Oops, did I do that wrong?
Please note: I am deserving of applause.
Yes, you did read that correctly. I did indeed say that, basically, you should congratulate me.
Why?
Well... for the first since entering the USA, I managed to look the "right" way before crossing the streets, which actually is looking
left first. There is nothing
right about it at all... and only the other day I nearly got splattered when I stepped out thinking all was clear and, well, it wasn't.
So, word to the wise (or to the unwise...), be careful. One of the problems of moving all around is you get a little confused after a while, literally.
Beyond that... of all the places in the world I have been and lived or studied or travelled or... yeah, you get the idea... I have discovered that there is only one place that I am allergic to, and apparently, that is NY at the end of May when its hot and humid and the air is practically fuzzy from all the stuff floating around in it. Goodness. My eyes are watery and red; my nose itches; my throat hurts, and suddenly all those boring (though sometimes comical) adverts on the telly make sense.
And finally (for now...), I had a lovely discussion with someone this morning all about the Eurovision Song Contest (held in Helsinki this year and won by Serbia), and it was quite amusing, especially discussing the blatant politics of it all... Warmed my heart.
Ramblings of a Nomad...
Silence; I sit alone in the room--completely separate from the strangers typing away at computers on either side of me.
Sometimes you wonder what all life is about. Everything seems so pointless or confusing and we never quite manage to understand what goes on, or why. We hurt; we ache; we cry or refuse to cry. Those of us frightened enough run. Those of us strong enough run. In the end, we all run, yet somehow, we never can quite escape.
That's why we kill ourselves.
How else are we to escape from ourselve? From our lives?
Sure, there are other reasons for suicide, but this is at least among them.
Greatly among them.
I've been thinking a lot about life and being and time... Here I am, travelling around the world. It's been six months now, and I'm still going steady. Country to country, place to place. Six months of suitcase living. How delightful... How wearisome.
Sometimes I wonder why am I doing all this, and what is the point? Am I running from something? To something? What?
There has been a lot of discontent in my life; a lot of struggle. So also in the lives of so many of those whom I am very glad to know.
Something I read several days ago, while passing through an airport, actually, caught my eye and directed me to a passage in Ecclesiastes. (This, aside from the "time for everything" passage, has not been much frequented by me...) And I want to share this as I continue to think about it, because I cannot shake it from my thoughts...
"I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God's gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil." ~Ecclesiastes 3: 10-13, NRSV.
Now, this is something written by King Solomon, the wisest king ever to reign in Jerusalem and the son of King David. And it struck me so much that I'm now really looking again at the whole book. It's so nice to know that I'm not the only one who thinks like this; who looks at life and thinks how pointless everything is even when I have people telling me time and again how wonderful and rich (etc, etc) my life is. Because I look at it, and I look at other people, and I don't understand anything at all, and it all seems in the end, as King Solomon says so repeatedly in the chapter, to be such vanity. So pointless.
But then he says, despite all of this pointlessness... that our life day by day is something that we are able to take pleasure in. Here I spend so much of my time trying to figure out or understand what my life means or what is its point...and end up missing the joy of it. And this joy is a gift. It is not something that I should have to earn particularly, or something that comes and goes...but a constant; a given. A gift.
So here I am... sitting away typing... not having a clue how all my countries and cultures fit together when many times all they seem to do is war inside me... and smiling... because I'm starting to see that I'm the one making them war. I'm the one trying to do all the meshing. I'm the one trying to do...well, everything. I want to know, and to understand.
But I can't.
So why can I--can we--not sit back and enjoy the things that we are given... "the lot set before us," and be joyful anyways because we ARE?
I am. That is a present condition. We do not say "I was," nor "I will be," but "I am." That is the defining of ourselves.
Who am I, when all the extra stuff about me is blown off? When my likes and dislikes are discarded; when my emotions are removed; when culture is irrelevant; when there is nothing but the core being of me left?
I do not think that my being will be revealed with careful scrutiny or self examination... That will only be followed by self censuring and more self censuring and one day, I will be so censured that I will no longer be...me.
Who am I? It comes out in a laugh or a tear; in the arms of a friend or the hands of an enemy. It emerges ever clearer the more I embrace the goodness of life... If a painter sits and wonders what he is painting, the canvas remains blank. If he just begins to paint, the picture emgerges...
This is going to be an unsatisfactory post; I think it must be quite random sounding and it is not really finished yet. I have many more questions and many more thoughts, but I cannot quite reach that deep into my mind right now to retrieve them. But they will surface, and this will be continued another time.
But for now... Now I have the wedding of a friend in but a few days and another a week after that. I have meetings with professors whom I have not seen in six months. I have coffee appointments with friends I have so much to catch up and share with. I get to go swimming and enjoy a natural defiance of gravity. I have tan lines to get rid of and books to read and work to do in the office and the sky is blue and the sun is warm and the nature calls my name.
It is good to be able to go home wherever I go.
I am glad to be a nomad.
Jetlag and joys...
It is my humble opinion that jet lag is far worse flying West than flying East.
But I, for the first time in my life, have discovered that I thoroughly enjoy travelling alone.
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Next stop...??
I suppose that every once in a while it is a good thing to just stop and take a look at everything you have been doing... Well, I had opportunity to do so today, while enjoying a barbeque of spikachky (Slovak specialty--no idea how to describe it...kind of like a hot dog, but definitely not) out in the country. It was nice to be out of the city, to sit in the fresh air... to feel warm again for the first time since returning from Africa.
Goodness, it has been cold!!
(And wet...)
But today was bleutiful--I mean,
beautiful--and warm and sunny...
Sitting there, it was rather interesting to realise that I really have been doing a lot of travelling lately. I mean, I
know I have been--am--doing so, but I don't usually think about it... But this is what I realised...
Sunday, 22 April 2007 I was in Nairobi, Kenya.
Sunday, 29 April 2007 I was in Kampala, Uganda.
Sunday, 5 May 2007 I was in Budapest, Hungary.
Sunday, 13 May 2007 I just outside London, England (UK).
Sunday, 20 May 2007 (that's today...) I was in Bratislava, Slovakia.
To continue that trend...
Sunday, 27 May 2007 I will be in Pennsylvania, USA.
Sunday, 3 June 2007 I will be in New York, USA.
Sunday, 10 June 2007 I will be in either Indianna or Ohio, USA.
And finally...
Sunday, 17 June 2007 I will be back in Europe, potentially and probably in Slovakia... but who knows? I'm sure I don't!! But either way, that is 6 weeks of being in a different country each Sunday... 3 Sundays of being in different States... and technically, the week before being in Nairobi, Kenya, I was way far north in yet another radically different setting (though still in Kenya.)
That's a lot of places, even for me...
This week alone will find me in four different countries... Slovakia... Austria (meetings & hopefully visiting friends & my old secondary school)... England (short airplane layover)... USA (weddings of friends). Crazy.
Sometimes I wonder what it must have been like before airplanes and internet. The world itself has become so much smaller... but that really is because it requires our personal worlds to become so much bigger.
What I want to know is... do you ever reach a point where your world just cannot get any bigger? You just can't squeeze in one single more culture or worldview or friend or...
I find it all very stretching, but I do think rewarding as well.
What can I say? Next stop... Vienna!
Of Tubes & Chips & Still More Travells...
(Mark & I walking towards St. Pauls in centralish London)
There is in Tolkien's works a most famous of quotations...
"The Road goes ever on and on/Down from the door where it began./Now far ahead the Road has gone,/And I must follow, if I can,/Pursuing it with eager feet,/Until it joins some larger way/Where many paths and errands meet./And whither then? I cannot say."
And I find myself thinking about it fairly often these days with all the travells that I am taking. Sometimes I wonder just where that road first began... what was the door that pushed me out into this great big world? What began me on these endless wanderings?
I went into London town again today... Oxford Circus and Highbury... Wandered about the Camden Town markets with friends in the afternoon... Left them later on to do their grocery shopping and I instead strolled through Green Park, walked the length of St. James Park, past Trafalgar Sq, down to Embankment and along the Thames to Westminster before heading home.
And it was good to have that time with friends; good to wander about alone as well. With friends to relax; alone to regroup.
Tomorrow finds me on my way back once more to Slovakia; another home; another world.
Here in London I wander about quite free. No obligations or responsibilities visibly pressing on me; no anything save what I might choose. And as much as I do always find myself the stranger here, London really does seem more like my world than any of the others I belong to. Walking along today, my steaming hot salt and vinegar chips wrapped in paper in my hand (chips being fried potato wedges for those who don't know the term) and warming me up after a nice walk along the Thames followed by the looonnnngggg ride home on the Tube... I couldn't help but think, though, that as much as I do love this world, I don't know just how much I actually want to live here in the future. And I don't know that it would really make much of a home base to come back to, either... because it is so much in constant change.
And yet for now, as I do continue with these travells of mine; as I carry on this rootless lifestyle... I am making this my home base. It is the one actualy physical location, I think, that I will always come back to. My family can go anywhere in the world and I will always go home to them. But I don't think I will always go home to Slovakia, or the other places that they or I have or will live.
This is me wishing tomorrow weren't Thursday already.
London Times
London. City of Museums. Capitol of the world. Place where the stuff in your nose turns black...
And I am there. (So I guess that means I am "here.")
Yes, I am here.
Boat rides up and down the flowing Thames (That's pronounced "tems" for those of you unfamiliar with the river); picknics along its banks comprised of fresh fruit bought from a street vendor. Westminster... Big Ben... Trafalgar Square and the pigeons lurking about plotting all manner of evil against you... Waterloo & Victoria Stations... Kings Cross... Shakespeare's Globe... cozy, dark pubs...constant refils of English tea.
Walking once more along familiar paths... running again the roads which first taught you the habit... Revisiting favourite haunts and enjoys old tastes; what waking from a long winter's hibernation must feel like.
Friends. So good to meet up once more with friends. Want to memorize their faces; sear the moment and the time into memory. Never forget. Knowing that it is friends who make a place a home; friends who make a home a place to come back to. And each time you come back... there are less faces that you know. As one of my friends here famously said, London is an aircraft carrier; people are always coming and going in droves. But for each friend whose face has vanished into the fog of the city... vanished
from the fog of the city... there comes a new face to meet. A new face to learn and never forget.
Never forget.
A friend is someone you come home to, who makes home, who
is home...
It's funny how much you can fit into 12 hours of time; how much you can fit into 24 hours.
It's funny how much can change in 12 hours; how much can change in 24 hours; in one minute or one second.
Lean your head against the glass in the train; watch the scenery wash by. Running towards something or leaving something behind; saying hello or saying goodbye. The glass is half empty or half full.
Sit on the train and ride. Mile by mile; kilometre by kilometre--you use both.
Watch the rain droplets slide across the pane; look until you view is obscured by your own exhaling.
Your pain is your own doing; your decisions of your choice alone.
Walk along the river and let your teardrops mix with the raindrops rolling down your face. Let your tears fall with the rain pouring from the weary, heavy laden skies. No one in the sea of faces all around knows whether you cry for joy or pain. No one in the sea of faces notices you at all. You are just another face; it is just another rainy day; and these are London times.
Family or United Nations
Being back in Slovakia gives pause to wonder a little about some things. Like my family. The question is... what are we, really?
These last four months have seen members of my family--my immediate family--split up between five different countries at least twice. We have been split up in four different countries the entire month of April as well as a portion of February as well as a day or two scattered here and there throughout January, February, and March. We live permanently in three different countries. Or we did, anyways, for four months. But now I'm back in Slovakia, so it's just two different countries at the moment. Just two continents again instead of three. Just the northern hemisphere again instead of southern as well.
Of course... that won't last very long.
I returned to Slovakia a week ago last night.
My next younger sister returned from Hungary Sunday morning from studies there.
Tomorrow, my Dad travels to Romania for an extended business trip.
Friday, my next younger sister and I leave for London.
And so it goes...
With the travelling we have done in our family, we could circle the earth who knows how many times!!
It makes explaining family very...difficult.
Sometimes it makes understanding family difficult, too...When you were raised on an entirely different continent than your youngest siblings... Or they grew up in the city but you grew up on an island... What languages do you communicate in? Spanish? French? German? Dutch? Russian? Slovak? Papiamento? English? Elvish? (yes... we even have had some of that last one thrown in, too, thanks to LOTR fanaticism in the family...)
I don't know...
Our parents look at us and cross their arms and sigh. They have no idea where the people we fall in love with will be from, or what language they might speak...
We just laugh.
After all, you never know what is going on in the United Nations, no?
Ahoj!
Sunday, 29 April: stay up packing until 1:30am next day...
Monday, 30 April:
--depart Kampala by overloaded bus 5:30am for Entebbe airport
--depart Uganda & African continent at about 10:00am
--look out airplane window and see deep blue sky above and bright orange Sahara desert below... BEAUTIFUL
--watch "Last King of Scotland" and "Freedom Writers" on flight to London
--sat next to London journalist on flight and had great conversation covering four + continents
--arrived in London and said goodbye to my fellow students 4:30pm
--enjoyed the thrills of repeating shops of Heathrow airport and purused some fifty book covers waiting on my next flight
--depart London for Vienna at 7:15pm
--wished I could sleep
--arrived, collected my bag, and went out and saw my family!!
--drive across the border to Slovakia
Tuesday, 1 May: National Holiday here in Slovakia.
Today--as yet unwritten. :)
It's so good to be back here... not quite over the shock of it all, though. It's strange to see all white people again, strange to hear Slovak once more... strange to eat icecream again!!! I can't believe I haven't enjoyed Slovak icecream since 2005. Kai! That's far to long to have the best icecream in the world!!!
Amazing things:
washing machines. I have a load in right now and it's a shock not to wash everything by hand after doing so for four months...
bread. We defintiely didn't have much of that during the last four months, either... except in Rwanda, where we ate French bread all the time...
temperatures: I'm freezing to death here! Kai! It's spring but it's so cold to me now!!!
