Sleepless in Madrid

An email exchange from 7/28/2010:

Me: "I'll get in touch with the people doing the conference in Madrid."

My Editor: "That conference -- hahah -- World Youth Day!"

Me: ...

World Youth Day is a huge deal. It's Catholicism's Super Bowl. I spent 4 sleepless days and nights in Madrid last month and somehow put the following together. Enjoy.

ARTICLE:
Organizers hope World Youth Day helps youths experience joy of faith

PODCAST:
WYD 2011 Madrid

My Own Private Camino

Article #2: Written from a small cave, on the side of a mountain overlooking El Monasterio Leyre in the Pyrenees of the Basque Country. These are the last words I will write in English before I convert formally to Euskara.

Pilgrim-hikers find time for inner reflection along Way of St. James stop in France

Il est Américain

Recently I've thought a lot about how to explain the difficulties of learning French. I can't say it's that special. It's difficult in the way training for a marathon is difficult. It's difficult the way calculus is difficult. How difficult is that? It's difficult enough to make you reconsider the value of your time.

French isn't Spanish, this is true. However, I've found that Spanish often lets me read French. Also, thanks to William the Conqueror, English has more than a little to do with French. Recently I sat around the dinner table eating fromage and talking with my buddy and his folks. When faced with a specific word absent from my French vocabulary I'd ask him to translate only to have him repeat the word back to me with a French accent.

Language learning has become a much smaller part of my trip than I anticipated. After one month I'm neither disappointed nor discouraged. I've spend July appreciating France. From here, the language I learn will reflect a deepening affection for the culture and people. This is the way language learning should be.

No Leaning

Danger: Images not suitable for my father. If you are my father, do not read any further. Failure to yield to this warning could result in extreme bouts of acrophobia.

Last Wednesday was a special day. After several days in Lyon I decided to explore the Alps. Here is a running diary of one of the scariest days of my life. (Times are color coded by location.)

8:30am - Up to get the petit déjeuner offered at the Vagabond Hostel in Chamonix. My roommates, who were Finnish and much better hikers than I, were up at 5:30 to get on the train. The more extreme the route, the earlier you get up. The good climbers don't sleep.
 

10:00am - I arrive at the train station. Train station? Okay, I need to explain. I'm hiking along the mountain, not up the mountain. (Registers a 0 on the Dad Scale)

Ode to a Russian Seminary

Can I interest you in the first article of the trip?

"Catholicism in Russia"

Between La Tour and Le Tour

Just inside the entrance to The National Museum of the American Indian in DC there's a large room with a circular space in the middle. The whole arena is earth-tone: wood, sand, and lots of light. The circular space at the center acts as a stage where the museum displays American Indian culture, crafts, and events.

A few years back I observed something really brilliant on that stage. A craftsman from Bolivia was making a boat of reeds. The reeds were long and green and flexible. He would gather them into a bunch and tie them really tightly. Then he'd carefully gather another bunch, and he would tie those too. When he had a bunch of bunches, he would bunch them together until he had a gorgeous green canoe with reeds bound up all along the hull. The craft was simple, elegant, and quite sturdy.

The other day I began thinking about how I learned Spanish. Looking back there seemed to be formative moments where a conversation synthesized all the little pieces of Spanish I'd been gathering. These milestone moments seemed to gel the reeds of a growing vocabulary, tying them together, making them fit.

My favorite reed boat moment came after my American classmates went home for winter break. I stayed behind to travel with my father. While in Bilbao, we stayed for about a week with a lovely Spanish/Basque family in Getxo. Every morning Rosa, la madre, would wake me up and demand that I tell her how I slept, what I wanted for breakfast, and what I wanted to do that day. She didn't give me a chance to think in English, just speak Spanish.

I'm writing about all this today because I just had my first French reed boat moment. After two weeks of staring at my French computer program and feeling embarrassed as I listened to my French friends tell each other what I can only assume are the most entertaining stories ever told, some of the small French pieces began to gel.

It happened as I managed to get a ride from Lyon to Chamonix with a French gent baring a delightful resemblance to Harrison Ford. Whereas I've found it difficult to get new people to speak slow, well-enunciated French to me the last few weeks, he obliged. Every new sentence seemed to unlock some hidden word I'd learned somewhere, waiting for confirmation in a real-world setting.

As I'll discuss in a later post, French presents challenges that don't exist in Spanish. But for now, at least, I've begun tying together the reeds of a simple, but sturdy French vocabulary.

Toulouse à Vélo

Gérard Manset - Il Voyage En Solitaire

Keys to Photographing Le Canal du Midi

On Sunday my host Raoul took me on a bike ride along the Canal du Midi. It's like the C&O canal in DC except businessman don't cut down trees along the canal that block the view from their mansion.

Riding back I noticed a gorgeous field of sunflowers just on the other side of the canal, protected by a barbed wire fence. The flowers obviously needed to be photographed. Monday, I obliged the sunflowers. I learned a lot along the way. Enough to present to you:

The Keys to Photographing Sunflowers along the Canal du Midi in Southern France

1) Do not, under any circumstances, bring a map. French roads are generally laid out in a circular pattern, as opposed to English streets which use a grid pattern. Also, all the houses in suburban France conveniently look the same. This is perfect when searching for a field of sunflowers. Not only won't you find the sunflowers, but your frustration will be compounded when you realize you're incapable of finding a HUGE FIELD OF SUNFLOWERS.

2) Make sure you bring a heavy metal camera-stand that's large and black and doesn't fit in your backpack. That way, when you ride down the streets of Toulouse, all the French people will think you're carrying a semi-automatic rifle.

3) If you do nothing else, go in the middle of the day. The light from the sun will be incredibly ordinary AND it'll be as hot as possible when you get lost.

4) Oh, and when that cute French girl approaches you on the way back, make sure not to speak any French. You'll be too tired, frustrated, and sunburned to care about missing the chance to meet the future French mother of your children.

Okay, you're all set. Follow all the keys and here are some pictures you'll take:

Toulouse, Je t'aime

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

What comes first: being happy or smiling?

Socially, I dominated middle school. There are a number of reasons why. I had a clique. I had a girlfriend. I still believed I was destined to play professional soccer (Brazil 2014!). Adults, teachers, fellow students older and younger; there were few people I felt uncomfortable talking to.

My high school social life didn't exactly live up. Some new realities had set in. There's a list, but most of it revolved around puberty. I was surrounded by the same people as middle school, but something had changed. I wasn't having the same social success. Sports became more difficult and I found myself struggling to keep girls' attention.

For a long time I externalized the blame. Fate, my parents, my school, my community: everything was fair game. Even into my twenties I blamed everyone and everything except myself.

Not long ago I came across an old photo album from that time in my life. Flipping through, I was unaffected seeing myself Boy Scouting, wrestling, playing soccer, or standing on stage. Towards the end of the album there was a pouch with all my old school pictures.

I never loved school photos, but I never feared them either. For some reason I'd always liked my photo from 6th grade. I wore a white, long-sleeve shirt with Michael Jordan silhouetted over wacky 1990's colors. I looked young but not infantile. For once, my unruly hair was tame. But what struck me more than anything was my smile.

I looked...happy. My smile was genuine, honest, welcoming. I recalled seeing the photo sometime during high school and trying to remember what it felt like to be in that moment and feel what that smile felt like. I remember failing. Pictures of that smile don't exist from high school.

I've never forgotten that photo. Thinking back, it's the way I wanted people to remember me, and I'd never understood why. Much later I realized it was my smile.

Please don't think that my smile is anything special. Everyone's smile has this power. A smile does a number of things well. First of all, it projects confidence. Two, it makes other people feel good. This combination creates a powerful attraction. In "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell talks about a famous study that found the act of smiling has a reverse effect. In other words, we smile when we are happy, but we also become happy when we smile.

On Tuesday I arrived in Toulouse, France. It's a big sprawling city with a gorgeous downtown and a extremely pleasant night-time atmosphere.

When meeting French people here, I have limited resources at my disposal. I don't speak French. I don't know anything about the city. And my host and I are still relative strangers.

And yet, I'm having a great time.

It could be French culture. Or maybe I'm blessed to stumble upon a group of people that make me feel so welcome. It could be I'm a curiosity because I'm foreign. But if I had to guess, I'd say smiling shares some of the responsible. Feels like middle school again.

Rule #4: Smile

Devendra Banhart - Can't Help But Smiling

St. Petersburg Math

This...
plus this...
multiplied by...
equals a wicked birthday. Good-bye Leningrad

St. Petersburg Pop Quiz

Why does Russ love the Leningrad Underground?

A) It's like going back in time. The light fixtures look like they belong in a 1957 Cadillac. The coaches look like trolleys. There are portraits of Soviet leaders.

B) Everything is in the Cyrilic alphabet.

C) It runs on a token system.

D) The trains seem to come once every 3 minutes.

E) You have to go to a window to purchase a ticket.



If you chose A, you were wrong! What did I tell you? Rule #3: Embrace Challenging. The answer is B. So there.

Pounding Pavement in St. Petersburg

Rule #3: Embrace challenging

It's noon, it's starting to get overcast, and you've just arrived in a strange city with a strange alphabet. You have two large bags and a backpack. The simple way to get from the train station to your hostel would be a taxi, except that you're America and you don't like to negotiate the price of a cab ride with a Russian who probably won't speak English and wants to rip you off. On the other hand, the signs for the metro aren't in your language. They aren't even in your alphabet. What now?

I went the metro route, which wasn't easy. However, I was rewarded with some of the coolest Soviet-era architecture Russia has to offer anywhere outside Moscow. Pictures soon. In the meantime, there's been a lot to check out.

Moy Moy Helsingfors, Privet Leningrad

I've been spoiled. English isn't obligatory in Russian schools. Russia doesn't put English on their street signs or their underground, especially those around the train station. As much as I've fallen for St. Petersburg, Russia hasn't gone out of its way to make me more comfortable.

A word about Helsinki before I gush about St. Petersburg:

It's hard to get a feel for a city after only 4 days. Understanding a city takes time and I was only in Helsinki for two day, taking into account all the time spent in Tallinn and Suomenlinna. But I have to say the Fins seem to have it figured out. My host Jim spent a lot of time describing the idiosyncrasies of Finnish culture. It's a culture of appreciation and care. Like many European countries which have respect for the individual, Finland maintains an egalitarian system heavy on education and mandated time off. In Helsinki the trains run on time and locations, streets, methods of transport, and signs are laid out logically and clearly. Throw in the unique sense of style: simple, elegant, modern, utilitarian, and you have a very attractive and easy aesthetic. And the people couldn't be more friendly.

St. Petersburg couldn't be less user-friendly. No one seems to speak English well. There's not much English on the signs, which is fine in most European countries, except that Russia has a different alphabet. This made getting around on the underground a real experience.

Riddim: Appreciating Foreign Music

The Pop
Benga & Coki - Night

The Filth
Skream - Oskilatah

When you listen to new music, it helps to have a location in mind. For example, when listening to rap music where do you think of? Don't say the suburbs.

Right, Brooklyn.

How about classical music?

Vienna, sure.

Country music?

Nashville.

So when I started listening to dubstep music, it was clear I had nowhere to place it. The dubstep I knew came from Baltimore. Baltimore is dirty. But dubstep, as you may have heard above from Skream, is filthy. Last week I found my dubstep spot. It's London. It's the London tube. It's busy, it's cramped, it's wet. I love it.

Dubstep?

London.

A Traveler Humbled

Time for an ego check.

If you've read my stuff before, or ever met me, you might have heard me talk authoritatively about travel. I retract everything. One week into EuroTrip 2010, I've managed to break all but the most cardinal rules of travel. Let me explain by speaking even more authoritatively. During the next month I'm going to dish about some of the do's and don'ts of travel. This is PaxPangea's:

"EuroTrip 2010: If Only I Practiced What I Preached"

Rule #1: Be anal

No seriously. Be really, really anal. Let me explain: Traveling is about variables. Just like life, there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Your only recourse is to be as vigilant as possible.

The interweb is a glorious fount of information on things like visas, news, and whether or not your train ticket from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, that you bought well ahead of time in the U.S., will be rendered useless because there is track maintenance on the day you were scheduled to leave.

Rule #2: Keep everything

In 2008 I was traveling with a Peace Corps buddy of mine through West Africa. We planned to meet in Accra: the capital of Ghana, spend a week there, and cross the border into Lome, Togo. Whereas Ghana has recently prospered economically, Togo has not. A pseudo-dictatorial regime runs the country, the GDP is low despite abundant natural resources, and during the rainy season Togo's main highway is almost always out. In 2008, the 50 most dangerous cities in the world went: 1) Detroit, 2) Baghdad, 3) Lome.

I broke a rule by not doing my homework ahead of time and therefore not getting the all-important Ghanaian Visa. "No worries," I thought. I'll buy it at the airport, problem solved.

We rolled around Ghana for a week and came to the Togo border. My PCV friend had warned me what to expect: a run-down, militarized border where people were known to have been beaten for taking pictures. No smiling.

We cautiously walked to the shack outside the menacing archway, with a menacing watchtower, and menacing guards. It was, in a word, menacing.

The office was busy with people moving in and out. There were people dressed in uniforms and tourists whose perplexed faces mirrored our own.

The woman behind the counter didn't look happy to see us. She was equally unhappy about seeing our passports. My friend was first. He got his back without issue.

Then came my passport. She looked at it. Then she showed it to her friend. Then she checked something and looked at me. I looked at my buddy, sitting on the edge of his seat, eyes drifting quickly from perplexity into fear. He came over and she asked him something in French. He smiled the smile of absurdity, the worst kind of smile.

It's the smile you smile when you are forced to pay full price for parking because you lost your parking stub. It's the smile you smile when you are forced to walk through the entire airport departure maze when no one is in line. It's the smile you smile when a Togolese border worker asks you for the receipt for a visa payment you made about 500 miles ago, when the visa is clearly visible in the passport. My friend turns to me with the frown of hopelessness.

I wish I had a picture of his face when I told him I still had the receipt. It was the smile of elation. The best kind of smile.

Keep everything.

Finland as an Island

As an eighties baby, it's hard to imagine that some counties weren't always countries. Finland is one of them. Their history is not a pretty one. First they were part of Sweden for 600 years. Then they were part of Russia for a hundred years. Then, just when they gain their independence, they become entangled in a civil war.

There's a small island off the coast of Helsinki that embodies a lot of that history: Suomenlinna. First the Swedish built up the island waiting for a Russian attack. Then the Russians attacked and the island held. Then the Russians came back later and won. Then the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 and Finland declared independence. All the while Suomenlinna has been raised and razed. The results are quite special.

Finland's Mexico

Estonia is Finland's Mexico: dirtier, cheaper, and going there may result in stories that need not leave Estonia.

If you're Finnish, the city of Tallinn in Estonia has a lot going for it: there's a medieval downtown, the city sits on the water, and it's a pleasant two-hour ferry ride away. Despite all the perks, there seems to be one overwhelming draw. Booze.

The only thing Fins love more than drinking coffee is drinking alcohol. They seem to have a particular preference for cider. The Finnish government, in an effort to curb drinking, imposes a 22% tax on alcohol. The Estonian government does not. And Estonia still works on the Kroon system...at least until next year. So people go over and buy crates of alcohol.

A Very Finnish Solstice

Grab your globe. Hold it straight out in front of you and pretend you're the center of the universe...um, the sun. Then tilt the Earth correctly and remember that in June the bottom is tilted away. Now spin it. Can you see Finland the whole time? Exactly.

I arrived last night at around 12am and it felt like 6pm. Woke up at 5am and it felt like 1pm. The city is beautiful and modern. The people alternate between quiet and silent. I'm too jet lagged to put together a cohesive thesis on Finnish life: here are some pictures.