Travelogue 279 – May 25
Sun Smiles

It may happen one day that you arrive in Cairo unannounced, on an unplanned stopover. You might, for example, have been forced to extend your business in Addis Ababa. It might be that the combination of making last-minute changes to your travel plans on a weekend, inept customer service, and internet problems have overwhelmed any hope of comfortable travel, and you arrive at Cairo airport at 3am for an eight-hour layover. Don’t fret, because Sameh will be there for you.

You’ll recognize Sameh as the composed and awake, well-dressed and well-groomed (in hirsute and fat tie Arab style) young man waiting for you as you emerge from customs and passport control. Actually, he is the one who will recognize you: as a discerning Dutch businessman on the go. Yes, I’ve had the odd good fortune to arrive from Addis at the same time as a KLM flight from Amsterdam. In a surreal twist, during these days of swine flu, the men with white masks over their mouths and noses who meet us directly as we enter the terminal building, are stopping travelers from Europe and letting those from sub-Saharan Africa go. So I emerge ahead of the brisk Dutch businessman, looking just Dutch enough for Sameh to rush to my service.

Sameh escorts me up the long escalator to the mezzanine level of the terminal, into his little office with comfortable armchairs and brochures. Hotel and taxi? Why, of course. He glances through a notebook full of hotel brochures, and he selects the perfect glossy trifold for me. I’ll be spending the night in the Sun Smiles Hotel in Heliopolis, a short ride from the airport. It’s new; it’s quiet. It has a cool name.

The taxi driver doesn’t find it amusing. This round, grey-faced man engages in long guttural exchanges with the even smoother young travel agent assigned to walking me down to the parking lot. He needs to process the name of the hotel, the directions to the hotel, the voucher for the hotel, his compensation, and the current state of NASA, as far as I make out. While they negotiate in ever higher volume, I watch a grumpy Dutchman grouse and quibble with his handlers beside the next car; he’s obviously irritated at being frisked for farmyard viruses. His taxi takes off well before my driver has exhausted his line of inquiry; the Dutchman stares grievously out the back window as if in one last indictment of all customs people and chiseling travel agents. I don’t know what indignities he may have suffered from the men in the masks, but I find no fault in Sameh’s service. He was there when I needed him, and within the hour I’m snug at Sun Smiles Hotel.

I might have been snug in 30 minutes, but predictably my taxi driver gets hopelessly lost, flying down the wee-hours highway, only to creep in confusion among the side streets of the hotel’s neighborhood. I get a comprehensive 3am tour of some two dozen affluent blocks in Heliopolis. He pulls over to ask at a 24-hour newspaper stand. He engages in more discourses with my smooth handlers on his cell. And eventually, on a block virtually indistinguishable from any other, housed in a building indistinguishable from its neighbors, we discover the Sun Smiles Hotel, resplendent inside if not out, in the splashy (faux) marble and gold style of the Arab world. My bed is sprinkled with ficus leaves, and at its foot is my towel, twisted into the shape of a heart. I am delighted by these touches, as any sensitive traveler would be, but have to confess that sleep came as something even more deliciously luxurious. Four hours later, I have to submit to being rudely awakened for the next leg of travel.

Travelogue 278 – May 9
Good Vibrations

Here’s what I’ve learned about life in Addis Ababa in the merry month of May: First of all, as I’ve mentioned before, we’ve arrived at the end of the dry season, so hydro-electric Addis Ababa is perhaps the quietest capital city on Earth. It’s a great month to pick up a meditative spiritual practice. There will be plenty of time for enlightenment while you wait for the power to come back. And during those brief and unpredictable spells when the lights come on, you will need Buddha by your side while you try to catch up on weeks’ worth of work. You will see the neon lights of Nirvana well before you finish any of your projects.

While Minnesotans revel in the glories of springtime, Addis citizens are sweltering under the sharp sun of the final month of dry season. If you have asthma, don’t step away from your inhaler: nine months of particulate matter has lodged itself firmly in the atmosphere of the city. Native citizens labor under the burden of pollution-fueled colds and flus, while faranjis wheeze and limp along the roads of Piassa, looking for internet cafes with generators and available computer stations.

But today, there is one happy place in the nation that is a showcase of ruddy good health and good cheer. That is the Tserah Tsion School in Mojo. About a dozen members of Team Tesfa, men and women, teens and adults, have volunteered to hop on an early bus to Mojo in order to spend the day cleaning, maintaining, repairing, and painting the kindergarten out there. It’s part of my effort to set a tone to this team project, one of generosity, community service and moral leadership. If any one of these athletes resents giving to others, they should be in Hollywood, because at 7am they are all smiles. We take over one of the minibuses heading east, occupying every last seat. The hour and a half trip is all bubbly conversation and laughter. And once there, not a moment is wasted. They mob the astonished school staff, and immediately start piling tables and chairs and mixing paints. The only delay is waiting for a local boy to fetch us jerrycans of water.

Soon the school is a hive of activity. The athletes have swarmed into every room and have started sweeping dust and cobwebs off the walls. The water arrives and swaths of primer and paint are unfurling on all sides. Everyone is splattered from head to toe. In the playground, Lewis – a volunteer from London – is busy kicking around a couple soccer balls donated by Mark, another Londoner, with some of our kindergarten kids. The school has a vast, dusty space for play – the spaciousness was one reason we liked this facility. And there is no fence beyond a much-abused hedge, so the road beyond is like a spectators’ gallery. The team invasion is provoking a great buzz in the neighborhood. Kids are especially intrigued by the wild soccer matches. A few slip through the ‘fence’ and join the galloping play. The reckless cavorting is no less a temptation for me, and I’m drawn to dash into the games, thinking nothing of trying to keep up with professional long-distance runners. The mill of karma grinds quickly, and the dues are paid that evening: sunburn and lactic acid burn, as I watch Liverpool play the game the way it’s supposed to be played on the TV in the hotel restaurant.

By mid-afternoon, the team is wrapping up. We’ve painted inside and out, and we’ve patched up some cracks in the concrete floor. Asnakech, official barometer of mood, strikes up a whine for food. But Addisu won’t have it. He is surveying the walls earnestly, and he attempts to explain what is thinking. I sigh when he says ‘pictures’, and pull out the camera again. Photography has been my primary duty today. But, no, he protests, it’s si’il that’s missing: art on the walls. The athletes are immediately on it, sketching out houses and animals and flowers in primary colors. A few of the drawings show promise, only marred by the English spellings the runners add underneath.

It’s time to eat. Malaku, our local school director, takes us to a place that looks like an old and neglected VFW hall, with an empty stage and an empty dance floor. The staff, with stunned faces, round up a chain of tables that they set up beneath the stage. Malaku is maitre d’ and conductor, taking orders from among the day’s three dishes – kikil, tebs, and shiro – lamb, injera, and chickpea sauce – and orchestrating the convoy of food and beverage from the distant kitchen. The team is in good spirits, and they plow through plates and bowls of food with gusto, while Malaku keeps it coming. Yes, good deeds do have their rewards.

Travelogue 277 – April 28
Surprising

It must be close to a year since I first wrote about Abiyu, the high school boy from the village of Debre Tabol who spends his school breaks in Bahir Dar playing tourist guide and hotel broker. We took him on as a temporary employee back then, taking him out to the Gobame school with us. After we returned to Addis, he carried on with a few tasks for us in Bahir Dar.

We met up with him again on our latest trip to Bahir Dar. He’s getting ready for his final exam, which will qualify him for university study. He says he wants to be a doctor. For the moment he joins us again in our endeavors. Further, we convince him to follow us down to Addis since he has a break before his exams.

It’s a fun trip for him, if a little distracted and hectic. It’s his first time in the capital city, and some things come as a shock. At first, we have him staying in a room that Selam has rented for him. But he calls us in great distress because his landlord is an ageing lady who is fond of chewing ch’at. As if that isn’t already too much to contend with, he has decided that she is a witch. He’s afraid to sleep there.

So we set Abiyu up with a little bed at the Tsegereda School, and he eats with Yigramachew’s family. He and Yig have become close in Bahir Dar; Abiyu is great with kids. He works for us, getting a taste of what business in the big city is like. He handles himself well.

We are so confident in him, in fact, that we send him to do some of the research in a town where we would like to set up the next school. He returns with five pages of hand-written notes in both Amharic and English. I’m ready to weep at the sight this document, as much professionalism as I’ve seen in years! I accept neat pages of information with great ceremony.

A more typical work session occurs a few nights ago. We have sent Addisu and Ijigu out with Menna’s camera to document another potential school site in the city. (Yes, another school project: things are popping here, folks!) The two guys do a great job, and they return with about twenty photos. The trouble is, clear as some of the photos are, the boys cannot agree on what they depict. It’s a big house: so big that the pictures could originate in completely different sites.

I stop the debate about which room is which, and ask the boys to draw me a map of the house. Simple enough, I’m thinking: a big square for the compound and then rows of smaller squares for rooms, and so on. But what I get are intersecting blobs, and each room a heavy, drifting, single line. The boys start arguing again. My head is in my hands and Menna is laughing. Meanwhile our bill is mounting at the cafe as the boys eagerly fuel their dispute with tea.

We often meet in cafes because, to date, there is no office. The HQ cafe on this trip has become the ‘La Coquette’, one of a new generation of high-end cafes: clean and well-lit, with nicer cakes and higher prices. There seem to be quite a few of these suddenly. I’m not sure where the boutique crowd came from, but every cafe in Addis still manages to be crowded in the evenings. The advantage to the higher prices is a chance at a table. We hold on to this table at prime time in the evening; the bill climbs in tandem with the frustration. We leave with little less knowledge about the house in question, but easy consensus among the boys that it’s perfect.

As a reward for Abiyu’s efficient service, we take him out to dinner and to the new mall in Bole, where there is an American-style movie theater. I’ve mentioned this place before with much enthusiasm. For dinner we take him to one of the best pizza places in town. It’s the first time he’s tried pizza, and he wrestles with it mightily, holding it upside down in both hands, curling it, rolling it, and letting the cheese hang over his mouth. It’s also the first time he’s seen cheese. Abiyu professes to have enjoyed it, though it seems to me that he might have thought that pizza was a lot of work for food.

He is wide-eyed as we enter the multi-storied mall. We do the movie right, with popcorn and soda, and sitting up front to catch every bit of lurid action in this classic American guns-and-car-chase story. Afterward, in the lobby, he sums up his assessment of the place with a big smile and his beginner’s English, ‘This place,’ he says, ‘it’s surprising!’

Travelogue 276 – April 24
And the Ugly

One eye is almost swollen shut when I awake today. I think some little bug took advantage of me last night, biting me near the inside corner of my eyelid, and now I’m a monster. I splash cold water on it, and work the distressed flesh in the mirror. It’s funny how one clings to the accustomed contours of his face, and the slightest distortion completely throws him. A day’s bug-bite swelling makes me ugly. I don’t want to go out.

I’m in a foul mood. Breakfast is late. There is a renewed canopy of clouds overhead. I’ve dreamt about hopping onto the metro of some European city, heading toward some stimulating stop, a luxurious cafe, a downtown riverside, a bustling modern avenue. But worst of all, I’m ugly.

I stand in the concrete courtyard and I stretch. The morning is fresh and cool enough to be pleasant. The clouds are the type that are likely to burn off and scatter across a blue sky. I can veritably feel the sun on my shoulders in anticipation of a beautiful day.

From outside the gate come sounds of the day’s start. They are happy sounds, children running by and shouting, neighbors hailing one another. Who can listen to the bustle of a fresh morning without hearing the echoes of others, thousands or millions of others, depending on the power of his or her imagination? Who doesn’t wonder at the resilience of mornings and the life that awakens in them every day?

I confess that the noise from beyond that gate, and a dozen others in Ethiopia, has oppressed me in the past. Beyond is the Other, difficult homo sapiens, difficult town. Out there are kids who push each other into me for giggles, the duryes who call me names, the glaring old men, and the rag-tag, insistent beggars. The noise beyond contains every conflict and insult, every birr I’ve been cheated out of, and every embarrassing encounter.

But today I stand in the courtyard, brooding, and the sound of life creeps into my awareness, and I listen to it. The noise has been transubstantiated from everyday clamor into hope. It complements the hint of sun among the clouds, suggesting that even those disfigured as me have a place in the pageant of the a.m.

I’ve been watching moods lately, fascinated by the whimsy of them and trying to find a logical correspondence between triggers and the emotions they fire off. By trigger, I don’t mean the speeding car that splashes you with mud as it passes. I mean the unpredictable impressions. Why does the combination of a song and the color scheme of a cafe’s decor, tossed in with the timbre of a man’s voice as he answers his mobile, transport you to one morning in a hotel lobby in Monfalcone and perhaps excite a longing that is as absurd as it is intense, considering how remote and unlikely the recovery of that memory was in the first place? Are moods a lottery? Is there really a mathematics to chaos? Either way, we don’t turn away the jackpots. My mood is three bars of gold when I open the gate.

Travelogue 275 – April 23
Buna and the Philosopher

The visitors are gone. I’m sitting at the table in the modest salon of my home – white walls, linoleum tiles, boxes of Stuff lined against one wall, the small white fridge tucked in among them. I have the laptop open, the ancient Mac PowerBook donated by Pey and Giles. The screen radiates a bright and artificial shade of blue, almost matching the cushions on the backs and seats of the wooden chairs that Saba bought for me a few years ago.

Right next to the table, next to the door to the kitchen, in the sunlight admitted by the front door, sits Tsegenet. She is roasting coffee beans, and she is doing it the traditional way, sitting on a low stool in front of the small stove, the pot of beans, the jebena (the traditional coffee pot), and the tiny coffee cups, like Japanese tea cups, which are placed on a wooden tray equipped neatly with a small drawer. On the ground is a scattering of grass.

All I see is the part in her thick, black hair as she bends over the miniature gas stove. It’s a comfort to me, I find: Tsegenet’s competency and the smell of roasting coffee. I return to my glowing, blue work station with renewed confidence.

When the beans are roasted, she holds the pot high and swings it slowly in the air about the room to spread the aroma. Then she passes it to Gete, who will take the beans outside to grind them. This is done with a heavy rod of metal in a chunk of wood that has been hollowed out at the top. The compound resounds with the thump, thump of her labors. The vibrations of it travel through the concrete of the courtyard and through the hollow cinder blocks of the walls.

Gete is a regular part of the household now. She has settled into her routine here, showing up late, hanging around listlessly until someone reminds her of her duties, her youthful face slack with mysterious thoughts. She has a lot to think about for someone of her age. She’s already been married for some four years before she came to Addis. She’s sixteen, though she appears to be fourteen.

We make sure she keeps her studies up. Some evenings, once all work is done and we’ve had dinner, we sit her down in front of her notebook, which she bends over as though she has sight problems while she sounds out the letters of English words or Amharic characters. ‘P-A-T,’ she whispers. She stares for a minute, and then she pats herself on the head with a smile, remembering my demonstration.

Sometimes, we’ll pull out the old Connect Four game, which she became familiar with in Bahir Dar. She’s quite adept at it. She’s earned the nickname ‘the Philosopher’ at this game, she pursues her victory with such single-minded and inscrutable concentration. Sometimes the Philosopher will lean over until her nose nearly touches the middle of the vertical board, and she’ll chew on her game piece. She reaches up and drops the piece in with considerable deliberation.

Travelogue 274 – April 11
The Golden Mask

Early one morning, we go for a lake cruise to the headwaters of the Blue Nile. We walk up Lake T’ana’s shore to a small set of docks for tourist boats, far away from the convenient and high-priced docks by the Ghion Hotel. We rent a boat for 150 birr, and head out, the boat and the pilot-guide to ourselves. No one’s in a hurry – the morning is calm and sweet – so it takes us about a half-hour to get to the headwaters. We’re lucky to come upon a group of about five hippos, lounging in the water near the islands at the headwaters. They wiggle their ears and glance at us sleepily. We enter the mouth of the Nile. You can see right where the waters divide between lake and river; there’s the steady ripple of a current, looking like a watery zipper joining seams.

It’s hard for me to be in Bahir Dar without thinking about Egypt. I wonder if others are similarly reminded. Now I think of Cairo, and the glinting, sea-like blue of the Nile winding its wide way through downtown. They are good complements for each other, Bahir Dar and Cairo. Most travelers go to Cairo to connect with the ancient roots of our civilization, but they might find it hard to tap into the feeling of millennia lapsed and set aside like rolls of papyrus as they negotiate the sprawling metropolis of Cairo, let alone any feeling for the lives of the ancients. Drifting on Lake T’ana, particularly in a papyrus boat, as the orange mask of Helios rises in the east, one feels time.

Okay, one does glimpse fleeting time among the sands of Giza. To my credit, I’m wearing my cheesy tourist cap from Rome – upstart little town across the Mediterranean – as I ride the camel across the sand dunes. I was offered a cheap version of Arab headdress by one of the camel guys, and I proudly refused. I will enter the realm of history as Western, compromised and corrupted as the Caesars ... though perhaps with less panache. Little does all that matter, though, once one is out on the sands, under the oppressive gaze of Amen Ra. Even now, in the age of highways and encroaching suburbs, one approaches the Great Pyramids ant-sized among the blank dunes at the edges of the Sahara. There are other ants leaving their ephemeral trails, but the blaze of the sun and the sands’ radiation blot everything out but the enormity of the pyramids. One doesn’t know the pyramids from photos. One must approach them, like subjects toward their kings.

I’m riding with Said today, a former air force helicopter pilot, now retired and driving vans for a tourist company. He’s from Port Said. He has a friend, Said, who rents camels. We meet him in an indifferent neighborhood of Giza, where camels and boys mill around restlessly. It’s strange to travel by camel through suburban streets, rolling along with the animal’s distinctive gait. But it’s only a few blocks to the gate in the wall that separates suburb from unbound desert. I ask Said the camel driver how far it is to Libya. The answer is in weeks, but I am instantly sold on the idea. ‘Let’s go.’ He says no one does it anymore. In his dad’s time, they would set up camel caravans. Now it’s SUVs, and a matter of days.

Said the van driver has several obsessions. First is the new Ring Road, which has shortened the drive to Giza considerably. I can appreciate that after the ride from the airport, which is an hour of traffic any time of day. ‘See, see!’ he points out a narrow road that passes underneath the new road, clogged with cars. It’s a hazy day; we should be able to see the pyramids already. ‘Al Humdillah,’ I say. Thank God for ring roads. It’s a strange echo from Ethiopia, this obsession with roads.

Second on Said’s list is an admiration for the houses of the rich. After Giza, we cruise south along the western edge of the metropolitan area. We’re headed toward Saqqara, where I will stand in the hot sun before the oldest standing pyramid, erected nearly six thousand years ago. Stand on a height and you can see the Giza set to the north. Look south and see a few more in the distance. There are over a hundred that have been discovered. We drive by fields, and by dusty enclaves of suburbia. You really see how the Nile makes Egypt. Signs of life in this city strictly follow the map of canals that fan out from the river. To Said’s delight, there are mansions galore on this road, many not finished yet. He slows every few hundred yards to point out another. Many have a view of the Great Pyramids.

His last obsession is one that I can share: good food. He shares with me an Egyptian fast food delight called koshary. It’s a mixture of rice, pasta, chickpeas, and various etceteras that together make something delicious and filling. He warns that you can’t find good koshary just anywhere. He has a friend who owns a fast food shop in Giza, and he sells the best koshary. He’s so proud of the dish, he pays for mine. We sit in the car after my visit to History, and we greedily eat koshary.

Back downtown, I make the pilgrimage to the famous museum of Egyptian antiquities. It’s a short walk from the Sadat metro station. I mingle among the bus-tour crowds, and file in. The place is like a grand warehouse, organized very loosely according to period, featuring amazing antiquities standing in confusing jumbles. My eyes glaze over fairly quickly, I’m afraid. I’m very well behaved in an art museum, but not at my best among bits of stone.

But there are some wonders that penetrate even my bland crust. There’s the heavy lid to a stone sarcophagus carved with a beautiful woman made of stars, reaching out to the deceased. I’m not sure how comforting that would be after a few hundred years: I might have wished for consummation before then. But there are worse sights for the stiffly departed, I suppose.

There are rows of crazy wooden armies and wooden fishermen who accompanied the deceased into the lands beyond, carrying on with their bucolic, river-bound lifestyles for eternity. And upstairs there are the heavenly furnishings of our friend, young King Tut, including the famous mask of gold, its glassy eyes staring forever upon ... paunchy American tourists? Or upon the bliss of the Western Lands?

Personally, I have to prefer the statues of Tutankhamen’s predecessor, the famously perverse Akhenaton, whose mysterious wife Nefertiti became something of an archetype of regal beauty. The pharoah himself preferred to see himself in bizarrely androgynous terms. He has been called the world’s first individualist, and he survived the disgust of his successors to purse his ample lips at us all. Was he the inspiration for Moses’s monotheistic revolution, as Freud suggested? That would be fun.

Travelogue 273 – April 9
Barack and the Pelicans

A street boy walks alongside me, with nothing better to do than chat. It has just rained, though the sun is breaking through in the east. He points out a rainbow. In Amharic, it’s called Mary’s Belt. When I tell him I’m from America, he wants to lead me to the new hot spot in Bahir Dar, the Obama Restaurant. People in Ethiopia are very enthusiastic about Obama. He’s tiru sew, a good man, in everyone’s estimation. Finally, America has another president who stands tall, says one taxi driver. ‘Bush’, scowls another, ‘only he want, war, war.’

I’m up early for a walk, something I particularly enjoy when I’m in Bahir Dar. The breezes are gentle, and the lake is peaceful. The sun’s first reflections on the water are subdued and lead one toward meditation. Reflection and the gentler activities of the mind have been hard to come by during this trip to Ethiopia. The agenda has been action only and stark decisions.

We’ve come to Bahir Dar as a full team this time. Mark’s in-country from London, only for two weeks. We had a narrow window for this trip, and the airline wasn’t cooperating, so we arranged for a van. With seats to spare, we expanded the expedition, inviting Mark’s sponsored child and his uncle, and inviting Gete. The van is deluxe: spacious, clean, and powerful. But it doesn’t save us from the ravages of the long and spotty road. It’s still too many hours of bumps and swerves. You might say our drivers are ‘deluxe’, as well, steaming ahead, leaden-footed and minds afire with ch’at. And somehow they proliferate. We leave Addis with two drivers and return with four. Over the course of the journey, they exile us to the back seats with their feverish discussions and feverish accelerations.

There are some highlights to the long, long drive, despite the damage to our nerves and rear ends. There’s a nostalgic stopover in Sticktown, scene of much merriment on New Year’s Eve of the Ethiopian Millennium in 2007, when the whole UK contingent was in Ethiopia. It had the feeling of a homecoming, teens with sticks chasing us up the steep road out of the Blue Nile Gorge as we approached that sweet old Dodge City of the African highlands.

This time we crossed over the new bridge at the bottom of the gorge. Last time it was only under construction. Though the bluffs are all brown with the season, the Nile is still wide and glinting in the hot sun. The federal guards allow us to stop and take pictures, though they, sitting on folding chairs in the shade of a few dusty trees, guns across their laps, yell every so often to caution us against arbitrary pathways, as though either baiting us or proving they’re on the job.

Once in Bahir Dar, as though the bone-jarring odyssey weren’t enough, we’re straightaway in vans for a few more trips. The first is to Gobame, site of one of our schools. The dust is overwhelming, and we stagger into the village on half a lung each. The children run from the school in their heavy green dresses and cloaks, but they don’t mob us the way Addis children do. They hesitate a few yards away, and they duck their heads and stare, walking beside us. Some of the children are frightened of Mark and I, and I can’t help exploiting that to the hilarity of the others, reaching out a quick hand toward them. Their eyes widen and they stumble and flee. Once we’re all gathered at the schoolhouse, I find these timid ones and take their hands. They can only stare back.

The second trip is to T’is Abay, the waterfall some half an hour from the Nile’s Lake T’ana origins. It’s along another teeth-chattering dirt road. Once you’ve reached the village, you have to walk to a river crossing, where you negotiate with a grouchy latter-day Charon to ride five minutes in an old metal skiff with benches along both sides. It’s a beautiful little passage, among reeds and papyrus, with sunny hills in the background. There’s another, longer walk on the other side among farmer’s small fields, under the gaze of shepherd children. Some of the fields are devoted to ch’at, a burgeoning crop here of late. Once you’re near the falls, you are assaulted by a variety of enterprising young sales-people, offering you soft drinks and pseudo-traditional knick-knacks. One lad wants to provide the soundtrack for your entire experience with his bamboo shepherd’s flute. He would follow you into the rocks underneath the falls if he thought you had a birr or two for him.

Even with all this drama, or perhaps in consequence of it, I find the mellow evenings by the lake most pleasant. We gather every evening, the whole team from Addis, in the lakeside ‘Mango Park’, just as the sun is getting ready to set, when the sunlight on the lake is most golden and there’s a strong breeze coming in off the water. This park is little more than stepped concrete leading to the lakeside, each step furnished with lines of rusty chairs facing the water. We always meet at the farthest end of the park, right by the water. Mark and I have Meta beers and the rest have Mirinda or Coca. Mark has brought along a little plastic game of ‘Connect 4’, so we play game after game, collecting numbers of wins and losses and declaring champions. Pelicans gather on the water, just beyond the papyrus. In the late afternoon, a cafe employee will go out in a papyrus boat filled with fish to try to entice the big birds closer to the park. Sometimes he is successful, sometimes not. On several afternoons, we catch sight of a hippo that has strayed from the Nile’s headwaters and pops his ears up close to the cafe. This goes on until it’s dark and we pack up to seek out one of Bahir Dar’s small and dimly lit restaurants. Strangely enough, now that I look back, I realize we never did try the Obama Restaurant.

Travelogue 272 – April 3
The Body Electric

Among the adventures of life in Ethiopia, few are as misadventurous as those concerning electricity.

Internet will be the first complaint you’ll hear from tourists. If you’re a local, or have achieved the patience of the saints, it must be comic to sit in an internet cafe that’s popular among faranjis and listen to the concert of huff and fluster and forlorn sighs that rise from every other station. The connections are slow and unreliable. Alas, my patience falls a good deal short of the saints’ – it hovers somewhere around the level of a taxi driver’s – so it’s rare that I’ll enjoy the spectacle. I’m usually contributing.

In my case, the predominant challenge has been getting any current at all in my new house. A little known secret about Ethiopia’s electrical sockets: it seems there are two sizes for the two-pronged attachments that give life. The outlets in my house admit the smaller size, and everything I own seems to be fitted with the larger size. There are only three outlets in my house. One outlet is dedicated to the refrigerator. Menna works a sleight of hand in which the fridge’s plug hangs from the outlet, the tips of the plug just making contact with the juice. We went shopping for extension cords and those little multiplier plugs. The cord we found didn’t work, and the first multiple-outlet was molded for the small size. When finally we found an attachment with small-size prongs for the wall and accommodation for large-size plugs, -- this begins to sound obscene – it was time for celebration. But the neighborhood was blacked out.

It is late in the dry season now. The rainy season ends in September. For a city that derives a significant percentage of its electrical power from hydroelectric sources, this creates a situation near crisis. So at this time of the year, the city starts rationing. One or two days a week, neighborhoods experience day-long blackouts. The hydro-hieratic planners alternate the neighborhoods so that coffee and internet service (in the abstract sense) can be found on any day. That’s the theory, but of course there are the random and unexplained blackouts to contend with.

There are also the mysterious ‘dry-outs’ in water service, as well. As I’ve observed before, these often follow strange daily cycles – water from the faucets in the morning, dry in the evenings, etc., -- but it happens that two or three whole, mournful days go by without water. I bring water up in connection with electricity because these are the two essential ingredients in the life-sustaining elixir we call hot showers. The powers behind the powers seem to have decided that one flowing service to any given house is boon enough, so the hot shower is something to be cherished. Ethiopian quandary: if you discover on a 3am toilet run that there is light and the water is running, what do you do? Can you sleep knowing that this could be your only chance for a hot shower?

Travelogue 271 – April 1
Oikos, Dolce Bet

This year, home is in the hills of Shiro Meda. I’m back on the north side of Addis Ababa, among the meandering lanes of uneven stones, among the humble and the poor, among old ladies in traditional white, and among loitering teenage boys trapped uncertainly between awkward poses – sardonic or friendly or menacing – particularly conflicted when a white guy appears. Menna and Ijigu have outdone themselves on this house. It’s quiet and relatively well-appointed. We share the compound with the landlord’s family and servants, a small and respectful household. The compound is laid with concrete. It’s furnished with the usual vicious dogs who live their lives inside barred iron boxes barely wide enough to hold them. My little house is closest to the compound gate.

Gete is of indeterminate age, in her teens. She wears her rural upbringing in her humble clothes, thick skirts and kerchief over her hair; she wears it in her gait, ungoverned by the clock and stooped in docility; and she wears it in her face, slack in deference and innocence and a kind of wonder at the crowd and flash of the city. She is sister to one of the teen athletes of Team Tesfa. She has been tentatively invited to join the staff of Casa di Jarvis, working as house cleaner – though much of the time I make her and her sad face sit and eat or copy out alphabets and numerals.

Conforming to the theme of the year, I’ve had all possessions and all my thoughts (conveniently suspended in notebooks) gathered at the new house, and whenever possible, while directing staff from the dining room table command center, I sort through the Stuff, breaking open boxes like tombs at Saqqara, boxes with no corners or seams left, held together by stubborn packing tape, holding my breath through clouds of dust, sweeping away dead spiders, rat turds and cockroaches to access treasures from the past. Five years I’ve been here! I marvel; the household carries on its work.

I think, at times like these – the cook is in the kitchen, the courtyard is being swept by someone from the landlord’s retinue, the bathroom is being mopped by Gete, bedsheets hang from the clotheslines, Menna is calculating budgets at the table – I think of the household in its traditional role in history, the oikos, the fundamental unit within the organization of civilization, the microcosm of society, the central root in the Greek word that becomes ‘economy’.

‘We’re just about out of soft, Gete.’ Soft is the word for tissue or toilet paper, an essential item in the oikos, forced to serve a variety of sanitary purposes in Ethiopia. When she returns, she leaves tracks of mud, so she wants to mop again. It seems I’ve arrived in Addis at the leading edge of a storm front that brings the spring’s ‘little rains’. All the locals rejoice, enjoying the respite from months of harsh sunshine, while I curse my ever-cloudy fate.

Travelogue 270 – March 27
Twenty Million

Taxi drivers will tell you with a sigh of exasperation that Cairo is home to 20 million souls. That’s a big number and probably exaggerated. More conventional sources assign 16 million to the metropolitan area. But what are numbers anyway? To the man in the street, a number like that is an expression of a feeling before it’s a statement of science.

If you would like that ’20 million’ sensation, here’s what I recommend: take a stroll in the late afternoon from Opera Square in Cairo to the historic Al Azhar mosque, through the market district. This is not an exercise for the faint of heart ... nor for the claustrophobic, nor for those sensitive to noise, for those subject to panic attacks, nor those with strong ideas of personal space. Take a deep breath before you take this plunge.

This walk is as near perfect human chaos as I’ve been. But if you’re like me, once you pass a certain degree of chaos, when the street is filled to bursting with humanity and cacophonous sound is rising to fill all of space, you finally have to laugh. An order inside chaos emerges, and you give in to it or you become paralyzed or bruised. You surrender to something like continuous, improvised motion: turning, accelerating, wedging between people and objects, facing down a wall of traffic for just the right moment. Give up on straight lines and don’t look ahead. It’s a dance.

At last you reach history. You will pass a few lovely old mosques from Cairo’s youth, and you will enter the old Muslim quarter. Follow along the murderous multi-lane thoroughfare that has roared at your side for a mile. You will come to the venerable Al Azhar mosque, granddaddy of Cairo mosques and founder of the world’s second oldest university, bestowing degrees by the end of the tenth century. The mosque is open to visitors.

Walk back down Xaos Avenue to the Egyptian fast food outlet, Gad, for a chicken shwarma. Don’t let them lead you upstairs, where you will pay double price. Take your meal out. There’s nowhere to sit and eat, so order a taxi and ride back to Opera Square for a couple dollars. You will have plenty of time to eat, as the driver has to drive out to Heliopolis in order to turn around and rejoin the tooting traffic going your way. Meanwhile learn your Arabic numbers as you sort out the fare.

Don’t worry: Cairo has more peaceful entertainments. The first one is at home, if you’re staying at the Windsor Hotel. The Windsor is a vestige of British colonial presence. It stands tall and narrow above alleyways and noisy cafes (ah, the smell of shisha!), its spacious rooms set round a tiny cage of an antique elevator and its accompanying spiral staircase. On the second floor is a pleasant bar, famously furnished with chairs made of barrel halves and friendly society. Notice in the dining room a painting partially burned during anti-British riots at the time of rebellion against the Empire during the 50s.

Take the subway down to Sabat station. The trains are easy. Tickets are one Egyptian pound and conveniently bought at the station. Just beware entering the women-only car if you’re male, watch your toes, and be ready to push your way off the train at your stop. From the station, find your way to the Nile. Let the god Aman Ra guide you west. You’ll find the southernmost bridge to the neighborhood of Gezira on the river island of Zamalek. Don’t mind the occasional amiable man who sidles up to you and wants to practice English. Eventually the educational dialogue will come round to money, and you’re best to say no early. Don’t mind the cop stationed mid-bridge who smilingly asks where you’re from and shakes your hand and then demands fifty dollars. Smile back and carry on. Enjoy the walk. The Nile downtown is broad and beautiful, and surrounded by glassy cityscape. One afternoon, take an alternate route, strolling down the eastern side of the river from the same bridge. Stop in a few of the high-rent hotels and pay the price for a coffee, soaking up Middle Eastern luxury.

The neighborhoods west and south of the Windsor are fun, especially in the evening. There’s lots of shopping, and it doesn’t stop until near midnight. The buildings are Old World European. The stores alternate between Old World and modern style. Stop for ice cream. Peak in the McDonald’s to see the young Bohemians bitterly swallowing their pride for the free wireless.

Cairo highlight and lowlight: Be sure to stop by the Khalily Musuem on western side of the Nile, just south of the Sheraton, for quiet time with Rodin, Gaugin, Van Gogh, and friends, along with lots of Japanese and Chinese porcelain. Be sure to miss the old Coptic neighborhood, which has been reduced to incomprehensible alleyways like chutes in a stockyard, channeling mobs of tourists among confused and underwhelming sights.

Travelogue 269 – March 23
One Ship’s Cargo

Poppies are blooming red among the ruins. There are oranges on trees along the street. An African immigrant has me by the throat in the Metro because I tripped him. I’m in Rome!

It so happens I’ve arrived on the day of the Rome Marathon, which was the occasion for my first visit to Rome, seven years ago. I catch a bit of the end of the race, cheering on the stragglers, at the Fontana di Trevi. The city is extraordinarily crowded.

The crowds don’t deter me because my objectives on this stopover in Rome are modest. I want to rest up for Ethiopia; I want to take walks in the sun. I want to see what sights I see. Most of historical Rome, I’ve visited at one time or another.

Sun and walks. I’m an effective traveler; I meet my objectives almost immediately. On my first day, I make my way to the banks of the Tiber in the oldest part of Rome, where the old green river curves toward the south, just below the Capitoline and Palatine Hills. This is, roughly speaking, where it all began. It’s also where the oldest standing Roman bridge, the Ponte Fabricio, spans the short distance from the Capitoline side to the Isola Tiberina, Rome’s only river island. The bridge was built in 62 BC, while Julius Caesar was just a young, rebellious praetor and notorious reprobate.

The Romans believed this island in the Tiber grew around a seed of grain tossed into the river after the deposition of the Tarquins (a nasty Etruscan dynasty in the 7th and 6th centuries BC). If it wasn’t a kernel of grain, it was the body of Tarquinius Superbus himself. Silt gathered for a few short centuries until it became this solid, boat-shaped isle. Scientists have something to say about that theory, but don’t they always, those pesky devils?

For quite a while, the island was ignored or even avoided as a disreputable acre, the dark street corner where Albanians and skinheads smoked and plotted. But then destiny spoke out. Battling a plague, the Roman Senate consulted the Sibyl. This oracle recommended a temple to Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing. This entailed sending a delegation to Epidauros. The delegates returned with the gift of a snake, meant to be the centerpiece for a new temple to Asclepius, the god of healing. As the delegates arrived home, rowing up the Tiber, this serpent slithered overboard and swam straight for the isle. This is where the temple is meant to be built, decided the Romans.

Built it was, a temple that stood for five hundred years or so. So enamored were the Romans by the temple and its story that the island accrued a magic and a legend all its own. It was clearly shaped like a boat, this bit of land. The Romans enhanced the resemblance, erecting an obelisk like a mast and buttressing the sides of the isle with a marble keel, a piece of which can still be seen, embellished with a caduceus in relief, the symbol of Asclepius and of all healers. And an aura of healing attached itself to the location, an aura that has never diminished, even with the destruction of the temple by the zealous new state religion imported from far Palestine. The temple was built over by a church for the disciple Bartholomew, whose severely compromised remains are said to lie here, but the other half of the island is given over to a hospital that has been run by healing friars since the sixteenth century.

In any case, the island is a pleasant place to hang out on a sunny afternoon. Below the church, temple, and hospital, as though the boat has run aground, a broad space roundabout the island has been paved. You can walk around the isle or sun yourself leaning against the slope underneath the hospital, along with a host of descendants of the old priests and soldiers.

Thank you, Carolyn, for posting entries while I’m in blog-unfriendly Ethiopia!

Travelogue 268 – March 20
Altered States

I’ve been graced by two unlikely boons in Perugia this week, religion and the blues.

Antonio is a book binder. He comes by it honestly, having grown up with the craft in his family in Puglia. He is a handsome man, with curly black locks to his shoulder, a strong, goateed chin, and piercing eyes. As a boy, he wanted to be a priest but he became a bass player instead. He has lived in London so he speaks English very well, though thankfully not well enough to have lost that melodic Italian accent. His Japanese girlfriend is back home, waiting for a new visa. He has settled in Perugia, and works out of a studio on the Via Sant’Agata, an arched, ground-level space that used to be a stable. You can find him on occasion behind a table in front of the cathedral, selling blank, Renaissance-style, leather-bound books that he has crafted himself. But don’t look for him this weekend because he’ll be in Frankfort for an AC/DC concert.

Antonio has a friend from Sparta, a gentle and serious and saintly man, whom I will call Biff in order to protect his identity. Biff has lived in Italia for a dozen years now but he’s about to return to Greece. He is a graphic artist and piano player. He has studied botany and biology. He’s an extreme ascetic, and he observes a very rigid and healthy diet. He is a loner and a very quiet man. He passes days on end in silence.

Antonio tells me that Biff is a devotee of meditation. What type, I ask. Ah, what type indeed! Biff comes up with something I had never heard of. The answer is Hesychasm. It seems that as a young man, Biff spent some years among the monks of Athos, and not just any Orthodox monks, but ecstatic who can fairly be called the Sufis of Orthodoxy, who seclude themselves from civilization in the mountains. Hesychasm, Esicasmo in Italian, is a meditative practice that Biff compares to certain yogic disciplines. It includes breath control and a kind of mantric use of the Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

I flap my gums about a past and passing interest in Sufism, and a visit I made to a Sufi ashram in Turkish Cyprus once upon a time. My ten words to his one put the lie to any spirituality I might have made pretense to, but I still do harbor a genuine, if dilletantish, appreciation for devotions and discipline like his. Within minutes, I’m Biff’s biggest fan, and I try to keep the conversation going, but Biff has exceeded his word quota for the week: discourse complete.

Genius of another ilk awaits us at night. Antonio invites me to the Thursday open mic might at Busker’s Irish Pub, which is just a block down the ol’ cobblestones from my hotel. Whatever one may think of the tired Irish theme, the space is very comfortable, two floors in an old building, with lots of rooms and a stage at the back of the lower floor. The open mic night is popular. All the Italians there seem to know each other. A lot of them are musicians, entering with instruments on their shoulders and ordering nothing.

We meet Matteo, a passionate young man who sold his ’58 Stratocaster to pay for flying lessons. Now he is a pilot for a small carrier, and he has another guitar. He is an accomplished player, as he proves later in the night. But first, the three of us must have long and impassioned discussions about politics. Their explanations of current politics in Italia seem impossibly bleak. Matteo draws a comparison between Roma 2009 and Orwell 1984, and it’s completely plausible if everything he and Antonio say is true.

Finally, by 11:30, as my red eyes sink low in the night sky, the music starts. I’ve begged the cute MC, Sara, to allow Matteo and friend to go first. In my honor, they perform American blues, including 'Hoochie Coochie Man'. They turn it a laudable performance, and I enjoy the cultural dissonance as much as the show (medieval town, Italian language, Hoochie Coochie Man). Bravissimo!

Tonight, a heavy snow is falling on the streets of the old town. I’m nearly alone as I stroll the Corso. ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ is being broadcast from some bar’s outdoor speakers.

Travelogue 267 – March 18
Perugia

Allow me to introduce to you my old friend and home town in Italia, Perugia, my Umbrian hill town of pink stone, Etruscan acropolis, Porta Sole, my gruff and introverted little Perugia.

Perugia è una città di 164.782 abitanti dell’Italia centrale, capoluogo dell’omonima provincia e della regione Umbria. Sorge su un colle, nella valle del Tevere. Right, that just about covers it. Perugia is situated dead in the center of Italy, about two hours northeast from Rome, among the lovely hills of Umbria, and just above the Tiber river valley. It’s the capital of Umbria. It was first an Etruscan city, but only appears in history when the Romans took notice of it, right around 300 BC. Afterward it’s Roman, of course. In the Middle Ages, (after some rough times with those silly barbarians), it’s an autonomous city-state, until Papal Rome takes her back into the fold in the sixteenth century or so.

This isn’t Rome or Milano. The train won’t deposit you in the center. The reason for that is simple enough. Perugia is one of those hilltop towns that are common in the interior of Italy, situated snugly and precipitously above the perilous lowlands. So do not despair when you disembark and exit the station only to see the bland visage of modern Europe. Head upward. If you’re determined to make it on foot, allow 45 minutes and follow just about any road that goes uphill. Eventually you must emerge at the pinnacle, on the Corso Vannucci, named after Perugia’s most famous native son, the artist Perugino. This is the central artery of the historical center. You can see from one end to the other. Its flagstones are prohibited to auto traffic, so join the passegiata.

If you turn toward the head of the Corso, you’ll come to the Piazza IV Novembre, around which are gathered some of the architectural jewels of medieval Italy, including the Palazzo dei Priori, (city hall, basically) a tall and stately fourteenth century construction of rose and white stone, erected in three elegant layers of classic medieval design, with rosettes and mullioned windows and a grand arched doorway that is set with ghostly and delicate figures, almost cartoonish in that high medieval way that somehow fuses dignity with simplicity, figures that include two guardian griffins subduing, in an odd show of power, two terrified bulls. In the center of the piazza is the Fontana Maggiore, also of pink stone, embellished with two levels of allegorical, religious and mythical characters in relief. On the north side of the piazza is the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (yes, another one, coincidentally – see mention of Genova’s in the previous blog,) the bishop’s seat for the region. It was built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and exists today as a curious amalgam of styles and bits, including a Renaissance loggio along one side, a beautiful outdoor pulpit decorated with mosaics set in one of the walls (a pulpit from which San Bernardino of Siena himself preached,) and a large bronze of a pope popular in Perugia for relaxing papal rule after brutal wars in the sixteenth century.

Walk up past the cathedral, toward the north, and you will discover the Porta Sole, the cliff-top site of an ancient Etruscan temple to a sun god, long ago destroyed, where you will be confronted by a sudden, breath-taking vista of the red-tiled roofs of the town below, set along narrow, zig-zagging streets, and of green hills rolling toward the horizon. The fact is, you can find these vistas at each point of the compass in historical Perugia. Most dramatic are those at northern and southern ends of the acropolis. The southern counterpart is at the other end of the Corso, where couples gather at sunset in the Giardino Carducci , where you can stand at the long stone balustrade and gaze out over valleys that lead south toward Roma. On the eastern side of this prospect, you can spot Assisi, a patch of medieval stone suspended on a hillside across the Tiber River Valley.

These are just some highlights, but choose any of the high-walled alleyways leading down and away from the Corso and you’ll stumble upon travertine, marble, and cobblestone treasures left for us by the centuries of cittadini-believers, who want to tell you about their city, about their wars, about Saints Francis and Bernardino, or about the Roman Catholic God and His works.

Here are some personal recommendations for must-see leisure stops while you’re in Perugia:
First, of course, my specialty: a few cafes. I’ll restrict myself to two. Just north of the cathedral and beyond the Piazza IV Novembre, you’ll spot the Caffe Turreno. Here you’ll experience a touch of old world class. There are tables out front and a few rooms in the back where you can sit and study some photos of Perugia from the days just after the Second World War, Perugia in ruins. Sip your coffee and watch Perugia’s equivalent of the ‘Via Veneto’ set, the upscale socialites and artists. If your taste in self-consciousness tends more toward the young and grungy, be sure to stop by the Caffe Morlacchi, where you’ll enjoy hippie chic under low vaults of brick. This is also a good spot for nighttime entertainment, they often bring in DJs and bands.

Please stop by the Oratorio di San Bernardino on the western side of the city, behind the university, down by the old city gate at the end of the Via dei Priori. It’s a beautiful little Renaissance chapel, with a colorful and remarkable façade. The spare interior is worth a look, too, if only for the late Roman sarcophagus being used as an altar.

And, at sunset, try to be on the eastern side of town, at the Chiesa di San Domenico. The colors on its vast and empty western wall are gorgeous. Take a minute to peek inside the cloister to the left, where there is a nice collections of Etruscan urns arranged around the cloister walls.

Travelogue 266 – March 11
Calvary by the Sea

I think of Milano as the city of balconies. I really haven’t seen much of Milan yet, but the hundreds of balconies above the streets have become symbolic of the city. I stay in the neighborhoods near the train station, and I’ve strolled around the centro. In these areas, the architecture is all similar, a heavy but elegant imperial style that I quite like, a style that features lovely, carven stone balconies. Milano is the base for my Genova trip this time around, so I have seen a lot of the massive, Fascist-era train station, (recently featured prominently, by the way, in the film ‘The International’). I’ve exited and entered and exited again from underneath those high, arched shelters in the back of the station.

If Milano is the city of balconies, Genova is the city of stairs. The city has the feeling of having been precariously built on a tiny strip of flat land by the sea, mountains right at its back. When it grows, it grows up. Off every street are steep and narrow staircases heading up those looming hills.

Five years ago, I have a day to kill in Genova. (See the previous blog.) I’ve missed my boat and I’m catching a night train to Perugia. I’ve been up since 3 or 4am, and I’m stuck with my XXL backpack, stuffed with supplies for several months’ travel. What does one do in Genova? One goes to sea, or one climbs stairs. I’ve turned my back on the sea already, so I climb. And climb and climb.

I’m in a state of mind one could understate as ‘distressed’. The physical labor with the load on my back feels just. My thoughts are stilled. The future is as blank as my mind. There are only the hills and the work. I will sweat out my grief. I will push through the pain of being adrift.

Up I go, staircase after staircase, shoulders and thighs aching. Back and forth I hike, across the steep and concave hillside above downtown, sometimes up long series of steps, sometimes following curving lanes past houses and gardens, past tenements of the earners and the rich, stopping occasionally for increasingly dramatic vistas of the city and the sea. I can see the old port and beyond. In the old port are monstrous ferries, these for the luxury voyages going anywhere but Tunisia. I see the whole, rumpled topography of the city, red tile, towers and spires built on the shoulders of neighbors. The sea gleams with dull sunlight.

Eventually, I reach the top of the ridge. I achieve the summit of the final staircase … only to look to my right and see the terminal stop of the funicular. Ah well, it was all about the pain of the climb, wasn’t it, the cleansing labor of it? I cross the road and look out over valley-burbs of greater Genova. The day is reaching its last hours. I stop in the bar next to the funicular station. The several grey-haired regulars are already unsteady with drink.

This time I take the funicular up. It’s one euro twenty and the funicular departs at fifteen-minute intervals. A few bored kids are waiting with me. The funicular arrives, a tired looking set of silver boxes, built at a slant, so my orange plastic seat and its partner are about a meter higher than the next set, etc. The first half of the ride is through tunnels. After that, the view opens up a bit, and I see some familiar neighborhoods, one precarious house after another, some with gardens. In one garden, a pair of floppy-eared sheep watch us go by. At the top, we emerge on top of that old, tame ridge with the wild view. The sea winks at me from its silver, misty peace.

Back in the centro, I make time to see the sights, some of the things I missed the first time around. I head toward the old town. The streets narrow and they meander. The ubiquitous staircases diminish into mere cracks between high walls, vanishing quickly into shadow. In fact, most of the intersecting vie shrink into Genovese vicoli, passageways about a shoulder’s width across. I want to run up every one of them. There’s something compelling, like the lure of mazes, about the vicoli.

Stop by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, around which the old town seems to organize itself. It’s a beautiful medieval structure, dating back to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The façade is a fun example of medieval design, with horizontal stripes in colored stone, and a grand doorway telling many stories in sculpture, framed in groovy twisting marble columns. Huge marble lions guard the wide stairway, though with a meek Christian demeanor.

It’s nighttime when I make it back down the hill five years ago. I wander among streets that seem dark and murderous until the time my first train leaves. I’m beyond exhaustion in both mind and body, but I can’t sleep, even on the train. The first train goes to Firenze. I arrive there in the dead of early morning. In the time between trains, I make my way into the heart of the old town. I stand alone beneath the bizarre façade of the Duomo in the darkness of a winter night, just before dawn.

Travelogue 265 – March 10
By the Sea

One of your first sights in Genova – provide you travel there by train – will be a massive white monument to Cristoforo Colombo. He stands high above the central train station, facing the sea and brooding with lowered brow. Shall we say he’s plotting the overthrow of everything sane and righteous – just so we conform to the intellectual spirit of our times?

Genova certainly looks different my second time around. Granted, the first time I saw it I was in some distress. This was after my first trip to Ethiopia, five years ago. I was only ten days in Ethiopia – a wise bit of planning on my part. First exposure to Addis Ababa is traumatic in the best of times. But this was six months after Leeza had died. I had met her family for the first time. I had visited her grave. By the time I reached Genova, I was quite heart-broken.

I’m back. I’m retracing my steps. These Italian adventures took place just prior to launching the ‘jarvistravels’ blog in 2004. Think of this as investigative journalism – no, let’s call it subjective or even subjunctive journalism. I’m researching for a possible memoir.

I went to Genova in order to catch a boat. I wasn’t in search of a passage to India. I was looking for the thing that Colombo’s sailors must have feared most, the edge of the world. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a break from an unendurable story. New chapter: I had planned a trip to Tunisia, thinking that somehow Tunisia was just the anonymous little oasis of desert that I needed. It’s hard to say why now, although it still seems like it would be a nice vacation.

When you catch a ferry to Tunis from Genova, you find yourself on the very last dock in the west wing of the old harbor, a desolate place. The western docks are all function. There’s no danger of confusing this with the Riviera: lots of concrete, cranes, and lorries. In fact, just to underscore the Genovese concept of their friend, the sea, any view of the harbor from this side of town is blocked by a crazy motorway, many lanes wide and several levels high. Hardly the boardwalk.

You loiter with hundreds of people and autos on the concrete dock beside the ferry. It’s no luxury cruise ahead of you. The boat is blank and beat. The people themselves are blank and beat. They mill around restlessly and smoke, most of them Tunisian and poor. It’s almost dawn. The scene is bleak.

Something in me snaps. The ferry starts loading, but I stand aside. I’m rooted to the spot. I watch everyone embark. Gangplanks are clanked into place. The anchoring lines are stowed away. The engines rumble, churning the harbor water, and the ferry drifts free, moves, accelerates.

What was wrong? Maybe it was the thought of returning to Africa. Maybe it was the specter of poverty and depression on my holiday away from grief and depression. I couldn’t face another round. I wanted to be Nowhere, but try to find it. It always turns into Somewhere.

I’m not thinking. I have no reasons for watching the boat go. All I feel is lost, absolutely lost. I was supposed to be out there, on the water. What am I doing? The sun rises in the Genovese sky, but I am wrapped in a fog of disappointment and renewed grief. I stumble off the dock, out of the port, and off into the bitter streets of town. I throw my backpack down on the steps of a busy bank, and people are staring at me. I must have had a wild glint in my eye.

So this is where she finds me, forsaken by Self and Fate in a trashy foreign town, nowhere to go, and my extra tall backpack tossed aside for bank customers to step over on their way to get money. When I say ‘she’, I refer to Leeza, my angel. She visits me then, and I don’t mean white light and a hush over the street. I mean something like a memory as vivid as presence, or vice versa. I can’t argue scholastically about it but she was there, and she believes in me.

Why has she found me? Is the question absurd? I’m in about as desperate a state as I’ve ever been. She’s come with a message. Translated from near-presence into plain newsprint, it’s something like, ‘Dana, you have dreams. Look where you are!’ Like: maybe it’s not about rest and nowheres and gardens by the sea. It’s about being alive. ‘You’ve been to Ethiopia to tend to my dreams. Now look after yours!’ It’s so like Leeza. She knew about my love of everything Italian.

An artisan in Perugia shares with me a phrase of D’Anniunzio’s: Memento Audere Semper. Remember to dare.

I imagine it’s what resuscitation must feel like, those plates against your chest, heart punched into motion, the sensation of blood coursing again, lungs seizing oxygen, and the eyes seeing. My mind pulses with ideas. I pick up the old backpack.

I know immediately where I’m going: Perugia. I march to the train station. I choose an overnight train to save myself a hotel bill. I set out into old Colombo City to kill the day.

Travelogue 264 – March 4
By the River Thames

In the Victoria Embankment there’s another statue of Brunel, and a much finer piece of art than the one in the Temple District of Bristol. This I discover on a stroll through the riverside park today. I’m making my way from Leicester Square to the Temple Tube Station. Isambard in London looks as though he might have lived, which is a contrast to the Bristol likeness that suggests he was a character in Alice in Wonderland. No doubt it’s tempting to treat a man named Isambard Kingdom in just that way. But in the end, he must have been as opaquely physical as his creations, which were some of the critical gears in the clockwork machine that was imperial Britain.

In fact, a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century Brittania comes alive in the Victoria Embankment. That includes Arthur Sullivan, whose memorial statue is morbidly arousing, with a glorious, mourning bronze nude draped around the pedestal of his bust. It must be that his Italian blood guided the sculptor.

I’m meeting Felicity at the Temple Tube Station. Once we’ve identified each other – it’s our first meeting – she leads us back up toward her office. We choose a cafe on Fleet Street for our meeting. Across the street is the marvelous building belonging to the Royal Courts of Justice. Here’s another Temple District, inspired by yet another circular temple erected by the Knights Templar. (Oh, the sweet aura of mysticism evoked in our times by those feisty Templars!) The temple still exists, more or less. It serves as the chapel for the Inner and Middle Temple Inns of Court.

After the meeting, I carry on up Fleet Street toward St. Paul’s. I cross the Thames on the pedestrian Millennium Bridge – otherwise known as the Wobbly Bridge, reflecting its early performance. On the southern bank, I walk east toward London Bridge. This is a neighborhood I very much enjoy. It includes the Tate Modern, the Globe and Southwark Cathedral. This church has a fascinating texture to it, faced almost entirely in grey flint. But be sure NOT to pronounce Southwark as it looks. Say ‘Suvvok’. The neighborhood includes a Gibraltar’s-worth of cobblestone, and veritable stacks of bars along the riverfront. It includes the Borough Market, which fits snugly in among a tangle of little alleyways underneath a tangle of railroad tracks overhead. They say the market dates back to the Roman times. In any case, it makes for a fun stroll.

Travelogue 263, February 26
The Matthew

The day is a replica of the last, grey with a chilly breeze. Jet lag has
kept me up until 3am. I’ve got that cold medicine-like buzzy feeling
from lack of sleep. But this is our only free afternoon to sightsee.

Pey and I take the train to Bristol. This will be my first visit to that
town, though it’s only about fifteen minutes on the train, and it’s where
Giles has his office. Disembarking from the train, a difference is immediately evident. We’re in a real city. The population is about five times that of Bath.

The train station in Bristol is named Temple Meads. The entire district is called the Temple district because there was once a circular temple of the Knights Templar here. That was built over by a large Catholic church, but even the church retained the memory, being called Temple Church. It stood for almost six hundred years before the Germans bombed it. And it still stands, though gutted.

Bristol was the fifth largest target of the German blitz because of its harbor and the airplane industry. So today you see a relatively bland modern city. Not that there aren’t vestiges of the old. Not far from the train station, you’ll pass a crude statue of a local hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who contributed much to the old city which we can still catch glimpses of. Personally, I think he deserves a statue for just his name, let alone his achievements. The old town owed much to this 19th century architect and engineer. Perhaps his primary claim to fame is the Clifton Suspension Bridge high above the Avon River as it heads toward the Severn estuary, that huge waterway separating England and southern Wales. Brunel designed the bridge, but never saw it completed. Construction took over thirty years.

Brunel also spent some time working on the locks and the docks of Bristol. This city has been a major port for England since the time of the Normans. Earlier port towns were closer to the great estuary. Bristol is a few miles inland on the Avon, presumably because of the powerful tides of the Bristol Channel and estuary. Locks built in the 19th century created the stable ‘Floating Harbor’, Bristol’s calm waters for docking ships. Walk along the Avon today and see calm waters. The river has been so engineered and supplemented with canals that it hardly seems a river. Does a river take neat ninety-degree turns?

Here you can ogle boats and visit history. Another famous product of Isambard’s genius floats here, the SS Great Britain, built in 1843 and once the largest ship afloat. It was not the first ship built of iron, but the first iron ship to employ a screw propeller and take to the open seas.

I admit, it’s not the SS Britain that attracts my attention. It’s the Matthew, symbol of an earlier age. It is the replica of John Cabot’s vessel, which crossed the Atlantic and discovered – for his age and his people – North America. The replica followed the same path some ten years ago. It’s a beauty, built in late medieval style, square-rigged with a high forecastle and aftcastle. And the gangplank is down! It happens that the crew is on board for a luncheon that has finished by the time we arrive. We are able to board.

The first thought in boarding a ship like that is: my God this is small! Nineteen people spent seven weeks on this vessel, crossing the ocean? It boggles the imagination. One of the old crew members spends some time talking with me. ‘When I grew up,’ he says, ‘I was taught to pronounce Cabot in the French way, dropping the ‘t’. But of course that was wrong.’

Approaching the Matthew, reading that it was a replica of Cabot’s ship, the date 1497 leaps into my mind. I turn out to be right, and Pey graciously acknowledges my boast. It’s a child’s number, and for the first time I reflect upon it with an adult’s mind. Wow, that’s only five years after Columbus set sail. Friendly competition?

Cabot’s real name was Caboto, which apparently means ‘seaman’ in Italian. He was Italian, as were many captains and seafarers at the end of the fifteenth century. Many of them were farming themselves out to the new sea powers: Spain, Portugal, England, and France. The Atlantic was the new sea to be working.

The old man on the boat says Columbus spent some time in Bristol. I haven’t seen that corroborated anywhere, but it’s certainly possible. He travelled widely in his youth, and could easily have stopped here. What if they met? What if they shared ideas? Small world: isn’t it always?

Travelogue 262, February 23
Signs (NOT directed by Shamalamadingdong)

Four signs that you’ve arrived in England...
Indoor Birds: Disembark from the Northwest jet airliner after three movies and a protracted battle over the armrest with an oversized and twitchy man, and make your way to the Tube for a lift across the sprawling suburb called Heathrow Airport. Follow the signs to the Central Bus Station. Stand in line for fifteen minutes for the only functioning elevator.

The bus terminal isn’t huge. It’s a sales window, a WH Smith, a digital departures board, rows of benches for several hundred, and most importantly a Caffe Nero, where you go to exorcise the phantoms of sleep deprivation and close range video imagery.

There’s something ad hoc about the terminal space, like it was a convenient, if awkward, quadrangle of concrete that was converted by one of those balloon roofs and some glass doorways into an interior space. The doors are propped open day by day, allowing hungry, grey pigeons free access. Watch your pan au raisin; they might launch from that chair back. Pigeons are just as ubiquitous in, say, New York City, but in Europe they are real citizens, as essential an ingredient to any plaza or piazza as the timeworn flagstones themselves. Now they’ve been invited in.

Complexions: Scan the faces; listen to the voices. The musical scales have shifted, and so has the spectrum of complexions. The Anglos bustle by in their restraints, singing their light and rounded syllables. At the cafe counter, meet the Eastern Europeans issuing questions as orders in nasal curlicues that never stray far from sarcasm. South Asians add spice to the swirl of pink cheeks and blondes, translating motion itself into diffidence, turning wide eyes on the clock, on the clerks, on the walls.

Buckles: Board the ‘coach’. It’s tidy. The seats are high. The driver is a friendly chap with a warm and booming voice, a shaggy coif, and a well-aged cardigan. Before setting out, he cheerfully fulfills his duty of addressing the customers, much like an airline stewardess: seat belts are mandated; exits are at front and back; the lavatory is in the rear of the coach; and please come up front if there is any way I can make your ride more comfortable -- I’m up here, on the right.

The Press: Pick up the abandoned ‘Metro’, a free London rag, handed out at Tube stations. Two stories will stand out, one on the front page and one in the back among sports news. The latter story concerns a world celeb that registers negligibly in the American consciousness. (This is itself a jarring phenomenon. How do Americans manage this kind of blithe impenetrability?) Said celeb is the unflappable and eminently photogenic Jose Mourinho, once invincible coach of Chelsea and now generale at Inter Milan. A Champions League match approacheth: Inter vs. Manchester United. Mourinho has a few wonderful quotes to offer us, wonderful for their luminous vacuity, poetic indications of nothing, reminiscent of JCVD in his youth. Mourinho is confident of winning. Beyond that, we have only zen color: the match will be a sensation on several etheric planes.

The front page celeb is none other than our faltering PM, Gordon Brown, portrayed in exaggerated toad-like glory as he puckers up to kiss the cheek of cousin toad Angela Merkel. The accompanying photo captures Ms. Merkel wrinkling up in disgust, presumably post-contact, though the paper is suitably ambiguous on that point. You’ve got to love the British press -- though God preserve us all from their attentions.

The evidence is in: I’m in England.

Travelogue 261, February 14
A Valentine’s Toast

In conversation, a friend refers to Valentine’s Day as a holiday, and I laugh. But later I consider the point: yes, it is a holiday. Judge by the way people celebrate. We’re downtown, and people are as sloppy as I’ve ever seen them. The bars are rammed. Block E roars with chaotic good cheer.

Block E is a block-sized entertainment mall downtown, occupied by bars and movie theaters, and a five-star hotel. It’s been a mall since 2001, despised from its inception by all city hipsters, especially those with long enough memories to recall the seedy legacy of the block before its demolition in 1988 -- when it was home to such classic mid-century establishments as the Moby Dick, Brady’s Pub, the Rifle Sport Gallery, and Shinders. And truly, how is one supposed to feel about the complex that houses a Hard Rock Café downtown? But I have to confess to a lot of time spent at Block E. What are my options? I don’t have a car, and I can’t see a movie unless it’s on a huge screen with blasting sound.

In any case, the mall and the street are in an uproar. People are shouting, even if they’re strolling right next to each other. A beggar is asking passers-by for a stimulus package. Limos with dark windows cruise by. Excitement levels are high: isn’t this a holiday? It’s an odd one if it is. Are we celebrating love in the middle of winter? I’m not seeing much that I would recognize as romance.

Holidays are platforms for the collective voice of a people to speak. So what are our holidays? I don’t mean the empty spots on the calendar, the long weekends and days to sleep in. I mean the ones we truly celebrate. In the U.S., would they be Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s? With the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas, they all look the same, don’t they? Get drunk and be loud. Throw in birthdays as another holiday, then. The two exceptions are sweet but tedious celebrations of family. Sure, there are people who commemorate MLK or Veteran’s Day, but they are usually bound by some experience or conviction that separates them from the herd.

So where is the mass civic mindedness that quotes poets, poets like Henry Timrod, who wrote,

Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause

though he himself is now memorialized by marble in a park on Broad Street in Charleston. He wrote these lines just before his death in 1867, about the laying of wreaths for the Confederate dead. The park is entirely devoted to Civil War memories, and is empty of visitors on the day I stop by. Aside from the monument to Timrod, there’s one to General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who oversaw the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor in April, 1861, the first engagement of the war. And there’s a column erected in memory of all the men who lost life’s breath in support of the Confederacy. A plaque declaims South Carolina’s motto, ‘Dum spiro, spero’, which means while I breathe, I hope.

‘Carolina!’ Timrod wrote at the beginning of the war,

Fling down thy gauntlet to the Huns,

And roar the challenge from thy guns;

Then leave the future to thy sons,

Across the street is St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, a church orginally founded in the late seventeenth century, though most of the current building dates to the mid-eighteenth century. Its graveyard is the real item of interest. Walk its peaceful grounds and gaze at stones carved centuries ago.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies
By mourning beauty crowned!

Anyway, the graveyards are quiet now, and the monuments are unattended. Let’s head down to the mall for some brewskies.

Travelogue 260, February 5
Oysters and Gumbo

Howard corrects me immediately, before we’ve driven a mile. ‘They’re palmettos,’ he says with the smug authority of a local, though he’s only been living here for five years. I stand corrected. They’re not palm trees, they’re palmettos. It is the Palmetto State, after all. How callous am I? But really, the names are not what matters. What is outstandingly urgent right now is the GREEN. There is green grass by the side of the road. There are oak trees reaching over the road with branches full of green leaves. Moss – not so green this time of year – hangs from those branches like stockings blown from the clothesline. Sunshine warms my cheek through the car window.

It’s late afternoon, and Howard drives us straight to his favorite Mexican place, where he orders us two 46-ounce margaritas. We launch into reminiscences. It’s been six years since we’ve seen each other. The memories become funnier as the big, round glasses empty.

It’s night by the time we drive into downtown Charleston. We cross the Ashley River, over some sleeping yachts, and drive down the east side of the city’s central peninsula. We arrive at Battery Park and take a walk along the harbor-side. The water is calm. The night is wonderfully comfortable, with only the hint of a southern chill in the air – something Howard calls ‘cold’. What are the evening sights waterside in Charleston? To the left you’ll see the new Ravenel Bridge lit brightly, its cables spread like delicate fans. Behind you, you’ll enjoy a row of nineteenth century beauties, residences of the rich and genteel, all columns and balconies, Renaissance and Colonial, redolent of plantation culture. Out to sea, you’ll be able to pick out the lights of Fort Sumter, squatting out in the harbor, protecting memories of the war that still seems to define this city.

Walk east and you’ll enter the French Quarter, where the oldest architectural relics of Charleston stand firm against time, relics of the city that was one of the first ports of the British colonies, founded in 1670, and one of the biggest cities of the early republic. Keep going; you’ll find some nice bars and restaurants.

This vacation is destined to be a culinary excursion. Everything Southern, I want to try. That includes ‘Firefly’, an inimitably Charleston liquor: vodka brewed with iced tea. That includes grits and succotash with breakfast, and barbequed ribs for dinner. My favorite meal, consumed with delight on my last night in Charleston, is gumbo complemented by ‘oyster shooters’. An oyster shooter is a shot of vodka with a raw oyster, horse radish, and hot sauce. The bartender and Howard nearly had me convinced that I was supposed to slide the whole concoction down my throat without a gag, but these oysters are not the rubbery little nuggets I’m used to in northern ports. These are like whole eggs swimming in vodka and hot sauce. I savor each shot.

My second favorite meal is more than food. It’s sitting in the full afternoon sun on the highest deck of a bar called Red’s in Mt. Pleasant, set right beside Shem Creek, a wide, marshy creek that sluggishly flows toward the harbor. The meal is a basket of fried scallops and a basket of huge, delicious shrimp. Howard and I catch up on politics and religion, and we work our way through beers and food just about as slowly as the sun is dragged toward the earth. About five degrees from sunset, we clear out and drive to Sullivan’s Beach, crossing over the Intracoastal Waterway, which looks like any other creek in these marshy lands, just wider and straighter. Humble creek, it’s part of a venerable American institution that stretches uninterrupted from New Jersey to Texas.

Access to the beach is between rambling beach houses, wooden and bleached, and over some dunes populated with reeds and low scrub. The beach slopes down very gently to the calm ocean. Gentle describes everything about this landscape, flat and warm and watery. The view is not striking; its beauty is spacious and calming. The sands are not dazzling, tawny rather than white. The ocean is not sparkling, but dull and sleepy. We stroll contentedly among the wet sands for a mile or so, until we’re ready for the next meal.