When a place is new sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I don’t quite know what to take a picture of, so I take pictures of the biggest things around – buildings – to represent all that’s different about a place. I certainly noticed the buildings when I first arrived here – the shacks and crumbled homes – but as the weeks have passed it has become less shocking, more normal. The buildings are still representative, but there is poverty in symbolism – in fact buildings are vessels that carry lives, the relevant content of a place, and the lives go on whether the buildings are standing or fallen. One can’t look at a broken building and have any clue as to the character of the people within. All I can know is that a broken house or school is probably making daily life more complicated.
I’m thankful that after a couple weeks of being here the broken buildings are becoming more normal to me because it allows me to see past them and to the stories of this place – the good, the bad, the complex stories that make Haiti so incredibly uplifting and heart-wrenching in the exact same moment.
And I’m glad we’re doing something to fix those buildings.
I hope when you watch this video of David you can see the complexity unfolding around him. He’s carrying water to mix into the concrete that will go into the wall of a new school.
Ethnologist Wade Davis is National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence, if there can even be such a thing. In the videos below he talks about ethnospheric (like biosphere, except made up of cultures) diversity. He is the author of one of my all-time favorite quotes: “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”
Bali’s climate is so f-ing perfect that on any day of the year you can see all phases of rice cultivation: sowing, growing, harvesting. We came across this little corner when we were lost and trying to find our way back to Ubud. We knew we wanted to come back, so we made a backwards map as we drove home – Azure took a picture of each corner we turned, then the next day we traced it in reverse.
While I’d always understood presence to mean a sharp focus on – say – your breath as it hits your nose, here it meant paying attention to the area within earshot, which I consider Place. When we look back at photos sometimes I remember, “At that time I was dealing with a window washing issue back home.” or something like that. How strange is it that I’m looking at photos and thinking of a far-away adventure, but at the time of the photo I was thinking about home? It’s one of the struggles of modern travel: leaving home at home, not just in words, but in thoughts and attention as well.
The back-to-the-land family sings a prayer before eating cassoulet on a Sunday afternoon. The guy with the shaved head is Johann, the son who had just fallen from the rafters. This is near Carcassonne, France.
by Mike
Before every meal they would sing these prayers – two in French with a Latin prayer in between. One of the prayers is the Lord’s prayer and I believe another is for Mary. They prayed after the meal as well. When we left the farm and started eating without prayer the moment felt a little emptier, a little more mindless. The same was true after we left the meditation retreat in Chiang Mai – we had chanted a prayer before eating there as well. It’s just another instance in which the practices overlap.
The family prayed before and after eating, when waking up and before going to sleep at night. In addition to these five routine prayers, there were also moments throughout the day when they would, essentially, check in with God. They saw it as giving thanks to God; I recognized it as an act of staying present. Similarly, Didier described how at the beginning of each day he would dedicate his physical pain to God – he knew there would be pain. God (as Jesus) went through so much pain for him that it was the least he could do to give some back. In this I recognized Buddhism’s distinction between pain and suffering.
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.
We woke up yesterday morning feeling some of the residual effects of the night before. After resigning ourselves leaving the scooter at Jean Paul’s house and selling it for whatever price we got on ebay (I truly would have been happy to get half of what we paid for it) we went out to see the only American we know in Paris–a bar owner from Florida whom we met because he was the guy who bought the bar that Mike worked at in 2001. The night only ended with a reinvigorated hope and some good old American can-do attitude. He thought we could sell it here or there for this much and our eyes lit up and we thought that maybe we’d sell it easily again.
Nope. And luckily this revival of ambition didn’t last longer than 9am the next day. We really had to leave Paris ASAP and kept telling ourselves, we’re leaving today, we’re taking the scooter to Jean Paul. We’re leaving today, we’re taking the scooter to Jean Paul.
We packed up our bags and loaded the scooter for the real last time. It was a little nerve wracking because we didn’t have insurance and it was registered under Jean Paul’s name, so he was liable for us. And, as I pointed out to Mike, driving through and around Paris put us in contact with more people and police than we had seen the whole rest of the ride. We looked it up online, however and saw that the fine for driving without insurance was a mere 1500 euro fine, but no jail time. Of course our motto of the day was “No jail time!”
We made it ok, of course. We drove past the Palace of Versaille and I caught my first glimpse of the enormous place, up the side roads and made it to the “Buffalo Grill” parking lot where Jean Paul would meet us. There was one random checkpoint at one of the roundabouts, but we made sure to exit the roundabout before we got to the checkpoint. Of course my heart raced.
When we parked the scooter in Jean Paul’s garage and he said we could leave it there until next year when we came back to pick it up, I paused and thought, well maybe… My mind appears to be completely incapable of remembering pain or fear. We still had our helmets on when he mentioned leaving it, my heart was just slowing down from fearing the police, and I actually considered it. Of course we wouldn’t do something like that because that would be a pain for him, but now I think why wouldn’t we buy another scooter? We would just go about it differently. No lesson learned.
He invited us in for a glass of wine, we got to witness the most incredible being on the planet, Morgane’s dog and later, Jean Paul took us to the RER. The next part was shockingly fast, coming from a vehicle that went a top speed of 70km/hr, but averaged more like 50. To ride the scooter from Paris to Poitiers would have taken us about 14 hours, we would have scheduled two days for it. When we fell asleep on the train out of pure emotional exhaustion, we woke up to find we were over half way there. The whole ride only took 1.5 hours. (on another note: I just don’t think you see the country the same way when your are going that fast)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QHZFdDLx-Q&hl=en&fs=1] “The most incredible being on the planet”
Nash picked us up in the old white chateau car. It was good to see that some things don’t change AND that some people appreciate good old vehicles. We pulled up to find many of the flowers in bloom and the place to be just as tranquil as I remember it. I feel like we’ve been put out to pasture here to spend the remainder of our time roaming about and doing projects on the grounds.
The Chateau car
We had dinner (Salmon topped with creme fraiche, caviar and mint, sides of potatoes, broccoli and salad and of course cheese and wine and chocolate) with Nash and Linda (the owners of the chateau), their son Syrus (sp?) and Patty, a woman I met my first time here who also cooks for guests and has made a really great part-time life here. We had great, easy conversation, though afterward I feared we talked too much about ourselves-oops. It turns out we have a lot in common, not only our living proximity to Greenlake, but our love of food and slow life and gardening and just the ability to live part, or in their case all of our lives over here.
We are staying in the building that is the back side of the chicken coop (this reference is probably only good for Kim and Adam). The chateau grounds house a small abandoned village, where all the work used to be done. There is a barn, carriage house, paper press building, a place to house the farm equipment, the list goes on. These buildings go about one city block along an unpaved road. All of the buildings are being turned into either living spaces (ours has been turned into a 3 bedroom apartment) or spaces to house events. Our room is lovely and the bed is the most comfortable we have had in a long long time.
When we walked back from dinner in the darkness I felt so at peace, so opposite of how I had felt the night before — we are already a whole world away.
I started to get a sore throat at the farm the day before we left. As it turned out, it was a good thing that I had to ride while sick because it left me no time for moping or whining. Well, except the one day that we decided to stop and stay in Noyers, I moped and ate soup that day. The other days, we rode at least 7 hours a day. We saw all new territory for both of us that revived the dream of living in France. The center was so typical, we loved it.
We decided to drive early each morning, stop for breakfast, drive a while longer, have a full lunch, then grab a light dinner. It made it easier to handle the long days (if you look at the mileage, we only go about 300k per day, but going an average of 40km/hr it doesn’t go fast). On Monday we took a 40 minute nap in a field after lunch and then got back on and kept riding until sundown.
The days were the warmest yet. We lucked out and ended up driving on what seems like the first sunny week in mainland France. Monday, the thermometer topped at 70 degrees. Tuesday around 65 and Wednesday, back up to 68 or so. It made the rides so much easier and we could go until the sun was low.
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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