“Once there was a way to get back homeward…”

It´s not often that I explain the quotes I use to head posts on this blog which usually have little or anything to do with the content. I choose to explain this one because it has everything to do with the content, whether we like it or not. Lauren and I arrived in Cochabamba three weeks ago and had been staying in my dear friend Carwil´s apartment until he arrived on the 12th of this month with his lovely fiance Sophie. We took off travelling and touring together and in this time a nickname for our clan emerged. A Rasta, A Small Boy and Two Giants: our inexcapable percieved international identities, the way people see each of us who aren´t used to seeing people like us. Carwil has a giant puffy fluff of afro hair and despite having absolutley no other qualities that lend themselves to rastafarian behavior he will be identified and labeled as that anyway. Lauren has been called by masculine pronouns by virtually everyone we´ve met so far, and when you look at her and see a boy, you certainly don`t see a 28 year old one. Of course, myself, at 5´8″ and Sophie at a remarkable 6 feet tower over everyone in the mostly indigenous population of Bolivia. This is what strikes people about us when we are not at home.

At clinica Wiñay I was the Gran Khali again, the biggest wrestler in the WWE, and one of the largest people in the world, or so it felt. I volunteered at a women´s health and dental clinic in Quillacollo catering to largely Quechua speaking indigenous families for the two weeks we were in Cocha, and on more than one occasion walked up on the doctors or nurses who worked there making jokes about how big I am. I would try to fall in step and compare myself to the 33 meter tall statue of Christ that looms over the town, and boy did they love that. I would walk down the hall in the clinic and spot a baby spotting me and they would systematically freeze in their tracks like they saw the worlds largest ghost. “What the heck are you?” they must have been asking. “I´ve seen people before and YOU are not it.” It was like being sized up by the kids in at Odilia´s house in Guatemala all over again. Its amazing how much 5 to 7 inches can make you feel so out of place, so excessively present. The one thing I did think I had on my side at this clinic, unlike at Odilia´s was a much more polished command of the Spanish language, which I wont say proved to be useless but good lord did it feel like it sometime. I was doing patient intake at the clinic so women would come in and tell me their names and I either had to find them in the computer or make them a new chart if they were a new patient. Patient after patient they would tell me their four names and I couldn´t understand a word or even a letter of them. I would ask them to repeat them so many times it was humiliating. They spoke in such hushed voices and when I would ask them to spell their names they would just sound them out. I would then write the name and they would confirm it was correct with or without looking at it and then I would look it up in the computer and find something totally different. I would then get their charts which would say something different all together. Getting their address was even worse. Proper nounds I´ve DEFINTELY never heard of versus the occcasional familiar, Maria or Flores or Rosa or Guittierez, each of which there are more spellings for than I thought possible. Later they would be uncertain of their birthdates, and would approximate their street addresses by saying I live “at the middle” or “at the end” of a particular street. I can´t remember the last time I felt this inept. After awhile some of the Colque´s and Mamani´s and Quispe´s and Quiroga´s started to repeat themselves and I got more comfortable. I tried to apply my western lens to the practices I saw in some cases and deconstruct it in others. I poked around for the staff´s various opinions about abortion and what they would do when women came seeking it to no success.

They invited Lauren and I to come to the clinic on the first friday of the month in which they do an offering to Pachamama, the mother earth, to bless the clinic. This involves building a fire indoors, burning coca leaves and little idols made of sugar over top of it and spilling large amounts of booze on the floor. It also involvs sitting around it until your eyes tear up from the smoke and yelling “salud!” everytime you drink, or even worse “vacio!” which means someone wants to go head to head with you on chugging whats left of the beer in your hand. Lauren and I have hardly drank on this trip but I have to say that girl does not back down from a challenge. They inquired about our lives, compared our worlds to theirs, offered us more and more beer and coca leaves on our empty stomachs until it was time to go. We left drunk, and happy, and smokey smelling. The day I left they had all forgotten it was my last day so they told me to come back in the night. I came back and they gave me a foil wrapped box containing a porcelain statue of a women in a Nurses uniform holding a baby upside down that says “gynocologist” in Spanish underneath. It was maybe the nicest, and most thoughtful gift I have been given by people who knew so little about me. They then sent Lauren and I on a wild goose chase for a traditional fermented grain licour called Chicha in which corn is first chewed up to initiate the fermentation process. After being yelled at by old men, chased away by dogs, nearly fondled by a drunk guy and straining out a couple dozen flys we finally aquired about 2 liters of the stuff for approximately a dollar and 14 cents.

We´ve spent the last few days touring the salt flats near the Chilean border and looking at some of the nicest scenery I´ve ever seen with some of the nicest people in my life. I went from standing out like a sore thumb to bouncing around in a Land Rover full of sore thumbs. We go home tomorrow back to our own worlds where we are normal and don´t have much to explain.

Happy and weary,

Andie

We are leaving Buenos Aires for Cochabamba tomorrow and everything seems like a big blur. Maybe I still feeling a little bit of the vodka that was hidden in the passionfruit cocktail I had at the Vietnamese restaurant where we had dinner tonight in which Lauren got slighted by a pregnant waitress and I spilled a tremendous amount of soy sauce into our food and on the table. Segway into the final conversation about the horrible gastronomic landscape for Vegetarians in Buenos Aires and make way for new tales of woe in Bolivia. Lauren and I have not been eating well. Westernization of Argentina manifests itself most clearly in the colonization of every restaurant’s menu to include a loose interpretation of Italian cuisine along with the customary parilla (barbecued beef). This means pizza, pasta, salads with no lettuce, milanesa (breaded whatever) and or course french fries. I don’t understand how every single restaurant was able to consense upon identical offerings but they did. So we either participate unwillingly in that form of colonialism by eating bad pasta dishes and then looking at each other sadly when the meal is over and we’re still hungry, or the more posh form which involves taking a taxi to Palermo and going to a Mexican, Vietnamese or high-end Organic restaurant and spending what we budgeted for a week in a single meal. We rented an apartment in a relatively commercial neighborhood of Almagro with a very friendly though perpetually-shirtless Jewish bro who likes to play Bob Marley songs on his guitar, smoke pot, and then go to work at as a social worker at an orphanage run by Chabad Lubuvitch. But when we are hungry we go to Palermo which is a wealthier neighborhood to the North that is divided up into Palermo Soho, Palermo Hollywood, Old Palermo, and the new Palermo Queens which they have interpreted as cheap shopping and outlets. It feels very funny to walk around a neighborhood in another hemisphere that is trying to mimic the walk between my subway stop and my school building. It all kind of looks like if you blew hard enough it would all come tumbling down. The food however is very good.

So, so far this description of our trip sounds surly and whiney which is by no means the mood of this experience so far at all. Despite sweating through my clothes instantly upon stepping outside, Buenos Aires has proved to be a beautiful way for me to relax, and decompress and spend the time with Lauren that I wanted, and will miss terribly when school starts again. On our last few days in Capilla del Monte Lauren got this evil, undiagnosable head cold mess that begged us take things a little slower so we have confronted it by spending one day walking Buenos Aires up and down and coming home exhausted and then spending a day recovering, reading the Hunger Games next to a fan and taking naps on demand. Knowing full well that I wouldn’t totally be able to access the infintely badass radical activist culture in this town in any real way in the short time we are here, we did get a little taste of it here and there. One afternoon we passed an encampment of people from an indigenous community in Northern Argentina who were hunger striking because they were kicked off their land so soy crops could be planted there. They blockaded the highway and the police came in and killed two people and attacked and abused the women and children. One guy who was there got shot seven times, survived and was now starving himself for his community. Then we were trying to go buy Lauren some ear jewelry and our efforts were trivialized by a street blockade of burning household trash. The residents of a building that had no power for 10 days were trying to get the governments attention to intervene in their conflict with the power company which hadn’t been responded to their calls. Electrical pumps are required to carry water to the units so they haven’t had water either. It is amazing what people will do when they are trapped and no one is listening to them. They shut down one of the busiest streets in the city. I’d love to see what their tenant association meeting looked like!

We spent Christmas at the home of some beautiful friends we made. And though drinking licorice flavored booze (fernet) and coke, dancing to reggaeton on a terrace, and cheerzing (word?) at midnight was not the gumbo and stockings and jellied cranberry sauce im used to, we did spend it with extremely kind people who took strangers into their home and showed us a great time. Its incredible that you can go someplace in the world, know no one, and still find a place to spend christmas. Since we did New Years for Christmas more or less, we decided to spend New Years alone instead of going out but instead of spending it at the very nice hotel room we booked we got stuck running from one fully-booked restaurant to another looking desperately for a place to eat and ended up at midnight in a horrible tourist trap of a bar/pub eating and “fajitas” while portuguese dubbed techno pop covers blared all around us. We decided to celebrate new years on New York time at 2am instead by watching the local broadcast of the live coverage of times square in our room with no audio, just katie perry playing in the background. Wouldn’t change it for anything.

This blog is an injustice to how much we’ve done here,

Shakira

You would think being reared in Texas would be enough to make a warm Christmas season feel normal but nobody makes the holiday season less convincingly present than the Argentineans.  It is hot, and arid, and there is no indigenous pine. But four foot tall plastic christmas trees in every lobby of every building will do the trick.  Every day feels like a century.  Sleep comes when it can but not when we are ready for it.  Food is anything we can find that isn´t beef, but we are thrilled to be here.

In Buenos Aires Lauren and I did two things. 1) Made logistical arrangements. Bus tickets to Cordoba, looking at apartments to rent, plane tickets to  Bolivia, sunscreen/headlamp purchases.  2) And amazingly this happened simultaneously, but we found a large toilet and put in all our money in it and flushed it.  The reasonably priced Argentina a la financial collapse/run on the banks of 2000 has seemingly stabilized.  Getting to divide all the prices you see by four is really exciting until you realize that the sunscreen you just bought is 12 dollars and the cheese on bread on cheese on bread meal you just ate because you don´t eat meat in Meatland will not only guarantee you won´t poop for the next 5 days but will also cost you 30 dollars.  Oh we also did another thing.  Poorly prepared for things.  We didn´t know the actual exchange rate until a day and a half after we got here,.which ended up working out in our favor.  (4 to 1 US vs. 3 to 1).  But what didn´t work in our favor was the fact that we had no idea what time it was for three solid days since we arrived.  We were getting ready to go to an early dinner and out to a club to meet up with an adorable, delightful guy we met on couchsurfing when we noticed that we had two watches, a computer, and two ipods that all said different times.  We searched ¨time in Buenos Aires right now¨ on google and it was two hours later than any of our devices had promised.  We also had decided not to WWOOF and just to stay in Buenos Aires for the whole time until we searched “the place we´re going to WWOOF” in google images and it was so pretty we changed our mind and went and bought bus tickets.

One day later we were on a sleeper bus to Capilla del Monte, a tiny hippie town north of Cordoba in central Argentina, covered in dirt after a very sad all day visit to an authentic Argentinean tourist trap.  We don´t dare come near each other the whole bus ride for fear our dirty, sticky skin will actually not come unstuck.  Its been a day and a half since we arrived and we still haven´t showered because the farm we are staying on is out of water.  Oops!  Lauren and I are forced to get more comfortable with each other than even a 6 week south american vacation had threatened.  Hygiene covered. Next. Hippies.  We thought we had only wrongfully assumed that WWOOFing meant hanging out on a farm with extremely good-looking hippie people.  THIS IS NOT A MYTH.  We arrived at Jardin de los Presentes from the bus station, made our way passed hand-made ovens, hammocks, and composting toilets to turn a corner into convergence of blue and green eyes, surrounded by dreads and dark skin watching extremely technical videos on how to spin poy.  It only took us one day to break past their extremely unfriendly skepticism of us. We won them over by spending the afternoon moving chicken shit shrouded in sawdust and feathers from one place to another, and by tripping down a rocky ravine in total darkness to the hippie gathering of the century.  The community of Faldea, which we believe is a somewhat intentional gathering of very good-looking people dressed head to toe in wool and leather from various parts of Argentina, was having their end of the year party.  It was like being in a magazine spread for JCrew´s gypsy sheik fall fashion line.  Besides dancing, and playing small guitars and pan flutes, and eating mysterious vegetables and breads out of communal bowls in a large circle, the central theme of this gathering seemed to be propagation of themselves as a community.  Every woman came attached with a gorgeous baby at her breast, or was pregnant, and every performance piece and photo slide show we watched was ironically geared towards either demystifying or idealizing the pregnant or nursing body in some way, shape or form.  I was excited to find out that most births here are attended by one of many midwives, and that being pregnant is seemingly like being god.  So we danced by the fire and drank a few drops of the wine we brought before in got passed into the circle and disappeared, and then got driven home in a car full of loudly-snoring babies.  Our stuff is drying out today after it rained on our tent through the night and the elements seeped into the periphery.  We´ll be WWOOFing the next few days, trying to avoid watching another consipiracy theory movie about saving the world through making things with trash, and then bussing it back to Buenos Aires for chistmas.  Monica has the contact info for where we are in case anybody needs me cuz she was the only person I had time to write before catching our bus.  Oh also this place is famous because it has been visited by UFO´s and is situated on top of the subterranean community called Erks where the future of humanity is supposedly going to emerge someday.  If you don´t hear from me in the next week assume I have been abducted by an objeto volando no identificado and give up looking.

Peace, love and the World,
Andie

Model Home, big house, the Cabin, Shanti and Kalyan’s, the Model, the cabin.  The Weaverville hopscotch.  Spending time with Amit and Meg has historically involved relentless deliberation about what to do and when, passively pretending that we are “ok with whatever.”  The last thing we need is three different houses to have to decide which to occupy at any given moment.  This was the fifth time that Meg, Amit and I have reunited, always in a different locale, and it happens just infrequent enough and just consistently enough that we look nostalgically on the literal days, if not weeks, of time we have spent together suspended in indecision.  Weavervegas was freezing this trip, not unlike the last trip, so our options were limited.  I would say this is a good thing.  Slept ’til noon, ate something, talked about what we would do, came to no conclusion, ate something else.  By sun down we were ready to go somewhere, which in some cases was determined by the time we got in the car and sometimes not.  My family and friends in Texas had changed so much between aging and pairing off that it was nice to relate to people in ways unaffected by time and space.

I met lots of 20 year-old men here in Asheville.  A wolf-like mathematician with whom I compared complex mathematic theory and anthropological thought, a douchy NYU student who defended NYU students’ rights to behave like assholes, and a kind of a lanky dreamy one that I counseled on his brewing desires to “to go abroad.”  Where, just anywhere.  I drained their box of Franzia as I illuminated to them the slightly older woman’s perspective on “the world.”  Another instance where younger men think I’m awesome, and my ego skyrockets.  I rekindled my friendship with Nate Welling, and awaited Andy Saltzman who never came, got told by a four year-old that they like Amit more than me and danced with one of Amit’s cabin mates like a gorilla.  Good luck with the men this leg.

This is all almost over and it’s been at least three days since I’ve talked to someone who thought it was “cool” that I live in New York so my impulse to go home right now is nonexistent.  Long story short.  Never can get enough Amit, and always sad to leave him.

I hope that when we get there we’ll remember why we came,

Big Babe

The fact that I have to leave the all-inclusive spa resort that is my father’s house in Tucson is total bull.  First of all, I just got here.  Second, I have a tan.  The first morning I got here, I woke up to a mug full of hot green tea, two veggie sausage links, my favorite Grandy’s Style Cheezy Eggs (TM), and a banana blueberry fruit salad with whipped cream on top. My step-mom paid for me to go get a massage, and not only that, she put the keys in the car, set the GPS to the spa’s address and set the card for the massage therapist on the seat, handed me a bottle of water and sent me on my way.  This is the world-class treatment she gives me when I get here.  My dad did daddy things like glue my broken purse strap back together, and play the traditional rounds of hypothetical “if you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring 5 albums from the 60′s and 70′s what would they be?” games.  My dad thinks I’m a classic rock trivia guru, and it makes me feel very special.  Then there was the “where is your relationship going?” question and the ever-important “what city could you see yourself living in the long term? (please say tucson)” future mapping project.  

All this love and hospitality has a catch.  My parents have been renting a 8×8 foot storage space containing aproximately 5 boxes of my crap and a poster tube containing a rooster/chicken oil pastel that was assumed to be mine and is not, but is now.  They have been blitzkreiging my small apartment with more of my own shit every few weeks since the minute they moved from Kansas City.  They put me in the car thinking we were going out to dinner or something fun, and then DROVE ME TO THE STORAGE PLACE and loaded up my shit and then DROVE ME BACK TO THE HOUSE, where I was forced to go through all of the remaining boxes and execute my memories by firing squad.  Goodbye pink kitty statue on a mirrored stand.  So long year-of-the rabit chinese zodiac tea leaf straining mug.  See you in the next life 3 guatemalan patterned wrap skirts that show my ass when its windy.  These people have no pity.

Middle-aged couples.  In one day I got to know and had similar but different conversations with exactly SIX middle-aged couples.  We first went on a hike (beautiful 6-mile hike in Catalina mountains which was like a piece of cake for me HA!) with Mario and Peggy, Ronnie and Sherry, and then had dinner at a little local Italian place called Macaroni Grill with Toni and Terry, Pat and Sandy, and Tom and Melba.  Then of course there was Lynett and Aaron, the ones I belong to.  Stories of small apartments with no bowls, lack of need for car in the city, discussion of weather in New York City compared to the Southwest, same song and dance.  I ate my Eggplant parm, drank my Chianti. Nice to meet you nice to meet you nice to meet you. Bed.

It is warm. It is mountainous.  It is sunsetty.  There are good bath products and cute bird feeders, and my wonderful wonderful parents who I will not take leaving lightly.

These mountains may never be our home,

Andie

I LOVE my nephew.  He is awesome.  He loves me and therefore that makes me awesome.  I have finally achieved my life’s work. My nephew has hit the precise age where I am not too old to be cool and he is old enough that he wants to impress me.  He’s been by my side since the minute I showed up and in between stretches of hormone-induced staring off into space or just sitting with his eyes closed, he would just want to tell me everything that is going on in ninth grade including, get this, updates about his latest girlfriend, the break up with his last one, AND detailed breakdowns of clique formation on the part of the “emos, scenesters, preps and jocks.” Cloud fucking nine.  It took every bone in my body to try and remain just the right amount of indifferent and detached so that my ecstatic sense of self-worth didn’t show and ruin everything.  He showed me all the latest you-tube videos and said things like, “Don’t you hate it when you like really like a band, and have like liked them for a long time and then all of the sudden they get cool and popular and everyone likes them and it just sucks.”  I respond by saying, “Hello, Dave Matthews Band? After Crash? I know exactly what you are talking about.”  He has no idea what I am talking about.  He will also still play leg wars with me on the coach (foot to foot, push til knees touch thighs or both legs go up straight and its a draw.”  I’ve been crafting this perfect Aunt-ship since the minute he was born and if it ever changes I will probably have to kill myself.

I visited my cousin Beverley and her three children in Fallbrook, CA, The Avocado Capital of the World and had no avocados, drank tremendous amounts of wine and told my big sister everything about my life, and got not one but TWO people to either drive or send 100-dollar cabs to Long Beach to pick me up….

One of those people was Elizabeth Zepherine McDonough, who was host to all of my New Years good behavior and Zeno-esque fits of decadence and fancy.  She was house sitting in one of those silly Beverly Hills houses with pink lawn furniture, a pink kitchen, life-sized Grecian statuary and a 100-pound bulldog named Pinky for which her primary responsibilities are to drive Pinky to the park twice a day so it can shit, and wipe the black sludge from it’s face crevices.  We rang in the new year at a bar near her boyfriend’s house with our shirts tucked into our bras while grinding on helium filled latex balloons in the faces of inevitably less-drunk, innocent bystanders.  All the rest is extremely well-photographed history.

Elizabeth dropped me off at the train station minutes before the train left as I force-fed her  her lucky servings of black-eyed peas from a can.   Wish to god we lived closer.  I don’t want to be this far from anyone who will repeatedly take such big bites of something she describes as tasting like vomit.  I used the first hours of the train-ride to nurse the worst hangover of my life.  Met an awesome girl doing Fullbright in Korea who was also going to Tucson, talked with her for hours but I guess didn’t like me enough to give me her phone number.  I’ve been in Tucson for less than 24 hours and I already have a V-neck sunburn. tbc…

LA was delicious,

Bee

Excessive free-time and unyeilding fear that I may never be “abroad” again led me to until-now purposefully unprecedented domestic travel blogging. It’s all I’ve got. Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in a hair under a month. All family, all catching up, all the time. Traditional blog posts related to family were characterized by mildly offensive professions of shock at majorly offensive racist, sexist, and gossipy comments made by the people I love most in the world. I’ve decided that that practice is exploitative and will withhold using them for blog masturbation unless utterly irresistible. I love my family. My new role is peacekeeper not firestarter like I got so good at in the last few years. I wow them with normalcy and totally predictable observations about “new york life.” Cramped quarters, no money, no cereal bowls, or unstained kitchen towels, development of humble taste for Carlo Rossi, the fourth roommate.

My new thing is loving my family unconditionally. This shit is awesome. It’s like, “it’s just not right that the president is black.” Nona you are so cute. “I’m so glad you are here because you can translate for me if the cleaning ladies are saying my taste is tacky.” Mom I love you. My tongue won’t hurt so much if I just don’t get upset enough to need to bite it. This may be the first family holiday where I just let myself love the people around me, neither offended or scandalized by their culture and custom. I have just loved them and let them love me. I was quiet a lot because I’m having a quarter life personality crisis, but not because I was fuming. Success.

The next theme of my holiday. Geriatrics. I am not ready for this. The time has come that people around me have become old. Walkers that need new tennis balls, hearing aids that need new batteries, artificial knees through metal detectors. Ways are set. I have found the way to deal with mild dementia. Hearing the same story for the 10th time in a couple hours gets old. Yes. But boredom, frustration, and sadness do not have to be a part of it. My nona always has 1-2 cups of coffee before bed. My nona is not affected by caffeine she says with every late night cup. My nona gets up to pee 2-3 times per night. But not because of the coffee, she says, but because of her blood pressure medication which is also a diuretic. Caffiene is also a diuretic I explain. She says no it’s not that because coffee doesnt affect her. Frustration. Round two, one hour later, followed by round three the next hour. Same convo. Two can play at this game I say.  I make wild accusations that her blood pressure is not at fault.  It is coffee.  I get heated. She gets heated.  She forgets the conversation ever happened.  We go again.  And every time she starts again I get my rebuttals prepared.  My nona is now my verbal sparring partner.  Unoffendably senile.  My mom says she has a preschooler.  This is hard.

I saw friends and family and drove in my rental car with loud music.  I went to a Korean spa, got kitchenware and dodged chicken broth with limited success.  My sister’s boyfriend told me I didn’t mind chicken broth just actual meat when describing me to his brother as I chewed.  Assuming just makes an ass out of me.  LAX at 7:10.

In California, I dream of snow,
Andrea