Our Golden Age
It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age.
- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Heart
Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.
- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In Egypt
I’m in Egypt for the next two weeks on vacation. Adventure recanting upon my return to Zurich. See ya.
And Then There Was Swiss Hockey
So my first season playing Swiss ice hockey has come to an end and I understand my mentioning of this in Bluebirdy is greatly overdue. I realize also that I never write about hockey much even though it’s my second largest endeavor behind my horse-related obsessions, and I’m always surprised to discover that some people don’t even know I skate. They just know me as that “crazy horse riding chick who also owns some weird pet bird that eats human food.” This is mostly accurate, so I won’t deny it. I also like chickens, which is another massively misunderstood fact about me that I’ll save for another day.
Hockey is actually the one constant in my life that’s nearly always there even when I’m not riding horses or feeding my pet bird Google dinner leftovers. Unlike the horse activities which are fickle and subject to fluctuations in fortune, time, location, and interpersonal relationships, hockey happens almost anytime, anywhere, as long as I’m of sane enough mind to show up and skate (and believe me, your craziest instances in life are usually when you play the best hockey).
There are two things that make hockey grand and have managed to keep me playing even when I moved to the other side of the world. First, all your shit fits in one big wheelie bag that you can take anywhere with you. Second, there’s usually a minimum of fourteen other people expecting your lazy butt to show up at practice, or at the very least, the game, so it’s hard to stay home without repurcussions. Of course, then there’s the small detail that every time I feel like not going to hockey, I go and have a great time. Like I said, trivialities.
I’m in my seventh year of hockey, which is hard to believe, because that’s pretty much the number of years I’ve been out of graduate school in snowy Pennsylvania, where I picked up this nasty little game. I’m starting to think that I was actually predestined to grow up somewhere where there’s snow and ice, and that my birth in Palo Alto, California was a cosmic mistake. I never seem to feel more at home than I do when I’m residing somewhere it’s snowing like the Dickens, I’ve tricked someone else into digging my car out of the pile-up for me (Huckleberry Finn style), or I’m blazing a Jess-shaped path down the obliterated winter sidewalk. As such, it seemed only natural that I’d continue my hockey explorations after moving to Switzerland.
There was only one catch - people play hockey in Swiss German here. This is only a half-catch in that the hard part was figuring out how to get into a league in Zurich, not necessarily how to play hockey. As it turns out, the Google Zurich office is literally down the street from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) headquarters which handles all things European hockey-wise, despite what the name may suggest. In July of last year this geographical coincidence finally paid off when I was randomly invited by a Googler to attend a BBQ at the IIHF’s posh little establishment on Brandschenkestrasse. Not only did I meet all kinds of people who don’t play hockey at all, but I met the IIHF president and got a tour of the castle that is essentially the office where they do hockey-related paperwork. Who knew. On top of this I met an emotionally disturbed goalie (a redundant description, if you will) who bragged that she only played for men’s teams now because female hockey players are too catty-drama. “And who might I contact if I’m interested in engaging in such catty-drama here in Zurich?” I asked her.
That’s the second time I received contact information that I already had, when earlier in the year a particularly chatty Swiss lad at the Kreisbüro called up the IIHF for me and wrote down the same contact person. I’d spoken to this woman before, but alas, my hockey equipment took so long to arrive from the U.S. last year that by the time I had it, summer was in full swing and the season had ended. It was the end of September when I finally made it to my first practice, which I found out later was more a try-out to see if I could actually stand up on the ice. Frankly, I’m surprised I could, as by that time I hadn’t skated in eight months. What I didn’t know is that, after jumping off a plane from Malaysia half a day earlier, I’d shown up in Zurich at the A league practice, skating alongside some women who, for all intents and purposes, were being paid to play.
This small misunderstanding on my part made my utter exhaustion and infuriating incoordination at the fifteen minute mark into practice that much more embarrassing, as I had no idea I was skating with at least two women who played division I college hockey in Boston and Canada. “Man, I am seriously out of shape,” I said off-handedly to one of the players after practice, as I was riding home in her little car filled with miniature stuffed animals dangling from the ceiling. “What makes you say that?” she asked in her softly accented English. She whipped around a narrow, winding road on the way back into the city and the animals and I all leaned to the right, pressing on the side of the car to keep from falling out. “Uh,” I replied, scooting my ass back into the seat, “I could barely keep up with those girls tonight.”
She glanced at me with a somewhat unbelieving expression and then looked back to the road, suddenly veering left through a roundabout. I gripped the side of the seat. “Those girls,” she said, “play on our national team. There were only three women out there who are part of our regional league that you’ll be playing on with me.”
So ok, sometimes I have unrealistic expectations of myself. At least I can say that sometimes it’s not always my fault either. The truth is, I was out of shape - eight months of chocolate and cheese wasn’t doing me any favors, and the level of play was just enough to make me work harder than I ever had to in the U.S., and sometimes I just could not for the life of me figure out what our coach was saying, but overall I kept up respectably for someone who happened to grow up in the non-hockey-playing-burbs of the bay area.
When you first start any sport, everything’s imbued with a little bit of wonder - from the equipment to the rules to the teams to the rituals and the superstitions. After a while though, it all becomes rote, and you go through the motions methodically, only pausing to think here and there about strategies and to make instant decisions. There’s an element of familiarity that I love about this and that makes playing a sport in another country just like running into an old friend at a cafe in a new town. You may be in a strange land but this person, this person you know. After an entire season here in Zurich, I still get asked by people how I can possibly play ice hockey here if I can’t understand the coach or other players.
Well, there’s two issues I have with that statement. The first is that when people speak standard German, I can usually figure out what’s going on. It’s the Swiss German that throws me off. I may not have met many true-to-life Swiss people while working in the Google office, but there are plenty of them when you go out into the big, wide world that is Switzerland with your glorious attempts to integrate. I still remember the first time I thought I was actually understanding what was going on, as dictated by a coach, only to get stuck when he said “weese und rot.” “What and red?” I asked the Swiss-American girl who often translates for me. I knew he was talking about jerseys but I didn’t catch that first part. “White and red,” she said. “Oohhhh!” I exclaimed, “WEISS und rot.” She looked at me distastefully. “Yeah Jess, that’s how we say ‘white’ in Swiss.”
The second issue I have with the aforementioned statement is that hockey, like many sports (except for horse polo) is filled with set plays and standard drills and exercises. I had the good fortune of being introduced to hockey in a town where the game is well respected (Pittsburgh, PA). As such, I had all kinds of great coaching and clinics at my disposal, where I was properly taught rules, positioning, strategy, as well as a ton of warmup and practice drills with cute names like “horseshoe” and “breakout.” These all exist in Switzerland as well. The challenge is figuring out what they’re called here, and what tiny variation has been inserted to throw me off just a little bit. For example, the women always do the horseshoe drill as the last warmup exercise before a game starts. They of course don’t call it that, but by simply watching how we lined up I immediately knew we were going to do the horseshoe drill without having to say a word. They vary this drill by sometimes having a defenseman skate out along with a forward, and sometimes there are two forwards and one defense. They call this variation “Zwei Eis,” and I’ve come to understand the translation for that as “two on one horseshoe drill.” Of course no one would ever understand my translation - it’s just my personal Jess translation for the purposes of this blog entry and my head when I’m actually at practice.
Harder than practice is being in the locker room with the women, where everyone is speaking in Swiss slang and cracking inside jokes and otherwise speaking a mile a minute on topics I probably wouldn’t get in the first place. My Swiss-American friend, who I’ll call Rosetta for her enduring willingness and unending patience in translating the hard stuff for me all this season, occasionally fills me in on the jokes or if not, tells me that at least I haven’t missed anything important. It was Rosetta who told me that in German, “laufen” means “run,” but in Swiss German it means “walk,” and when referring to ice hockey exclusively it means “skate.” You won’t get that from the software program of the same name, I can guarantee you that.
Remember that sense of wonder I talked about earlier? You might think you never get that back once you’ve been playing a sport for a while, but you can. Just try playing it in another country. All of the rinks we play at in Zurich and the surrounding area are outdoors. Occasionally we play inside if the weather is horrendous, but sun, snow, or rain, we’re usually outside. It can be a drag when it’s raining but when it snows it’s magical, and there’s something about playing outdoors that I know I’ll miss terribly when I leave Zurich. It reminds me a little of learning to skate outdoors in Pittsburgh at the rink in the park, seeing your breath and the city lights rising up from between the rivers below.
At practice we often have orange cones and small golf cart tires laid on their sides, both used to mark parts of the ice as a skate-around, passing point, temporary goal, and so forth. I’ve seen these used before and am pretty familiar with them. What I wasn’t ready for were the miniature nets we’d use to play 4 on 4 or the short side of the ice. These are goal nets, perhaps about 1′ high by 2′ wide (rough guess) that I assume Frodo Baggins would use if he and the hobbit gang decided to pick up ice hockey. Obviously the idea here is to make it harder to score when you don’t have a goalie. Sometimes the coaches turn the regulation-sized nets back to back and make us play that way, forcing the goalies to look all the way around to defend their goal. The best, however, has to be the long, yellow, triangular padded blocks that the coaches use to mark off sections of the ice. These look just like, well, just like giant Toblerone, and that’s what the players call them too. As Rosetta said when explaining a drill to me once, “So you skate around the Toblerone and then you come back to the center…”
The day I finally received my jersey and socks for my first Swiss game, a guy helping with the game preparations pointed to my helmet in the locker room and asked if it was mine, then asked if he could take it. While I wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, I happily decided that it was something official and proceeded to let him run off with it. Five minutes later he returned with my helmet covered in stick-on advertising. “What the-” I mumbled when he plopped it into my hand. I had just become a skating billboard. In fact, our jerseys and socks are covered with sponsor logos as well. In Europe it’s considered perfectly acceptable to sell out your team and cover their equipment in advertising. You’ll even see it on TV if you watch the professionals play over here. It’s not something we do in the U.S., strangely enough, even though we plaster advertising all over everything else.
Our games our filled with rituals, some of which are mysterious and some of which have, if not sensible, then at least believable back stories. Before games we do a warmup which consists of running around the block and some random running and jumping exercises in a circle, and then we do this mysterious drill in which we all link arms in a circle and start jogging (or rather sprinting) in place as fast as we can. The instructions are usually dictated by our assistant captain, and for the longest time I could not figure out what was going on. She told us to go left, go right, jump, double-jump, and sometimes we’d all come up and pretend we were taking photos with a camera then continue running. After this happened three or four times, Rosetta finally said to me, “It’s a horse race. Get it?” It’s amazing what I’ve learned playing hockey out here.
In the locker room the women blast hip hop and rock and pop on a boombox they bring in just for games, and we can partake of the tool chest that also shows up at games that’s full of free tape (every kind: grip, friction, sock) and anything you could need should your equipment suddenly fall apart. Once fully dressed and out of the locker room, our team captain has us chant something strange in Finnish. Half the team doesn’t even know what this is, but I understand it has something to do with the fact that some of the team members went to a hockey camp in Finland last summer and learned some dirty Finnish words which they’ve kindly integrated into our pre-game rituals. We then have to perform the standard version of a hockey high five (bumping fists inside your glove) with the captain and coach as we pass out of the locker room and onto the ice. Out on the ice, our warmups always consist of a passing drill on the short side where you do “anything” when you get the puck, such as turning sharply, skating backwards, going down on one knee, etc., before passing it to the next person. We finish with horseshoe variations and then everyone lines up on the blue line. At this point, the captain skates down in front of the blue line, touching her stick to everyone else’s stick as she does so, and then everyone raises their sticks to salute the opposing team, who all do the same. We then turn around and head for our goal, where we get in a circle, listen to some captainish words of wisdom, repeat our Finnish foul language shout, then skate in a line to high five everyone on the team. Everyone then either goes to the bench or gets into position at the center face-off circle as planned. Now, you might think I’m joking about this ritual, but it literally happens the same way every single time.
In between periods, the guy who stuck the stickers all over my helmet serves us sweet tea and sliced fruit, biscuits, and chocolate. If princess hockey ever existed anywhere in the world, this is it and I’ve hit the jackpot. Usually during this time our coach yells at us in Swiss German and I can hardly understand most of it, so I take to enjoying my tea and biscuits and the occasional kiwi fruit with a side of clementines. A long time ago when I was skating in Pittsburgh, I had seen a t-shirt for sale at an ice rink that said, “Hockey Princess” on it with a drawing of a bejeweled crown underneath. When I mentioned this one day to Superstar, he said that he had seen it too, and that he’d thought more than once about buying it for me. He’ll never know it now, but had he bought it for me it’d still be applicable. I love me some between period hors d’oeuvres service.
Away games are no less ridiculous. The A league apparently has their own branded coach, one of those enormous busses with the reclining seats and curtains and DVD system. We get to use this coach to travel to away games, I guess on account of being the “same” team even if we’re the C league version of that team. For late games, we bring this gigantic box that our coach calls the “Kochkiste,” that actually plugs into the wall after unloading from the bus. My German friends find this hilarious as “Kochkiste” apparently translates to “cooking box.” While this humor is way over my head, all I know is that the Kochkiste contains just-from-the-oven hot pasta and sauce, ready for us when the game’s over and we’re out of the showers. I’m also loving me some Kochkiste right about now.
The games themselves are what I’m used to, although the periods are a standard 20 minutes which is crazy long for people who play hockey twice a week, and the clock counts up instead of down (this confused me greatly the first time I watched a game here). Halfway through third period (at the 10 minute mark) the buzzer sounds and the teams change sides, which is a little peculiar. All the penalties called are the same, although some of the teams play quite rough, Canadian or tournament style hockey, and they’re not always called on these things. At my very first game two chicks got into a fight and I had to retract my statement that women never fight during hockey games. Granted, our coach and team were laughing during this fight, but maybe it’s because it was more of an afterthought fight than a real fight. From what I’ve been told, “real fights” are discouraged with a 500 franc fine. There’s very few people worth punching out if it’s gonna cost 500 francs, I have to admit.
The other big difference? The season ends in the spring. That’s right, and I’ve already had someone ask me what my summer sport is going to be which gave me a little bit of panic. Am I supposed to already have that lined up? I haven’t even packed my hockey bag away downstairs yet, but, mountain biking anyone?
The Karmic In Between
Before I begin and before you develop even more preconceived notions about the subject of this entry, I’ll admit that I don’t really know a thing about “Karma” as defined by those who might be considered experts in the matter. All I know is that there’s definitely a “what comes around goes around” method to the universe, and for lack of a better description I’m going to call it Karma. It’s that unearthly intangible somewhere between Skywalker’s Force and Neo’s Matrix, the thing that supplies us with sometimes opportune and sometimes unexpected poetic justice, retribution, and just deserves. It’s the thing you’ve been waiting for as well as the thing you dread, the miracle and the disaster, and at the heart of it all is that undefinable space between, where you’re not sure if you’re being rewarded or punished, but you know damn well there’s no way you’re being ignored.
The problem with the space between is that unlike the good or the bad, you can never be entirely certain what it is you did to bring on this wave of ambiguous fortune. Just like a huge credit card bill, at some point you can’t tell whether you’re paying for Saturday night’s dinner or that sofa you bought last year. When it comes down to it, you’re just paying. Something like this happened to me over the course of the last two months, although it’s not actually what spurred me to write this entry. Around November of last year I decided, quite suddenly (as all my decisions go) to request an extension to my work assignment and stay in Zurich for another year. My manager verbally approved it, at which point I procrastinated until the week before Christmas to submit my official paperwork for formal approval. To make this short, my procrastination caused some bells to go off and my extension approval was subsequently delayed for two months during which time I languished in the purgatory of not knowing whether I was coming or going, quitting or staying. While the delay wasn’t all my fault, going into the details is irrelevant to this discussion and will only encourage me to start anew my blame distributions, so I’m not going to do that. Instead I’ll just say that I was convinced I was somehow being punished for misdeeds in my past, though I could never be sure what they were. About two weeks ago, the great karmic wheel or whatever it is reversed with a squealing of rubber and not only did my assignment extension suddenly go through, but I found and was offered a new apartment in Zurich after only three days of searching. (If I haven’t before mentioned the Zurich apartment fiasco, remind me and I’ll write another entry on it, as it certainly deserves its own.)
With my wheel of fortune (minus Vanna White) rolling along smoothly now, I was feeling like I’d somehow gotten it together, made amends, taped the wings back on the fly, done whatever was necessary to make those fickle karmic deities happy. This morning I set off on my long train ride to Friedrichshafen, Germany, where I was due to catch a flight home to the U.S. for Frigg’s wedding. I had decided to fly out of Friedrichshafen as a cheaper although less convenient alternative to leaving from Zurich. Somehow, after nearly two hours of perfect train changes and nothing particularly interesting, I managed to miss the stop for the airport. No problem, I reasoned, I had padded my trip a bit and decided to simply get off at the next stop and take the next train going in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, I had efficiently boarded an interregional express train that only makes about three stops between this tiny German airport at the edge of Switzerland and, well, the other side of Germany. I’m not sure if I was halfway to Munich before the train actually stopped. It doesn’t really matter because it’s more like the weather report - they can say it’s 50˚F out but if it feels like 32˚F to me then does it really matter? I was halfway to Munich, or I might as well have been halfway to Munich because either way I was now doomed to miss my flight.
When I got off the train in what was effectively the middle of nowhere Germany, I did feel that old, familiar panic rising up from my gut towards my throat. Interestingly, this panic has nothing to do with the possibility of being stuck in the middle of nowhere, or being stuck where no one could speak English, or being stuck in say, Rome at 3 a.m. after the airport shuttle never arrived to pick me up at my hotel and no public transit was running and there wasn’t a taxi in sight and my flight was leaving in two hours, which actually happened and also did not cause me to panic. The panic was more this fear that I was going to freak out.
For years now, I’ve suffered from this partial but debilitating inability to control basic emotions. Now you might think, but Jess, you seem perfectly fine when you talk to me! Yes, this is probably because I was perfectly fine the last time I spoke to you. This isn’t a constant, unpredictable berserking and raging. It’s more of an overreaction to seemingly mundane setbacks in life, like getting a parking ticket or missing a flight or even screwing up a pass at hockey. Instead of blowing it off, I seemed destined to always take it to heart, bursting into a heaving, sobbing mess or alternatively, stomping and cursing and fuming. And yes, since I freak out about such trivial things you can imagine how I react when something devastating actually occurs, or a series of these smaller things multiply to become one devastating thing.
After discovering that the next train in the other direction wouldn’t get me to the airport in time to make my flight, I spent twenty minutes in the middle of nowhere debating whether I should attempt to find a taxi or take the next train back to the airport to plead my case to the gate agent. Muddled, frantic, and dragging my huge suitcase all around through the snow, I stopped for a minute. Ok, I reasoned, perhaps this bad karma was because of something I did. Or maybe it’s really good karma in disguise. Or maybe it’s a test to see if I deserve better karma. As I stood there with the snow blizzarding all around me, turning my hair to frizz and soaking my luggage, I recognized that I wasn’t actually freaking out. I didn’t even feel a freak out coming on. I actually cynically wondered how long it would last. I calmly dragged my bag back up the steps of the train station and over to the platform where I caught a train back to the airport I’d missed the first time.
Ever skeptical of my ability to manage a situation without making it worse, I stood behind two other people at the Lufthansa ticketing counter, waiting for that intimate hysteria that’s accompanied me into every critical situation since I was a kid to step up and ring the doorbell to my serenity. The customers in front of me walked away and I strode up to the counter with a closed smile, the corner of my mouth twitching downward ever so slightly. l explained the situation. The gate agent told me what Lufthansa had told me over the phone - that my ticket was completely restricted and that I couldn’t even pay a change fee, that there were no more flights out of Friedrichshafen that day that would get me to Frankfurt in time to catch any of the San Francisco flights, and that if I wanted to buy a new ticket to fly out tomorrow it was going to cost €1400+ (on top of the non-refundable $800 I’d already spent on the ticket I wouldn’t be able to use). This is pretty much always the point where if I haven’t freaked out yet, I go absolutely postal. Most people don’t respond very well to this, especially airport personnel, who are not only used to this sort of behavior but no doubt trained in how to deal with it. And usually, they’re trained simply to tell you to go to hell because they aren’t paid enough to listen to someone else’s psychological shortcomings.
I stood calmly and smilingly, and asked what other options might be available. Interestingly, I think that when the gate agent noticed I hadn’t yet flipped after seeing the new price, she decided to search further for me. After nearly twenty minutes, she had printed out three possible new itineraries for me, although none of them could get me into Frankfurt today, and all of them still cost in the €1400 range. My options were staying overnight in Frankfurt or taking the train all the way back home to Zurich only to do it all over again in the morning. She suggested I take the itineraries, look them over, and “think about them” and then come back to the desk when I’d decided to purchase one. It was an odd suggestion, so of course I tried it, and sat for a while staring at all the different ways I would never make it home today and still have to pay nearly $1800 more. Ah damn you Karma, I thought, I did something bad. But what? I sat there for about another fifteen minutes, staring at the deluge of white drowning the airport parking lot.
I was still procrastinating on my decision when the very serious German woman who had printed the itineraries earlier came running around the corner, apparently looking for me. She gave me some instruction in German, then corrected herself and told me to wait for her in English. She then dashed away and came back a minute later, and told me she could put me on almost my original itinerary (except that I’d still have to fly out tomorrow morning since today’s flights were long gone) and I’d only have to pay a €250 change fee. “Oh my gosh, are you kidding?” I looked at her, astonished. “I spoke to the supervisor and told him that due to heavy snow you should be able to change this flight for only the change fee.” An honest to God “Dankeschön” has never fallen so freely from my lips. Who says Germans can’t be sweethearts when they want to? More shocking even than that was the eerie composure I had maintained so easily through the ordeal.
Now, you’d think it had ended there and happily ever after, but if that was all I don’t think I’d really have a case for writing about any of it. After all, who hasn’t experienced some sort of airport mishap, whether self-inflicted or through divine interruption? Or even an airport mishap that spontaneously (or not so spontaneously) resolves itself eventually? I’m actually writing this while sitting in a little square room of a little B&B run by little old German ladies who have little idea what I’m saying whenever I open my mouth. I’m staying here until my flight leaves tomorrow at 6:25 a.m., and the only way I even have a ride back to the airport is that I was able to use my horribly broken German to ask the cab driver to come back for me at 5 a.m. People in little towns in Germany feel sorry for people who speak terrible German, as I found out. So sorry that you have to feel more than a tad embarrassed for yourself and for them as well. I can’t be sure if it was my €1 tip or my pathetic plight (or both) that inspired my cab driver to carry my heavy ass suitcase up three flights of stairs, but he did. He then explained to the old lady running the B&B that I spoke “a little” German and that I was from California. To my wonderment, I understood their entire conversation. To my frustration, I couldn’t figure out how to contribute to that conversation.
My inability to form a complete sentence was irritating at best, but my surprise at mostly understanding what was going on around me overwhelmed my initial vexation. When I asked where I could get something to eat, the two gray-haired ladies bickered on about it between themselves, discussing what places were and weren’t open and which places were only open for coffee and tea. I watched and listened to them, fascinated, as if observing a thrilling tennis match. Finally, after calling a number of places, they realized that none were close enough for me to walk to. You know you’re in the middle of nowhere Germany when you need a car to get somewhere. At this point, I started to lose the gist of the conversation. One of the women put her coat on and picked up her car keys and motioned to me, then told me she was going to take me to a restaurant in her car. Did I mention that I used “Dankeschön” a lot today?
“I have a big auto,” she said in German as she giggled and gestured to her Smartcar. That’s it, that’s joke number three in German that I actually understood and laughed at (although to tell the truth, we laughed at the Swiss guy who told us we weren’t allowed to laugh at the yodeling CDs he was selling, and I’m not really sure he meant that as a joke, so maybe the count is only two). I’ve never been in a Smartcar. They’re amazingly roomy inside, but built like toys - plasticky and unpredictable.
The woman took me on a winding route down the slushy back streets to a restaurant that turned out to be very “geschlossen,” then tried to back out of the deeply bedded parking lot. Her Smartcar started to spin its front tires when she put it in reverse, and I thought for sure I had gotten an old lady and her car stuck in the snow because I wanted a sandwich. The day couldn’t have become more bewildering or absurd. I made a motion that I was going to get out and push the front of the car while she gassed it, but as I reached for the door handle she put her hand on mine and then pointed in a “stay” sort of gesture, the way you’d tell a toddler not to move because you said so. “Uh,” I mumbled, then sat back. I’d almost gotten my sedan stuck in the snow in exactly the same way when I lived in Pennsylvania, and I thought for sure there was no way this old lady knew how to rock herself out of this. All I can say is, don’t underestimate old German women who have been driving in the snow for years. She put the car back in drive and gunned it forward, plowing deeper into the snow drift. I raised my eyebrows but didn’t yet grab for the door handle. She then unceremoniously put the car in reverse after getting stuck in neutral twice, and lead-footed the accelerator while the little car whined in agony and then suddenly and unexpectedly popped out of the rut. Yeah I did. I had to clap. She smiled triumphantly as she turned back onto the main road, once in a while saying, “Oooo” when the car fishtailed.
I recall FlyBoy once saying to me, “I can’t believe the situations you get yourself into.” I suppose it’s telling that his remark came to mind again as I rode in an old lady’s Smartcar in the middle of snowy nowhere Germany. I just wanted to get to California, but karma makes you pay your due, as it were, and maybe it even helps you learn a little something about yourself in the process, my new, rational, sensible self. I still couldn’t believe my emotional heroics. In fact, I feel like I can’t even qualify them as heroics, because the whole thing was so easy. Emotional heroics are where you dig your nails into your forearm to prevent yourself from crying, or grit your teeth so hard they might crack to keep from saying something nasty. You just can’t physically (or mentally) keep something like that going. Having it come naturally to me is something I’ve vividly imagined for ages but could never, prior to this event, make reality. If I was forced to acknowledge any hint of regret at all about this extraordinary awareness, it’s that I wasn’t able to come by it sooner. Exemplary self-control is useful for a lot more than just airline employee charity.
We did eventually find a sandwich shop, in case you were wondering. The best part is that the old lady made me out to be an American Oliver Twist, this poor girl from California who doesn’t speak German and just wants something to eat. This is amazing actually, since I understood everything she was telling the woman behind the deli counter, and she didn’t once tell the woman that I was penniless yet the deli woman still gave me the sandwich for free. To my surprise, the old woman then bid me auf wiedersehen and took off in her Smartcar right after explaining to me that it was less than a 1 km walk back to the B&B. I wanted to scream, “No, take me with you, I’ll only be a minute!” but that was a little too complex for my limited vocabulary, so instead I just waved goodbye, wondering how I wouldn’t be soaked through by the time I got back to the B&B, if I managed to find my way back.
I decided to sit down, eat my sandwich, and ponder it a bit like I did earlier when faced with the prospect of bad and then worse. After ten minutes or so of deliberations, I watched as the deli woman came out from behind the counter and tried to explain to me in the kind of German you use when you’re talking to retarded people and Americans that she was off at 2 p.m. and would drive me back to the B&B if I wanted. How does that go again? Oh baby, dankeschön…
I guess maybe you’re wondering wtf this all has to do with karma. Or maybe you’re just wondering wtf in general. I kind of am too, since I’m still sitting here in this B&B wondering if something good happened, something bad happened, or both. On the one hand, I missed my flight for a pretty dumb reason, and I was literally almost at the airport. I had to pay a change fee. I had to get a hotel. I’m late getting home. On the other hand, I only had to pay a change fee. I had two German women who don’t even know me drive me around town and give me free food. I serendipitously realized that I understand a lot of German when German and not Swiss people are speaking it. I managed to finally write a new blog entry. Most of all, I’m conscious of the fact that somewhere along the line, apparently while I wasn’t even paying attention, insanity stopped coming ’round this place. There’s something about that feeling that points to some pretty good karma.
Unenjoyment
While I don’t quite understand the mechanism, there’s something about being sick and trying to get better that makes a small subset of people want to treat you badly. Whether they do it on purpose or by accident, it really doesn’t matter. People always think that intentions matter. They do matter, but mostly only when you’re standing trial for something that could put you away for a very long time. In matters pertaining to emotional violence and wreckage, it doesn’t matter what your intentions were. You simply shouldn’t be a shithead to other people, whether you intended to or not. It’s more than not nice - it’s a dealbreaker.
The worst types of people are those who, when you try to explain that you were scared or insulted or angry because of something they did or said, not only don’t apologize but then defend their actions by putting the blame on you. You’re always “too sensitive,” or “an exaggerator,” or best of all, “a liar.” Who am I talking about? Well, I can’t say, but I wrote an earlier entry about just such an experience, which you may have read, and now I have a new one.
Four days ago I decided to return to Turkey for a trip with a friend to the southern coast of the country for a relaxing beach holiday. I’ll admit - booking the initial trip for over a week gave me pause, mostly because I was supposed to be in Zurich getting better and seeing my doctor and all of those good things, but I thought hell, what can’t be more healing than swimming in the Mediterranean? What I failed to remember is that even the paradise quality of the Garden of Eden is completely dependent on who’s sharing it with you.
This person had in fact insulted me before - but with friends, that kind of shit happens, right? You give a person a freebie and then you move on. His offense was rather egregious (insulting my family) but I’ve been in a forgiving mood lately with my emotional healing process solidly on track with only the expected fumbles here and there. This is of course, not to say that I’m currently perfectly capable of handling people who choose to antagonize and offend me, especially when they are already aware of what I’m going through. A while back when Papaya was sharing with me a story of a person who was pissing her off, I said to her almost off-handedly that I had long ago decided to avoid people who caused me “unenjoyment.” There’s no dictionary definition of unenjoyment, obviously, because unenjoyment, like fashion, is sort of a personal taste thing. Like fashion, though, there are things that many people might agree constitute unenjoyment just as there are many people who might agree on what’s considered bad fashion. The key fact to remember is that not everyone perceives the same kinds of things as unenjoyment.
For me, unenjoyment is much more subtle and complex than straightforward hate or fear. It’s more like an irritating biting insect that buzzes around your ear and attacks you when you least expect it. You swat at it occasionally, but it never goes away and never stops its nagging, mostly because that’s its nature to be annoying in order to get what it wants. Such an insect is usually harmless, but on occasion it can transmit some life threatening disease that you saw coming, but you ignored because it was easier not to have to deal with it. How does this translate from simile to human being? The person who causes me unenjoyment can have all, some, or even only one of the following characteristics, and can also manifest these characteristics in varying degrees: delusions of grandeur, hypocrisy, poor work ethic, excessive self-righteousness, defensive default, laziness, superiority complex, inflated expectations (particularly of the friendship shared with me), abrasively public politics, constant demands for non-reciprocal respect, a lack of or distorted understanding of empathy, and a basic deficiency in reading body language and social hints. Note that this is my list - your mileage for what causes you unenjoyment may vary.
Now, I don’t want to paint a picture for you of some utter freak or homicidal maniac. In my experience, many of these individuals appear as highly functioning members of society. In fact, they probably are and continue to be highly functioning and fit well into their respective social circles. It’s not even that any of these people are horrible at all, it’s just something about their interactions with me that cause me great unenjoyment. These people are often surrounded by friends who can deal with them for whatever clinical psychology reason you want to use to explain the functioning. They have jobs, they appear happy from the outset, they are educated, and they can even be fun to be around, which is usually why I become friends with them to start. I am not sure if it’s communication breakdown, mismatched expectations, or simply incompatible personalities, but the common link among all people who cause me unenjoyment is just that - even if I valued their company to begin with, I eventually can’t stand to be around them because they consistently make my day a little darker.
The longer you hang around people who cause you unenjoyment, the more likely it is that you will develop a bad attitude yourself, or become depressed and irritable. These people may even start to consume the hours that you don’t spend with them, because you’re constantly thinking about how they’ve recently offended or disrespected you. Worse is that such people won’t even notice they’ve made you angry, freaked you out, or insulted you. Your attempts to relay this message in the nicest way you can are met with blank stares or subject changes or unfunny jokes.
I usually end up thoroughly severing all relations with people who cause me unenjoyment. It might seem like an excessive reaction to simple unenjoyment. I mean, I don’t hate these people. In fact, most of them I really enjoyed spending time with before the fatal moment. It’s just that I will be forever unable to give them what they need to cause them to stop dishing the unenjoyment my way. They want something, you ask? Let’s be fair - of course they do. Everyone wants to reap the fruits of a relationship with someone else, either as a friend or lover or teacher or mentor or leader or follower. I can always offer friendship, but what I can’t provide these people with is higher self-esteem, unconditional respect, complacent agreement, a soul to save, company for constant misery, or love. I’ve been working hard to rid myself of my own variations on these needs, or finding ways to discover personal fulfillment without the help of others. The last thing I need in the world is someone who thinks that I am the solution to even one of the shortcomings of his or her own troubled heart.
And so it was that I had to cut short my holiday in southern Turkey to get the fuck outta Dodge. I won’t exhaustively detail why I needed to get away from this person, or why he pissed me off. It’s really all irrelevant, because like I said, my unenjoyment may not be someone else’s unenjoyment, so it would probably not have the same impact on you as it would me. Suffice it to say, that as I put ever not so lightly (as is my style) in my last email to him, (despite hoping he’d drop the subject altogether and not contact me anymore - but alas, people who cause unenjoyment don’t understand that), he’s a chain smoking fascist asshole and I choose to not be associated with him anymore. No, it wasn’t the nicest thing to say, but I was at my wit’s end after numerous straightforward and non-profane indications that I wanted to be left alone, and that he promptly ignored. The problem with the unenjoyment is that it never goes away that easily. There is always the rebuttal, the defense, the accusations, the superiority, the trivializing of the victim’s emotions and fears, and so on, ad nauseum. You really must wonder how the situation might have been different had the person just said, “I am sorry I offended you and your family,” or, “I am sorry I scared the living shit out of you,” from the get go, or, “I value your friendship so maybe we can discuss the matter further in person.” It’s a sad fact of the universe for me that a person who causes me unenjoyment will, by nature of the definition, never be able to put themselves second in order to save a human relationship.
Leaving the offenses unmentioned, I still can’t omit the gem of the entire last three days of unenjoyment in southern Turkey. After directly asking to be left alone a number of times and being ignored, I finally resorted to angry body language to 1) save my voice from having to repeat my request twenty more times, and 2) attempt a different method of indicating “go the fuck away.” I buried my nose in the book I’d been reading the entire holiday and sat on my bed while he continued to ask interrogative questions. It was at this point that he articulated the demand that has come to define the spirit of unenjoyment for me, that jewel of a statement that lords over all friendship, respect, and common courtesy.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Why, I don’t think I’ve heard that request since I was 8 years old. Even better, I’m pretty sure there are only two people in all the world who have ever had the right to say that - mom and dad. I remember deliberately placing my book on the bed and replying, “Excuse me?” I guess he got what he wanted, but perhaps not with the reaction he intended. Of course, as it goes, he later insisted that I misinterpreted him or overreacted or didn’t hear him or all of the above. He wrote in an email response to my first message, “What I meant was, ‘You aren’t looking at me when I talk to you.’” While I’m not surprised I’m still saddened that he’d try to play down what he really said as if it was a statement as innocuous as “It’s dark in here.” It wasn’t, he knows that, and his attempts to cover it it up are almost more unenjoyable than the original offense.
I hadn’t really decided whether or not I was leaving, but at that moment all was decided for me. Shit always goes down at the worst possible time, of course, and to prove it, Ramadan had just started and all flights out of Bodrum, Turkey were either fully booked or several thousand bucks for a one way ticket to Zurich. In the end, it all comes down to how much you want to get out of your current situation versus how much money and effort you’re willing to spend. For me, money and effort aren’t always connected, which is a bit erroneous but that day, it still worked out for me. I ended up sitting at the Bodrum airport for nineteen hours (or rather, living at the Bodrum airport) awaiting a flight to Istanbul, then spending another four hours in Istanbul waiting to board a flight for Strasbourg, France. Once in Strasbourg, I discovered no one spoke English but I knew enough crappy French to catch the bus to the tram to the main train station where I caught the second-to-last train back to Zurich. It took me about 48 hours to get home.
When I walked into the office sweaty and disheveled with my luggage still in tow and saw Kiwi typing away at his computer, I said, “I have never been so glad to be back in Zurich.”
“Jess,” he said, “I think that in the future, whenever you have an idea about something you want to do, you should ask an unbiased third party whether or not they think it’s a good idea before you actually go and do it.”
That’s some advice that causes me great enjoyment.
Photos from my trip to Ephesus before all this shit went down are here.
Spanish Horses, South American Butterflies, and Viennese Bumper Cars
Bee and I always know where we’re going, even if it has yet to be decided or we don’t end up leaving the hotel until noon. I don’t really understand how we know this, it’s just that there are things that we know and things that we don’t know and have yet to form an opinion about. We don’t allow the latter to slow us down, I guess, the way it almost always slows down men and women when they’re together. When you’re dating someone you always have to know where and why and for how long and “are we actually going somewhere?” Thankfully, Bee and I are neither dating, nor do we care about any of that, and we still managed to get around Vienna in serious Austrian style.
Ok, I’ll get straight to the reason we were there - to see the horses, of course. The Spanish Riding School, which is in Vienna, Austria, just to be confusing, is the world famous training school of the Lipizzaner stallions. I can sense already that 98% of you, as my audience, are now fading away as soon as you saw that this was going to be about horses. At one point in my life, I would have thought, oh my gosh, I should try to make this more interesting so that people will keep reading it, but then one day I got old and thought, the hell with you people. I find horses intensely interesting and anyway, what are you doing right now besides sitting in front of a computer pretending to work? You don’t have anything more interesting to read right now or you’d be reading it. And so you will suffer me this horse story.
These horses put on a wintertime show in their grand riding academy building that includes high level movements that take years to train. I’ll spare you the names of all these things since they won’t mean a thing to you, but suffice it to say they include cool tricks like leaping into the air and kicking out their back legs at the apex of their jump, with or without a rider mounted. If you think about it, it is pretty amazing that you can train a horse to do any of this stuff, since they don’t respond well to voice commands like dogs do and most of these moves don’t come naturally to them, such as rearing and then hopping forward on both hind legs, or trotting in place without moving forward. Even more surprising was what we learned about their riders. Despite Bee’s perseverance in suggesting that I try riding Lipizzaner stallions during the year off I was considering taking from work to pursue my horse ambitions, you do have to be a man to join the Spanish Riding School (not surprising), and you don’t have to have prior riding experience - in fact it’s discouraged. The trainers here believe that any prior riding experience you might have won’t be applicable here (unless it’s dressage, and even then, not so much) and could potentially slow you down. Personally I think they just want to mold their students to their training ideals, but hey, how can I hold it against them when everyone who’s ever trained riding students wants to do that, including me?
The other peculiar fact besides riding school applicants being selected on the basis of having no horse experience, was the rule that they are also chosen based on build. While this isn’t a complete shocker (you’re just not going to make much of a basketball player if you’re 4′11″), it’s not necessarily an athletic requirement. It is true that it’s just easier to ride horses if you have a short torso and long legs, but there are plenty of riders who don’t meet this criteria and do quite well competitively since the horse plays a large part in a rider’s success. But like a classic huntseat equitation class, riders with this build are selected over others simply because it flatters the horse much more and looks better in general. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the leggy, tall riders parading around the arena (and who Birgit and I were deciding upon for my next date) were really only around 5′5″ and it was all a sexy illusion!
In the summer the horses don’t perform, they just train. They’re so popular that you still have to pay to get into their training sessions to watch them trot around for two hours. Of course, being the horse freaks that we are, Bee and I paid and stood there for about an hour and a half waiting for people to get bored and leave before us. They did, but only about half an hour before the training ended. One thing I learned that I should share - if you ever go to watch an actual performance you should definitely shell out the cash to get front row seats. Anywhere else and you seriously can’t see anything because of the way the building is designed. It looks grand, and it is, but it is not spectator friendly. Unfortunately they were totally anal about photography both during the training and the barn tour, but Bee was able to snap this illegal photo under one arm during a break. I really can’t imagine having to train while wearing a wool coat with tails and white britches.
The barn tour was short but romantic, with the tack room arranged by someone apparently obsessive-compulsive slash hypochondriac, and the horses all neatly bedded down in mounds of shavings and surrounded by the brass post and rails decorating the bars around their stalls. Most notably, there was one brown horse in the sea of gray (white) horses. Lipizzaners are born black and gradually turn gray as they age. You’ll notice that I don’t say “white.” This is because in horse technical terms, there is no such thing as a “white” horse. A true white horse would be an albino, and those are rare. All horses, even if they look white, are gray. There are varying shades of gray. In the photo above, the horse on the far left of the photo is what’s called “dapple-gray.” Dapple-gray horses will always fade as they age. This is a good way of telling whether a horse is young or old. For example, I can tell you that the horse in the center of the photo is the oldest, since he’s the lightest gray out of all the horses there. We asked about the brown horse in the barn and were told that brown (or rather, bay) is an acceptable color for the Lipizzaner breed, but not common. Horsey superstition insists that there always be at least one brown Lipizzaner in a Lipizzaner barn at all times, to prevent accidents. By “accidents” I’m assuming they mean having to call the ambulance or the vet, since one of the riders did hit the dirt during the earlier training session. He didn’t get hurt, however, so maybe brownie is doing his job.
I’m not overly sad that Vienna is not an option for my next riding career. After all, that still leaves Europe, Argentina, and Montana as possibilities. I’m more sad that all the guys in the Spanish Riding School turned out to be Napoleons!
The best part about traveling with Bee besides her being the only person who will put up with horse tourism is that she always manages to get me to go somewhere I would otherwise think too lame or girly to appeal to me. That’s right, Bee has a few girlier tendencies than me, though she’ll never admit that to you if you ask her. “We’re going to the Schmetterlinghaus,” she said determinedly, after reading about it on a Vienna tourist map. “Ok,” I said, without question. Bee usually doesn’t make solid decisions in my presence, so when she does, I know only to answer in the affirmative. Schmetterling is German for “butterfly,” and that’s what this was - a giant greenhouse filled with tropical plants and annoyingly elusive butterflies. It really was a tropical paradise. So tropical, in fact, that within thirty seconds of entering, you were smearing the sweat around on your face with your shirt sleeve. The butterflies seemed to come in two varieties. Those that would let your camera lens get so close you nearly smushed them, and those that flew away when you were fifty feet away trying mightily to be quiet while you approached.
These giant blue ones were impossible to photograph, and Bee took the only successful photo of one that day.
Then again, there was the one that landed right by us and mysteriously made no attempts to fly away as some visiting idiot virtually finger raped it trying to get it to open its wings so he could photograph it. Gads, people are dumb.
I will readily admit to Bee and the world that the Schmetterlinghaus was pretty darn cool, and that everyone should try and drop by if you’re ever in Vienna.
Other things I suggest? The Uhrenmuseum (clock museum) was amazing. And no, all the clocks are not set to the correct time as the popular fable goes (can you imagine having to change all these clocks for daylight savings, or hearing them all go off at noon?), and I don’t think all of them are even working. Regardless, this is a seriously huge collection of timepieces. They even have “Die kleinste Pendeluhr der Welt,” or the tiniest pendulum clock in the world, sitting next to a thimble.
Bee always manages to surprise me when I least expect it. I suppose that’s the definition of “surprise,” right, but there are things she does that are unexpected but not eyebrow-raising, and then there are things she does that make you go, “And where, pray tell, did that come from?” At the end of our Vienna trip, she said, “Let’s go to that amusement park,” and pointed to it on her map. This is funny in that Bee refuses to ride any of the roller coasters, deeming them too scary. She will, however, gladly ride anything that involves violence or possible injury to others, which is a little known fact about Bee that I am now exposing to the entire world. I suspect this is probably why she plays polo, and why (to my utter disbelief) she decided to try hockey, but she always keeps her dangerous tendencies in check just enough to cause me to look at her out of the corner of my eye every so often.
Bumper cars usually aren’t dangerous. At least, in the U.S. where you’re not allowed to hit anyone and everyone has to drive in the same direction so that the park doesn’t get sued, they’re not dangerous. Even after 7.5 months in Europe, I consistently forget that people here are responsible for their own actions. As such, you can mostly do whatever the hell you want, including standing up in a bumper car or jumping in or out while it’s moving or not even bothering to wear your seatbelt so that when Bee sneaks up on you from the left and rams into your car at full speed, you practically go flying out onto the metal floor of the ride. You’d be surprised at how many times she was able to do this when there isn’t even anywhere to hide. She sort of scares me a bit in these situations, but I figure that after all these years of my various antics I’ve been asking for it, so I buck up and try to get her back, though never quite as well.
The Vienna Prater amusement park is an old skool, half post war, carnie trash games and rides park dotted with more modern vomit-in-your-lap, spend-ten-minutes-upside-down type thrills, all enjoyable within the flexible European guidelines of “If you kill yourself, it’s your own damn fault.” The best part about the €3 or so that we spent on the bumper cars was that the ride went on until you either wanted to jump out on your own to prevent your concussion from getting worse or you puked in your own lap. When either of these things happen, you can’t say you didn’t get your money’s worth.
The entire Vienna gallery is here.
Mozart Balls
I don’t know if you know this, but Mozart was a dirty little sleaze. I didn’t actually learn this in my travels around Salzburg this week, rather, I thought it might be intriguing to go to Salzburg just because I knew this about Mozart. I took an entire class about ole’ Wolfie’s brief but colorful life back in undergrad. Besides of course listening to his work, we were given some biographical material to read, and best of all, the sordid, translated letters written between him and his favorite lady friends. Mozart, dare I say it, had some kind of fecal fascination. Either that or he thought the ladies would get a real rise from him explaining how he’d “shit on their heads.” If you think I’m making this up, pick up Mozart: A Life, by Maynard Solomon and verify it for yourself.
So, Mozart’s “birth house” is indeed in Salzburg, as well as the church he attended, but there’s not a whole lot of other evidence that he was around, unless you count the infinite souvenir tributes capitalizing on this sheer coincidence. Today in Salzburg, Mozart is a rock star. If someone was ever born in the wrong century, maybe it was him. You can buy Mozart CDs, Mozart mugs, Mozart pens, Mozart magnets, Mozart kitchen aprons, Mozart pot holders, Mozart staplers, and the shining star of marketing excellence - “Mozart Balls.” I could make this up, but it just wouldn’t be as awesome. These edible chocolate souvenirs are wrapped in foil stamped with his big-nosed likeness and sold at at least five hundred shops all over town. I really don’t know what they have to do with Mozart, in all honesty. I mean ok, I can certainly come up with some obvious but inappropriate connections, but they don’t seem to be that unique to Wolfgang Amadeus himself. I guess they don’t need to be, because people were still buying them like they were going out of style.
Salzburg is apparently also known for being the place where they filmed a bunch of scenes from The Sound of Music. I can’t give you all the details because that movie actually bugs the heck outta me ever since I worked stage crew for our middle school production when I was in the seventh grade. The old people are loading themselves onto the busses there though, and it’s something like €45 for your authentic Sound of Music tour!
If you really want to visit Salzburg, my advice is - the gardens. The flowers are absolutely stunning, and the cool statues aren’t too bad either. In fact, of all the postcards I sent home to my mom from every country I’ve traveled, the only one she commented on was “that place with the beautiful garden!” This is Mirabelle Garden on the east shore of the Salzach river. I adore the unicorns.
Festung Hohensalzburg (High Salzburg Fortress) isn’t too bad either. It still has some of the original wall decorations, doors, furniture, and a gargantuan ceramic stove, known as the Majolica stove, covered with exotic fruit sculptures and religious motives. The fortress even has an indoor loo on one of the floors (not the bottom floor, mind you) that the explanatory sign said was “accessible from all floors.” I couldn’t determine if this meant that you could get to it from any floor or that there was one like it on every floor… right below this one?
The castle also has a very mentionable view of the whole city too.
I wasn’t actually in Salzburg to see Mozart, believe it or not. It was just a stopover on the way to Vienna, to meet Bee who was playing hooky from the Czech factory to meet me at some convenient halfway point. And really, we were only in Vienna to see some horses, so you can see where this is going already. If you were looking for the Lonely Planet version of our adventures in Austria, this is totally not going to be it.
And my recommendation is, if you’re interested in learning about Mozart the man, don’t go to Salzburg. Watch the movie Amadeus, which, while a fictional account of his life, does an accurate job of portraying his rambunctious personality and lifestyle that he glamorized in his own lascivious correspondence. For even more entertainment, sample some of his translated letters to his lady friends. What a guy.
The entire Salzburg gallery is here.
Two Weddings and a Credit Card Bill
If you really must know what started me on the road to behind, I’ll gladly blame it on the peculiar fact that everyone seems to always want to get married in August. I really wouldn’t mind it if y’all decided to vary it a bit, or at least get married a little closer together geographically, as in the past five years I’ve had to travel an average of 3,300 miles per trip to get to your love shindigs and damn if that isn’t more jet lag than one person can handle in half a decade. Ok, I jest, just a tad, as those of you who have seen me make my appearance at your once-in-a-lifetimes know I’d have jettisoned to Mars and back to see you properly wedded off, but you know me and so you know I have to make public my fair share of bitching and moaning about loving you guys. And by the way, if this turns out to not be a one time deal for any of you, the second time you’re on your own, but do tell me where you’re registered and I’ll send you whatever apple peeler or trash compactor or telescoping feather duster you and the backup love of your life both desire.
Truth is, the weddings were lovely and I must be getting quite elderly emotionally because they did bring a little tear to my eye, and this time I can’t even attribute it to my accursed allergies. Blinks actually got married over in Oman with amazing Saudi Arabian-Pakistani dual flair, as evidenced by the mountains of photo albums documenting the colorfully ritualistic event, but was clever enough to stage the after party in London. He thereby enabled everyone to drink themselves into amusing idiocy while wearing saucy outfits on the outdoor terrace of a swank club, all within the inviting arms of an absolutely chilling English summer night. I detest the cold, and I still adored the party. Plane ticket to London: $250, Italian silver dress from Berlin: €39, new European plug adapter after burning up the first one with a hair dryer: CHF 25, all-inclusive train ticket for getting off at the wrong tube stop four times in a row: £2, seeing Blinks get hammered to the point of alarming incoherence while surrounded by Saudi Arabian princesses: priceless.
The other treat: Meow, Pins, and Lavender (photo above, L to R: Jess, Pins, Meow, Lavender, Blinks) showed up from the U.S. While they were technically there to see Blinks off, the happy side effect is that I got to see them as well and finally had someone to travel with, a luxury I haven’t had very often this year. I haven’t traveled with anyone in so long that I worried I could have developed some annoying habits (yes, even more! Smartasses…) that might be readily detected by my new travel partners. Whatever the truth may have been, Meow and Pins put up with me all the way to Warwick Castle and back, during which time Pins was able to extract her vengeance in the way that artsy people do.
I’ve been to my fair share of castles since moving to Europe, but I have to say that no one capitalizes on their castles quite the way the English do. Warwick Castle (which is pronounced “War-ick,” because both the English and the French insert lots of random letters they have no plans of using but enjoy laughing at Americans for attempting to use) was built in 1068 and features two “machicolated” towers, Guy’s Tower and Caesar’s Tower. “Machicolated” simply means that these towers have openings between the stones jutting out from the sides of the structure. These openings were used for throwing your favorite pointy or heavy (preferably both) object down on your attackers or perhaps pouring the boiling liquid of your choice on vacuum cleaner salesmen.
Nowadays it’s some kind of Monty Python slash Renaissance Faire abhorrence overrun by costumed freaks and kids smoting down baddies with plastic broadswords. It was, in a word, staged. While this kind of thing no doubt irritates, it’s still an original castle, and it’s hard not to be awesome when you’re a castle. It still has towers and parapets and winding, dark staircases, great banquet halls and even a dungeon. Most notably it has the world’s largest siege engine (yes, I just wanted to say “siege engine”), a catapult with the Old World moniker “Giant Trebuchet,” big enough to launch boulders the size of cows. Pins, a European history major and ancient weapons connossieur, led us as reliable leaders do all the way out to Warwick to see this thing launch. After waiting five hours for the second launch of the day (we missed the first), everyone lined up at the edge of the stream and watched expectantly as four men climbed into the human-sized hamster wheels mounted at either side of the trebuchet and started to wind the giant flinging arm down to the ground. As noted by a costumed announcer, animals such as horses and oxen were rarely used to prepare the trebuchet for battle as they were too valuable and needed for other purposes (whereas soldiers were, as they are today, readily expendable).
“How are they gonna bring the giant rock back?”
Meow always asks the sensible questions that no one can answer because no one has yet sorted out the answer to the preliminary questions, such as, “Where are they getting a giant rock from in the first place?” As it turned out, they weren’t launching a cow rock at all. They were launching what they tried to make sound a lot more exciting and which probably was, if you’re eight years old - a fireball on a long rope. I can only assume that in the case of an actual siege, the guys running in the wheels would run a whole lot faster because it must have taken thirty minutes at least to set the thing up. When it finally launched, well, you can see for yourself the terror.
I was hoping that a similar cutback in cultural attraction funds wouldn’t be awaiting me when I headed to Stonehenge a few days later. The miniature foam artifact from This is Spinal Tap, anyone? Ok, yeah, so there were little Stonehenges for sale when I got there, but the circle of stones itself appeared largely free of banner advertising and people running around trying to sell you keychains and umbrellas (although I would like to take this opportunity to rub in that Meow and Pins could have greatly benefited from an umbrella hawker so they didn’t have to resort to buying Warwick Castle branded umbrellas despite me telling them that yes, it will probably be raining in England so bring an umbrella).
While it’s pretty amazing that Stonehenge is still around as it is today, being around 3,800 years old, although it has actually fallen down a few times and been put back up. Most people agree it’s an altar for sun worshipers, although it’s still not really clear who actually built the thing.
It’s a mystical, cool place, no doubt, and I would recommend that everyone see it at least once, but I will admit it didn’t move me the way standing on the edge of a cliff at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa did, or climbing Oberrothorn in Zermatt, Switzerland to see the entire valley and the Matterhorn stretching far into the clouds and sky did. Maybe I have an obsession with the sky and the sea (particularly the sky) but I want always to see the whole world from some enormous vantage point - the best I could do is my wide angle lens shot below.
I took a bus to the little town of Bath after my trip to the stones. Bath is famous for, yes, the Roman Baths (although despite living in and traveling around Europe for nearly a year now, I still get weirded out by Roman things being everywhere except it seems, in Rome), which are built in such a way as to take advantage of a natural hot spring rising right out of the chilly English soil. The water of course flows through a series of aqueducts that Romans are famous for, and was probably a heavenly little luxury during its heyday. You can still see the bubbles bursting at the water’s surface in various pools, and the largest pool, the one surrounded by cranky looking carved Roman soldiers, still sits under a layer of steam at night that settles over the water as the temperature drops. There’s another pool inside the building where the management has taken to installing a video projection of “typical Roman bath life,” with actors portraying Romans in various states of undress, walking around and chatting about Roman business and women and whatever else it is that Romans used to talk about (and possibly still do). It’s a wonder how many people were in there trying to photograph a projection on a wall with their flash on. While I still have light years to go when it comes to learning about photography and being able to call myself a “pro” (though I’m well aware that plenty of people already do that with far fewer qualifications than me), it just seems common sense that you can’t shoot a light source with another big light source washing it all out, or that if you try to shoot fish at the aquarium with your flash on, all you’re going to get is a huge white star in the center of your photo. As usual, Apants tried to tell me that these people don’t understand the light concept or that they simply don’t know how to use their cameras, and while the latter seems a bit more plausible to me, the whole thing just reeks of absurdity with a whiff of stupidity.
But as usual, I digress. There was a pool, and it was full of coins. Pounds and euros and a U.S. dime here and there and suddenly I got to wondering if people just threw coins in pools out of force of habit or were they all, each and every one of them, wishing for something? I felt the itch and pulled out whatever I had in my wallet, five pence or a pound or whatever it was, I’m not sure and I don’t even remember, and I clutched it in my palm, squeezing it so tight that the edges of it dented my skin. I’m never at a loss for what to wish for. Sometimes I consider why this is - is it because I am so focused I know exactly what I want (ha) or am I powerless victim of the moment who only manages to wish for something she wants right now, whether or not it might be of any benefit to her in the future? I’d like to think that in my wishes as well as my political views, I am more middle of the road, that I can manage to wish for something with longer term benefits and more profoundly beneficial impact. But hey, I’m only human. It’s something I despise and love everyday. At least you will never catch me wasting my wish on selfless world peace or selfish lottery winning. I know better than that, especially when a much smaller wish will do to make me and everyone around me and maybe even indirectly, over time, everyone around them happier. I pressed my eyelids shut as tightly as my curled fingers around the coin. When a tear still managed to flee the corner of my eye I opened them and flipped the coin high into the ceiling. It plunked through the water with grace and came to rest next to its many sparkling companions. I don’t know why wishes make me cry, but I like to think that when I cry it’s sadness escaping to send someone a message about my wish, and hopefully when it finally returns it will come back a lot happier.
Whenever I get that zany little sad streak during my travels, I know that the thing I must do is to take photos. To have a camera as a constant companion is I guess more than a tad weird, but if you saw my camera you’d know that it was loved and traveled and has seen as much of the world with its one big eye as I have with my two. I guess people get a little surprised when I pull it out of my handmade hippie bag with no padding around it, its corners smooshed and hand grip worn to a slick, shiny surface, dust in the lens and bits of cracker dust and sand all over the LCD. Well, it’s seen stuff, like me. If I sat around in a little padded bag all the time and worried constantly about whether I’d get a scratch or a bump or look worn out, then I suppose I’d be a lot prettier too but not nearly as useful or interesting, and what’s the point of that?
The town of Bath is apparently well known for its glass (and anyone who knows me knows that the way to my heart is art glass and not diamonds), so camera and I headed over to a glass blowing demonstration before the bus pulled out for London. Since I love glass you’d think I’d know more about how it’s created but I’ve never really watched the whole procedure up close.
The actual process in terms of steps required is simple but the skill needed to make the pieces I most adore is insane. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you can spend a lifetime learning to make glass and continue to get better, as many art forms are exactly like this, but I was still amazed at how long it took to make something that didn’t suck. In other types of art, such as drawing or painting, you can make something that’s perhaps passable as art, that doesn’t suck but isn’t great either, and that someone might actually still buy, thereby actually confirming your standing as an “artist.” I’m not sure I’d buy any of this student glass work, even if it is on the discount shelf. Misshapen and sad, it isn’t even salvageable by claiming it’s full of “character.” It’s mostly just ugly or creepy in a Tim Burton kind of way that prevents you from wanting it to buy it, let alone set it on the mantle in your house so it can sprout legs in the night time and gimp around your living room in disturbing rapture while you’re asleep.
I had the good fortune of watching a master glass blower at work, making a lovely vase with a lily-flower opening. He started with a glob of red hot glowing glass on a stick which he rolled in colorful, crumbled glass bits to produce the streaks of melting color you see on some vases and bowls. He then placed it back in the oven, melted it some more, and pulled it out. With his assistant helping to keep it in constant motion, he began to shape the vase with tools. The hardest part of this entire procedure seemed to be the perpetual spinning of the stick. The minute you cease to turn the stick, the blazing hot glass starts to drip straight towards the floor. In addition, like a pottery wheel, inconsistent spinning will make the piece lopsided, Burtonesque (see above), and liable to scare small children when finished and also end up on the student discount shelf in the adjoining store.
The difficulty of working with even large globs of glass made me even more impressed when I looked later at some of the store pieces and saw the fine threading and delicate handles and the perfectly balanced bases. During the demonstration, the assistant shaped a small piece of glass into a gossamer thread, easily four feet long and nearly as flexible as a fiber optic hair, and gave it to the small audience to handle. If you bent it far enough, it would of course snap, but the pliability was still unbelievable and it was difficult to remember that you were manipulating glass. Yeah, they got me to buy something from the store. It’s sitting on my dining room table now as I type this. I also made sure I chose one of those impossible pieces that looked like it would take twenty years to learn how to make. If you want to see it, I guess you’ll either have to come visit Zurich or wait for me to move back to California.
I spent a few more days with Blinks and his wife Sweets in London after their party. As Sweets’ family slowly dispersed back to Oman, their flat became emptier until it was eventually one family member, Sweets, Blinks at work, and me. Sweets makes the most awesome Jasmine tea - the kind that makes you fuzzy, contemplative, and full of dreams. She claims she just buys it in Chinatown but I know there’s something that goes into the making of it that’s her doing alone. One morning as I surrounded this coveted tea in a hot mug with my hands, Sweets asked me if I planned to stay in Europe. I nonchalantly gave the answer I give to everyone: “I thought about it.” She smiled in that casual, curious way I’ve come to know her for in this short amount of time since we’ve met, but said nothing. The silence drew it out of me.
“Well, you do know I thought about doing my British Horse Society certification.” I had mentioned it to her before, when I visited them in April right after their wedding in Oman. “There are lots of excellent schools to do that out here in the U.K.”
“You did say that!” she acknowledged, more supportively than I’ve heard from most people in a while. “I bet you could even do that here in London.” She and Blinks have been advocates of my moving to London since they got married.
But I’m not sure if it’s a good idea leapt into my head, as it always does, whether I’m talking to a real person or just dueling it out within my own head. “Have you always worked since college or have you taken a break?” I asked, trying to redirect the questioning while still staying on a topic that I was vastly interested in but usually too fearful to discuss.
I half expected her to say no, that she’d gone straight to work after school. Why, I don’t know, except that it’s the answer I get from almost everyone. People haven’t done anything. They’ve just worked. And worked. And worked. And generally made me feel like a lost slacker whenever I suggested taking a break from work to do something that not only didn’t make any money but might actually cost money.
“Oh yes, I took a break,” she answered, smiling and looking down for a moment. I grabbed my mug by the handle and slid it out in front of me, leaning forward ever so slightly over the table.
“What?” came out of my mouth a little more forcefully than I expected.
“I went to Cordon Bleu for six months and learned to cook.” So the secret of her delightful cooking and amazing beverages was revealed. She admitted that it wasn’t all fun and games all the time, that there really were French head chefs yelling at you all day long and a legion of male students snickering and teasing your abilities or what they actually thought was the lack thereof. And is sounds like if you really want people to love you, you go through the whole one year course which includes the baking curriculum, after which if your smile doesn’t win anyone over your crème brûlée sure will.
Maybe everyone doesn’t think this is as big a deal as I do, but you see, cooking to me is like chemistry class. If you don’t mix the right ingredients together, the whole dish will blow up. And when you don’t have something you need, you have to learn what you can use to improvise with, while preventing the aforementioned disaster from occurring. It’s all really a mystery to me. I’m the kind of person who sees there’s nutmeg on the recipe, checks my shelves and finds no nutmeg, and then promptly decides there’s no way I can make the entire dish without that ingredient since it’s on the recipe so I end up boiling ramen in a bowl for dinner. A real chef would have improvised, and not only that, but would have improvised so well you’d have thought there was nutmeg in the dish. This fascinates me. I don’t really know that that’s what they teach you over at Cordon Bleu. I suspect you have to have some skill going in to begin with, but really it’s all irrelevant. The fact is, Sweets went to Cordon Bleu for half a year and learned to cook and I am totally impressed even without the details. I think I’m totally impressed that she simply didn’t go to work right away.
Well, why don’t I take the time off? Why don’t more people do it? For mostly the same reason - people are scared. Despite it seeming like people are successfully starting up businesses left and right, it’s still not the beaten path, the mainstream, guaranteed you won’t tank track to success. It’s such an unknown that people on the main road spend much of their time either ignoring the fact that other roads exist, frowning upon people who take other roads, or giving advice to people on that other road when they themselves have never set foot off the highway. In fact, the most refreshing news I received recently was from an old high school friend who I haven’t spoken to in ages, who gave me some flat out advice about the straight and narrow that I’ve been pressured to follow for years by parents, acquaintances, and lovers: “Only do it if you absolutely love it, and you can see yourself doing it for ten to twelve years. Otherwise it’s not worth the pain and effort.” The most startling realization from that advice was - I already knew it. I’d secretly known that for years, but for some reason was waiting for someone else to say it.
One day later I was flying back to Zurich, and two days after that I was headed home to my old stomping grounds to see yet another couple wedded off. After meeting years ago on an online dating site (which I still can’t believe, but which Papaya claims is the trendy thing to do now), HalfFull and Origami were finally getting married, and while I might stake the claim to fame for flying the furthest to see them, I can’t make any claims to being the oldest friend there. HalfFull had friends from his childhood in Pittsburgh, PA make the trek out over time and distance to see him, including someone he knew when he was five years old. It seemed that everyone invited to the wedding wanted to boast about how long they’d known HalfFull, about how they were possibly his oldest friend. It was wonderful. It must be amazing to not be a celebrity or an oil tycoon, to not own an expensive car dealership or to be a rock star, and to still have so many friends who are genuinely proud to be your friend, to have them travel thousands of miles just to see you married in a park on a sunny day in Oakland while surrounded by your other friends, who, whether they’ve known you for two years or twenty, are all lifelong.
And, because life is a juxtaposition of opposites, because you wouldn’t know good if you didn’t have bad, the best day of one person’s life had to be the worst day of someone else’s. More than likely this is merely coincidence, but either way it had the effect of shifting my perspective to the middle, which is a lot better place for it to be. By the end of the reception, with everyone reeling from drink and exhaustion and celebration, a friend of HalfFull’s sat down beside me and across from other friends in a hotel bar and laid out his tale of divorce, hate, greed, and worst of all sorrowful confusion. Because what’s most of all hurtful when love goes awry is not the logistics (though those can be terrible and relentless), but the lack of explanation. There’s no answer to any of your whys, and no matter how you thrash and shriek there’s nothing to squeeze out, no real response that the other person can ever give that you can call closure. You might come up with what you think are explanations, but in your heart you know that those kinds of wounds never quite heal over.
I didn’t know what to tell him, if anything at all, understanding that while I was not the ideal person to give advice, I was at least aware that my mind was clearer than his at the moment. He wanted to get over it too soon, to say out loud that she couldn’t hurt him anymore, that she hadn’t wrecked him. But she had. “I don’t think it works like that,” I said. “I think you just have to feel how you are going to feel, for as long as is necessary.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
HalfFull took him back to his hotel. That’s right, on HalfFull’s wedding night, he had to drive his destroyed friend back home at 3 a.m. Well, that’s why everyone came to HalfFull’s wedding, why they flew all that way, why they love him. I flew home on Monday morning, destroyed, in my own way. I’d traveled across the world in two weeks to see the happiest day of four people’s lives and the worst day of one person’s life. I had a lot of love in my heart, a lot of sadness around the edges, and a huge credit card bill. I want my partner in crime too but damn, am I ever too tired to do anything about it right now.
About a week after HalfFull’s wedding, he posted some photos that I happened to feature in randomly. They were somewhat odd photos, but there I was, thrilled to be seeing him off. “It’s a good photo of you, Jess,” HalfFull said in all his honesty. I smiled. The first photo wasn’t even about me. It was of course, about the bride, Origami. But there I was, popping in unexpectedly, saying hey there, it’s the happiest day of my friend’s life, and I’m here.
The entire London, Warwick, Stonehenge, and Bath gallery is here.
Swiss National Day
August 1 is a completely Swiss holiday celebrating the independence of the country from Austria. This goes way back to 1291, so it’s a bit older than U.S. Independence Day. It doesn’t seem to be as organized as in the U.S., however, as there were no planned fireworks over Zurich - just a lot of people setting off very expensive personal fireworks that you’d never be able to legally buy in the U.S.
I geeked out and brought my tripod and took a couple of shots of the enormous ferris wheel across the lake over at Bellevue. I’m starting to really love shooting at night. And yes, per usual, you can click on either of these to see the big version.
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