gogo shoe

The long and winding road winds down

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about my travels and I’ve been so many places in South America over the last three months it’s gonna be a bit hard to catch up. But it’s now or never as I’m sitting in the “salida de emergencia” row of the airplane on my way back to New York.
Karen and I spent the first month in southern Peru, which I found very inspiring and where I took tons of pictures that you’ve probably already seen as they’ve been up on my blog for two months now. Then we took the first of many super-long bus rides down to Chile and as I went through border control after waiting two and a half hours in line, I realized I had left my computer 17 hours behind me in Peru. Those of you who know me are likely not surprised and indeed may be wondering what took me so long to forget something so utterly important. You’ll be equally unsurprised to learn that I got it back, lucky dog that I am, two months later, hence the blog-lag. But there was a catch and that was that a kind fellow traveler from Japan did actually carry my laptop across the border only three days after I forgot it in Peru but she didn’t bring the charger with it, so I’ve had to carry the damn thing around with a dead battery for two months and only when I went back to Peru a couple weeks ago did I retrieve the essential cord. But that’s jumping ahead…
The funny thing about Chile is that even though it’s the tallest, skinniest, richest country in South America it’s got an inferiority complex. You can tell this by how many times people will tell you they’re the tallest, skinniest, richest country in South America. And as if that’s not enough, they also claim to have the driest desert, the saltiest lake and the highest, and the coldest, and the hottest you name it. And since they have it all, there’s no reason you should go to Argentina, they’ll say. “Besides, Argentines aren’t very nice, because they’re so jealous.” Someone actually said this to me. I couldn’t wait to get to Argentina. I figured it must be pretty awesome if the Chileans have to brag about their country so much. And IT IS. I love Argentina. I love the multi-colored jagged mountains, the giant trees and endless azul lakes. I love the solitude and freedom out in the middle of the pampas grasslands and the gaucho-cowboy-culture with their strut-stomp-swoosh dances and gourds of bitter mate. I love Buenos Aires, a mega-city cross between New Orleans, Madrid and some wild-west frontier town. I spent a couple of glorious weeks in Argentina on my own, camping by the side of the road under enormous skies, hiking up spectacular mountains with crashing glaciers and graceful condors. This is a marvelously civilized society where hiking in the wilderness is the national idea of vacationing. But forget about the burden of an overstuffed pack because when you reach the near summit of the popular trails, there will be waiting a cozy “refugio” complete with mattress’ and steak dinners under a solid roof that you won’t have to carry all the way there on your back! Now how genius is that? I got to go repelling for the first time, over the edge of an expanding crack of ice and down into the depths of a glacier formed when dinosaurs still munched on giant ferns…and each other. The ice was eerily blue with dirty swirls. My guide told me that the dirt was actually dust caught by the snow flakes as they fell a million years ago…Okay, I don’t know how long ago those snowflakes fell that formed that block of pre-historic ice but that was some old dust in the old ice I got to climb that day and it was thrilling.
Another great thing about Argentina is that it’s a country of middle-class people. Sure folks complain about the economy and their politicians are all…well political, just like ours but I never saw a gated community or someone sleeping on the street and the streets are clean besides…something you won’t find in other Latin American countries I’m sorry to say. It made me think about how very middle class I am and how glad I am for that and how thankful I am that I’ve never been without something to eat or someplace to live. After a month in lovely Argentina, I flew to Ecuador to meet up with Karen for our last three weeks in South America and it was there that my cozy middle class status bit me in the ass. There’s a greater gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in Ecuador and Peru and one of the ways that people even the playing field is by stealing from the “haves”. What I had was a sweet Nikon camera…but not anymore. So, friends these are the last pictures I can share with you from my trip but I hope to always remember how incredibly fortunate I am that I could outfit myself with cameras and plane tickets and travel the world for seven whole months…incredibly fortunate.

Identity Crisis

While I traveled through Eastern Europe, the first question people asked me was, “Where are you from?” I say New York…choosing to claim a popular region rather then my less than popular nation. Then they want to know my ethnicity. “I’m a mutt”, I tell them. The next question might be what religion I am. “I’m not religious, but I grew up Unitarian”. “Is that Christian?” “Sort of… the U.S. version is a mixture of beliefs but you aren’t require to believe in any of them” (this is a very foreign concept). “Well, what do you DO? What’s your job?” This is an uncomfortable question for me since ‘what I do’ is the part of my identity that I have most identified with and it’s in limbo too! But I have an answer that I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just make up to hang onto some semblance of identity. “I don’t have a job right now, I’m traveling for the year but I’m working on a project. I’m making a film about cultural and personal identity as expressed in textiles.” The only answer I have that identifies ‘Who am I?’ is that I am working on a self-motivated project about other people’s answers to the same question!

Culture is a universal element of humanity. We co-create language, costumes, cuisine music, art, and beliefs. Living within the roles of our culture’s framework, we have a place in that world and a sense of “who we are”. Culture is also inherently changeable. For instance, developments in technology give us new tools, new materials, new ways of communicating and meanwhile our roles change. And unlike our genetic code, cultural elements of our identity can change within one generation; even one single person could cross a cultural divide or inspire a change in her culture’s perspective.

I’ve been looking for an answer to my question of “who are we?” by visiting with and interviewing people who make things (specifically fabric) because I believe that in the act of creating we express ourselves and our culture. Textiles carry a lot of weight in the world of identity. Think of Gandhi awakening India’s national identity with homespun cotton, women burning their bras in the sixties symbolically destroying the idea that women are born harnessed to a narrow cultural role, and remember you can’t enter the corporate world, or religious sects without the right costumes on your back.

Europe is a cultural tomb of beautifully made and treasured artifacts of what was once vast cultural diversity. There were thousands of different styles of dress that are now only found in antique stores and museums. Nowadays, everyone looks alike in t- shirts and jeans with a cell phone for accessory. In Turkey, trucks make the rounds of the villages loaded with machine-made carpets that are traded for older carpets made by hand. Most women prefer the China-made synthetics to their dusty Turkish heirlooms.

We may one day have a universal culture but for the time being what we have is the replacement of enormous cultural diversity with nationalized cultures and “consumer culture”. The places where you do find traditional cultures still intact are the places where you’ll also find stateless tribes and people too poor to participate in consumerism. As soon I as landed in South America, I began to see this…vivid colorful cultures thousands of years old and people living with little else than the food they grew, the clothes they made and few choices for anything else. It seems to me that the people who have their cultural identity most intact are the poorest and that it's very hard to maintain a distinct style of dress or language without suffering from prejudice and lack of opportunity. Will we one day have a global family and if so, will diversity still exist?

Istanbul on a whim

All of the sudden I want to go to Istanbul. It’s been snowing in Romania and it feels like winter’s setting in for good. Plus, I’m afraid if I don’t go now, my dream of traveling there might slip away for another year or more or never. Almost in a panic, I buy a ticket at midnight for the next morning, set my alarm for four and make the flight at 6:30am. I wait eight hours in Bucharest for a connecting flight and when I land in Istanbul it’s night again. With only a few hours notice, I don’t have a couch surfing host yet and I don’t have a guidebook. But there are maps of the giant city (130km long) at the passport check and the metro line comes right into the airport. I head for what looks like the most touristy part of town. When I get off to transfer to another line helpful people seem to be at every turn. “Where are you going?” “Go that way. Do you want help with your bags?” The people on the street are 85% men and these guys not shy to ask me if I need directions and quick to return my smile. When I stopped in front of a restaurant to see if there’s an open wireless hotspot around the owner brought me some tea and while I pull out my computer, he pulls out a chair. This is Turkey.
This is the way Turkish people live and do business. They are truly helpful and very hospitable. So I have some tea and then order some food at the restaurant and when I’m finished, the waiter walks me to the tram stop, carrying one of my suitcases for me. A few stops later, I get off and I’m met by a fellow whose job is guiding fresh tourists to his hostel’s door. Why not? I have no idea where any are and I’m getting used to having some help with my bags. I know many people find this sort of helpfulness distasteful if there’s a possible sale involved but I’m a salesperson myself and I have to admit, I make my living as well, by being helpful or conversant to potential customers. Sometimes, charmed customers have become good friends too! So I just go with it and over the next week I make easy friends with Turkish people.

The songs of prayers over come the noise of traffic five times a day. Loud speakers positioned in a radius on the Mosque’s minaretes call and respond in deep male voices from the various towers. It’s a beautiful thing to hear and to be vibrated by prayer five times a day. I’m surprised to learn that many of the stories from Greek, Jewish and Christian mythology happened here. The temples of Artemis, the city of Troy, Noah’s Ark, the Olympus enternal flame, St. Basil, St. George and the early cave dwelling Christians, Alexander the Great and even Santa Claus was supposedly born here! Though 90% Muslim, the country is a bridge between the West and the East. Istanbul even straddles the continental divide of Europe and Asia and like the currents of the Black Sea and the Maramara churning between the two sides of the city, Istanbul is blender of Eastern and Western ideas.

Dracula, politicans and life in Romania

Brasov 11/6/07

Perched above a small cemetery in the Calvinist church guesthouse, I am watching two men hauling buckets of dirt up the steep steps toward the yard. It’s night and they’re working by lamplight while snow falls into the new grave. The in-town plots are so close and so old I wonder how there’s room for one more. “Probably stacking them one on top of another” is Karen’s answer. We are in Brasov, Romania in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and a few miles from “Dracula’s Castle”. Actually, Vlad the Impaler only spent the night here at Bran Castle and it turns out he wasn’t a blood sucking bat either but a tyrant with a big, sharpened stick.

Learning something of the history around here is similar. I hear one story and then another version seems to contradict the first. The only thing that might be agreed on is that it’s been hard, even gruesome to live here through the 20th century. The Hungarian/Romanian border moved over the heads of the people no less then three times in twenty years and then was closed off for fifty more behind the Iron Curtain. The three large ethic groups remaining, (Romanian, Hungarian and Gypsy), speak different languages and somewhat, sometimes don’t seem to trust each other. There’s a long history of backstabbing and bad blood.

My new friend Oliver Kiss is the editor of the Hungarian language newspaper in Cluj Napoca, Romania. He explained it with a joke. “A Hungarian and a Romanian are friends for twenty years. One day one of them says, “I can’t be your friend anymore for what your family did to mine in the revolution of 1821.” “But that was more then 150 years ago!” says his friend. “Yes well, I just heard about it yesterday!”

“… the executions, torture and reprisals that took place on both sides are enough to turn sympathy into a simmering hatred of an enemy that at one time was a fellow countryman. This kind of hatred can continue for generations.”

“I don’t like Canadian’s or Austrians. They say they’re easy-going but they’re boring”, so says Mihai. I’ve invited him for coffee in Budapest to ask him about traveling in Romania. We met on couchsurfing.com where I read in his profile that he has traveled extensively in the Balkans and is an avid music collector. He’s gruff, opinionated and easily offended by the owner of the restaurant who offers some suggestions of his own on our itinerary. “I am Hungarian but not as Hungarian as him” the restaurateur scoffs back and we are caught in the middle of a rapid exchange of insults in a language we don’t understand. The rest of the night Mihai discredits the man whenever possible. This sort of thing, on various levels, plays out over and again as we travel through Hungary and Romania. While everyone is relieved to be living free of the communist regime the different languages and ethnicity sometimes breeds nationalistic extremity. There is a tension and a fear that someone, some neighbor even, might take their identity away...again.

The lastest from Iceland's Pony Express

What's that prayer...? God grant me the will to change the things I can, some patience for the things I can't and the wisdom to not throw a $1200 laptop off the roof! This week, I learned a few more things about computers.

1. Files are modern day Tinker Bells. They can disappear and take all your work with them to never-never land when they feel like a good prank.

2. Portable, when it comes to computers, really is a Spanglish concoction meaning por (for) the table. Laptops are not really meant to be carried any distance farther then from the kitchen table to the coffee table. Attempts to take the laptop out of the house will be punishable with fines payable to the chiropractor.

Despite these rather harsh lessons, I managed to recover all the photo-files from Tinker-Bell's lair and to sit upright long enough to write some entries about our last two weeks in Iceland. Please click on "Iceland Tour" in the journal pages to read the stories and check out the pictures under the category "Iceland Tour Pictures".

If you want to make a comment that everyone can read, Great! Then add it here in "comments". If you want to send just me a message, Great! You can do that too by just clicking on the email link.

Also, there's a guest page by Karen...she did such a good job reporting on the phallological musuem in Husavik while I took the many pictures that will leave you all with a good feel for the place. Karen's a great writer and you can check out her blog at travelpod.com - search "rawhideone".

It's really great to hear what's up in your world and get some feed-back on the blog...Thanks for writing!

Okay, so my book is going to be called "Journey to the Center on the Earth or How I Finally Learned to Use a Computer By Spending Too Much Time in Transit". This web-site is testimony to the fact that anyone can set up their own blog if they carry around a lap-top everywhere they go and only go places that have wireless connect. Jeez...I never imagined adventure could be this analytical. But here it is...the travel-log I promised to deliver you all once I pried myself away from family and friends, roots and roost to go see for myself what the big world had to offer. Computer skills, that's what it's got! And lots of people who now speak English because they have computer skills too! I'm lucky I started with the language of these darn programs...if I had had to learn, say, German to be able to set-up the blog, you would not be getting a blog from me.

So, after two weeks of downloading pictures and spell-checking my journal entries...here it is..the first installment of the year. If you want to see photos, click on "Thorsmork/Iceland" under the categories and if you want to read my journal click on that. I will be adding more categories about fabric and also some of the things I learned about different places...maybe that will helpful to some folks. I hope so. If you want to recieve a notice in your email whenever I add a new post (about every three weeks) please subscribe!

Thanks for reading and sharing! Drop me a line, I miss you all and love to hear your news from home.

Be well,
Love,
Lisa