Here, I am!

22 December, 2013

Well. Here I am in the clouds.  I'm not sure where. I feel like I've lived so many different lives in the last three months, especially after the last couple of weeks without my mother. It's much different when one can say "I," rather than "we." I'm not a different person, but it is much easier to sort of forget who I am when I'm traveling alone. I feel detached, in a good way, calm, and happy. I guess that's why I say I'm in the clouds (and because I'm in an airplane).

Not sure what the significance of that is, so I'll move onto a new subject. I just spent a fantastic ten days in Riga, Latvia with my cousins. 

No wait... First there was France! After our three beautiful days in Rome with Bamby, the rake and Hoeh parted ways and I took a seventeen-euro flight to Marseilles. Eva, 5, and Simmy, greeted me at the airport and I spent the next five days Simmy and Sabine's lovely new (self-built, some finishing touches still in progress) home in Aix-en-Provence, practicing my French with Eva and Hugo, 3, wrestling with them on their parents' bed, playing cache-cache, or dragging them across the floor by their feet as they shrieked with laughter. 

Having lunch outside on a particularly nice sunday.

We also did some exploring of the beautiful countryside (check out the roman aqueduct), and picked out and decorated the perfect Christmas tree. 

Overall it was a great experience getting to meet my two new second cousins and also getting to know Simmy a little better, who was always that "so friendly but also intimidatingly cool and funny older first-cousin-once-removed that I get to see once every few years" throughout my childhood. Sorry about my insuppressible urge to be precise about the relationship. It's wordy but that's what it is.

Me and Hugo

Ok, now onto Riga! What a fantastic end to my trip. For the first week I was alone with one of my other long-time favorite first-cousins-once-removed, Nicholas, and another one of my new favorite second cousins, Paula, 4, whom I had never met before. The combination of Paula's sometimes frustrating, but mostly hilarious antics and Nicholas's engaging and comfortable company, along with the fact that I had no stresses or responsibilities of my own, put me in a state of plain old constant happiness. It felt like a true vacation. I laughed often and ate well, exploring the city and baby-sitting some by day, sitting up late talking by night. 

Paula: "Yes, tate a pitchure"

The only thing that could have improved the situation would have been the arrival of more people that I loved, and sure enough, exactly a week after I landed, we went back to the airport, flowers in hand, to welcome my beloved cousins, Eloise and Adelaide. I'm not going to explain what we did for the next 4 days, partly because I don't remember, but mostly because it's not important. Summary: We talked and ate, planned family vacations, laughed and did not cry, and Eloise knitted (in addition to participating in the above activities). 

The only thing that could have made things better would have been one more person. And so we went to the airport again and came back with Nicholas's wife/ Paula's mother, Zuzanna, who has been studying dance and music in a program in Barcelona for the last few months. Another charming and beautiful human being, whom I immediately liked and wanted to get to know better, but I was leaving in less than 48 hours! So, after she arrived and we were all having such a good time together, I saw that the only thing that could improve things at that point would be to change my plane ticket so I could stay for just a few more days. . . Sooo. . . Surprise! Just kidding, I'm coming home tomorrow :) I'm spending tonight in Milan at Owen's (the anchor and unsung hero of our trip) with him and Mila and then to boston in the morning.

Goodbye Riga 

Overall reflections on the trip? Well, sort of a bust on goal number one; I didn't really figure out what i want to do when I get home, you know with my life and career etc. But the world seems much bigger now. Traveling's fun, but seeing friends and family was the most important part, with meeting new random people in a close second, and although traveling alone is more relaxing, the trip wouldn't have worked without my mother the Hoeh. As far as I can tell, the most once-in-a-lifetime element of my voyage was getting to do it with her.

Three months is a long time to summarize. I mean that amount of time can easily be a trip without going anywhere. I would say I just had more interesting scenery. 

Now, from a philosophical standpoint, what I might take away is, now is always now and tomorrow never arrives, but somehow what used to be tomorrow is now getting farther and farther behind me. 

Good luck to everyone else in your life journeys. May you always search, but never find yourself. Maybe we'll see you back here!

Inch by inch, row by row, time for Rake and Hoeh to go.

iThis morning we said goodbye as the Rake dropped the Hoeh off at Rome Terminale.

It's been a journey that defies simple answers to "How was it?" So instead, may as well just finish the highlights since Thanksgiving.  

At the hostel we met hilarious and fun people, and ended up at Pompeii with them, on a frantic search for the corpses one sees in the textbooks.  The guy with the white glasses asked every workman we saw, "where are the bodies? The dead people? The corpses?" 

We only found "the 2," not "the 11" we'd hoped for, but our friends all had to catch planes and we had to get the bus to Amalfi.

We returned to our awesome Hostel of the Sun in Naples, which we recommend without hesitation.

 Next day we were tourists again, which was a bit disorienting after our weeks and weeks of rural and isolated living.  But Napoli is a really cool place that we enjoyed wandering around.

Finally got enough bones to satisfy us at the Cemeterio de Fontinelle, a huge cave that was filled for centuries with the bones of miscellaneous unfortunates, whose remains were later adopted by locals who formed a cultish system of honoring them, giving them names which came to the caretakers in dreams.

Our final destination together was Rome, to visit Aunt Bamby ( she prefers Nadia but it is hard to drop the family diminutive!), who must have the most central and impressive apartment one can imagine.  For example, the Vatican and the Pantheon and several other things are all a few blocks away.

Elisabeth and Bamby, who is almost 80 but still taking watercolor classes and turning out incredible botanical paintings, writing a novel, addressing the problem of the publisher releasing a second edition of her book Maria Callas Remembered without involving or paying her, looking for a publisher for her two childrens' books, and writing a novel.

Photo from a book on the 1962 sculpture "invasion" of Spoleto, which went on to become the Spoleto festival, all of which Aunt Bamby was involved in and helped design, then worked on the festival for many years.

definitely one of the weirdest and most effective illusions ever.

So that's it.  If I ever find WIFI in Milan, this post will end our trip on the day it ended, Dec. 5, 2013.  It started Sept. 26.  We've had an incredible journey, with so many good people and so few bad ones, so many interesting experiences and not too many boring ones, and just enough difficult ones to give us a few stories to tell! I think we are both really glad we got to spend so much time together, and neither of us would have wanted to do exactly this trip alone - no way! But together, what a team!

Elisabeth's journey goes on, but without an iPad so you'll have to follow her facebook I suppose. Ciao everyone.

A Happy Thanksgiving

Goodbye to the Umbrian countryside!

But when you wake up to snow in the cow pasture, you know it's time to go.

 fond farewell from our host Adje

and her doggies

reviewing our memories of the past two months - on the train to Naples we listed our best experiences, our most grateful moments, the people who meant the most to us....

When who should appear but these Indian guys we had shared a compartment with on the train from Slovenia to Germany, 43 days ago.  Is that weird.  They were on their way to the SAME HOSTEL as us. Cue Disney - "It's a small world..."!

At the Hostel of the Sun in Naples we had our little Thanksgiving.  What we were thankful for, specifically on this table, were the black trumpets we found in Umbria, the goat parmesan made by our Slovenian host, the crushed red peppers from our Tuscan host, the $2.50 decent wine, and most of all the olive oil from olives we picked in Umbria.  Thanks everyone!!

Expat Italia

"All I need is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground..." - Dave Mallett

Well - turns out, you need a lot more than that to move to Italy and create a retirement homestead!  But of course many people do, but why? Obviously there is a sort of absolute allure about the rolling hills of well-spaced rows and diagonals of olive trees, oak forests, ancient stone retaining walls peeking out of any hillside no matter how remote, castles on random hilltops, sheep and cows, tiny ancient villages of people sweeping their patios with twig brooms, 90 cent espresso, truffles, wild boar stew, all that.

But try buying a deserted stone farm house and turning it into your dream home in a country where nothing, NOTHING works the way it is supposed to, including people!  Things are totally illogical, bureaucracies are ludicrous, businesses all close for most of the afternoon, and don't open til 10 a.m. Trains and buses can be cancelled without any public notice at all, the post office can't find addresses, mail just doesn't come. It goes on and on. Some may find this charming. But it appears from our Yankee practicality point of view to be a nightmare! We're trying to figure out if all these people from Holland and England and the U.S. and Australia have any idea what they are in for when they buy these places, or if the weather and scenery really could actually make it worth it!  

Anyway, right now in this Workaway stay we are experiencing Italy by looking over the shoulder of one Dutch expat who is making her way through all of this.  Six months into it she has a pretty good start, but she was once the Director of Facilities for the City of Amsterdam, has run a museum, owned an art gallery, and managed her own B & B.  She is also very single-minded, stubborn, sufficiently wealthy, and completely independent.  Plus she has a good handle on Italian language, acquired in the last couple years. These tools seem to make her able to keep moving forward, but she is usually dealing with something exasperating enough to justify ulcers. Before we are through here with the olive grove and hanging paintings and lamps and mirrors, we hope to meet some more of these intrepid settlers and find out what gets them through the Umbrian mud puddles!

Working in the very irregular, just recently recovered olive grove.  A totally different experience from the previous, 30-year-old grove in Tuscany.

The Hoeh and two other Workawayers with a small part of the brush they moved in one day.

Rake gets fun, manly projects.  Adje favors her.  Rake always was teacher's pet.

Adje our host flipping a crêpe.  She is an INCREDIBLE cook.

Stone shed here.

Orvieto on our day off.

Funicular up to the town.

This gargantuan cathedral was built in this tiny town because someone noted that some communion bread started bleeding in resonse to some priest voicing his doubts.

Funicular back down.  Then we got on the train, which, when we arrived back at our station, would not let us off!  The doors of two consecutive cars were not working.  Train officials were outside the door observing, but helpless. It simply started back up and kept going, so we had to go to the next town!  Perfect example of Italy.

Our first trip to the olive press here! 380 kilos.

Yield: 45 liters!

Employee lunchroom at the olive press. Note wine, olive oil, fire in fireplace.

"Our" olive oil.  Followed by pasta with truffles....

So here we are in sort of art gallery, eating gourmet food, drinking local wine with dinner every evening, cursing the changeable weather and the ubiquitous mud, but sleeping in the most comfortable beds ever. As Drew Barton's father would say, Could be worser!

castle in the back yard.

A different sort of olive grove

Hello devoted readers!

We're back. 

So, where do we start? Above is a picture of me picking olives at our new home in Umbria. In front of the tree is our new host, Adje (a better picture to come). We have been here now three days and it couldn't be more different than our last place. Adje is a 63 year old dutch woman fixing up an old house and abandoned property with the help of workawayers like ourselves. She has been here since May and managed to turn the house into a beautiful living space and also to uncover about a hundred olive trees that she didnt know existed from a gigantic thicket of brambles. 

The techniques we use to pick olives are different. For example we use rakes to help us get the olives off the branches, and we also have a machine to get the really high ones (since this grove has been abandoned for so long, the trees are not maintained at all and some have grown up too high to reach with a ladder). There is a lot more room for creativity here, since we are all pretty new at this and open to each other's ideas, whereas at the last place, there was one, and only one, right way to execute each of the steps for each of the trees. 

There are two other girls, Verena (18, german), and Lilly (25, Irish), who arrived shortly before we did. They are both very nice and vegetarian. However, all of our dinners so far have also contained meat for the meat eaters! Adje is an amazing cook, and we all pitch in and work together on our wonderful dinners.

This afternoon, as a reward for our hard work, and since the weather was not great for olive picking, Adje brought us to her favorite Patisserie and treated us to some frothy cappuccinos and immaculate bon bons, chez Michele.

Me and Adje with her dachshunds.

Things are relaxed and pleasant here, and we feel like we are making a difference every day with the work we do, helping Adje to realize her vision of this place.

On another note, we have one exciting story to tell about our last week in Tuscany. During a misadventure typical of our previous location, we found ourselves stranded in the rain, 10 kilometers from home, in a town where the one cafe was not open. What started out as a beautiful day for a walk had quickly turned sour and we had resigned ourselves for an afternoon of misery. The Hoeh was reading under the shelter of the bus stop, and i was pacing under a large tent in a small parking lot, when a young man ran out from the next house and then came and stood under the tent next to me and looked around. After a minute, he said something to me in Italian. 

"Non parlo italiano. Sono Americana," i said.

"oh," he said, "sono di morocco." 

Then he somehow communicated an invitation into their house and after a half second hesitation, i said "si!"

What followed was an afternoon of sitting around with three Moroccan guys in their early twenties, drinking moroccan tea and beer, trying their hamburger kind of things, spiced with spices straight from morocco, and watching music videos while it poured outside.

(Me, Said who invited me in, Friend we were not introduced to, Said from Rome, Adil who spoke some English)

Only one of them spoke a tiny bit of english, so even my ten words of italian were appreciated. we spent about 4 hours with them, and talked about everything we possibly could, given all of the words we knew in common. We drove to the nearby larger town, had a coffee and came back. and then, after exchanging contact information, they gave us a ride home! Then Said-from-Rome texted me to tell me he loved me. And then he called me and asked him why i hadnt answered. and then he said some other things that i didnt undertand and i said "va bene." He lives in Rome so we are supposed to call him when we get there on December 1st. We'll see...

thats it for now. Buona notte, kids.

rainbow during tonight's sunset

adje's house.