Going solo

A person is a person through other persons.  –Desmond Tutu

Traveling alone is sort of a love-hate thing for me. 

For example, today I loved taking my time making decisions and going up to Table Mountain when I was ready.  I loved not having to make conversation with anyone on the drive there or discuss whether we were going to wait in the 60-minute gondola line to ride to the top or not. 

But I hated not having anyone next to me I could poke and say, “Hey!  The floor of the cable car is rotating!” or “Look!  You can see Cape Point from here!” or of course, “Take a picture of me pretending to fall off the edge of the cliff!”

Instead, I asked a couple of strangers to take a few pictures and then perched myself on top of a large rock looking out over the mountain dropping into the ocean.  I had just settled in to eat my dark chocolate seed bar (it was amazing) when two guys clambered up next to me and actually asked me in  to move so they could take have their picture taken where I was sitting.  Dude, seriously?  There are approximately one million rocks all together right here with almost exactly the same view, and you want my rock?  Can’t you see I’m sitting here far away from other people eating my lunch and having a moment?

Later, as I walked in the Company’s Gardens, a gangly man with one eye and a limp (and alcohol on his breath) pointed out the South African white house and a couple other sites to me.  I tried to shake him, but he kept walking with me and to be fair, he actually showed me some interesting things, like old apartheid benches with “non-whites only” still painted on them and the way into Desmond Tutu’s church.  But I was relieved when I finally gave him a handful of change and we said goodbye.

I spent the day warily keeping people outside my bubble, enjoying the sights but also enjoying being inside my own head.  But by the time I sat down to dinner at a restaurant called Fork, I felt a little lonely.  In Shall We Dance, one of the characters says in effect, “We have relationships in order to have someone to witness our lives.”  And when I travel alone, I acutely feel the lack of a witness.  If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear the sound, did it make a sound at all?  If I eat a fantastic asparagus and parmesan stick and no one is there to witness it, did I really eat it?  I thought of trying to replicate the meal later in my own kitchen just so that I could share with someone else how tasty it was. 

I glanced over at a window and noticed my own reflection, looking like a ghost sitting at an empty table.  And I felt like a ghost, like someone who breezed through this city today without leaving a mark, someone who was almost here – but with no one to witness it, was I really here at all?

Halfway through the meal, a new server started waiting on me.  She laughed when I told her that I almost licked the plate clean and her eyes got round as she described which desserts were “to die for.”  She brought me the strawberry and lemon curd pavlova along with tea made from fresh mint leaves.  It was divine.  I told her if I lived in Cape Town I would eat there every single day, and she laughed with real delight and said, “Yes!  I know what you mean!”  And for a moment someone witnessed my life.  I realized I didn’t want to be in a bubble, I didn’t want to be a ghost, I wanted to witness life, to participate in it, to leave a mark.

I left an overly generous tip with a note: “Thanks for the great service, and for your smile and laugh.  Best wishes.” 

Russia in pictures

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again

Add to the list of supposedly fun things I’ll never do again: A 22-hour road trip with 45 friends on a bus. Add in Soviet-era roads; waiting four hours at the border between Russia and Ukraine; two group sing-a-longs; and rest stops with squat toilets that you have to pay to use, and you have an idea of the luxury travel I enjoyed this weekend.

Trip highlights included:

*Rest stops. And not just for the rest. It was amusing to watch the mothers and grandmothers in the group venture into the bushes to avoid paying a 50-cent fee to use the bathrooms. That was the first rest stop. Later, after dark, we pulled over for another rest stop, and as I got out of the bus I realized that there was no rest stop at all. We were pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and people were scattered among the trees doing their business like it was the most normal thing in the world.

*Eating kolbasa sandwiches and sharing a teacup of juice with the Hausbiulins, each drinking out of a different side.

*Showing Roma the PhotoBooth application

Funny thing is, when they all got back on the bus tonight to head back to Russia and I stood waving and blowing kisses on the sidewalk, I actually felt a pang of sadness that I wasn’t going back with them.

But I guess that didn't really have anything to do with the bus.

Perestroika, physical and spiritual

Perestroika: The literal translation is "rebuilding."

The word you really hear all the time is remont -- it means "repair" or "remodel."

And it's going on everywhere you look in Moscow. Including here:

Hram Hristos Cpasitel (Church of Christ the Savior) is the largest Orthodox church in the world.

It was built in Moscow in the 1800s and destroyed by Stalin in 1931 to make way for an enormous Soviet Palace topped by a colossal statue of Lenin, designed to be the tallest building in the world. But the palace was never built, and the foundation of the cathedral became a huge swimming pool. (Yes, everything is huge, colossal, enormous, mammoth – we’re in Russia, and bigger is always better!)

In 1994, after nearly five years of petitioning, the Russian Orthdox Church was granted permission to rebuild the cathedral on it’s original site, and in 2000 the new building -- an exact replica of the original church -- was consecrated.

From the guidebook I bought there:

A tragedy for Russian Christians, the attempt of the Communists to put up the Palace of Councils in place of the cathedral revealed the struggle between God who had become man to save humanity and man who was trying in vain to become God.

The gigantic “Babylon Tower” … was a symbolic antithesis of the Saviour cathedral, its anti-reflection. … Many elements of the palace were devised as antipodes of the cathedral’s elements -- the huge statue of Lenin instead of the cross crowning the cathedral, the representation of a five-pointed star on the ceiling of the Grand Hall, and articles of the Stalin Constitution carved on the walls of the foyer.

And then this symbolism of resurrection and repentance, which I found especially moving:

Many Muscovites who watched the [groundbreaking] ceremony [for the new building] on TV in 1994 could not believe their eyes: the miracle did occur. The main national sanctuary was being resurrected from its ashes, like a mythological bird Phoenix. ...

Today it is primarily a place of repentance, a personification of the country’s conversion from atheistic theories to the Law of God, to Christian doctrines of eternity and the City of God, to the traditional roots of the Russian Orthodox civilization. The cathedral, regarded as a martyr for Christ, has been resurrected on the site to show gratitude to God for saving Russia and overthrowing the utopian theory of the earthly paradise. It is a sort of memorial to Russia’s history, heroism and sufferings. It is the national Orthodox idea embodied in stone.

Where am I, you ask?

I'm in Moscow.

Why am I here? Great question.

A few years ago, at the recommendation of several friends, I started reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. She writes about her travels to Italy, India and Indonesia on the heels of a wrenching divorce in an attempt to rediscover meaning in life. But I found myself resenting Gilbert and all her exotic wisdom so much that I had to stop reading after the first few chapters.

Nice for you, I thought, that you can just pack up and travel the world to mend your broken heart. Nice that you have the means and the time and everything to do whatever you want. If I had that luxury, I could also write full-time about the purpose of life, have more spiritual epiphanies and sort through all my personal psychoses.

But I don’t have that luxury. I’m stuck here in what feels like a dead end life with crushing student loans, an hour-long commute to an unfulfilling job, a crisis of faith, disappointment upon disappointment in my personal life and no idea what to do next. And all I’m getting from reading your "inspirational" book is that if I want to find purpose and meaning and healing I need to have a ton of money so I can travel the world. What about the rest of us? What about people who have to find a way to sort things out on a budget, while still juggling life's responsibilities?

And yet, here I am. I’ve arranged for 16 weeks of leave from my job to work on an important-sounding writing project. I've put all my earthly belongings into a 5' by 8' wooden crate. I’ve scraped together enough money to get to Russia and (hopefully) survive there for ten of those weeks. Maybe I bought into it after all. Maybe a part of me really believes that leaving my life behind, even temporarily, and living a foreign life in a foreign country while writing about foreign people is the path to life's answers. Maybe I resented Elizabeth Gilbert because I wanted to be her. Or maybe I just bought exactly what she was selling, without even realizing it.

A few weeks ago, I said to M., Maybe after three months in Russia I’ll know exactly what I want to do with my life. I’ll have direction and answers.

Probably not, he said.

Wow, I thought. That's a little mean.

But he was right, and that's when I realized how hard I was trying to be Elizabeth Gilbert. Life's answers aren't just out there for the taking, growing on mango trees in Thailand or currant bushes in Russia. It's not like there's an on-demand channel for them. I'm just as likely to come back and be right where I started as I am to find answers to any of life’s questions, solve my crisis of faith and have clear direction for my career and my love life.

And you know what? It's a relief to think that maybe I won’t figure it all out this summer. Or ever, for that matter. And so in the end, the answer to why I'm here is that I want to be here. Sure, maybe I'm trying a little too hard to find meaning. Welcome to my world. And yeah, maybe I'm just running away. So what? (Thanks, Dad, for helping me come to terms with that one.) It comes down to the fact that I just want to be here, and I can. And so I am.

It's like this guy said, after quitting his fancy New York City engineering job (what is it with our generation?) to walk across America. (Yep, just walk. He loves walking, apparently. And he’s meeting people and seeing the country and getting to walk.) He said:

"I didn't want to be too ambitious about what I would figure out on this walk. I didn't want to tell myself that when I was done, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But maybe in the back of my head somewhere, I'm kind of hoping that."

Amen, brother.

Window on Wadi Musa

(Go ahead, click on it. That's right, there are 400 itty bitty trip photos in there. I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of impressed with myself right now.)

Favorite Mideast memories, stream-of-consciousness (aka, How I spent my stimulus check and tax refund)

• The warm, gooey perfect falafel we bought just outside the Western Wall
• Making a human pyramid at the pyramids
• Referring to any food we didn't recognize as "wikipedia"
• Singing hymns in the matchless acoustics of Saint Anne's church
• Laughing, talking, sipping lemon tea and eating wikipedia crackers and white pomegranate at the hostel in Petra, afternoon sunlight streaming in through the perfect window
• Matt's spirited rendition of the Lion King in the Petra monastery
• Floating down the Nile talking with dear friends and watching a slow sunset
• Wandering through the tunneled streets of Acco at night
• Dumping piles of dust out of my shoes after a day in Petra
• Falling asleep on a horse and buggy ride around Luxor from sheer exhaustion
• Sinking in up to my knees in mud at the Dead Sea
• Paging Andrea over the airport intercom in Amman
• Praying in the church on the Mount of Beatitudes
• Getting lost driving in the West Bank … I'm not sure where we are but there’s a sign to Ramallah … yikes ...
• Rusty and Dave pelting each other with olives all along the Jerusalem city wall
• Jewish men and boys singing and dancing their way to the Western Wall at sunset
• Wading through knee-deep water in Hezekiah’s tunnel
• Camels everywhere! I heart camels
• Getting proposed to by my camel driver (he offered 1 million camels for me!)
• Being told by my donkey driver that my donkey was slower because I was too fat
• All the homos – I mean hummus – I could eat. I heart hummus
• Being nearly accosted by Egyptians for money
• Melt-in-your-mouth Egyptian pizza
• Randomly meeting someone from the Cairo ministry of culture who got us reserved seating at the whirling dervish show
• Matt reading us select verses at Biblical sites in and around Jerusalem
• Walking smack into a wall in the Masada museum
• Shekels!
• Dinars!
• Hearing the call to prayer virtually everywhere
• Sprinting through the old city with a djembe and a backpack full of dishes and scarves
• Losing half my body weight in sweat at the Valley of the Kings
• Gaining it all back eating pita bread and every kind of salad imaginable

Salaam alaykum

This is how awesome/nerdy my family is: A week or so after I got home from Egypt, Jordan and Israel, we used freeconference.com to set up a conference call. It included a web feature where they could all see my desktop, and I walked them through roughly 400 (out of 1500 ... ) pictures I'd taken. And not only were they actually interested right up to the end, they were jumping in with additional wikipedia info on things I didn't know!

I won't put all of you through that, but I will post a few pics and highlights here (an even better album of the best pictures with soon-to-come captions is here here):

More New Orleans Pictures