I'm never sure what impresses me more when I read
Kevin Sites ... whether it's his endurance, his way of connecting with people, his courage ... I don't know but something he wrote struck home with me today.
He's in Nepal being driven through rain heavy enough to dent a car ... the car is a
1971 pre-Nissan thing called a Gista.
Here's an extract from his piece titled
'Nepal: I am a Dog' :
When I was traveling in Africa or even the Middle East, the country changes weren't as abrupt to me as they have been in the last six weeks. Like a slow-dissolve connecting the disparate sequences of a continuous story that spans too much geographic territory, I see the roads before me blend from one to the other — riding the river beds of eastern Afghanistan in a humvee, through the lowlands of northern Colombia packed in a local taxi, winding through the hillsides of Haiti in my fixer's beat up Datsun and now to this moment in Nepal.
Sometimes I have to wander to find myself, and when I'm not free to wander I have to read ... searching I guess, for some thing to hold or interest me, to allow movement of another kind.
I love a journey, be it real or imagined; mine or belonging to someone else.
Dan Eldon made sense when he wrote
'The journey is the destination' and he lived his life accordingly.
In 'The Great Arc', Carrithers wrote,
'The first moral is that human life is 'metamorphic'. 'Metamorphic' here is a term of art meant to capture the incessant mutability of human experience, the temporality woven into all human institutions and relationships.'
For those who dare, I ate
this last night.
Cecil said,
There are two kinds of sweetbreads: stomach sweetbreads (also known as heart or belly sweetbreads), which are an animal's pancreas, and neck (AKA throat or gullet) sweetbreads, an animal's thymus gland. (The animal in question can be a hog or calf or just about any other large mammal, I gather.) They're called sweetbreads for the obvious reason that if you called them thymus glands or whatever you couldn't give the damn things away. The art of euphemism goes back a long way.
There's nothing like trying the food in your country of residence ... nothing quite like it
In Turkey, I attended a teachers conference in Edirne. I went with two of my Turkish friends and we met up with my future boss and colleagues while there. They decided I should try the local delicacy ... the one that another colleague had asked that we take back to her because she loved it so much.
Sounds good I thought to myself.
I admit it, I balked a little when they told me it was deep-fried lung, thinking 'Dear god, must I?' Off we wandered to the restaurant, with me psychologically dragging my heels.
The other
wandering woman has sprained her ankle and made me remember my Istanbul experience of damaging self ...
I went searching for the email I sent to the people back home in those blogless days and was surprised by the 'novel' I found:
I'm sitting with my ankle propped up on a chair, using a pillow to slide round my apartment when I need anything ...
How did it happen, well the story is long.
It had become clear that it was time to move on from the school I am teaching in. Morale continues to plummet and many teachers have found new jobs for next year. I vacillated between soul and security, not sure of what I would find if I went looking for work.
One of the best things about expat life is often the other expats you meet along the way. They are travelers but that's not all, the baggage they carry is often their tales of lives well-lived; lives full of stories.
Last night Shannon and Gabe were celebrating Shannon's birthday and had invited a few people over for the night many months ago, giving their American friends time to fly in for it ... a lovely couple from San Diego really did.
We arrived with Alison and Andrew, the Canadians who had popped over to pick us Antwerpens up. We were immediately made welcome and our glasses were filled before we were whisked off for the first of the many interesting introductions made through the night.
'Solo journeys can strip away all the edifice of a created life and open the traveller to new possibilites. Within the structures of the home environment your self-image is built on the foundations of accent, friends, family, education, clothing, profession, size of house, brand of car, etc.
When you are on the road, however, the relationships you make with others no longer rely on all those perceived signals, but come down to your personality alone. It's an unfettering, liberating experience for those who can cope with it.
Andrew Eames
from 'The 8.55 To Baghdad'
Have you ever driven 400 kilometres over a 13 hour day, walked miles through war cemeteries and villages with names like Kemmel and Poperinge ... always expecting the rain to stop and the clouds to clear, as promised by a reliable weather source the night before?
Have you ever bought cheap Pumas from a bazaar in Istanbul then worn them all over Flanders Fields in Belgian rain only to find that they are clearly 'indoor' Pumas ... in fact, they're possibly not
Pumas at all?
It's not often that you see a man successfully accessorising his khaki green puttees with his World War One military uniform these days however that was my experience in Ieper.
Drew and Kevin were standing to attention throughout the ANZAC ceremonies at the Menin Gate in Ieper (Ypres in French). They were still-life subjects when my photography was limited by the number of heads in front of me. Casting about for something 'in theme' my eyes were drawn to Drew's puttees.
It seems I need to enter the landscape of a story to begin to understand ...
I grew up with a
Gallipoli veteran; my grandfather was a soldier who after being shipped off the bloodied beaches of the Gelibolu (Gallipoli) Peninsula, found himself fighting in Flanders, Belgium; the place where his horse took the full brunt of a shell that injured h
