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In Kampala for a few days, then off to Soroti!
My new hobby is not getting malaria.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: africa, coming home, packing, snacks, travel
Wandering around this afternoon, putting things in order, I kept thinking ‘you know, it’s really important to have enough snacks.’ When wandering out into the unknown, take chocolate bars. The bag is almost packed again, just waiting for my swimsuit to dry, tomorrow lost to travel… and Friday I’ll wake up in Africa.
So.
Updates may be few or nonexistent for a little while, but! I’ll be in Seattle July 31 to August 10. We should hang out! There are bikes to ride, french toasts to eat, picnics to picnic, snuggles to snuggle, pies to bake, silly hats to wear, and all manner of other adventures to galumph into.
See you soon!
More cousins.
Conversing through a dictionary, every word gains the weight of the time it takes to translate it. Every sentence becomes so heavy, the simplest questions enough to crush you if you aren’t careful, until impatience and the heat drag everyone back into their own languages, save for the occasional important thought: ‘I met your aunt once - the one with the parrot.’ They want to know about second and third cousins of mine, people I haven’t seen or heard of since the last big family reunion when I was… how old? Seven, maybe, or eight, young enough to remember only the tiny crabs under rocks on the beach and the boy who wouldn’t swim with me, not until I called him a coward and splashed ahead so far he had to yell to tell me anything. I don’t remember who he was or where he came from. I remember, though – in the end, he swam.
And after everyone left and I retreated to my room to cover myself again with my own thoughts, Lenka brought me a picture of my auntie Mary, standing on a hillside, ‘1957′ printed at the top. In our shared language, part English, little Croatian, mostly gestures, she points to Mary and explains, ’see, we used to be thin like you. Now I am here and she is dead. You don’t know how your cousins are… but I care about these things, because I am a grandmother.’
So earlier today I wrote a long, angry post about the parasites that have been hiding for months in some remote Pakistan of my backpack and chose their strike for now, when I’m in Italy alone, two days at least from my borrowed shower and washing machine. I was cranky. Very, very cranky. (Dear friends, I can’t quite explain what it feels like to see a bug and wonder ‘hmn… did that just land on me, or have I been harboring it secretly across borders, letting it feed on my skin and breed and bide it’s vicious time?’)
But then I checked my email. And while I’m still not so pleased about the current state of my scalp, the world is a beautiful place and, in the words of my father (which I repeat to myself often enough that I think I’m eventually going to get them tattooed somewhere) ‘this too shall pass.’ Thank you all for continuing to send me so much love.
Missing pre-script: In which our heroine explains how she decorated a Yugo to look like the Croatian flag, spent a few days in Austria with soccer hooligans, saw Bob Dylan play the harmonica, rediscovered her faith in humanity, and hopped a midnight train to Venice.
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My favorite cities are the sleeping ones, blue and pink and still, curtains closed against the eyes of prowling midnight cats and the promise of sunlight. Dawns beautiful as children, great emptinesses all possibility and stone waiting to feel new footsteps, to watch the first whispers of new lovers and the arguments of arrogant men. Twice this week I met new cities while they slept, wandered their playgrounds alone and wondering ‘what creatures will come out of these houses?’ In Austria the creatures turned out to be thousands of uniformed, uniformly drunk soccer fans. If someone could harness the energy they gave off it would easily have powered the city – they drank and sang and danced for 48 hours straight, and for a while I tried to keep up, but I just don’t really want another beer at 7 am and I can only remember the words to one of Croatia’s patriotic songs (of which there are hundreds). Now, in Venice, the streets swell minute by minute with people from anywhere but here, pudgy children in gondolier hats clutching desperately their huge ice cream cones and dodging the feral pigeons. They look so strange against the stone angels and rows of darkening archways, but so does everything human. The city should issue tuxedoes and ballgowns at the entrance of the Piazza San Marco… it’s the first time I’ve ever wanted to dress up to compliment the architecture. And perhaps I will, tomorrow, when I go out again to walk with the dreaming city, to watch the first light fill all the canals with rose petals.
Denny put up the first part of his Nepal photos! Go see mountains, and waterfalls, and me making weird faces!
Outside Zagreb’s downtown train station, rows of kerchiefed, smiling old women sell strawberries in the shadows of dignified buildings and tall girls with good shoes. Stepping hungrily off the train I picked one at random and armed myself with a kilo of solidified summer air and then a loaf of fresh soft bread, to take up where all the espresso left off in fueling my walk around the city. There’s something almost indecently joyful about wandering around on a sunny day eating strawberries, the sweetness of it all chameleoning my fingers and lips from pink to rose red and smiling, as the enormous door of the Cathedral shrank me to little-girl size and the candles inside flickered all the sound down to soft, echoing footsteps. God sits above the cathedral door, perpetually deep in conversation, but not so absorbed as to miss any of the tiny humans stumbling into his house. Or the ones stumbling out, like me, to where a stone wall guards paths through huge oak trees, soft grass… and a swingset! The girl on the other swing said of course she didn’t mind my company, so I flew back and forth for a while watching the sun through face-sized green leaves. Then more coffee.
There’s a bronze statue in the corner of the park, a naked woman hiding her face with one arm, so mysterious we only get to see her mouth. Nothing explains her – no title, no artists plaque proudly owning her, no rows of tiny candles or distinguished, stern saints. She claims only pigeons for followers and trees for family, a shy, softly curving answer to the all-seeing deity next door.
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I’m going to Zagreb tomorrow to see Nick Cave! And Prodigy! And this fun band! And a bunch of other people!
Walk to the sea through narrow streets; little Renaults and old Mercedes as much a part of the architecture as the sun-drenched white stone Catholicism and the roses. Pass the brown, buddha-shaped old men, waist deep in clear green waves standing still, giving thanks for the perfection of everything that is while their wives sun themselves on the rocks like tired seagulls. This morning in a cafe the man at the next table asked ’Are you from Kenya?’ and I realized I’m about the same color as my espresso, from mornings of playing tag with schools of tiny rainbow fish in a fluffy neon seaweed forest and finally giving in, letting the salt water precipitate me back out onto the hot, bleached pebbles of the beach. My great aunt serves the main meal of the day in the afternoon, and then everyone sleeps full of beer and fish and family until it cools off enough to wander back outside, where my nieces practice Spanish guitar for the stars and for each other.
My first Hrvatsko words were ’beautiful’, ‘ice cream’, and ‘I’m going swimming.’
