Why Next Year, I’m Celebrating Purim

March 7, 2015 JG Leave a comment

I’ve never been much of one for Halloween. But next year, I’m celebrating Purim.

I know they are totally unrelated holidays, one about paganism and the other the triumph of a people over oppression. But they are celebrated in very similar ways: costumes and candy. Let me leave my sugar addiction out of this and focus on the costumes.

I’ve never been much of one for dressing up in a costume. Maybe it’s the pressure of creating the complete alter persona, when my personal persona already felt like an act. Maybe it’s the act of acting, which seemed disingenuous. It could be the subtle but persistent undercurrent that “slut” was the way to go – was it the easy way out? Was it a latent desire to be slutty? Maybe it was the tension between my inner feminist and my inner fun-lover that never liked looking that one in the eye. Maybe it’s nothing more than a simple lack of creativity.

I took a break of more than a decade between Halloween costumes. Between my first year in grad school – when I hastily ironed glitter letters spelling “Princess” on a black t-shirt and donned it with a tiara to hit 6^th Street in Austin:

– and my last year in Dallas when I got caught up in the infectious spirit of friends who live for Halloween and Mardi-Gras, and told me I wasn’t allowed to their annual party without a costume, which sent me on a spiral of craftivity that resulted in a “Toddlers in Tiaras” getup

(a failed one, I confess – most people thought I was just trying to be a beauty queen), I spent most Halloweens pretending not to be home.

I marvel at pictures of my friends who go all out for these occasions, and I can’t get there. Is it competition? Is it confidence? Whatever it is, Purim is sucking me in.

I live in Hancock Park, a neighborhood of Los Angeles that is predominately Jewish. Very Jewish. Forelocks and overcoats and wigs on the women Jewish. Families walking to temple on Fridays and kosher grocery closed on Saturday Jewish. Last night, the world erupted in firecrackers that sent my dog running under the couch, trembling. And this morning, the world is alive in costumes.

In the two miles I just walked, I must have passed 100 people in costume. Only one was dressed like a cheerleader. None was dressed as a slutty nurse. Many were clowns with rainbow hair. One young boy was dressed as a fat yuppie, stuffing overflowing around his belly so that his plaid shirt bulged above the belt holding up khaki pants, and a false butt bugged out beneath them. I saw an astronaut, a ninja, a baker, and an Haredi who had rainbow-striped his shtreimel (his big, round, fur hat, disrespectfully analogized to a lampshade – see below), so that it looked as if he wore a circus tent on his head. The award-winner, to me, was a group of five multi-aged siblings dressed as newsboys from the 30s, complete with knickers and caps. That is, not counting the Mustang convertible of young men in kippas that I saw pulling out of a temple parking lot – but I think that just happened to be how they were rolling this morning.

Shtreimel

Because today is a holiday, all these young people were out in the neighborhood, many going between two bounce houses set up on the front yards of their apartment complexes. Remnants of confetti lie on the sidewalk, sparkling in the morning sun, and boys run around blowing plastic horns. It is a holiday about joy, and creativity, and perseverance. It is a holiday that celebrates one woman, her honesty and her bravery. And maybe some revenge.

I’m not sure whether it’s the creativity, the community, or the history of Purim that has me intrigued, but I’m already contemplating outfits for next year. And French maid is not among them.

On the Road, United States

Vernita Falls

October 21, 2014 JG 1 Comment

There are no pictures, because you are driving and you have to keep going. No pictures but what will burn itself in the memory centers of your brain, just like light burns onto the chemicals of film, the chemicals of photo paper, for you to pull out at a later date and remember. No pictures but what you make on your mind, and what you recall from it because something you see now, through the windshield, tickles something you saw before, in a picture, in a museum, through an airplane window.

90 takes you over the first set of mountains, into the fog, by the sleeping ski slopes, and out the other side. Past Vernita Falls, Dallas Road, Coffin Road, the famous (who knew) Teapot Dome Gas Station. Out past the vineyards, the apple groves in the process of being harvested – apples so big and ripe you can see them from the highway – past the wind turbines and burned fields. Frequently, you want to stop, take a photo. Frequently, you wonder who names these places, and how.

My maternal grandmother’s name was Vernita. She died two weeks, almost to the hour, before I was born. In her honor, my middle name is her first name – because my mother didn’t think Vernita was a nice thing to do to a girl in the 70s. But who, out here, in Eastern Washington State, who knows when, had this same uncommon name, and gave it to a waterfall I don’t have time to stop and see?

Onto 84, crossing the gorge into Oregon, you travel behind a truck filled with sweet onions, their papery skins flying off behind and a waft of onion scent trailing you both over the border. The land dries, the wind flies, dirt dances up into whirling dervishes of land, lost in its own silent prayer.

Occasionally, an ancient barn will crumble by the roadside. Next to it, the new one, the house built in the years between the two. Occasionally, next to it, nothing but land, nothing but the hills, and the freeway, nothing but these dilapidated remnants of America’s agricultural past. Sometimes, the remains are of a cabin, no town near, no river, no….nothing, but the skeletal remains of Manifest Destiny’s westward expansion and the casualties that came with it. Dead dreams by the side of the road. Road kill of a different kind.

And then a car on fire, fully engulfed in flames. And then a strip mall: Kohl’s, Best Buy, Starbucks, Target. You could be anywhere, but you are here, wherever it is. Soon it is southern, eastern Idaho, northern Utah, the Snake River cutting deep through high dry mesas, creating a fertile green farming valley. Somewhere, the rock is volcanic, black and sharp, and then everything is red, rust-colored. Out 80, into the mountains, the snow fences begin, lined up and waiting for the weather to come like a farm of solar panels waiting for the sun.

And then Wyoming. Wild, wonderful, heart-breakingly gorgeous, with the green aspen turning gold and the black trunk of cottonwoods striking out behind yellowing leaves, along the riverbeds, up the valleys between hills. Trains snake through the canyons, hug the red-rock cliffs, slither low on the prairie behind the scrub brush and sage, carrying the loot of virgin land. They fade into the distance the same way Vernita Falls faded behind you, the same way the distance fades into fall – nostalgic, fogged over, waiting for weather to come.

Dallas

This One Time, In America

August 31, 2014 JG 2 Comments

The first week I was back in the country, I was determined to make domestic life the same adventure I’d created in the rest of the world. Was I not seeing the US through new eyes? Didn’t I want to be able to tell stories about home that sounded just like stories I could tell about every other country? This one time, in America…

I made a list of sites unexplored by me prior to my Dallas departure, and took a stab at one: The Bush Library.

The library is situated on the edge of the SMU campus. I followed signage that pointed me in the general direction of the library but not directly to it, or its parking lot, and eventually found what I was looking for. I have navigated the world’s museums and monuments in languages I don’t speak or read, but I literally got lost going from the parking lot to the museum, and accidentally ended up here, where an armed guard redirected me.

I’d feel like my lefty impulses had led me astray, but two guys wearing OU shirts came up right behind me. “Turn around,” I told them. “Follow me.” They proceeded to believe I was a tour guide, until we got here, and I sat on a bench in the sun to wait for my friend Vivian.

I’ve never been to a presidential library, so I have nothing to which to compare this one. I’ve also never voted for a Republican, which I confess by way of saying, I went in with open eyes – been all around the world, seen a lot of things, like to absorb without judging – and this is what I saw, which I’m sure is partly impacted by my political beliefs:

George and Laura love each other – it sounds silly, but it’s true. The pictures of their early life together, the building of their family, may be propaganda, but they seem filled with love. I doubt the Clinton library could make so genuine a montage.

The exhibits start off feeling less than substantive. One big day-care-like room has information on education – No Child Left Behind exhibits and a display of books (Laura Bush is the creator of Texas Book Fest, an annual festival of authors, publishers, agents and books in Austin) aside a tax relief display without a hint of irony that the latter gutted any possibility of the former being successful. But then, we forget all about that, because 9/11 happens.

A narrow entrance pulls you into a circular path around the remnants of an I-beam. Lights are dimmed. The walls are lined with engraved names of the dead from both towers, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania flight, while televisions play news coverage of the attacks. It is emotionally overwhelming, but visually simple; an impactful, respectful display.

But then, there are the docents. In 15 feet of walking this exhibit, I was twice approached by women who may have been 55 but looked 75. While I was wiping a tear from my cheek, one said to me, “I saw you looking for someone’s name; did you know people in 9/11?” Another one approached me toward the end and said, “were you near New York on 9/11? Do you want to share your experience in our digital visitor book?”

I was tempted to ask, “are you a therapist? That’s so great that the library provides therapy with this exhibit!” Or, alternately, “are you a moron? You have NO IDEA what I could say right now. Are you prepared? Are you ready for me to tell you my mom jumped from the 44^th floor? I didn’t think so.”

I just smiled, and moved on to exhibits on terror prevention (or deficit creation) and a beautiful display on action against HIV, with, of course, no hint of irony that the man responsible for re-establishing the global gag rule (and as a result, the loss of donated, HIV-preventing contraceptives by more than 20 developing nations around the world) would also give $15 billion dollars to combat AIDS.

Global AIDS Map

The faces of HIV

Though everything pales in comparison to the 9/11 exhibit, the library makes excellent use of technology in Decision Points Theater, an interactive activity on decision making, in which participants get to participate in global diplomacy based on the limited amount of information a president would have had at any given time. Results are based on the majority vote of people in the room – exciting during a classroom visit, not so much when Vivian and I are two of five people in the room.

By the time we had lunch (delicious) and were ready to leave, I was contemplating voting for Laura Bush, should she happen to make a presidential bid –

and feeling like this gift shop offering was a little redundant.

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

Europe, Life Skills, Uncategorized

The Van Gogh You Know

April 1, 2014 JG Leave a comment

You think you know Van Gogh. Don’t we all? His sunflowers, the time in Arles, his self portraits, and of course, the dreadful ear. Maybe you’ve heard about the recently discovered Sunset at Montmajour, or the record-setting price ($39.9MM) Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers won at auction in 1987. This is the Van Gogh that most of us know. In Amsterdam, however, here’s what I learned: we don’t know Van Gogh.

When I was young, my father brought me a poster from a Van Gogh exhibit. It was the ubiquitous painting Bedroom in Arles, and I loved it. I found peace in its broad brush strokes and strong outlines, both hallmark Van Gogh, and the unapologetic use of color, which in this piece, he specifically chose, “to suggest a certain rest or dream,” as he noted in a letter to his brother. And of course, I loved that the blond wood frame bed closely resembled my own bunkbeds, recently unstacked to accommodate my imminent adolescence.

Bedroom in Arles

For years since then, I have still loved Van Gogh for the same reasons – his boldness, his outlines, his color. The crazy flawed humanity that accompanies the desire to remove one’s own ear. At some point in college, I learned where he fit in the larger canon of artists and I’m sure that it made perfect sense, but over time, those are the things I forget. The color, the vision, and the sense of calm they bring are a sense memory that sticks with me.

What I got when I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam was far more than I expected. With so many of his the works so close together, I could understand the development of Van Gogh as an artist – one, I learned, who died when he was only 37, and was most prolific during the last decade of his life, which ended in 1890. While I recognize him for these more well known works that have been easily accessible to me, I discovered much more of his beauty in smaller, quiet pieces, like Sloping Path in Montmarte.

Sloping Path in Montmarte

I gleaned a bit of his sense of humor in his Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, which is familiar now as the cover of the David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. When I learned that the details of cadavers (anatomically accurate) were part of Van Gogh’s art schooling, and that he added the smoke as a humorous act of rebellion or boredom, I enjoyed him – and this painting – even more. How Sedaris must have loved learning this fact given his own adoration of smoking and his exclamation that he loved Paris because you could smoke everywhere, including the waiting room of the hospital. I loved it for entirely different reasons: I could imagine my grandfather, an accomplished painter and irreverent soul, doing the same. And there I am, closer even still to this painter who died a century before I graduated high school.

Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette

Where the museum really wins is in the science. Want to know how art historians determine whether the artist was mixing his paints and creating his works plen air or back in the studio? It may be something that never occurred to you, but even those who aren’t into art will love the pigment analyses and microscope images of sand grains embedded in the art that help determine where it was created, and with what. It’s common knowledge that artists reused their boards or canvases, but in Amsterdam, you can see the x-ray photographs of cross sections of canvases revealing multiple layers of paint that confirm more than just the masterpiece on the surface, and you can view the recto and verso of boards with practice paintings, including some of the many birds nest series.

This is barely scratching the surface. Speaking of surface scratches, want to know how different an art may look over time, or how it is restored after years of exposure damage the paint? There’s an app for that. Really, there is. In the museum, there is an iPad set up with my beloved Bedroom in Arles, and on multiple touch points I could be enlightened about restoration work, letters about the painting between Van Gogh and his brother, and see the Yellow House in Arles in which the bedroom lay. The app is available for free in the App store; just search for Touch Van Gogh (there is also an android version for the rebels out there).

I suppose I could learn all of this by reading the beautiful coffee table book on Van Gogh that I have in storage, but it isn’t the same. There’s a magic to playing with these interactive exhibits and then walking out into Museumplein to catch the tram home down Marnixstraat, with the canal at your side. If you can catch a glimpse of a windmill in the distance you can imagine the reapers who may have worked beneath it. It’s part of the magic of the place, and brings with it the magic of the person who created the art. And that, my friends, is worth the $39.9 million, but costs a whole lot less.

Tree-Roots, van Gogh’s last and unfinished work

Worth Packing In

the little truth of traveling

irony