We got into Punta del Diablo so late that we couldn’t really tell what the town was like, or even how close to the ocean we were. The next morning I woke up at 6am with the sun and when I stepped outside this man was walking up with his thermos, cigarette and the ubiquitous yerba mate.
To drink it, the Uruguayans fill a gourd with the tea leaves, then pour in hot water. They drink it through a special straw that has a filtered end so it can draw in the tea without taking the leaves. When the tea is gone they pour in more water.
When I saw him I asked if I could take a picture and only really snapped this one shot, the first shot I took in Diablo, and the best.
If anyone from Punta del Diablo is reading this and knows this man, I’d love if you would contact me.
Bert Teunissen photographs people in their own kitchens and dining rooms in a series called “Domestic Landscapes.” The photos are gorgeous, shot inside by natural light, but they’re also uncomfortably intimate like we’re looking at the inside of a person’s skin, not just their kitchen. Most of the series are shot in Europe (it’s broken up by country on the website) but there’s one series from Japan during which I kept asking, “Why is he shooting these people at a restaurant?” I guess I’ve never been in a Japanese home….
I’ve spent a lot of time in people’s houses as well, but in the US I rarely come across a home that exhibits a personality’s corners the way Teunissen’s European homes do.
The other website I’ve been loving is the David Lynch Interview Project. The filmmaker has sent a team across the US to conduct four-minute interviews with locals and they talk on a variety of subjects, but often about themselves.
While window washing I’ve had a lot of four-minute conversations and though I don’t think such passing glances can give a full picture of a person’s life, it tells you what they want you to hear in four minutes.
I was in India during the tsunami. I was eating dinner with a friend in a restaurant that sat at the top of the beach and we started hearing waves, the Arabian Sea, which was a surprise because it was low tide. People were shouting and I ran to the front of the restaurant to see Indian men knee-deep in water, grabbing chairs and tables as they drifted away. I thought, “How desperate they must be to think about chairs and tables when this is happening!”
The people in town were spooked because they’d never seen the ocean act like this. (read more)
It had been reliable as the moon until this point, then suddenly it hits the front of the restaurants during low tide. People fled. I ran to my hut to grab my valuables then went inland. Palolem is a one-road town from which one other road takes people away from the beach and back to the rest of India. That one road was packed with traffic and we walked past rickshaws and cars, past policemen who were uselessly directing traffic. I asked one policeman if he knew what had happened and he did: There was a big wave at 8:30pm or so, but the biggest was yet to come at Midnight. Of course he knew nothing, but the police wanted to appear to be in control, so they made up a story and stuck to it.
We went to the closest building that looked safe: a 3-storey hotel made of concrete. The owner was sending people to the roof. There were about 8 Westerners up there, one of whom had a cell phone, so I texted Azure that I had evacuated the beach and was now safe on top of a hotel. I didn’t know the tsunami was a big deal at that point (I didn’t even know it was a tsunami), but I assumed that it could potentially be. There was a pair of old hippy ladies on the roof, the kind of people who had come to India in the 70s and never left. One had worked for Mother Theresa, she had a puppy with her. We slept restlessly under the stars that night, and at some point I was prodded awake and led downstairs. The owner let us sleep on his floor – about 6 of us and a puppy – but it was more comfortable than the roof.
The next morning I went back to the beach and saw that the damage wasn’t too bad – there were a couple restaurants that had been hit hard, but the restaurants on Palolem weren’t much more than a collection of chairs & tables in front of a kitchen. Other than that the beach just looked dirty. The soft sand above high-tide wasn’t so pretty anymore. Since the initial wave, the sea retreated, then pushed back high onto the beach, then retreated, over and over again as if it were sloshing back and forth between India and Arabia.
Over the next few days the restaurants with TVs were packed, CNN or BBC giving us the details: 13,000 dead… 30,000 dead… 50,000 dead… 80,000 dead… and with each number was the feeling of wanting to wrap small around your aching heart but having to face a swell of souls so towering and powerful you couldn’t see the whole thing in one glance. Who can understand 100,000? And when I’d had enough of the TV I would walk out of the restaurant toward my hut and, for god’s sake, be approached by men on the beach wanting to sell me something: Jewelry, scooters, a room at their huts, a nice fish dinner. There were 100,000 freshly dead people, many of whom were their countrymen, and they took no break from trying to profit. At the time I was so angry, I glared intensely at these men through my red eyes and tears on my cheeks, hoping they would feel it, hoping they’d take a break and mourn. Still I don’t understand why they were selling immediately after such a tragedy. Maybe it’s only in our culture (or my mind) that profit & sincerity are mutually exclusive.
Later, I heard this story: On the day before the tsunami – Christmas Day – an old widow finally came out of her house after many weeks of mourning her husband’s death. She was dressed in black and she walked down the beach with a couple people on either side of her. She looked at the Western tourists, sunbathing in revealing clothes. She looked at the Indian men trying to sell sell sell to the Westerners. She looked at the restaurants and groups of huts that crowded the beach and hogged electricity, that blocked access by Indian families who had lived there for generations, that represented the materialism and greed spread wide down the beach. She angrily pointed to the sea and said, “That water is going to come and wipe all of this away.”
There were other signs, too. Christmas night was an awful night: a full moon with dogs that were going nuts, dog fights breaking out up and down the beach. The local men were lighting off fireworks that were way too close to other people, and I got uncontrollably drunk on just two glasses of whiskey. I knew something wasn’t right, and I told my friends that I was going to bed early. I threw up all night. Not that I could have seen it coming, of course, but in retrospect, the craziest, scariest night in all my time there was by far the night before the earthquake.
I was on the beach in India on a night when tens of thousands of people died on the beach in India. I never wondered or cared why I survived, I consider it luck. But I stepped back to look at my life and made sure that I was living the way I wanted with the person I loved.
If there is a god, then why do stupid things happen to smart people?
by Mike
Azure and I have had plenty of health care encounters abroad, so I thought I’d tell some of the fun stories about how we get treated when we leave our own country.
Chipped tooth, France 2001
I chipped my tooth biting into a sandwich (yep) and called a dentist recommended by a friend. (read more)
His office was in his apartment. He had no receptionist, no assistants, just a chair and his tools in a room adjacent to the kitchen. I hadn’t asked how much it would cost, so as he worked on me I worried that I’d get ripped off.
When he finished, about 30 minutes later, he asked for “50 francs and a pint of Guinness.” That calculates to about seven dollars and a pint of Guinness. A few weeks later he came into the bar and I gave him his drink as the second half of my payment.
General badness of the body area, India 2004
For $2 the local doctor saw me right away and, after consulting, told me I should go to the private hospital. I went to the hospital and checked in with dehydration & a fever. They were going to inject me with a fever reducer, but then noticed that I was sweating. They asked if I’d taken paracetamol, and I had. That’s what they had in the syringe.
To treat the dehydration they were going to put me on an IV and rehydrate me right into the arm, but not wanting to be injected in India, I asked if there was another option. They said I could get some electrolyte packets and mix with water (Gatorade, essentially). They didn’t ask me to pay since they ended up not treating me (in the US the price of a consultation like this is enough to dissuade someone from seeking treatment).
Here in the US, when we go to the doctor we want SOME kind of evidence that we’re being heard & treated, so they’ll prescribe us some pills. Apparently in India their preferred consolation is an injection – that’s why they were going to give me two injections of treatments I could take orally.
Ear infection, France 2005
I waited in the doctor’s office in Chateau Neuf de Pape for about 2 hours before finally being seen as a drop-in. The doctor spoke to me in English even though I tried to speak in French – he wanted to make me more comfortable. He prescribed me a $10 course of antibiotics and charged me $10 for the visit. Cured like pork.
Broken teeth, Thailand 2006
It’s a crazy story, but the long & short of it is that I chipped a tooth (the picture above) and the dentist saw me the same day. I had the tooth fixed and three cavities filled, then a teeth cleaning. It was around $30. The side-note to this story is that, once again, I didn’t want to get an injection, so I underwent all this tooth fixing without any Novocain, only Azure’s hand to squeeze.
Fake rabies, Thailand 2006
Azure thought she might have rabies because a friendly dog licked her on the elbow, so we went to this stunningly beautiful hospital in Bangkok. It looked like what I imagine a 5-star hotel looks like. After an hour wait (again as drop-ins) we were taken back to a specialist for this type of fake disease. She was a great doctor – understanding and patient. Azure would be ok and we payed $15 for the peace of mind.
It was light at 4am because we were so far north and I laid on the couch where I woke and watched the men get ready to go fishing. For a few minutes I pretended I was doing serious independent travel and imagined describing the scene in my dispatches home: “These men are obsessed with coffee. They drink it every morning, at least two cups, and then bring a thermos with them on the boat. When they run out of coffee on the boat everyone crashes and takes turns napping on the narrow benches. They play cards late into the night and laugh constantly and have dedicated their lives to fish.”
that they spoke some exotic, fucked up language like Portuguese, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but my imagination was burdened by my relationship with my dad, by my friendship with Michael & his dad Mark, by old memories of my dad’s friend Fred. The four of them shuffled around the room reaching for coffee cups as they pulled on their jackets and talked about fish. I could understand every word.
We walked up the bank of the Situk river occasionally hollering, “No bears!” so that we wouldn’t surprise a grizzly who might be snacking around the corner. We cut down to a sand bar on the river. Michael and Mark headed into the river, up to their waists, watching sockeye weave between branches and splash under trees. They cast, let the lure bounce on the bottom with the current and slowly reeled it in, hopefully right across the nose of a fish.
From the bank we heard eagle chatter echo down through the woods and onto the river and we pointed quietly, but excitedly, when others glided overhead. A pair of chatty eagles crossed the river upstream from us then drifted downstream until they landed on an evergreen branch above us, still chattering. I told my dad to grab the video camera but as soon as I opened my mouth they shut up, alarmed by my voice. I felt foolish for not having established a whistle-based language before the trip to the river, but I’ll never make that mistake again.
The eagles sat on their branch watching us for half an hour, completely silent. Just watching. No worry about the future, no regret about the past. Just watching. I wish I could focus as well. The previous night I meditated on the couch and while trying to clear my mind – pieces of jokes or advice or opinions echoed in my head. Nonsensical phrases bounced around in my dad’s voice. I could understand every word. Looking up at the eagles I wondered whether chatter bounced in their minds, whether those birds – so tuned to the rhythm of the present – were enlightened. When one meditates, is he trying to be more like an eagle or less like one?
I tried to sense the rhythm of the place, again tuning out voices. The water sounded like it was just tapping the pebbles on the shore, it was a constant clicking at our feet. Other eagles chattered in the forest and there were many birds talking regularly. Every few seconds a sockeye would splash around. Deep in the glowing green woods, branches cracked.
You have to be pretty cheap to find places like this.
Y’all want to know about our finances anyway. I’ll keep it oblique so there’s still a sense of wonder and enchantment.
Az and I budgeted about 50 Euro per day for us as a couple this winter, which works out to about $1000 per person per month, not including airfare. We spend less traveling than we do at home.
Here’re 20 tips for traveling Europe on the cheap:
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Tip 1: Travel with a partner. Save on accommodation, split meals & taxis, free massages, share toothbrushes. AWWWwwww….. Stop paying strangers to hold hands while you walk through the park.
Tip 2: Learn the language. You’ll be closer to people’s hearts if you can communicate with them, and for that reason opportunities will knock. You’re also more likely understand when someone’s telling you about other/better options and it’s less daunting to get off the beaten path.
ACCOMMODATION Tips 3-10: Spend as little as possible on accommodation. Unofficially, SEVENTY FIVE per cent of our daily budget went to accommodation when we were paying for it, in fact the price for a hotel room was sometimes so high that we would start the day over budget. Yucky! By spending one night in a free place we can halve the price of a night at a hotel.
And the math doesn’t lie: spend half as much and travel for twice as long.
There are a lot of ways to do it: Wwoof, Couch Surf, Servas, Global Freeloaders, Help Exchange, rent an apartment, stay in a hostel, stay in a pension, ask for a good price for a longer stay, offer to exchange services, visit places where you know people who would welcome you in their homes….
Tip 11: Stay in a place with access to a kitchen. So you can cook instead of eating out.
Tip 12: Get away from the tourist areas. The tourist areas attract money-obsessed locals (as is the case everywhere in the world). They’re good at business which means they’d punch their own mother to make a buck. Break the cycle of violence, try to deal mostly with businesses that don’t cater to tourists.
Tip 13: Rent/buy a scooter/car/bike. The more independent you are, the more options you have. Most of the places we stayed would have been next to impossible to find without our own transportation. It’s also possible to do this and save money on transportation, especially if you can buy & sell for the same price.
Tip 14: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Develop a routine. You’ll learn what’s cheap, what’s a rip-off, where you can go for free. There will also be less urgency to experience everything before you have to run to your next destination.
Tip 15: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Moving costs money. When you arrive in a new place you might need to take a taxi, to sit in a cafe to kill time, to stay in a too-expensive hotel because you didn’t plan well, etc. There are a lot of costs associated with changing places besides just wasting your precious time.
EATING Tip 16: Buy your food from local markets. Some have the idea that it’s cheaper to eat crappy fast food, but in fact eating the absolute healthiest is the absolute cheapest: raw veggies, salad, pasta with tomato sauces, water from the tap. Our bodies & wallets love going vegetarian.
It’s hard to get past the pride of wanting to “eat bouillabaisse in Nice” just so you can say you did. But food doesn’t have to be your ego’s crutch every meal. Ordering vegetarian food in Thailand, one says, “Gin mung.” That means, “I eat like a monk.” We should eat more monk-like anyway.
Tip 17: Carry food staples with you. Have you ever been so hungry that you panicked and splurged on, say, two bottles of liquor for lunch? Oops! You’re less likely to repeat that classy performance if you have some snacks with you at all times. Our to-go bag includes jam, cheese and some fruit, olive oil, salt a bottle of water and some cutlery. To complete the meal we buy a fresh loaf of bread, some wine and a jar of Nutella, then picnic somewhere beautiful. See video below (it’s just 7 minutes of us eating in beautiful places. I won’t be offended if you skip it).
Tip 18: Eat at small local places if you do want to eat out. It’s best to ask locals where they go most often, as it’s usually a sign of good food at good prices. In France there’s almost always a plat du jour (daily special) which is the best deal.
Tip 19: Split meals. Our bodies & wallets love eating less.
Azure’s shadow against a home in Cartagena, Colombia.
Whether you’re traveling with your partner, a family member or a close friend, you GOTTA establish expectations beforehand because chances are you’ll want to tear their throat out just because they eat pudding with a Swiss army knife or something like that. Love the people you love. That’s my motto.
I wrote up these points in the first person (“Here’s what I promise I’ll do”) because I can only be responsible for my own actions & reactions.
I love you now before the trip and I’ll love you after the trip despite any disagreements we have on the trip.
To me, a successful trip means _____.
(visiting museums, relaxing, talking to a lot of people, getting drunk and sleeping on benches, renting an apartment, getting a job, finding a spouse, I’m not sure yet).
My budget for the trip is $_____ per day.
I Promise:
I promise to communicate what I want because I know you can’t read my mind.
- I’ll tell you if you’re encroaching on my personal time and space before it becomes an issue.
- I recognize that it’s ok to take regular alone time – because sometimes I don’t want to do what you want to do and vice versa. It’s important we feel we have the freedom to see what we want in a particular place. Also, intense experiences produce emotional pressure, and alone time can diffuse that.
- I’ll continue to communicate my expectations as I become aware of them.
I promise to listen when you communicate what you want because it’s easier than trying to read your mind.
- I won’t take it personally – and I’ll be patient – when you’re having a rough day.
- I’ll be conscious of your personal time and space and try to avoid encroaching on them.
- I’ll be flexible with my plans.
You want to get coffee on Monday? Somewhere quiet, I’m tired of going to Broadway. I feel like I can’t hear myself think.
Love,
Travel Partner
Is there anything else you would include, five loyal readers?
I read somewhere that to travel well you need patience, tolerance, respect and a sense of humor. To that I’d add a Rolex and rock-hard abs, just in case. But I’ve been thinking about some actual travel advice we’ve developed for ourselves over the years. Here they are. Just below. Right… now. Below. Look down there now, the next few words don’t matter. Slicey trickster temple mat. See? They didn’t matter.
Quarter Year’s self-imposed rules for long-term travel: (read more)
1) Travel slowly. Sacrifice geographic breadth for social depth — the world is unmanageably enormous as it is, so you couldn’t possibly spend quality time every place that deserves it. It’s better to spend quality time in the places that excite you at the moment and to remember that you can always go back to a town you might pass this time around.
Traveling from place to place is the best way to waste your precious time. We like to make a base and explore out from there, like tracing a flower – stay in one spot then make day-trip loops in each direction, or just stay in town for the afternoon. Come back to the same bed as many nights as possible.
2) Get off the beaten path. Get away from people who work in the tourist industry. Every time we leave the backpackers’ circuit we wonder why we were on it in the first place. (That is, unless you’re a single college student. In that case you should go flirt with all the other youths.)
3) Learn the language of the place you’re visiting. Know at least the following: I, you, please, thank you, need, want, searching for, 1-10, how much is it, where is…. These are the absolute basics for day-to-day stuff, but the better you know the language the more rewarding your experience will be. If you’re going to one country (or linguistic region), make language a priority. With all the great websites out on the internet, there’s no excuse.
4) Make learning a central theme in your activities. Otherwise you’re just a tourist.
5) Pack light. No, even lighter. You don’t need that many shirts. Things are an extension of home and the more crutches you bring from home the less exposed you will be.
6) Give yourself a purpose. Even if it’s as simple as keeping a blog or learning to surf, it will give you direction and a reason to interact. When Azure decided we needed to learn to make brocciu, we immediately came in contact with a community of interesting characters. Get involved in something – a social group or a job or hobby. Find something that excites you and start asking questions. Be curious, be brash.
“Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica” is a beautifully written chronicle of Dorothy Carrington’s time in Corsica (which spanned decades). Even after the second world war Corsican peasants were living very much in the same way their ancestors had for centuries. In the following paragraphs Carrington, visiting from London, writes about her experiences living with a Corsican peasant family near Sartene.
“… I had not understood how far my daily load of anxiety was a craving for the things every peasant knows: space, silence, and food that is not stale. [expand title=(read more)]
Blindly, automatically, like released circus animals rediscovering their natural environment, we slipped into a routine of bathing from the empty beach, eating huge meals and listening to Jean’s stories after dark….
“There were hours, too, when no one did anything; when brothers and sisters and parents sat on the little terrace overlooking the bay, hardly speaking, glad to be together, glad to be there. Working a little, resting a little, doing a little of everything, inexpertly, but just well enough: this is how Corsican peasants, in favorable circumstances, have always spent their time. And it is a way of life that has always irritated foreigners extremely. Why, one hears, don’t the Corsicans work harder, clear more of the maquis, produce more food? How dare they sit about on walls and stones doing nothing at all? The sight of Corsicans of all ages sitting about doing nothing is positively outraging to many visitors. So are the answers to their questions: that the Corsicans see no reason to work any harder, to grow more food, when they already have enough to eat, and that if they did they would have great difficulty in selling their surpluses. Moreover, there is no one to make them work all day: their land belongs to them, as does their time. Leisure or laziness – call it what you will – is their one luxury, tenaciously preserved in the absence of all others; a luxury so inaccessible even to the prosperous tourist that he is likely to regard it as a sin.
“Yet this was man’s birthright, the world over, before landowners and employers got control of them and forced them, by threat of hunger, to labor all day long. [Native Americans] and other so-called savages lived like this before the Europeans took them in hand. The Corsicans may have missed many of the benefits of civilization, but they have also escaped its inhuman servitudes.”
When we were in Ajaccio there was a place selling pictures of old Corsicans. I asked if I could take pictures of the pictures and they said, “of course,” which seemed an odd answer to me considering it meant we wouldn’t actually buy them. Anyway, I regret that I don’t know who to credit for these photos.
Azure and I agreed that Bonifacio is one of the most spectacular cities we’ve visited – it’s built on a cliff that’s surrounded by water on 3.5 sides and it’s pretty much waiting to fall into the water, as you can see above. From Bonifacio you can see Sardegna, Corsica’s Italian sister to the South. Bonifacio is hundreds of years old, of course, and somewhere up here was found one of the oldest inhabitants of Corsica, a woman whose grave was dated to ~9000 years ago.
We found the town itself to be one of those annoying seasonal towns that’s a shell in the off-season, so there’s nothing to do, nothing that sustains people. Tourism keeps em going the rest of the year, of course, so when we were walking around the town our interactions felt uncomfortably artificial. We were much happier in Sartene where there was a university and some commerce and free wifi only half an hour away.
I was lucky enough to win* (* from my dad) a trip to Yakutat, Alaska last weekend! The first day we got in we went to the Hubbard Glacier and navigated small icebergs to get close enough to hear the thunder of ice breaking down. The glacier is 70 miles long and we were looking at its mile-long face.
The next three days were dedicated to fishing. We would get up around 6:30 and head down to the harbor to meet Tim, our guide & charter. We went out on the saltwater and fished mostly for kings, but we did spend a slow half day looking for halibut.
The kings were huge and tasty. Fred pulled in the largest one at around 40 pounds.
This last picture is cold-smoked sockeye. It’s marinated in brown sugar and soy sauce (plus some other stuff) then cold smoked for 8 hours, if I remember right. It was served with soy sauce, sesame oil & lemon, plus some wasabi. Pretty outstanding. It was like the best sashimi you’ve ever had with a complex smoky flavor.
One evening we headed out to the Situk River to try to get a sockeye or two for our own consumption. No luck, but we did see a ton of eagles.
In the last two weeks, two of our photos have been named Gadling’s Photo of the Day! Gadling is one of the biggest travel ‘blogs’ on the ‘internet’ so I’m pretty excited about this development. All the more reason to start trying to sell these things. (read more)
Azure & I visiting 2/3 of the Frost family in Buenos Aires last year.
by Mike
Thaipusam is a Hindu festival in which revelers purify themselves through fasting & prayer. Some of the devout make shrines on platforms that are hooked into their skin and they carry them in a circuit to the temple while their family cheers them on. The only reason I have any idea this exists is that I accidentally stumbled onto a procession in Little India in Singapore – they had shut down one lane in either direction to allow the march, but cars still buzzed by.
There are literally thousands of other examples of how travel has educated me in ways that a traditional education simply never would have. I think of it as education by proximity and experience.
My cousin Maya Frost is doing her part to encourage this method of learning. She’s written a book called, “The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition and Get a Truly International Education.”
She explains how to study abroad in a way that’s CHEAPER than paying tuition at home! Azure and I travel every winter for less money than it would cost to stay at home. We travelers know the tricks – and Maya’s put it in a book. If you’re a student at all interested in seeing the world, and you want to do it in a way that doesn’t break the bank, then you should check out her excellent book. Parents of students should check it out as well so they know what options are available for their kids internationally.
Little did I know at the time that this was the first of many many olive trees we’d take pictures of. This tree was on the walk down from the amazing howevermany course dinner high above Dolceacqua to which we had to hike… and from which we had to hike back. Drunk. We walked on stone walls that lined olive tree orchards that spanned the terraced hillsides.
It was interesting to cross the border from France to Italy and see an immediate difference. Physically, there was much less emphasis on aesthetic beauty, powerlines were all over the place and the hillsides were mostly terraced in this region (which was beautiful, but not natural). At the same time you cross the border and the people are much warmer and the food has different emphases as well… freshness rather than alchemy.
On our way back from the brocciu making we stopped at this strange fake windmill that had the best view on the island. Well, I say that, but there were tons of great views there. The windmill had one of them.
When I picture Mediterranean islands, I usually imagine looking down at them from above, as if I’m floating above and getting to inspect the valleys and smell the trees on the wind… When we pulled to the top of a hill and saw this view I knew I’d have to take some time to experience it.
That’s one of the reasons I love night photography. When the shudder opens, you have nothing to do but be still and wait and watch. It’s a situation where taking it all in – really appreciating the scene – is automatic and easy. Night photography is also a little magic. The camera picks up light that you didn’t know was there in the first place.
Up on this ridge there was a stiff wind and there were old stones scattered down the hillside that had at one point been structures. There were wind farms on the hill and the moon was rising behind them. We could somehow see all the way down to L’Ile Rousse at night – it’s the collection of lights on the right side of the picture. That was the town we’d slept in the night before, hours away by scooter. But there it was, under our noses like we were floating above the island inspecting its coasts.
Azure and I, picking olives, noticed that the sky was getting dark up the valley. We asked Margarite, “Is it going to rain?”
“No, it won’t rain,” she said.
We didn’t really believe her, so we kept working. But the darkness grew and we were startled to feel an icy wind flee down the valley in front of the cloud.
We looked up and saw that the darkness had crossed a ridge and was heading for us and whether it was rain, it was serious. Claude screamed orders to get the full olive caisses up and we scrambled to move our equipment inside, protected, and to get the olives out of the cold. Then it hit – snow rioted through the orchard and the temperature must have dropped 25 degrees. (read more)
There was a lot of confusion but we eventually got everything moved in and spent the rest of the day wide-eyed at the snow falling just 30 minutes from Nice.
We love to travel and learn. We like eating and sleeping and going on the internet and we can do all of those things from anywhere in the world. We are originally from Seattle, but no longer stay for the winters. We must leave and see new places and great ways to live. We enjoy living well and seeing how others live well.
Winter of 2010-2011 we were in Europe for a little over a month, then Haiti, then Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. There was logic to it at the time, don't worry about trying to figure it out. We don't yet know where we're going for winter of '011. Maybe France? Maybe India?
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