Volume 1 – Vagabond 6/14/09
When the mascot starts attacking you, you know it’s time to go. I came home last Sunday from the Strawberry Fest, a cool yearly fundraising event at this old mansion along the river that a small non-profit group is trying to restore. Right now the mansion is falling apart but is still open to walk though, a cool experience of being inside a decaying building without trespassing. When I arrived at my front steps I saw a cute little baby blue jay standing on my steps. Its head was still fluffy but its back was just beginning to show the black, white, and blue that helped me identify it. It clearly couldn’t fly, so slowly and tenaciously it hopped its way the three inches or so up every step, squawking all the way. Hop, squawk, hop, squawk. I stood there and watched this little guy for about ten minutes, not wanting to scare it, accidentally push it off the edge, give its parents the impression that I had abducted it, or worse yet, attract the ire of the momma. Mom and dad both appeared and made their way from roof gutter to tree to power line, surveying the situation. I was glad to see them, because I thought the baby may have fallen out of the nest or been abandoned. I can just imagine what it would have been like if I had walked out of my house at that moment and seen a baby blue jay greeting me at the door. “No Mr. Blue Jay, I would not like to buy any cookies.” My little friend did eventually leave the porch, taking a diving leap to the plush uncut grass below and hopping off to hang with the ‘rents. It was really cool to get this close-up view of the family life an animal that usually never appears for more than ten seconds at a birdfeeder. But then things turned ugly…
The next day when I got home from work I was pleased to see my little baby blue jay friend under the tree near my steps again. Mom and dad were also hovering around and flying from perch to perch. Sometimes they seemed to be flying a little lower than normal. All was kosher till it came time for me to leave to go out that night. I walk out of my apartment only to find the baby blue jay now happily standing on my steps. Of course I can’t go down for the same reason I couldn’t go up the day before, so I went back inside for a few minutes hoping he would get the hint and move down the steps. He did not. He went up the steps. I slowly peered out my door and saw the little guy about two feet from me at the top of my steps. I contemplated jumping down but decided I couldn’t do it with the papers I had in my hand. So I thought I could avert disaster by moving very slowly. Most animals don’t get scared if you move very slowly. Baby birds are a bit easier to scare. As I inched my way out the door, locked it behind me, and creeped onto the deck, I got a cold hard stare followed by “SQUAWK, SQUAWK, SQUAWK!!” I laughed for a second at how innocent this little thing was. He wasn’t going to charge, and he didn’t fall of the edge, he was just yelling at me. I tiptoed down about a step before I was abruptly disturbed by a very surprising crash and scrape across the top of my head. It hurt. I thought I was bleeding when I realized that little bird wasn’t yelling at me, it was yelling for its momma. I totally got dive bombed by a blue jay! I knew Etown chose the blue jay as its mascot because they had a reputation for being scrappy fighting birds, and now I can affirm that they are indeed the helicopter parents of the avian world.
But of course none of that has anything to do with the real message behind this, my first journal entry in three years. For three years I have been living the domestic life – apartment, bills, job, cooking, and all – in Elizabethtown. That period will have to stay a mysterious omission in the history books, because I know any vain attempt to characterize this period of my life and the volatility and range of emotions that have gone with it in a paragraph or even a book would fail miserably. It shall always be a part of me and will continue to play a part in shaping who I become, but it will not be a part of the public record. And anyway, I’m leaving it for a lifestyle of throwing my entirely too many possessions into boxes to store in basements, a lifestyle of answering the inevitable “Where are you from?” question with the perplexing “well, um, you know, it’s complicated.” Of course it’s all subject to change. My anchor is still aboard the ship, and without any significant rock to latch it onto, I will continue to float, not quite aimlessly, and not without purpose, but ever moving and ever onward into that great and glorious unknown.
Truthfully, there is nothing I would rather do than throw that anchor down. My years of travel taught me many things, the most important of which – the value of genuine relationships – has never left me. But this world is not designed for lovers, it’s designed for workers and drones and beer bellies and agnostics. This may sound terribly depressing, but it’s not intended as such. The world is just as beautiful as it ever was, and you certainly may not throw Jeremy Ebersole in the old bin of yet another idealistic college grad beaten down by the real world. No, friends, my idealism is stronger than ever, but (and this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this) as Bono reminds me, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” So I’m headed off to move the world inch by inch ever closer to one that actually is designed for the lovers and the dreamers and the spiritual out there, which of course in our heart of hearts is all of us.
Along the way I will do cool things. Next month will find me in Bavaria, working alongside 15 international young adults to reconstruct a labyrinth at a world heritage site marking the border of the ancient Roman Empire. A labyrinth is not a maze. Mazes get you lost. Labyrinths help you find yourself. It’s an ancient spiritual practice that helps Christians focus their thoughts by walking a specific pattern and meditating along the way. I will be in a tiny town with lots of people from all over the world. Most importantly, I will eat lots of delicious chocolate. Chocolate so good it doesn’t matter if it’s bite-sized. I’ll just have two! After Germany, the plan is to intern with TOMS Shoes. TOMS is a little company that no one had heard of six months ago till they made a commercial with AT&T that has now been seen by all of America. No one remembers it’s AT&T, but they do remember TOMS. Hopefully they will buy lots of shoes but not apply for this internship. Competition is not in my nature. We’ll see how this turns out. Then maybe I’ll work on an organic farm and learn how to cook, and maybe I’ll bike across the country. But maybe I’ll buy a Vespa, or maybe I’ll go to school for historic preservation, or maybe I’ll become a city planner, or maybe I’ll marry a nice California girl, or maybe I’ll become a helicopter pilot. That anchor is just waiting for something to latch onto.
They say that college is all about “finding yourself.” That’s a half-truth. Life is about finding yourself. It doesn’t end, kiddos. It’s the great grown-up whitewash. Of course they had to do it. Small minds need to believe that perfection exists, that someone out there knows what they’re talking about. And of course it does, but it does not come from a person. And yes, folks do know what they’re talking about, but do they know what you’re talking about? Life is questions, not answers. I have found one answer, the only answer. And that is Love; that is God. It’s just the great question that still eludes me. So I will build a labyrinth, and I will donate shoes to impoverished children, and I will smile, and I will make others smile, and I will fail, and I will succeed, and someday I will sit down with a fluffy white dog and tell my grandkids that when he was young he knew how to rock the party, and they’ll believe it – because he still does. I’m glad to have you join me on my journey, for it is only in our relationships with others that any of us truly exist.
Jeremy
Volume 2 – 8/18/09
Okay so I’m a bit late getting this guy out. I promise I haven’t forgotten everything! What can I say, it’s been busy! In fact, busyness is one of the first things I noticed upon my return to the glorious U.S.A. After three weeks of having hours a day to just relax, read, walk, and get to know my friends, I returned and was immediately busy again. Reading emails, planning for the future, posting pictures on Facebook. A part of me likes to be busy, but why is that? Is it because I feel guilty if I’m not? It took me about a week to get used to just hanging out while I was in Germany. I always felt like the time should be used to do something. All the Europeans thought it was positively amusing and distinctly American. Now I am back and very much enjoying the time I’m spending relaxing, researching, thinking, but it can be a tough sell. In the pit of my stomach I feel a little weird when I tell someone I don’t have a job, I’m hanging out with my parents for a while, and planning to do some more traveling soon. According to our overzealous work ethic I might as well say, “I’m a drain on society.” But I don’t feel like a drain. I feel like I’m finally enjoying myself. Despite the cockeyed glances of a Republican here or there, I feel like I’m doing exactly what I want to do, taking time to enjoy life. We hear sermons about it, we read about it in self-help magazines, but it’s difficult to actually slow down the pace of life. Just give a little prick and watch that East Coast insanity ooze out like melted butter.
But on to the actual trip. If you don’t have an hour to sit in front of a computer and read this, just take in the next few lines and you’ll know enough to impress me with your knowledge of my life the next time we talk. I was in Germany for three weeks in a tiny village called Wittelshofen. The town was founded in 1007 (a thousand years ago) and today has maybe 1000 people, exactly where it’s been for centuries (we’ll get into sprawl later). I found the project through the American organization Volunteers for Peace (which I discovered from the WWOOF organic farming website, another trip I hope to do soon…there’s the benefit of a liberal arts education, I can make connections!) VFP is just a middle man; you pay them $300 plus airfare and you have housing, food, and work for the length of your trip just about anywhere in the world. They post over 3000 different workcamps (please get rid of any negative connotations you have this word, no POWs here) on their website of varying lengths and you choose one and go. Remarkably, I was the only American in our group, the only native English speaker (and the only one who monolingual) and the only representative of the Western Hemisphere (and incidentally my $300 turned out to be a boatload of money, just one more benefit of higher taxes is the opportunity for European youths to do trips like this on the cheap, sounds better than letting us spend our own money on purses and gun racks…I’m not quite a socialist…yet). We stayed in a very nice five-bedroom apartment above the town hall, complete with our own stork family nesting above the chimney. Our actual work involved building a labyrinth at the site of an old Roman fort. The fort and surrounding parkland is called Romerpark Ruffenhofen and is part of the Roman Limes World Heritage Site marking the border of the ancient Roman Empire. Interestingly, as part of the World Heritage designation, the few remains of the fort are not allowed to be dug up because they are better protected under the ground. This makes it a hard sell for visitors, which is part of why we were building our labyrinth to give people something physical to do. The fort is visualized above ground with various flower and tall grasses above the buried rubble. I think it makes sense, actually. There is so little of the fort left that digging it up would produce nothing more than a few piles of rocks which might be even less exciting. To make it look like a real fort would require completely rebuilding like 95% of the place. All of a sudden you have something artificial, a Disneyland of sorts. That’s not bad, but it’s also not appropriate for this setting, so they stay underground (and provide a butterfly habitat far better than any artificial enclose I’ve ever seen). Also I should mention that a labyrinth is not a maze. Labyrinths are ancient; in fact we don’t really know when they first appeared, but it’s definitely long before Christ. They were etched in stone and drawn on pottery before being used in churches and monasteries all over the world as a meditation tool. There’s only one way in that leads to a dead end in the center; then you follow the same path back out. This focused simplicity helps to calm the mind. The idea is to use every available space within the structure. For example, our labyrinth was 20m x 20m, so the inside path was 400m long! It was created by lifting a bunch of stones about 3ft long x 1ft tall x 6in wide onto a cleared gravel square we had measured out using poles and string. Each stone weighed about 150lbs and required four people to carry using two big clamps. Then we filled it in with more gravel to stabilize it and peppered the whole earth with dirt. Eventually grass will be planted and a tree and bench set up in the middle so you’ll be walking through stones about 13cm high. And the scenery was gorgeous!
So that’s the short version. Here are the juicy details. I hate red eye flights and I hate jet lag. Though this was better than my last European trip where I fell asleep during a show, slept for like 15 hours and then not at all the next night. I found that it can be difficult to pick a German out from an American if they don’t have glasses. Spectacles, however, are a dead giveaway. The more rectangular the frames, the more likely the wearer is German. The Germans were awesome. I was sad to find that they don’t believe in water fountains though, thus forcing me to buy very expensive bottled water. At least I didn’t make mistake of buying the incredibly popular water “with gas” by mistake. Carbonated water is the opposite of refreshing. Airport bathrooms were also peculiar, small, and tough to find. The trip to Wittelshofen from the airport was an adventure, as I expected it to be. I was elated when I knew more about the Nuremburg subway system than a native and was able to help her figure out where to go, but that changed when I bought my train ticket and the teller had never heard of Wittelshofen. It got even hairier when our bus pulled off the road and the driver started talking to everyone in German. Luckily a nice man near me with a very basic knowledge of English (much more than my knowledge of German) told me to get off the bus and get on the waiting van nearby. It ended up being flight, subway, train, bus, van, van to get to my destination. People wonder how I could do all this in a foreign country, to which I reply smiling faces and hand gestures can go a long way!
When our group of 17 met up it felt like I was back at a college fair talking with other admissions counselors again. Instead of talking about the differences in our colleges and regions, however, we were all abuzz about our nationalities. Our group was myself, two Germans, two Spaniards, a Parisian, two Venetians (who weren’t too fond of Venice and not at all fond of the lights and sound of our tiny little village…there are no cars in Venice so no noise at night), a Finn, a Mongolian, a Ugandan, two Russians, two Serbians, and two South Koreans. It was absolutely fascinating to talk to all of them. I learned so much and of course got to dispel many of the stereotypes about America as well. Most of them had never met an American before, and I was so glad to share some of the positive vibes from our culture. It was particularly cool to meet people from countries with which American government typically does not get along too well. Talking to these normal people I found that they are just that, remarkably normal. We have such a tendency to vilify others from different cultures as wrong. “How could X country elect this monster for a president?” we say. Then you talk to them and you remember our past eight years and it all makes sense. No matter how crazy Putin might be, Russians are not evil. Just like no matter how crazy Bush is, neither are Americans. It was funny to hear some of the American stereotypes. Asking someone what they thought American houses looked like, I found out they were all huge with big yards and American flags out front. Ultimately I was an am proud to be an American and had to calm myself down a bit when in the midst of everyone making regional dishes to eat, I offered to make some chicken wings and got “who would want to eat chicken wings?” as a response. (I ended up, with much difficulty, making BBQ chicken and potato boats with “American style” cookies.) Germany itself has some unique characteristics. Some of the people initially threw me off. It’s not as common to do the little friendly things we do here. You don’t smile and wave when you pass someone, but it’s not that they’re not friendly, just different. It was a bit odd to see some German soldiers around, but all that awkwardness disappeared very quickly. Every house has a gorgeous red steeply-sloped roof. Every single house. Not much variety, and while I hate American conformity this seemed different. Not sure why. Maybe it was just different for me. Streets were built for people and horses so of course they were exceptionally narrow and curvy. The area smelled like cows and reminded me of home, but there are no solitary farms out in the country. Instead, they just fill the town. There are no suburbs, just small town with lots of farm houses and then sudden open land. It was beautiful and amazing and impossible to put into words how wonderfully different this felt. The towns don’t really have squares or circles or commons like we do; the businesses were just spread everywhere. And despite the fact that there was a lot more walking and cycling (train stations were stacked with hundreds or parked bicycles; while we bike for exercise, they bike for transportation) pedestrians do not have the right of way. Of course there were many things that were universal. I heard a story of a relationship problem and was hardly surprised when this entire international group could all nod our heads in agreement and honestly say, “I know exactly what you’re going through.” Then on my way home I sat next to Swiss timber worker who was reading about “the 5 love languages” because his ex-girlfriend had suggested it and I realized just how alike we really are.
The language barrier was tough at first. My one Spanish friend spoke very good English because his dad was British and he spoke English at home. We were able to navigate the few differences between the two Englishes pretty well, but everyone’s English ability varied. And of course I felt bad because everyone else is working so hard to learn my language. The whole American imperialism thing is hard to shake. I didn’t want at all to come off as the arrogant American, especially since I was the oldest and the strongest English speaker. I didn’t feel at al superior. I was with people as young as 16 and no one older than 23. Some people have said that seems weird but nothing about it felt the least bit strange to me. There was once when I thought, “I quit my job to go to Germany and hang out with high schoolers?” But I couldn’t be more happy I did. I love America and my old job, but the bigger world was so captivating. I was able to have more intelligent and meaningful conversations with 16 year old Germans than I can have with 30 year old Americans. This is not meant to generalize the two populations, but I don’t think age has much to do with maturity. One thing that does tend to happen is that people graduate for college and suddenly care about only one thing – success. It’s a vicious and life-draining trap, and I was so glad to get away from it. The language difference did give me a sense of how important language is. Number one, how the heck are you supposed to flirt without language? Flirting, humor, intelligent discussion, all these things rely on an equal command of language to be understood. I can say all the clever and witty things I want and no beautiful foreign girl is going to think anything but, “I have no idea what this scrawny kid is trying to say.” Humor is my backbone. You make friends because you have common interests, but how do you know anything about one another if you can’t communicate? I have so much respect for the others who did this trip. It was frustrating to me to not understand all of what was being said, and it must have been even more so for non-native speakers. The archeologist in charge of our work spoke very little English and some of the English conversation among the group was at such a level that I didn’t have any more idea what was being said than anyone else. I even felt like I was losing my English ability but using such a basic version of it so much. For days I couldn’t remember what mulch was called…earth, manure, dirt, fertilizer? It’s amazing how much language shapes culture. For example, at one point I was called a “douche” and had to explain that that was likely not what they were intending to say, but try defining douche in rudimentary English. Essentially they were saying I was a clown, the comic relief, the free-spirited zany optimist (which no matter what I do I always become in a group setting). The upside was that it made me more confident to talk to other English speakers. We think it’s so hard to talk to people here sometimes, but it’s so easy in a way because we speak the same language. But we all tried, we all smiled, and we all got along great. What was tough at first had disappeared within about a week.
There were a few examples of “roughing it” that caught me a bit off guard at first and made me realize how spoiled we can become sometimes. Washing clothes in the bathtub and hanging them to dry was a first for me, and it did not go too well. And when we found ourselves with a dirty floor we decided to use dishwasher fluid sprayed on a rag and moved around with a broom to serve as our mop. And much of the difficulty of my all-American lunch came from the fact that we had a tiny oven that only went up to about 200 degrees, lots of chicken, a broken stove, and a lack of basic cooking knowledge on my part. We eat poorly in America and are pretty crummy cooks. I don’t think anyone will argue with that. Sixteen- year-olds knew a lot more about cooking than me. I burned the nuggets (who ever heard of nuggets on the stove anyway), almost cut off the wrong end of the chives, tried to cook bacon without oil, and almost made someone cry from the stress of it all. Perfectionism is an international malady and I suffer from it myself sometimes, but with cooking I’ve decided it’s best to just not pretend like I know what I’m doing.
Then there was the Beach Party. There are beaches in Germany, but they’re cold and we were not near them. “Beach Party” means walk two hours in the dark to a sports park with a parking lot covered in sand. There was music (a lot of American on top of the German stuff) and a crazy thing happened…I was cool! Often times here I feel intimidated. Dance clubs are often filled with girls there to get away from guys and guys there to drink too much and creep out the girls. There was something so purely fun and innocent about our German dance party. First, we were the only ones dancing, but second, no one had ever seen any of the goofy American dances. I got show a whole crew how to drop it like it’s hot, push the shopping cart, start the lawnmower, and drive the Caddy (and was asked to repeat it over and over again the next two weeks, even at our own little Daft Punk party the last night…awesome!). It didn’t matter that it wasn’t “good,” it was fun and that’s all that mattered. I still firmly believe that dancing is less about talent than confidence. New dance moves are all about doing something really ridiculous and saying, “no way man, this is the next big thing.” One of the other group members even commented to me that I had so much confidence in myself (this was after I had helped convince everybody to wear our bathing suits on the outside of our clothes since it was too cold to just wear the suits…any pretense of being old and mature gave way to the mush more important being light-hearted and full of life). I really don’t have that much confidence until I’m put in an environment and a culture where things that matter are finally celebrated. Dance even more than music I think really is a universal language. Out on the floor we all understood each other.
Our first excursion was to Nuremburg where I walked around the site of the old Nazi party rally grounds. Hitler has planned a massive capitol city here and while much of it is gone, there is still a considerable bit of this architecture still standing. The old Congress building is now a museum, a symphony, and storage for the city, and Zeppelin Field (where the big political rallies were held) is just wide open and used for auto racing and other sports. While I was there I saw kids skateboarding and a guy hitting tennis ball off the wall. Seventy years ago this was the center of an ideology that almost ripped the world apart, and today it’s starkly and unapologetically normal. These were buildings designed by the Nazis to represent their vision of a new world order, but I found nothing inherently evil about them. You expect to see a Dracula’s castle or something. Something that screams, “we’re the bad guys!” But it just looked like Cleveland. Old buildings falling apart. Nothing more. On the way back I was chatting about philosophy (see how quickly our ability to communicate had progressed?) and met a really cool German grad student studying consciousness and had a long conversation on the bus ride home. He had never talked to an American about philosophy and wondered what I thought. Next we went to Dinkelsbuhl, and amazing old city still completely surrounded by walls. It was one of the few cities never destroyed by war, either medieval or modern. And they do an amazing thing…even though they have suburbs, they purposely separate it from the walled city with a big park. Why can’t we do that? We can’t keep developers from knocking down a 20-year-old structure to build new condos and they have all their 800-year old structures intact and completely isolated from modernity! I guess it’s a cultural difference. We just don’t care about our history in the U.S. unless it has to do with war. And again, the higher taxes mean more good can be done for everyone without preservation groups having to kick and scream to get anything done. This whole idea of my money, I do what I want with it, screw the common good is purely American, and it’s almost enough to make me want out. Let’s build livable, sustainable communities that foster interaction instead of independence for a change. Let’s celebrate our local differences and our collective past. I don’t know why Europe gets it and we don’t. This is why I want to go to grad school for next year for historic preservation, because old buildings foster a sense of community pride and common experience and enforce life-affirming ideals for the entire community. Anyway, outside the city walls, there was an awesome kids’ slide that you’re not supposed to ride if you’re over 12, but I did anyway and it was the fastest thing I’ve ever ridden.
This whole thing is becoming increasingly random, but so is my mind. The supermarkets in Germany have the coolest thing ever. There are some plastic bottles there that you just recycle like normal, but there are some that you can take back to the store to go into this amazing shredder that chops them up before your eyes and gives you store credit for them. It was the coolest thing ever! The wine is also cheaper than the water. And the cars were an interesting sight as well. Mercedes is like the Ford of Germany. They may be ridiculously expensive luxury cars here, but there Mercedes can be just a plain Jane econobox. And every taxi in the country is a Mercedes. The cars there tend to be rounder and smaller with barely an SUV in sight. My favorite thing in the world, the Smart car, was everywhere too, but not as common as it was in France. German newspapers were a bit peculiar too. I opened up a paper to the “arts” section to see a lovely picture of a completely shaved vagina. No one else thought this was strange but me. It was a story about trends in teenagers shaving different parts of their body and was accompanied by more pictures from magazines of naked shaved people. Apparently there is a magazine that does this every issue, gets a normal person and they pose naked and answer questions. In the advertisements further back there was an ad for a shower that had a naked woman showering. They didn’t get how you could advertise showers without showing someone using it. This was not porn at all though. This was statue of David-style nudity, just the human body. We make nudity so scary and evil and sexualized here that there is no real appreciation of the human body. When you’re naked, it’s because you’re doing something sexual while in Europe the attitude is so different. In a way, we are the ones more obsessed with sex. While they can appreciate the human body for what it is, we turn any little show of skin into sex sex sex. Of course the line is blurry and I am by no means an advocate of porn. There’s a difference between art and normalcy and the objectification and manipulation of one gender by the other for the purposes of exploitation. It’s the difference between treating people like human beings and treating them like objects.
We also visited Rothenberg ob der Tauber, the inspiration for Pinocchio and one of the most photographed cities in Germany. It, like every other town, had huge churches. I just love old European churches and it became a bit of a joke with the group since they were just normal old churches to them. While we build big old boxes and do everything possible to make our churches look more like Wal-Marts than anything reflecting the beauty and awesomeness of God, here are these gorgeous old buildings just filled with art and history. It’s a different brand of Christianity, and I think both have their advantages, but coming back home and seeing 1970s brown suburban churches and modern big box churches, I was very sad. Europe is a much less religious continent than the America, so there are some good things about the way we do things I suppose. The whole question of religion came up a few times. It’s very different there. It’s really just Catholic or Protestant and most people don’t have a choice, it all depends on the history of the village. We are used to this overwhelming abundance of religious options. We can find row after row of denominational churches, but Europe has a much different story. I’d love to talk endlessly about it but I’m afraid if I write more, I will literally write endlessly. To put it simply, it was just so thought-provoking and interesting. I do hope I was able to be a strong witness that it’s possible to be a Christian and not be a lunatic (which is frankly what much of the world thinks of Christianity) and give an example of what that might look like. I went to one church service there and was able recognize the Apostles Creed (when I heard “Pontius Pilate”) and the Lord’s Prayer (from the pace and rhythm).
Spalt was another little town where we had a tour in simple English by a really cool guy. He was a friend of a member of the Office of Rural Development for Middle Franconia, the organization that wrote the grant to get us there. There was something very authentic about this. We were not just touring random places with random people but were instead given gifts like this by people giving of their own time and resources to thank us for our work. It was completely unlike anything I had done. People giving to other people out of the goodness of their hearts. Spalt is a hops-growing region and claims to have the oldest hops patent in the world. Bavaria (the state we were in) has a microbrewery in almost every town and Spalt’s is actually owned by the townspeople. There is a purity law in Germany that says something like no beer can have anything artificial in it, so this stuff was literally just water, malt, yeast, and hops, nothing else. Liquid bread. It tasted horribly bitter to my tastebuds though. I also discovered after picking cherries off a tree at a nearby cherry and hops field that cherry juice turns your hands blue. I have no idea why that happens. We went to Munich as well, but it rained the whole time. In fact it rained quite a bit throughout our trip. The few days that it was hot people were dying. We must have some crazy temperatures here in the U.S. because all I could think is “this is nothing compared to Florida.” One of the group even got burnt and was peeling for the first time. I guess it would be a weird experience if it had never happened before, makes you look red like meat she said. Munich had four H&Ms on the same block. That was ridiculous. Other than that, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do there. We did have an adventure getting there since we missed the first bus. Luckily there was another bus that could get us there by another route, which is just one more perfect example of how staying calm and having confidence can solve virtually any so-called crisis.
Near the end of our time we went to the grand opening of a “trekking path,” what we would call a trail, that led to the Roman limes (walls). We were served the only truly bizarre food I had in Germany, a ball of bread and potato mixed together. “You know what this starch needs? Another starch!” They might as well have served on top of noodles to complete the trio. It was better than the mosquito that literally flew inside my mouth later that day (the bugs were nuts there). Later that night we discovered an attic in our building. The only thing cooler than exploring something is exploring something abandoned. It was really creepy up there, especially when we found ladder that led down to a 1940s bathroom with no doors. We also began to be visited in our daily work by the cutest old German guy ever. Apparently his family used to own some of the land where the Romerpark now stands and he wanted to see what was happening. He brought us candy or a new newspaper article that had been written about us almost every day. It’s amazing to me that they were able to get the land. All that land (and there was a lot of it) had to be purchased legally from the landowners to open the park. And they did. Even more amazing was a big series of man-made lakes used as reservoirs in a different area of the country we visited. They had to flood entire towns to make these lakes and buy the property from the landowners. No funny business, no bribery, nothing, just convincing people to give up something of theirs for the common good. That would unfortunately never happen in the U.S. We don’t want anyone else messing with our privacy and independence and we certainly don’t trust our government that when they say something is the common good it actually is. It’s different there.
Okay, my last bit of excitement concerning the European lifestyle. (I’m really not anti-American, but I do appreciate experiencing different and often more life-affirming ways of doing things.) Americans are a good bunch. I think we really try. And Europeans are not all saints by any means, but man did I ever love just being able to have authentic relationships with people. There was very little if any complaining. I have heard more complaining about sitting through a half hour lecture at college than I did from people walking 5 miles to get somewhere in Germany. Of course our feet hurt, but we kept walking. Even better, there was a freeing lack of technology. Even though I don’t have a TV, I still have to hear about it all the time. This show or that is everywhere on the lips of people around me. For three blissful weeks there was nary a mention of the idiot box. In America, we come home and plop down on the couch and veg out because we’re burnt out from our job that we hate. They have jobs they like, lots of vacation time, and come home and interact with the people around them. I used the Internet maybe three hours over the course of the three weeks. Now that I’m back I’m on it all the time and I so badly wish I could go back to those weeks without its fluorescent chains. In some of our down time, do you know what the Europeans did? They read the newspaper! Do you know any American high school kids who would spend their own money to read about what’s going on in the world? Seek out news from their home country? Spend a summer with people from different nationalities in another country in the first place? I also didn’t have a cell phone. Sure I would have liked to call and chat with people from home, but not having it made me realize what a crutch it can be too. Everyone else had a phone, but a remarkable thing happened. They barely ever used them. It never rang during meals. People never held conversations with you while texting their friends. When there was a conversation, people would go somewhere away from the group and talk in private. People had phones and used them as they were meant to be used. To talk to people occasionally about important topics, not as a way to get out of having real conversations with the people actually in your presence. It was so polite and beautiful. The most wonderful thing about the European way of life is that is really is communal. People matte, society matters, intelligence matters, feelings matter, the greater good matters. It is the complete opposite of American individualism, and it’s amazing. And guess what? It works. They are successful and developed and enjoy benefits our incessant American stranglehold on self-centered gain will never allow us to attain. Score one for the Motherland.
Yea for Germany! It really was an awesome trip for me and I so strongly recommend this type of international service work to anyone and everyone. You are never too old or too attached to do something meaningful. Thus begins what I have dubbed “The Year of Living Spontaneously, Authentically, and Peacefully.” It’s a mouthful, but it helps me focus on what I’m really trying to do with my life during this next turning point. I’m trying to capture the essence of life in an uncompromising way. I just love the variety of experiences that exist in our world. I love high culture and low and I need them both. I need constant action as well as rest. I need to constantly see new things. I need to be independent and venture out to explore the world and I need to be dependent, recognizing that I do not exist outside of my relationships with the people around me. Georgia’s state motto is, “Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation.” I’ll take two out of three. I don’t know what this year will look like, I don’t know where I’ll be or who I’ll meet. But I will love the world, I will love myself, and I will love people. I will take risks and I will smile a lot. I will be alive. Living and loving have always been my primary concerns. Now they will be my only concerns. Grab your shades boys…the sun is shining and we’re about to have us an adventure!
Jeremy
Volume 3 – 10/20/09
Okay so this one has nothing to do with anything really. This is pure journal, no travelogue. This is how my mind works - little caterpillar becomes deep philosophy. So I came home yesterday after a few days away and saw right in front of my garage door, a little wooly bear caterpillar. I’ve seen these things a million times before, they’re just big fluffy caterpillars with red and black fur. This time I started thinking, though, maybe because of the previous six hours I’d spent just chillin’ in the car. Do caterpillars know they will one day become butterflies? Here’s this little completely defenseless creature that moves at the speed of paint drying out in the open with no way to protect itself other than to hide. And then one day, for some reason, it will just craw into a tree and spin a cocoon and go to sleep. But how does it know to spin that cocoon? Are they born with this knowledge, or do they just follow animal instincts at a certain time? I went to college because I always planned to go to college. Does a caterpillar spin a cocoon for the same reason or do they “lose themselves” to the inner animal at a certain point? Do they really know what they’re doing? I wonder if they don’t. If they live their whole lives just thinking they’re these helpless little caterpillars and then one day they’re just really tired and they build this cocoon thinking, “this is it, my life is over” and think they’re dying only to wake up again as these completely transformed, beautiful, flying butterflies!
And then of course, the logical extrapolation from all this theoretical postulating is this…how do we know it’d not the same for us? Don’t we live our whole lives thinking there’s a time when we die and then that’s it? What if death is not an end, but a beginning to a new more wonderful life? What if all we know to be real is just a stage? It’s like “The Truman Show” in the natural world. There’s something else beyond the sea. There is of course no way to prove or disprove this theory, but it’s so cool to think it’s possible. Of course butterflies do eventually actually die as well and there is a difference between physical death and the sleep-like cocoon stage scientists have identified caterpillars going through, but is our physical body really all there is? This is heavy philosophy, but I’m not the only one out there who believes in dualism, the idea that there is a soul beyond the physical; in fact, it’s a necessary precondition for every world religion. What a wonderful example of heaven this can be! Caterpillars might go their whole lives thinking there’s nothing else till they think they’re dying, only to wake up again as this enlightened and beautiful butterfly! Why can’t it be the same for us? Life is so big and there is so much we don’t understand. How incredibly beautiful it all is.
This is right up there with my old “you can’t eat ice cream with a fork” metaphor from about 10 years ago, but that’s for another day. In the meantime, take time to embrace the uncertainties and unknowns of life!
Jeremy
Volume 4 – 1/8/10
It hasn’t quite been four months since I’ve had a deep thought. Quite the contrary, I may have had too many to even attempt to write about them. Perhaps that’s a way my writing has changed over the years. I used to write cumbersomely long essays attempting to put every single thought that raced through my head onto paper so I could flesh out what exactly it is that I was thinking. If others got some insight or ideas or inspiration from me, then what a nice little added bonus. They’d call that “value added” in the entertainment biz (it must be spelled with a z in order to be mod…I like that word lately…mod…otherwise it’d just be bus…though an entertainment bus sounds fun too). It’s like if you make some yummy cookies and share with your bff’s when you’re over gabbing about the local goings on and they love them so much they tell you to sell them so the world can experience the mandibular sensations of your now patented yummy cookies. It was originally just fun to make cookies, but hey if other people like your cookies too, they why not sit back and admire their good taste. That’s the difference between a journal and a blog – a journal is for the writer, a blog is for the readers. Journals are introspective and thoughtful and personal. Blogs are ubiquitous and opportunistic and commercial. Then there are travelogues, which can be full of witty cultural hoo-ha or read like a grocery list. This will never be a blog. They say that people who write blogs hate the word blog. I guess in a way this is a travjourog…or a blavnal…how about jouravlog? Take your pick. I just let the spirit preach it.
Of course it typical fashion that has nothing to do with anything (I guess I haven’t changed that much). I just can’t get away from those wacky intros. You gotta hook em before you can reel em in. In the days, weeks, and months since I was moved by the potential afterlife of insects I have spending much of my waking and dreaming life in front of my arch nemesis, that ever-present bastion of impersonal modernity – the computer. This necessary evil has proved quite necessary, however, as many many hours searching its portals have helped me put together the continuation of the aforementioned Year of Living Spontaneously, Authentically, and Peacefully. I really believe that you get out of every effort what you put in, and baby let me just tell you, I have put in the time on this one. I have a tendency to over-think everything, hyper-analyzing every bit of minutia (and some other hyphenated words I’m sure) and I clearly did that here as well, and it was full of stress as can be expected (14 months shingle free though!) but having worked as hard on this as anything I’ve ever done, I can say with absolute confidence that I am about to embark on the most amazing, least expensive, and most Jeremyfied escapade humanly possible. I drool just thinking about the taste of adventure awaiting me.
Part of that drool come from the inherent risk of all of this. Danger is not my favorite word, though I’m sure it could be appropriate here. Risk is calculated, it’s anticipated. I know I’m going to be in uncomfortable situations. I know I’ll be a minority. I know I’ll have trouble communicating. And just like every other adventure I’ve embarked on I’ll often wonder why on earth I ever decided to do it. But likewise I will experience pure unadulterated emotion, the freedom of feeling. Complacency is the enemy of experience and progress and understanding. Something inside me needs to have danger in my life. That doesn’t mean a weekly bungy jump, but it does mean allowing myself to take risks, to get lost, to make mistakes. If I don’t have the opportunity to fail, I never know that I’m capable of doing anything. This is particularly difficult in our age of GPS systems (the bane of my existence…next to text messaging these things probably contribute more to human devolution than anything yet dreamed up to make our lives easier). I simply don’t like doing things that are easy. It’s boring. There’s no fun, no life in it. The goal of life is not for it to be easy; the goal of life is to experience it and in doing so leave it a better place than it was without you. It’s a wonderful life, but only if you’re actually living it.
So I’m going to a few third world countries by myself to speak a language I don’t know very well, climb around their architectural wonders, care for their misunderstood wildlife, build up their infrastructures, and dig up some shards of ancient Tupperware. The connection is clear, right? Ultimately of course it’s about the people. About meeting people, connection with people, learning about people, understanding people, and impacting people. I think I’m slowly working my way up Plato’s hierarchy of love. Love of the Good seems closer every day. PBS tells me that humans are wired to be in community. It’s the so-called “secret” to happiness. Not really all that much of a secret is it? It’s a calling, a complete uprooting in the name of Love. Do you need to completely uproot yourself to serve God and love other people and be in community with them? Most definitely not, but for me in this time, I do. Why did I go to California many years ago? Because I couldn’t not go. And thus I go again. You can hide it under a bushel for a time, but that little light just never stops shining.
First stop, Guatemala. Guatemala has always been a bit of an interest point for me. Central America and its southern big brother are the quintessential underdogs to us North Americans. Those guys who stole our name seem be left off most of our maps. We don’t travel there, we don’t know anything about their governments, we never hear about their politics, and we tend to generally forget they exist. But not me my friends, no sir, I took middle school Spanish. And it was there that I learned about the pre-colonial civilizations! Woo pre-colonial civilizations! Another underdog story…when most people think of ancient culture the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians generally come to mind. And we sometimes remember the ancient Asian dynasties if we’re especially cultured. So those are our options right, Western culture, Eastern culture, and maybe a few native people here and there? Well there’s also Southern culture, and I don’t mean Jeff Foxworthy and a banjo. Deeper. The collective societies of the three major Central and South American pre-colonial civilizations – Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas – are just as vast and important as anyone else. They’re as much a part of modern life as many other ancient cultures, even if they don’t have countries named after them. What’s great about these guys, apart from the fact that they developed in complete isolation from the rest of the world, is that we still know so little about them and their architecture is largely untainted with the commercialization of modern society. My particular interest has always been the Mayans. The Aztec cities were mostly destroyed and built over, the mountainous Incan ruins have been weathered by time, but the Mayans built in what’s now thick rainforest. Their ruins are still there, off the beaten path, protected, some completely unexcavated, and just waiting to be visited. There’s something primordial about it. I’d always wanted to go to Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico until I recently discovered that their pyramids are off limits to climbers. (Something about too many people falling off and dying.) Guatemala seems to have no such petty concerns. Deep in their jungle region of Peten, a huge area taking up a third of the country with very few roads and ever fewer that are paved, lies Tikal, the grand poobah of Mayan cities.
But I can’t just go visit a temple. The point is to give back. The equally important reason for visiting Guatemala is to volunteer at ARCAS – Asociacion de Rescate y Conservacion de Vida Silvestre (www.arcasguatemala.com, there are tons of accents in there, but who knows how to make those marks on our English computers). It’s an NGO set up by the government to care for and rehabilitate native animals, many captured in luggage from smugglers trying to take them out of the country to be sold in the black market exotic pet trade. Be careful where you get your parrots. The animals are of course in dire straits and need a lot of help. We help them. It’s an awesome opportunity. They accept volunteers year round and couldn’t survive without them. It’s an amazing setup. I went into detail when I talked about Germany about the way different volunteer organizations work, so I won’t reiterate that, but this is almost a new system entirely. Here in the US, we have lots of free time, don’t have to worry too much about making ends meet, and volunteerism is seen as a worthy pastime in small increments. The downside of that is that very few Americans have the opportunity in their own country to do full-time volunteer work unless they’re retired. You can join a large organization like AmeriCorps or the awesome SCA or religious organizations, which require substantial time commitments, or you can wait till you’re retired. There are very few places in America where you can exchange your service for housing and food. You either pay out of pocket, there’s not money exchanged, or you get paid (and that’s called a job). This program lets people pay a very small fee (that goes 100% to covering your costs and supporting the work of ARCAS) and get to eat good food, sleep for free, and work with rainforest animals without having a veterinary degree! It’s not backpacking, it’s not tourism, it’s not pricey voluntourism, it’s not a job…it’s…awesome.
I’ll be there for two months before going to Costa Rica to do the same thing at the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica (www.slothrescue.org). There’s no grand story here, I just think sloths are cool. They have a lot to teach us. I dare you to not smile when you look at one. In fact they’re one of two animals (along with the dolphin) that wears a constant smile. What crappy luck they had, being named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins and all. Naturalists of old never gave them a second though, throwing them away as evolutionary leftovers, creatures with no redeeming qualities. It’s been said that “one more defect would have made their existence impossible.” So no one really knew anything about them because no one really cared. Until a little girl brought an injured sloth to a couple in Costa Rica because she didn’t know how to save it. Being good-hearted folk (as the story goes) they took it in and tried to find out themselves how to care for a sloth. Turns out nobody knew. Nothing had ever been written about them other than to criticize. So they did it themselves, learning the best way you can, as they went along. A few years later, they now run the world’s only research center dedicated to these incredible animals and have written the book on their care (literally). In fact their slothfulness is exactly what they need to survive and thrive, and our roads and power lines are about their only natural predator. There’s something to be said about moving slowly, peacefully, contentedly.
Speaking of…I’ll wrap up in the Galapagos Islands. Good old Charlie Darwin made these islands famous. The concentration of endemic species (found nowhere else on Earth), small size, and isolation of the islands means lots of very friendly animals you can’t see anywhere else. Including the giant tortoise, the longest-lived animal on Earth. We think they can live to be 200+ years, though none of us have been around that long so we don’t really know for sure. I saw one in Australia years ago that was estimated to be 175 years old (read about it in my old journals) and it positively blew my mind. I was looking at a living creature that was alive before the Civil War and probably had no knowledge that humans existed for 80% of its life. The Galapagos are technically a part of Ecuador and getting there is notoriously expensive. They were the first site to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, meaning they were the most import place that the people who decided to pick the most important places on Earth decided was the most important place on Earth. It could de deduced that this is the most important place on Earth. Ecuador has done a lot to save the islands from over-tourism, but the effects are still there. The organization that I’ll be there with, Galapagos ICE (www.galapagosice.org), believes that’s largely because the people who live on the islands live in poverty and have no vested interest in the preservation of their home. (People live there? I know I had no idea either.) Most people who visit the islands do so as part of a scientific expedition or on a very expensive cruise. Problem is that the Galapaguenos don’t own any of this. Everything is run by foreigners or Ecuadorians from the mainland. When you’re living in poverty, taking care of the forest in your backyard plays second fiddle to feeding your kids. By helping give the islanders the basics of life, including health and education, and by educating them about the importance of conservation (especially where they live) they can not only raise themselves out of poverty but take ownership of the protection of their homeland. I’ll be living with a host family there and working on a green school project. Essentially I’ll help make a school building and its students more compatible with an eco-friendly ethic. And maybe I’ll make friends with a tortoise.
I’ve always liked service, but I think this can be something more, we’ll call it Service. That capital letter makes all the difference. I’m so blessed to be able to Serve. Little by little I know I will make small differences, and The Butterfly Effect tells us that any positive change, no matter how small ripples throughout eternity. It shall be a soul-enriching experience. I may return penniless, but I will have produced immeasurable growth in my soul. And maybe the souls of others. As always the appropriate question is not “why?” but “why not?”
I’m so glad to have you a part of it. Won’t you be my neighbor on this journey? I quite literally can’t do it without you. Yes man. YES
Jeremy
P.S. – I’m not entirely sure what my Internet access will be like during this trip. It’s my hope that I can have enough access to a) figure out where I’m going next and how to get there, b) write a bit every now and then, and c) stay in touch with awesome people but not so much that a) it eats money from more important expenditures, b) it eats time from experiencing life first-hand, or c) it eats my soul. We’ll see.
2.22.2010
Volume 5 - Vagabond
Ah writer’s block. What do you do when you have a month of inexplicable experiences to convey? Experiences that have continued to collect in a little notebook waiting to be expanded on, only to have the possibility of expounding on them thwarted by mailing lists and Viagra spam. It’s been an interesting month with lots and lots of time spent exploring and getting to know people from all over the world, and a tiny bit of time to check email and live the virtual life required of any Facebook member. I’ve consciously tried to do as much as possible to live completely in the moment (not the selfish living in the moment mind you, but the much more meaningful experience of being present in the present). So of course this has meant as little time as possible with a computer in front of my face. And it has indeed been wonderful. What was originally a trip for animals and experiences and my own growth and excitement has turned very much into a trip for others. So many people in and out of my life, so many people to try to impact and love. Traveling like this is new to me and it’s just astounding to try to get to know so many people so quickly. It’s a new summer camp every week. Indeed I’ve spent so much time just in conversation with other people that I’ve had little time to myself. It’s bizarre. For three years I lived alone and the loneliness of it was palpable. Now I haven’t had a private moment in a month. Balance I suppose is, as always, the key. I hereby decree there shall be more reading in March…unless I meet a pretty girl.
Guatemala is a third world country. You may not know it by the looks of the backpackers hanging around ARCAS and the little town of Flores (Spanish for flowers) that sits in the middle of Lago Peten Itza 10 minutes from our little animal haven. As usual, I must digress. Backpackers are a new breed for me. I hoped to find a number of people very much like me out on the road. And I have found a few, but in general they could not be more different from the conservative church pals I’d been spending much of my time with back in O-H-I-O. I fall somewhere in the middle. Another Christian (or even anyone who knows a Christian) I haven’t yet met. Where I thought I might find kindred souls with a lust for adventure and a burning passion to change the world, I’ve found more listless, wandering thrill-seekers than anything else. It has not been a disappointment, just different, and the passion I have seen in some people I’ve met has been quite impressive. Backpackers are different than volunteers I’ve found. They seem more interested in hitting every point on a map and taking something from it than sticking around and giving anything back. It seems a bit nihilistic in the end, traveling from place to place but with little purpose. Friendliness levels have been all over the map from cheery 18 year olds to jaded 22 year old typical college kids to awesome older couples who live on the road. But in general a lifestyle of always moving I think creates a resistance to developing relationships. If you’re moving every few days, what’s the point of getting to know someone? It’s a dangerous attitude and even more puzzling to the people around them. Getting know people when everyone is coming and going and leaving at different times has proven to be quite difficult. Still others have provided me with some of the more stimulating conversations of my life. I’ve found the coolest people are Canadian or British, though they are also capable of being uncool. It’s interesting how cliques have kind of developed between people who like deep conversations and people who don’t. I’ve had amazingly complex discussions about love, religion, morality, relationships, war, and everything else with friends with an insatiable appetite for conversation. It’s been wonderful!
So as I said, Guatemala is a third world country with all these wealthy mostly European world travelers traipsing around talking about the next place they‘ll visit. There is a very definite backpackers’ trail of cities in Central America where it seems everyone goes. It’s incredible to think about the power Lonely Planet has. LP is the self-proclaimed “backpackers’ Bible,” a guidebook series designed to give backpackers the logistical information they need to get around. Of course, I eschewed conventional wisdom and took my info from the much less snarky underdog Rough Guides (fewer bars, more cultural background, writers who seem to actually enjoy the country they’re writing about). Nonetheless, there is this entire subculture existing within these countries. Real people with real cultural backgrounds, life stories, and personalities surrounded by young adventure seeking tourists populating towns deemed worthy by a corporate guidebook writer. Are there hordes of backpackers at a hostel somewhere in Cleveland asking fellow travelers about the logistics of climbing the mountains around Pittsburgh next week?
So like I said…Guatemala is a third world country. The public transportation system is made up of “chicken buses,” old American school buses shipped down here, painted loud crazy colors and packed with 10 times as many people as they should carry. You can go about 8 hours on them for a buck, but comfort and safety are virtually nonexistent. I’m yet to ride one, but that day may come. On initial glimpse, the Burger Kings and Pizza Huts may appear western, but the barbed wire fencing around the hostels, the overpowering smell of smog, the international airport the size of a closet, and the men convulsing in the street while other step over him tell a different story. Seeing houses built of sheet metal and other construction scraps (but still with a TV) is quite an experience. We’ve all seen pictures but there is absolutely nothing like seeing it in real life. To stand in front or a legitimate shack in the middle of a legitimate shantytown is an experience everyone must have. America knows nothing about poverty.
I flew down here in mid-January on Spirit Airlines, a bare-bones discount airline along the lines of those popular in Europe for hopping around short distances. They fly almost exclusively to Central America and the Caribbean and were about half the price of the next competitor. I read about them on the always accurate Wikipedia to find out why they’re so cheap but it turned out to be because they’re like buying a Hyundai. You get nothing - no water, no baggage, no food, no changes without paying for it. TV and radio are nonexistent and the only normalities I saw were the cute little airline magazine and potties. It said that they don’t even employ janitors at their headquarters and have employees do it to keep costs down. It’s all about cost. So of course they have about 10 times more complaints than any other American airline, but I loved it. What a great idea. Charge people for the product they’re buying - a flight - and if they want other goodies make them pay for it. Only issue…they broke the buckle on my backpack, rendering the backpack largely useless. Without that lumbar support it’s like carrying 50 pounds on your shoulders. May be part of why my back is killing me now (and of course the huge log I tried to lift…didn’t hurt till the next morning when I was brushing my teeth, now it’s been a week of pain…ironic that I was always the one who didn’t need to be manly and try to lift too much and I’m the only one to get hurt).
My first night was in Guatemala City, apparently one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It was pretty crazy. There were a few sections that reminded me a bit of the US, but overall, even the section my hostel owners said was the neighborhood of the rich and famous seemed paltry by our standards. The hostel was cool, a Guatemalan woman and her Dutch husband run the place and gave me an impromptu tour of the city looking for a working ATM. We even got some mammoth avocados from the tree next door. The owners were cutting them down and tossed some down to us. Four times as big as the ones I normally eat. Despite all the crime, the city was surrounded by huge volcanoes and was therefore really beautiful from the right angle. The next morning I was pleased to see the comic strip Zits in the Guatemalan newspaper and wondered if the fact that the main character is named Jeremy would mean that all kinds of people would know how to pronounce my name and make cartoony jokes about it. Nope. Hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still waiting! The 8 hour bus ride to the remote Peten region of the country was pretty interesting. We passed all kinds of city and country on the way and I even saw Titanic for the first time…in Spanish. Upon arrival in Flores, I set off looking for Los Amigos hostel, the place the Guatemala City hostel owners had recommended. I found it, but all they had left were hammocks. The owner tried to convince me that it’s a right of passage for Central American backpackers to sleep in a hammock, but I decided I liked a flat back when I sleep. The next morning I waited on the wrong side of the island for the ARCAS boat to pick me up and bring me to my home for the last and next month. And so it had begun.
ARCAS is the only major animal rehabilitation center in Guatemala and one of only a few in Central America. They’ve been around for about 20 years and currently house about 500 animals. The current grounds were built in 1998 with a grant from the Japanese government and some more money from Disney (yes that Disney). The goal is to rehabilitate injured, sick, or orphaned animals that come in, largely taken away from smugglers, rehabilitate them, and release them back into the wild. They have a 75% success rate at doing so, but they started off with a lot of trial and error. The first parrot they released fell down once they tried to fly because they were too fat, so they trimmed them down and tried again. This time they landed on branches and fell off. They didn’t know how to stand on wobbly branches. And so it went until they mastered the art. It really is an incredibly complex and interesting process. Of course they’re under-funded and 70% of their operating budget comes from us volunteers. It feels good to know my money is not going to any corporation or middle man but directly to people who really need it! I’ve seen some awesome animal sights including the first ever howler monkey release (black Amish-looking monkeys who roar like dinosaurs more than they howl…the sounds is pretty otherworldy and completely inexplicable coming from that animal). Animal noises can be pretty hilarious. A mean and wild raccoon-like animal called a coatamundi squeaks like a tiny mouse, and wild pigs called peccaries garble like chickens. There’s also Rico, the talking parrot who fans his tail feathers, bats his eyes, enlarges his pupils, cocks his head, and lets out a cat call “hola” to all the senoritas. (As an aside this has pretty well turned me off from buying exotic birds ever. There are legitimate breeders out there but they’re hard to come by and verify. Many birds passed off as legal are actually taken from the rainforest and 7 of 8 die en route. It’s literally killing the scarlet macaw. There are only 300 left in the wild period.) We also have sheep. They’re a funny breed of animal. You hear all the time about sheep being followers, easily manipulated, etc. but it’s incredible to see. The sheep got out of their pen one day and were hanging out a football field away or so. I couldn’t understand why thy the workers seemed so accepting of this fact until I saw them fix it. It was just a matter of walking to the other side of them, shouting, and waving his hands and the sheep ran single file right back into their pen. Amazing.
Kinkajous are one of my favorite animals. They are a really cute little monkey/raccoony thing that only comes out at night. They found one really sluggish on the side of the path in the middle of the day and it was brought back for examination. I came into the operating room in time to see a shaved neck with a huge bump about two inches across with a perfectly round hole in the middle. It looked like a neck volcano. The vet sliced it open and beneath the blood it became clear there was some kind of large unnatural something underneath there. He reaches in with tweezers and slowly pulls out a massive black blob about the size of a quarter and puts it down on the table. It was moving. Squirming. Wriggling. It was alive and was not a little baby kinkajou. Turns out there is a fly that lays its eggs on mosquitoes, which in turn deposit the eggs inside whoever they bite. Then inside the host grows this massive fly, living off the host. What he pulled out was a grub (maggot, larval insect) that was living in the kinkajou’s neck. Unbelievably gross. It was nursed back to health though and released about a week later. We also have a cage with crested guans, great curassows, plain chachalacas, and other bizarre birds, but the king of all these larger birds turns out to be the brack-bellied whistling duck. I’ve never heard them whistle but they don’t need to with their spunk. The big birds would pick on the little birds, then the ducks would chase after the birds twice their size. One of the big guys eventually got fed up and killed a duck though so the waddling reign of terror may be under threat. We have a jaguar that can never be released because there is no suitable habitat left in Guatemala without a jaguar already living there (they don’t get along with each other) and politics prevent them from going across borders. It eats enormous cow heads, one of which I got to help carry (it’s a two person job). Carrying a massive bloody cow head has thus far been my least favorite experience aside from the yet-unresolved back injury.
We also have spider monkeys. Its an apt name for these amazingly agile creatures who swing and climb and bound around with such grace and with such incredible use of their tails that they really do look like spiders. Their eating habits are peculiar. We feed them leaves every afternoon and they usually pick up a leaf and eat about half of it before throwing it down and moving to a new leaf. In choosing their new leaf they’ll often pass over a number of seemingly perfect leaves en route. I suppose if I have 10 French fries in front of me, I may not always choose to eat the one closest to me, but its really funny to watch this peculiarity in monkeys. Out in the wild I saw a blue-crowned motmot, a big kingfisher with a tail that looks and moves just like a grandfather clock pendulum. I’ve got to see a necropsy of a parrot (it died of stress), force feed a sick crocodile, de-lice a turtle, watch a lump get removed from a spider monkey, and got a little gash in my eye from a parrot thinking my face was a perch. I helped pull over a tree by tying a rope to it, cutting part of them bottom and doing a little tug-of-war with the trunk, accidentally dropped wire cutters from 20 feet up about 2 inches from someone’s head, went skinny dipping not once or twice but thrice, and sweat more than ever before, and it’s all been pretty dang interesting. There are some peculiarities. We have a pack of stray dogs that ARCAS doesn’t feed, which seemed strange for an animal rescue center at first, but it seems they all have owners who just take advantage of our good nature. It’s also tough to try to make the animals not like me. Because the end goal is to release most of these animals back into the wild, and wild animals should not like people (otherwise mean people will take advantage of them) we have to spend very little time with the animals and sometimes be kind of mean to them. No cuddling here. Even cleaning the sheep poo every few days is a strange experience since we eat them every Friday. It feels weird to be that close to the animals that will be on my plate the next day. But the chicken is often undercooked, and that sheep is the only red meat we ever eat.
Of course the most interesting aspect of any experience is the people. Yet again I am reminded of how abnormal I truly am. This is something I’m quite proud of. I am the only one with any kind of wall poster (a Thoreau quote and a small Etown pennant) to remind me of home (it seems that many backpackers don’t have a huge desire to remember home at all), the only one with a calendar (3 may be overboard, but they’re great!), I keep my room neat, I use lots of bug spray, and I love my mosquito net (despite what anyone says I probably have a quarter as many bites as most people). Of course sunscreen might as well not exist for most people but I’m used to that one. “Puff the Magic Dragon” has reared his hazy face here as well. I still don’t understand the appeal of altered states of consciousness, and Puff’s more popular and slightly cuter older sister “Gallo the Intoxicating Brew Named After a Rooster” is in full force as well. I may find my way back to the straight-edge life before too long if I have to witness too many more frat boy antics. Just when you think college is over you have people buying drinks for ladies and saying “I’m not asking, I’m telling.” What exactly about that approach is attractive, chicas? Here’s my unscientific analysis: guy with little personality drinks and starts acting like the drunk guys he’s seen on TV. It’s not his own personality but the mimicking of a standard drunk college guy personality the media tells him is funny. Ladies are surprised that the guy with little personality suddenly has a personality and is acting a little loony. It’s funny to see people doing stupid stuff and they’re buzzed too so they laugh. The affection of the ladies reinforces in the guy’s mind that this kind of behavior attracts ladies and so the vicious cycle continues. Ah self-sustaining systems. I lashed out petty intensely once when a joke about rape slipped from a someone`s mouth. The jokester was clearly sorry he brought it up, and I felt a bit bad about how harsh I was, but there’s a point where the nonconfrontational side needs to let ethics break through. I could have been more Zen about it, but I’m glad I said something. It’s bizarre that the atmosphere could be so different from what I experienced in Germany this summer, where alcohol was respected and enjoyed in moderation, even thought the people are around the same age and from the same places. Just goes to show that stereotypes are often false, and binge drinking is not just an American problem. Lowering the drinking age will not fix the problem. If it could, there’d be no problem in Europe, but it appears that there is. It seems silly to me, this lifestyle of backpacking around third world countries just to drink and smoke in a new city each week. There has to be some meaning beyond that. And wouldn’t it be cheaper to do that at home?
There have been lots of cool experiences as well. Some of the first people I met here were other volunteers from the US, specifically Eckerd College. This was a fun experience after standing in alphabetical order next to Eckerd reps for 3 years at college fairs. And a guy from Germany whose last name is Eber and is probably related to me somehow told me Ebersole likely means wild boar skin. I always thought it meant very attractive lover of peace, but the difference is pretty slight. Ultimately I am loving my time here, hoping my back heals so I can carry my broken backpack to Costa Rica in a month, and missing NPR a lot more than I should. I miss friends and family as usual, but I guess I’m used to that, and I get them in small doses during my 4 hours of email a week. But NPR just doesn’t exist here. Who would have thought I would miss Lake Wobegon so much? So tonight after my dinner of beans and tortillas with peanut butter, I’ll dream of the satisfying deliciousness of a warm fluffy Powdermilk Biscuit and some do-bop-a-rebop rhubarb pie. Here’s to you Garrison Keiller. Keep the children above average for me till I get back.
Jeremy
4.7.2010
Volume 6 - Vagabond
Whew! One aspect of backpacking around Central America (or anywhere I imagine) that I neglcted to remember is how much planning is involved. Unless you do the whole don´t planning thing, which of course was part of the idea for the ¨Spontaneous¨ part of my Year of Living Spontaneously, Authentically, and Peacefully. BUt as it turns out I just really like planning. It´s fun. Part of my obsessive need for things to be organized and orderly (thanks mom) coupled with my obsessive need to spend money wisely (thanks dad). As a result, my limited time online (which honestly has been about 10 times more than I would spend if I had the choice) has been spent figuring out how to get from point A to point B and where to stay in point B when I arrive and not in writing journal updates. But here I am writing away again, all planned up through June (if those Montañita hostels would just return my emails).
It´s been eons since I wrote last (I´m sensing a theme) and a lot has happened. Get ready for a ride. Immediately after writing my last entry I entered the first period of my months away when I had time to myself to think. I´m glad to be around people all the time as I began to greatly dislike living alone, but the summer camp mentality of volunteer work makes any private time hard to come by. This should be a bit more introspective than my last note. The lack of personal time also means the lack of time to think and develop ideas, but as they do the ideas have sprung from the ground like soon-to-be-bottled-and-resold water. The first thing I realized as I was cleaning the poo off the pre-rehab parrot cage by myself (other than not getting my shoes eaten or my pen stolen out of my pocket by 90 yearning-to-be-free tropical birds) was that for the first time in a while I was feeling quite proud to be an American. Indeed, I would even say I felt patriotic. This was not the case in Germany. Perhaps I really liked the way they do things in Germany whereas the poverty and 3rd world status of Guatemala and Costa Rica (along with the ability to buy sub-$7 peanut butter) makes the US look quite good by comparison. Nationality is the number one topic of conversation when traveling this way, so it´s always at the forefront of my mind. This place is different, I think. I am THE representative of my country to these people. It´s not Christian or admissions counselor or any other defining feature that distinguishes us here, it´s nationality. It´s more than just NPR too. I saw a girl carrying a macaw cage and immediately got excited becasue from a distance it looked like a pizza delivery box. I don´t even like pizza that much and can´t recall a time when I actually purposelly ordered delivered pizza (even in college), yet I was seeing fanciful visions of PIzza Hut in the middle of the rainforest. When I lived in the desert I missed pizza too for some unknown reason. There must be something in the cheese...or in the lard. I also missed the auto show. I´ve been to the auto show every year for three years. I don´t think Detroit had anything thrilling to show off this year, but just seeing a familiar car not made in China is something I miss. I miss rural America the most. County fairs, truck stops, diners, shoo-fly pies (what kind of central farmers market doesn´t sell sticky buns, really?), cakes made with unnecessary amounts of sugar, windy roads. It´s a good exercise. Everyone should go away for a while and see what they miss. It might surprise you.
And the headier stuff. Get ready for it...I defended George Bush. Pick yourself up off the floor, compose yourself, and rest assured that my soul has not been sold in exchange for pumpkin pie. It just seems that I become the opposite of whoever I´m around. It´s like a subconscious, unintentional inclination to stand out as different from the crowd. Whether I like it or not, I always without fail make myself different. Or perhaps I´m just more nuanced than the average person...which in itself makes me different. At church I find I´m the crazy liberal, but among the wandering party animals of Europe and the south seas, I´m positively puritanical. It is difficult to explain the passion with which international backpackers dislike and make fun of George Bush. Yeah he did horrible things that are too massive to comprehend, but he´s still a person, and people no matter what they´ve done still deserve love and respect. It may play into the international view of religion. I´ve written about this before but it continues to fascinate me. Whereas Christianity is generally on the out in the US and spirituality is on the up and up, in Europe even spirituality is seen as weak compared to the scientific humanism that wil supposedly some day erase our silly need for metaphysical meaning. In the US, I find myself defending Christianity, but here it´s the very idea of religion that seems to be the first hurdle. It has made for some awesome conversations, and I even met my first European Christian, a cool German guy. Germany rocks.
The rest of my time at ARCAS was great. It was humbling to deduce through some number crunching that the local workers there made about $6 a day. Not much man, but they were so good and generally happy. The animals continued to amuse, like when a strong wind picked up and the normally fussy parrots were dead silent, frozen, some shaking, not eating, and leaning into the wind. Animals are such creatures of habit that it is extremely offputting to see them act strangely. The parrots were awesome. One landed in a girl´s hair and got all tangled up. One climbed to my shoulder and just stood there. Too many pirate movies. When I went to the Mayan ruins of Tikal and looked down on dozens of free-flying parrots soaring hundreds of feet through the air, it was incredibly moving. Seeing parrots at ARCAS move from little pet-sized cages up the ranks to cages where they can fly about 50 feet, all in the hopes that they can someday be relased, you lose sight of the majesty of what we were working for. It was amazing. Part of the reason ARCAS exists is to rehabilitate animals that were almost trafficked out of the country. The maximum penalty Guatemalan law has for animal traffickers is 10 years in prison and $2500. Seems like a long time to spend in jail, but this is what poverty does to people. I´m more and more convinced that the way to end crime is to end poverty. And then there was the guinea pig that ate his foot down to the bone, presumably because of gangreen. We tried to amputate but half way through the anesthesia wore off! Three more attempts were unsuccessful, so we ended up wrapping his foot back up (they said it would grow back together since nothing important was cut) and hoping the bandage would be enough. We also had a botfly-ridden kinkajou who had me rolling on the floor when he was cleaning himself like a cat and literally lifted the skin on his shoulders off the bone when his neck wouldn´t reach it so he could lick that all-important spot.
Random discovery: I found out from a French girl that our favorite office supply company/razor maker, Bic, now makes cell phones too. Soon they will come complete with razor, pen, and old school notepad.
As I was preparing to leave ARCAS after two months, it hit me as others talked about returning to normal that I really have no normal to return to. For the first time, this, this vagabonding is my normal. Strange, but comforting too. I haven´t been bored yet. Before I left, I had to do a chairwalk. Chairwalking was introduced to me by an amazingly cool British guy as a way to both explore and contemplate our surroundings by hiking with a chair in tow, setting it down periodically, and taking in the scenery. Simple but effective. So ended ARCAS. It was good.
Tikal was the reason I came here in the first place, so I was natually very excited to finally be there after my months of being so close. Ever since learning about it in middle school Spanish class, it has beena dream to visit these ruins. They seemed like the least touristy and most in-tact ancient ruins in the world, and they largely didn´t disappoint. A lack of deep tourist infrastructure meant that when I asked the hotel clerk what happened if it poured rain on my uncovered tent while I was sleeping (after I saw lighting slash across the evening sky during dinner with the Harvard student I met who was personal friends with the Car Talk guys), the answer I got was, ¨I don´t know.¨ Luckily, this was some supernatural tabernacle protected by God from water, so the hours of pounding rain inches from my face never saw the inside of that hold tent. Tikal collapsed as the capital of the Mayan empire because of lack or resources. Interestingly, there were many resources around that could easily have given them what they needed. But the Mayans were a warrior culture and they couldn´t beat the enemies who held the resources. It seems cooperation wasn´t an option. What a lovely example of the ineffectiveness of violence and the inevitable fate of any culture basing itself on competition rather than cooperation. And speaking of the Mayans, guess what, we´ll all still be here in 2013. They never said the world would end in 2012. Mayan cosmology broke history into really long eras. They said at the end of each of these eras there was major change in the way things work, and the era they and we live in, according to them, is going to end in 2012. But we´re not going to die. Of course the end of the world has been predicted since the beginning of the world. So I´m banking on a good 2013.
I saw almost every animal we were rehabilitang at ARCAS running through the wild at Tikal. A coatimundi caught a bird in front of my eyes (to the horror of a local schoolgirl). As is often the case, the guided tour was lackluster (though some on the tour said it was the best they´d ever taken). I realize more and more that whatever I may portray myself as I am at heart an academic. I want my knowledge deep, insightful, meaningful, and without stops for beer. Don´t dumb it down. Away from the throbbing masses, however, Tikal was amazing and positively mystical. I found my way to some of the out-of-the-way temples where few tourists make it and literally had temples and their surrounding woods to myself. Words are insufficent. Oddly enough, the effect of being in front of a temple with an eerie mist enveloping the surroundings was something like, ¨wow this is just like The Legend of Zelda!¨ And so in the middle of an ancient sacred site where people were likley ceremonially offered to bloodthirsty gods, I was reminded of my old love for video games. This could probably be the basis for some kind of cultural or psychological enquiry filling the pages of an academic journal, but for me, it was a strangely peaceful and happy moment. It reminded me of a time when reality didn´t matter a whole lot to me, when I was younger and let myself be totally immersed in a fantasy world. The video games and fantasy literature I once read haven´t been a part of life for almost a decade, and despite seeing lots of great movies, somehow I have not recaptured the complete immersion that video games provide. In many ways, that scientifically-documented immersive experience that video games provide can be detrimental, keeping us away from interactions with real people and the real world. At the same time, the ability to let the imagination run free and unencumbered by that samne real world can provide creative spark and imagination that brings immesurable joy to our lives. I haven´t run out and bought a Wii, but I got a good smile and some food for thought from that time alone on the templetop.
Antigua was new to me. It´s Guatemala´s biggest tourist destination and quite unlike the rest of the country in the sense that it is clean, decently wealthy, and based entirely on tourism. It´s popularity centers on the colonial church ruins that dot the small town. All over town are literal ruins of old churches that can be toured for around $1 each. (One of the most dilapidated sits behind a basketball court, one of many that I´ve seen scattered around the towns here, none of which seem to ever be used for basketball. It´s all futbol here, even on TV, one sport and one sport only.) This of course provided endless hours of entertainment for me, the guy who loves history, religion, history of religion, and architecture. There were some troubling aspects of this seeming paradise however. The colonial churches are much different from their European counterparts. I haven´t seen Spain yet (the colonizers), but the gothic and Romanesque styles used in Germany and France were really interesting to me. The colonial churches in Guatemala seemed to focus on one thing - the suffering of Jesus. They are just really into suffering here. And Mary seems to suffer even more. If I didn´t know any better I might thnk Mary is the God. In fact in most churches, the pulpit area (don´t remember the actual term) features a small crucifix in front of a much larger and higher crying Mary. Jesus is always on the cross and both him and Mary always have bleeding hearts and tears. Not sure why this is. Even the massive Holy Week celebration I happened upon was a massive, day-long, city-wide parade with mournful music. Enormous floats picturing, you guessed it, suffering Jesus and Mary, were carried through the streets by up to a hundred men who marched over beautiful floral carpets that had been created by local community groups and laid on the street, only to be destroyed. Perhaps it all relates to us experiencing the suffering of our saviour, but it was still a bit different for me. This is my religion, and while I didn´t necessarily disagree with it, I barely recognized it.
I was really excited to find an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast at a cool little bar in town. But the bar is run by Americans. They also print an indie magazine catering to the hip young ex-pat crowd that lives or at least bums around here. It was the typical indie zine fare but focusing on Antigua from an outsider´s perspective. And reading it made me feel really weird. I have thought at times that my personality would be better suited to another country, but being here in a little Americatown within Spanish-speaking Guatemala was bizarre. I couldn´t help but feel it reeked of apathetic disinterest and cultural insensitivity. If I lived in another country I would be there very much so that I could participate in that culture. Reinventing America in another country seems to defeat the purpose of emigrating in the first place. Of course there are immigrant communities all over the US (Chinatowns, Little Italys, etc), and these places tend to replicate their home culture to a degree, it seems to establish some comfort in a strange land. It gave me a sense of what it would be like to be an ex-pat, and it was unnerving. Somehow, however I feel about it, the US of A is as deep a part of me as my family or religion. It´s inescapable, and I´m surprisingly okay with it.
Along with the touristic bent of Antigua comes the requisite people asking for money. Never have I experienced so much begging. All over Central America, however, the begging is quite different form what I´m used to. They like to do something for you in return for your dinero. Not something you actually want or ask for, mind you. People will just come up and start talking to you, asking about where you´re from, what you think of the country, your family, etc. At first you think they may actually be friendly and have a genuine interest in you. This can continue for up to 10 minutes before the ask. Sometimes they´re selling soemthing, sometimes it´s just for money, but every single time there has been an ask. At this point it´s like, man, this guy just spent such a long time getting to know me, maybe I should help him, but you feel betrayed at the same time. And of course you never asked for any of it. In San Jose, Costa Rica, a teenage guy started talking to me in a park near my hostel and continued to follow me all the way there, chatting up a storm. When we finally got there, he wanted money for showing me where my hostel was...the hostel I had been to for the past day...the one I knew very well how to get to. It was seriously an issue of not being able to leave the hostel anywhere without anticipating these occurances. And I´m clearly not from there, so there is no way to avoid it. This is how city-dwellers become hardened.
I did some awesome things though. Everyone at ARCAS had been talking about Pacaya, an active volcano you can climb near Antigua. I thought it´d be out of my budget, but after finding out I could get the three hour round trip bus and four hour hike for $6 I decided to go for it. So I climbed an active volcano and at the requisite lava-toasted marshmellow. Even with the loud American hitting on the German girls in fornt of me the whole way (he brought a beer to have at the top but forgot water), it was pretty neat. You could never do this in the US, from the whoops he just got burned to the black snot for two days after to the tramping over sharp lava rock by flashlight, there was a healthy level of risk that has been found its way out of our comfortable society. Hiking with a large group was a beast though. I´m not super fast at much of anything, but waiting for the slowest person in a group of 30 means you get home at 10:30 after all the restaurants in town are closed instead of 8:00 when you were supposed to be back.
Antigua had some other oddities as well. The central market there had zero shoofly pies, no sticky buns, no desserts of any kind, just naked kids peeing, labyrinthine passages, and lots of cheap underwear for sale. Out back was the local bus station. Chicken buses dominate here. They are a treat to look at. Decommissioned American school buses given diesel engines and wild paint jobs that stop anywhere there´s a person and sit people on laps if necessary. I chose not to experience them first hand, but they were cool to look at. Nearby was the cemeraty, but no headstones. It was all mausaleums here. Very odd, but somehow fitting for this place. And there was the Bagel Barn. Much like Disneyland Paris this was a place run by and for Americans with everything in English but with employees who can´t speak a lick of it. Which leads me to food.
Food has occupied a disproportionate amount of my mental energy since I´ve been here for reasons I´m only beginning to understand. This isn´t a bad thing, in fact it brings me an amazing amount of joy. It didn´t used to be this way. Perhaps it was a childhood willing devoid of vegetables or any food group other than chicken fingers that made me into...I´ll admit it...a foodie (but not a food snob of course). I don´t spend much money here, but what money I do spend is almost always on food. I remember being in Australia and asking my good friends there why they went to the supermarket every night to get going-to-be-thrown-out rotisserie chicken and spent so much money and time on food. They explained to me that food is the most important thing in the world, that it is a source of joy, that there is nothing more worthy of time and money than food. This might make them sound gluttonous, but nothing could be farther from the truth, they just really appreciated food. I thought they were a little loco, but meeting another coworker who spent evening upon eveing blissfully whipping up amazing meals and years of trying *gasp* vegetables and other food groups has let me to much the same appreciation. I even picked my hostel in Antigua because I knew they had an all-you-can-eat (see a theme?) BBQ on Saturday nights. This came back to bite me when it was cancelled and the hostel was pretty unremarkable otherwise, but it showed me where I´ve put my priorities (and continud to convince me of the relative oldness of my sould compared to other vagabonds). I had some great food here though. From awesome tomato soup and pecan milk to good old McDonald´s (see? not a food snob), food has been the source of much happiness. Speaking of the golden arches, I was surprised that I wanted to eat there. I don´t pretend to be anti-fast food to any degree, but I do try to be anti-the same experiences I can get at home. I always try to support the local economy and not do anything while traveling that I could do back in the States. But MsDonald´s here are different. This one was in a beautiful old colonial buidling with a massive courtyard and fountain, Internet, and fancy deli. It was legitimately gorgeous. Weirdly, I am not really even morally opposed to McDonald´s being in other countries. My liberal sensibilities should be against this bland Americanization and conformity-building of the world, but I´m not. McDonald´s in other countries are like Chinese buffets in America. It´s a representation of another culture. And here they tend to not be bland boxes off the highways but beautiful downtown edifices. They don´t kill competition it doesn´t seem, they add an international flavor, and they are architecturally interesting. Still can´t believe it.
The best restaurant in Antigua is called Y Tu Piña Tambien. There´s one in most towns, the amazingly cool little restaurant that makes you want to stop everything you´re doing and just get a job there for the rest of your days. They even had free water as a green initiative (very welcoming in a country with unsafe tap water). These places really excite me. And so, let me with great joy bring you the top 5 restaurants I´ve ever been to, because by now I´m sure you´re dying to know: 5) Wish You Were Here, Lancaster PA (amazing Swedish oatmeal pancakes) 4) Coral Reef Restaurant, Epcot at Disney World in Orlando FL (lobster soup baby) 3) The Tomato Head, Knoxville TN (who knew drying tomatoes in the sun could be so delicious?) 2) Boma-Flavors of Africa, Animal Kingdom Lodge at Disney World in Orlando FL (so full I couldn´t move for an hour) 1) Joey Buona´s Pizzaria & Restaurant, Milwaukee WI (the nachos that changed my life). Go to these places. Please.
At this moment, and for the last few weeks, I have been on America´s newest vacation hotspot - Costa Rica. You know you´re in a country with a little more money when the country has a lottery. You can´t throw you´re money away if you don´t have money to eat, right? I loved being in San Jose for a few days. Everyone seems to hate this place because it´s not the ¨real¨ Costa Rica (lot´s a pretty nature). I liked it for the pure fact that I was in a real working city for the first time instead of a tourist attraction. I am now at a tourist attraction, the Sloth Santuary, that uses those tourism dollars for something good. Visitors pay a hefty fee to see sloths up close and personal, but this is literally the only place in the world where you can see sloths like this. I thought coming here that I had never actually seen a live sloth before, and I learned I was right. The Dallas Zoo (who got their sloths from here) is the only other place anywhere that has been able to keep these slowpokes alive in captivity for more than a few months. The place is run by people not trained in animal sciences at all, which gives it a different feel, but who happened upon these critters and discovered that there was almost nothing known about them, and what was known was often wrong. They have literally written the book on sloths through trial and error, and even now we know very little about them. I know one thing, they are really really cute. Not wombat cute, but pretty darn cute. We also have one non-sloth: a one-eyed kinkajou. I´ve never seen a stable kinkajou before as the ones we had at ARCAS were loaded with botflies. This guy does alright with one eye, though I´ve found that one-eyed animals tend to be pretty pugnatious. This fella lets you pet him though. Totally not a natural behavior; still really cool.
There´s a lot of tourism around here. And unfortuantely no locally-made peanut butter, which means I was suckered into buying some Peter Pan PB for $7 (only Americans buy it so they charge a hefty premium to have it imported). It could have at least been Jif. Live and learn. One of the local workers took some of us on a hike near her house where we saw the remains of an old cacao plantation, the root of chocolate. Elsewehre I got to taste the fruit and the actual nut, which is quite yummy. I also saw a rubber tree. Rubber and chocolate are the industrail hearts of the only places I´ve ever really called home, and it was an incredible eexperience to see the root of these goods where they start. It takes a lot to make Hershey´s and Goodyear from what we´ve got here, I´ll tell you that.
On my days off here I´ve done a lot of moving my body. No booty-shaking, just some natural trekking. The nearby Rasta-infused town of Cahuita is home to a national park where I managed to walk 11 miles and see a wild howler monkey (one of the animals we cared for at ARCAS...glad I packed those binoculars, knew they were good for more than just baseball). The enterance guard even went to Engligh school in Canton, OH, 20 minutes from me! Other than that is was lots of lizards and the ubiquitous biting ants that are everywhere here. At home we have little lone ants. Here we have massive mounds with thousands of ants that wear trails through the forest with their awesome might. Unfortuantely, I neglected to bring the toilet paper I packed from home for this very purpose and found myself making like a caveman and using a leaf to wipe the old bum. Not terribly effective. The next week I moved on to biking and increased the distance to 18 miles of ¨paved¨road that makes New Jersey roads seem pristine. Perhaps this is why I am always hungry and eat like a horse all the time, without ever gaining a pound...or a stone I´ve learned they say across the pond.
Speaking of our forefathers, I had the privilege of watching a baseball game on TV with a Scottish volunteer and explaining the game to him from the ground up. It reminded me that despite being known in my prvious job as the guy who was unreasonably tough on athletes, I really do love baseball. How cool it was to get to explain something so interesting to me, and so basic, to someone from another culture who knew nothing about it. I got a tutorial on cricket from another British volunteer back in Guatemala, which was really neat as well. What a great game baseball is, so different from every other sport. He couldn´t believe there was no time limit, that it could theoretically just go on and on forever. Good old baseball.
Last week, I visited the coolest site yet on my travels. (Okay, Tikal was pretty cool, and very unique, but this was up there.) It was...get ready...a permaculture farm! Woo! I originally didn´t want to go because it´s advertised as botanical garden, which I love but I´ve seen before, and I want to do unique and Central American things on this trip. But that must be marketing gobbledegook because this was one sweet dirty organic farm. Permaculture means cultivating the land in a sustainable and permanent way. Since learnign more about organic farming is still a big goal of mine, this was an awesome place. For three hours I walked around a big forest full of almost every tropical plant imaginable, many of which I have never heard of. Then at the end I got a half hour private tasking session! I saw a kumquat tree too! Kumquats are unbelievable. IThe first time I had one at the Lancaster Central Market back in PA, it was like the first time I had a fluffernutter, totally new taste experience. Kumquats are like grape-sized oranges that you eat, skin and all; part is sweet and the other sour, like yin and yang. I saw a cacoa tree as well. After seeing them many times at Chocolate World (Hershey´s Disneyfied tribute to the process of chocolate making) it was cool to see them in the wild. I got to eat an actual nut and taste the fruit that surrounds it! And of course there was the rubber tree, without which there would be no tire industry and thus no Akron, OH, and my life would have been dramatically different. It just looks like a big tree. How exactly anyone figured out to get rubber out of it (or any of these fruits or other plant uses for that matter) boggles my mind. How many people died figuring out what plants were safe to eat? I saw ginger root as well, quickly becoming one of my favorite foods. Growing up it was just ginger ale and ginger snaps, which are so diluted the ginger doesn´t come through well. Even the giner you eat with sushi it a bit overprocessed. But when I had ginger brew for the first time at the rootsy lemongrass store in Connecticut last year, I was awakened to the awesome power of unadulterated ginger. Good stuff! Noni was interesting too. It´s a bit of a health craze these days and ridiculously expensive, but here I tried some straight. The stuff smells rank and tastes about as bad, but they say it´s good for you. The juice is literally noni sweat. They put it in a jar in the heat and let it bleed baby. Banaana trees have become commonplace by now, but seeing a pineapple attached to its plant was new. Nutmeg was there (makes a yummy jam) as was cinnamon, which it turns out is literally just dried out tree. They cut the bark, let it bake in the sun, and chop it up. That´s it. Even smelled the plant they use as the base for port-o-potty fresheners. Darn plant smelled just like a port-o-pot. I even saw some red poison dart frogs in the wild. They´re tiny, not more than about half an inch, and they make a big and very un-froglike noise and didn´t sing Rainbow Connection once, but it was still cool. And so, despite my general lack of funds, I spent big bucks on some goodies. If I have a soft spot for consumerism its for things that are purely fresh, totally organic, and unavailable anywhere else. And man, is it good!
Very recently I met some of the coolest travelers yet. One was a Jewish retired community college computer science professor from Pacific Palisades, CA, who was traveling Costa Rica with his wife for two weeks. We just had the most amazing conversation, so much so that he left me with his contact info and said to get in touch next time I´m in LA. I´m not sure what it says about me that one of my favorite people is old enough to be my grandfather, but it was just really cool and refreshing to meet him. The others were a couple who were worked in the animated film industry! This to me is like a 13 year old running into one of the Jonas Brothers. I took most of my composure not to turn into a screaming kid. I have seen almost every animated movie that has hit our theatres in the past 5 years and am working my way back through history till I get to the seven dwarfs who started it all. These folks had just left a job a Blue Sky Studies (Ice Age, Horton Hears a Who, etc) for...Pixar! Pixar! I tell you what, that´s a dream. I just really like people.
So next I go to the mountains of Costa Rica and the beaches of Ecuador before heading to a month of volunteering on the Galapagos Islands. Oh and, this might be new news, Israel and New Zealand are next. More to come, maybe not till June, but it will come as it always does. Keep smiling. Adventure is out there!
Jeremy
This is my life. Read and enjoy...or don't...but then you won't enjoy. Bummer.
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