71 days

Closure

Hmm, just kind of trailed off there. Blogging for ten weeks is hard! I don’t know how people keep it up. Anyway, the last bit of the story, just so the 0.03 readers I have left aren’t left hanging: I spent a few days in northern Tunisia trying to feed myself despite Ramadan and visiting beaches. (I never thought I’d be so grateful for tourist ghettos, but the bartender at an Italian Club Med-type beach-chair universe set me up with a Limonata mid-afternoon one day—it was, let me tell you, a great heathen pleasure.) I went to Carthage. I flew off to New York and met up with Richard, Rodrigo, Kyra, Dean, and Amanda, among others. (This was very, very different from being in Tunisia.) Then back home to Seattle. As I started regaling visitors with the first half of my trip it started to dawn on me how many details vanished with that notebook in St. Petersburg—nothing left but this blog, my memories, and 7000 photos. Since then I’ve been back at work, catching up with friends, eating turkish delight, halvah, rice crackers, and melty chocolate brought back from the wilds of Eurasia, and winnowing the photos down to 3400. And tagging them. And color-correcting them. And writing a new java-based browser for them. All this will show up online someday. Until then, signing off!

Bashir

Bashir is a grizzled, lanky old guy who pointed out to me in the Tunis medina, the twisty old town, that there was a mosque behind me I could look in. And when I got to the doorway, there he was again. He explained to me how Abraham is everyone’s father—muslims, catholics like me, juifs—and how God gave four books to four prophets, and people see only the skin and the clothes but God sees your heart, and people need to open their minds—his father is Spanish, his mother is Tunisian—and here, I should come have a seat next to himm because the old need the book education of the young, but the young need the LIFE education of the old. He then enumerated the flower liquors of Tunisia in parallel to the holy books and the children of Abraham—rose, lemon, and amber—and magically, after about seven turns down twisty streets, we arrived at his nephew’s perfume shop, where a couple of muscle-shirted tourist dudes and their girlfriends were obediently lined up on plastic stools having flower liquor swqbbed on their wrists. I took my leave after amber flower, lime, and opium (no hashish, he assured me)—no argument, I must have looked a dubious prospect to begin with—and then we were off on the cultural tour, antique doorways, a duke’s house, and then why don’t I have another seat, and maybe I could give him something for the guiding, for his newly existent baby, see. He was short on change—he’d give me the rest on my next vacation—fine—but after the five and half dinars had changed hands and we were done with the milking of the tourist, he called me back and by stages pulled seven grapes off the bunch in his bag and gave them to me. And sent me off again. And that’s the part of the developing-world tourist-milking culture that I think I will never fully understand.

recapping

Okay. So I notice that the blog text has been a little thin on the ground for a couple of weeks. So here’s what I’ve been doing, if the photos aren’t sufficiently explanatory…. I went to Svalbard. There were puffins, polar foxes, skuas, kittiwakes, glacial ice, abandoned mining towns, non-abandoned mining towns, stubby-legged raindeer, ptarmigans, neverending dim sunlight, and blond people. Then I went to my conference in Liverpool. It was a conference. Then up to the Lake District for a few days—very rainy, so not quite as long as intended, but still really absorbing and, in a funny way, exotic. The Lake DIstrict is full of towering, treeless, scree-sided cliffs that happen to be covered in sheep and have villages with quaint pubs at the bottom of every valley. It’s the most dramatic combination of wild and homey I’ve ever seen. Wild, homey, and sheepey. I’m getting better at drawing sheep. It was wet. I was wet. But then the sun would come out and light up one hillock at a time in a dramatic, nineteenth century sort of way. There was good local cider.

Then I went to London. I’m in London. I like London. I took a walk through the Bengali part of town today and got snacks at a deli/sweet shop. These included a paneer roll that was fried and contained paneer and I don’t know what else, because it was so good I ate it in a sort of dreamy haze right there on the street through which I could identify the paneer but nothing else, so that the rest is just a sort of blur of red, brown, and Bengaliness. I spent five hours yesterday getting to know the Italian Renaissance at the National Gallery and eating snacks in the cafe. There was a (packed) gallery talk on Titian. I like Titian.

Now I’m off to Brussels for 36 hours! This wasn’t in the original plan, but hey. I’m going to visit my college friend Margaret, who some of you may know. I’ve been told there’s good pizza, and a park with ducks and geese. And really what else do you need.