with water and with stars

2007-07-16T13:31:00.000-05:00

By the time my feet touched Irish soil, it had been six months since I’d been in an English-speaking country. Even so, when the letter “h” is “haych,” the word “film” has two distinct syllables, the remark “oh, it was great craic [‘crack’]!” can be heard in polite company and Republicans have my respect and admiration, there is no mistaking Ireland for the United States.

I spent a couple of weeks in the South (the independent Irish state that includes 26 of the island’s 32 counties), then went north to Belfast (the capital of the British-controlled six counties that make up “Northern Ireland”) for the remaining month of my trip. It had been three years since I was in the North, and this time around I had a Yale grant to do a news photography internship at a newspaper in the overwhelmingly Catholic and Republican community of West Belfast.

American press coverage of the situation in the North has too often had a decidedly pro-British bias. It depicts the British army as a neutral force in the conflict, and condemns the IRA for “terrorism” while remaining silent on violence by Loyalist paramilitary groups supported and often tipped off by British agents. It attempts to explain away “the Troubles” as senseless sectarian tribalism (Catholics and Protestants killing each other for no other reason than for belonging to the opposing group)--dangerously ignoring the complexity of Ireland’s status as one of the first, and one of the last remaining, colonies in the British Empire-- and the discrimination, violent intimidation and denial of civil rights that this status has entailed for its non-Protestant subjects.

If the specter of the modern “Troubles” in the North of Ireland dates from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the roots of Republican-Loyalist antagonism are deep. I will spare myself the task of writing an extensive history of the British presence in Ireland, but to give you an idea I will point out that the still highly contentious, often violent, Loyalist marches through Catholic neighborhoods every summer celebrate a military victory that took place in 1690, and that when Belfast’s City Cemetery was built in 1869, a 3m deep underground wall was constructed to ensure that Catholics were separated from Protestants, even in death’s decay.

During my time in West Belfast I lived with a wonderful and amazingly hospitable couple, whom I’ll call Tim and Eileen, and their four children. After months of staying in hostels, it was a pleasure to live with a family again: the boys, aged seven and ten, who watched soccer matches bouncing on their feet in excitement with their eyes just inches from the television; the girls, aged eleven and fifteen, singing Rihanna songs in their pink rooms. There was the Sunday morning when I was woken by the plaintive cry of “Mummy can we never have ONE DAY off from Mass?!”; and the night when the youngest boy asked me to show him in his atlas coloring book the places I’d visited (“Have you been to Barcelona?” Yes. “Have you been to Celtic [Scotland]?” No. “Have you been to Alligator?” His finger rested on Algeria.)

The night I arrived in Belfast, Tim and Eileen had another couple, their friends since childhood, over for dinner. As the sun sank and the kids played soccer in the backyard, the adults started to reminisce, as adults will after several bottles of wine. Eileen remembered when her family was chased by Loyalist mobs which burned the family house to the ground along with those of the other Catholics on the block--leaving her, her parents, and her twelve siblings homeless on the curb. She remembered how after that, two of her brothers joined the IRA—and how her parents didn’t want them to, but they could understand why they did. She remembered how the only time her mother slept well over all those years was when her sons were interned, because while she knew that the guards beat them viciously, they were unlikely to kill them. (The two brothers were eventually sentenced to long prison terms—25 years for one, “natural life” for the other.)

Eileen remembered the British soldiers in blackface who kicked in the door of her family’s house nearly every other night looking in every room for her brothers before they were interned--and after they were imprisoned, looking simpley to terrorize the family. She remembered how she and her older sisters would go out into the streets to protest during the day, banging pots and pans at the soldiers, and how her youngest sister, Mary, would mostly stay in the house, because the raids made her so anxious and scared.

The man they’d invited remembered growing up with “involved men” (IRA volunteers) hiding out in his house each night, and making bombs at the kitchen table. He remembered the iced lollies, meat and crisps all the neighborhood kids used to grab from the hijacked delivery trucks during the riots that erupted in 1971 when the British interned 342 men (all but a handful of them Catholic), imprisoning them without trial.

His wife remembered watching her father get shot before her eyes, and watching, too, when fourteen-year-old Mary was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by a British soldier, unprovoked. In Long Kesh the following day, the prison governor summoned Eileen’s brothers into his office. “Do you have a sister called Maria?” he asked them. It’s Mary, they responded. “Yeah, well she’s dead.”

Auntie Mary, I would learn, still faithfully attended every family gathering. She was in the framed pictures on the wall and on the mural on the side of the brick apartments just a few blocks away; she was the namesake of the niece who described excitedly the new apartment she was preparing to move into, the niece who saw the end of the Troubles, and has already outlived her aunt by twelve years.

The Belfast Mary lives in is very different from the Belfast in which her aunt, her namesake, was murdered twenty-six years ago. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement announced the end of the war (if not necessarily the hostilities). And in May of this year, a devolved assembly was reestablished at Stormont with Ian Paisley--a man who once stood on a truck with a bullhorn urging on the Loyalist mobs who burned down Eileen's family home—as Deputy First Minister , doing what he swore again and again he would never do: sharing power with former high-ranking IRA man and Sinn Fein politician Martin McGuinness.

For those of you unfamiliar with Irish politics, the sight of Paisley and McGuinness working and even laughing together publicly might have seemed, not so very long ago about as likely, in an American context, as Strom Thurmond and Malcolm X draping daisy chains around one another’s necks.

But in Belfast today Loyalists and Republicans are indeed sharing political power.

In staunchly Republican neighborhoods the long-resisted, Protestant-dominated police force (recently renamed the PSNI) is patrolling again for the first time in years, with Sinn Fein’s support.

Along the top of the deep green hills from which Tim remembers that Loyalists would fire shots into his neighborhood, his youngest son rides his training-wheeled bike down a recently-completed hiking trail.

At family gatherings Eileen’s brothers, once condemned to 25 years and “natural life" are in attendance. Thanks to the prisoner releases stipulated by the Good Friday Agreement, they laugh and drink with their wives, siblings and cousins. And when their youngest nieces and nephews ask them why they were in prison, they’ve been known to say, ashen faced, that they were caught smoking cigarettes on the bus.

In Eileen’s backyard her sons play soccer, and she says to me simply, “Thank God our kids don’t have to go through what we went through.” They will grow up in a house where no one is making bombs at the kitchen table; and while they will know about their Aunt Mary, of course, Eileen will have the luxury of not having to discuss politics with them unless (until) they ask.

In Belfast today Eileen’s youngest son climbs all the way inside the army-themed laundry hamper that he’s dragged into a corner of the kitchen, his eyes just visible peeking mischievously over the top while his older brother stalks the house with a toy revolver looking to hunt him down. As Eileen explains what she means by “what we went through” (burned-out house, imprisoned brothers, blackfaced soldiers, dead sister) her youngest son catches my attention with a forcefully whispered “Psssssssst.” I look over at him. “Do you see anyone out there?” In Belfast today I lean back in my chair, take a wide look around and whisper back: “I think the coast is clear.”

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was.

But still, there are the death threats against the Republican ex-prisoners-turned-black-taxi-drivers accused by Loyalist paramilitaries of spying in their neighborhoods while dropping off passengers. There are the 12 July bonfires where, in Coleraine this year, Loyalists placed the name of a 16-year-old Catholic boy recently dead of a heart attack on top of the pile to be burned (next to effigies of Gerry Adams and the Pope), and when the boy’s grieving father climbed to the top to retrieve it, he was issued a death threat. There is the Orange Order march where a banner commemorating Ulster Volunteer Force man Noel Kinner was unveiled when the procession reached the spot just yards from where Kinner once murdered a Catholic father of three.

There are the visual demarcations of turf: the Union Jacks and red white and blue curbstones in some communities, and the tricolors and IRA graffiti in others. There are the ironically named “Peace Walls” that divide the two communities and the fact that while more and more of them have been built since the trumpeted end of the Troubles in 1998, not a single one has come down—a troubling reminder that peace is distinct from reconciliation.

And what, after all, is meant by peace? If peace is, as Einstein put it, “not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice,” than Belfast (along with many, if not most, places in the world) may yet be far from it. Which is why when I asked Eileen how she felt about seeing the PSNI patrolling her neighborhood again, she sighed and said “It’s hard. For a lot of people, it’s just too soon. Sinn Fein, they expect you to walk down the street and look [the PSNI officers] in the eye, they really do. But I just can’t.”

She can’t because although the name and uniform of the police service has changed, and although they are taking steps to recruit more Catholics, Sinn Fein is asking its constituents to look to the very people who terrorized Republican neighborhoods for decades suddenly to protect and serve them. “For me it’s too soon. It’s hard to change when they don’t—and a leopard doesn’t change its spots. I don’t want anything to do with them—because of Mary.”

Because no one was ever prosecuted for Eileen’s sister’s death, just as no one was ever prosecuted for the deaths of so many civilians on both sides. Because despite the reports of external international commissions confirming the existence of collusion between the British Army and Loyalist paramilitary groups, the British government continues to obstruct investigations and prosecutions in the highest profile cases (notably the murder of lawyer Pat Finucane, which Amnesty International cites in its report finding that the United Kingdom “continues to erode fundamental human rights”).

Belfast today is not the Belfast that was, and thank God that Tim and Eileen’s children will not have to go through what their parents did. But they will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

Across the North Protestant and Catholic communities alike are plagued by a growing epidemic of suicide, with 57 people already having taken their own lives so far this year in West Belfast alone (a community of only about 90,000).

Residents complain of “anti-social behavior” (drinking, arson, vandalism, racist attacks) among gangs of youth. One afternoon I photographed residents who live alongside a nursery school playground where janitors have to quickly clean up the remains of the night (underpants, broken bottles and used condoms) every morning before the kids arrive. As the reporter and I turned to leave, an old woman shouted to us from the front yard of her house: “See the peelers [cops]? They haven’t shot enough of [the teenagers who’ve been partying at the school at night]. Tell them they should shoot them all.”

With the PSNI only halfway patrolling the Republican neighborhoods where they are only halfway welcome, and with the Provisional IRA (which policed Republican neighborhoods very effectively, if unofficially, for decades) having officially given up violence, the resulting vacuum is being exploited. In the Ballymurphy housing estate, a feud between two families has been linked to 600 criminal incidents, ranging from arson, to murder, to the nighttime leveling of a house with a stolen bulldozer. So for the residents of these communities plagued by crime, there is little peace in peacetime Belfast. As someone wrote in an anonymous letter to the editor that referenced the IRA’s former favored form of punishing criminals, “bring back kneecapping!”

Drug abuse is another problem claiming more and more of Belfast’s young. On one morning I sat with a reporter in the darkened parlor of Mrs. McVeigh’s house as her fifteen-year-old daughter Ashling, who choked on her own vomit while on ecstasy, lay in a wooden box covered by cards just feet away. “She was the heart of this family,” Mrs. McVeigh told us as Ashling smiled from the framed photographs on the mantle. “She was our whole world in this house. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go on.”

She lifted a couple of the cards from the coffin and handed them to us, explaining that the ones we were holding were from Ashling’s Protestant friends. Ashling was a popular kid, popular with everyone, and when she started going to the Protestant neighborhoods to see her friends, her mother was worried that it wasn’t safe for her there. “But Ashling just couldn’t understand what all this bad blood was between Protestants and Catholics,” she told us. “All her wee Protestant friends came by last night and you should’ve seen them. They loved her.”

Ashling bridged the sectarian divide only to die from a drug overdose—a fitting poster child for the complexities of peace, sealed up in a polished wooden box.

Tim and Eileen’s children will have to grapple with things their parents did not.

When the eldest daughter asks about politics one night at dinner after the younger children have gone away, her parents will struggle (understandably so) to explain cogently a war half won and a country half free. “Is the IRA still around?” The Provisional IRA isn’t, but the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA splinter groups are. “Are Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams mates now?” No, not exactly. “And Ireland, Belfast, is part of Britain?” Yes, right now it is, but we want a united Ireland. “So I’m a British citizen then?” No. No, don’t ever say that, you’re Irish. “Is the war going to start again?” No. “Well how do you know?” It’ll never be as bad as it was. You have to work through politics now if you want to change things. War is a very bad thing. “But the IRA wasn’t bad, was it?” No, because the IRA was fighting for our civil rights and our freedom. “So if you’re fighting for your freedom then war is okay?”

In Belfast today peace—even peace without reconciliation, even peace without justice—is better than war. So in reply Tim said to his daughter, because he knows it all too well: “look, it’s not a pretty thing standing over coffins.”

And now I've come to the end. Over seven and a half months I’ve passed through three continents and twenty-five countries. When I arrived at American immigration and was handed a customs declaration directing me to list the “countries visited on this trip prior to U.S. arrival” in the space of about two inches, all I could do was laugh and write down three or four of the least offensive ones. It’s been a hell of a trip.

I realize that a lot of you thought I was crazy to travel around the world by myself, and from the beginning I could see your point. Maybe it was the fact that the recurring sentiment nearly every one of you expressed to me in our goodbyes was “please don’t die,” or maybe I was just being realistic, but before I left for this trip I was really scared. Scared enough to write letters to friends and family in case anything happened to me. Scared enough to pack a knife.

The letters are still unopened, and the only person I cut with the knife was myself (making a sandwich). When I think about the people I met, the kindness I was shown and the fact that I have seen more of the world in twenty years than most people will see in a lifetime, I feel nothing but overwhelmed, humbled and fortunate beyond measure.

Maybe I was crazy to do this trip, but given that I could, I would’ve been crazy not to do it. I may have come to the end for now, but traveling is no cure for a longing to travel—it only makes it worse.

Two days before I left early last January I had a strange dream. As some of you have heard me complain about how outrageously boring my dreams usually are (sipping a mug of tea, turning the pages of the newspaper, and the like), I thought I should pay attention to this one. I was sitting on a long flight next to two of you, and the plane suddenly split open like a Christmas cracker. As all of the passengers hurtled to the ground I realized that the plane had been equipped with parachutes under every seat, though I hadn’t known to grab one before I’d jumped from the wreckage. As I fell faster and faster, as I braced myself for the impact and awaited my certain death, one of you reached out and pulled me in, deployed the parachute attached to your back and guided both of us gently to the ground.

It's a crazy thing to think you can travel around the world; to show up in places where you don’t know a single person and sometimes don’t even know the language and expect, even depend on, finding a welcome.

And the fact that it worked says something desperately good about a world that so often seems so desperately bad.

This trip was a crazy and presumptuous thing to do, and I knew it even before I left. Which is probably why I dreamt what I did, that dream about manmade wings melting in a too-high flight.

I can say two things equally: that I have missed all of you for every day of the past seven-and- a-half months, at times so much that it physically hurt; and also, that this trip has been the best time of my life. No matter how often you wrote, and no matter how long I took to write back, please know that I simply would not have been able to do this without you guys.

So thank you for letting me wander so far—and above all, thank you for reaching out to pluck me from freefall, bring me home.

Love,

Fitz

2007-07-13T21:57:00.000-05:00

Still, there is no place in the world quite like Paris (and I've looked).

With my transportation fortunes brightening rapidly, I took a train (!) from Istanbul to Athens (towering mountains, shepherds and sheep, a Thessaloniki thunderstorm), and then an airplane (!!) from Athens to Paris.

In between, I spent a day alongside throngs of tourists in Athens seeing the Acropolis and assorted other old shit that left me, if you can't tell, a bit cold. Someone’s bound to point out that I'm a History major. Let me live.

When I was seven I had a calendar of photographs from the Greek Isles, and I've never forgotten the deep blue of the ocean in those pictures. Inspired by these memories, I took an eight hour ferry to the island of Santorini to stay for five days.

Every day in Santorini I stayed on the beach until the last light finally disappeared around ten in the evening. I swam, read a long book and otherwise did as little as possible. No place looks how it does in calendars, but Santorini does (with the exception that on one afternoon there was a visiting karate team whose members were jumping from iconic white roof and blue-domed church to another— an innovative variation on the theme just in time for the 2008 calendars).

I could go on fawning for several paragraphs, but it should suffice to say that Santorini is stunning, and that the ocean was blue enough to satisfy even memories formed at the age of seven-- the peak of the Crayola years, when one is particularly attuned to bold colors (box of 64, not a poor man's 8-count)-- and not impressed by just anything.

Since I have the obscene privilege of having been to Paris three times before, I didn’t arrive this time around particularly wanting to climb the Eiffel Tower, see the view from Notre Dame, or visit the Louvre, though these are all perfectly pleasant things to do.

This time around, I just wanted to know if Arthur and Henri were alive. Because if they were, I needed to bring them back into my life.

I met Arthur and Henri on a miserably hot July day four years ago. It was the last day of the Tour de France, when the riders enter the capital and complete eight laps around the length of the Champs Elysee before a winner is finally named. It’s an event that draws immense crowds every year, and any cycling aficionado knows that in order to get in a good position to watch the final stage, you need to arrive at around six in the morning. I’m not a cycling aficionado, and if nothing else I’m a sleep aficionado, so I walked up to the boulevard at 3:00 in the afternoon, half an hour after the riders were scheduled to arrive.

I managed to push my way through the crowd to climb up onto the window ledge of a bank building. An old man and a boy were already standing there, having recognized the rare perch from which, if you could remember to hold on and manage not to get heat stroke, you had a decent chance of not falling to death or disfigurement. But if we could breathe a little more freely than the people down below, none of three of us on the ledge could see the race any better from where we were standing, and soon we were a bit starved for entertainment.

Within fifteen minutes twelve-year-old Arthur and Henri (his father, but at 68 old enough to be his grandfather) had struck up a conversation. Over the next three hours we had glimpsed, two times (through the crowds, behind lampposts, through the branches of trees), what may or may not have been Lance Armstrong’s yellow jersey, and in the long periods of waiting in between, we had discussed everything from Eminem, to my high school soccer team’s training regimen, to a comparison of conditions for cows on dairy farms in the United States and France. (I would later learn that both Henri and Arthur have a charming and inexplicable affection for all things cow.) When the race was over we exchanged addresses, said goodbye fondly and went our separate ways.

It had been a lovely encounter but I didn’t expect to hear from them again. However a few weeks after my return to California I had a card bisected into two halves by a hand-drawn line. The top half was filled with Henri’s small, idiosyncratic and semi-legible script, the bottom half with Arthur’s loopy cursive misspellings.

From that first short card, our correspondence continued consistently for three years, with Henri and I exchanging letters that were often three or four pages long two or three times a year, and Arthur sending postcards from his summer vacations. I wrote to Henri about applying to colleges and the debacle of the 2004 elections, about my travels in Northern Ireland and India, the devastation in New Orleans, and my despair at watching Zinedine Zidane get ejected from the World Cup final.

On blue construction paper, lined paper and Christmas cards, Henri wrote to me about the books he was reading, the progress he was making (or not making) on his paintings and collages, the rioting in the Parisian suburbs, the French reaction to the American elections, the trouble he had getting Arthur to clean his room, and the brief news report he’d seen on French television that had shown footage of Yale (they’d looked closely, but hadn’t managed to spot me).

He wrote to me about many more things in moments when his handwriting became so loosely formed as to be illegible. If you’ve ever walked into my room and seen me holding a letter two inches from my face, then holding it at arms length trying to catch the light in just the right way, chances are I was trying to read one of Henri’s letters. Henri was too old, and Arthur too young, to want to give up our letters for e-mails, and in the end it was better that way. If half of what Henri had written was routinely indecipherable, the thought and care he had put into each letter was plain.

Two years after our first meeting I was going to Paris again, so Arthur and Henri sent me their phone number and told me to call them up. On a Saturday afternoon I took the metro to their small apartment not far from the Eiffel Tower, and Henri drove us to the field where Arthur’s soccer team was halfway through a game. We watched the second half and then the three of us went to lunch in Chinatown, wandering through the bazaar afterwards, sizing up the jade lions and wooden snakes.

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and we wandered through the street market nearby, had a cup of tea at the bistro on the corner and visited Henri’s artist friend who, scandalized, recounted his recent run-in with the Parisian police (he had been hanging around his gallery one night in dark clothes and a Batman mask, and a passing pedestrian had reported a robbery in progress).

They told me to call them the next day and I did. I took the metro to their apartment and during Arthur’s lunch break from the school he attended a couple blocks away, we quickly ate the three course meal Henri had prepared. Arthur ran back to school, Henri and I had another cup of tea at the bistro and browsed through the selection at the bookstore next door to their apartment.

I flew back to Yale the next morning, and the long letters kept arriving a couple times a year; each semester, not long after finals were finally over, I wrote them long letters back.

And then, about a year ago, the letters stopped. Since it was not unusual for several months to go by between them it was awhile before I noticed. I rummaged around for the last thing I’d received from Henri, a quick postcard from a vacation promising a long letter once he returned to Paris the following week. Alarmed, I wrote him and Arthur a letter and waited, but nothing came back. Months later I wrote another short note, but still nothing.

After nine months had gone by without any news I would periodically type their names into Google or the websites for Parisian newspapers, worried that they had been killed in a car accident, or that Henri might have had a heart attack-- he would have been 72 by then, and if he had, in fact, died, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Arthur had been unable to reply to any of my letters . Dozens of scenarios ran through my head, but there wasn’t much more I could do to find out what had happened to them from the other side of the Atlantic.

I had long ago misplaced their phone number, so not knowing what else to do, on the morning of my first full day in Paris I got on the subway and went to their apartment. The bookstore Henri had taken me to years ago seemed as good a place as any to start. A somewhat surly older man was sitting behind the desk and when I asked, he told me that he did know Henri. “Do you know if he still lives next door?” The man asked me how I knew him, and I told him I was his American friend. “Yeah, he’s still next door.”

The surly man went back to his accounts. “If I leave you a note would you mind passing it on to him when you see him?” The man shrugged: “If you want.” At the end of twenty minutes at the back of the bookstore painstakingly writing out a letter to Henri in French, the surly man’s cheerful wife walked in the bookstore, exchanged a few words with her husband, and walked over to me.

“Are you Maura?” she asked me excitedly. I was. “Henri will be so glad to know you’re here, he’s told me all about you. He’s in the hospital right now, he had an operation on his eye and it got horribly infected.” I shot a quick glare at surly man in the corner, crumpled up my nearly finished letter and, despite myself, I broke into a relieved smile. The woman had already dialed Henri’s hospital room, and she thrust the phone into my hand. Within seconds Henri’s voice was at the other end of the line, shocked to hear from me, but evidently delighted when I asked if I could stop by during visiting hours. By the time I’d hung up the phone the woman at the bookstore was passing me a hand-drawn map with directions to the hospital.

Two hours later I walked into Henri’s hospital room. I found him sitting in a chair by the window wearing a bandage over one eye, but otherwise looking like a relatively healthy 72-year-old man. On the bed beside him there was a book on astrophysics, and another book, lying open and already half-read, entitled Why Cows Can’t Go Down Stairs.

He smiled warmly when I walked in, offered me a chair, and immediately launched into one of his characteristic speeches that went on, with only minimal interjections on my part, for nearly an hour and a half-- about health care, anarchism, the menace of Nicolas Sarkozy, and the wonders of cows and the cosmos. And then, finally, he got to why he’d stopped writing.

He was terribly sorry, the last year had been very hard with Arthur, who was going through a rocky adolescence. The last time I’d seen Arthur he’d been a rosy-cheeked and particularly sweet-natured thirteen year old, if a bit shy, and I wondered what kind of trouble he could have gotten himself into in two short years. Henri told me that Arthur had spent half of the school year in the bistro across the street, or riding his moto around, smoking cigarettes and staying out with friends every night until 2 AM. Henri is already acutely philosophical and sensitive in disposition, and since he's retired he has all the time in the world to worry about Arthur, his only child.

In the latest episode, not a week before, the police had called Henri into the neighborhood precinct to collect Arthur after he’d been arrested for tagging. The building he’d chosen had been slated for demolition anyway, and Henri conceded that the police might have shown his son some leniency-- had Arthur not made the small mistake of informing the officers that he refused to answer any of their questions until they asked them in proper French.

As I’d always been charmed by Arthur’s frequent and often egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes (and had never envisioned him the future academicien he now, apparently, would style himself to be), I couldn’t help but see a good deal of humor in his classically French declaration. Still, I did my best not to show it, because Henri was clearly worried to death about his son. He told me that in the last year he had stopped painting-- had stopped everything, really. He had gotten my letters and had started to write back a couple of times, but he'd always stopped not even halfway through. He just couldn’t do anything. We talked for an hour longer, and when I finally stood to go, I told him that I hoped he’d write to me even if things weren’t going well. Henri smiled, promised that he would, and told me how happy he was that I had come.

Having successfully tracked down Arthur and Henri, I spent my remaining four days walking around Paris the best way I know how—with no plan and all the time in the world. Because when you don’t have a plan in Paris, things just happen; because to try to mold the greatest city in the world to your will is hubris.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because if you climb up on a window ledge, you will climb down with two friends; and if you lose them, just come back—Paris will find them.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because the woman selling olives in the marketplace scowls when you ask for a second sample (how could you not be familiar already with the over two dozen varieties she has devoted her life to selling?) And because the woman who sells you the slice of spinach and cheese tart gushes (after the sale has been made and the money handed over and nothing other than the purest appreciation for her metier could have inspired her to say it): “magnificent … she [the tart] is just magnificent!”

Paris is the greatest city in the world because there are streets named for a dragon, a wooden sword, the four winds, mules’ tracks, the “honest bourgeoisie” and something called “looking for noon.” And because on one of these streets there is a stroller stopped mid-sidewalk, sending passing pedestrians on a detour onto the road because its two-year-old occupant is down on his hands and knees drawing with chalk (because there’s no helping when and where inspiration deigns to strike).

Paris is the greatest city in the world because a scoop of pear Berthillon ice cream is simultaneously exactly what a pear tastes like, and better than any pear that ever could have graced this earth; because the petit pain figue noix at Poujauran bakery is handed to you still warm; and because while you sip your mint tea from a glass in the salon of the city’s main mosque on a rainy day, little birds land on the chairs nearby and flit in and out of the brass Moroccan lamps overhead.

Paris is the greatest city in the world because on an evening dubbed La Fete de La Musique, bands take to street corners in every neighborhood across the city to play free concerts (classical, jazz, indie, klezmer, tango, punk, drumming, Piaf standards, Scottish bagpipes and covers of the Clash)— some of them decent, the rare two or three good, a good deal of it horrendous, but taken together something wonderful and unexpected. Because as I walked away from the boisterous public sing-a-long attended by over a hundred people in the corner of the Place des Vosges (balding guitar man in the center of the crowd flinging stacks of xeroxed lyrics into the air like confetti before each song as hands shot up to snatch the lyrics as they fluttered down), I was almost knocked over by two teenaged girls chasing a runaway orange balloon. And because as I walked along Boulevard Richard Lenoir many hours later, I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was looking for, exactly, but I did know that there was a small brass band and a few scattered second-liners just steps ahead of me feeling out a path through the night.

In the weeks before my arrival, I had made a plan with Pan Pan (who’s in Geneva for the summer) to meet up with her during my last day there. It would be her first time in Paris; she’d be arriving in the morning and taking an early train back the following morning.

A couple of days before she was supposed to arrive, Pan Pan wrote to say that every single hostel in the city was booked for that night.

For a couple minutes this seemed like a problem. But Paris is an insomnia-inducing city-- why do something as trivial as sleep in a place like that? If we had no place to sleep, then all the better. We just wouldn’t sleep.

This plan got off to an auspicious start when we actually managed to find each other in the train station without any problems. Things started going quickly downhill when we tried to leave the train station. I stepped off the escalator and noticed that Pan Pan, behind me, did not. “Um … Maura? I think I’m stuck.” I looked back and Pan Pan’s loose pants were, indeed stuck in the bottom of the escalator. Within a few moments several gendarmes had descended on the escalator and were cutting Pan Pan free with a hunting knife while Pan Pan held onto the waistband of her pants (what little remained of them) to keep from flashing all of Paris. Within another few moments Pan Pan had bought and changed into a skirt from a shop in the train station. As we left the train station, we walked over a vent in the sidewalk emitting large upwardly gusts of air. As Pan Pan walked over it, her skirt flew up and she flashed all of Paris. Things were going well so far. A few minutes later, the torrential rains began.

But only a fool would let destroyed pants, involuntary exhibitionism and near-biblical rains ruin a day in Paris. Until night fell we walked across the entire city, right bank and left, Ile-de-la-Cité and Ile St.-Louis, making our way from bakery to outdoor market to ice cream stand to cheese store to bakery (again), stopping to study the exteriors of whatever tourist attractions we happened to come across along the way, but saving our entry fees for the good stuff: food.

If you need to stay up all night in Paris and you’ve made the mistake of walking around all day, by 1 AM you will already be wondering if you're going to make it at all. There isn’t much open at this time of night, but there is a 24-hour McDonald’s at Place de la République where for €1 the girl behind the counter will give you a token and point you to the coffee machine next to the toilets. You will put your token in the machine, and watch as dense brown and vaguely milky liquids pour, steaming, into the cup. You will look back at the girl as if to say, for fuck’s sake, this can’t be what it’s supposed to look like, but she isn’t paid minimum wage working all hours of the night to be your shoulder to cry on. You will take your “coffee” to a plastic chair by the window, and it will look vile. Drink it anyway.

You will drink it anyway because you’ll want to be awake between 2 and 6 AM in Paris. When the McDonald’s nightman will tell you that you have to visit the Congo—and will even go so far as to write down his banlieux street address (no phone, no e-mail) to let him know when you’re ready to go, because he has family there who will look after you. When you will unknowingly walk away from where you will think you were heading, and only realize your mistake three miles later, when you will realize, too, that with five more hours to kill the whole thing can hardly be called a “wrong turn.” When a drunk Vana White will stand unsteadily on the sidewalk displaying, to no one in particular, the paint samples in a darkened storefront. When the square outside Notre Dame will be emptied of people and filled with chairs. When you will come upon a sober and startlingly normal guy of about your age walking down the street, and without any preamble he will ask you a question, then at the next intersection turn and walk away, leaving you to ponder an exchange so effortless and mundane that it could have happened between old friends on a living room couch in the afternoon, had it not happened with a stranger on the streets of Paris nearing dawn: “Do you know how to speak Chinese?” he will have asked you. “It must be a very difficult language, you know, a character for every word and all .... But the writing is so pretty.”

Around six, when you and Pan Pan finally will be able to walk no further, you will collapse against the wall across from the bakery in the subway, sitting there like bums while you wait for it to open. And after awhile a decently-dressed black man will come up to the two of you, say something quickly, walk away, walk back: he was sitting right over there (he will point, your heads will follow) and they told him to leave. But he just wanted to get some coffee (you will nod) you don’t see those fucking gendarmes saying a word to the two of you, do you? He will mumble to himself, walk away and then, just as you turn to look at Pan Pan because you are astonished by the eloquence of his enraged movements, his subway soliloquy, he will turn on his heel and all he wanted was some fucking coffee. Sometimes these racist cops just make him wanna (he will walk a few paces away, sigh heavily, stride quickly back) just make him wanna (he will pinch the hem of his shirt, will pull it up slightly and let it drop) just make him wanna, wanna (he will lift the hem again and grab for the gun that will not be tucked in the waistband of his trousers) shit GODDAMNIT. Show me a man bored by Paris, and I will show you a man who is no longer interested in life, and probably never was.

A couple of weeks after I left Paris my mom e-mailed me from California to say that a letter had arrived from Henri, did I want her to open it? I did.

“I went back home Saturday,” he had written on stationery that features a cow in a green pasture watching an old-fashioned locomotive. “My eye is regaining its images at the speed of a small train!” When you open the card, the cow has climbed on board and is riding in the freight car.

There are several nearly illegible paragraphs, and then, at the end, this:

“For me this stay [in the hospital] was like a voyage where I’ve re-learned what life makes you forget: sight, life holds so few things: a few drops and some friends.”

Which is not so very much. And which, after all, is enough.

Love,

Fitz

2007-06-14T13:23:00.000-05:00

When, in the morning upon waking, you can recall the year, but not the day of the week or even the month you find yourself in; when the search for the answer to your drowsy question of "where am I?", stumbles on continent before even considering country, city and street; and when you walk out the door unsure of which currency you don't have enough of, and which language you don't speak, you've been traveling for a long time.

After Krakow I spent a week in Prague, a city where nothing seemed to be where it should have been, and yet nothing felt out of place (the Bohemian, Baroque, Renaissance and Art Nouveau buildings next to churches and synagogues, next to Communist-era bureaucratic offices; the alcohol cupboard-turned-neighborhood bar in a clothing boutique-turned-art gallery tended by two elderly female proprietors; the late-day light batiked on a garden's outer wall).

Next was a week in Budapest, a fantastic city where I went to the opera for $4, stayed in a hostel with beautiful light and a brothel on the third floor, and was literally stopped in my tracks one evening on a stone stairway by the sound of someone practicing Mozart on a cellar piano, punctuated by the squeals and giggles of a gymnastics class on the first floor, the chiming of church bells down the block and a thunderstorm overhead.

I needed to get to Bucharest, a city just 400 miles from Budapest. As we've already established that I never make decisions that make geographic sense, it will come as no surprise that from Budapest I took the bus 8 hours in the wrong direction to Berlin for a long weekend to visit Gabriel, a German friend whom I lived with in Buenos Aires earlier in my trip.

It’s one thing to know that it’s not fair to hold a grudge against all Germans for World War II, but another thing altogether not to hold a grudge against them for World War II. It’s one thing to reason that probably not all Germans are dull, humorless and overly efficient, but another thing altogether to believe it. So for a long time Germany topped my (very) short list of countries I have no desire to go to, ever. Enter Gabriel—a German who not only was always a lot of fun, but also one of the most astoundingly lazy people I’ve ever encountered. Gabriel had raved about Berlin, and four months later I was in the loosely-defined “neighborhood” (just an eight hour bus ride away!), so I thought I’d give Germany a chance.

I can’t speak to the rest of the country, but I’m not too proud to admit that Berlin has made my (very long) list of places I’d love to go back to. Berlin is a deeply interesting city, lively and vibrant and new while still leaving the unmistakeable impression of age and fatigue, of just how much suffering it has endured (two World Wars, crippling economic depression and a long Cold War in the 20th century alone).

You see this in the small stretch of the Berlin Wall downtown dwarfed by the reflective glass of modern commercial developments going up on all sides and next to H&M advertisements. Or in the teenage couple making out on one of the cement blocks that makes up the sprawling Holocaust memorial, or in the kids playing hide and seek below its undulating heights not far away. Or in the choral recital given one evening in the rebuilt structure of Kaiser-Wilhelm Church--which stands in the busy center of the city in the shadow of its still-standing original, partially destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943—a jolting but not unfamiliar boom that interrupted the program just seconds after it had gotten under way. A boom like a bomb exploding (thunder again).

On a Sunday morning Gabriel’s father and I drove to the East Side Gallery, where the longest remaining stretch of the wall has been preserved. It was Gabriel’s father’s first visit there as well as mine, and we weren’t sure what to expect. We parked, walked out, turned the corner, and there was the unadorned wall, with little text or other direction for the visitor. Gabriel’s father looked confused, then disappointed: “I was hoping they would’ve done a bit more with it.”

“I remember watching the bulldozers rip it down,” he had told me on the drive over (new Mercedes glides through the former East Berlin). “We ran to embrace the people on the other side." It was a story that he seemed to be in the habit of recounting for visiting guests, but it was a story with some grandeur, and I was happy hearing it. "We were all strangers, but everyone was hugging and crying.”

The exhibit at the East Side Gallery, on the other hand, told no easy story. It was a dull gray wall, a “death strip” of empty space, and then another dull gray wall. Gabriel’s father was right that they could’ve “done a bit more with it.” Which is to say that they could have told a story, and they didn’t. We stayed, hands in pockets, a few moments longer, and as we turned to leave Gabriel’s father looked back: “Well,” he conceded, “that is exactly what it looked like.”

Because for most of the time that the wall stood, though there was certainly no shortage of international propaganda from both sides, there was no story to tell that would've made any sense to Berliners on the ground. There was just a dull gray wall, ugly and unkind, that could not credibly be reasoned into the reassuring narrative of victims and villains, the progression of a narrative rising, the climactic moment of a wall falling, the reassuringly sunny denouement.

When I booked my bus ticket to Bucharest, the very nice ladies at the Berlin bus station had given me a pitying look when I asked how long the trip was. One of them smiled kindly as she said "this is going to be the longest bus trip of your life." They obviously didn't know who they were talking to. At 36 hours, it was a full four hours short of matching Barcelona-Krakow.

I believe in a couple universal truths: there is 2pac graffiti everywhere (even in rural Romania), and poor people the world over travel with those red, white and blue wide plaid woven plastic bags (at least one of you has to know what I'm talking about).

Next to the dozens of those bags, a man with a face the color of milky coffee and a well-trimmed sugar white moustache rolled up the sleeves of his houndstooth blazer, crouched down on his brown socks and sandals, and placed in the luggage hold his only baggage: two accordions. As the bus pulled onto the autobahn, the metallic tones of his ringing cell phone resounded through the bus as he fumbled through his pockets, slowed by a half smoked pack of Marlboros (What do ye do with a drunken sailor, what do do ye do with a drunken sailor, what do ye do with a drunken sailor earl'y in the morning!)

From the window of the "longest bus trip of your life" Romania is fishermen in high boots dragging in cast nets; beggar girls staring up at you, all leg limps, out-stretched arms and open hands; old women in aprons and scarves carrying potted flowers; old men in blue work overalls riding bicycles loaded down with pitchforks and rakes; hunched backs over hoes in the fields; stacks of firewood circling a boxcar home; the jet black hair of so many Morticia Addamses; two men and a boy in black vests along the roadside, holding a polished brass plate before them at arm's length.

I spent a few days in Bucharest staying at the apartment of a great French girl I met at Auschwitz (where do you go to make friends?) who's doing a year-long internship there. It turns out that there are a lot of French students who study abroad in Bucharest, and as I met what seemed like every single one of them, I was introduced each time with a "Je te presente Maura. Elle est americaine ... mais sympa" ("this is Maura. She's American ... but she's cool.")

Bucharest is noticeably poorer than the other European capitals I've visited. Roads in some of the poorer neighborhoods are still unpaved, and there are beggars everywhere, packs of stray dogs and a woman who wanders around the train station trying to sell a single bouquet of wildflowers. The too-large squares surrounded by billboard-capped buildings, the lifeless wide boulevards, the abandoned, trash-strewn buildings, the rattling subway escalators, the unmarked open manholes on the sidewalk-- the scenes that betray a city that seems to resent those who would try to live in it. If found it interesting, I didn’t quite manage to like it.

Bucharest does have a few gems, however, foremost among them the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, where an exhibit placard reads:

“Few people are ignorant of what happiness in grandma’s kitchen means. The problem is what to do after grandma’s dead. You come into an inheritance that can be a burden. You cannot keep all the objects, word, gestures, smells … at least put some of them in a safe place.”

Looking at the displays, I couldn’t help thinking that if dead Romanian grandma was ever to rise from her grave, she could be excused for being a little perplexed to find everything—from her wooden kitchen table and chipped white plates, to her woven shawls and painted eggs, to her windmill, wooden house, schoolhouse desk, crucifix collection, rolling pins, rings of sesame seed bread, transistor radio, window dressings, wool rugs, newspapers she used to line the cupboard shelves and yes, even her tombstone—in a cold room with a piece of sheet metal over the door, from which a crucifix shape had been cut to make an entryway.

It was an entryway that was too narrow for any of the Romanian peasant women I’d seen to be able to enter the room, or perhaps more to the point, to be able to get out it.

Because we tend to put things in museums when they are dead or dying—or when we wish they were. And after all what safer place than a museum to store the “burden” of the past, to write a story we can all live with? Here was the “bit more” that could’ve been done at the unsettlingly stark patch of Berlin wall at the East Side Gallery. Here was a story-- that creation of the human imagination characterized by a beginning and yes, most importantly, thank God, an end.

It probably started last fall, on one of those days in Spanish class when we had to partner up and discuss answers to a string of fairly inane questions. What is your family like? What is your most embarrassing moment? Where do you see yourself in 20 years? Neither Onur nor I could have given a shit, quite honestly, and it had been a pretty boring morning. What is your home town like? Onur, still bored, told me briefly about a city split by a river, one half in Europe and half in Asia, one half modern, the other traditional.

That was all it took, really. I wanted to go to Istanbul. And six months later, I had crossed all of Europe to get there.

And if he hadn’t been so tired, bored or hung-over that morning in Spanish, or if we had known the Spanish words for “labyrinthine” and “loofah,” Onur might have mentioned that the streets of Istanbul are the former, and that there are strings of the latter hung from the stands in the covered marketplaces. He might have mentioned the pyramids of ground spices, piles of delicate saffron strands, blocks of feta, towers of Turkish delight, bunches of mint leaves, tubs of olives and burlap sacks full of nuts or dried dates, apricots, and sun dried tomatoes. Or the tree seedlings, the Ataturk flags, the boxes of bunnies, the cages of pigeons, the freshly-shaven carpet dealers wearing their best suits to attract the obese older American women whom they say pay the highest prices. Or the plastic jugs of leeches said to cure eczema, rheumatism and arthritis.

He might have mentioned that if you walk ten feet you are liable to pass women wearing everything from tank tops, to stylish patterned satin headscarves, to long black burkas. Or that a merchant will shout across the bazaar his contribution to the heated debate over the public high school teacher recently caught leading students in Muslim prayers: “two girls praying and they want to close a school, but people show their bare asses on TV and nothing closes!”

He might have mentioned that if you’re looking for a trash can you’ll be hard pressed to find one (there’s been trouble with people placing bombs inside them). Or that when you go for drinks on a rooftop terrace you will be overlooking the British Embassy bombed by Al Qaeda, and toasting a friend’s bad eyesight, the only thing that spared him a deployment to Afghanistan under Turkey's system of compulsory military service for male citizens. Or that in a country where the army intervenes in politics every several years or so, a country which is slated to hold contentious early national elections later this month, you can buy a handgun for about $20 as you leave the tram on your way home from work. But as it was, he said enough to make me curious enough to come and see the rest for myself.

When you travel for months on end, there will be some days when you can’t help feeling that you’ve seen it all, when you think you can’t be bothered to see one more 17th century chateau, one more architecturally notable cathedral. But these kinds of thoughts cannot last.

They can’t last because there are places in the world where if you happen to be sitting by the water when the call to prayer starts, the sounds emanating from the six mosques on the surrounding river banks will form a cacophony of chanting interrupted by brief moments of absolute unison; where as the bazaar shuts down for the evening a man twirls the bottom half of a mannequin in a sidewalk waltz; where a little boy charges through the streets with a garbage bag half full of aluminum cans slung across his back like a superhero cape; where a Gypsy girl huddles in a street corner setting a discarded pack of cigarettes alight; where a double amputee roams the street in a wheelchair hawking red heart balloons he’s piled on his lap; where at night in the glare of the floodlights illuminating the mosques that line the Bosphorus, the gulls diving overhead look like oversized fireflies in the world’s vast jam jar.

These thoughts can’t last because there are places in the world that in an instant will wipe all cynicism from your mind, then strike all eloquence from your thoughts, and finally leave you incapable of thinking (simply, humbly) anything more than: wow.

After two weeks in Istanbul I still hadn’t been inside the city’s foremost tourist attraction, the Hagia Sofia, a Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque that dates from the 4th century. This seemed a little ridiculous, so on my last day in Istanbul I woke up planning to spend the day there. But then I walked to the entrance and the thought of spending my last day in Istanbul surrounded by tourists seemed distasteful, 4th century mosque or none. Also, admission was $10. I studied the outside of the building for awhile and turned, satisfied enough, and walked away.

I walked to the river and took a long ferry ride to the residential suburb of Fener, without any idea of what I was doing, but comforted by the thought that you can’t be late if no one’s waiting for you, and you can’t get lost if you set out without a destination.

I fell in love with Istanbul all over again. In hours of walking through neighborhoods where I didn’t run into a single other tourist, I passed kids playing soccer in the street, laundry drying overhead, men on scaffolding repairing crumbling buildings, Greeks and Hasidic Jews, a colorful vegetable market that stretched for blocks and blocks, a Bulgarian church with headless angel statues and two women sitting under the afternoon sun in burkas, knitting.

On the ferry ride back I sat on the deck exposed to the wind, on benches that ran the outer length of the indoor seating area. Just as I leaned my head back and stared out over the water, there was a tap on the window behind me. I looked back and saw two young girls staring at me. I made a face and they made faces back, giggled, pressed their cheeks against the window, looked back to their mothers and grandmothers who sat laughing behind them. We kept it up for twenty minutes, until the boat reached their stop and they stood to leave.

As they left the indoor area and reached the outdoor deck on their way off the boat, one of the girls let go of her mother’s hand, ran over to me and, smiling, asked me a question in Turkish. “America?” I guessed. She repeated the word, and looked satisfied. Then she said what I can only guess was goodbye, and ran off the boat to her mother, who was waiting onshore.

Earlier in the day, wandering around Fener, as I walked down a hill I had been given a brief glimpse over the high wall of a schoolyard full of children playing. Something about the scene, I couldn’t say what, had caught my eye. I walked a dozen steps more, and then curiosity got the better of me.

Curiosity: that recognition that none of us (living just once) can know much of anything about the world, and that the best we might do is to set off blindly, get our hands dirty and return at day’s end to listen to the stories that we could tell each other--stories that are flawed and self-serving, every one of them individually false and all of them, collectively, true.

It was curiosity that brought me to Istanbul and curiosity that knocked on the window of the ferry and pressed its two faces against the glass.

It was curiosity that led me up the uninviting stairs of the Mercado Central in Valparaiso, Chile, and rewarded me with a cardboard box full of kittens.

It was curiosity that woke me one morning in Guediawaye, Senegal, when light streamed into my eyes from the small window onto the courtyard stairs that had been opened by two neighborhood girls I’d never talked to. They stood huddled together, staring back at me bashfully: sorry to wake you up but there are a few things we’ve been wanting to ask you.

On my last day in Istanbul, I walked a dozen steps more, and then curiosity got the better of me. I walked back, glanced quickly around to see that no one was watching, and then timidly put my eyes to a crack in the high schoolyard wall.

From the other side of the wall and just inches from my face, a child’s eyes were staring back.

Love,

Fitz

2007-04-27T17:34:00.000-05:00

"The plan," though it was never really worthy of the name in the first place, has changed. I had been ready to deal with the considerable harassment that girls traveling by themselves in Morocco often encounter. But when, on top of that, there were suicide bombings in Casablanca and the American embassy closed, I decided to skip Morocco and just spend a bit longer in Western Europe. But then I flew from Dakar into Madrid and it was clear that this new plan wouldn't do either. Spain and France are lovely countries—and they'll still be lovely in four decades when I'm lucid enough no longer to want to go to places like Salvador de Bahia and Bamako. But in my present irrationality, I only managed to spend an hour in Spain (a country which has a perfectly functioning tourist infrastructure and where I speak the language) before I found myself missing adventure, nostalgic for chaos.

I decided to head east for Turkey, stopping in any country that seems cheap and intriguing along the way. At least that's "the plan" as of today.

But first there were a few places in Spain and France that I did want to see before I left. A friend from high school was studying in Madrid for the semester so I spent several days living with her host family, going around the city with her and happily staying longer than I'd meant to because it was great to see her. Madrid, too, is a great city that has won a permanently fond place in my heart if for no other reason than because on a rainy-turned-sunny morning in the sprawling grounds of the Parque del Buen Retiro, I saw an old man sitting on a bench wearing a formal, well-tailored three piece suit and a tri-cornered paper hat he'd folded out of his morning newspaper.

I went south to Granada where I met up with another friend from high school. He was leaving town for the weekend but managed, before he left, to arrange for me to sleep on the couch of a girl on his study abroad program. Then the girl went away for the weekend as well, leaving me with a bed, a kitchen, a laptop and a sunny Andalusian balcony for free. I'm not as dumb as I look, sound and act, so I stayed there as long as possible trying to figure out where to go next and visiting the nearby Alhambra Palace. While not quite as breathtaking, the palace is impressively reminiscent of the Taj Mahal, and the Alhambra does have the distinct advantage that I didn't see a single person taking a shit on it.

Since I had tickets to see FC Barcelona play Levante at Camp Nou I went to Barcelona, though only for one night initially because every hostel was booked for the rest of the week. The game was decent but the atmosphere at Camp Nou (capacity 98,000) was incredible, even if the crowd was somewhat tamer than the one at the River Plate game I went to in Buenos Aires—which is really only to say that no one was shot in the stadium before the match (it occurs to me now that I forgot to mention that before).

Within five minutes of walking around Barcelona I had stumbled across the police breaking up a nasty domestic dispute that had spilled into the street and I had also, only minutes later, had to make a quick about-face on the sidewalk to lose a crazy man who seemed to be following me. I like my cities gritty, so I took these as wholly promising signs for Barcelona, and I decided to come back for a week once the hostels had freed up again.

In the 24 hours I had in Barcelona before I left for Marseille, I managed to meet, by complete chance, Naeha's brother's two childhood friends, with whom I spent a day at Antoni Gaudi's bizarre and wonderful church, La Sagrada Familia, and park, Parc Guell. It was here, alongside the plaza atop the hill where tourists swarm with digital cameras held out at the panoramic view of the city below, that an African guy was selling 5 euro "designer" sunglasses that were spread out across the pavement in front of him.

In the past decade the sight of African men on the street selling everything from watches, sunglasses, belts, curio woodcarvings to bootleg music and DVDs has become ubiquitous in Spain, when once it was seen mostly in neighboring France. Almost all of these immigrants are from West Africa, where I was just a month ago, so it was strange seeing them here in Europe, out of the context of the huge but tightly-knit families back home that I know will struggle to eat if the sun does not shine strongly enough on Parc Guell in Barcelona and Western tourists don't buy fake Gucci sunglasses to replace, for just a day, the real ones they left on their hotel nightstands this cloudy morning.

I watched the man for a few minutes, watched the tourists ignoring him, then walked over. "Only 5 euros," he told me. I greeted him in Wolof and he looked surprised, then smiled and responded in Wolof as well. "How did you know I was from Senegal?" Just a guess. We talked about Guédiawaye, the Senegalese food we're both missing, his seven years in Spain and his hope to go home as soon as he can. Seven years ago he arrived in France, but he only stayed a week: "it's horrible there." And here in Spain? "It's hard here too..." (I thought of the bar in Granada where I'd watched one of the Champion's League games, of how every one of the dozen Africans in the bar had watched the game holding their drinks and standing just inside the door or even on the sidewalk, though there was no lack of tables if they'd wanted to sit, or felt welcomed to) "...mais France, France c'est le pire." But France, he told me, echoing what I'd heard so many times in Senegal and Mali, France is the worst.

The next morning, in Marseille, I was beginning to understand what he meant. The hostel I'd booked was not in the city itself (hard, dirty, a place I like quite a bit but that many people would not), but about an hour's walk away in one of those quintessentially French small towns with just one main road, but a dozen boulangeries and at least two chocolatiers, and where no posting signs reference, in elegant cursive, laws dating from 1882. It was a charming town, and also the kind of place where French people who decry the African and Maghreb "takeover" of the big cities have grudgingly decamped to try to reconstruct their social and racial fortresses. It took me about a minute to realize that the owner of my small hostel was decidedly among their ranks.

Where's the best boulangerie in the neighborhood? "Well, you came on the worst day of the year, the Communists have closed everything." (It was May Day.) "Where are you from?" he asked me. "America is a good country, unlike France with all these Socialists who are so bad for business." His only employee spoke up to tell me that they were closing the hostel by the end of this year and moving to the Philippines-- tired, he claimed, of a government that taxes away everything they earn and fed up, too, with French women. Looking at the two of them-- the owner hardly a great catch and his employee a short, round, middle-aged chain smoker who I would soon discover felt about as much inhibition about farting loudly in the company of others as normal people feel breathing--I couldn't help thinking that it was more likely that French women are fed up with them.

They went on to tell me that they were very impatient for the results of that coming weekend's presidential elections between, as the owner put it, "Sarkozy and the fucking girl" (Socialist candidate Segolene Royal). Do you think Sarkozy will win? "I'm not sure..." he told me, adding in a tone of distinct contempt, "all the immigrants are registered to vote." Whether this was true or not, Sarkozy did indeed win, and from the looks of it France will continue to be the worst for Africans like the ones who welcomed me time and again into their homes.

That night I talked for awhile to a Chinese guy, Yang, whom I was sharing the dorm with, then climbed into my bed. Just before I fell asleep he looked over and asked me if I'd been into Marseille yet. I hadn't. "It's..." he thought for a moment, circling in on the English words to approximate the pictographs before him in his mind, "it's ... a kingdom of shit."

I could tell you about Marseille's ancient Roman port, its crumbling buildings, the man who ran down the upwards escalator in the train station yelling unintelligibly and the wedding dress-clad mannequins staring past the passing crowds of dour expressions, long moustaches and hands shoved in pockets, or I could tell you simply that Yang was precisely right.

After several days in Marseille I took the bus back to Barcelona to stay for a week this time around. I arrived at 5 AM but couldn't check into my hostel until noon, so I dropped my bag and walked the streets at random while the sun came up, eventually being given an impromptu city tour by two guys I met at a neighborhood cafe where I was starting my day and they were ending their long, apparently drunken, night.

Barcelona is infused with golden light unlike any I've ever seen. It renders the palm trees stark silhouettes at dawn, gilds the graffiti along the Port and wakens the drunks passed out on the beach next to old women going for Sunday morning swims while their old husbands play dominoes wearing bathing suits and cloaks of cigar smoke.

On long Barcelona afternoons Barcelona light casts long the shadows of people passing on the street, reveals the too-heavy concealer on the too-old faces of the hookers smoking Marlboros on the sidewalks of the red light district and warms the terrace of Gaudi's La Pedrera apartment building (its twirling stucco towers and sentries of still watchmen, its undulating lines that give the impression of flying high above the city on a dragon's back).

And on a Barcelona evening it was Barcelona light that slowly crept away from the square in front of the post office where two men shook hands to jovial exclamations of "qué tal, hermosa!"; from the street nearby where a woman pushed a stroller containing a small child and a bigger red balloon; from the guitar-strapped back of a white guy kneeling in front of the large Ganesh statue in the glass storefront of Kama Indian Restaurant and Lounge, only removing his lips from the window to cross himself; from the white hair of the shrunken woman with the small bag of groceries who stopped to ask me, in a small mumble, something I had to ask her to repeat.

On that last evening in Barcelona I reached into my pocket and gave the single euro I'd been asked for to that woman decades older than me, then walked away quickly (light receding slowly) to collapse on my back for a long time in the park across the street, paralyzed by the feeling that the world is a kingdom of shit-- majestically, overwhelmingly, beautiful, strange and sad.

Having spent a couple days trying to plan the rest of my travels methodically and rationally, having failed spectacularly, I impulsively bought a bus pass good for most of Europe that I then realized I should probably use. I looked at the list of the 40 cities the pass covered, circled six or so that sounded interesting, and connected the dots between them.

Since I was "educated" by the Berkeley public schools (too progressive and alternative to teach such traditional, purportedly obsolete subjects as world geography), I have to admit that my mental map of Europe includes little more than France, Spain, a couple major bodies of water for good measure, and an indistinct blur that eventually becomes Asia at some point or another. Or at least that was my idea of Europe until I took the bus from Barcelona to Krakow and I had some 40 hours and about 1,500 miles to learn the map of Europe as I (slowly) crossed it, and to "appreciate" what perhaps I hadn't sufficiently before: Europe is really big.

No one in their right mind takes the bus from Spain to Poland, but I'm long on time and short on money, so that's what I did. In South America I got used to taking long bus rides, and in Africa I got used to taking shorter bus rides that seemed infinitely longer, so I was confident that I could survive a 40 hour European bus ride, though I didn't expect to enjoy it.

But I did. In praise of taking the bus: the passing waters of the Cote d'Azur, the Seussian whovilles tucked into terraced Italian hillsides, the rain pouring down on Austria during the night, the strobe lights of tunnels that waken you momentarily, the church spires like overturned beets, a cathedral next to a graveyard next to a boat building workshop, a statue of Jesus crucified like a grapevine next to rows of grapevines, the lavender and poppy-dusted fields of Slovakia, the man in blue shirtsleeves riding his bicycle down a two-track dirt road, the train cars rusting in their tracks and the front yards of Poland: vegetable gardens, laundry on the line, a boy trying unsuccessfully to train a puppy.

And if I hadn't taken the bus I wouldn't have realized: that the bus will almost drive away without you when the length of rest stops are announced only in Polish; that when you open your eyes in the morning thinking about breakfast the Slovaks behind you will already be nursing tall cans of beer, or else shuffling to the bus toilet, returning minutes later with bashful grins and the smell of the cigarettes they've just smoked; that in one small village next to the garish life size Jesus statue the garish life size peasant woman statue (white and blue checkered gingham dress, white headscarf, rosy cheeks) is, in fact, very much alive-- she's watering the flowers.

Krakow is an unexpectedly lovely city, though what drew me there originally was my desire to see Auschwitz, about an hour's drive away.

In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect: barbed wire fences around brick barracks, "hospitals" where human medical experiments were performed, firing walls, public gallows, gas chambers, crematoriums, ponds filled with human ashes and the other trappings of a profoundly depressing afternoon. If you're wondering what the hell I was thinking, I was hoping to remind you that the first Fitzgerald, my father's father, to "summer" in Spain was fighting Franco, and he later considered Communist East Germany the ideal holiday spot. So within a certain context, the fact that I went to Auschwitz on my vacation might have even been construed as familial progress towards normality. But then, by complete coincidence, I went to Auschwitz on Mother's Day.

But in another strange coincidence, the very first paragraph of the book I'm reading (Waterland by Graham Swift, it's fantastic) is the following:

"And don't forget,' my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, 'whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk...'"

In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect, but in a sense that I have trouble articulating, it was only when I was standing there that I believed that the Holocaust happened-- or that I realized that I hadn't believed, really believed, this before. Because in the end the greatest danger to our collective historical memory will not come from those who, out of ignorance or malice, would deny the Holocaust-- they are easily refuted with facts, their absurdity not to be excused but maybe pitied. What will prove more dangerous in the end is the best of our intentions-- that in our attempts to convey the full horror of the Holocaust, in our desire that it be repeated "never again," we will rarefy that event to such an extent that we will believe groundlessly that it will never happen again simply because it could never happen again.

In popular consciousness the Holocaust (note the big H) looms so dangerously large that it is not until you are standing in Auschwitz that you realize its human scale-- that the grounds of concentration camps could be walked fence to fence in under 15 minutes, that those fences were only as high as normal fences, that those torturous "medical experiments" were performed in buildings that look not unlike Connecticut Hall, and that millions of people were systematically murdered not in the black and white of old newsreels (over six decades back on that time line of human history that we imagine reaches ever forward towards progress), but in the full color of our present world (with its present holocaust in Sudan). For indeed long before the Holocaust there were other holocausts, and after the Holocaust there were holocausts that followed, follow and, it seems, will follow.

In the museum that today occupies the site where the Auschwitz camp once stood are displayed dozens of piles (floor-to-ceiling, many stretching 25 feet wide) of items the Russians found when they liberated the camp: empty canisters of zyklon b pellets, shaved human hair, suitcases marked with family names, eyeglasses, crutches, back braces, artificial limbs, mugs, bowls and shoes.

Outside the museum today, along the 3km road connecting Auschwitz I and the extension camp Auschwitz II - Birkenau (built when the Nazis felt that human beings were not being exterminated quickly enough) there is a pigeon lying decapitated on the sidewalk.In the spring the woods bordering Birkenau are tranquil and beautiful. In Krakow Oskar Schindler's former factory is notable only for its banality (empty offices with views of the adjacent buildings now housing an hp computer factory, the smell of bread baking in the neighborhood). One of the few remaining fragments of the gray walls that once contained Krakow's 60,000 Jews in the Podgorze ghetto (57,000 would not survive the war) is today the backdrop for a quiet children's park.

I sat on a bench one afternoon facing that wall-- facing a small boy talking to his grandmother and his sister rocking on a toy horse nearby. It was a Pole, I remembered, who exhorted us to "praise the mutilated world," but watching that scene it was hard to know whether to feel hopeful or simply dejected. Whether we are able to believe it, really believe it, or not, holocausts happened and will happen, and as much as it should not life goes on-- and on the whole really never so much as pauses even while they are happening (Birkenau trees grew, morning bread was baked).

Life goes on: Polish children will laugh and play in a ghetto-turned-playground, while the barefoot children of about their age in Mali and Senegal could still, truth be told, get a lot of wear out of the concentration camp victims' shoes on display in the Auschwitz museum (it's been cloudy in Barcelona).

Life goes on, and never really stops as it should for holocausts, because holocausts are human events carried out on a human scale. And human beings (we of mother's milk) are so flawed, so unintelligently designed that we cannot even comprehend the evil we are capable of inflicting on each other. We all, at some time, act no better than the majority of the perpetrators of holocausts-- not the Hitlers and Pol Pots, but the soldiers and citizen collaborators who enabled them. It is not really the malice displayed in holocausts that makes them relatively anomalous events in human history, but rather their extraordinary coordination of the disorganized, static, apparently small-scale pettiness and cruelty of which we are all guilty in our lives.

Even when we try to comprehend this evil we have done collectively to ourselves, we are reduced to mourning piles of shoes to suggest (this is all we can bear, suggestion) those who once filled them.

And even after hours wandering the grounds of Auschwitz contemplating the murder of millions of human beings, it was only a decapitated pigeon on the sidewalk that finally made me feel viscerally sick.

And after an hour watching kids playing in front of the remnants of the ghetto walls, I stood up and walked home. Because big drops of rain had started falling from the sky. Because there was no sense in getting sick; I had things to do the next day.

Love,

Fitz

2007-04-21T13:29:00.000-05:00

You can convince yourself that you're all grown up, you can travel the world for months and months by yourself, but sometimes it's just really good to see your mom and dad.

I should explain, to those among you who've preemptively banned me from ever planning a group trip for fears we'd end up on Spring Break Somalia, that I didn't play any part in bringing my parents to Mali specifically. They missed me, they wanted to see me, and my mom's high school's vacation happened to coincide with my time in Mali. In any case, my parents were very eager to visit an African country for the first time, and particularly enthusiastic about Mali-- both because my mom teaches French, and because Bamako, the capital city, is renowned for having some of the best live music in the world. So Mali it was.

My first few days with them reminded me of how much traveling in various parts of Africa has taught me to ignore things that would (and to be fair, probably should) bother most Americans. My parents are hardly princesses, so they should be excused for needing a couple of days to learn that when you travel in Africa, just because there's a light switch, it doesn't mean there's going to be light; that just because there's a faucet, it doesn't mean there's going to be any water coming out of it; that just because you're handed a menu with over twenty dishes on it and the waiter asks you what you'd like, it doesn't mean the restaurant can actually prepare more than two or three of them; that just because you book a room at a nice hotel, it doesn't mean you won't be lulled into gentle sleep (?) to the sound of rats scampering over the roof. These are the things you quickly learn to ignore when you travel in Africa, because there's not much anyone can do to change them anyway-- and even if there were, chances are still pretty good that it still wouldn't happen.

Before I booked my plane ticket to Mali, a land-locked country that includes large bands of the Sahel and the Sahara, I didn´t bother finding out when the dry season is. Turns out it´s in March and April. The temperature regularly climbed to 115 degrees, and on some days it was undoubtedly higher, although when it´s that hot it´s just really fucking hot and no one´s going to be any happier knowing just precisely how really fucking hot it is.

We spent our first several days in the capital looking around and allowing my parents to adjust to the culture and climate. Bamako is sometimes described as "one big village." There are only a handful of multi-story buildings, only the major roads are paved and women do laundry bare breasted in the Niger River alongside fishermen in pirogues (small wooden fishing boats). The open sewers, over-crowded houses, streets brimming with pedestrians, mule-drawn carts, scooters and honking cars and the air heavily polluted by charcoal stoves make it clear that for better, and certainly for worse, Bamako is a real city.

After hearing so much about the quality of live music in Bamako, we soon realized that it´s rather hard to find. The restaurant that was supposed to have kora music nightly was inexplicably closed, and the two clubs that locals swore to us again and again would have traditional music were quiet and entirely empty. It seemed like bad luck, but we knew that Amadou and Mariam (who recorded the really fantastic, Manu Chao-produced "Dimanche à Bamako") were sponsoring a music festival the following weekend and we´d be back in Bamako to see that if nothing else.

In the meantime we set off with a driver and guide for the Falaise de Bandiagara, a stunning, 70 mile long cliff face the rises above the southern Malian plains. The Dogon people who live there now were preceded by the Tellem, who built their mud houses and granaries directly into the cliff, out of reach of the slave catchers from rival tribes who had been decimating their population. The Tellem are gone now, and no one is entirely sure what happened to them. While many Dogon believe that the Tellem reached their houses by flying, others maintain that they climbed strong vines that once scaled the steep cliffs rising hundreds of meters high. Today both on the Falaise itslef and along its base, the Dogon have taken over the land where the Tellem once lived, and have built smooth-walled mud houses and mosques with rounded minarets studded by wood beams.

My parents and I trekked along the Falaise for several days passing groves of trees, small villages, children pushing along old bicycle tires with sticks, women hauling jugs of water on their heads, and just once, a small patch of onions growing brilliant turquoise alongside a small river in the midst of so much Sahel, the searing heat. Around a bend in the path: a group of newly-circumcised young boys in loose indigo robes, shaking rattles and chanting, asking anyone who passed for money or small gifts. In the shadow of the Falaise as the sun set: a man facing Mecca, touching his forehead to the sand in prayer while his donkey looked on beside him.

As we passed each village, groups of little kids came running up to us screaming toubab! (white person) and then collapsing in giggles. The braver ones walked along with us to ask for bonbons or pens for school, but most often just our empty plastic water bottles. At one point a group of three eight-year-old boys smiled at me and then trailed a few feet behind me for a long ways, whispering heatedly to each other back and forth in Dogon ("whisper whisper tu?? whisper whisper whisper tu, tu"). Fifteen minutes later, in very nervous French syncopated by laughter: "Comment t'appelles-tu?"

At night my parents and I slept on the roofs of the mud houses, opening our eyes in the early morning to the towering Falaise at our feet, the sounds of the village slowly awakening-- the call to prayer followed by hours of religious chanting, joined by roosters crowing and donkeys braying, women talking as they set off for the well, talking when they returned, then the dull thuds of millet pounded with over sized pestles. For his part, my dad entertained himself by asking the village goats "what kind of daughter is Maura?" (The concensus, sadly, was "baaaaaadd.")

For all of Senegal's poverty, which is considerable and cruel in its own right, Mali is the fourth poorest country in the world, and the material conditions of life there are noticeably worse. Before I left Senegal, my friends in Guédiawaye had told me that the Dogon live "à la vrai africaine." When I asked what it meant to live "like a real African," they smiled and said that the Dogon live how most white people who´ve never been to Africa, but who watch a lot of The Discovery Channel, assume that the whole continent lives.

When I got to the Falaise, I understood what they meant. Most Dogon houses don´t have any electricity, and in one village the courtyard of the hunter´s compound was decorated with stuffed rodents, snakes, and small mammals he had killed, the skulls of larger beasts plastered into the mud walls. In Dogon villages children of both sexes are circumcised, and by age 15 most girls have had at least one child by husbands their parents have chosen for them. The Dogon are renowned for their beautiful wood masks, and while they only take place every 70 years or so, some Dogon ceremonies include human sacrifices. The hogon (spiritual leader) of each Dogon village lives alone is his compound, except for a young virgin girl to prepare his meals and a tortoise to test them for poison; hogons are forbidden from ever bathing. They are considered to know everything, have the ability to read the stars, and are so powerful that while Dogon villagers will consult them, they will never look them directly in the eye. So after a few days in Dogon Country I understood that "à la vrai africaine" was a way of describing what we might think of, though rather crudely, as "primitive."

This probably isn't fair. Master G. will be glad to know that I won´t be plastering animal skulls to my bedroom walls next year, but I should point out that the boys´ rooms in L-Dub freshman year were considerably more barbarous than any Dogon house I saw. While I instinctively find the idea of female circumcision abhorrent, in a country as desperately poor as Mali, where community bonds are the only thing keeping people fed (just enough) to survive (barely), I´m hesitant to condemn absolutely any practice that serves to police and perpetuate these bonds. The hogons who read the stars may live in near animal-like states, but for years and years they maintained that Sirius is not two, but in fact three separate stars--a fact that Western astronomers only realized fours years ago, and certainly not with their naked, "primitive" eyes. (I got nothing on human sacrifices-- that´s just fucked up.)

On our last day in Dogon Country, we hiked out early to the small compound nearby where our driver had left the car that would take us back to Bamako for the weekend. When we showed up the car already had a flat, but that´s another thing you learn not to let bother you too much when you travel in Africa. Twenty minutes later we were on the potholed dirt road again, and within ten minutes we had another flat. We walked to the nearest village and waited for an hour while our guide came to get us in another car to take us to a nearby town. Another hour later our first car was "fixed" and we headed off towards Bamako once again. Fifteen minutes later we had our third flat tire, and our guide started screaming at our driver in Bambara, leaving him on the side of the road, and shoving us onto a passing bus that he had flagged down on the highway.

There are a lot of things you learn to ignore when you travel in Africa, but try as you might some things just can´t be ignored (the packed bus, the seat that wasn´t quite securely bolted to the floor, the afternoon heat so intense that I started to hallucinate, the moment after nightfall when the bus swerved and ran off the road, the other hour lost to engine failure, the six hour trip back to Bamako that ended up taking twelve and Amadou and Mariam´s music festival that we were too late, filthy and delirious to attend). And even after twelve hours spent wishing I was dead, even after several seconds when we ran off the road and I realized that I really wanted to live after all, there were incongruously wonderful moments that I could not ignore either: the Big Dipper and Orion's Belt against the night sky rising above the plains outside the bus window; a group of girls in one village selling sesame cakes and fresh carrots singing a song with the same notes, my mom realized, as "Amazing Grace."

The next day was Easter, though next to our safe return from the Dogon Country, Jesus´s ascension to heaven seemed like the less miraculous journey of the two. It was my mom's last night in Mali so we decided to make one last attempt to see live music in Bamako. Each time we'd asked locals about where to see shows, the Casino de l'Amitié was always among the names mentioned. Up to that point we´d stayed away because we´re just not accustomed to making family trips to the casino, even if it was said to have live music every night. We were desperate and thought it was a pretty safe bet, so we decided to finally give it a try. Just to be sure, we stopped by early in the afternoon to talk to a waitress. Is there live music tonight? She said yes, but looked at us a little funny, as if the answer should have been obvious: there´s always live music here.

We came back when she'd told us to, and there was no live music to speak of. The first waitress wasn't there anymore, but another led us to our table for dinner. We asked her if there was live music that night, and after a little hesitation she said no, then gave us a funny look as if the answer should have been obvious: there's never live music here. My parents and I did at least eat before we left, and while I can't say it was the best Easter dinner I've ever had, the upmarket Malian prostitutes in mini-skirts clinging to Western, Asian and Arab businessmen sitting at slot machines and the dread locked d.j. in the corner playing the Bee Gees and Abba all night certainly made it one of the more memorable.

My mom flew home to California to start teaching again, but my dad and I had several days left in Mali so we decided to head to Ségou, a town three hours away from Bamako along the banks of the Niger. After our adventure getting back from Dogon Country, we had spent an hour writing a formal contract in French for the new driver to sign before we set out, just to be sure. The driver, Ibrahima, was in his late twenties and nice enough, although it soon became clear that his driving left a lot to be desired. He would periodically turn his head around to the backseat to ask my dad "Ça va?" Each time he did this the car started to veer into the opposite lane, which for me, anyway, answered his question (negatively).

After awhile on the road Ibrahima asked me if I smoke cigarettes, and I told him I didn't. He didn't that much either, he told me, mostly just weed. (Luckily my dad doesn't speak much French.) Later Ibrahima explained, unprovoked, his philosophy on life: "moi, je m'en fou si je vis ou je meurs" (I could give a fuck if I live or die). "Oh," I replied. "Um ... Ibrahima would you mind not saying that so long as we're paying you to be our driver?"

Ségou was lovely and relatively relaxing after the chaos of Bamako. My dad and I spent one morning on a several hour pirogue trip down the Niger to a village where we watched a woman paint beautiful patterns onto strips of white cloth with an enviably steady hand-- particularly considering that she was working with a toothbrush and holding a squirming toddler in her lap while she worked.

The night before we´d agreed to meet Ibrahima to drive back to Bamako so that my dad could catch his flight, Ibrahima showed up unannounced at the restaurant where we were eating dinner. He confirmed, somewhat unnecessarily, that he'd be there the following morning to drive us back. He shifted from side to side, looked a little dazed, smiled a bit too long and then said goodbye.

"Did he look high?" my dad asked me. "Big time." I went to call Ibrahima and tell him that if he showed up high or hadn't slept enough the following morning that I'd find another driver, but there really wasn't much I could do except threaten.

The next morning before we left I pulled Ibrahima aside and reminded him that we'd hired him for the whole day and that my dad's flight wasn't until late that evening. There's no rush, just go slowly and safely, okay? "Okay, calm down, don't worry so much." I glared at him and we set off, almost rear-ending a woman on a moto before we'd even left the Ségou town limits. The beginning of the trip went reasonably well, though only because I refused to respond to any of Ibrahima's conversation starters with anything more than yes or no, so he had to watch the road.

After about an hour we came to a village where it was market day and crowds of people were milling around the streets. Ibrahima decelerated slightly, though not enough, and turned his head to watch something going on in the market. As he did so, our car veered into the opposite lane, heading straight towards an old man riding his bicycle along the opposite shoulder. "What the fuck are you doing?!" I yelled, and Ibrahima swerved back, but not before we felt a sickening bump against our car.

At dinner a couple of nights before, my dad had mentioned offhandedly that he'd once read an informational brochure for Westerners living in the developing world that instructed you never to stop in the event of a traffic accident. Instead, you were to drive to the nearest police station to report it there, because rural villagers sometimes take it upon themselves to punish traffic offenders on the spot. Not knowing if we'd killed the man on the bike, it was a bit disconcerting to find our car immediately surrounded by a huge crowd of marketgoers peering into the car at us inside. At the time I could have cared less if they were about to kill Ibrahima, since he had shown absolutely no concern for the man we'd hit (and I was about ready to kill Ibrahima myself if the crowd didn't first). But I wasn't entirely confident that a mob jury would recognize my dad and my innocence in the face of our driver's clear culpability.

Luckily the old man had survived (though with a nasty gash down his leg), and my fears proved to be mere paranoia (too much Discovery Channel). We were escorted to the nearest police station, where I informed Ibrahima that there was no way in hell we were going to continue on to Bamako with him. He demanded to be paid for the rest of the journey and I refused, leading to a screaming fight which was eventually adjudicated by a local gendarme, guided by the contract I´d handwritten on lined binder paper. He explained apologetically that since Ibrahima could still theoretically get us to Bamako, he hadn't technically broken the contract-- even if he had almost killed a man. Isn't it an implicit condition of the contract that he be able to get us to Bamako alive? "Well, no." The policeman asked me if I knew how to read, and since I haven't been asked that since I was four years old, reflexively I laughed. "Sign here." We payed Ibrahima the balance, got on a passing bus (only three hours this time around), and got over it. My dad flew home that night and I caught a plane back to Guédiawaye (en route to Europe) the following evening.

Mali was a beautiful, interesting, complex and absolutely exhausting place to feel obliged to lead my parents out of alive. The day after he´d arrived home to California my dad sent me an e-mail in which he wrote that "seeing Americans on the plane from Paris to SF was troubling ... overweight, self-absorbed, wasteful." Which I'd like to think was, whether he realized it or not, his first attempt at articulating that he was glad to have come.

Anyone who has travelled in Africa knows that most African "vacations" are best appreciated retrospectively. My parents are some of the best people I know, but they will be incalculably better for having come here. It is good to read about poverty, but another thing altogether to see it first hand. If you have the resources to do it, no matter where it is (Africa, Latin America, Asia or two blocks down the street in New Haven), please just go. It is hard to come away from a country like Mali without feeling outraged-- and we could all use being a bit more outraged, because the way the majority of the world has to live is nothing less than outrageous.

We will be better for having gone. We will be better for spending Easter dinner watching foreign businessmen gamble and buy sex in a country where 90% of the population lives on under $2 a day. We will be better for playing with wonderful children during the day, then lying awake at night thinking about the fact that a quarter of them will die before they turn five. We will be better for realizing that it was unpardonably obnoxious to laugh when the policeman asked me if I could read and write in a country where the adult literacy rate is just 19%.

African "vacations" are best appreciated retrospectively, and in retrospect I can even forgive Ibrahima for not giving a fuck about his life or anyone else's-- after all, most of the time the world doesn't seem to give a fuck about his. Consider that if my parents were Malian, not only would they never have had the resources to make this trip, but in a country where the life expectancy is 48, they could well have been dead a decade ago.

I miss you guys more and more and more. Good luck on finals.

Love,

Fitz

2007-03-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

(I had a bunch of photographs loaded but then the power was cut. Welcome to Africa! I'll try to add the rest of them eventually.)

There were a few things I needed to do before I landed in Senegal: remember how to speak French, read my guidebook, figure out where I was going to stay in Dakar, and get a solid night's sleep. I didn't do any of them.

About half an hour before my plane landed I started talking to the old Senegalese man sitting next to me. Are you going to Dakar? Is it your first time in Senegal? Where are you staying? You're all alone? Be careful with the taxi drivers at night, you never know, come to think of it look for me after you pass through customs I'll negotiate a fare for you.

And before I had even touched ground, before I had a single franc in my pocket, I had a friend in this country. Over the next few days that he was in Dakar, Demba gave me a place to stay, helped me get a Malian visa, introduced me to his extended family who stuffed me full with delicious couscous and fish, and taught me my first words in Wolof.

And in return, he asked for absolutely nothing, turned down nearly everything I offered. And all I could do before he left for his home along the Mauritanian border (where, I later learned, he is the "chef du village") was give him my sincerest thanks. He said it was nothing, really, as a Muslim it is his duty to help anyone he sees who is in need. He told me about stealing away unannounced from his home at the age of 17 through Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinée in search of work, eventually ending up in France without papers and later Germany, where he has lived for the past couple decades. And when he arrived in Europe he didn't know anyone, but strangers helped him out, asked nothing in return. It's nothing, really, he told me, la vie est comme ça.

And I thought back to intro microecon lectures, that refrain of "there's no such thing as free lunch" resounding through the lecture hall of SSS, and all I could think was that it was all bullshit.

And as improbable as meeting Demba had seemed, a couple days later the whole thing happened again. Walking around Dakar I stopped to look at my map and a guy came up to me asking if he could help me find something. He directed me to the building I'd been looking for. And then he gave me a tour of the centre-ville. And then he invited me to lunch at his home in Guédiawaye in the Dakar banlieux (mostly dirt and sand roads, goats tied to the outside of houses, men in long colorful boubous, kids playing soccer or marbles in the street, or running after rubber tires prodded onwards with sticks, women selling French bread or bags of peanuts, green mangos, cigarettes one by one, never by the pack). And then I met the entire family. And then I met the entire block. And then they invited me to stay. And I did.

I was given a small room, a mattress on the floor, a bucket of water every morning to wash myself with next to a squat toilet, meals in the living room where eight people squatted around a meal of spiced fish, rice and vegetables and ate from the same bowl, some with hands, some with spoons. And in return, they asked for absolutely nothing. And I ended up giving them what I would have been paying at a hotel anyway. But they asked for nothing. And when, several times a day, I gave them my sincerest thanks, they just looked embarrassed. It's nothing, really, la vie est comme ça. Life is just like that.

These are the kindest people in the world, and we have a hell of a lot to learn.

One of the main tourist sites in Dakar is l'Ile de Gorée, a small island that houses the Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves). Along with the slave forts in Ghana and other sites along the West African coast, the site has been turned into a monument to the horrors of the slave trade and the Middle Passage. "Only" about 300 enslaved Africans were imprisoned at the Maison des Esclaves each year before they were packed onto slave ships, but the house has become a focal point for remembering. You may have seen photographs of Clinton and Bush here alongside what has been named "La Porte Sans Retour" (The Door of No Return, through which it's said that the enslaved Africans passed into the belly of the slave ships, though this claim, good for tourism, is historically rather dubious given the preponderance of large rocks alongside the coast that would've prevented the ships from approaching so close to land). La Porte Sans Retour is where visiting dignitaries, actors, singers and athletes come to reflect on the slave trade, to be moved to tears-- and to be photographed doing it.

As a descendant of slaveholders, as an American, or best said as a human being I had expected to be moved visiting the Maison des Esclaves. But then I walked in alongside throngs of other white tourists who, before they could have even conceivably reflected on what they were looking at, took out their digital cameras to take snapshots. And I imagined their interminable slideshows back home later (this is the hotel, this is the beach, oh and this is the door without return, I nearly cried), imagined their friends' furrowed brows, their silent self-congratulations on their racial sensitivity, and within minutes of walking in all I wanted to do was leave.

I realized that there can be no fixed monument to the slave trade and what followed; it is not a site that can be visited in a day, captured in a photograph, grappled with to any satisfaction, ever contained. There can be no fixed monument to the inhumanity of slavery. It is a monument that visits you, whether you were expecting it or not--when you walk into an elevator in San Francisco and see a black deliveryman with your family's name embroidered on his uniform; or here in Senegal, when you see a man who looks exactly like a guy you've seen in passing around campus, they could be cousins (they could be); or at the beach one evening looking out at the Atlantic towards Connecticut missing friends one moment, then the next, an image coming to your mind of the bodies that must line the ocean floor between you and them. It is a monument that visits you.

After a week and a half living in Guédiawaye (meals from the big bowl, cup after cup of mint tea drunk among friends over the space of several hours, pickup soccer games in the sand, entertaining the entire quartier with my pigeon Wolof, watching Senegalese music videos while the kids danced along, or Colombian soaps dubbed into French with the older women while they beaded or braided hair extensions) I figured I should try to see a bit of the rest of the country.

I went north along the coast to the former French colonial capital of St. Louis, and across the border into Mauritania for two days to beautiful sand dunes and Berber villages (and, admittedly, to be able to say that Maura was in Mauritania ... simple minds, simple pleasures).

Without knowing why exactly, but maybe drawn by that quintessentially American longing for the open road, I set off east on the Senegal side of the Mauritanian border to the little town of Podor. After 7 hours waiting for the shared taxi heading there to fill up and then an additional four, stiflingly hot hours on the road, I arrived in Podor with the faint recollection that I had once wanted to see the interesting mosque and colonial fort that a short paragraph in my guidebook had mentioned--but mostly wondering why I had bothered to come at all.

And then, walking down the street with my backpack looking for the auberge I had circled in my book, I came across a twelve-year-old girl who seemed to have been expecting me all along. I asked her for directions to the auberge and she took me by the hand, started jabbering away, took me to meet her uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, friends, neighbors and anyone else we ran across walking to her house. She introduced me to her mother, who greeted me with open arms and a spare bed, the insistence that I stay for the weekend. Later her eight-year-old son Félix, 15-year-old son Jean, and her parents joined us on a mat laid out under the stars in the courtyard of the house and we shared dinner.

It was hot as hell; there were birds that flew in and out of the rooms, a frog that found its way into my room and didn't seem inclined to leave, the occasional mouse, and huge roaches that, come nightfall, swarmed around the squat toilet dug into the dirt. And I would've been crazy to let any of it bother me much.

That first night I wrote in my journal: "these are the kindest people in the world." And of fifteen-year-old Jean: "he is intimidatingly smart."

The next day the kids took me all over town to meet their friends and family, and share meals and tea. They asked me if I had a camera and I told them I did. We took photographs for hours, and when he showed particular interest, I taught Jean how to use the camera and some basic rules of composition. He asked me if I had a cell phone and I told him I did, let him use it look at it for awhile. He asked me about life in the States-- does everyone at my school have a cell phone? Does everyone have a laptop? After lunch I realized he hadn't given my cell phone back but I figured he'd just forgotten, no harm done.

And then later that evening the same thing happened again, and he disappeared for hours.

His sister asked me where my phone was and I told her her brother had forgotten to give it back to me earlier, I'd have to ask him for it when I saw him. She looked alarmed and told her grandmother, who told the mother, who explained that Jean had stopped going to school, she couldn't control him on her own with her husband in France working to support the family. My hopes that there had been a simple misunderstanding cast aside, she insisted that Jean had stolen the phone and was planning on selling it, maybe already had. All day he'd been asking her to buy him a cell phone like I had, a camera like I had, the other things I have that are so incalculably beyond the means of a family living hand to mouth as so many here in Senegal are.

I ended up getting the cell phone back, but it was clear that I had to go. And to be honest even if it had been lost I could have given a shit about the cell phone-- I hadn't even bothered to get it to work in Senegal; it's really only there to wake me up in the morning and to keep my parents from worrying about me too much.

But my only real rule for traveling is to first, do no harm. And my presence in Podor was doing harm. Before I left the following morning the family gave me breakfast, a length of cloth and a bracelet. The younger kids started crying, and the older family members asked me again and again to stay. I was devastated to be leaving, angry at a world in which I can't be bothered to give a damn about a phone that cost more than that family of seven will see in a month, but unable to be angry at a fifteen-year-old kid smart enough to recognize that the world is not fair, and stubborn enough not to excuse it, as his mother did, as ce que le bondieu veuille (what God wants for each of us).

Jean is intimidatingly smart, and if he had been born in different circumstances he could have been at Yale. But he was born in rural Senegal, so instead he's trying to steal my shit. And I just couldn't be angry at him for that; but it was also clear that I couldn't stay.

I came to Podor wondering why I had bothered. I was welcomed by astoundingly generous people who more than justified the trouble. I left sadly, but knowing why I had come. I came to Podor to be reminded that people can be limitlessly kind-- and also that the world can be limitlessly cruel.

I came back to Guédiawaye feeling that I had come home. In Guédiawaye I was given a small room, a mattress, bucket showers, a squat toilet and shared meals. In Guédiawaye I was also given what at the end of three weeks truly feels like a family, and a home. They asked for absolutely nothing in return, and I ended up giving them what I would have been paying at a hotel anyway but under no illusions that I was in any way repaying their kindness.

In Guédiawaye I passed afternoons drinking tea among friends, talking about nothing at all, or whether 2Pac is really dead (I was told he's hiding in Accra--"Why Ghana and not Senegal?" I asked. "Parce que Ghana est un pays anglophone." Of course.) On other afternoons we talked about the failing Senegalese economy, no work even for university graduates, the need to immigrate to Europe just to keep families fed. On others we talked about slavery, the fact that my ancestors owned men and women stolen from these coasts. There can be no fixed monument to the slave trade because it is a monument that visits you. I left the Porte Sans Retour unmoved, but in Guédiawaye ended some days crying because it is overwhelming to be treated with the greatest humanity among people whom my ancestors treated with the least.

In Guédiawaye my family called me Aissata and gave me their family name Sow. I bore it as proudly as I hope the deliveryman in the San Francisco elevator bears my mother's family's name Deming as something fiercely his own. Or as proudly as the other descendants of my family's slaves may have cast off that name in exchange for another, not imposed, but chosen freely.

In Guédiawaye I was given everything and asked for nothing. These are the nicest people in the world, and they treated me with the best kindness-- kindness that cannot be repaid, but only passed on to others, expecting nothing in return because la vie est comme ça, that's just the way life is.

And I think about that Western mantra that "there is no such thing as free lunch," think about the reception we tend to give non-white immigrants in our countries, and then think about my friend Samba (the one who helped me with directions that first day) getting ready to immigrate to Spain just to see his family fed and the lights kept on. And I am scared for him, scared for what he will find, because human beings, capable of being limitlessly kind, are too often unimaginably cruel.

I love you guys. Please be good to one another.

Fitz

2007-03-05T19:02:00.000-05:00

After more than two months traveling I was pretty bored with the world, so I said to hell with everything and just went home to California.

Kidding. Lisbon stole our bridge.

The main reason I came to Portugal was to catch a connecting flight between Brazil and Senegal: Knowing absolutely nothing about Lisbon, I figured the name sounded nice enough and decided to spend a week there. With two months in South America behind me and six weeks in West Africa ahead, I expected Lisbon to provide a much-needed "vacation" (um ... from my vacation?) It did. I didn't expect, however, that the city would leave such an impression on me.

No one knows that Lisbon exists. After a week there, this was the only conclusion I had arrived at to explain how a city so utterly perfect has been allowed to survive in a world capable of exploding atomic bombs and commiting genocide. My first afternoon in the Bairro Alto neighborhood where I stayed, I walked around almost giddy. The hilly cobblestoned streets are lined by fruit and vegetable stores, cobblers, cornerstore cafes, butchershops, apholsterer workshops, art galleries, dance studios and vinyl shops.

Down one street I passed a jovial old man in a tweed cap who had set up a table and chair on the sidewalk outside his apartment to sit and read his newspaper. It was so picturesque that I couldn't help but smile; maybe I know too many of you New Yorkers, but I generally try to avoid walking around major cities with a big, shit-eating grin on my face, so I had to walk away from the old man as fast as I could. Half a block later I figured I was safe, but then I looked down and saw that I was standing on the tiled promenade of the "Society of Typography," which only made me smile more, so I looked away again. This time my eyes fell upon laundry hung unselfconsciously to dry in perfect geometry, so I stumbled to the next block, turned my head and saw a small yellow and black tram packed with people heading towards me down a hill while nearby, an elegantly-dressed man walked a brown and white dog that trotted alongside him carrying the man's leather wallet delicately in his mouth. At which point I gave up and grinned like an idiot.

During the day, Bairro Alto is packed with old people: men playing cards in the park, women feeding pigeons or talking with neighbors from the top half of farmhouse style front doors. During the night, Bairro Alto is packed with young people drinking, booting, talking, dancing, bar-hopping, kissing, waving broken umbrellas like band-leaders and earning the occasional yell from the old people who retake the streets when the sun comes up and the party is put on hold until next nightfall. Lisbon is a good place to be young, and a good place to be old. I can't say for sure, but it's probably a good place in which to be middle-aged, too.

And then there are the pasteis de nata: flaky puff pastry cups filled with custard and topped by a paper-thin, oven-blackened top layer, the whole thing served warm and sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinammon. The best ones in the country have been made since 1837 in the suburb of Belem, or Bethlehem. There's a huge and ornate church nearby, but I can't say it explained my daily, 25 minute pilgrimmage by train to the town. If DeBoer can claim to have seen God in his iTunes visualizer, I'm going to go ahead and say that I found Him in a pastry. I probably had to leave Lisbon for my own good.

In Lisbon the medieval streets sometimes narrow to just a few feet across; the streetlamps are cast iron and the street workers dress like the proleteriat out of a Popular Front-era film. The fire hydrants are even red. No one knows that Lisbon exists, because if we knew how to live that way, we would never choose to live otherwise.

I was starting to worry that I was going to sound like I was being paid-off by the Portuguese tourism office, so at a loss to complain about anything else, I planning to remind you that Portuguese footballers are a bunch of whiny, pretty-boy actors.

Luckily (?) on my last full day in Lisbon a dodgy-looking man in the train station followed me for awhile, then came up to me and asked, with a strong Portuguese accent, if I spoke English. "Yes," I told him. "You fuck?" I gave him the worst look I've given anyone in my life and started to walk away quickly. He ran after me and said, in a way that he seemed to think conciliatory, "No, no. I pay you." The dollar is weak, but it's not that weak.

So Lisbon is not a fairy tale after all. There are men soliciting apparent prostitutes in the train station, drug dealers on the streets at night, and a myriad of the other imperfections that make great cities great. Dead-end alleys with four black cats; crumbling, exposed brick walls; street art and graffiti on nearly every block; testaments to the fact that people actually live in Lisbon, that the city is malleable and dynamic, itself alive. Lisbon is not a fairy tale. It is something infinitely better: a city that can chip without crumbling.

Happy Spring Break. I miss you guys lots.

Love,

Fitz

2007-03-01T12:42:00.000-05:00

Just when my Spanish had gotten competent enough that I could get around Argentina without a care in the world, I went to Brazil. And it´d been easy to forget how hard it can be just to order a chicken sandwich until the first time I had to do it in Portuguese.

I decided to save Rio de Janeiro for the end of my two weeks in Brazil, and instead to head straight to Salvador, the capital city of the Northeastern state of Bahia. Salvador was a deeply complicated place, somewhere I’m still struggling to get a grasp on, but it’s also where I spent the majority of my time in Brazil. I’m going to do my best to describe it.

Salvador is beautiful. It’s a port city split vertically into a cidade baixa and a cidade alta, connected by an elevator overlooking a light blue bay. There are crumbling churches, fading, colonial era pastel buildings blackened by soot and city, the occasional spattering of blue and white Portuguese tiles.

Salvador is African. Before Rio, Salvador was the Portuguese capital in Brazil, and the region received the majority of the enslaved Africans sent to harvest sugar cane. Their descendents are still there, and they make the city Brazil’s blackest. Men practice capoeira (a dance-inflected martial art developed by Brazilian slaves) bare-chested in the streets alongside women in plastic chairs embellishing cornrows with colorful ribbons and beads. From a balcony, older women walking down the street in traditional, lace-trimmed hoop skirts stark white against dark skin look like plump, strutting hens. Round women sitting behind fortresses of metal pots on the sidewalk sell acarajé—bean curd buns fried in woks, split open with a thin knife, and stuffed with a variety of sauces and spicy shrimp to make a hot, crumbling sandwich—which I’m told you can also still find in parts of Nigeria today.

Salvador smells. Of pools of cooking oil in street stalls, and skewers of white cheese grilling on hand-carried paint cans of glowing charcoals stoked by quick, shallow breaths. Of machete-cut portions of a bulbous white fruit I still can’t identify in the market, of beer and cachaça, passion fruit caipirinhas and mounds of trash everywhere rummaged through by beggars. Salvador smells—and when I left the city everywhere else I went smelled strange for a couple days because for the first time in a week it didn’t smell like piss.

Salvador is loud. From tables set up on the street waiters shout orders to second-story kitchens. A short time later, women emerge from the kitchen, ringing hand bells to catch the waiters´ attention while they slowly cradle the meals down to the street on trays lowered by pulleys. There are animated conversations, beggars begging and vendors hawking (cashews, fresh-squeezed juices, cigarettes, packets of gum, ice cream from wheeled white carts topped with green spaghetti mounds of coiled orange rinds, coconuts drilled open to drink the water inside and iced sugarcane juice pressed from seven foot long stalks). There is always at least one radio, and no matter what´s on, everyone seems to know the words.

Salvador during Carnaval is especially loud. There are people everywhere, processions of drummers through the streets, cars crawling along with speakers blasting from open trunks, men selling beads, confetti and feather headdresses, and a samba or axé band right outside your window that doesn´t stop playing until 3AM at the earliest. I didn’t notice a single moment of pure silence until I left.

Salvador is fun. Carnaval in Rio is more of a spectacle to watch (huge glittering floats, women in elaborate sequins and feathers and nothing else), while in Salvador it’s a party to take part in—the biggest street party in the world. In Salvador for the most part only children wear costumes—sequined bikini tops and feather skirts, lots of cowboys and Batmans—though there is a sizable group called the Filhos de Gandhy (Sons of Gandhi) whose members dress in white turbans, long robes and sandals, and who spray perfume into the air as they passes. (Apparently the group formed out of solidarity with Gandhi´s philosophy of non-violence, though from observation its members appeared less than inspired by his abstinence from sex, alcohol and tobacco.)

During Carnaval in Salvador hundreds of thousands of people pack the streets to dance behind trios eléctricos (massive trucks with eardrum-shattering speaker systems and live bands performing on top) that slowly complete the parade circuit over four to six hours. When it poured down rain the first night of Carnaval, no one could be bothered to give a shit—everyone was soaked to the bone but still dancing wildly, arms waving, belting out the words to the songs they knew and the ones they didn’t (à la Spring Fling 2006), jumping across trash-filled gutters overflowing with water, dodging men’s outstretched hands and shuffling away from fights that broke out periodically in the crowd.

Salvador is poor. If carnivals are often notable for their symbolic usurpation of the ruling order (“bottoms up”), in Salvador the ruling order fights back. Even in the free-wheeling block parties, wealthier Brazilians and tourists pay up to US $200 per night to dance in roped off bloco sections immediately surrounding the trio eléctricos and boasting their own private security. And even as revellers toss their beer cans to the ground there are young children that scurry along collecting them in large sacks to earn a few centavos at the recycling center later on.

Or there is the leper who slithers along the street on his belly and flip-flop-covered hands. Or the beggar boy with whom I shared some of my lunch one afternoon who didn’t even say thank you—only suggesting, I think, just how damn hungry he really was.

Salvador is frightening. I’m not usually prone to harboring unreasonable fears-- indeed I’ve exasperated at least a couple of you on occasion with my insistence, on principle more than anything, not to be scared when maybe I should have been. In Salvador I can say, both without shame and without demanding any sympathy, that I was initially scared even to walk outside. My first thought was simply that I needed to leave. Something, I’m still not sure what, made me stay.

This is what I’d read could happen: if I wore a skirt, hands would be up it almost immediately; if I wore earrings, they would be ripped out; if I took the wrong taxi the driver would radio ahead to a nearby accomplice who would carjack and rob me.

This is what actually happened to people I personally knew in Salvador: a dozen people had their pockets emptied by Carnaval mobs; one guy was robbed and punched in the face; another had his credit card information stolen at a rigged ATM; several women were groped to varying extents; a girl in my hostel was nearly raped on a street not far away; a friend of a friend was sent to the hospital with machete wounds across the chest after a robbery.

This is what I did: I assumed everything with which I walked outside the door would be stolen; I kept a token amount of cash in my front pockets ready to hand over quickly if necessary; I stayed with as many people as possible at all times; I took off the Claddagh ring I never take off; I hardly took my camera anywhere (which explains the dearth of pictures … sorry).

And in the end, it is important to point out that nothing happened to me. Was it luck? Some. Caution? Certainly. There were very real dangers in Salvador. But there was also an element of hysteria and, as we’re talking about the blackest city in Brazil, undoubtedly an element of racism. Without knowing the language or the culture well, I was particularly susceptible to both of these. I tried to be conscious of their effect on me, but I couldn’t claim immunity from them.

Wherever I go my only job, as I see it, is to come home. But it was exhausting and disheartening to feel that I had to assume the worst of everyone all the time in order to do this.

And yet, while assuming the worst, I was constantly reminded that most people are good, and that the most vulnerable people are also the first to appreciate the smallest gestures of kindness. I’m grateful beyond words to the man who translated the ATM instructions for me the first time I withdrew money; the menacing-looking guy with prison tattoos who came out of a restaurant to warn some friends and me not to continue walking down the street because there were robbers further on (as in, shit, even I wouldn´t go down there); the waiter who, when I ordered a juice and didn’t recognize all the vocabulary, emerged from the kitchen with a tray containing every kind of fruit on offer so that I could first simply point to the kind of juice I wanted, and so that he could teach me the words for each in Portuguese afterwards.

Salvador was a lesson in fears, in letting go of those which paralyze, and holding on only to those which make you smarter. I can’t be fearless and at the end of the day I wouldn’t want to be—the best I can hope to be is fair, and brave.

Leaving Salvador was, in many ways, a relief. As I walked down a small cobble stoned hill with my backpack to catch a taxi to the bus station that last evening, all I could think was: Carnaval is over. Thank God. And then I realized that that’s the whole point. Just before the bottom of the hill the doors of a church were opened to the street for the first time since I’d arrived.

A section of my guidebook that I naturally didn’t look at until I´d arrived in the country reads: “Brazil’s special combination of problems and cultural characteristics makes it a fairly dangerous place for women to travel alone.” These warnings were stronger for Salvador in particular and strongest for Salvador during Carnaval.

On that last evening in Salvador, from the street I saw that inside that church--built by slaves for themselves only during their free hours at night, and then only during the full moon when there was enough light to work by--there were dozens and dozens of worshippers celebrating Ash Wednesday. It was a scene as beautiful as it was unexpected, and I could have stood there watching for hours. The Dylan line ran through my head: There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is.

I left Salvador that night with two distinct impressions: that I probably shouldn’t have come at all—and that I’m glad that I did.

Instead of heading to church myself, I opted for a secular post-Carnaval and headed 14 hours south along the coast to Arraial d'Ajuda, a beautiful little beach town a short ferry ride away from Porto Seguro. I know most of you are in New Haven right now, so I'll do you a favor and spare you the details of the hammock, the white sand, and the ocean water as warm as a swimming pool. After a couple days there I took a long 24 hour bus ride to Rio. ("Long 24 hour bus ride" seems silly to write— pound of feathers, pound of bricks— but if you've ever done a long 24 hour bus ride you´ll know exactly what I mean.) My best friend from elementary school is studying abroad in Rio and she was nice enough to put me up for a couple days even though we haven't hung out in about ten years. I had a great time. Sure, Rio has sprawling favelas, the occasional dengue fever outbreak and drug lords firebombing city buses to welcome the new governor to office, but what I saw of the city was tranquil and gorgeous (again, no pictures, sorry).

I wanted to see Ipanema Beach in Rio one last time before I got on the plane, and after a couple minutes my khakis were drenched in the surf. This put me in the strange and privleged position of being able to say that my pants dried somewhere over the Atlantic, and that I brushed Brazilian sand out of my pockets onto Madrid yesterday, and onto Lisbon today. Before you get too jealous, I should also say that thanks to consecutive overnight plane and bus trips, and a hostel with a late-afternoon check-in time, I was also in the considerably less enviable position of being able to say that I hadn't taken a shower since two countries ago. Gross.

I recently figured out how to make calls using Skype, so if you have a crazy ex-boyfriend and you're in the habit of screening sketchy-looking numbers, stop. Next time it'll probably still be him, but there's also a slight chance it'll be meee!

Love,

Fitz

2007-02-12T14:44:00.000-05:00

To all of you (to my knowledge, just one person) who check this blog "less than facebook but more than hotornot.com," I suppose an apology is in order. It´s been awhile.

Argentina.

Since I last wrote I´ve received a number of requests: for more descriptions of food, for "less flowery language and overwrought description," and for "pictures of the naked Chilean chick." I´m happy to oblige one of the three.

(Naeha and Amit: stop reading.)

Steak! Argentina is a lot like India in that there are cows everywhere. Unlike India, however, they´re mostly on the plates. This is the best beef in the world, barbequed to perfection with nothing more than a dusting of salt, and with a distinct flavor that comes from the pampas the cows eat. A choice cut in a restaurant will set you back all of about $5. On first taste it´s hard to imagine why Argentinians would eat anything else-- and indeed, it seems many don´t. By this point in my stay, though, I have to say that

(welcome back, gentle Hindus)

I´ll be happy if I don´t eat steak again for at least a decade.

Today marks the end of nearly a month in Argentina-- or, better said, a month in Buenos Aires. I wish I could scan, if only for comic effect, the margins of my guidebook, which I filled, long ago, with meticulously-charted plans for traveling all over the country (north to Salta, south to Patagonia, a weekend in Córdoba, and so on).

Buenos Aires changed all that. With the grit and chaos of New York, the architecture, cafes and wide avenues of Paris, Buenos Aires also has something all its own-- gregarious and immensely likeable people; modest peñas where on Sunday afternoon couples dance to a man singing over cassette recordings of ballads; every several blocks, another scattered pocket of improbable green.

Needless to say I´ve had a hell of a time leaving to go anywhere else. I did manage a few short trips-- to the tranquility of Uruguay for a day, to the packed beach town of Mar del Plata for a weekend, and to the beautiful wine country of Mendoza for another. And each time I was happy to have gone, but happier still to be coming back to Buenos Aires.

Thanks to Kuelli, who put me in touch with a friend of hers here, I´ve been renting a room in the apartment of a wonderful porteño family. The food is great, there are other foreign students who keep me more than entertained, and best of all, the couple´s mischievous four-year-old granddaughter Catalina is a frequent visitor. Within five minutes of meeting her, Cata not only invited me to watch "The Lady and the Tramp," but had also taken a seat in my lap and told me that I was "the best in the world." From that point on she had me wrapped around her finger (and she certainly knew it). Every time I´m just about to drift off into a siesta, I hear her knock on my door wanting to play. I can´t say I´ve ever minded.

It´s been a privelege to live in a home for awhile, to feel settled, to have home-cooked meals and people to remind you of siblings and friends, surrogate parents to look at you bemusedly from the breakfast table when you come back from a Buenos Aires night out at 8:30AM. (And yes, Renee, people here do indeed drink on Sabbath. It´s not unusual for porteños to go out every night of the week. Happy hours end at midnight, clubs open around 2:00AM-- you can dance until the sun comes up and head to work an hour later.)

Like New Orleans, Buenos Aires is a city that can only shorten your life expectancy-- while making you feel, simultaneously, that you´ve lived immeasurably more. Within a day I found myself lingering by the real estate listings posted on agency windows.

And then, of course, there´s the fútbol, some cross of national passion and national religion. Only in Argentina could a commentator have exclaimed in the seconds following a legendary Maradona goal: "¡Genio! ¡Genio! ¡Genio! Barrilete cósmico, ¿de qué planeta viniste? ¡Gracias Dios! ... por el fútbol ... por Maradona ... por estas lágrimas." I couldn´t possibly do these lines poetic justice, so I won´t even try to translate.

Argentina is host to one of the great soccer rivalries in the world: River Plate versus Boca Juniors. On an overnight bus ride I took the chauffeur, a River supporter, announced that Boca fans would be served nothing more than bitter tea. This was a pretty tame threat as the rivalry goes-- just ask the teenager who went into a tattoo parlor and asked the artist for a Boca tattoo. The artist happened to be a River fan, and the kid ended up with a penis etched indelibly on his back.

I wasn´t able to see a Boca game, but I did make a visit to the Museo de la Pasión Boquense, located directly under the stadium. In a country that sees the wonders of the cosmos incarnate in their fútbolistas, it should´ve come as no surprise that Argentineans would identify some rather surprising parallels (to our untrained, gringo eyes, anyway) between the outcome of the twice-annual national club championship and major world events. Some favorites:

- "1934: To Argentina, arrives a Cardinal who will one day be Pope and pass into history: Pius XII. To soccer, arrives a team that will be national champions and pass into history: BOCA."

- "1940: The Germans enter Paris and parade past the Arc de Triomphe, a symbol of France. BOCA inagurates its own symbol of triumph: la Bombanera [their stadium]. To celebrate, they win another national championship."

- "1954: The United States explodes three atomic bombs in the Pacific. Boca passion also explodes. Boca finally comes back to win another championship."

- "1990: One name resounds in all of Africa: Mandela is freed. In Asia, the Gulf War is taking place. Another name resounds through all of Latin America: BOCA, which reclaims the championship."

The picture above is from La Boca, the neighborhood where the club is based. And it looks alright here, but you´ll have to take it on faith that it smells like absolute shit (how´s that for flowery language and overwrought description?). It´s partly for the smell, and partly for their generally lower social class that Boca fans are derided as bosteros (scum). River fans, in contrast, call themselves millonarios-- and are called gallinas (chickens). To be fair, their stadium does smell a lot better.

I saw a game there last weekend, the opener of the season against Lanús. The Estadio Monumental was packed with people in red and white jerseys, and there were homemade banners everywhere, flags that spanned from upper to lower decks, coordinated chants that shook the stands to the foundation and, luckily, heavy police protection for the visiting fans. If you´ve never seen a grown man yell "¡HIJO DE PUTA!" at the top of his lungs around five times a minute, this is the place to go.

The quality of play was obviously way above anything you´d see in the States, though River looked uninspired for most of the game. In the 91st minute, however, they broke the scoreless tie with an incredible strike from the top of the penalty area.

There is an infectiousness to Argentinean pasión. When the ball hit the back of the net and, instinctively, I leapt from my seat with arms raised, then jumped up and down screaming "¡PUTA MADRE!" at the Lanús fans while flipping them off along with thousands of my fellow fans, I figured I had more or less caught it.

But in the end, the best days in Buenos Aires were days spent doing nothing:

Days when I rode in the rumbling, wood-panelled car of the ancient Línea A subway to the end of the line, took a seat at the very front of the car, at the open window that looks out into the surrounding tunnels. When I rode the train all the way back home, peering out at an underground reminiscent of old mine shafts, ducking water water drops that fell from overhead pipes onto the seats.

The best days here were days spent doing nothing:

When I spent a day on the river delta region of Tigre, an hour outside Buenos Aires, where I happened to start talking with a porteño guy and his mother on the ferry. When they invited me to share lunch with them at a quiet restaurant on the riverbank, and treated me with all the kindness in the world; when we finished lunch and sat around in the shade, laughing and sipped round after round of mate through a straw. When after several hours with them I spent the train ride back thinking about the chances of having found them at all-- the relative improbability that I should have studied Spanish, have been traveling in Argentina, have decided to go to Tigre that day and not the next, have caught that specific ferry, have sat in the one place on the ferry next to the mother-- that she should have felt an itch and have decided to move towards me just slightly, bumping my shoulder and warranting the "excuse me" that started hours of conversation.

(Less than wanting to declare a belief in anything as self-important as "destiny," days like these make me think that there are so many iterations of life that have the possibility of being good-- that instead of there being one way that is right, everything could have been different, and still might have been good. And yet, an infinite series of events happened one way and not another, for some reason or for none, and once they happened as they did, I wouldn´t have wanted them any other way.

Or maybe all I mean to say is that it is rare and wonderful when strangers talk to one another.)

The best days here were days spent doing nothing:

When I passed a full six hours at a table by a window looking onto Plaza Dorrego in cobblestoned Barrio San Telmo with a book, a journal and a café con leche-- where I learned that over the course of a Buenos Aires afternoon people will gather under shaded tables for lunch, a couple will dance a tango in the square for loose change, pigeons will flock around the tables, get kicked away, straggle back, scatter again, regroup. And it will start to rain, waiters will rush to put up umbrellas, the sun will break through again just as they´re finishing, and the pigeons will come back again, chased now by a barking dog and a little girl.

The best days here happened when I didn´t do anything, nothing at all (time best spent)-- when I sat quietly for six hours in order to learn that a girl who stalks pigeons for long enough eventually sprouts wings.

I´m devastated to be leaving Buenos Aires, and somewhat scared, quite honestly, to be heading to Brazil tomorrow.

I miss you guys terribly (no matter where I am) and it only gets harder the longer I´m away. To people who have been e-mailing me with updates: you´re only making it worse-- and please keep doing it.

Love,

Fitz

P.S. I hear big things are in the works for the combination TNC/Cuervo´s 21st birthday party tonight. Rest assured that I´ll be more than happy to post any and all incriminating photographs.

2007-01-26T08:22:00.000-05:00

Welcome. The first rule of Fitz's blog is that you do not talk about Fitz's blog. The second rule of Fitz's blog is that you DO NOT talk about Fitz's blog. I think we all know what kind of people write blogs, and I just don't want to go there. If you don't already know what kind of people write blogs, ask Duncan and he'll make a gagging face that should give you a pretty good idea.

Flew to Chile at the beginning of the month, and was met by this (lazy man's) view of the Andes. I spent several days in Santiago getting oriented, brushing up on my Spanish, and staying with a rather eccentric Chilean family-- the German grandmother who lived in apartheid-era South Africa until Mandela was freed from Robben Island; the Lolita-esque young teenage daughter who was inexplicably naked every other time I saw her (lounging in the pool, sure, but also while talking on the phone, or making a sandwich); an older daughter who asked me if I studied history, then gave me an article entitled "How Allende destroyed democracy in Chile."

Santiago is a modern city that feels distinctly European. It's easy to get around, and quite safe in most parts; the subway is as efficient as in New York or Paris, and only half as dirty.

And maybe that's why several days in Santiago were more than enough. Soon it was too clean, too modern, too efficient. Santiago is a city with all the infrastructure of Paris without, well, Paris. It's a city so easy to live in that I can't imagine why anyone inclined to live in a city would ever want to live there.

Enter Valparaiso. Stray dogs on every street, piles of shit to step in, sea salt smell off the port, beggars, crumbling, colorful houses built precariously up the sides of muraled, graffiti-strewn, potholed cobblestoned hillsides climbed by creaky, century-old ascensores, short cuts, back alleys, switchbacks. Imagine a hilly Havana, or San Francisco struck by an earthquake and then carelessly reassembled. I've never been in a better place for getting lost. Which is all to say that I fell quick, and hard.

I decided to stay for most of my time in Chile there, content to try to get a feel for life in one place instead of racing from tip to tip of that impossibly long country trying to see everything without seeing anything. I met a couple of great English travelers and spent a few days with each of them, but most of the time I was on my own in Valparaiso, walking around, taking photographs and talking to locals.

I spent an afternoon at La Sebastiana, as Pablo Neruda's Valparaiso house is known (I eventually visited his other two-- Isla Negra, right on the coast about an hour and a half from Valparaiso, and La Chascona in Santiago next to the zoo). They are all whimsical, enchanting places, infused with his love and fear of the sea. Most rooms are built like ships (too-low doorways and curved, wood-planked ceilings) and they brim with collections of colored glass, shells, African masks, flea market-bought still lifes, engraved metal horse-riding stirrups, carved wooden bowspirits, pinned butterflies and a large lion stuffed animal Neruda bought to guard the sleep of his lover and later, third wife, Matilde.

(For all you kids out there, Neruda's favorite drink was the coquetelon: equal parts cognac and champagne, with a few drops of cointreau and orange juice. Salud.)

Another Sunday morning found me at a very Valparaiso Catholic mass at the oldest church in the city, where a mother came in half-way through the service, trailing six, soccer jersey-clad kids like a school of fish. A wino interrupted the service at one point and had to be subdued. The priest, no doubt aware of his audience, took particular care to note that when the water was converted into wine, it wasn't bottom-shelf wine but real primo shit. Outside the church after the mass, a homeless man came up to me and claimed to be Jesucristo.

But my favorite place in Valparaiso was the Mercado Central, mostly passed over by tourists since the surrounding area has a reputation for petty theft. The Mercado is a gloriously crumbling three-story gallery with winding staircases around its perimeter, entirely unlit except by the natural light that streams through the glass-domed roof.

The first floor has a fish market where you can buy everything from conger eel to seaweed to shark. There is a butcher with a big red scale, and people hawking fruits and vegetables from piles on the floor that are occasionally scaled by tiny stray kittens who nestle themselves among the lettuce leaves. On the right afternoon, there is a boyscout troup passing through and the policeman directing them.

The second floor is all seafood restaurants, which are always deserted except for a couple hours at lunch when locals come by for paila marina and chupe stew. There is a group of boys who play here all day while their mothers work in the restaurants. They have a bike and a toy truck, and if you stay with them for long enough they'll take you to the cardboard box stashed around the corner, pull off its plywood cover, and show you the stray cat and her six kittens inside.

Officially you're not allowed to climb to the rooftop terrace, but it's easy enough to do and you're rewarded with a 360 degree view of Valparaiso--hills, port, coast. There is laundry drying from the windows across the street, a radio blaring from the kitchen, and on some days, an easel and an art student studying the hills from a corner of the roof.

The third floor is locked off by chain and padlock, but through a hole in the gauzy netting that blocks off part of it you can see the inside is dusty and debris-strewn, with old white-washed columns and light streaming in everywhere from glassless windows floor-to-ceiling onto the street.

It's a hole, come to think of it, that would be easy enough to climb through and jump down to have a bit of a look around. Next thing you know you've made friends with the building guard. A couple days later: "Is it possible to look around the third floor?" "No, no, that's impossible." "Right ... I mean but if I can do it is it possible?" "No it's not possible ... Es decir, I'm the guard here and I haven't seen anything." He gave me a hand down.

Almost all of the photographs are from Valparaiso, most from inside the Mercado.

I had to go back to Santiago for a couple days in order to catch my onward flight to Argentina. I stayed at a hostel in a grittier area than before, and Santiago grew on me a little. Even so, my original impression more or less holds. One of you wrote me recently telling me to enjoy my traveling, and to "leave a small piece of yourself behind." Santiago was fine, but there's no doubt that I left that piece in Valparaiso.

I've been in Buenos Aires since Sunday, and I'm having a great time. I'll do my best to update this from time to time, but photographs might be few and far between because computers are mad slow.

I love you guys, and I think about you all the time. Let me know how you're doing.

Fitz

2006-12-24T14:18:00.000-05:00

Keeping it simple, playing it safe.