Via del Burro and Ice-cream City

Comfort born of intimate knowledge and best best friendship pervaded my stay in Rome. What a gift, to begin my further travels with my great friend Loren, and her sister Gracie too! We talked about traveling, living, love, home, being women and girls, eating, spaghetti carbonara, gelato, landmarks, walking, blisters, thinking, tiny penguins and dancing cats, being late and getting lost, cooking, growing and growing gardens, where we'll live, how we'll live, how activism lives in our lives, how that's different for everybody because, guess what? Everybody's different. I know, shocker.

Maybe I'm laying the gratitude for friends on a little thick here, so let's be real for a minute (as if I'm every anything else): my life these days is absolutely marked, shaped, formed, and transformed by the support of those closest to me. As much as traveling has shaped me, it wouldn't mean anything if I extracted from that travel the ways in which the love and presence of my loved ones has buoyed me at the same time. And the fact that I've had the opportunity to see so many of those so close to me during my travels, well it makes the celebration of those friends that much more inevitable. So there's that. And honestly, I'm plagued just as much (more? Probably not...) as anyone else with doubts about friends, friendship, being liked and loved, being likable and lovable. Maybe it's just that these relationships and connections seem like the most noteworthy things in my life right now. As much as I struggle with the presumptuousness of writing my thoughts and feelings and publishing them, these friends and friendships seem to me worthy of sharing (to be clear, sharing on this blog, i.e. with my mom). Just laying it all out on the line here; dropping some knowledge. Like I do.

I bought a stuffed goat (not taxidermied, worry not!) for Per in lieu of leaving behind a friend of George to keep him company. I toyed with the idea of leaving George, but I can't quite bring myself to do that. So a goat it is. A goat named Marco; he's Italian. Marco slept with Loren, George, and me once he joined our little caravan, and he and Loren in particular became fast friends. Let me share with you a memory that I will pull out whenever a melancholy mood threatens violent takeover:

I went to the bathroom getting ready for bed while Loren laid in bed, preparing mentally I suppose, for the same.

Loren: What's that?

Marco the Goat (Loren): Maaaaa.

Loren: I know, she's taking forever.

MtG: Maaaaaa.

Loren: Don't worry, she'll come back. She's just in the bathroom.

MtG: Maaaaaaa.

Loren: I know, I totally agree.

MtG: Maaaaa.

Loren: Hahahaha. Don't worry. I won't tell her.

I can't imagine a life without friends like this- ones that converse with toy goats and imaginary ghost people and take everything you say and sing it in a throaty Tom-Waits-meets-the-Rolling-Stones kind of way. This kind of creativity and silliness is my life-force, or maybe the butter in life that makes it worth eating, and occasionally overeating, but never eaten with regret when all is said and done. What would we do without these friends? What would we do without butter? Vegans stutter- I know, I know, you do do without butter. I wish I could. But I can't. Or won't, if we're being real.

We cooked dinner the night Gracie came to visit, and it turned out magnificently under the benevolent kitchen-dictatorship of Loren.

Gracie: If you keep taking pictures of me, it's going to look like I'm on some kind of weird cooking show where I do random things that don't add up to anything!

Loren: Now, add the flour and eggs together. Do you think the cake will be OK without baking powder and baking soda? Yeah, probably. Right?

Alex: Uh...

Loren: Yeah Gracie, just mix them all up together, equal amounts, and then whip the eggs.

Alex: I'm trying to help, but I'm just in the way. Should I just get out of the kitchen?
Loren: NO! I need you to help me spice the veggies. You're not in the way.

Alex: OK.

Gracie: Is this good?
Loren: No, keep stirring.

Alex: FOREVER.

The cake was very dense, and everything was delicious, and don't worry, we finished the entire can of whipped-cream by the time we left Rome. What would I do without friends like these? I honestly have no idea. Certainly not eat gelato twice a day. Which we did.

Off Again

And so the journey continues. From Zurich to Rome.

From Rome, with only a few tears, to Istanbul.

Istanbul, not bad, right? Guess what? Turkish, it's a great language. It's related to Finnish, and guess what else? HUNGARIAN! The world tends to line things up in surprising ways.

More later- trying to spend less time on the computer, and more time in the city, though even with the lure of the computer ignored, I've been spending a lot of time lying in the sun with this; it's like a drug. The family thinks I'm sleeping in but really, I'm reading. What's becoming of me? I remember this with Harry Potter. Curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor of my parents' room, as was my habit in those days, with a headlamp and the Book. Being in middle school, I remember my mom sitting up eventually and telling me to go to sleep. With a plaintive look in my eye, I would say "But mom, I'm almost finished, and Harry's battling Voldemort!" She, with a look of pity and understanding and resignation, would say, "Alright." 

And in the morning, I would be exhausted, but exhilarated. Basically the best.

George (not curious) cake for Ashley's 1st!

 Watch out Martha, I'm comin' for ya!

Just kidding, Martha would laugh in my face if she had time to spare between whittling homemade marshmallow sticks. Even so, here he is. Next stop, here... Seriously though, I just want to make those cookies that have a cutout to put on your teacup. Genius, right?

"I can't talk!"

Love,

Alex

Great Friend and the Great Plain

The other weekend, I had the magnificently good fortune to visit (again) with my great friend Dianna. We met in Hungary, where Dianna has been teaching medical English to medical students at the University of Debrecen (yeah, she's kind of a big deal). It was lovely and warm and whispy dandelion seeds floated around everywhere making it feel like I was in some kind of blissful dream.


Furthering the sense that this trip was some crazy dream was...the Hungarian language. I will tell you this for free- Hungarian is crazy. I am not joking. I am eschewing my inner jokester with a firm hand in order to communicate to you with all seriousness that Hungarian is unlike anything I've ever come across. Maybe Hindi made more sense to me because I expected it to be crazy (linguistically speaking) because of the Devanagri script. Hungarian blindsided me, though if I had done any research prior to my trip, it wouldn't have. Hungarian is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of the Uralic language family. It is an Ugric language, a classification which is shared with Mansi and Khanty, spoken in western Siberia. Sibera, as you may know, is the place where Perchik, the husband of the second oldest daughter in "Fiddler on the Roof" was jailed because he was a Bolshevik Revolutionary. I say this not because it is relevant, but because (with the exception of conjunctive words) "Siberia" is the only word used in the previous sentences that has any meaning to me. I'm bringing it back down to my level. Like when someone starts talking about the bible and my response is, "Well, that's not the way it happened in 'Jesus Christ Superstar; " with a smugness born of the knowledge that my information is infallible not only in an academic sense, but also because it has come the mouth of God. In song. 


So, the takeaway here is that if you, like me, have been lulled into a sense of security and superiority because of a passing familiarity with French and Spanish because hey, you can even understand some words written in Italian! then think again my friend. There's a whole other linguistic world out there. And it's called, well, I wrote it above. And DON'T ask me to pronounce it.


But really, these were just pieces of a lovely, dreamy, delicious few days spent with the lady I can see myself spending the rest of my life with (yeah, I said it. Watch out, Chris...). So here are some photos. And guess what else? I got home, and remembered this quote which, in my typically omniscient and psychic fashion (not), I had copied out of the book when I read it and saved it on my computer. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the crane is not, as far as I can tell, the national bird of Hungary. But who cares, right? Tom Robbins is a freakin' genius. Just go with it.

The crane is the bird of poetry. It was Robert Graves who pointed out that the crane has been traditionally connected with poetry all the way from China to Ireland. The crane is the national animal, the totem animal of Hungary...Graves says, 'While there are still cranes in Hungary, poetry is bound to continue.' He's right. And if poetry continues, Hungary will continue. Religion and politics are unnecessary to the culture – or to the individual – that has poetry.

- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Love,

Alex