WorldHum
>Would I like to see them again?
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| Sandra Dieckman @ Paper Darts/ |
Jeffrey Tayler revisits his first travel journal and all that has been lost over time @ WorldHum.
Every now and then I sort through my belongings and cull the superfluous. This habit started with my first trip overseas (to Greece, in 1982) and the challenge I faced then in fitting all I needed into my rucksack. Though I’ve been living in one country (Russia) for the past 17 years, and in the same Moscow apartment since 2000, I keep on culling, figuring that my most significant “possessions” are immaterial ones: memories, if often logged into journals, battered notebooks with blue or green cardboard covers and dog-eared pages. As far as other things go—be they books, clothes, whatever—I’ve always thought it best to own as little as possible. It’s more important to be, not to have. Or so I tell myself.
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So, the other day, during a routine culling, I pulled out of the closet one of the suitcases I’d brought with me when I first moved to Moscow, and popped it open. I use it to store things, so I began rummaging to see what I could toss. Out from one of the case’s side pockets tumbled an address book, forest-green, the size of a playing card, with ADDRESSES TELEPHONES embossed in gold on the cover. I had forgotten about this booklet. Seeing it evoked an inexplicable pang of grief, and then a poignant nostalgia verging on the bereft, and then curiosity. I had bought it the year before going to Greece, while still at university in upstate New York. It was one of the few items I’d packed” in my rucksack that would link me with friends and family of my “old life” in the U.S. during my senior year abroad. I remembered carrying it aboard the long, lonely charter flight from JFK to Athens in July of 1982, to what I hoped would be a new life; it had accompanied me that autumn on my first forays, made from Italy, into countries of the socialist bloc; and it had dwelled in my pocket the next year on a seven-month ramble from Czechoslovakia through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, all then “people’s republics” that seemed like political Rocks of Gibraltar, repressive, iron-walled and eternal, not shaky shams that would be gone within a decade; and, in the case of Yugoslavia, burn with the fires of war.
>I also became, for the first time in my life, a feminist
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Sarah Menkedick on her own Mexican revolution @ WorldHum.
I was walking back from the grocery store, loaded down with bags, when a man came up the sidewalk. I looked down and away. He leaned towards me and whispered, “F**k me.”
The insistent pressure exploded. I lost it. “F**k YOU!” I shouted, and then continued, calling him a dog, a monkey, an animal, a barbarian, and any other disagreeable creature I could think of in Spanish.
He laughed.
I put my grocery bags down, picked up an orange that had fallen from a nearby tree, and threw it at his head. I missed. He laughed again. I walked up and spit in his face.
He punched me.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )A highly informative exercise in futility ensued. I called the police; they came, the man threatened to kill me, the police shrugged, scuffed their boots, looked bored, said they could do nothing, and left. An old woman in the street told me to stop causing problems, shut up, and go home.
“Callate, pendeja,” she said.
That was all I could hear for weeks afterward, everywhere: Callate, pendeja. Shut up, bitch. Shut up and go home. I saw it in the faces of people selling vegetables at the market, in the apathetic stares of passengers on the bus, in anyone I passed in the street. A whole society saying, “shut up, bitch.”
Everything around me started to seem as if it were rotting on the inside, part of some persistent disease that was devouring what I loved about Mexico.
>You can’t know a culture without knowing its food
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Terry Ward @ WorldHum reflects on national identity in the Amerika section of a German grocery store.
My friend Hannah, a Pennsylvanian transplanted to Hamburg, Germany, posted this caption with a photo on her Facebook wall:
“People, this is what makes a country great.”
The great country she referred to was America. And the photo inspiring Hannah’s sentiment was this bag of candy corn-flavored Hershey’s Kisses she’d spotted during a trip back to the States:
I knew exactly what Hannah meant. Unusual eats like the aforementioned are part of our American ingenuity.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Still, what counts as American food has always confused me. And, American mutt that I am, it’s a question that becomes all the more perplexing when I’m faced with it abroad.
>Globish
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Frank Bures @ WorldHum on the the icebergs of words.
It was getting dark. Paulo had been walking with me for half an hour. He’d invited me to dinner at his house, up near Mount Meru, and now we were going back down the dusty road to my neighborhood in Arusha, Tanzania. I wondered when he would turn around. I kept telling him I knew the way. But he kept walking.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can escort you.”
The last thing I needed was an escort. I enjoyed walking by myself. But I didn’t realize how much had been lost in translation between Paulo’s chosen English word, “escort,” and the Swahili word for what he meant, kusindikiza.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In my dictionary, kusindikiza signified “to see someone off” or “to accompany someone part of the way home.” I had read these definitions, but I didn’t really understand them. Why would you want to accompany someone part of the way home? That is often the problem with learning new languages: You are taking an idea from one world and transporting it to another. The edges of the word, the shape of the idea, do not fit neatly into a new box.
altimoniere 