, wild boar, and horse (best eaten raw), all without trying to seek them out . After lusting after all the meats and fish I couldn’t cook, I got myself some cold cuts, cheese, and a bag of fruit (can you say local kiwi). The Italians are much less inventive when it comes to animals for their deli meats, with nearly all their sandwich meat coming from pigs except for bresaola which is a salted and smoked beef that costs upwards of 40 euro a kilo.

I ate my lunch beneath a tree in Campo San Polo, and then headed off towards the Academia and the arts district. As the crow flies the Academia is maybe about 400 meters directly south of where I was eating. In New York this would be a 5 minute walk, maybe 7 if there were some bad street crossings.  In Venezia it takes 20 minutes provided you don’t make any wrong turns, a caveat which is far from trivial if you’d like to look out from above your map every now and again. There are no through streets on the whole island, where every walk is conducted via the ducks and turns of narrow roads that are hardly distinguishable from alleys. Without any clear lines between different places, Venice is a city of points, connected by a maze of alleys and bridges that wind over and along the city’s many canals. The Grand Canal makes a large mirrored “S” through the island and is spanned by only four bridges adding to the complication and making these vertices key to the navigation of the many other disparate points. The buildings push in against the narrow streets, squeezing out sky, and at night their upper halves are lost and fade into the black above.  There are less piazzas or open spaces than in other Italian cities, as there is only so much room on an island has only so much space. This has a significant effect on the architecture as the streets and canals push you up against the buildings and prevent the type of awesome facade that characterizes the architecture of other Renaissance powers like Florence or Milan. In Venice the most magnificent buildings don’t overlook piazzas, but the canals. Domes litter the skylines around the Grand Canal where they can be seen over the congestion of the streets, and the Doge’s Palace, set against the one great piazza on the island fronts its best face to large ships in the Canal di San Marco.



The lay of the land

Hey team, the past couple of weeks have been pretty busy around here so I haven’t had time to put together any more posts.  Much to my chagrin, I’m only going to be staying on my current farm for a little more than week. I need to be out of Europe by mid August for visa reasons, and I’d like to try and see a little more of Italy before I leave. The good news though is, that I’m planning on holing up on the Amalfi Coast for a week just to write. Hopefully this will result in a coule more posts popping up while I’m there. Anyway, I wrote this a little while back, it’s not complete but I hope it paints a good picture of the farm for everyone:

Our property rests along 20 acres of hillside in the Taro Valley, 60 km south of Parma.  The steep incline of the hill effectively divides our farm into two parts, an upper and a lower half. The house, workshop, and trailer that I live in all sit on the upper end of the hill, while the fields, bees, and greenhouse we’ve been working on lie below. The Taro River runs along the bottom edge of the hill and marks the edge of our land. Over time the river has left the soil of the lower fields rocky and dry, making it difficult to plant in. Right along the river sits our largest field, where we have strawberries, tomatoes, squash, and zucchini. Just across the way from this, lies another smaller field further away from the river and its rocky soil. In this field we grow potatoes, onions, beans  and other vegetables which don’t require as much water. Above these fields lies a grove of saplings, planted last year, which will eventually bear apples, lemons, apricots and other  fruits. Below these  are our beehives, and just a little further down the path heading back towards the house lie the beginnings of the greenhouse.

The rest of the hill is divided into two large pastures, the one further to the right when looking downhill is shared by Elio, our donkey,  and two horses, while the other field to the left has been let to grow out and is where I go to cut grass for the animals (Since I first wrote this it has been mowed and bailed into neat little boxes). A path between the pastures has been beaten down by the tractor and leads up the hill to the house and our third garden where we grow herbs, lettuce, tomatoes and other foods which we use regularly in the kitchen.  Near the house is a workshop as well as a gravelled patio with tables and chairs that overlook the rest of the property. At the end of the patio there’s an old stone oven for baking bread and foccaccia. The view from the patio looks out across at the hill on the opposite side of the valley.  To the west sit two other farms before the hill slopes down into Pieve di Campi, the one street town below, which has half a dozen houses, a church, a World War II monument, and the belltower that chimes out the time as we work throughout the day. To the east the hills are covered in forest and slope up higher into what becomes the Apennines. Over the hills, low mountains shadow the edge of the horizon and add a hazy blue to the sunbeaten yellows and verdant greens of the less distant hills. For the past couple nights, the full moon has risen centered perfectly over this panorama casting a haunting, yellow pallor through the thick fog over the mountains. On rainy days, we can lose all but the nearest hill in this fog, and it stretches up into the dark clouds that coat the sky.  The mountains play a large role in the weather here. Being on the edge of the Apennines, the weather changes quickly and we always find ourselves on the cusp of a front. Storms come and go in the mid-afternoon, showing up on a whim, raging for twenty minutes, and then dispersing without leaving a trace in the sky, only the fresh droplets that coat every surface in sight.  At the higher altitude the effects of the sun alsoseem stronger, and during the days it can get insufferably hot, while at night the thin air makes it very chilly and I find myself having to bundle up tightly to fall asleep in my trailer. This still hasn’t stopped me from sleeping in the nude, but I’ve gotten in the habit of sleeping with both my blankets and a sleeping bag.

My trailer sits down a little path removed from the patio and the rest of the living space. I have a bed, two closets, and a sink without running water.  There’s  a small stovetop which I use as a nightstand since I take all of my meals in teh house and can use the kitchen when I cook. My living space is small with barely room for two people to stand, but it’s comfortable and I spend little time there during the day, when the trailer cooks in the sun, and it’s more pleasant to be on the porch or in the hammock which sits on the hill above my trailer. At nights when it rains the splattering of the drops on my roof is deafening and somehow manages to both excite me and then gently lull me to sleep.

Farm Lesson of the Day 7/5/10

If you get up at 4, you can get a whole day’s work in before lunch.

In Fattoria di Angelo e Simona Part II

Since the beginning of June, I’ve been working on a farm 60 km southwest of Parma. Most of our efforts go into growing fruits, vegetables, and herbs but we also run a bed & breakfast, keep bees, and even have a couple horses and a very talkative donkey named Elio. We recently fenced off some land and even put up a house for a few pigs, but their arrival keeps getting delayed. Right now I think we’re on week 3 of , “They should be here in ten days.”

My hosts, Angelo and Simona bought the farm a little over a year ago, after having worked ten years on another farm a few kilometers away. We’re still getting many of the very basic operations up and running, and a cold winter followed by a rainy spring have put us even further behind. When I first arrived there were very few plants in the ground, and our largest field didn’t even have irrigation lines. My first couple of weeks were mostly spent planting, fertilizing, and mulching. All the planting has really helped to familiarize me with everything that we grow. Since we refer to each plant in Italian, there are a couple of herbs and vegetables that I’m still not sure  I could match to an english name.

That brings up another topic, language. If you ask them, Simona and Angelo will tell you they don’t speak any English. What they actually mean by this is that they speak English better than I could ever hope to speak Italian. Still, this doesn’t mean communication is always smooth, or even always possible.  It takes a back and forth hodge podge of broken english and italian to communicate anything aside from very basic sentences.  If Simona weren’ so good at pantomime, sometimes i think we’d be completely lost. Despite this, I think we understand each other and we get along very well. They have many friends who are around all time, many of whom I’ve gotten to know very well. Between these friends, the guests at the B&B, and half a dozen or so trips off the farm, I’ve met quite a lot of people considering how otherwise isolated I’ve been.

Most days I get up a little before eight, and have a small breakfast. Tea, toast with jam that Simona makes, andsometimes a cup of yogurt. Afterwards I go out to cut hay for the horses, and work on my main project for the day. At first this was planting, but for the past few weeks, I’ve been weeding, working on the new greenhouse, staking tomatoes, and cleaning up some of the overgrowth with good old fashioned industrial weedwacker.  I tyically work with my friend Francesco. He is about 60, speaks no English but but has a  great sense of humor and would have made a great silent era comedian. Yesterday he unbuttoned his flannel with a smile to reveal a SEx Pistols t-shirt. At around noon Francesco and I stop and lay out in the shade for a while before Simona calls us for pranzo (lunch). Pranzo often has several courses and for the first couple weeks, I kept eating until I was full only to have another course come out. There’s usually some sort of pasta, salad or plate of salame and cheese, and often another course of meat after that.  I plan on doing an entire post on food soon,where I can try to do more justice to Simona’s excellent cooking. After lunch we break until 4, since the sun makes it too hot to work. At 4 I cut more hay for the horses and then start working on some smaller project, either planting a couple lines or picking strawberries or cherries. By 6 o’clock I’m done and have more down time until dinner. We usually sit down to eat a little after 8, and rarely get up before 9:30. Most nights dinner consists of the full italian menu, antipasta, primo, secondo, and dolce. I’m still getting used to 3 course meals, and Angelo worries that I don’t eat enough. If I’m not careful he’ll slap half a pound of cheese on my plate and say, “You work hard, you are hungry, manga!”

By the time dinner’s over it’s dark and i’ll head off to my trailer to read a little bit and go to sleep. For the first week my trailer didn’t have electricity and I was out with the sun. Now I’ll stay up and read for a little while, before going to sleep in order to get up early again the next day.

Farm Lesson of the day 7/1/10

Do not wear red when working near the beehives.