In Between

Confessionals for a new year.
Twenty-two seems to me a far more tender age then I’ll remember when looking back on the best years of my life. I’ve just finished college, the ultimate preparation for the future. Everything until very nearly the date of graduation seemed focused on doing my best in an academic sense. You take a test and get good grades so you can pay thousands of dollars to go to the best possible prep school. You do well there so you can get to the best possible college. All these things give you the best possible prospects for your future, for your life. But, all of a sudden you graduate, and you’re caught between the before that was college and the after that is the rest of your life, the bit you’ve been preparing for, the part that now stretches before you like a vast web of unmarked paths. C’mon, with all that potential, that quickness of mind, that willingness of spirit, that $160,000 degree from that wonderfully fancy school, all you’ve got to do is choose, put your mind to it, and you can achieve anything. But, what do you want to achieve? And perhaps now, the question is becoming a little less, what if you fail, but what if you never try? What if you never make a decision, nothing ever grabs you or you never let it?
Rather than being crushed by the weight of my own amorphous expectations, I have to just begin. Take it a step at a time, as my mother says, almost on repeat, for nearly every situation. So, I’m here, in Spain, letting life teach me, trying to learn how to drink a new knowledge from life, one whose responses aren’t multiple-choice or the difference between this small liberal arts college in Rhode Island and that one in New York. I’m here to quit looking the gift horse in the mouth, and just get on the damn thing.
So, as I look for my passions and “answers,” which have decided to not ceremoniously present themselves immediately upon the completion of school or my arrival in a foreign land, I share with you a song that I feel best encompasses some of the feelings of this time of life.
Jamie Cullum, "Twentysomething"

Third-World Lite

I left myself a whopping twenty hours between my return from travel and the arrival of my parents. Their arrival came with much jetlag and another trip, to Morocco.
I explained to my father that Morocco is Third-World Lite. The fact that he was going at all was a vast change from when three years ago, he nearly forbade me from going because the locals might see my Jew horns and cast me into the farthest deathly reaches of the medina where I’d never be found again. But, as it turns out, the Moroccans are pretty down with the Jews and the reason that all but 3,000 left in 1948 was for economic reasons above all else.
Our trip was beautiful, but more of a smorgasbord, a tasting of several different sites and cities. Our first day was in Casablanca, a mostly industrial city that now has the third largest mosque in the world. Inside it can house 25,000 people, and during Ramadan, the whole complex hosts about 105,000. We went to Meknes, where we didn’t see much, Volubilis, which is an enormous Roman ruins, and Rabat, the capital since the French came and has remained so even now that they’re gone, all in the same afternoon and probably ate a tajine every two hours. We stayed in a beautiful hotel, a converted French villa with peacocks and free Internet. The following day we raced to Fez, where we shopped until the boys dropped.
The beauty of Morocco is truly in the details. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, people are constantly yelling at each other in a very unfamiliar language that contains occasional spikes of the more familiar French. But, the architecture is beautiful, detailed carved plasterwork and unending mosaics. The people are kind, even if they’re trying to swindle you. My father and I met a man on the street that invited us into his house for tea. It turned out later that he had given us a fake name and was just trying to take us to a certain place to shop so he could get a commission, but the gesture was also kind and we enjoyed it. Apparently, if “Mohammed” does this again though, he could get fired from his real job, teaching math at a local school.
Our last night, we saw the world’s most touristy show. We started as the only people in the restaurant, but it filled fast when several tour buses arrived. But, “what’s one more tajine, when I know there’s a belly dancer on the way?” Wrong. The tajine was good; the belly dancer was definitely past childbearing age and was wearing a lime-green polyester getup that hugged her hams in a most uncomfortable way to watch. Not the kind of half naked Muslim girl you want shaking her groove thing while you’re eating dinner. I never had so much fun being an ugly American as at that dinner.

Peng and Prague

In ten days of solo travel, I ended up spending one alone. It took me a beer and a half to make friends with an Irishman and a Swiss kid who’d been living in Bratislava and two more beers after that to meet two Kiwi girls. I hung out with them in Vienna (think lots of beer, opera and Christmas lights) and ended up meeting another Kiwi who was on his way to Poland. Talk about a surprising way to end up taking a trip to someplace very depressing. But, I’m glad I went. Despite being quite grey, and the sun setting at 3:30 in the afternoon, Krakow was quite pretty.
I met Hanying Peng on an overnight train from Krakow to Prague, but the knowledge of her existence came earlier. I’d met a girl from Sacramento while touring a 700 year-old salt mine, and during the only conversation I had with an American that lasted longer than 95 seconds, she informed me about Peng and her fear of night trains. I told her to have her look for me (red coat, green glasses, long hair) and then promptly forgot about it entirely. That is until Peng (and some Japanese girl wearing a surgical mask to “protect her throat”) ended up in the same sleeping car on my train, on her way to stay in the same hostel. This is how solo hostel travel seems to work. You meet someone that you get along with reasonably well, and then you end up paling around with them for a day or two. Sometimes, you end up going to Krakow instead of Budapest because “hey, they’re having a transportation strike there anyway.”
Peng and I arrived in the morning, so after dropping off our bags, we spent much of the day wandering around Christmas markets, reading the map upside down and drinking beer and eating sausages. We talked about our countries, our lives. She’s been studying in Sweden, one of only a few English-speaking studying programs that doesn’t require the TOEFL, an expensive test that certifies that you do in fact speak English. I explained why everything in the Jewish Quarter was closed because it was Saturday and she explained why no, she didn’t have any brothers and sisters and the idiocy of banning Wikipedia and then allowing people to travel outside the country.
Prague was simply beautiful, the more so with Peng and her picture taking. She was the harbinger of some pretty ridiculous situations. While waiting for her outside a once brothel/cabaret now hotel, I somehow ended up in a circle of Czech guys, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and stumbling about with their limited English. When Peng finally showed up, we left our rag-tag group of Czech university students and found ourselves in a 14th century cellar, sitting at wooden tables, listening to a jazz/blues band. Man, that girl could sing.
I spent my last day of travel back in Vienna, being disappointed by the Jewish museum, lamenting the cold weather, and wishing I could live there.

Krakow

Prague