france

The word for blisters in french and spanish is the same for lightbulbs. I imagine the lightbulbs on my feet shining bright as we walk inexonerably onwards, each day different, the many people along the way so beautiful and open.

Physically the walkling takes a toll on the body, and at the end of each day I am exhausted, and tend to my feet meticulously. It is amazing how refreshed i feel after a nights sleep and howready I am to continue this journey.

French has been hard. Last night I had my first quasi conversation over dinner with Laurent, an arborist who lives in DisneyLand, France.

posts with no pictures

I apologize in advance for the lack of imagery and the sparse postings. Being here poses technological difficulties, and the swarm of thoughts that I can hardly keep track of when I finally do have a moment on a computer have hard time materializing as a concrete post. Nevertheless, here are a few ancedotes and rememberances of the last few months:

The fat Chilean in Milan has trouble keeping his pants on when he is drunk. He has invested in a pair of suspenders, but a little too late to save his reputation at the neighborhood bar, where he has been banned regardless of how many pretty young women he brings with him as an offering.

The rain follows us from country to country, making the farmers we meet happy, and us rather sad as the days go by in perpetual gloom. Books have been a solace, but a solace can never fully erase the dark clouds and wind that shake the shutters at night.

Food is an addiction, and particularly good food; an obsession. I find myself dreaming of bread, cheese, sausages, fish, gelato, and various other Italian delicacies, and have gained a few pounds in the month that I have been here. I desperately need the camino.

Sheep are indeed helpless rather pathetic animals. Two were eaten by wolves during our last days in Tuscany. We found the larger ones mostly eaten carcass with its head and bell still attached. Not a trace was found of Linda the lamb.

sicilia

Lemons. Their scent. Their thorns. The scratches left on my arms. The Sicilian sun burns, strong even as the air is cool. Fresh ricotta, a wood fired oven, the smell of smoke still deeply imbedded in my clothes. Pepe and his family, the sicilian dialect, seemingly impenterable until it suprisingly is intelligible.

Bth farms here in Italy have left their marks on me. The work is straightforward, the rewards are generous and abundant, the weather a friend and foe. Magna Greca, the Jewel of the Ionian and Mediterrean soon will be a glorious memory of flavors, frangrances, and sights. And then we'll walk.

ciao!

Its has been sometime since I wrote last, so I will attempt to recall everything that has happened since my glowing report of Istanbul.

The rest of the time spent in that lovely and grand town was amazing; a trip to the Black Sea with our hosts and their friends, a visit to the Hagia Sophia, and a bathing experience in a 15th century hamam (turkish bath). We walked that town silly, for ten to twelve hours a day we moved through the old and the new parts of the city in the rain, ate all sorts of delicous food,and finally departed by rail on the 12th of March. Now of course, nothing we do is straightforward,and our departure and subsequent travels was no exception, as we meandered through the Balkans by train quite unexpectedly, in order to reach Italy by the 18th of March. Our idea was that we would travel by ferry through Greece from Turkey, and from Greece to Italy, but the ferries did not start operating till mid to late April, leaving us to an unknown rail trip through the former Yugoslavia. We started on a train from Istanbul with the idea that we would reach Sofia (Bulgaria) the next day and figure out transportation. We booked a private cabin for less than fifty Euros for the both of us, and thoroughly enjoyed our train ride (aside from the passport inspection at the Turkish border that had us outside in the freezing cold at least an hour) and arrived in the late morning the next day. We found out from there that could take a train to Belgrade (Serbia) that would give us access to Western Europe by rail easily. The train left that night, so we spent the day wandering around Sofia, thinking of Robert, the Bulgarian Bar in NYC, and all the lovely food we had left behind in Isti. I would love to give a longer account of our brief but rich experiences in the Balkan cities of Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubliana, but time grows short on the hour of internet time I purchased, so I will leave you with thes images/vignettes: A man handing me a beer in the town square of Zagreb as a St. Patrick celebration rages (a decidely un-slavic holiday aside from the fact its an excuse to drink in public); A Japanese man, drunk on the one beer we insisted he drink, sings Beatles song on our walk to our Hostel, Karin's exhausted face as we arrive in Venice at 7:00am......ciao regazzi.

istanbullu

This crazy Byzantine city is so alive, it makes me yearn for something undefined.  I have been trying to fill this longing with cay (chai), baklava, and lamb sandwiches, only to make the realization a few days into this journey that I have gotten a taste of what it is to be an Istanbullu (a denizen of this fine city);  a citizen who is lucky in enough to have an appetite to match the offerings of this metropolis.  Food is only the beginning.  The beauty of the Bosphorous, the architecture, the men and women, the winding alleys, the Muezzedin's call to the faithful echoing through the cosmopolitan city streets, the juxtaposition of modern and classical, all invite the senses to lose themselves.  

The infrastructure is pretty impressive as well.  We've discovered the Akbil, Istanbul's answer to our metrocard, a plastic keychain that one can add as much money to as one wants, and use on all of the public transportation options; the buses, the tram, the metro, and the ferries.  The transportation system as a whole rivals (and in most cases, is better than, with possibly the exception of NYC) any major western city.  

Grilled mackerel sandwiches on the Galata Bridge.  Smoking nargile in an Ottoman cemetery chai garden.  The blue of the tiles in Sultan Mehmet Cammii taking me back in time.   

in space

I've been in space. Or more importantly, space has found me. Travelling across the length of this continent, with some national width thrown in for good measure, had me camping in California desert, eating chipotle beef jerky in Arizona, sneezing my brains out in Austin, Texas, and eating oysters for the first time at a raw bar in New Orleans.

Then, freezing at our President's inauguration ceremony on the frozen tundra in front of the Washington Monument to culminate my adventure and begin something new.

The new has me skipping Japan and heading straight for Byzantium, with a promise of ferry rides across the Aegean, large and boisterous swine in Tuscany, and some serious walking along the Camino in France and Spain. Am I ready? Damn right.

a roadtrip

I'm on the verge of a road trip. I even have a copy of Dharma Bums in my bag as if to validate the journey as a bonafide American pilgrimage, nothing short of any other planned and unrehearsed adventure on the table for 2009. Yet this road trip has been overshadowed by the other more ambitious and exotic travels planned for the spring into the summer. That worries me. Am I taking a trip of some magnitude too lightly? Will Los Cruces be a spectacle, Austin a debacle, and New Orleans reduce me to savagery?

I have an atlas. The maps detailed enough to show me not only the blue highways of American automobile myth, but those even more illusory roads that might lead me to huckleberry patches, moonshine, or Pepsi machines in long forgotten gas stations.

I haven't forgotten my playground conversation. I promise.