A quick trip to see the ocean often reveals the simplest possible truths. You might hear seagulls, ride in the historic Mt. Washington steam train, climb said mountain in a car (though without racing) and, in the banality of basic tourism, find a few moments worth remembering: that most essential something which seems to live in the water, in the sound of waves, in the gulls and the smells of salt and seaweed. It lingers long after, like the faintest echo of the surf you might hear in a seashell, or in the wind through a window, or through the rows of Iowa corn a thousand miles from the water.
In the quaint beach shops of North America, alongside surfboards, t-shirts, fudge candy, and the smells of coffee and cheap milk, there lingers a distinct scent of desperation. The shops cluster at one end of each beach, like seaweed left strewn there, while between them stretch multi-million-dollar summer homes, condos, hotels like teeth along the rim of the bay. The people want to live here, but only in the summer. They don’t want to work the shops. Who will serve fudge when the last condo takes over the last quaint walking street, and the last surf-shop has finished its metamorphosis into a distant Wal-Mart?
A little further away, in a swamp of mosquitos if you can find one, there might spread some dense checkerboard of recreational vehicles, where those wealthy enough to buy one of those behemoth’s on wheels, but not wealthy enough for one of the summer houses, might take temporary refuge in their pursuit of an escape. But there does not seem to be any place to escape among the vehicles packed in like beans in a can, stewing in the smells of BBQ and the sounds of the neighbor’s Netfl
Despite all of this, there is the sea. It will be here when the last shop closes. There will be seaweed on the shore when the condos have gone. Maybe then, someone will want to sell fudge.
Cats wander among the tables ringing the moored boats and calm waters of Skala Sikamineas harbor. The cats come in every variety of mange, scruff, scar and distemper, and a great many of them crowd around anyone eating at an outdoor table. They’re the only thing unkempt. The carefully cobbled stones of the harbor, the elegant, ancient taverns and cafes lining it, the pastel puff coats and leathers of the patrons, worn to ward off the last murmurs of spring chill loosed as the sun sets behind a curtain of too brilliant stars, all of these things would fit correctly into a Hollywood romance set. The only things out of place are the Frontex police with sidearms and the table of Spanish rescue boat operators in stylish red uniforms. Only those guns and red coats whisper a word amiss.
As of this writing my first week at Korakas lighthouse draws to a close. The day before I arrived, six Afghans landed on the rocks east of Korakas in the boat pictured here. No-one has landed on the North shore since.
I don’t have a count of exactly how many boats have landed here this year, but the shores keep their own ledger. Wrecks are difficult to remove up the long and uneven dirt road. They lay in great heaps around every possible landing point and some impossible ones, tallying the landings with marks of rubber, fiberglass and wood. Until now there hasn’t been the time to spare for the rubbish problem, except to cut up the dinghies to get them out of the way of the next landing. (more…)
Departure in the early hours, before the sun rises, has a special smell which to me is one of the treasures of living.
This morning I stepped out onto the road. No sooner had a grey dawn risen over the Eastern Iowa Airport then I had my first “oops” moment, when I realized I hadn’t finished my paperwork for an international drivers license. Volunteer stories suggest Greek car rental agencies often don’t ask for one, so it may not end up mattering.
Perhaps that will be all that goes wrong. Hah. (more…)
Below is my original post for why I’m spending the month of April volunteering in Greece. The situation has evolved since I wrote this, but I’m moving it here for context.
I go on April 1st to spend one month on the Greek island of Lesvos. This is not a vacation. In the past year more than half a million Syrian, Afghani and Iraqi refugees have arrived on that island, fleeing terrorism and war. Every day I see new pictures of their boats overturned, their wet clothes and hunger, their desperate need for help. Each story tears me up inside. I can’t just watch from afar. Fortunately, I don’t have to. Stacey Hurlin launched her Lesvos Refugee Project to raise donations of clothing, medical supplies and food for the refugees. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to help her, and now we go together to lend our hands to the work. The needs are many: to help the boats land safely, to help stave off hypothermia from the cold Aegean crossing, to help distribute food, transport people and clean clothing, set up tents and other immediate and urgent necessities of basic survival.
It is amazing, certainly amazing, how many people have told you that to travel with these chests is impossible. On the third train out from Nice, crawling across Italia via the walking speed regionals that are the only ones the chests fit on, all alone in the last car on the train, the ticket man walks in, looks at the chests and says “It is IMPOSSIBLE, absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to travel with baggage of this size!!” It is hard to restrain the response “we’re on a train. it is moving. I think we are traveling.”
But the dramatic mystery always works out in the end. It is the word “Circus,” that almost always proves magical. As soon as any official sees the print “Marmalade Circus” on the side of the behemoths that you’ve privately come to call Mass and Inertia, they seem to come to the internal conclusion that whatever we’re up to is alright. Some even smile and laugh.
It took two full days of travel to get to Venecia from Nice. Granted the first was spent mostly in the tiny border station of Ventimelia trying to figure out which trains could hold the chests, and which could not. The night before you had arrived there well prepared to get on a sleeper train strait to Venice, but no luck. Only Gaelyn and Darla got on that train with beds in stead of chairs, on account of having bought tickets that they could not afford to lose. The other three stayed that night outside the station, sleeping in the shadow of a spreading palm tree under the waxing moon, and the smell of the over-full dumpsters ten feet away lulled you to sleep.
Shortly after the encounter with the ticket man, who had stomped away mumbling “mumma mia” (yes, they do actually say that) the reginal train broke down, and the five of you, three men and two chests, spent two and a half hours waiting on a graded track in the sunlight, and leaning against the leaning walls that lilted sideways.
In the end you made it to Venice in the late evening, just after midnight, and just after the last trolley to the camp ground, where the other two waited, left the port. So you spent your first night in Venice sleeping by the light of the full moon as it reflected off the grande canal, and listening to the radio of one of the other stranded travelers who shared the train station’s veranda with you.
Come dawn, you were awoken by a security guard, and took the first boat back to the mainland, there to gently wake the other two. The rest of the day was spent wandering Venice, looking for pitches and enjoying the countless shops of Venician Masks, and Glass.
Though the island of Venice is one of the largest tourist traps in the world, there is something that subtly distinguishes it from places like the Eiffel Tower or the Tower of London. Most such traps are a place within a city – a little area that surrounds something of great fame, where countless thousands of Indonesia-made stickers and baseball caps are sold. Venice though, is itself the attraction. The entire city exists almost exclusively on the sustenance of tourism, which gives the stuff of the place a different quality. The glass, the masks, even the gelatto, it is all incredible. To go there again, would be completely worthwhile. But more money would be better. It is unfortunate that you could not stay there longer, but it was so expensive, and in order to perform it was necessary to acquire a pass from the government. The representatives of that government were almost unbelievably friendly, and apologized profusely when it became clear that you did not have the necessary visa. Despite this, the experience of Venice was worth the days of travel and trouble.
Now you are headed for Rome, and will be spending the night in front of the station in Florence before you get there. Everything is well, and life is good.
Train station, somewhere between France and Spain. The air is hot, dry, heavy, bright, and still as a desert night. Everywhere the sun hammers down on the dry sand and rock of the rolling almost desolate hills, reflecting and refracting and slowly boiling away any sense of comfort. The only mitigation to the unrelenting brightness is the whisper of a breeze that slips in between the hills and over the shoddy half-wrecked town from the sea – a thin wisp of blue against the horizon. Every hour and a half a train rumbles by. Some of them stop for a moment to pick up harried looking passengers whose faces grimace relief at their opportunity to leave. No one ever gets out of the trains.
The train station has one single deli – a tiny, vaguely air conditioned cave where sandwiches are sold at inflated prices. You spent your last eighty euro cents on a plain croissant, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. After the last weeks training you could have lived a week on that eighty cents, but you were just so damn hungry.
It was Barcelona that broke you. The living expenses were so much higher then the earnings on the street, and it was a tough, tough crowd. Twice as much work for every laugh, and the smile on your face got more and more strained as you grew weary. Leaving came too late by a long time, but finally the risk had to be taken. In a last bout of desperate optimism you chose to visit the Dali Museum before you left Spain behind, and that may well have been worth it, despite the various problems it caused.
Las Ramblas Barcelona, a tough crowd.
Barcelona Darla
Barcelona Geoff
Surrealism is definitely an interesting artistic movement, and one certainly best appreciated through direct first hand experience. There is no where on earth better to have that experience then in the museum designed by Salvidore Dali, the museum that is the tomb of Salvidore Dali, the museum in which every line, every angle and every brick is set to enhance less the particular beauty of the individual pieces of art, but rather to engender and empower the complete sensation of surrealism. To be in that place seemed like it was to walk through a human mind and watch in glimpses the various forms and shadows of its subconscious, its morality, its memories, and its dreams. You arrived for the evening opening at nine, and left at midnight with a headache, and having fallen for a cunning trap.
It was not until you arrived at the train station in the tiny town that you realized that a museum that opens at nine and closes at midnight closes at the same exact moment as the train station, thereby forcing all foolish tourists to spend their money on a hotel. You were wily and unwincing in your approach to defeating this trap. You were also broke, so you and your troupe slept on the ground outside the train station.
The events of that night were many and varied. There were British backpackers camping there also, and they became your allies in the face of police inspections, drunken gangs, the middle aged gay stalker man, and the hours and hours and hours of muffler-less moped driving teenagers doing circles.
Then, after a night that was restless in its truest meaning, you caught the nine a’clock train here. Here is desolation, dubbed “desperado ville” by Gaelyn, a concrete platform in the middle of dry desert that bears more akin to an old western film then to real life. There are no tumbleweed.
The problem is that the chests do not fit on trains. It is a real problem.
The other problems are hunger and thirst and heat, which make thinking hard, and movement unpleasant. In the end, you grin, bear it, and hammer you unwilling chests in through the upper half of a not quite large enough doorway while making sure the train attendants aren’t looking.
An hour or so later they find the chests and kick you off, but by then you’re at a train-station that has more then one train and you manage to find your way north and east, heading for Nice. You have to change trains twice more, and once requires a change of station too. Here the chests are too big for the commuter buss between stations, which is no surprise, so you set out to walk the five kilometers on foot, and it is then that you receive some aid.
Half a mile down the dark and winding metropolis roads you suddenly come upon a group of colored men, laughing and talking and walking together, by all appearances just out for a friendly walk in the evening. You pass them in the street and only a few hundred feet later take the care to glance back. One of them has broken with the others and is approaching Darla. He exchanges a few words with her, and then suddenly begins speaking loudly in french. His words are foreign, however his meaning is clear. He says he will escort you to the train station, because the way you are going is very dangerous. He says not to follow the signs – they lead through a section of town where gangs operate, a place that is not safe for five tourists pushing three hundred pounds of wooden chests at night. You share suspicious glances with your friends, but there is something about this man that you, not trust precisely, but you are willing to give him a chance. He takes the lead, smiling and chatting in french. At one point he tells Darla to stay close, to stay in the middle of the group and hold hands with someone. He smiles when he talks, and there is nothing about his smile that is unwholesome. His eyes are bright, open and kind. He seems genuinely concerned for you. If he is acting, then he is very good at it.
The winding streets unfurl before you. The stranger leads you through quiet, middle class neighborhoods where parents are walking their children by the side of the road. Your chests are the largest moving objects you see. You keep the pace up, knowing that you have only about an hour to make it to the station before your train is gone. After leading you in a large arch, presumably around the danger, the stranger stops under a bridge and with another open smile points to the highway above you and gives a few final directions. You are almost there, just a little further. Then he gives a final handshake and wave and walks away into the night. It turns out his directions were accurate. You arrive at the train station just a few minutes later and catch your train. There will be one more stop before Nice, but you’re almost there.
Was it really so unsafe? Were the gangs so bad as to warrant such extreme caution? Who was that gentle stranger, and why did he go so far out of his way to help us? Questions to which the answers will probably never be known.
The train deposits you in a train station in yet another city whose name you cannot remember. Immediately as you disembark a security guard tells you in unequivocal terms to leave the station. Now. You try to ask him when the train will come in the morning and he merely crosses his arms in front of him in the universal symbol for negation and says firmly and angrily “out!” You try to ask another guard as you step out the front door if he knows of a cheep hotel and the first nearly shouts at you “this is a train station not a hotel! Get out!” You are already outside, you cannot believe his attitude.
For the second night in a row you are obliged to sleep on the concrete outside a train station. This night is better then the first, perhaps you are getting used to it. At five in the morning you wake up and catch the train that actually goes to Nice. Arriving there in a dull stupor, you find your way to a hostel 16 euro a night, and crash. The next day you wander the city and spot a few pitches. You are still broke but the apartment the hostel gave you has a kitchen and you discover that you can spend the 16 american dollars still in your bank account to buy food at the monoprix, so you have something to eat.
The next day you do two performances and earn a total of two euro and fifty cents.
Feeling awful, you try to find a new pitch, and then, walking through the crowded city center, you come face to face with Mariam. You knew she was here, but you’d been unable to contact her. Her face lights up, and laughter fills the group. It’s her birthday, and she had planned to spend it just rollerblading around the city. The rest of the evening is surreal. Gelatto occurs. The best you’ve ever had. Rose and ginger and passion-fruit and Irish-cream and many others. At last you make it back to bed, and sleep.
The next day you do six shows and feel great about them, tying your record for the most shows you’ve done consecutively, and earning a record of a one hundred and thirty five euro, which is almost thirty each. It looks like you’ll stay in Nice for a little while longer.
It is the following morning that you update your e-journal. Life is good.
It was day before yesterday that you left Cape de Agde for Barcelona, and you’ve seen a few things since. The first train slipped from the station without you, it´s doors were too small, an ongoing problem. But as those minuscule doors closed others opened, namely the doors of the local cathedral wherein a local musician was practicing Vivaldi on the ancient pipe organ. The church was small, its vaulted hall built of despairingly stark grey stone blocks that gave it the feel of an aesthetically incredible bomb shelter, but the alter seemed transposed from a Titian painting. As you sat there, letting the waves of music wash over you, you were glad to your core that you had two giant boxes that wouldn’t fit on trains. Otherwise, you´d have left and never even known the place existed. But that passed, and a new train came, and you got on, and took off for Spain. It was to take a little longer then you expected.
Now that you are here, Barcelona is, so far, a city which you could learn to like, probably quickly.
You arrived here a day latter then you planned, because the second of your connecting trains the in France was not equipped with enough storage space to fit the chests. It really is like hauling a couple of coffins around, and you have spent a great deal of time reflecting on this reality. It is not, however, a curse. Because instead of arriving at midnight in Barcelona as you had planned, you were forced to spend a night in, god help you, the most beautiful town you’ve ever seen. Just shy of the French-Spanish border, and with a name you never really learned, it was absolutely incredible. You managed to locate a small hotel for no more then 45 euro a night, which split between the five of you wasn’t all that bad. It was right downtown and only a couple of seconds from a cathedral that, despite the ongoing renovations, was DEFINITELY the most beautiful you´ve ever seen, and you’ve seen some of the most famous in the world.
You spent the evening eating alone in one of the many sidewalk cafes, and listening to the music from the strolling performers who wandered the riverside parks. The sky was clear and the weather cool, with a slight breeze that drifted down the winding canal at the towns heart carrying the scents of distant flowers and ocean, and the whispers of musicians playing their trade on the street corners. It was surrealy beautiful.
In the morning you went with your friends to the cathedral, and, it being Sunday, stayed for the french mass in the vast echoing chamber, a tomb to saints and monument to catholic glory. The huge stain glass windows were cunningly wrought and ever so slightly offset behind the marble columns of the alter so that they appeared to hang, floating mysteriously in the incense smoke. It was unbelievable.
One long, long, long train ride and a lot of waiting later you´re in Barcelona. The first evening was spent walking the streets with your equipment (chests) looking for someplace to stay. You were fortunate enough to find a hostel right on Las Ramblas that had a spare five person room for 130 euro a night. That room was only available because the people who had booked it hadn’t shown up. Every other place you tried, and you tried many, were full as schizophrenic’s head in a Dali museum. But, against your protestations, come morning your friends decided they could probably find a better place to stay elsewhere. They might be right, either way, you can´t go back to that one.
Today you´ll hunt for that elusive oasis, and hopefully, once you’ve found it, do a few pitches in the evening to earn money for food, which you need pretty badly.
All you´ve seen so far of the city of Barcelona is Las Ramblas, but so far, it´s been pretty hot. Everything is posh, beautiful, expensive, and full of people. Since the vast majority are tourists, it´s likely they´ll pay well. Performing will be fun, and there are some awesome spots for pitches.
The day moves on, the internet counter wears down. Time to sign off. Peace!
The internet cafe in Cap d’Agde smells of the Mediterranean sea. This makes sense as it is no more then a hundred tourist swarmed shop filled yards away. It took you two days to find this place, granted that you didn’t spend too many of the sun baked hours in the balmy sea-side air looking. No, sun bathing and Mediterranean sea bathing seemed to be better uses of your time, but now that you have found access to the wonderful international internet, you’re content to spend a few minutes away from the baleful eye of the day star and update your e-journal.
The last few days in Paris are not ones that you are likely to forget soon. You spent each afternoon doing short vaudevillian performances, enough to earn money for food and have some fun. You met a few really cool people, including Marion, the french three pin contact juggler, and Anna and Sara, acro partners from a Swedish cirque school. All three of the above joined you for your final performance in Paris on the night of the 15th, the night France celebrates its independence in a display of fireworks not unlike our 4th of July; a display that you missed completely because it started half an hour early while you and all your new friends were still rushing towards the Eiffel Tower through the subways.
The trip to Cap d’Agde was a nice long 8 hours of train, starting at midnight the following night. Agde is like Florida only French. It’s hot here, and you’re very, very glad you finally got the wheels on the big chest sorted out before you made the four hour hike pushing both chests from the train station to the beach house where you’re staying.
Also, you would like to profess your undying love and appreciation of the extreme awesomeness of the Matzkin family. The beach house is bliss. You are out of e-money now, so you will sign off. You hope to do your first Agde performance tonight. All is well, even if you are totally broke and a little hungry.
Prepare yourselves for a real treat. This narration will be glorious and exotic and marvelous and that’s just the narration! I will tell you of events such as you can barely imagine, except I only have about ten minutes worth of internet time and the elephants haven’t gotten here yet. So instead of all that stuff, I’ll just tell you about the first two days of Paris.
Paris is a big city, as many of you know, and also as many of you know, it is the capitol of France. Since most of you are american, you may not know that France is currently in the finals of the world cup (that’s the soccer event). They acquired this much sought after honor at about 11:13 PM night before last, which’d be the night of the 5th, when they beat their long time rivals, Portugal, in a very tense match. I know this, because from around 8 pm when the game started, the entire city of Paris went silent. It was like a ghost town, only with huge crowds spilling out into the streets surrounding those bars that possessed televisions. Every now and then a goal would be scored and the entire city would erupt in violent sound and fury. Then all would return to rapt silence.
But I start my story at the end. That was our first proper day in Paris, and it was a hell of a day. We met Gaelyn exactly where we planned, several hours after we had planned to. Gaelyn had to solo navigate the Paris subway with a hundred pound wooden chest containing props. We had a wonderful lunch at a Paris cafe, and then wandered the city for several hours, pushing our chest ahead of us.
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They say no sight is out of the ordinary in a city this size, but apparently five Americans pushing a hundred pounds of wooden chest on wheels is pretty unusual because there was all sorts of amazement written on the faces of the bystanders. It was around then that Gaelyn informed us of an awesome development: a friend, a fellow performer, owns an empty house about a half an hour by subway from downtown, in which we were invited to stay. Sweet.
Being happy and pleasantly tired we did some showing off, no real gigs as we were out of costume and didn’t have all our props, but enough to get a feel for where we stood on the “that kicks ass” scale. People love the hand to hand act.
Then we started home. But first we had to grab all our other stuff from the hostel. The subway is an interesting place to have a hundred pound wooden chest, but it’s even more interesting when you’ve got two of them.
It was about twenty minutes into the ride home when the drug deal went down. An oddly shaped dude mumbling to himself ‘tourist tourist tourist no terrorist, tourist tourist’ came up to us and said a few words in french, seeming to want something. Then, from around the corner comes a tall colored fellow in dreadlocks and rags and rams a small scrap of plastic bag into the first dude’s shirt, grins, and pulls the wad of cash from his patron’s hand. They exchange a momentary grapple, and the first opens the scrap of bag to sift through the weed wadded up inside. He seems to think it’s OK, ’cause then they go their own ways.
That was about 11:05 PM. At 11:13 PM the city exploded.
I don’t know who won the game, but I’m betting it was France. Boom. People, fireworks, honking horns, screaming, shouting, flag waving, whistling, tipping cars, dancing in the streets, big, loud, noise. I do not believe that I will ever forget pushing two one-hundred pound chests through the roaring crowds down unfamiliar streets in the middle of the night working on 4 hours of sleep since jet-lagged arrival. The crowds alone would have been unforgettable enough. Geoff and I watched in mute awe as, on one subway, two gentlemen came to blows literally over our chest. If the chest hadn’t been between them, it might have turned the whole car into a brawl.
Eventually, we got to the house, laid out our mats on the tile floor, and went to bed. It was about 3:45 AM. That was day 2.
Day 3 it rained, and one wheel came off the big chest.
Day 4 we gave our first ever full costume performance and made about thirty-five euro. We’ve got a long ways to go. Holy hell is this fun.
