Driving Off Into the Sunset

July 16, 2015 JG 1 Comment

I’ve said goodbye to many things over the last few years. Things, and people, and experiences. My dufflebag was first. It was followed by a bandana that fell off while I was hiking in Parque Tayrona, (and washed up on the beach an hour later so is once again with me). My travel pack sprouted one structural break after another starting somewhere in Asia, got repaired in Kenya, and sprang another leak before I got back to the states. More significant are the less physical things to which I’ve said goodbye: economic security, a physical grounding in place, an emotional safety net. Recently, constant adventure. And now, the perfect combination of them all: Bessie.

I should know better than to blog about Bessie. Last time I waxed poetic about my reliable steed, she countered by ‘stranding’ me in Oregon for three days while she was fixed to the tune of more than her worth. It was late last summer, and I was heading down to LA to confirm I should move there. Despite having been on the road in some form for over a year at that point, I had just begun to feel homeless, in the sense that I was not in one place, but should be. I was unrooted. My movement was less of an adventure and more of an aimless pause in a waiting room of mid-life.

The Eugene stranding was a blessing in disguise. It was a reminder that wherever you are, there is an adventure to be had, something new in the mundane. I visited the museum at the University of Oregon, where the art was amazing and the campus a cool respite from the heat.

A Buddha of layered paper

I managed to get to the Bell Telephone Pioneer Museum, with cool switchboards and a badass phone-fixing Barbie, during its four open hours of the week. There was good beer (hello, Oregon), decent food and more important, always, than any of this, were the unbelievably nice people of Eugene, from the motel clerk to the amazing team at Action Automotive, who cheerfully ferried me around town. Even when she lets me down, Bessie builds me up.

Colorful phone wire becoming obsolete at the Bell Pioneer Telephone Museum

Since then, Bessie and I have driven almost 14,000 more miles. My commitment to be the one to get her over 200k miles has wavered as I contemplate all the places she may strand me when she gives up the ghost. Lights I’ve never noticed have lit up – and stayed on – in the dash display. Twice, the brake fluid has needed topping. I finally listened to the signs she was giving me. At 198,890 miles, we said goodbye.

When I began to clean Bessie out to sell her, one memory after another came pouring out. There was the fossil found behind a friend’s house in Taos that I keep for good luck, the Italian notebook I use as a travelogue, and the 20-year old swiss army knife I use for everything and anything. From the stick shift, I removed a rosary from Chimayo and from the rearview, a Hello-Kitty phone decoration a friend brought back from a business meeting in Japan. And then there was the visor organizer

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A small collection of small collections in my visor

Inside, I found an entrance ticket to the Santa Fe museums dated Dec 22. The only Christmas I drove to Santa Fe was in 2007, the first year I owned my home, which means that this ticket was used two days before my house was broken into the first time. While unfolding it, I could smell powdered sugar melting into the thumbprint cookies I was making when the alarm company called.

The art before the con

Tucked into a mesh side pocket of the organizer I found a stack of business cards, dating back to 2003. The gold US Senate crest on one of them reminded me that my parking sticker from some Capitol Hill garage is still tucked way down at the base of my window.

My 1.5×3 inch life

I found a faded receipt from the Dry Clean Super Center in Dallas, onto which had once been written the address and phone number of the owner. The store lost a new dress of mine, and the employee with whom I was discussing this lured me outside the shop to finish our argument because he could tell the rising tone of my voice was attracting the attention of other customers. The dress had only been worn once, and he wanted to pay me no more than half its value. My fury was mostly about the way he bested me in our negotiations, and my frustration at the degree of my anger. Despite it being the least expensive cleaning location in town, I never went back. Two nights ago, while looking for someplace to eat in Red Bluff, California, I noticed Yelp has messaging. In my inbox was a note he had written me several months after the incident to say that he found my dress but had been too embarrassed to contact me. The note is only dated “more than two years ago;” the faded date on the receipt says 2009.

A faded, angry dry-cleaning receipt

One after another I dug these bits of my life from the nooks and crannies of my car. There was a flyer for a friend’s short film that showed at AFI Dallas, also in 2009. The friend is now a successful director. Behind it, two thank you notes, from 2006 and 2007, evidence of my bad habit of opening mail in my car (and not cleaning it out, but that was obvious already). They are wedding thank-you notes from a brother-in-law and a sister.

Long-forgotten, still-beloved thank-yous

In addition to some pots and pans, the sister also thanked me for the flip flops I got the bridal party members to wear during the reception when our heels proved too much. Mine were grey with bedazzled flowers on the thin thong straps. I remember them well because I hardly wore them until the fall of 2013, when I took them with me around the world, and left them with my hosts, and a bit of my heart, in Kenya.

Long-forgotten, still-beloved flipflops

I pulled a removable decal from the windshield.

It’s a tinkerbell-like fairy. I have no idea where it came from originally, but I found it on the kitchen window of my apartment in Seattle – the one I moved out of in 2002 when I headed to Texas. She has been flying right in front of me as I drove these last 13 years, and it was time to say goodbye. But now is a time for new adventures. 3,000 miles into my next car, I’m ready to tuck away some different memories that will last me the next decade and a half, and I’ve got a door-pocket full of national monument postcards to prove it.

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Even Spanky was a little sad to see Bessie go

Dallas

The Story of Hanna Rigler

March 29, 2015 JG 2 Comments

It seems only appropriate, with Passover coming next week, to share the below.

I was in Dallas briefly at the beginning of March to celebrate some fantastic ladies who came to Paris to meet me for my birthday last year , and a friend invited me to go with her to the Holocaust Museum. I’d never been, in the whole 8 years I lived there. How could I say no?

With Fantastic Ladies, In Paris

The special exhibit at the museum right now is about the flight of Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, from Paris to Brazil, and then the US, during WWII. The truly special exhibit, though, was this woman:

Hanna Rigler

This is Hanna Rigler, also known as Sarah, a Lithuanian Jew who survived a ghetto, a camp, and a harrowing escape, which she wrote about in her book Ten British POWs Saved My Life. The following is what stuck with me after listening to her talk, and speaking with her afterwards.

_____________________

The men were mostly gone by the time they came and took the children, during the day while the adults were at work. The old people, and the children. Imagine: coming home to find your children and your parents gone. Your children, whom you had birthed and nurtured and then guarded when you were moved from your neighborhood, your own home, to this ghetto. Your parents, whom you had guarded, as well, as they aged, whom you fought with, disagreed with, loved, cherished, appreciated because they watched your children so you could go get what little work there was to be had, what meager money to be earned. And then to come home and find the building empty, the family gone. This, no more:

The Matuson Family (Hanna’s Maiden Name)

But like you say over and over, you were lucky. You were lucky, and it makes all the difference. You were too young to have a family yet. You and your sister had found work, cleaning and cooking in an official’s house, so you were not at home when they came to take you. So when your mother came home, she didn’t see what others saw: the vaccuum. Instead, she saw you. The fate of everyone you knew – all your friends, their families – the elderly, the young, the men: unknown. There would be little time to adjust to this demographic shift; soon, they will be coming for you.

They will come for you and what is left of your family – the mother, the sister. They will put you in the cattle car of a train, in Lithuania, in July, where the heat makes its way through the wooden slats of the wall but the air is nowhere to be felt. The lack of air presses down on you like the bodies of too-many people shoved in next to you. The smell of the one bucket you all share in a corner will bear on you too. You will think it is too much to survive, but you will. You will travel like this for days – seven days, nine days – who knows how many? And when you arrive, you have only just begun.

You will be given a number.

There must have been number 1. By the time they get to you, the number will be greater. It will be 58386, and you will wonder where everyone has gone, because when you arrive, the camp will seem empty, except for the shoes. The shoes pile high. They will pile high long after you are gone, and bear witness to the 58,385 pair of feet who walked through the gate before you.

There is a rumor that the Red Cross is coming to visit POWs, and so you will be kept alive, for now. Soon, when the threat of freedom comes, the marching will start. You will be lucky, and get a coat. It will be a bad coat, thin, and you will have no choice but to wonder to whom it used to belong, and which pair of shoes from that pile were also hers, but you will wear it as you walk away, moving in front of the front.

You talk about the unpleasant things. You will mention, to catch the attention of errant school kids, the hunger – how the coffee you got was really water; how the soup was water too, with just a little cabbage; and how the one small bread was meant for ten people and never enough, and yet you lived for the bread. Or because of it. You will tell the children how you would swear that if you had enough bread to eat, you would never want for anything else in your life, save for maybe a piece of potato on top as a delicacy. In this gluten-free paleo generation, they will fail to understand why you could want such a thing.

You will tell the children you know it isn’t nice to talk about, but when you don’t wash, when you can’t bathe, the lice come and so you all had them, on your skin, making sores, quite ferocious. The children will be texting on their phones in the back row. You will tell them how your numbers dwindled to 500, from thousands, because anyone who couldn’t walk was shot and left to rot on the roadside, and anyone who was eating only coffee-flavored, or cabbage-flavored, water can’t walk hundreds of kilometers through Poland in the winter.

The children perk up a little when you tell them how you tried to trade a diamond watch your mother had buried for some bread, and how, having accepted the trade, someone returned with the police instead of bread. They chased you around town, a posse with pitchforks shouting, “yude! Yude! Yude!” They hear you a little better when you say you don’t mind if you are killed. Even though you are barely a teenager, you don’t mind this being the end – but you just don’t want your mother and sister to have to see it.

It sounds more like a movie they have seen, when you tell them about the chase, about hiding in the barn for three weeks, amongst the hay, in a feed trough, fed from time to time by the British POWs you credit with saving your life. When you say, pressed for time to wrap up your lifetime story in less than ten minutes, that the Russians were not a very nice liberating force, that they raped the women and that again, again you were very lucky, their disappointment is palpable.

When it is over, they ask almost no questions. They are about the age now that you were then, a continent and a half away, a lifetime removed. They hear you say it again, “you had to be very, very lucky to survive,” and they don’t see their luck is in geography. They don’t hear you, afterward, when you share, “these children, they know nothing. In New York they know everything. Here, nothing.” And is there nothing left for us to do but thank you, hold your hand and thank you, and walk way. Another group is coming in, and you have your story to tell.

Hanna and her sister Sarah, before the war

Life Skills

I Want All the Adventures

June 25, 2014 JG Leave a comment

When I was little, I had a book called, “I Do Not Like It When My Friend Comes to Visit.” The basic plot was that the protagonist hates when her friend comes to visit because she has to share her toys and include her little brother, who gets called cute, and be nice, and not get her way all the time, and she hates it. And when her friend has to leave, she cries because she loves when her friend comes to visit and misses her when she’s gone. In other words, it’s about being selfish. I’m pretty sure this book was around because I was one of the most anal-retentive, selfish children on the planet. If you don’t believe me, ask one of my sisters about trying to borrow my purple pen, cross the doorway into my room, or, god forbid, sit on my bed. As an adult, I know this was about jealousy and control, but that’s a lot to ask another 7-year-old to live with. I Do Not Like It When My Friend Comes To Visit is the first thing that popped into my mind last week when three of my friends landed in various parts of Brazil to celebrate the World Cup in all its intoxicated, sun-drenched, body-painted glory. Despite my having just completed a loop around the planet and reading their facebook posts from my last-ditch outpost in Sevilla, all I could think was, “I want all the adventures!”

Another boring view in my last ditch adventure outpost: Sevilla

I want all the adventures. Isn’t this the same thing as wanting all the toys? I want all the adventures. It felt like the wrinkle-browed toddler from my childhood fable had suddenly crawled into my skin and taken over my wonderful life. Only the difference was this: I don’t want all the adventures just for myself. I want all the adventures, with, and for, all of you. I don’t want anyone else not to have an adventure. If there is one thing I’ve learned this past year, it’s the reality how many fantastic adventures are out there. Sometimes, the adventure is just figuring out how to cross the street when the traffic keeps coming from the ‘wrong’ direction. You’d be shocked at the thrill of making it safely from one curb to another without getting hit by that surprise coming from the right. Other times, the adventure is jumping out of a plane. Most of the time, it’s someplace in between.

Sometimes, the adventure is jumping out of a plane.

The intoxication of adventure is the thrill. You aren’t required to defy death to get it; you just have to feel something (a)new. My first morning back in the Pacific Northwest after I returned to the States, I snuggled into my purple beaded Moroccan jelaba and headed into my sister’s kitchen, where I got on the floor and played matchbox-car-closet-soccer with my nephew. Last summer he refused to hug me for two straight months. This day, my heart lept when he not only hugged me hello, he determined I was a worthy-enough playmate to receive two cars. I want all the adventures.

In my purple beaded jelaba.

I won’t have all the adventures. And that’s ok. I won’t have kids, and I feel good about having made that choice. I won’t be a war correspondent; my feelings are still mixed about that one. When you depart for Asia next week I will ache with memory, and jealousy. And if my friends in Brazil really do go hang-gliding, I may turn green with envy. But despite my round-the-world trip having ended, I believe my adventures have just begun, simply because I’ve started wanting them. All of them.

Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Preparing, South America, Tourist, Traveling, United States

Money Matters: the new New Math

May 4, 2014 JG 3 Comments

For the last six months, with the exception of one week in March, I have moved every three to four days. I haven’t slept in the same bed for more than a week since last September. While I didn’t change countries every time I moved, I did manage to make it to 17 of them, only three of which use the same currency. So while everyone thinks I’ve been off on vacation, I’ve in fact been doing some rather intense money math.

Money math should be easy, but it takes quite a bit of preparation. The longer you do it, the quicker the preparation gets, but the harder the math becomes to perform on the fly, an essential skill for effective bargaining –itself an essential skill in almost every country in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Here’s how it works:

Crisp, clean US dollars

Carry some crisp, new, $100 US bills, and try never to use (or lose) them. (Even if you are from the Euro zone, you should carry US dollars. Your money may be worth more than ours, but people don’t actually want it more.)
Before arriving in a country, go online and determine how many ‘whatevers’ there are to the US dollar.
Remember this rate. If you are bored, practice multiplying and dividing by it so you are acclimated before you arrive at your next destination.
Avoid currency exchange windows, especially at the airport. Instead, make withdrawals from a cash machine in amounts sizeable enough that your improved exchange rate and lack of service fee offset whatever your bank may charge you for daring to make it interact with a foreign country. Careful not to withdraw so much money as to be left with unused bills upon your departure. The rate to sell these back will invariably screw you.
Because the ATM will undoubtedly give you bills of a denomination large enough to render them useless, go directly to the nearest bank or large, busy establishment (or sometimes your hotel desk) and break large bills for ones that won’t encourage the average taxi driver to pull the “I don’t have change” routine.
Rinse, repeat.

It seems simple. But do it three times in a month. I guarantee that at least once, you’ll forget to check the exchange rate before you land somewhere, and find yourself negotiating for a taxi without knowing whether you are arguing over 100 dollars or 100 cents. By time four or five, you will likely forget to take one of your prior currencies out of your wallet, and will find yourself attempting to pay for your pad thai with pho money. Somewhere in this timeframe, you will also realize it’s started to seem completely normal to carry three currencies simultaneously: dollars, currency of current country, and remnants of a country you’re still too close to to miss.

Colombian Pesos

Bolivian Bolivianos

Chilean Pesos – note the pretty window in some of the bills

Suppress the temptation to buy one of those lovely leather travel folios that fit your tickets and passport and itinerary, unless you are on the kind of trip where someone else is creating the lovely itinerary for you and handling most of your logistics. Opt instead for something plastic or vinyl, because at some point, you will find yourself in a country with the dirtiest, moldiest, wimpiest, most ripped bills you have ever seen, and you will likely have a lot of them. For me, this country was Myanmar. For you, this will also likely be the country in which you pull out your precious clean US dollars to exchange them on the black market for a rate up to 100 times that you would receive at a bank. If they aren’t pristine, they will be discounted to only 95 times the bank rate – or less.

The fake Burberry pouch I bought to be my moldy Myanmese kyat wallet

Due to the exchange rate, I bought this plastic pouch to carry the the hundreds of notes that make up $100 USD

Until I found this wallet in Cambodia, which I am still using. It has the added benefits of water resistance and multiple currency pockets.

If you have chosen to skip step (1), above, you will find yourself doing things like going to a bank machine in Bangkok to pull out baht and take them to the exchange window to buy dollars, just so that you can carry them (new, unbent, untorn) to Myanmar to buy flimsy, delicate kyat. In other words, even your lovely new dollar bills will be double-discounted by your own disregard for the international exchange scheme of tourism.

By the time you’ve been through this rigmarole four times, the preparation part becomes old hat. You are much less likely to forget to look up the exchange rate and land someplace unprepared. (Don’t bother with cash in any country where you’re laying over in the airport. Just use a credit card, or you’ll be left with 30 random Australian dollars and nothing to show for them.)

Australian dollars – for the 15 hours I spent in the Sydney airport

Note to self: when you find yourself taking money out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m., chances are you don't need it, and you should find an empty chair and go to sleep.

Note to self: chances are you don’t need those rupees you’re taking out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m. Resist the temptation, find the nearest prayer room, and go to sleep.

What becomes more difficult as time goes on is adjusting to the mental money math that accompanies these exchanges. In one week, you may transition from dividing all prices in kyat by 971 to figure out actual cost, to dividing by 3,954 riel to dividing by 21,097 dong. Give or take some zeros depending on how recently a country has revalued its own currency, or whether it has recalled its former currency from circulation and bothered to print up something new. In addition to a language barrier, you are now facing an economic translation grey zone in which you and your provider may be using two different bases on which to settle your accounts, and they differ by a factor of 100.

I shared a cab with a woman in Santiago. She took out bills completely unfamiliar to me, despite my having been in the country for almost two weeks. I asked her where they were from, and she looked at me oddly and said, “here.”

Now start bargaining. You aren’t used to that in your home country? That’s a shame, because it’s fun. It’s friendly, and vigorous, and slightly different everywhere you go. The whole process will start to seem like a game, in part because the money feels fake: it’s a different color, or size, or weight than you are used to. It has unfamiliar pictures and in some cases doesn’t even use European numerals, so you can’t be sure what numbers you are looking at when you at last agree on a price and pull out your Monopoly bills to pay for things. It will make you long for expensive Europe, where you will be astounded at what it costs to buy coffee but are willing to pay anything just to multiply by 1.4 instead of dividing by 758. Money Matters: the new New Math.

Dear Jordan: I love your country, and I can’t for my life tell how much money this is.

For the fun of it, more pictures of some foreign currency are below. They are mangled and messy in real life so the pictures aren’t the clearest, but you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to have carried about 15 currencies in six months:

the beloved Ataturk

Vietnam apparently wants you to know how productive they are.

Very few currencies have women on any denominations.

The elusive 5000 kyat note. Makes exchanging a $100 USD note much more efficient.

At 980 kyat to the USD, it’s hard to say why this 5 kyat note even exists.

Crisp, clean US dollars

Australian dollars – for the 15 hours I spent in the Sydney airport

Chilean Pesos – note the pretty window in some of the bills

Note to self: when you find yourself taking money out of the ATM in the Colombo airport at 3 a.m., chances are you don’t need it, and you should find an empty chair and go to sleep.

Dear Jordan: I love your country, and I can’t for my life tell how much money this is.

Colombian Pesos

Dallas, Goodbye, Life Skills, Moving, On the Road, Preparing, Tourist, Traveling

Dallas in My Rearview Mirror

August 9, 2013 JG Leave a comment

Tomorrow, I will pack my car and watch Dallas fade in my rearview mirror for the last time as a resident. As excited as I am about the beginnings this end represents, I find myself more mixed than I expected about the ‘no-mores’ and ‘haven’t-yets’ that come with it.

Foggy Day in Dallas

This isn’t an ‘I left my heart in San Francisco,’ kind of moment; Dallas and I have never had that kind of relationship. I came for a job and brought an attitude with me, assuming I’d be here two years, and leave. I never actually checked in, so I’m not sure you could call my approach checked-out. But it definitely was disengaged.

My sweet hundred-year-old home in a rare snowfall

And then a few things happened that kept me here. I liked my job. I could afford to buy a house on my own.I fell in love with the house – and then with the convenience of living in Dallas. I ignored that part of me that wasn’t actually doing any actual ‘living’ – an ignorance that is easy to come by when you do yard work, house work, and burglary prevention, get a dog to play with, and watch too much t.v.

After years of returning to San Francisco and Seattle on vacation and wondering how to respond to questions like, “when are you going to get out of there,” I started getting defensive. “It’s not so bad. It has it’s good points,” I’d respond. And then I’d try to list them, and realize my list was short. ‘No state income tax’ is a weak argument in Seattle, which also has no state income tax, in addition to Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, the San Juan Islands, the Olympic Peninsula, and public transportation that actually gets you somewhere. So I realized I needed to augment my list. I started getting engaged.

I actually liked what I found. Dallas has great music venues, many of them in cool old theaters with no such thing as a bad seat in the house. It has Big Tex, the Texas Star and a handful of good dive bars. In the last couple years, I’ve heard speakers from Junot Diaz to Madeline Albright, watched a taping of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, seen Hair, West Side Story, and Alvin Ailey (among others), and heard bands from Metric to Loretta Lynn. I’ve seen Gordon Parks and Cindy Sherman exhibits. I’ve watched the arts district grow by one theater, then another, then an amazing public park the draws people outside for food trucks and chess games and yoga class. And when I tire of Dallas, when I crave some lefty funk, I head to Fort Worth for an afternoon at the Amon Carter or a night at Billy Bob’s. My time is here is ending, but my opportunities to explore are far from over.

Relentless Reunion Tower

I haven’t yet made it to the Canton flea market, or another Chef DAT dinner. I haven’t learned to love the Cowboys, or even how to talk about football, no matter how good it may be for my social life or career. I haven’t learned to two-step, though I have the boots to do it. I haven’t yet eaten at Nazca, that new place at 75 and Walnut Hill – someone go and let me know how it is.

Despite all I haven’t done, my life here has much familiarity that I will miss: driving by the 1-2-3 Divorce storefront on Fitzhugh, which always makes me smile; brunch at la Duni; morning dog walks on Swiss Ave, watching old, neglected houses come back to life during a loving restoration. I’ll miss Taco Joint migas tacos to start the day. Pizza, wine and writing Wednesdays at Times Ten. Nights at the Granada, or the Kessler, falling in love with music I’ve never heard before, or moving on from music I thought I loved. I’ll miss frontage roads to anywhere, and valets to park you everywhere (actually, I won’t – I HATE valet). And of course, I will miss my friends.
In truth, what I will miss most about Dallas is the one thing so obvious to those who know me here, and so foreign to those who know me elsewhere. Even as a resident Dallas, I am an intellectual tourist. The joy, frustration, challenge, and growth that have come from being unable to assume the people around me, even close friends, agree with my outlook (political, social, economic, artistic, what-have-you), are unlike anything I have experienced in any of the other wonderful cities I’ve been lucky to call home. At home in Dallas, I travel regularly through a place so foreign, I could likely stay forever and never have it feel like home. And there is some benefit to that, as I’m sure I will find on the road.

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling