The red and the black.

"I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


I didn't see a single one that had front teeth. Top or bottom. I don't know if this was from malnutrition, or they had been knocked or yanked out by the Khmer Rouge during beatings or torture, or if that's just one of the first steps when bodies decompose. But I looked somberly and carefully at several hundred human skulls today, and not one of them had its front teeth in place. When surrounded by atrocity, sometimes it's these little details that distract you enough to get by. Because when I focused on where exactly I was, what had occurred in these fields and these cells thirty years ago, my normally granite stomach turned over and I nearly vomited. I wouldn't have been the first.The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, sixteen kilometers outside the center of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. When the Vietnamese liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge, this small area of six or so acres was found to contain 129 mass graves. Just under nine thousand corpses. Most of those remains are now piled in to the 17 tiers of the bone stupa memorial. Level one is a pile of clothing. The next eight levels contain nothing but skulls. The lower three of these were some of the ones I was able to look at, where only molars of their smiles remained. Skulls don't tell you all that much about a person's life. But they can scream sagas about their deaths.
The Khmer Rouge, not surprisingly, had very little money. Whereas their Nazi predecessors in genocide chose not to shoot their victims because it was too inefficient, too slow a destruction when attempting to wipe out an entire race of people, a good deal of the Khmer Rouge cadres avoided bullets simply because they were too expensive. They instead turned to methods of murder that were cheap. Repeatable. Hammers. Wooden stakes. Garden tools. Many of the skulls I saw today had a large, uneven hole in them from these instruments. One had a large slit. Could have been anything from an axe to a garden hoe, but while my mind will never be sure, it certainly visualized all the possibilities.
The killing fields were impossibly beautiful. Jade foliage broken up only by the mirror surface of ponds reflecting the most pristine of skies above. Not S-21. In horror movies and campfire stories, the wise elderly character will speak of places with an inherent evil, where venom is palpable in the building itself. It sounds like bullshit, and the places described in those stories actually are, but I wandered a complex of horror today for two hours. Its walls exhaled hatred. I legitimately felt the violence from those few decades ago still churning in the air I walked through. The air I had to breathe. Its proper name is Tuol Sleng, "Hill of the Poisonous Trees," which is fitting, but S-21 is even more appropriate. Those who entered this high school turned military compound in central Phnom Penh were unwillingly stripped of a name and reduced to a number, so why should it not be afforded the same courtesy. Security prison 21 was the epicenter of the Khmer Rouge's strategy of barbarism during its reign. This was nothing like Auschwitz, then or now. Then it was not a straight death or work camp but a place for political prisoners, even when that classification made no sense. Interrogations were conducted here to gain confessions, admissions of guilt and expositions of names of others just as guilty. Except that none of it made any sense. When you interrogate the same person for several months, you're going to run out of information to gain. What deeper knowledge are you going to acquire from the sixth fingernail you tear out, the thirty-eighth time you water-board somebody? (yeah. they did that. congratulations, we're in the same league as them). What you get is not accurate information, if that even existed to begin with. What you get is the names of everybody they have ever met, every grade school bully they can still recall and describe. What you get is a fuller prison, when all these new people are then brought in for interrogations, the further naming of names. And meanwhile the cells get smaller, are more hastily constructed, and walking through them now, today, it's not just your body that becomes claustrophobic. Looking around, you get a vise clamped on to your soul, your capacity for love, hope, faith in humanity.

This was not Auschwitz. Here you have solitude and space for the crimes to sink in. Because it was death manufactured on a smaller scale, you also have nuances that Auschwitz did not because of its sheer size. At S-21 I walked up and touched a bed-frame that just a few years before I was born a mutilated body was found on, covered in and hovering above a font of congealed blood. The broken plastic jug that held gasoline that was poured on the victim is still there. It was not to burn their corpse, but to get them to speak.... once that fire had been put out. In Building D you see the torture racks. The rooms of manacles that held the screaming in place. Still visible bloodstains.

Needless to say, I was not very successful at being distracted. You can only count a lack of teeth for so long.
****************************************
The first time I saw the tree, I frowned and took a picture. The second time, I cried. Because my only other option was to vomit.

English is a quirky language; the word "set" has somewhere around 150 different definitions. So I guess it's understandable not to get things right on the first go-round, even for someone who has studied history, specifically Twentieth Century warfare. The sign read "Killing tree against which executioners beat children." This sounded hideous, deplorable. I pictured toddlers being whipped, kicked, punched- desperate to keep their hands submissively on the tree's cutting bark to avoid further torture. Minutes later and a few hundred meters away, inside the Choeung Ek museum, I read the brief history of the tree and gagged. Because I wasn't even fucking close.

The tree itself stands next to one of the 129 mass graves found within Choeung Ek. This grave alone, when exhumed in 1980 after the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, was found to hold the corpses of over one hundred women and children, most naked. The first time around I said I pictured toddlers, but I think that would be inaccurate. The soldiers wouldn't have the arm strength. Certainly not to get the proper torque or velocity. You see, what they did, what that sign is actually telling you, is that soldiers would grab children, infants, by the calves, or by the ankles and swing them, as you would a tennis racket, a baseball bat, and slam their heads in to the bark of the tree to kill them. In front of their mothers. "Killing tree against which executioners beat children."

Maybe it's reassuring that I didn't comprehend that upon my first reading. At least I had 26 years of peace not knowing human beings were capable of doing that. Not simply to other humans, but to their own innocent people. That peace of mind of mind is gone now though. You don't get something like that back.
****************************************

Last night I went to sleep still thinking of the gorgeous girl I saw in the Bangkok airport. Tonight I'll be trying to convince myself that I'm not a monster.
It probably would have been worth the three or four shitty dollars not to feel like this. To break my rule of not giving to beggars, one that exists not out of apathy but equality. I can't give to all, so I shouldn't give to any. And what's a Band-Aid to a bullet wound anyway.

The first time he asked me, on my way in to S-21, the prison camp museum, I mumbled a "Tay, sohm toh (no, sorry)" out of pure instinct, still struggling to see my camera's playback screen in the glare of a noon sun. I glanced up and didn't realize what I was looking at right away. The first thing I noticed was the amputation, high above the left knee, condemning his genetically skinny legs to a lifetime of fragility. When I scanned up I saw the too-smooth flesh that comes with years-old third-degree-plus burns, these covering the left side of his entire head. I don't know how many years ago, but considering who he was and where I saw him, I would guess between the years 1975 and 1979. I would guess it was done by a man wearing loose-fitting black clothing and a red and white checkered sash around his head. What kind of a fucking prick says "no, sorry" to a genocide victim......

I said no on the way in, then spent the next two hours of my life wading through the most morally depleting site I've been to in my life. I left in a state of shock. I wasn't thinking clearly (still am not, that's why this post is in 3 incoherent parts) and simply said no to everyone, the several tuk-tuk drivers trying to get me to go with them, the women selling food and cheap wares by the gates, and the four or five beggars there as well. The burn victim/amputee included. Literally a blur of humanity to me at a time when I just trusted my feet to get me somewhere that my brain could catch up with later.
I realized only when I was somewhere across town that I had said no to what I can only assume was a victim of Khmer Rouge atrocities. For hours, I couldn't fathom my own self-disgust let alone express it. Typing this I'm still seething, but the loathing is waning in favor of something more promising. Determination. I have more in my arsenal than Band-Aids. When this five-month journey ends and I move to New York, it will be in search of the same type of job that I had in Los Angeles. I make documentary television. If I can't change the world, I can help enlighten it, and however small a fraction of the population it is at a time, at least it's forward movement. Writing this helps me for now. While some parts of this are graphic, and my photos in a few weeks time will be as well, it helps tremendously that for the few minutes you're reading this I feel like I'm catalyzing thought, maybe even discussion. No amount of money I could ever give would bring that man's ear, face, or eye back, bring back the years of embarrassment or torment that he has endured. But my effort to bring his story, Cambodia's story, Poland's story, the stories of guerrillas in the Spanish countryside, anti-Soviet demonstrators in the Baltics, environmentalist politicians in Scotland silenced by the Thatcher regime, Catalans vying for independence, Russian prisoners of the Gulag who died building trains to nowhere.....
This effort can really achieve something.

Phnom Penh and Battambang:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2115845&id=35804394&l=bee6341c00

The revelation will not be televised.

"I'm on the verge, just one more dose,
I'm traveling from coast to coast.
My theory isn't perfect but it's close." - Red Hot Chili Peppers


It started as a joke. I didn't realize why I'd done it, even when it was staring back at me in careful black block letters. Years ago, when Kelly gave me the artisan-crafted leather journal that would contain my travel writings, I wrote out the steps of Joseph Campbell's Monomyth, the Hero's Journey, front and center on its first page.

Maybe it was my lingering sense of only-child self-importance, or just a way to see if patterns hold true no matter how small the quest one undertakes. Admittedly my life is not an epic. It does not hold its own in comparison to the fictional heroes whose fabric was cut from this pattern, consciously or sub-consciously by their creators. But the brilliance of Campbell's theorem is its commonality. It not only finds a way for stories throughout history to overlap, but for the readers and viewers who have breathed them in to find mutual ground too. This is why we are drawn to such stories, because the protagonists are just us in a different environment. Neither my life, nor this trip fits the carbon-copy of the Hero's Journey. But there are undeniable elements within it that certainly apply.

The Abyss: "Regarding sharks in motion."
Atonement With the Father: "Two weeks notice."
Refusal of the Return: "The revelation will not be televised."

The way a deep sea diver resurfaces is in stages. After hours of isolation, of wading through darkness and heavy, salt-laden water, the change in pressure is so drastic that their return must be gradual, calculated. Those who rush back to the surface get the Bends- bubbles form inside your body, and symptoms range from headaches and queasiness, to paralysis and death.

I knew that my good friend Kelly meeting me for 10 days in Thailand would be more than simply two friends re-uniting after a long separation. With one month left in my travels, it was my first step back towards the vague concept I have of home. And coming from the Middle East and then India, it was also a return to a more Western world where American fast food chains aren't aberrations breaking up a foreign landscape, but merely more neon-colored Legos constructing a post-modern metropolis like Bangkok.

I know there are ways to which I've become accustomed, backpacking grooves I've worked myself in to that are incompatible with life in the States. In the first ten minutes of conversation, I got a little reprimanded by Kelly for some of these- describing weather in Celsius, distance with the Metric system. I'm not trying to be pompous, or Anglophilic, I've just thought in these terms, without interruption, for months. At some point I stopped doing the mental conversions back to the American system, at some point this became how I measured and broke down the world around me. And while I know it sounds arrogant, and gets old quick, it's hard to tell any new stories about my life that don't feature phrases like "The second time I was in Munich..." or "This guy I met in Lithuania..."

The ten days of her visit didn't dwell on these things. We were too distracted by the gorgeous architecture of wats (temples), the impossible hue of the water near Ko Phi Phi, hour-long massages that cost less than $5, getting lengthy rides down a mountain and in to town from incredibly kind Thai strangers (if you haven't seen the video on my Facebook page, feel free to check it out). But even if it wasn't foremost in my brain, this incongruity with life back home did creep in. Often.

This first step back, the inching closer to the surface, more than anything it made me realize that I'm not ready. But that's not a negative realization. I touched on something in Chiang-Mai, in one of those gorgeous wats we visited, this one in the middle of a forest compound that had an unavoidable déjà vu to something Colonel Kurtz ran in Apocalypse Now. Most images of the Buddha in temples are the same. They are generally either the meditative or reclining one, usually gold and androgynous, with a nearly robotic smoothness to his body. These are so prevalent because they depict him either near or (in the reclining position) at the exact moment of attaining total nirvana. It is the miracle upon which the dogma of Buddhism is based, why he is worshiped at all. But in the middle of the woods by the large chedi of the Wat Umong forest temple sits the life-sized black statue of the still-very-human fasting Buddha. Each rib is visible, as are veins that weave across the top of them. His eyes, still peaceful, are bulging from his emaciated face- his stomach nearly caved in upon itself. More than any other gold-leafed or jade carved statue in Thailand, more than any image of Christ I saw in my twenty years as a devout Catholic, or in the cathedrals of Europe since, this image permeated me on a spiritual level. Vitally, I think I began to understand. I've complained about my muscle and weight loss on this trip because it eats away at my outward self-image or how I think others will view me, but maybe it just means that I'm on the right track. I've spent nearly four months wandering three continents, but I've spent that same amount of time journeying within myself. It's not that one is more important- they're interlaced. I could have taken this same amount of time and wandered just India, or South America, or even the United States. But I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the same results. It's the comparisons that I needed. I read Dante at the Vatican, faced Mecca on my knees at a mosque in Bahrain as a Muslim man talked me through the steps of prayer in detail, walked through temples and shrines dedicated to Ganesh and Vishnu in New Delhi, and I visited Wat Umong in Chiang-Mai. I know which spoke to me the deepest, which eternal voice resonated most profoundly.

This does not mean I'm now Buddhist. Upon returning to the States, I am planning on reading the holy texts of each major religion, more out of an academic's curiosity than a pilgrim's devotion, and we'll see what decision I make from there, if any. But for now it does underscore to me the fact that I'm not ready to come back yet. And it's not the depression that a return to the American workforce, or to more consistent surroundings will probably bring. It's the fact that right now I feel close to something I cannot define. I said that I touched on something in Chiang-Mai. It did not fully impact me, not to the point that I think it is capable of. And while I can't logically describe it, I feel something beckoning me from Cambodia, from Laos. Of everything I was to see on this trip, Angkor Wat was always the most anticipated. But there's more to Cambodia than a complex of temples, and I need to explore what that is. And I will. Beginning tomorrow when I land in Phnom Penh. A step back away from a more Western world like Thailand. A step back away from home.

One cannot anticipate an epiphany, and the most profound ones happen when totally unexpected. But I feel like I know myself vastly more now than I did four months ago. The dream I had in Berlin about meeting myself, the one in Istanbul that predicted my father's death days later. This is proof to me that I'm gaining a greater wisdom about who I am and what I am capable of, and maybe even that I'm reaching some deeper level of knowledge in the world itself. And in going to some of the rural towns in Cambodia and Laos that I am planning to, I feel like I'm capable of finding there elements of existence that are raw. Not primitive in civilization, but primary in our humanity. I feel like I can just make out the outline of a lesson, maybe my lesson, hanging heavy in the shadows before me.

There's one last step in the Hero's Journey that I think applies to me on this trip.

Approach of the Innermost Cave.

Probably just that lingering only-child self-importance. But just imagine with me, for one second:

What if it's more?

Bangkok, Chiang-Mai and northern Thailand:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2112162&id=35804394&l=e005427d01

Phuket and Ko Phi Phi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113946&id=35804394&l=041eb13e8a

A passage from india.

"An endless string of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle." - Sports Illustrated

I was half asleep on the way there. Lyrics from "Fake Empire" by The National tumbled lazily in my head as my bleary eyes looked out the taxi window. I was in my third country in as many days, and had slept less than ten hours during that span. This on top of the general road weariness that I've been feeling since Istanbul.

I paid the small entrance fee for my fourth Delhi sight of the day and robotically took photos of the exterior gates of the Humayun's Tomb. No audio guide; time was short if I was going to squeeze all of Delhi in to a day, so I figured I'd just wikipedia it later. I passed through yet another identical looking gate, this one the West Gate, the modern-day final entrance way. I walked through it distractedly, my gaze still turned up at a rusting light fixture hanging above me. I finally looked straight ahead.

"Holy shit."

Loud. Loud enough for the nearest dozen or so people to turn around and give me judgmental looks. I mumbled a distracted, unaffectionate "sorry" without shifting my locked eyes. It wasn't just its beauty that shocked me, it was its unexpectedness. Its context. Aside from the previous few sights I'd visited, for hours I'd been surrounded by absolutely nothing but decay, in both buildings and bodies. For an afternoon I'd almost forgotten that wonderment was possible.

I've seen a good deal of destitution, especially on this trip. I mentioned the eyeless elderly woman crawling backwards in Lithuania, just one of many penniless beggars in Eastern Europe. Small Egyptian neighborhoods, especially outside of Cairo, were the worst kept I had ever seen. Then came India. In Delhi I thought it was just the scale that shocked me. Poor people packed as far as the smog allows your eyes to see. That every single time my car stopped children pounded on windows for money, or little girls dressed with absurd pigtails and inked-on black freckles did backflips in hopes of charity, their appearance distantly chasing an ideal so forgotten, so anachronistic it seemed like parody. A mother helped her daughter shit on the street in front of a UNESCO Heritage Site because they conceivably have nowhere else to take her. But Jaipur's desperation sunk so much lower. The first five minutes I was there I walked past a dead cow on the sidewalk, its eyes already mostly cannibalized by insects. (Mostly. That was the worst part.) Dozens of people urinating in the middle of the street (I mean middle), countless people with glaucoma so heavy it looked like cotton growing from their sockets, severely crossed-eyes, anorexic limbs twisted backwards: the tolls of malnutrition. Homeless men whose feet and ankles were the purest shade of black from dirt and soot from never owning a pair of sandals that a block away cost less than a dollar. Dozens of people molding flat cakes of manure with their bare hands so they can burn it for warmth. This isn't poverty. This is an economic holocaust.

Seeing all this squalor doesn't break your heart. It slowly drowns it in syrup. All the success and comfort that we strive for as Westerners works backwards, potently resonating as guilt when you have to turn away little girls tapping your legs and arms for a few cents. Men who walk beside you begging nonstop for the length of a full kilometer, in the unfathomable hope that after refusing fifty times, you'll somehow change your mind.Then look up from this to see phenomenal architecture. The Hawa Mahal, Qutb Minar. Jaw-dropping works of exotic beauty, close enough to complexes of squatter's lean-to's that they cast shadows. Or would be able to if the pollution didn't block out most of the sun.

If this sounds like my experience in Egypt, it shouldn't. At all. At no point in India did I ever feel in bodily danger. These people did not want to see me injured, maimed, dead. Their never-ending insistence, the flocks of dozens of potential cabbies my white face attracts when it steps out from the train station- it is all borne of need. These people need to survive and have very few realistic options. And despite all this tragedy, despite the weight of my sodden conscience over our economic divide, the occasional episode comes along to sweep my mind away, albeit temporarily.

I entered the Gandhi Smriti, the house in which Gandhi spent his final days and that contains the courtyard in which he was assassinated, rolled my eyes and sighed. Schoolchildren. Hundreds of them. Visit a museum at the same time as them and you'll be stuck there for hours, or at least so annoyed that you skip half the sights just to avoid them. Wandering the hallways meant I had to compact myself and tiptoe past a whole line of them. Just about all the boys turned their heads as I did this and around forty of them broke off from the end of this line to start following me around. When I hit a dead end, they cornered me.

The bravest one approached me timidly.

"Picture?"

"You.... want a picture..... with me?"

Bobbleheads can't nod that fast. And he handed his cell phone/camera to a friend, and several other boys slyly jumped in too. Not just this picture, but the seven or eight more that I was asked to take before I finally had to tear myself away. Back at Humayan's Tomb, the sight that blew me away to the point of public profanity, I encountered another battalion of schoolchildren, this one from an all-girls high school. I left the main chamber where the symbolic coffin lies to go into a side room that, it turns out, held nothing. I heard a clamor behind me and saw that fifty or so of these girls had evidently picked me over the dead famous emperor. The echoes of their giggling and catcalls filled the monument with a deafening roar that brought their less-than-amused old chaperon running, waving her walking stick in anger. Since this is a long post to write, I just took a break to grab dinner at a local open kitchen. The nine year old boy that brought me the menu stared at me for the next ten minutes, and shyly scurried away gushing when I simply asked his name. All this to say, even if it's for a few seconds, even if it's across the world, and for reasons I don't totally understand... it's pretty fun to be a rock star.

And it's not just these moments of flattery. Though I talked to them only briefly in my two day stay (been busy with sightseeing, errands, photo albums, blog posts), I could feel such incredible warmth from Arvind and Shoma, the 40-something couple that ran my small homestay in Jaipur. A genuine desire to know me and hear about what I had to say, what I had to talk about, as well as the others staying within these four rooms. I didn't just sign the typical guestbook with the necessary info. Shoma asked me tonight to write in a personal notebook, where travelers leave their well-wishes, the url's for their blogs so she can follow them long after they've stopped walking down the alleyway from Purohit Ji Ka Bagh, thru the gate and up the steps to the Explorer's Nest. The two of them have never been out of India, but in this way, yeah. They have.

Of everywhere that I told people I was traveling to on this trip, India was the place that the most people were jealous of, that they were dying to go. That confused me, I didn't understand the common thread, why that stood out over 29 other countries, especially when it wasn't even in my top five. My best guess is that it's the lure of the beautiful unknown. For all the current world tension the divide has created, the roots of Islam and Christianity aren't that different from an outsider's perspective. Hinduism on the other hand is magnificently rich, infinitely fascinating, and a total world apart from the ideology that most of the West is used to. The people that come back from India raving about the land, having experienced something profound, my guess is they've left their known world completely behind, they've wandered around this country giving it the depth and attention that it deserves, but doesn't often receive. Not the six days I can spare, not the two weeks you can get off work, but at least two or three months. You cannot attain any desired epiphanies by visitation, but by immersion. Life can only truly change via doorways, not windows.I am in India long enough only to be an observer, not a participant. The cows wandering the streets still attract my attention and even though they're just about everywhere, I get a jolt with each swastika I see, even if they only still wish its ancient, original meaning of good luck and protection. The doorway I'm walking through is not India, but rather the column up top to your right. My overall journey is the opportunity for change, something long enough that it has the capacity to shape my life. My season of wet cement. Some of the first words I wrote on this blog were that I preferred microcosms, not mosaics. I didn't realize that one can breed the other. Moscow, Manchester, Omaha Beach, Valencia, the Isle of Skye, Berlin, Amman... so many others, and now Delhi, Jaipur, Agra. For now crystal shards still settling, shifting in the fluid mortar. Still unsure of the final pattern. Not ready for display yet.

Soon.


Delhi:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2110582&id=35804394&l=c2834e4f17

Jaipur and Agra:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2111247&id=35804394&l=8899150aaf

Two weeks notice.

I was eight years old when I met my father.

He was not a bad father, not intentionally, not when we were speaking. This assessment may be cutting him a bit too much slack, a halo effect in reverse, but I can only assume that learning how to be a father for the first time at age 57 is not easy. Certainly not when your arthritis keeps you from playing basketball with your son with any agility. Certainly not when you're playing a video game for the first time with a child that is half a century younger than you.

To clarify, "when we were speaking" means from that day in 1992 to late 2002. We bonded mostly over court-ordered weekend visits, Dodgers, Kings, and Lakers games, buckets of balls at the Wilshire Country Club's driving range and cups of gazpacho in its clubhouse. These things I remember clearly. But for the life of me, I can't recall just what the fuck happened to start our silence, the one that would rob us both of seven years of one another's lives.

That's actually a lie. I remember quite clearly what it was, but not why it had to happen that way. The child of parents who are no longer together, I lived holidays twice. In this decisive case, it was Thanksgiving, and I was 19. I'd just been initiated in to my fraternity, just filmed my TV-MA episode of Dismissed, and to say I was cocky as shit would be a complimentary understatement. I spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving at the house of one of my mother's friends, got wasted before the meal began with that friend's son, and drank a few more glasses of wine at the table on top of that. Then I got behind the wheel of my car, maybe triple the legal limit, and drove drunk at 19 years old the 45 minutes up to Thousand Oaks on one of the biggest police checkpoint days of the year. I did this idiotic act so I could see my father on Thanksgiving. I got there at 7pm. He had already gone to sleep. And this was despite the fact that I'd phoned when I was leaving so they'd know I was on my way. That's when I stopped talking to him. The five minutes I saw of him early the next morning before I had to rush back to my Black Friday retail job in Orange County would be the last that I cared to see of him. But considering that Christmas came and went without so much as a phone call from him, the decision was evidently mutual. That was the part that I never understood. Never will. But now I no longer care to.

For six and a half years after that day, I couldn't think of any positive memory of my father. I didn't want to. It was easier to vilify him, to listen to "Styrofoam Plates" by Death Cab for Cutie, convinced that that song epitomized how I would feel when I found out he died. This morning is when that moment happened. And sitting in my hostel in Delhi, I just re-read the lyrics to that song and nearly threw up, literally sick that I had let such vitriol ferment within me for so long.

Those six and a half years of silence ended not today with his death, but in June, less than two months before I left for this trip. But the truce that ended it was asymmetrical, because it had come too late. When I walked in to the convalescent center that was now my father's home he had been wheelchair-ridden for over a year by a series of strokes. His extreme dementia (think severe Alzheimer's meets cerebral palsy) left him incapable of speech other than gurgles and moans, left his body folded in upon itself like melted plastic, left a once athletic and later a stout 260 pound frame withered down to about 140. His femurs and forearms were like Q-tips, and on my first visit his own sneeze prompted a look of absolute terror in his eyes. That was how deteriorated his mind was at times.

It took until my third visit to tell him that I forgave him. I refused to say it unless I meant it, until I was sure that I did so out of true understanding and not simple pity. But I did forgive him. Because he was no longer an abstract to me. No longer hubris personified..... he was just human all along. He fucked up, a lot, and put my mother through deep, deep shit, multiple times. It was out of selfishness, but more importantly it was out of weakness. And I saw that in some ways, he was frail long before the illnesses overcame him. But that's what human beings are. We are weak, we give in to temptation and our id, and put ourselves in situations where we'll act first and just get around to worrying about the consequences later. But if we expect forgiveness from others, we too have to be forgiving.

My entire life, it's been really difficult for me to accept that I was one of those worry-about-it-later consequences. That in a world where fidelity is universal and lovers do not lie to one another- that in this perfect world, I would never have been born. I still don't think that I have dealt with this properly, because I have a recurring recklessness borne of the inescapable feeling that since I shouldn't be here to begin with, I'm really just playing with house money. That's a big reason why I'm typing this from a hostel in Delhi and not from my old apartment in Los Angeles. And ironically why I'll be over here, missing his funeral, just as I missed the funeral of my grandmother (his mother) while I was in Australia. The compass needle and the damage done.

For years I always pictured myself absent from my father's funeral. But never once did I think that I'd want to be there and simply could not. I feel..... I can't describe how I really feel, awful is too weak of a word (maybe abhorred?)..... that I won't be there. But not because I needed to say goodbye. I was able to do that before I left, and to achieve the inner peace and closure that had eluded me for so many years. And the email my cousin sent me that announced my father's death came not as a surprise. Really it was two weeks overdue.

The last post I wrote, the letter to my friends, was in a very different tone than any of my other entries. This was because of the reasons that I expressed within it, and because it came at a time in my travels when the road felt interminable, when I saw myself standing on a bridge so long that I could not see either bank, neither its beginning nor its end. The bridge itself was the only thing that existed, and land on either side was merely an assumption and not a certainty. But the bigger reason that I wrote it, the one I didn't talk about, was that I had had several nightmares that morning. Ones extremely vivid, like negative exposures of the one in Berlin, and they affected me to a point that I was convinced that they weren't just dreams. For reasons of sanity I'm hesitant to say that I was seeing the future, but I awoke convinced I was seeing reality that just had not happened yet.

The last dream, the one that woke me up. I was in a car with someone that I used to feel was maybe my best friend in the world, but who now I haven't spoken to in months. We arrived at the care center to visit my father, and were sent to a theatre that served as a waiting room where an old film was playing. I left her there to find out what was taking so long, left to find where my father was. As I wandered corridors, a man in a Fedora came with me, his face covered in the shadow his hat cast, his footsteps silent though I didn't realize why. We wandered around and around, hallways in basements that never existed, corridors that led to identical corridors. I tried to go back to the theatre to find my friend but got just as lost, and I realized that I would never see that person again, that our bond was lost for good. I turned back to my initial task, an increasing desperation to see my father, and all this time the man glided along with me. I turned to him for help and saw the face of my father as he raised his head. I alone spoke.

"You're here. That means you're not with your body."

His face was placid, but vitally it was less than solid. His feet hovered above the ground.

"It's because you're already---"

I woke.

Miguel wrote me the email less than two weeks later. And while I wasn't looking for it constantly during that time, I knew without a doubt that my return flight to Los Angeles on December 14 would be too late.

"You should stay a full week [before coming back to Pennsylvania], that way you can see your father a few times," my mother wrote as we planned out the itinerary of my return. I realized oddly that that had never even crossed my mind. How can something be a priority when it's not even an option?

I won't get to say goodbye at his funeral. But I said before that wasn't the part that upset me. Because I had already said goodbye, more in fact.

On my next to last visit with my father, I was extremely choked up. Having already spoken my forgiveness, there was one thing I hadn't expressed yet. One more resurrected truth left to tell. Which is silly really, because anything you say to a person in a vegetative state is really for your own benefit, not theirs. We'd made eye contact a few times over the course of my series of visits, and one was prolonged enough that I thought he might have started to recognize me. This had been the highlight in the rekindling of relations with my father so far. The best I could bring myself to hope for. For my own benefit, for the final release of my burden, I knew I had one more thing to say. Holding his hand, I leaned over and kissed his sunken, overly smooth cheek, and then whispered slowly in his ear, enunciating each syllable.

"Dad. It's Joshua. It's your son. Joshua. I want you to know, Dad...... I love you. It's Joshua. Your son. I love you, Dad."

It was on the first time that I said it, not the second, that the limp hand I was holding seized firm, with a ghost strength that had not existed in years. It gripped mine for ten seconds, more, I didn't think to count. And as I moved away from his ear and sat back down, our eyes held contact again for a short while before he returned to staring in to the nothingness of the calm-colored wall.

Saying goodbye to my father before I left was possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Because I wasn't just saying it for my own sake anymore. I can't be at his funeral on Monday, which tears me up to think about. But I can always live with the knowledge that the peace of mind I feel, the absence of animosity... it's mutual. I didn't just get to say the goodbye that I wanted to say to my father. We were able to say goodbye to each other.


Kenneth William Woods
10.24.1934 - 11.11.2009


---------

(post-script) This is probably too much information for a lot of people, but writing this has been extremely cathartic. I will not be at my father's funeral to give his eulogy, so in this way at least I feel I'm paying tribute to him in another way. Admittedly it is not a glowing one, but an honest one (and yes, the dream happened, exactly as I wrote it). Another reason to write this is that a few people have given me the honor of telling me that my writing has helped them. In trying to be open about something so personal, I hope that maybe others who relate to a bit of my emotions or my experience in this entry can be helped a bit by it.

Regarding sharks in motion.

"I put my money where my mouth was
Until I couldn't breathe through my nose.
And now I'm staring at the floor,
Where my second life just ended,
Where I lost not one but two friends." - Taking Back Sunday

"Everything beautiful comes from pain." - Chuck Palahniuk


The irony is that Halloween is my favorite holiday.


Dear j.a.c.c.k.,

How are things back home?

I wasn't sure until this week whether or not I was doing this all wrong. You see, most of the other backpackers I've met so far, they've given me skeptical looks when I've told them how many countries I've been to on this trip. That with an itinerary at that break-neck of a pace, I couldn't truly be appreciating where I was. That by trying to be everywhere, I was really nowhere. And yeah, there are places I wish I could have stayed longer, sparks of friendship that I wish I could have explored more to see what sort of fire it would grow in to. I'm not one for second-guessing myself, which is strange considering how I have a tendency to jump first, look down second. So when I do, that means it's something that's truly tearing me up. Remember that really brief conversation we had when you were helping me pack up my apartment?

Joshua: "Am I making the right dec-"
j.a.c.c.K.: "Yes. ...Yes."

It took me twenty seconds just to build myself up to ask the question, and you wouldn't even let me finish it. The confidence of your response carried me. When I needed you most, you were there, even if it meant choking back your own emotions at watching me leave. And when we refused to say goodbye, instead saying a casual See you later to keep our emotions from flowing over. To an observer that might sound like denial. But really it was an unspoken promise. That this separation between us wasn't going to be as drastic as it appeared.

Sorry, I got sidetracked there, I'm bad at writing letters from the road. The thing about whether or not I should have been spending a few weeks as opposed to a few days in each country..... Well, I'm in Istanbul right now, had to spend a full week here waiting for my camera to get fixed. It was so frustrating not having the camera, I realized how dependent upon it that I've grown. It's not just a way for me to relate back to you what I'm seeing, it's more of an outlet for my creativity, and taking pictures almost feels like a voluntary occupation that infuses my hours, days, weeks, months, with a richer meaning. So my first four days here, I didn't have a camera, which means I postponed all the sightseeing options, and couldn't do much of anything, and something I didn't want to happen happened. Reality caught up with me.

By switching cities or countries every three or so days, I've been so distracted/enthralled/overwhelmed by everything new to take in, that I haven't worried about my dwindling bank account, the friends who have repeatedly let my facebook messages go unanswered, the economy/housing/job market that I'll be returning to and attempting to conquer in New York. But when those distractions went absent, those realities took over. They didn't creep in, they flew, and with devastating impact.

And that's when I remembered, j.a.C.c.k., that's when I remembered something that I think we learned back in Mr. Sanga's biology class back in sophomore year at Providence. The thing about sharks in motion. That sharks, except for the scavenging bottom-feeders, they have to always keep moving. That the second they stop, they begin to sink.

It wasn't just those looming concerns that caught up with me, it was my health too. I have stomach parasites again, and these are crippling, way worse than the ones I got in Russia. It hurts to stand, let alone walk, and I've doubled over from them more times than I can count. On top of that, and all the symptoms those entail, I also have a terrible cold (I'm hoping it's just a cold), probably because it's been pouring down rain in Istanbul for a week straight. So because of these I feel nauseated all day, and can only eat a few bites of something twice a day at most, and I can feel the weight-loss creeping in. But like a mantra, I've told myself "Remember Naples, remember Naples, remember Naples, remember...."* and that's gotten me through. These sound like complaints, or cries for sympathy, but they're not. I've been trying to relate to everyone else my experiences, and right now I'm just relating to you the lesser-known realities of life on the road. The side-effects they don't advertise. The loneliness of the long-distance runner.

On the night before I left, I told someone else that while I knew that I was doing the right thing, I really underestimated the negatives. I couldn't really gauge the difficulty of saying goodbye until the words were out of my mouth. Until the car doors were shut, and Justin and I were on the 134 East headed for Moab. I know I quoted Conor Oberst back then, and now a different line of his comes to mind. "I haven't been gone very long, but it feels like a lifetime." God it feels like forever ago, j.A.c.c.k., it feels like forever ago that we drove around Hollywood at magic hour with our cameras, photographing murals and neon marquees. It feels like so long because so much has happened, so much has changed. I still feel like I underestimated the negatives, even more so now actually.

I haven't heard the voice of anyone from back home in months. This is because Skype doesn't work on my laptop, and my phone inexplicably doesn't work overseas. For a while there I still carried it around as an extremely-underachieving watch. But then I realized that was silly. With the exception of a train/plane every once in a while, I never have to be anywhere at a certain time. It's weird to live a life in which you can leave time behind you. That with the exception of growing older a day at a time, it doesn't really apply to you anymore. I'm so far removed from this basic human concept that it took me until a few days ago to realize that it was October. I mean clearly I knew that it was October, but I forgot that it was October.... This is my favorite time of year, j.a.c.C.k. When the leaves change color and even in California the sky is grey, the wind howling, and I would hole up inside and watch the horror movies that we both love. I forgot that I was missing this. But sitting around now in Istanbul, it came back, and I was struck by an amalgam equal parts nostalgic and homesick.

So you need to know that you've helped me so much, J.a.c.c.k., maybe without even knowing it. Your emails make me feel like I'm still connected, still missed, and even if you're only reporting anecdotes of sitting on your couch sipping warm cocktails made with Ralph's brand soda, they mean the world to me.

I have at most a month and a half left on this journey... this is something of a two-thirds marker. Literally one hundred days of solitude. I'm not looking forward to this trip ending, but I will be inexpressibly grateful to see you again.

I feel like I've learned something in every city I've been to. And while it has nothing to do with the city itself, other than it was the setting for the perfect storm of the downsides of my travels, I will always remember that it was in Istanbul that I learned that sometimes "road" is a four-letter word as well.

I miss you, J.A.C.C.K.. And I love you.

Joshua



*if you don't understand this, please see my earlier post "Primi piatti: un chien napolitano"

One-way conversation.

Safwan - "I used to play football. Professional. I was really good."
Joshua - "Really? What made you stop?"
Safwan - (silence and a lengthy pause as he shakes his head) "There's no place for that here, I can't in my life. 24/7 in Cairo you have to concentrate just to stay alive."


A Richter scale works by quantifying how devastating a movement is, increasing by one hundred percent with each number behind the decimal point, and one thousand percent with each number before it, so that an earthquake measuring a 7.0 is ten times more violent than one that is 6.0, which in turn is also ten times more than a 5.0..... I'm not going to arbitrarily enumerate the difference in danger and trauma between Cairo and all my previous travels, but the very fact that I'm contemplating how things grow exponentially worse in such a short span should be an indication in itself.

This is my twentieth country. It is also the first in which I have not been mistaken at least once for a local by another local, who usually have stopped to ask me directions or about a train schedule. This ability to blend in has been pretty crucial since I've avoided being an obvious target for would-be hustlers in Barcelona or corrupt policemen in Russia. Entering the Middle East and then Asia, this is a luxury I am sacrificing. But I didn't realize the scale of this sacrifice until Friday.

My plane arrived at the Cairo airport at 2 a.m., and the driver my hostel was supposed to send for me with one of those cute little signs with my name failed to show. So as I gameplanned outside on just how the fuck to cheaply make it to an address in a city with virtually no public transportation in the dead of night, I was approached by scores of cab drivers trying to convince me to come with them. Except for one. That wasn't what he wanted.

"Why white?"
"......What?"
Far more aggressive this time around. "WHY you're white?""
"Why am I white??"
He nodded, his eyes seething further as he waited. I knew the answer he wanted to hear... I'd already been called "Obama" several times by the customs agent who stamped my visa.
"Because my family is white."

And I gave in to the reality of the situation, that standing around in anger and exasperation wasn't going to make my driver appear and I had to get out of here, so I booked a cab with two middlemen for 10 Euros. This price was settled upon and confirmed 3 times, and 30 seconds later it mysteriously jumped to 15 because of a phantom airport toll, and then finally back again to 10 when they were reluctantly forced to admit I'm not a complete moron and wouldn't pay that.

I didn't reach my hostel til 4 in the morning. That's a 2 hour ride from the airport, not because of distance or traffic, but because the driver didn't know where the address was. It's one of the main streets in downtown Cairo. Forty minutes earlier, he pulled over on a street in which thirty men were hanging outside talking animatedly. Thirty mouths that fell silent, thirty heads that turned to follow my face in the passenger window.

"Here."
"This isn't the right place," without hesitation.
"Yes. Here. Hotel."

It was the wrong street, street number, and name. It was also 8 km away from where I was actually staying, though I didn't know he was that far off at the time. The same stoic tenacity that had dropped the price back to 10 Euros made him restart the car. In all, he pulled over about fifteen times to ask for directions. Five of those times, he silently got out of the car, turning it off and taking the keys with him, never saying where he was going. There's a sickening feeling you get, like your stomach being pulled instantly and repeatedly backwards, when you realize that your well-being is being rented back to you. That the only reason you're still somewhat safe is because you didn't pay your driver in advance. That the price of this safety, your well-being, at times it amounts to as little as eight dollars. Safwan was my driver I hired for all day Friday; I had a guide take me around the Pyramids, and another on my overnight trip to the White Desert, and with them I felt this at least a dozen times in three days.

On Saturday afternoon I sat in Sam's living room. Sam is a middle-aged Egyptian man that runs a small tour company for the White Desert, five hours outside of Cairo. On this day, Sam was playing host only to myself and a Brazilian girl named Fernanda. And the "all-meals provided for" meant that his wife was making us lunch, which I actually preferred and appreciated over a restaurant or a kebab stand. Sam was nice to me until he asked where I was from, and from then on all questions were directed solely at Fernanda, all my asked questions went unanswered, and hung heavily, awkwardly in the air of the small room. He turned on the news and expressed his disgust with America before turning back to an Austin Powers movie. Before putting on his Tommy Hilfiger sandals. Before watching his son ride a Superman bicycle. A disgust far more convenient than it is consistent.

My tour guide for the pyramids repeated the same jokes for tourists as other guides along the route, as Sam would with his driver two days later. Verbatim. They must have been the same jokes used for a half century. I heard maybe three or four total facts about the pyramids, and then several times about how the Sphinx was his great-great-great-great grandfather. About how the camel's name was Mickey Mouse... Charlie Brown. I tried to get to know each driver, each guide, wanted their perspective on Egyptian history, or what else their society has been doing for the past three-thousand years, and got flat-out nowhere. I got cartoon answers to human questions. I don't think I'm remotely like the negative American stereotype, but they made no attempt to see me as anything other than that. It takes so much more effort to be close-minded, to ignore facts when they are in front of your eyes, and that was the only effort that they were willing to put forth.

I had a very beautiful four hours on Saturday night. I was camping in the middle of the picturesque White Desert, the sky filled with a continent of illumination, and I sat silently next to Fernanda and our driver/guide Ahmed after having had a bare bones traditional Egyptian meal and the three of us smoked shisha. I sat thinking about my life, and what the moment I was living at that second meant in the overall tapestry of it, the sky above me the perfect metaphor for my memories. A million pockets of light that create something phenomenal when you look at the whole. This is what I wanted to write about in discussing Egypt. But it would be a lie. This is not what defined my experience, but what salvaged it from uninterrupted disaster.

The freeway from Giza to Cairo. DJ Tiesto blaring on the stereo, Safwan weaved us through highway traffic at 180 km an hour in a car that wouldn't turn over twenty minutes earlier. It's not that cars in Egypt don't stay in their own lane, it's that they're never there to begin with. Cars will stack five-wide across a three lane freeway, until they hit the next batch in front which is in a totally different random alignment. A girl sat side-saddle on a motor-bike behind her helmeted father, her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead, her face visible as she wore no helmet, emotionless, like she was waiting in class for a lesson to begin. She doesn't hold on to the bike with her hands despite its frequent tilting and darting, doesn't cough despite the visibly ashen cloud of pollution that straddles Cairo, its roads in particular.

The honking isn't merely never-ending, it literally never lightens. On a six hour bus ride from the White Desert back to Cairo, our driver honked at not just every single car he passed up, but he would drive on the wrong side of the road, honking at any cars coming towards him who were in the correct lane. Over a span of six hours, this had to have been over 600 cars. The driver from the airport honked at parked cars. Not double-parked cars. Ordinary. Parked. Cars.

I found Egypt disturbing. And not because it is very unsafe for its residents, and incredibly unsafe for traveling Americans (though it absolutely is), but because of its common theme of disregard. Having been, I almost couldn't care less about the photos I took of the pyramids, since that's not the real Egypt. It's a coincidence, a luck of the draw of history. When you visit, you understand that those are not what defines the Egyptian culture because it is not what they embrace or even attempt to revere. They have an archeological museum with a ton of priceless artifacts from antiquity. In this museum, maybe one in thirty of these is labeled. Visitors have no clue what they're looking at, or why it is important. There are guards, but they sit idly by as children and visitors handle the objects, play with them, eroding them down, smoothing out the hieroglyphics and distorting them with the oil all human hands emit. When you get to the base of the pyramids themselves, you see heaps of people climbing all over them. The last remaining wonder of the ancient world, and 21st century sneakers chip off ends of giant bricks that were put in place thousands and thousands of years ago. It's a disregard for their own history in the museums, for their own safety and for their peers on the road, for common sense and for the basic order necessary to function as a society.

Egypt will be defined in my memory by what I was unable to photograph. It was too unsafe for me to walk around alone at all, let alone with an obviously expensive camera on clear display. So there are images I failed to capture, but also moments not applicable to film or memory cards. Without analysis, without narrative, without pretext, without embellishment, here is what I am bringing back.
Three men bathe a horse in the Nile a mile or so away from where this water is collected for the city's drinking water. A woman walks up and down the aisle of my bus trying to sell the passengers those individual packets of tissues... This is how she believes she will sustain a living. Safwan and I pass a bus with a plywood exterior. A carpet weaving school I walked through, and the boy of five who knew no English but after I took a picture of what he was working on rubbed his thumb together with the tips of his index and middle fingers: the universal sign for demanding money. I walk back on to the bus after a snack stop, and a woman in a full burka snatches her child away from the aisle so that she doesn't touch me (fear? disgust?). The hindquarters of camels scarred from whipping. As we wait for lunch to be served, Sam's son races in to the kitchen to shout something at his mother who is making the meal, and the boy and his parents all laugh at this.... Sam finds it so funny that he translates it for me and Fernanda... He says "Mom, you dog, hurry up with the food!!" And they all laugh more.

I realize in retrospect that I wanted the impossible from Egypt. In a world in which two societies are diametrically opposed, I wanted to achieve, in at least my few days of experience there, a sense of common ground, seeds for hope. Clearly I failed. But I am astounded at how complete my failure was. One last image, but one that I will comment briefly on. On the way back on the bus to Cairo from the White Desert, a couple in their late twenties (I think, she was in a full burka and veil, only her eyes were visible) sit with their two very young children (1 and maybe 2 1/2 at the most) in their laps. The boy is the older one, and when he smiles you see that his recently formed and still growing teeth are already brown with rot, the sides curved in some places from this decay, like the edges of a block of Swiss cheese. A black spot I mistake for a mole is right near his eye, and I stare for almost a minute and wonder if the family will ever have it removed surgically. And the spot moves, because it is a fly. It crawls closer to the boy's eye, and another lands on his lip and scurries in that creepy way that flies do, to the under side of the lip, the interior of the boy's mouth. This whole time, the father is looking at the boy, smiling with a fatherly pride. Yet he never once moves to swat away the flies, even though they are crawling on the boy's eyes and into his mouth. He clearly loves the boy, but at no point does the instinct to swat the flies away ever kick in. Can we be that different? Actions I thought intrinsic, ones so obvious as to be unconscious, even these don't seem to be mutual.

I don't think that my experience is unique, but I also know that it can't be the only one. I met two very nice people that worked at my hostel, ones I was able to speak with only briefly, and maybe my time would have been different if I got to speak more with them, or if I looked a bit less Western. I'm sure there are American backpackers (we're not counting the security of tour groups) that have been to Egypt and loved it, ones that did not experience the discrimination that I did. But it is part of this journey, and an experience that is important, if not pleasant. I now know firsthand what total shit it is to be treated this way, and especially for no true reason that an individual can control.

I included the conversation at the top between Safwan and myself because I thought it set a pretty accurate tone for Cairo and my experience, and also because it was the only real conversation I had in my three days there. The honesty of his answer was the one time I didn't feel like an American, the one time anyone was willing to let me be just human.



Egypt:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2108388&id=35804394&l=f2e5e02169

Dessert: study abroad.

John Keats died on Friday. This happened in 1821, in Rome, in a house at the foot of the Spanish Steps. If you're not familiar with Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century traditions, in a time before airplanes, high-speed international rail, and mass communication, Rome sounds like a strange place for an English poet to die.

To be taken seriously as an artist, it was necessary at the time to spend part of your education in Italy, to study in the country that was the cradle and final resting place of so many talented artists, their canons of work, and the fertile period of the Renaissance. If you think this tradition is presumptuous, that's because it is. But it's also rooted in accuracy. It is not that Italy is an oracle, a magical font of inspiration or skill that visitors can wash down with their Chianti. Not artistry by osmosis. Rather, something happens when you look at incredible pieces of art, and I've never felt it more prominently than I did in Italy. A person drawn to creativity is forever changed when he looks at the folds of Michelangelo's gentle marble, sees in his Pieta and Moses the frozen but living emotions that have existed for centuries, thoughts turned granite..... or as that person's eyes wander the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where da Vinci's Last Supper commands the vacuous space. He spent four years painting it, and every hour of that effort is apparent to this day. In these moments, the work catalyzes a desire in you, not the same as but also not entirely unlike competition, and you discover that in the highest strata of art, the art itself becomes the muse. You appreciate the mastery just like everyone else, perhaps more so, as you dissect what it is within the work that elicits that reaction, what somehow turns splendor in to a glorious vise. You stand literally at the feet of the masters, and pledge in this moment of awakening to strive for more in your own work because, having seen theirs, you know what vast heights you are capable of reaching.

It is limiting and misleading to portray Italy as merely some campus for the university of the world. All art aside, just breathing in the vistas of Tuscany, the subtle brownscale spectrum of Siena, or watching the sunset over the perfectly-sized city of Florence, (and I stayed urban, so I can't speak of the beauty of Cinque Terre, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily, Sardinia).... these visions transcend your eyes, permeate your senses and convince you momentarily that surely you must have more than five, for nothing could be this vivid otherwise.

For many of my friends, Italy has been the apex of their travels. If I don't completely share the extent of their enthusiasm, I think I can understand it. There are more beautiful places than this, but there is a deep level of our world more palpable in Italy than anywhere else. Over 2,800 years of cultural passion has made the devotion of artists and architects and that reservoir of majesty tangible, attainable for us, and it has made the country feel more like a conduit. A gateway to the days when God still dreamed.

The sunset I watched on my last night in Florence came on the day that is most likely the exact halfway point in my travels. A symbolism not lost on me. And today, my last day in Europe, the official day when visits to cathedrals become visits to mosques and temples, is the one on which I close the chapter on my European vacation, and thus leave behind my comfort zone for something much dearer. Something that, after my experience in Italy, honestly feels a little like a graduation.


The rest of Italy: Venice, Milan, Pisa, and Siena-
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105923&id=35804394&l=b880dba2a2