On the road again... not aimlessly

Tonight I feel trapped in the same cycle lots of people feel trapped in. Doing the same thing day in day out, somewhat aimlessly. I have the same questions as everybody else. What the hell am I doing? And what for? (Are you looking for adventure? Why are you here? Alone?) The only difference is my days in days out seem more edgy than, say, an office job. So what in tarnations am I complaining about?

Even while I am thinking that I am ready to be done, I know these have not been aimless years on the move; they have been for their own purpose. I needed to hop off the teeter-totter and ride the merry-go-round for a while. Itchy feet. Wanderlust. Whatever centripetally propelled search. My favorite playground activity has always been swinging, though. I suppose that means I need a little of both sides and to find balance. It's also (interestingly) one of the few recess pastimes you can do by your lonesome.

But I really wasn't looking forward to traveling by my lonesome again. It's not that one way is better than another way (accompanied or alone). They are completely different creatures. Once you are familiar and OK with both, you probably don't mind doing either one, but it's normal to have a preference--and even normal for this preference to change depending on circumstances and the time/space you occupy in your life. It's kind of like pets. Some people prefer dogs; some people'd rather have cats. Just because you think you like cats more, doesn't mean you won't someday have a dog, which you love like a child.

In some ways I started to get excited to travel on my own. The freedom! The easiness. But traveling with Serkan hasn't been difficult. On my own I might do more girly groomy things like do something with my damaged mane, or skip it all and go to farm-like yoga retreats. But the other repetitive travel crap is tiring. Men. I am not single. I'm not in the mood for flirtations. It's annoying not to be to be left alone when solo. When I am with Serkan, guys don't follow me around like the stray dogs of Puerto Natales, and the gross noises from their spittle spotted mouths are fewer. I miss that peace I have with Serkan and that sense of ...well... I guess it's security.

Lisbon and lost luggage

I arrived to Lisbon today. The day started at 3.30am with a short, expensive ride to Schipol Airport. Just me and my great big many-galloned backpack. Archteryx, blue, some black, patches on the lid. Each detail has its own special sku number at the airport. If I had it right now, I would take out a stick of incense and light it. But it still hasn't arrived. I should have known it was no good when I was told to lug it to the odd-sized baggage area before 5 a.m. Nobody was there, so I waited. A Dutch family also had some odd-sized baggage to drop, we walked around and found a manned drop.

It will get on the flight, right?
Yes, of course, no problem.

After waiting two hours at belt #9 for odd-sized items in the Lisbon airport, I describe my pack to the overly busy lost luggage office. I fill out an official lost luggage report, and I am on my way to the city center. I have no load, so I figure instead of queueing up for the taxi and paying some outrageous fare, I would just bus and metro it. I get directions and make it fine. I have even planned ahead this time, and not only do I have a place to go, I have the address and phone number of the hostel handy.

I walk up and down Avenida Altamirante Reis. It's hot, I am still in heavy travel jeans, and I lumber through the sketchy hood shouldering the most uncomfortable laptop bag I have ever met. I cannot for the life of me find the place. I pass by where it is supposed to be a couple of times and find a public phone. (Thank goodness there are public phones here.) I call. They say yeah, that is the number, you have to walk down the street more, closer to where the avenue turns into a smaller street. OK. Another hour. I am starting to feel whiney and desperate. Nobody knows the hostel, though everyone wants to help, tries to help. Normally I wouldn't be so attached to a hostel I couldn't find, I would just let it go and look for another one. But I gave the airport this invisible hostel's address, and it's where they are going to deliver my pack, if my pack ever arrives.

Eventually I hail a cab and ask if he knows where the place is. He doesn't really, but I get in anyway, because I figure we can cover more ground by auto and maybe he can call them on his cell to get better directions, in Portuguese. It turns out to be exactly where I thought it was the first time, you know, an hour or so ago when I called and they said I should keep walking downhill. The driver is horrified and says how muito perigoso this neighborhood is. I already know it's pretty dangerous, because I had been walking around the same area for hours already. You don't have any friends here? You are here all by yourself? Why? Are you looking for adventure? This is no place for you to stay. You could stay at my house. I am just driving the taxi all day anyway, and it's only seven km from the airport.

So that's where I am now. Haha, just kidding.

Really, I ended up in Portugal for reasons of yoga, rural farmlands, and dishwashing galore. I'm not looking for adventure, rather for peace, solitude. In having someplace quiet to go, I am, in fact, trying to escape travel for a bit. Traveling's hard. So often nothing works out the way it's supposed to, the way you plan it to. Just. Like. Life. This is starting to sound like a Black Sheep article. It's just that when you're out there on the road, it's only natural that you and life come within grimace distance of each other more often. How we divide ourselves from our lives is a whole other story altogether.

In Amsterdam

My friends greeted me at the Amsterdam airport in true Holland style, bikes and all. We first took a train to where the bikes were parked and then cycled home, weaving through the green parks in the breezy evening. Nico shouldered my pack and I sat on the rack behind Marjan.

First I must say that the fact of being picked up at the airport was a trip in itself. I can't remember the last time someone was inside the airport waiting for me. Normally I walk coolly past all the hugging or tearful reunions, sometimes with balloons or flowers and often with kids; and the anxious people waiting for loved ones--the faces that light up with the sight of their beloved behind me, or that slight let-down look every time another body comes into view, and it's not the anticipated body. I normally like this part of arriving and of airports in general. People giving each other the ol' once over, arms out and a step back and the upanddown looking. At this moment everybody looks good, refreshing even. The waiting's over and you get to drink each other in, tall glasses of cool water. These reunions make me smile and, admittedly often choke me up a little. So it was cool to be hugging this time and not just watching everybody else hug.

Rain scented that first evening, but it didn't start to tip until the next morning. And tip it did. I kept thinking, July? I am sissying out to the cold again after being so long in Turkey. But even though it rains, just a little every day, the days are also lovely. Green and flowery. Songbirds and rustling leaves of ubiquitous trees, which sound like rain even when the sun's drying everything off.

We've been having a lot of fun, cooking, catching up, museuming and eating delicious meals. Marjan and I kayaked through the canals for a few hours on Sunday up north a little in Waterland. We parked the kayaks at a tea garden for some tea and cake about halfway. The whole time I was amazed at how "perfect" everything is. I don't think I have ever been to a place so manicured. The houses are all different, so it's not like the wacky manicured look of our new age of cookie-cutter, tract housing. Here it feels simultaneously cute yet strange. What makes perfect perfect, and when is perfect too perfect? All super picturesque in any case.

For dinner we met up with Nico to eat Thai food, which I haven't had since I was last in California. Red coconut curry, mmmm. We took a detour on the way home to stroll through the red-light district, where apparently there are guided tours. I suppose that is obvious, but it is a pretty funny sight: one tour leader showing off a window full of spiffy condoms or elaborate dildos to 10 some odd pot-bellied tourists donning cameras and hats and, yes, even Hawaiian T-shirts.

Museums here are amazing, though overfull. I think the only way to enjoy them is to take the audio tours. The stories they give, for example, of Van Gogh's life and the history surrounding certain works whisk you up out of the crowd. Informative and moving, the audio slows you down so you can enjoy each piece a little more, with less sensitivity to the big heads that inevitably and frequently block your view.

Learning to swim

It's summer and it's Monday. Today was my last day running on the Black Sea shore, Samsun-side. It was my most quiet run since I've been here (at least three weeks?). The water, like glass. Not even the tiniest beginning of a wave. The high tide pushed me further up onto the sand, which was stained with seaweed and milky blobs of jellyfish.

The kids are out of school and many people are out of work, so enjoying the beach before the high sun at noon seems to be the best plan. Blond girls sunbathe. Grandparents watch their grandkids play in the sand. Dads teach their sons how to swim. Hardly anybody is in the water, because it's Monday and the beach isn't near as packed as it is on the weekends. In the sea are some young boys playing with beach toys, toddlers with neon-colored arm floaties, old men with hair backs, and a little futher out, the dads teaching their sons swim. No matter what part of the beach I run on, there is a dad out there with his crying child. Trying to get that kid to swim. The kids yell for their mothers and say they don't like it. Every scene is the same: the dad laughing slightly, saying come on, come on, just try it one more time.

A side note on languages. When I was thinking about the absurdly waveless see, I thought, "Nothing to wave hola to." And then I thought how in English the word for the ocean's waves and the act of waving hello or goodbye is the same. In Spanish, ocean waves are olas. And hello is hola. Our languages seem to point to wanting some sort of interaction with our environment. An ebb and flow kinda thing. End side note.

Afghans in Turkey

I have plotted my next adventure. In a couple of days, I leave for Istanbul and then off to Holland to visit a friend, Marjan, who I first met in Patagonia. I hope to see another couple of scattered-about Dutch friends while I am there as well, if it works out. The ticket there was an amazing 4 Euros + minimal taxes. Super.

It will be good to be on the move again. I enjoyed settling down for a bit at Serkan's parents' house, but I've also found it difficult to develop my routine. Some element of weirdness is to be expected, since we can't really communicate with each other. (It's been good for my Turkish. I still can't really speak, but I do understand more than when I started.) Plus I have officially spent more consecutive days in Samsun than Serkan has since he first left when he was 18. I've just spent a beautiful day with his mom and his brother's family. I still have the kids voices ringing in my ears. It's funny, but I can tell already that I will miss them.

This set up where I live with my sweetheart's family with whom I can hardly communicate while he is away has been quite the experiment. There's been a psychologically interesting part, mainly what's triggered when I start tiptoeing inside someone else's world. (The bastard question marks dangle their feet: "someone else's world?" "tiptoeing?" Though I am a master tiptoer, it's still kind of uncomfortable. My discomfort has only to do with me--nothing to do with anybody else (of course). Everyone has been crazy welcoming. In fact, I've received so many gifts, there's no way we can bring everything back with us to Patagonia. Some gifts are too precious, like the handstitched body scrubber from Serkan's mom. She crochets these amazing, exfoliating, super sudsy foaming wash cloths for the whole family. Her son-in-law loves his so much: To make sure nobody else uses it, after he bathes he stores the washrag in the pocket of his robe, you know, for safe keeping. Each rag could be one square in an afghan. Someday I think we should unite all the cloths into a hodgepodge family heirloom. Would that be gross?

Anyway, yeah, the discomfort is a mini psychic trigger for me. It has to do with revisiting childhood roles. We all have them, and they are, for the most part, bad habits meant to be tamed or flat out broken. Otherwise we end up playing out our Oedipal disasters in our adult relationships, and who wants that?

My role was that of the anemic tiptoer. Invisible bullet dodger. Mostly nobody even knew that I was anemic or that there were bullets to dodge. I have, I hope, sloughed off that kid identity. But it crops up again sometimes, especially in uncomfortable situations where I feel trapped in "somebody else's" world. Part of me refuses to enter that world and part of my is utterly incapacitated by it. Stuck inside, forever outside. There's something so familiar about this kind of discomfort, which dusts off the little girl in me. She says: Time to blow this popstand.

My zen side says, "You are not your past. You are not your identity. You are not a you or an I. You are light and love and one... just like everybody else. In which case there are no human separations. Your ego mind is creating these separations to keep itself in power, in control and in tact. Om. [white space] My literature side is intrigued by the idea of identity and identities and could write essays on the subject, has written essays on the subject. My therapy side says to turn the rock over in my hand until it becomes glossy from the grip. Crack open the stone, come to terms with it, understand its guts and its voices, listen to each and reunite them. [Time-is-up-buzz of the 50-minute alarm] My writer side says, "Ummm. OK. I am just going to Amsterdam and it's really not that big of a deal." My crafty side says to make a hodgepodge afghan outta this.