love from angkor.

I'll let a recent email from Peter Fotheringham handle this post, because describing a wonder of the world like Angkor Wat seems to be beyond me at this moment. Here are his words and a few shots from the hundreds of phenomenal ones that basically took themselves:

"Visiting Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples made me so happy to be a human being living in a time period where witnessing physical beauty is so accessible. Think about it, in the same year you witnessed Iguasso Falls and Angkor Wat. We are so lucky."

trekkies.

We spent our last day in Thailand trekking in the yungle outside of Chiang Mai: riding elephants, bamboo rafting, hiking through rice paddies and meeting old Karen people in a suspiciously touristy village.

But did I mention RIDING ELEPHANTS?! Because if I forgot, let me clarify: it was UN. REAL. Here's Mom, now known as the Elephant Whisperer because it appears to be a soul connection between these two.

Let it be known that if I could somehow work an elephant into my normal morning commute, I would be thrilled. My sister has requested that I not include here the shots of her gripping the side of the chair and looking less than thrilled "because we were sliding all around mud on the back of a FREAKING ELEPHANT" but I think she'd agree with me-- this was completely Jungle Booky mind-blowing.

hello, miraflores!

Since we are grownups who do what we want, Marlo and I made the executive decision to spend the next three weeks on the beach. Being a grownup is the coolest thing ever, how come no one told me?! So here we are in Miraflores, Lima in a situation that might commonly be known as living the dream. Here's why:

We are sharing a beautiful townhouse with two Peruvian med students. This townhouse involves a maid and a doorman, but more importantly, it involves TWO MONKEYS IN THE KITCHEN. Saved from a lab experiment only to live a cramped life in a cage, these two little guys spend their time leaping around the cage and releasing pent-up aggression in sexual ways (well, the boy monkey tries; the girl monkey appears to have a headache tonight). Here's a good diet trick: put a sexually charged male monkey (who isn't even wearing a dignified diaper like the street performer monkeys) next to your fridge. Making repeated eye contact with simian penises (peni?) is profoundly disturbing/unappetizing. Don't look at this picture too closely. Fair warning.

The huge, airy cafe with leather couches at the end of our street has a playlist that consists solely of Tupac, Fugees and UB40. That's not a joke, someone at that cafe divined precisely what we want to listen to and plays "Red Red Wine" followed by "Shorty Wanna Be a Thug" and follows it up with remixes of "Family Business." After six weeks of listening to horrid Bolivian pop, Tupac is like water to my thirsty ears. Here's a fancy old lady doing some important work at the cafe. That's right, our creepy documentation of the elderly in public hasn't ceased since we left Buenos Aires.

Our proximity to the beach is absurd (this sunset is a couple blocks from our door), and we have no excuse not to be on the water everyday. When in Rome, people! This has also led to the long-awaited surfing phase of our adventure. Side note: the first and only time I have been surfing was in high school, when a 400 pound security guard named Kaz taught me on Waikiki and my upper body strength was roughly equal to Stephen Hawking's. After a couple days of getting my butt kicked by the Pacific Ocean and wanting to die from paddling so much, I'm currently at the phase where I catch a wave, stand up, get nervous and sit down, realize I'm still on the wave and stand back up, almost hit someone and sit back down, and eventually topple over. Watch out Kelly Slater.

mercado central, or; will i be murdered while buying cinnamon?

Here is the Mercado Central, the heartbeat of Sucre and a stark contrast to the prepackaged predictability of Safeway. No two visits are ever the same, and I can never decide whether to be thrilled or terrified when I walk in.

One afternoon we went to explore the spices, wide-eyed at the stacks of bright saffron and curry in sacks the size of 8 year olds. Entranced by the range of colors, I grabbed my camera to document the pointed towers of flavor and was rewarded promptly with a furious 70 year old woman, who shooed us away with a bitterness I assumed was reserved for the gringos alone. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about the strange fury that fruit vendors can possess. Vlad, a Romanian transplant from California, told us that as he examined avocadoes once in the vegetable aisle (paltas, which we were disappointed to discover taste like anise) he was furiously maligned by the old woman at the stand for stealing her products. She embarked on an extensive, detailed rant until the woman one stand over kindly guided him to her selection of paltas and allowed him to inspect them without suspicion. Lifting your own fruit becomes a crap shoot-- you run the risk of being given older, bruised produce if you don't choose your own, but could also become the victim of a screaming Quechua matron if you do.

I understand that the art of photography isn't always appreciated by the subjects, a lesson that was reinforced with my spice section ostracism. I am a slow learner, however, and assumed that if I avoided catching people's faces in photos I could avoid their wrath and still document the impressive piles of their wares. I was sadly mistaken, and almost suffered a concussion while trying to snap this shot of the potato sacks. Right after I took this picture, a furious woman rose up from behind one of the bags with a massive papa in her hand, which she wound up to throw at me while screaming, "POR QUE SACAS FOTOS?!?" I understand that one would be tired of tourists snapping shots of you as an example of the "natives in their natural habitat," but what these women don't understand is Western awe at the sheer amounts of everything in the market. It's something quite stunning when one is accustomed to small portions of plastic-wrapped food that get replaced daily in the supermarkets at home. We can't help but take pictures.

Later that day, however, we discovered that the anger of mercado merchants extends to their own, as well, as two women fought loudly in the meat section until one was disgraced enough to wander away like a defeated buck who had just tangled horns with a much-stronger peer. "We just wanted to buy some butter," we marveled to ourselves, since grocery shopping at home rarely holds the possibility of deep human emotion (unless you are at the Trader Joe's on Roosevelt and run into my favorite bald gay man JoeJoe, for whom running the sample table becomes a wild, loud affair involving everyone in a 30 foot radius and stories from Gay Pride parades a decade ago, while you drink six Dixie cups of coffee in succession and stand riveted to his one man show).

Getting back to the mercado and some things I would like to change about it: the dog issue. The health department would have an absolute coronary at the goings-on of Bolivian perros. They wander freely, peeing liberally underneath the meat stalls, mere inches from the whole pig heads, chicken feet, and heavy racks of cow backs dangling from wires. Our legs turned to jello when we were on the scene of a roaring dog fight, because apparently it's normal in Bolivia to allow your Rottweilers and other attack dogs to wander amongst humans. More than once we have mentally drafted a leash law amendment to add to Evo's new constitution.

Conversely, your market experience could be a delight that leaves you marveling at how wonderful the world can be. Marlo and I have been lucky to find a fruit woman who cuts us thick samples of peaches and plums and mangoes and apples while regaling us with scary stories of La Paz, and thanks us for being loyal to her by tossing extra limes into our bags. We found a potato woman who, instead of yelling at us, asks us about traditional American holiday meals and begged us to teach her how to make baked apples. We buy cunape every day at exactly 4:30, when the little balls of yucca and cheese come out of the oven like clockwork (and never a minute sooner, an unspoken rule), and the sweet couple in the bakery section always laughs when they see us coming, since our order never changes. We buy butter from a lovely woman who gives us advice on how to stay safe in Bolivia, and homemade pasta from another woman who thinks our relationship with the kids from the guarderia (two of whom often are present for mercado adventures) is "just really beautiful." The world's most wonderful people can be found at the mercado central, once you find out who to avoid. Grocery shopping is a potent mix of sights and smells and the absolute inability to guess what will happen that particular day. And I think, besides the amounts of dog urine and fly colonies one has to dodge to get to what you need, I will really miss how alive places like the market are.

waiting at the sucre post office.

What it looks like to entrust your Christmas correspondence to the Bolivian postal service.

all the fashion news you can handle at one time

Ladies and gentlemen, here is your Buenos Aires fashion report:

Let’s start with the old ladies of this blessed land. These women know exactly what they’re doing with proportion and details. If you are an aging yet fashionable woman here, here is your uniform: a puffy blouse tucked into a pencil skirt, paired with slingbacks. Red lipstick. And bling, wherever you want to wear it. We pass 80 year olds in the street who look more pulled together than Carolina Herrera and Anna Wintour combined. And always, ALWAYS, pairs of old lady friends show up at whatever café we’re in looking like the newest issue of Elderly Vogue. We have seen countless little sets of amigas with palsy and manicures whispering secrets to each other over tiny empanadas. Elderly of Bs. As., I salute you for looking classier than every Florida retiree in existence and for reminding me that there is room for style after a certain age, and it doesn’t involve matching sweat combos with kittens on them.

These cranky old bats are not indicative mood-wise of most women here, but they do have scarves and pearl earrings. Note the sneaky angle of the camera as I tried to document them without igniting their wrath.

Next up: dear baby Jesus and all his holy angels, where did all these MEN COME FROM? These men who know how to wear a three piece suit like they’ve been doing it since toddlerhood? I’m flying them back to the States so they can teach seminars with titles like “How to Tuck In Your Shirt 101” and “Shoe Polish and Irons: What You’ve Been Missing Out On.” Or “Even If You Aren’t in the Fortune 500, You Can Look Like a Damn Supermodel Just Walking Down the Street.” It’s jaw-dropping, the miracles these guys work with a decent tailor and a well-placed belt. Oh, and impeccable bone structure on each and every one of them doesn’t hurt either. I keep wanting do some street photography to show you what these men are doing to our sartorial standards but I get SO SHY whenever I see one of them coming my way. Just use your imaginations, people.

However, even in the city of a thousand fashion hits, there is at least one MAJOR miss. Now this unfortunate look can be seen on all ages, body types and confidence levels, which is part of why it’s so upsetting. Here we have a classic example of the Pants That Will Not Be Contained:

Yes, what you have seen is a tight ankle/calf situation leading up to a baggy thigh area, complete with pockets that don’t fall with the rest of the pant. Combine this with color choices from magenta to tennis ball green and friends, we have a fashion disaster on our hands. In their natural habitat, these pants can be seen most often with their cousins, the infamous Dreadlocked Mullet and Nonsensical English Phrase on a T-shirt. This look can be described as “horrifying.”

This concludes your live Bs. As. Fashion rundown. Signing out,

IWWAADCBEDTNRJ
(I Wear Wrinkled American Apparel Dresses and Cowboy Boots Every Day and Thus Have No Room to Judge)

in over our heads.

Here’s a story about the time Marlo and I decided to get creative with what we call “The Budget.” Let it first be known that despite a few too many empanadas and café con leches, we are doing quite well in sticking to our budget in the most expensive place in South America. Let it also be known that we walk everywhere and that can be exhausting, ok?
We had spent a ridiculous day in Palermo. We wanted to see the Islamic Cultural Center and just happened to arrive there at the exact same time as two busloads of old ladies. These were not your average old ladies; they were exactly who we want to be in our eighties: well-dressed and obnoxious. They had no idea what was going on, and our tour was punctuated with loud questions like: “What happens if you are walking down the sidewalk when it’s time for prayer?” and “What level of heaven can women get to?” (Dear Elderly: get your world religions straight). They also enjoyed barreling into us to get a better view of the prayer room and interrupting us when we were trying to ask questions ourselves. Ok, ladies, just because you speak better Spanish than we do doesn’t mean we can’t have a turn too! Shoooot.
Exhausted by old women, we headed for the Planetorium to see what kind of space show they have (my dream jobs that will never happen, in order of likelihood: 1) paleontologist 2) next Stephen Hawking) 3) Olympic figure skater). It was our lucky day, because an entire school had gone on a field trip to the exact same showing of History of the Universe! So in one fell swoop we went from battling cranky old bats to battling 8.3 million middle schoolers with ice cream cones (and thereby becoming the cranky old bats ourselves). Of course, as soon as the show started and we spent a few minutes whispering about how much we hate kids, we promptly fell asleep and missed the whole thing. We woke up in time to get a rundown of all the planets, make awkward eye contact with a middle schooler who judged us for snoozing and call it a day.
Ok, so knowing about all the extra work we had done that day dealing with various age groups and coming to terms with our own misanthropic tendencies, could anyone blame a girl for peeking into a fancy bar on the way home and thinking, “Martinis would be a good life decision right now”? I think not! With the helpful encouragement of my friend Marlo, we walked into the fanciest bar in downtown Buenos Aires and ordered two dirty gins with extra olives.
About halfway through our drinks, we took a looksy and noticed that we were the only people in the bar not wearing suits, the only people under 40, and the only women.
“What the hell. Did we just walk into a gentleman’s club?” Marlo hissed at me. Wide-eyed, we took stock and saw no strippers, decided to finish our drinks and take our mismatched travelling outfits out of there. This is about the same point in time when we began to realize that we probably couldn’t afford to pay for our martinis. Whoopsy! Real panic set in as we came to new awareness that this was no dive bar and we tried to remember how to say “WE CAN WASH DISHES! DON’T PUT US IN JAIL!”
At this point I’m sure you’re very nervous for us but fret not, I’m not writing this from the back of a kitchen in the business district. Luckily, conversation was begun with two suits at the bar about relative merits of local fútbol teams, and we somehow ended up on their tab. Thanks, business dudes in a fancy watering hole. Sorry for treading in your territory, we shall not make the same mistake twice!

Travel Short- WC Priču

I was locked in a bathroom in Sarajevo, and my travel buddies (one of whom had given birth to me) seemed to have completely forgotten about my existence. Thanks, Mom!

I knew what was happening outside of my tile prison. Mom was lying down on the bed in our cabin-style hostel room, flipping through the thin copy of Oscar Wilde children's stories I had just finished. Lauren was outside, dealing with round two of the drunk Finn who had spotted us on the porch earlier. He watched us conduct an unproductive conversation with the sweet desk manager who spoke no English, and, buoyed by cheap beer and unwarranted confidence, he wandered his way into the hostel foyer, ready to grab our asses and fight with anyone who wanted to stop him. Earlier, we had played along lightheartedly with his inebriated attempts at flirtation. Now, worn out by exhaustion at finding decent accomodation, his middle-aged slurriness was not quite as cute.

This is when Emir entered our lives. Oh dear God. Emir. This is what he did: he woke up that morning, he put on a tight t-shirt, he re-Biced his head till it shone, he lit a cigarette and showed up in my life and dammit Emir, why must you be a chain-smoking, espresso-guzzling seductive Muslim from the former Yugoslavia while I am stuck, STUCK I tell you! in this lame life as a white girl from American suburbia? Why can't I have an addictive personality, leather pants, at least one dark secret that gives my eyes a hooded quality? Why can't I have stories of my days as a traveling busker, when I lived off of the kindness of strangers? Emir had the relaxed cool of someone who knew that, scars and all, they were the absolute shit and didn't care if you didn't agree. He also had flawed English, a confident chuckle and the ability to make me shy just by looking in my general direction.

I loved him.

Emir came blazing into the hostel and argued furiously with our Finnish suitor and quite literally tossed him out by his collar. Oh, the testosterone, how can a maid in waiting not swoon? Dusting himself off, he shuffled some papers behind the counter and explained that "he needs to stop drinking, it's not attractive. And he also needs to get the fuck out of here." I felt childish that moments before I had been amused at the old guy's antics. A more worldly woman would not have taken the time to laugh.

Earlier that day, a rickety bus took us up the side of the hill where we had heard a wonderful view of the city awaited us. An old woman, holding her groceries fresh from the market, wriggled her way around in her seat and gazed at us, telling us a story in Bosnian while smiling serenely. She paused. "Zlatkas," she grinned, gesturing to her face in the way Santa Claus did for the deaf girl in Miracle on 34th Street. "Golden Girls? Golden Child?" Our limited vocabulary clued us in to "zlat," but the rest of her meaning was lost. We got off the bus together, the old vehicle kicking up dust as it made a three point turn to head back down the hill. Last stop! And beautiful it was, yes. But also surreal to stand on an isthmus between two valleys and imagine the Serbs standing, crouching, lying in the grass around us and using their massive guns to entrap the Sarajevans. We stood alone, sharing the view with an abandoned crane ("Volim te, Tito!" declared in bold, spray painted contrast to the fading yellow of an unused machine), the city's beauty holding a bitterness that we wanted to touch gingerly.

"The tunnel? No, no. I don't want to go near the tunnel. I have seen the tunnel. I have seen plenty of the tunnel, and I never want to see it again in my life."

Emir had spoken. At this point, his word was pretty much law. We had asked him about the locations one expects to see in Sarajevo-- Olympic stadiums, the Holiday Inn (Lauren's suggestion-- the exact location in which so many journalists had been confined during the war held a strange attraction, although by the time we got there, it was hardly worth the trip, since no one was willing to acknowledge that anything of the sort had ever occurred), Baščaršija. They were all met with an aloof disdain, but at the mention of the escape tunnel, we were firmly shut down. I again felt sheepish.

They say that the escape tunnel, which was the only entrance to or exit from the city for the thousand days of Serb attack, was used by every person living in the city at one point or another. Despite the fact that, much like Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, it is a major draw for tourists in Bosnia, Emir saw it as dragging out the past, not to mention a little disrespectful to treat what once was a lifeline as entertainment for an afternoon. Isn't it too soon to go near a place that holds such bone-deep pain for so many?

Maybe. But if no one sees the tunnels and the houses and the mortar shells that represent what man can do to each other, then it will keep happening.

I had a lot of time to think about this before Emir rescued me from the bathroom with a laugh. Yes, I think I'm in love.

(July 2007)

"And then he kissed me on the cheek!"

This woman is so amazing. I wish I could be as peaceful, kind and loving! Maybe when I'm 90.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_R76gf67Bk

Innocent Intern and the Series of Events (Unfortunate and Otherwise)

Alright, I am going to come right out and make a confession here. I made it through the third grade epidemic without getting lice but I didn’t make it through age 22. That’s right, since I last wrote, a major event has been the unwelcome acquisition of nits. As I write this, I realize that a lot of my friends hate kids, always thought it was annoying that I loved them, and they are probably getting the last laugh right now at the thought of me paying the price for hanging around grubby primary schoolers all the time. (They’re gone now, by the way. The lice, not the kids.)
Other inconveniences include the arson of our church minibus, which, along with a few other cars in the neighborhood, got torched down to a piece of charred scrap metal last weekend. When the church copy machine broke the same morning, I honestly felt like we’d been left with just our four walls! Since there is no way we can afford to buy new stuff, I’ve started to devote my energy to researching and applying for grants for just about everything, because we are totally broke.
But Belfast is, bit by bit, becoming home. I have thankfully been hanging out with Mark and Steve a bit (the male half of the Woodvale Four from Deputation) and they are the kind of friends where, even though it’s been two years, it’s like nothing has changed. There aren’t many people who make me laugh as much as they do, and it’s really nice to have people you don’t have to start from scratch with. I also started my course at Union Theological College, which is AMAZING and it really makes me happy to still be in school in some way.
The old people at Crumlin Road continue to impress me. They all call me “That Big Girl” until they learn my name (I am seriously considered a giant here), and the language barrier apparently is still a problem: “I overheard Laura talking with Jean and Marjorie yesterday and it literally sounded like Chinese. But they just kept nodding their heads like they understood her!” --Direct quote from an elder in the church. I think I should have gone to some kind of manners school that teaches you how to speak properly, because even my own family tends to struggle to understand me, which would indicate that I have created my own strange little dialect. Other harassment includes abuse such as “Hey Star Spangled Banner, what’s up with Americans coming over here and eating all our cheese?” (This kind of thing is usually said within ear shot, but not directly to me, so as to up the humor ante, which usually I think is quite clever of those wee old men).
There are a few funny stories that stand out to me from the past weeks:
1. I am doing a literacy program at a primary school and working with a homework club as well (Mathilde, who runs the program, says that most of the kids are just plopped in front of a TV everyday, and their imaginations and communication skills are really stunted—one kid knew the word for machine gun, but not butterfly!). Today I was handing out fruit for snack time and telling the kids, “You better eat these apples, you don’t want to get scurvy. You know what scurvy is? Pirates get it when they’ve been at sea and don’t eat any Vitamin C. You’ll start talking like one. Eat the apples.” So this one kid absolutely refused to take an apple and kept saying, “No thanks! I want to talk like a pirate! ARRGHH!” And then all the boys started squinting one eye and walking around talking like Blackbeard. So much for my nutrition lesson.

2. Again, don’t judge me for this, but I hate coming home to an empty house, and since Peter and I live in a terraced house that’s three stories, I always hear noises from the neighbors and think they’re coming from upstairs. I wish I could say this next part is a joke, but it’s not. I was so scared one night that I grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and tromped around the entire house, peeking in every corner and ready to clobber anyone who would dare come into my place uninvited. This is why I don’t watch scary movies- my imagination is already active enough. Anyway, even though it’s always the girl who opens the closet who gets killed in scary movies, I’m not blonde and I’m not running through sprinklers in my underwear so I figure I’m ok. And I’d rather go find the robbers than let them come find me. Thinking I may have a future in home security. Just me and my knife, going into business.

3. Let’s talk about Olive, an old lady from around the corner who always yells at me for living in such a ghetto house (sample conversation: Me: Morning, Olive! How are you? Olive: Get those windows clean!). I think she likes me because I am willing to commiserate with her (“I know Olive, the place sucks. TELL me about it!”) Northern Irish people love when people will bitch with them, so I humor her! Anyway I am getting a serious history of the neighborhood from this woman, most of which I don’t want to hear, like how the club on the next block is owned by the UVF (big paramilitary in North Belfast), how some guy got both his arms broken in the alley I walk through to the grocery store (ten years ago, but you’d think it was last week the way she talks about it), and every minor flaw in the pastors in the area. I can only imagine what this woman says about me to my neighbors. If you come to visit, Olive is a must-meet.
(Side note for Dad: I did some research and Belfast has one of the lowest crime rates in the industrialized world. So don’t worry, really I’m much better off now…)

4. My bike. A hand-me-down from Alison, this bike is older than Belfast itself and the tires require pumping if I’ve ridden it for more than twenty minutes. It’s missing its kickstand, has a makeshift left pedal from when the old one fell off, and let’s just say it’s not NOT rusty. True story: Malia and I saw a homeless guy riding his bike downtown and it’s an understatement to say it was much nicer than mine. Rock bottom, or a great conversation starter? On the up side, when kids laugh at me and want to try to ride it, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make friends with them (“We thought all Americans had pools and three-car garages! What the hell is she doing with scrap metal!?”)

5. I tried to type out the story of how our neighbor Mark exploded a raw egg into Peter’s car after squeezing it “all morning” trying to break it, but it just makes no sense in real life, let alone written down. Moral of the story: my neighbors apparently spend entire mornings trying to break eggs in unconventional ways, but don’t succeed until the egg’s trajectory is aimed at a car interior. Such is life for your average strapping male citizen of North Belfast, and one of the reasons we need social workers STAT!

Life is interesting.