All posts filed under: roam

>>> Time Thieves: Eduardo Galeano on “Bureaucracy”

The Bureaucracy/3 Sixto Martinez completed his military service at a Seville garrison. In the middle of the patio was a bench. Next to the bench, a soldier stood guard. No one knew why the bench needed guarding. They guarded it because they guarded it. Day and night, all nights and all days. And generation after generation of officers transmitted the order and the soldiers obeyed. No one doubted, no one questioned. If as such it is done, and as such always have been done, a reason there had to be. And like this it continued until one person, I don’t know which general or colonel, wanted to see the original order. He had to forage the archives. And after much digging, he knew. Thirty-one years, two months and four days ago, an official ordered a guard to be placed by the bench that had recently been painted so that no one happened to sit on the fresh paint. –Eduardo Galeano, El Libro de los Abrazos, Trans. Nathalie Alyon As a little girl, I loved listening to my …

>>>>> 01.01.2017 Quiet on Israel’s Northern Front; Massacre in Istanbul

I entered 2017 at Kibbutz Malkiya on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. On the first day of the new year I woke up to the view of snow-peaked Mount Hermon in the horizon, erect with might. The sun shone strong even at 8:00 am and warmed the crisp air. I strolled through the fields towards the Hermon. I wanted to smell the snow. The Lebanese across the border are simple farmers, my host had said the night before. Outside of Tel Aviv’s urban hum, the quiet of the kibbutz and its surroundings gave me a sense of inner peace. I felt calm despite walking along wires and fences guarding the Kibbutz from Israel’s northern enemies, despite watching tank-like military jeeps patrol the border, despite my knowing that just behind the white snow that graced the Hermon lay the bodies of tens of thousands of people drenched in the blood of the Syrian civil war. On the morning of the new year, I woke up cheerful, filled with hope for the coming year. “2017 is going to be great,” I hollered towards the …

Writerly Advice from Best-Selling Author Scott Turow

You must treat your art as you would any other job: Show up everyday! This might be the number one golden writerly advice. We repeat it to ourselves; stamp it in capital letters above our desk. And no matter how many times and versions we hear the same advice, it is never enough. On Tuesday I attended a master class by the best-selling author and attorney Scott Turow at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. Turow mostly writes crime and mystery novels. His books have been translated to over 40 languages and sold more than 30 million copies. Also a successful, practicing lawyer, he writes about what he knows (golden advice two). His first publication was a non-fiction book as a first year Harvard Law student: One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School. And yes, he wrote it while studying at Harvard Law and it became a best seller. In his lecture Turow touched on many topics from the writing life to the doom Amazon has brought on the publishing industry to the …

Your Journey Has a Personality. Discover It!

“People don’t take trips—trips take people,” wrote John Steinbeck about his two-month journey across the United States in a small truck he named Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse. Plan all you want, Steinbeck wrote, but a journey has a personality of its own and it always finds a way to surprise you, to take you places you would have never dreamed of: “Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness… And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.” Steinbeck’s road trip across America in 1960 had a clear objective: after spending over two decades dwelling in bubbles like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, he needed to once again get to know America, to “feel” it. He wanted to know: “What is America? Who are Americans?” On the outermost level, Travels with Charley in Search of America is a chronicle of this inquiry. But Steinbeck’s journey …

Ragnar Kjartansson’s Art Made Me Cry

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota By James Wright Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. What do grown-ups do all day? I often thought about this question as a child. Adults’ homebound tasks like sorting out the mail or talking on the phone to strangers seemed so unimportant and boring. Then there was their mysterious life outside the house: magical, thrilling, and filled with adventurous trips. It rarely occurred to me that most adults work to sustain their lives. The way grown-ups spend their waking hours might not be the first thought to pop …

Swell Waves: A Song for Grandpa

Three days after I arrived in Guatemala in June, I woke up at my dark hostel dorm room in Antigua and rushed out to catch the 9:00 am Yoga class across town. I hadn’t walked two blocks through the cobbled-stoned streets of Guatemala’s old capital when I flopped down on the sidewalk, crying uncontrollably. I had been expecting the news my phone had delivered on that fresh morning ever since I started this journey over one year ago. I knew this moment would one day come and whisk me away from whichever corner of the world I happened to roam. Yet the news came like a flash flood and there I was, curled up like a scared rabbit, frozen on the damp, cold stones of Antigua’s streets, as if the entire world had caught on fire and I was the first to know. “Your grandpa is in a coma,” my father said on the phone. It didn’t look good. My grandfather had been unwell for some time and he hadn’t called me in over two …

Cities, Nature, and Social Media

Written in London. September, 1802 By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH For comfort, being, as I am, opprest, To think that now our life is only drest For show; mean handy-work of craftsman, cook, Or groom! We must run glittering like a brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: The wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws. Various studies has shown that overuse of social media can cause feelings of envy and even depression. The studies call it “surveillance use” – in other words, sifting through your friends’ pictures and status updates to see how their lives are so much better than yours. Much has been written about the subject and most people have experienced the phenomenon first hand, so I won’t elaborate. I wonder, though why …

[Don’t] Fear the Travel Warning

After the terror attacks in Brussels on March 22, 2016 the United States issued a warning to its citizens cautioning travel to Europe. I read the notice while lounging on my friend’s couch in central London, where I had arrived after dodging a throng of tourists near Parliament Square. The alert warned of “near-term attacks throughout Europe, targeting sporting events, tourist sites, restaurants, and transportation.” Reading this email at first made me laugh. I’m used to seeing Israel or Turkey – my emotional homelands – frequent travel advisory lists. In fact, most countries I live in or travel to are on some kind of list: don’t go to Mexico lest you become collateral damage in the county’s drug wars; don’t travel to Colombia for you’ll get Zika; in Israel you might become the victim of a knife attack; in Turkey someone might blow you up in the middle of the capital. And now the Americans had put an entire continent off limits. The absurdity of it all sounded like a joke. I looked at the …

A Story of Syncronicity: The Horrors of Solo-Travel

“Aren’t you afraid to travel alone?” I often get asked this question for traversing Latin America. A woman in bandit-land that is Mexico.  I must be out of my mind. Rather than a land of delicious food, great museums and beautiful towns filled with the kindest of people, in most people’s imagination Mexico conjures horror stories of kidnappings and drug-gang murders. “It’s quite safe as long as you don’t go around doing stupid shit,” I reply with a shrug. But I must confess. This is no off-hand reply. It’s crafted with precision to mask my luck in having managed to stay safe, despite doing stupid shit. Like wondering the streets of Mexico City alone at 2 AM with five shots of mescal in your belly. Don’t do that. After all, it would be naïve to say that Mexico is Denmark. The story I’d like to tell today begins in San Miguel de Allende, my beloved town of crazies and artists. But I will start this tale toward its tail end, which happened in Tel Aviv: my …

Who is this creature called the “backpacker”?

Yesterday a Frenchman accused me of being a fake backpacker at a Cuban bar in Lisbon. His allegation came after I revealed that I was staying at an AirBnB rather than a hostel. We had a lot to chat about–he had recently returned back to his nine to five IT job in Paris after a seven-month “backpacking” trip in Australia and Asia. “I bet you don’t even have a backpack,” he said with a smirk. “I’m not a backpacker!” I said in protest. “And I certainly don’t carry a backpack on my sensitive shoulders.” Our discussion made me realize once again why I decided not to stay in hostels and why I defied the categorical “backpacker” label. Though I indeed was once a “fake backpacker” and it was while I slept in hostels in Colombia. Thankfully my fraudulence only lasted five weeks. Before arriving in Colombia I read various blogs on traveling alone—all posts instructed staying in dorms for a fulfilling social life on the move. So who was I, a novice solo-traveler, to stray from the path? While staying …