Max at home: December

Last days of Mediterranean autumn.

Days and nights at home.

Little fir tree with some of the earth it grew up in.

Longer nights.

Some kind of core inertia, not fatigue exactly, but a deep sleepiness.

Elaborate dreams just before waking, and just off the shore of remembering.

A sense of shifting distances in time and place: last week has changed places with an evening years ago.

I would like a cocoon. A sleeping husk for winter. To sleep for a a few days, like Orlando. And wake up, having changed.

Oslo, September 15th

Hotel/Dream: Lisbon & Santiago de Chile

Max missed the beginning, but you always miss the beginning of dreams, don't you?

Hotel Das Letras, in Lisbon. Each room there is dedicated to a writer, and features a quotation over the bed. I stayed in the J.D. Salinger room on the 8th floor, with a good view of red tiles and enclosed courtyards. I slept under the last lines of The Catcher in the Rye.

Hotel Le Rêve, in Santiago. A small, lovely, French hotel on a quiet street. A sense of conspiratorial hospitality on the part of the staff. Lavender in the towels, a chocolate on the night table. On the last morning: the breakfast room full of winter sunlight, a book on birdwatching that I read until the airport taxi came, and seriously considered stealing.

This is not a hotel review, although if you get a chance to stay at Hotel Le Rêve, I really recommend it. What I want to communicate was the feeling of a dream that I had during my stays. The details had a pre-destined glow about them, as though I'd been asked ahead of time about my preferences (Ok, perhaps if that had been the case, I would have slept under lines from Borges or James Salter, but...). Everything felt familiar and new at the same time.

It's important to recall one other strange detail: there was a Buddhist restaurant across the street from both of these hotels. As these were my first true voyages in my new job, it made me wonder if this would always happen (it didn't happen again). Apart from a good taqueria, there's no other type of restaurant I'd rather see beckoning me with candles and lovingly prepared vegetarian dishes.

Those trips were the beginning of a long tour, one that continues this autumn. I went from summer in Portugal to winter in Chile. In the week between those trips, I saw my father for the last time.

After his last round of chemotherapy, it was as though the total weight of his illness and treatment was finally felt. I was angry, I was worried. He would have bursts of energy followed by complete exhaustion. We tried to work on the things he wanted to finish. Friends visited, the minister came to start talking about a memorial service.

You're waiting for a train. You know where you hope it will take you, but you can't know for sure.

On the last day I made minestrone. The minister was there, the physical therapist, the hospice nurse and also a close friend. It was the last whole day we would ever spend together, and it had the three-ring circus quality that a fatal illness can engender.

What I remember most was his effort to be present, to care for the others.

I write another sentence, I delete it, I try again.

I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.

Max's small valise: Milano

Milan is paradoxical.

So gritty, so filled with Chinese and Indian places offering you pizza and aperitivo. Deserted metro. Man trying to sell me a children's book, clinging to my arm. At lunch one day a colleague explained that now Milan is the only Italian city with jobs. There used to be Torino, but now...

The weather was dark and rainy. Until one vibrant day, the kind of day you decide to change your life. With all the others at the Duomo, I was looking for the best way to spend the luminous evening, one of the last days of summer. These years are a kind of open sea, far enough from either shore. In some moments, there is real pleasure, the gift of experience.

The impressions were like a deck of cards being turned over slowly. A woman in a long burnt orange dress walking past La Scala. My fellow diner at Trussardi, the one from Nigeria. An icy cocktail laced with ginger. Pigeons and ice cream and almost everything still closed. Beautiful language, almost understandable.

On summer head colds

Max and I came back from Rio last Sunday. As far as I can tell, his health did not suffer from the trip. I, on the other hand, have the kind of raging head cold that really gives the sense of lively microbes at play in my sinuses, throat, chest, etc. Thanks, Rio!

The other day, a colleague said simply, "summer colds are the worst." Always one to start whining at the least provocation, I would have to agree, if only because all the warm and cosy winter cold comforts do not appeal when you're trying to rest in a pool of your own sweat. Nor does air conditioning seem that great, rough as it is on a sore throat. Chicken soup does not beckon.

So what is the answer? Tequila. With lime and salt. Plenty of spicy pork wrapped up in a tortilla. Guacamole with fresh scallions and cilantro. The ministrations of someone very patient. Tons and tons of kleenex. Gallons of water. Garlic and more garlic. A screening of The Godfather. A private poetry reading.

And the promise of vacation coming very soon...

At home

Night on Earth: Rio de Janeiro

Night on Earth is a great Jim Jarmusch film. It's composed of vignettes which are all taxi rides in different cities, including Los Angeles, Paris and Rome. I'll admit that I'm not crazy about the first section with Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder, so fast forward through that one if you feel the same way.

I saw Night on Earth long before I had much experience with taxis or cities like Paris. Growing up in Huntington Beach, everyone drove; I don't even know if taxis existed there. Now taking taxis is an integral part of my travels, and one that's fraught with interesting questions and concerns. Is it safe? Will I be able to communicate? Will the driver try to cheat me?

A taxi ride can be many things. Elegiac, as when I'm leaving Barcelona, watching my beloved streets reel past. Anxiety producing, when the driver seems to be unable to get us there, or drives too fast, or is busy sending text messages or talking on the phone. Delightful, in the case of the driver in Oslo who pointed out the sights, talked about how the city was changing, who closed our short ride to the train station with "you're always welcome in Oslo." Daunting and outrageous: the guy who tried to quick change us in Budapest.

Taxi drivers are city ambassadors, for better and for worse. They are often the first and last people you deal with outside the airport. Here in Rio, they don't speak much English, which doesn't allow for conversation. They have music on, sometimes they ask questions I can't understand. I proffer my Post-It with the address and hope for the best.

Last night I went to a restaurant near the Botanical Garden. It seemed to take a very long time, in terrible traffic. We passed tables where people were selling fruit, buses going to Urca and Sugarloaf, and the sky was deeply dark, 8:00 on a winter night. We made it finally, after stopping once to ask and finding that we were almost there.

The restaurant was lovely, the air around us cool and clear. I could see the chef inside, drinking wine, and his assistant in a red toque. Our hostess ordered everything she likes and we had a great evening. At one point a guy came by and offered to paint for us on some tiles. He sat at our table and painted two tiles with scenes of Rio, souvenirs. We drank caipirinhas with ginger, passion fruit, lemongrass.

Our evening was finally over. I flagged a taxi and gave the driver my orange Post-It. We drove past the park, past the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, through Ipanema. I was seeing parts of the city I hadn't seen before. At one moment I wondered if we were taking a circuitous route, and decided that if I was having a tour, I would have a tour. Just then we came into a familiar intersection. In a few minutes I was in the hotel elevator and my taxi was disappearing into the night streets.

Chicken soup with rice

It turns out that I'm not a foodie.

Really not, and probably never will be.

I'm just not discerning and energetic enough; I like too many things. You won't find me standing in line for the best Vietnamese sandwich, or whipping out my iPhone to hunt down the best eats in one hundred yards. I love to eat, but I'd be happy dining in our same three local restaurants for the rest of my life.*

This is kind of disappointing, but it's time to face the facts.

The best meal I've had in Rio was room service at the Hotel Atlantico Copacabana: an enormous bowl of chicken-rice-vegetable soup, with garlic bread and a cold beer from the mini-bar. I'm not kidding, this was the best. The best for that moment, and probably for the whole trip. It was really hot, amazingly well made, and absolutely comforting.

If I come to visit you, I will try your local specialty. I'll sample your durian, your fetal duck egg, your goulash, your banana leaf breakfasts and your mescal. I'll probably enjoy most of it! I'll certainly appreciate your hospitality, and If you come to visit me, I'll do my best.

(But don't expect too much.)



*Just in case you're interested in the favorites of a non-foodie, these are all in Gràcia: Gado Gado (Thai and Indonesian), ChidoOne (Mexican) and Cafe Godot (Catalan/European). 

Outside and inside

I remember the first day in Barcelona when I was no longer outside the conversations going on around me. It was lunchtime at Out of China, and suddenly I realized I could understand what the people next to me were saying.

The truth is that they weren't saying anything very interesting. Any idea I might have had that the Spanish and Catalans who frequented Out of China were talking about highly sophisticated matters of art, culture, politics or sex went out the window right away. So did the bubble of white noise I was accustomed to walking around in. All that speech that I had sometimes wanted to understand, but often simply wandered through, was now flowing into my mind in a more or less intelligible form.

It was exciting and disappointing at the same time.

Now I often find myself in places with languages of which I will never understand a single word. This is usually pleasant; if I'm able to communicate the basics, and speak with my colleagues, all is well. In fact, it's very peaceful to be floating among people, hearing the music of their speech, but not being involved by it.

Inside English there is no escape. The beauty or ugliness of others' words is not white noise, it seems to come into me through my skin. It can be a refreshing sensation of being able to really understand everything quickly, with all nuances intact, all the humor in original version. It can also be a shock to the system, like hearing just how loud and unpleasant an American soccer fan sounded at our local bar during the World Cup. And he wasn't swearing to nearly the extent I might have been in a different setting.

After almost ten years in Barcelona, I realize that the sheer effort we make to communicate across language and culture has a beauty of its own. Maybe I'm not my full self in Spanish, or in the English I speak with non-native speakers, but maybe I'm my better self, and sometimes I sense the same in others: a softer tone, a more naked approach, a vulnerability that we don't have in our native language spoken at full force...

How I learned to go places

My dad taught me.

After he died, I came across a list in his handwriting, titled "Valerie's Trip to England." This trip happened in 1971, around my fourth birthday, and it was epic in every sense, including the current one.

We started in Scotland, and traveled all over the UK by rail. We were three plus my Snoopy, carried everywhere in the crook of my arm and dropped in enough train stations to be mostly grey by the end of the trip. My parents had packed two identical and rather remarkable bags for the month-long journey, and they had written a guide to the ingeniously pocketed contents.

We went to a butterfly festival in Bath, climbed around Stonehenge (no fence in those days), boated on the Thames and rolled down soft green hills in a park. We saw all the places they had imagined in their English literature teaching careers. We went everywhere. My lip was burned accidentally by my father's cigarette one day; a woman ran across the street to pacify me with a toffee from her purse. People were lovely to us. It felt like the beginning of a great adventure.

Our next journey was the one from Georgia to California by car, with our dog, of course. And then so many camping trips, trips with my mother to visit her parents, a trip alone with my dad to visit Steinbeck's Central Coast, December drives to Lake Arrowhead with a Christmas tree tied to the top of our Volkswagen Beetle. We drove all over California.

Meanwhile, my father was also doing a fair amount of travelling with the Air Force Reserve as a photojournalist: Greece, back to England, South Korea. He often travelled on Air Force planes and had his own flight suit with COULTON printed on a canvas strip over the breast pocket.

He was a genius packer. He loved to make a cozy space for me. He always put something special into my bag: a game, a chocolate bar.

I don't want to make him sound too wonderful. He could lead you into the wilderness. He would get lost and refuse to ask for directions. He was stubborn and childish sometimes, and he put others at risk. We made the trip back to Georgia when I was twenty, and it had some very low points in it, nights when we stayed in unsafe places, a day when we drove for hours on a broken clutch. I would never take the risks he took.

But still I often think of him when I go somewhere, and in the last months before he died I would often call him from the road. From the Oslo airport train, to tell him of the landscape of farmhouses and snow. I would always try to thank him for teaching me to want to go somewhere, to pack lightly, but with a little chocolate tucked away. I wanted him to see what I was seeing, but it was too late by then. As he wrote in his cancer memoir, the wind is not for me anymore. 

Lately I've developed the sense that he'll be back again sometime, that we'll be able to sort things out, that the end of our story will be different. He used to meet me at the airport, at the top of the escalator, always proud of having a close parking space, always insisting on carrying my bag.

Max's small valise: Rio de Janeiro

Max is a batik hippo from Jakarta. Is he really from the city? Maybe not. Impossible to say. He was there in the airport, not far from the gold-pattern-on-the-outside-purple-silk-on-the-inside bag which is now his small valise, in which he travels.

Max and I have been to Casablanca, Oslo, Stockholm, Singapore, Vienna, Paris, Budapest, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, and Manila. This evening we're in Rio de Janeiro.

It's chilly and rainy. Max stayed in this morning, while I went out for an unexpectedly long walk around Copacabana. I got sufficiently drenched and, at one point, pretty lost. The high points of the walk were two street markets with an amazing array of fruit and vegetables, and a man tending the orchids he has growing on the side of a tree.

A day alone in a foreign city. Alone except for Max, my travel totem, the one I look to in order to be sure I'm still in my own dream.

That's the thing about being a porous person on the road: sometimes the outside gets in to an extent that becomes what the French call depaysement, at best a wonderful existential change of scenery, at worst an undesirable level of disorientation.

Because coming into town in a taxi by night, past the poor vast neighbourhoods with their harsh lights and pervasive darkness, has a way of throwing things into question. What am I doing here? What are we doing here? Are we making a positive difference in this place?

By we I mean my company, and I feel strongly that the answer is yes. We definitely provide a great place to work. We strive to make trustworthy, convenient marketplaces. As I walk around the neighbourhood, the low level of trust in this society is palpable. It's palpable in every city in the emerging countries I've visited.

Is the trust level growing? Will people in Mexico, Vietnam and Morocco someday find themselves trading with strangers with the same level of abandon that Oakland Craig's Listers do? Or will we have to find some other way to do business in these markets?

All yet to be seen. Max is relaxing on my new copy of Brick by Brick, the account of innovation at Lego. This week in Rio we'll be testing new ideas, taking them "outside the building", to the rainy streets of markets, street kids, orchids growing on tree trunks, guys selling Brazil umbrellas and people waiting for the good weather to come back. I'll be interested in seeing what happens, and how this Rio story takes shape now that I'm a character in it for a few pages.