No Reservations

Next month I'll be traveling to South America- my first time on that continent. Brazil -Peru- Chile at least. I'm  excited.

As usual, I have no confirmed flights. I travel space available on UAL because my generous friend, Cecil, works for them. The passes he shares with me are greatly reduced,  and usually I travel business or first class, but occasionally I don't get on the airplane-for hours, or days. Mine is the lowest priority. Full fare passengers go first, followed by  employees, their relatives & finally friends. We board according to the enployee's seniority.  Sometimes that's the adventure.

A few years ago I spent 5 days with my then 16 year old grand daughter, Cooper, in "Tokyo's Narita Airport-along with a slew of other 'buddies.' We spent the nights partying with other guests in a  hotel on the opposite side of the runway; the days hanging out in the airport: playing cards, eating, shopping, laughing and complaining- waiting for available seats going anywhere in the US. New buddies with higher priorities than ours came and went. I learned never to travel at the end of summer.

Finally, the day before Cooper's school started in Santa Monica she flipped. She cried actual tears-for school.  "I need to go to school! she insisted." This was a new Cooper. One I had not seen since maybe sixth grade, when she looked forward to going to school. I hoped it was a turning point in appreciation for education. Capitulating, I paid  2grand! for a ticket for her to fly home.


Cooper & me

 That evening I got a seat to Hawaii, where I spent the next three days with my friend, Jessica, in Hilo.

Once I spent countless days at a friends while trying to get out of Chicago due to lousy weather. Another time, another city, hours and hours waiting for a seat because an entire class of students booked all of the seats. Once I had to fly into Denver after two days of waiting to get out of Anchorage to Los Angeles. 

Sometimes these happen because: I forget and travel on major holidays, when schools let out for the summer or spring break, or I'm just an idiot. I love it when it's a good thing. I flew to Singapore with new Canadian friends when the flights to Bangkok were full due to it being the Chinese New Year holiday. I've been incredibility lucky to get the last seat on the plane more than once. 

Not having a plane reservation, means making hostel or hotel reservations pointless. Finding one on arrival requires patience, luck, and perseverance, but can have unexpected pleasant results.


Monos playing on hostel roof Manuel Antonia, Costa Rica

 

New friends in Ulaanbator, Mongolia


Once, some folks who showed me how to use the airport phone in Bangkok at 3am, helped me find a room, and gave me a tour of their incredible diverse city the next afternoon.

In Casa Blanca I arrived at the Guimere Hotel in a cab. "Do you have a reservation?" the desk clerk asked. "No. But, I'd like to have one. For 4 nights."
"We are full, but wait a minute."
"I have a cab waiting. I need to either go to another hotel or pay the driver and let him go"
'Ok. Let him go."
I spent the next few hours with their truly delightful chef, Mohammad while they evicted someone. He took me to the market, showed me the surrounding area, and back at the hotel, poured me a glass of wine while I talked to other tourists who had shown up. 


Chef Mohammed


 In that room  in 2009, I, and several  European guests and a couple of Moroccans watched Obama become the 43rd president of the United States. I cried. The following day the hotel owner gave me the daily newspaper written totally in Arabic. Front and center was a big photo of President Obama on stage surrounded by American flags; a corner insert showed Jessie Jackson weeping. I was so proud of my country. He stamped and signed the front page.It's framed, waiting for me to settle somewhere.

No reservations. Perhaps it's also a metaphor for being unrestrained, flexible-ready to light anywhere. It's not extreme adventure, nor is it necessarily out of the way or weird- just free and freeing somehow. It's a way to meet folks you wouldn't ordinarily meet, eat places not in a guide book, and do things unplanned.

You are in charge of your time: to spend it with whomever you like, doing whatever you desire. 


drink & soak









Laugh





On the Siberian Express train with the Aussies



Mothers and Massages

My mother, Alice, was a lesson in contradictions. As it turns out, those lessons were the most valuable. Flexibility really is the key.

I keep my body flexible with yoga and massage-as flexible as an old body- ruled with a minimally disciplined mind- can be that is. So for this Mother's Day I took my daughter, Anna, who is a mother also, and myself for a massage at the  local massage school.  The low price, $25.00 apiece coupled with feeling I've served my civic duty( they have to practice on someone), cannot be beat.

Ahhhh. There's something liberating about stripping off one's clothes and climbing onto a table for the purpose of having a stranger knead your flesh and gouge your innards with elbow, thumbs, and knuckles; feeling your flesh yield- ligaments stretch and expand as blood flows freely through them like dormant roots after they are aerated and doused by a spring rain. Yes.

Methods of massage vary wildly depending on where you are in the world-how the culture feels about naked flesh.

In Morocco I visited several hammams-gender segregated bath houses-public or private, where one is gromaged; a massage/removal of old skin, with slimy brown soap and a scouring glove rough enough to strip off old paint.

In Asilah, my first public hammam consisted of two large  rooms. The first one was the check- in room where you paid your fees, were assigned a gromager (or maybe a gromagiss?) and stored your clothes.

The clerk, taking advantage of my being a foreigner, apparently charged me several times the local price. A young woman standing nearby intervened on my behalf.

After an impassioned debate the price was lowered. My gromager, lets call her Hercules, was not happy. Unsmiling and outweighing me by at least double she led me, naked to the main bath area, a large, maybe 40'x30' room with a sloping blue and white tiled, wet, slick floor. In the center were a spigot and a couple of buckets. At one end were open showers. The room was filled with with naked women.

Hercules, stopped  at an empty spot  in the middle of the slippery floor next to the buckets. Surrounded by strangers, she pushed me down (not necessarily with force, but in no way lovingly), onto the tile floor, poured a bucket of tepid water over me and began to rub the slimy soap over my submissive body. As she rubbed, my limbs and trunk slid around on the tiles seemingly separate from one another. I pretended I was a ballerina, sliding across the floor in the hands of my premier danseur as compliant as I am capable of being, before I would rise again-to applause.

When I was sufficiently slimed Hercules donned the glove. Holding on to me with her ungloved hand she began to scrub, vigorously stimulating blood, and removing the dead skin along with the live first layer of epidermis it stubbornly clung to. When I had been  rendered as pink as a new-born piglet, she poured more buckets of water on me-to  rinse and rid my body of any leftover slime, loose skin or incriminating fingerprints before disappearing- leaving  me for dead. All for about $10.00.

In China, Angelina, a member of the hostel staff took me to a small, hole-in-the-wall-boxcar style place that was  some one's home. The massage room was in the back. She told the masseur I wanted an hour massage found out it would cost 30 yuan, about $5.00, and left.

I was instructed to take off my shoes and climb onto the table in my clothes. Two tables from mine lay a woman, completely clothed, a light blanket across her, sleeping. "How nice, I thought." I won't have to hurry when it's over. Then because I didn't want the metal against my skin while being massaged, I reached up under my shirt, unhooked and pulled my bra out from under it. The masseur panicked. No! No! He shouted shaking his fingers at me. I shrugged, put the folded bra in my purse, and climbed onto the table. Through the material of my clothes and the blanket that covered them, he pulled and pushed my joints around, dug into the muscles of my back and legs and rubbed my skin briskly with manly pressure. Never touching any skin. When it was over he tapped my shoulder. In perfect English he said, "Done. Go now."

Another place in China, referred to me by my TA who had never been there, looked like a place for getting a pedicure. Six lounge chairs lined up against the wall with separate movable  hassocks at the foot. Everyone looked at me when I went in.

"Welcome." said a young man." "Nehao." I replied. That was it. All we had. He pointed to a sign posted on the wall.. I understood that I was to choose my massage from it.  None of them were over $10.00, but what did they mean? A pedicure in China is not what we think it is. It doesn't involve polish, but having your corns and bunions scraped. How many different massages could there be?  I pointed to the next to the last one. OK



massage sign in Chongqing, China

 
I was instructed to sit on the hassock, facing the chair. A good looking twentyish young man, began to rub and manipulate my neck and shoulders. I slumped forward. He worked downward into my back, waist, and kidneys onto my lower back. Now I was bent in half, stretched across myself, my head on the seat of the chair-a position I'm not capable of under normal circumstances.

Finally he tapped me gently on the shoulder motioning that I should move onto the chair- facing  him.

 He started on my feet and legs. Oh my. Was I in a funky little storefront massage place somewhere in Chongqing, China or had I gone to heaven? I was not alone. The man next to me was slouched back, his head slightly tilted, his mouth open-snoring. Obviously it was the latter. Anywhere snoring is accepted openly might be heaven.

Wandering a month through Thailand, for under $3.00,  I treated myself to a massage every day. Everyday!! Sometimes just my feet and legs, sometimes I changed into into loose wrap-around pants and shirt and lay on a mattress for a full on 'metta.'

Your Thai  masseuse will climb around you on the mattress, stretching your limbs with a rhythmic pressure, pulling your body into yoga positions like the arching cobra, push your boundaries, pressing spots that sync to others you've forgotten about since you were six. Massage is a loving thing in Thailand that brings kindness and awareness to the masseuse as well as to you.

Which brings me to Allen and Cecil, the two healers, masseurs of the first order in my life. Allen massaged my son's crooked body, stiffened and brittle by cerebral palsy. Kirk relaxing as never before drooled with abandonment through the hole making a puddle below him. If he could have had a massage every day he would not have needed Valium. And Allen kneaded my muscles through many a difficult time, or as a gift- pouring love into every healing stroke as only someone who loves you does.

And Cecil-The Masseur. He massaged my daughter, Alice, when her back ached  from carrying  my soon to be born grand daughter. And worked miracles on my achy  friends. And me. Time and time again, the sharing of warmth, healing, hands-on, giving of self. The precious gift of touch.
Pass it on.
 

Food

"Food is our common ground, a universal experience." James Beard.

 



Chinese New Year Dinner in LiJiang, China 2012

  



chicken soup



And, chicken soup is said to cure a cold, and good for your soul.

No one would argue that food is necessary to live, and if you have good food, life is infinitely better.

Food brings us together, tempts us, identifies us, frustrates us. Some people get rich off it-others work hard to provide it and still others have to steal basic food  to feed their families.

Roasting chestnuts in Chendu

Gandhi said, There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot apper to them except in the form of bread."

 
A humble American grandma will say, 'It isn't perfect,' when you praise a dish. 
My mother gave a recipe box filled with her most popular recipes as a wedding gift to brides- an intimate gift of herself. When my son lost his first tooth he asked the tooth fairy to bring him pie. My daughter makes my mother's pinwheel cookies every Christmas. Students from around the world decorated my grandmothers cookies for Christmas in 2011.
 Our family lives on through food. 

Because of my Irish heritage I salivate just thinking about real Colcannon; mashed potatoes with cream, sauteed cabbage and crispy onions topped with lots of butter and black pepper.

The smell of fresh tomatoes takes me back to my mom's kitchen in late summer when she labored to can jars of tomatoes, beets, peppers and  vegetable soup-summer in a jar during a snow storm. 

 I can taste her love steeped in the red sauce she taught me to make for  stuffed green peppers or pasta. At a request of a friend in China, I made spaghetti for him and his girl friend. He had thirds and finished off the sauce in the pan with the heel of the french bread I'd bought. "I had spaghetti at an Italian restaurant in Beijing, he said, but yours is better."  Mom would be so proud.

Food is the highlight of my travel. I can't describe nearly as much of what I see in museums, as I can the food of a country, and the people I share meals with.

Decorating Christmas cookies at EF International 2011

In Tangier I was admiring the sensual aromas and rich colors of bins of spices when an elderly man came up to me with a flat aluminum pan  full of what looked like cornmeal mush. I said, "No thank you." A passerby said, You should have some. It's delicious. He was right.  I ate the baked meal with my fingers, scrapping the small piece of paper it was on to get every grain.

In Fez, Morocco,  I was invited for dinner to the house of a man I met on the train. Actually, I went to Fez because he persuaded me to see the ancient Medina. Fortunately his marriage proposal came after the delicious meal his sisters cooked-so I fled on a full stomach.

Throughout Morocco I devoured roasted camel, and bowls of fava bean soup from street vendors. Come evening I sat alone with  6 to 10 different colored bowls spread out before me, each holding a unique flavor in restaurants for dinner. 

The gracious Thai people think it is sad to eat alone so they don't let that happen. I've had a Thai businessmen join me for lunch to discuss American politics, families invite me to join their table, and even the cook on the island of Ko Semet sat with me after she had cooked my meal. The following day she invited me into her kitchen to observe to learn how to make Thai chili paste -her way. 

In China I cooked traditional American Christmas and
Thanksgiving dinners for twenty plus students, staff and friends on a two burner stove with no oven. It's amazing what you can do in a wok.


A pot, A Wok. And a bowl=a double boiler!.


Almost every weekday I ate at least one meal at the dining hall. Because all of the meat and vegetables, including fish with bones, are chopped into  one inch pieces it is extremely difficult for a novice like me to determine origin.  It became a game of 'guess that food.' resulting on me eating mostly vegetables. The cafeteria workers, though, monitored my intake. One day I was sitting with a student, having lunch when a tiny woman came up to her. "Tell her she isn't eating enough meat.

"

On several occasions I was invited to a hot pot restaurant. Hot pot is a cauldron of hot spicy, oil one dips skewers of meat and vegetables into.  It's not for sensitive palates.

Offered a pig snout from a street vendor, I couldn't do it- just couldn't bring myself to bite into a big pig nose.

I laughed as my students read the yellow mustard jar at our traditional American picnic featuring hot dogs. "Is this American mustard. Ruby? I thought mustard was green."  " Ah. You are thinking of Japanese wasabi.  Not even close."

 Eating with people on the road is the sharing of cultures, the acceptance of one another's differences, the acknowledgement that we are the same. As a stranger, when I'm  invited to dine with a family or new friend in a country where I barely speak the language, I'm humbled and grateful.
When traveling, food is the adventure; everything else comes after. I was 23 when I first flew outside the US mainland to Puerto Rico. My date, an impossibly handsome man, bought us blood sausage from a street vendor. Oh my god, I said. Cooked blood! I can't possibly eat that! Next came the whole fish with a sunken eye peering at me. "The muscle behind the eye is the best." he teased. I put a lettuce leaf over it. He ate the eye muscle, I devoured the delicious fish. And then there were fried plantains, squid and pineapple freshly picked. I probably still wouldn't eat the eye muscle, but the rest-piece of cake!

Last week I took my grand kids, six and nine to an Asian market. "Ooohh. Look at the pigs feet. What is that? It's a block of congealed blood? Oh gross. What's an eel? " Who eats this stuff, the boy said?" "Many people-all over the world, Honey-even in your own neighborhood."  

Living in Mexico I found myself at the same taco stand, several days a week  eating fresh fish tacos with crunchy cabbage, cilantro and avocado - a balanced meal for a buck fifty.

In Lisbon it was bacalhau -salted cod,  sardines, squid on a stick; in Spain I ate my weight in tapas, washed down with red wine. In one bar the tiny fish bones kept sticking in my throat. Agh. Agh I coughed. Laughing, the bartender and two other patrons urged-mas vino, mas vino.

My family's staples were potatoes-roasted, mashed, or fried and home baked bread. My southern husband introduced me to rice and grits- my housekeeper/cook to heavenly greens, black eyed peas, chitlins, and corn bread-soul food. Isn't it all food for the soul.

  In Asia I watched folks work in rice paddies- small and large. I  heard stories about cobras' weaving among the thick fields, and the cobra hunters who catch them and milk the venom.  I've shared  unidentifiable food  on trains, buses and boats with people I knew for an hour or a night.

 In Central America I talked to coffee farmers who pick the berries and spread them out in the sun to dry, and women sitting on the ground surrounded by baskets of vegetables, fruit or a few chickens to sell.

Food is as essential to our souls as to our health.  I agree with J.R.R. Tolkien who said, "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. "
Indeed.

Domestic Violence- A Family Affair.

The idea that girls are less valuable than boys-women less valuable than men- makes me crazy. Thinking about my female students in China, I recall an incident that happened to one of my students. It's a common one-still happening in all cultures, all countries- regardless of laws,women's rights, or women's lib.

One morning, my student Cassandra texted to say she wouldn't be at class because she was ill, and she had something important to do. What, I wondered, other than going to the hospital or doctor, would be important for a sick person to do?

 The following day her roommate came to class alone. She explained that Cassandra stayed home because she was recovering from the bruises she incurred when her jealous boyfriend beat her up two nights before.

I asked if the police knew about it. "They do. But, they say it's a family matter. They don't get involved in family matters."

It was such a broad statement that I had trouble wrapping my head around it. She wasn't related to the boy. She didn't live with him. Yes. She knew him. Yes. She dated him. Does that qualify him as family? Is hitting a female member of your family OK?

Becaue she was afraid he would come back, Cassandra asked another boy she knew if he would sleep on the couch for the next few nights just in case. Against campus regulations, he agreed to. The boyfriend apparently heard about this so when he showed up again, he brought a partner with him to back him up.

The fight that ensued caught the attention of the campus police.The following day the boyfriend's parents were called. He was warned that he would be expelled if he bothered her again.

The girls told me that his threat from the university was not because he had beat her up, but because he had been overt about it-had made too much noise. Had it been kept quiet it would have remained a family affair.

Wang Xingjuan, a women's rights activist in Beijing says,

“Chinese women feel ashamed when this happens to them, and there are still so many people who think it’s a normal event. It’s a slow process. We’ve had hundreds of years where men were simply allowed to beat their wives,” she said. “The culture is deeply rooted, and for many, it’s still taken for granted that women are inferior to men."

That is China, a developing nation.

Here in the US where we think we have already developed, RAINN, a national organization on rape, abuse and incest, reports that every two minutes someone is sexually assulted- an average of 207,754 women and girls over 12 each year!
54% of these cases are not reported to the police. 97% of rapists never spend a day in jail. 
2/3 of them are known to the victim.
Why is this?

Women still feel ashamed and somehow guilty when they are violated. Whether it's been two hundred or five hunderd years, women's feelings of inferiority are deeply rooted.

Men still make most of the laws in the world. They make more money and have more infuuence. Conservative media wonks like Rush Limbaugh are allowed to slander respectable women bcause they advocate for women's rights.

Not enough women are demandng respect and equality. Not enough of us are speaking out. Women are the only ones who can make the family safer. We must.