London, or, "I have two pence"

This will be short and tidy, but I wanted to share a brief update. I feel like time is going quickly, punctuated as it has been by opening up my suitcase and letting it spread all over the floor, and then packing it all up again for another trip to the airport. I left Vienna, where I spent the majority of my 9-day visit sick, sleeping and staying in, this past Wednesday afternoon.

I got to my friend's flat in Leytonstone, East London, late Wednesday evening after a surprisingly long eight hours of travel from Vienna to East London. The metros in Europe are awesome, putting to shame America's woefully underdeveloped public transport system, but traveling by metro is also exhausting, compared with sitting on one's ass in a car. My main form of cardio exercise while in Europe has been daily walks inside the metro stations to transfer from one line to another. The outtings I've made in London so far have all taken about an hour of travel each way to get to any particular point.

Thursday evening, we went to the obligatory pub, in the Angel district. Yesterday, I was in Westminster, which is a beautiful district, home to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Again, the architecture was just wow!! Today, Sarah, her girlfriend Jude, friend-from-Palestine Merijn and I walked around north London, and ended up in Camden, which is a horribly crowded Haight Ashbury-like neighborhood .

But perhaps most spectacular of all during my time here: it turns out the crew I've landed with are huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, so we gathered last night and watched the musical episode of Buffy. Since many in the group are musicians, after some exhortation, someone took the guitar off the wall, a few of us picked up the two doumbeks in the room (one which Sarah bought when we were together in the Old City in Jerusalem), and we started goofing around playing some music. I felt, for the first time since I left San Francisco in December, like I was back home with friends. Oh, and then I woke up at 4:30 this morning with a bad hangover from too much wine. Oy.

Tomorrow I take the bus, then underground, then train out to Coventry to visit Yimei, a very good friend from my year in Taiwan. I'll be meeting Yimei's son Nicholas for the first time, who I believe may be in his terrible twos. Dear god.

Then back to London Tuesday, another pub, Sarah will roast a lamb, and then I pack up yet again for a flight out of Heathrow Thursday morning to India. Is it possible, after 3 countries in twice as many weeks, that I will find India restful?! HA! I already have a homestay planned in Fort Cochin for my first two nights in Kerala, and then train to Vijnana Kala Vedi Center near Aranmula, where I will be staying for 7 whole weeks. Yoga, singing, and homemade vegetarian food every day for 7 weeks. Blessed stillness. Hopefully, without any long bout of illness. Pardon the rhyme.

More soon, and missing you at home.

I'm onto There--Step 2--Vienna

Vienna. I am now in Vienna. There is nearly nothing to report, as I have been in bed most of the time. Sick. Hack hack kerpluf hack.

I could report that, actually, instead of being in bed, I am laying on a trisected arrangement of couch cushions on the floor, trying to remain stationary enough that the cushions don't separate from each other, leaving me to droop uncomfortably between them. As we settled in for sleep last night, my friend Alys was kind enough to inform me that the cushions were stuffed with horse hair. Ewwwww. Somehow, that just feels very ewwwwww. Which reminded me of the fact that it seems the French eat horsemeat, which reminded me of a conversation with a friend about the time I ate raw horse in Japan, which then reminded me of the picture I saw in the photographic exhibit of Robert Frank's "The Americans" while I was in Paris. This amazing collection of 1950's Americana as seen through Frank's eyes was paralleled by a second part of the exhibit called "Paris." There was an awful photo of an entire horse, presumably dead, hanging upside down in a butcher shop, being bled or dried or whatever butchers are doing with animal carcasses when they hang them upside down on hooks. Again, ewwww. And, sweet dreams.

Let not that image of grotesquerie sully you on the French, though. As I walked through the Paris exhibit, also shot in the 1950's, I noticed so many photos with flowers in them, that I walked through the entire collection two more times so that I could calculate the ratio of photos with flowers in them. 21 of 70 photos of Paris in the 1950's showed flowers, as compared to 1 photo in the American exhibit, which consisted of about 100 photos (these I did not count). There were bouquets of flowers being bought on the street, vases of flowers on coffeeshop tables as seen through the window, men holding flowers behind their backs before presenting them to a lover, flowers tacked onto a bridge across the Seine, and vendors selling flowers. In the case of the Americans, the one photo featuring flowers was taken in a cemetery in Chinatown.

But back to Vienna. Really, I have not done much, but there have been a few particularly sweet moments over and above the reconnecting with friends. The first night I arrived, I walked for awhile outside around midnight, in the extreme crisp cold. My companion and I climbed some stairs and entered into a kind of town circle, featuring St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is a huge gothic cathedral from the 1300s. The moon looked nearly full, and again, I was forced to stop, let the dumb smile spread across my face, and enjoy the fact that I was seeing a gothic cathedral with its long spindly spires rising up against a full moon while standing in a cobblestoned square in the middle of one of Europe's capitols.

The second sweet moment occurred today, when I made the decision to make my way outside on my own in search for food, The foraging instinct is surely the most strong of all our animal instincts....or perhaps, that is the case with me. In me, is is stronger than the urge to nest, to stay warm, to be comfortable, to stay safe, and to not appear a complete buffoon due to language barriers. Basically, I was sitting home reading and trying to get rid of my cold while Alys was out studying. The hunger was rising, and I knew Alys wouldn't be home to put food in my beak for a few hours. I remembered where the local grocery was, and figured I wouldn't need to speak to buy something a simple at the store. So I ventured out, and lo and behold! I looked in a storefront before reaching the supermarket and what did I see but....Fried Chicken! Yes, fried chicken, being kept toasty warm under a heat lamp in a lovely steel basin near the window. Those of you who really know me understand how this would have made my heart flutter. But still, I hesitated. I could forage safely at the grocery store, not worrying about my complete lack of German language skills, or I could forage rapturously for some truly satisfying fare, but I would have to verbally interact with the large frightening Austrian man behind the counter (who actually turned out to be Romanian).

I went for the chicken. I walked in, gave a hearty "Gross Gutt" for a greeting, and was greeted back quite naturally in, yes, German. At this point, I looked bashfully at the man and said "Ich no sprechke Deutsch." You see, I know the word for "I", the word for "speak", and the word for "German". But how to negate the verb? Or, as Alys instructed me later, how to negate the noun, for in fact, in this sentence, you negate "German", not "speak". Anyway, everyone knows the word "no" in English, right? Hmmm. The man looked at me dumbly for a second, as I shook my head slowly back and forth to further indicate that I didn't speak German, and then asked me what I would like in English. I pointed gleefully to the fried chicken leg/thigh combo, asked the man for a few language tips, completed the transaction with giggles, and scuttled back home as quickly as possible with my chicken in tow. This was the highlight of my day, and what a high point it was!

I am hoping I will be better tomorrow, as Alys and I will begin our cultural excursions then. We bought awful, can't-see-anything seats for the Barber of Seville tomorrow evening for about $12 US. For that price, I'll be happy to just listen, as opera tickets at home are so prohibitively expensive that I have only seen two operas in my whole life. Sunday we will go to the symphony, where standing room tickets cost about $6. This means we will listen to Beethoven and Mendelssohn while sitting on the ground in the back of the concert hall, which again, is just fine by me.

Next week, we may take a quick drive to Bratislava, which is only about an hour away. As Alys put it, why not go see another European capitol, though Slovakia has only existed as an independent nation-state for 16 years!

And then, next Wednesday, I continue on to the next stage of my 8-month plan and fly to London for a week. But more about that soon.

Where to Start When You Wait Until the End?

I have not written since the Louvre, largely because I have ventured out more the last few weeks, as the initial awkward timidity I suffered from when I first arrived in Paris has gradually lessened. This is not to brag that my heartbeat doesn't still accelerate noticeably whenever I walk into a restaurant to order anything more complicated than an espresso, but overall, I have reached a less-than-neurotic comfort level here. This happy progress, though, has been mirrored by the increasing closeness of my departure date and the knowledge that I am soon moving on to two new language zones, whose languages I am a complete stranger to. There is German in Vienna, though my friend there is fluent, and Malayalam in Kerala, though I insulate myself with the naive expectation that the aftereffects of British colonialism still linger there in the form of basic English. Nonetheless, despite the foreknowledge of more awkward timidity to come in more new places, I have been enjoying Paris here and now.

There is another less tangible reason for my not writing, which is the wordless awe I have felt at many of the things I have seen and heard. And wordless awe, surprise!, is a difficult thing to do justice to through words. Sages and mystics throughout time have phrased and rephrased this simple fact, with my favorite formulation coming from the Tao De Ching. There are as many translations of the opening lines, which consist of only 6 characters, as there are translators, but it amounts to this: The Tao that can be spoken, is not the real Tao. Feel free to substitute almost anything you like for the concept of "Tao", and there you have it.

None of this is to say that my life here has been so sublime that I cannot express it in words, but rather, that to actually write every amazing thing seems unlikely and overly time consuming, to the extent that I eventually decided to just enjoy more, and write less.

But now I'm leaving in two days, it is snowing outside, and I would like to remember briefly the checklist of things I have most enjoyed here as I look out my window at the tall narrow buildings with red tiled roofs.

The Musee D'Orsay, a museum of modern art, whose contents pick up approximately where the Louvre leaves off, housed in a train station from 1900, which fell into disuse due to the fact that trains grew bigger and the station consequently found itself too short by 1939. I believe this was my favorite western art museum, if for nothing else besides its uniquely picturesque setting and design.

The Musee National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet, whose holdings are at least half composed of Buddhist statuary and artwork, spanning across the entire array of countries in which Buddhism developed during the first 2000 plus years of its life. From India in the first century, through Cambodia's lush, spiraling, full-bodied Boddhisattvas, into Tibet's dark rich painted scrolls depicting myriad manifestations of Boddhisattvas, dancing dakinis, consorts and lamas, to the calming, down-home poses of Chinese Guan Yins seated with one leg up and her elbow propped there, chin resting in hand, to the thick, hearty, very masculine warrior-like visages of Boddhisattva statues found in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the impossibly narrow, lean gold Buddhas of Thailand, to austere images of Japanese Zen monks in their padded cotton robes, and on and on. I love Buddhist imagery with its calm and serenity. Seeing so many beautiful representations of the exemplar of this path of practice reinstilled in me my deep respect for this belief system.

Yesterday, I visited the Institut du Monde Arabe, which was also stunning, but whose contents I was much less familiar with, and thus a bit less prepared to fully appreciate. Most beautiful were the many pages of the Koran, in different calligraphic styles depending on the era and country of origin: Iran, Iraq, India, Syria, Egypt. The pages called to mind the illuminated texts produced by monks in medieval European monasteries. The pages of the Koran displayed incredibly small, precise calligraphy, elegant gold leafing, and circular designs throughout whose meaning I could not guess at. There was also a section showcasing Arab developments in math and science, where I saw the most beautiful multilayered golden discs hanging one after another in their display cases. They were astronomical tools used both for astronomy and the more esoteric practice of astrology.

And the music here! There are free classical concerts in Paris every afternoon and evening at multiple venues, many of which are churches. I have not availed myself of nearly as many of these as I should have. I sat in one church during lunch listening to two young female vocalists sing duets from Purcell and Bach, accompanied by the church organ. The soprano's voice simply soared and filled the entire nave of the church. Prosaic as it may be, if you closed your eyes, you could imagine yourself in heaven. Another concert I saw featured a male Lebanese cantor, singing over four male voices harmonizing in the style of Gregorian chant. I sat with my eyes closed, and found myself crying. These were the most beautiful sounds I could imagine. My only regret was that I couldn't jump up and sing with them.

These are a few of the highlights, not including the personal highlights of unexpected friendships I have found here, which have made this too short stay truly rich. So tonight I will drink absinthe and say a temporary goodbye to one of these friends, and tomorrow, another goodbye with my landlords and neighbors. Then on to Vienna for a week to see one of my oldest and dearest friends, Alys, and a few of her friends who I have come to know.