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We had perfect weather in Boston this weekend. I discovered that “Somerville is where college graduates go to die”- not literally, of course, but one gets tired of the drunk freshmen and angry bums on Mission Hill. Anyway, I saw that there is life after college in Boston proper and it made me feel a lot better about how lately I’ve been feeling “stuck”. I still don’t know what the future holds, but who can worry about that listening to this song?

Once the research begins my curiosity seems insatiable and all of my senses tune to the excitement. Traveling is no longer about indulging whims for me, and despite what my parents frown about, it’s not just a phase either. It’s actually a compulsion I feel, to seek the occasional change of scenery. I’m driven by the intrigue and spontaneity I feel discovering somewhere new, and the feeling is unavoidable after some time in one place- you know what I mean wanderlusters!? This time it started during a favorite occasional past time of mine- browsing flight prices. I reminded myself that my sister and I want to travel together again, but to somewhere with less offensive toilets and more “normal” food (she’s picky). Last year upon the back of an Elephant in the jungle of Thailand, we had agreed- our next foreign encounter will be in a Spanish speaking country. In reality, I’m not sure when this journey will take place, as money is always an issue and those airfares are not getting cheaper. I am certain, however, that we cleared the public library shelves of their Spain category for the next three weeks. I even briefly considered purchasing this print from art.com. Then I actually saw the price and figured out how many portions of tapas or cava it equals out to… a girl can dream. Or she can get hungry and make it happen!

Hits close to the jai.

Earlier today an art forum newsletter showed up in my inbox with this little gem about an exhibit at the National Museum of Norway.  I’ve copied below the parts of the text that I found most interesting for the travel community, as it doesn’t require any additional comments from me except the several head nods and exasperated “Thank you!” as I threw up my hands at the end. Enjoy…

The exhibition features works that address the theme of never-ending journeys from a variety of angles. The works are about travel in the figurative sense – the ongoing quest for one’s own identity and place in the world – but also tackle the issue of migration.

It has been argued that in the 21st century we are all chimeras, hybrids, “illegitimate bastards” who can no longer draw upon an original comprehensive history. We are marked by different languages and incompatible patterns of socialization. Thus the idea of a rooted identity, of an essentialist concept of identity as essence and origin of the subject, has to be substituted with an image of the subject as constituted by the routes it has traveled. So the question “Where are you from?” should be replaced by “Where have you traveled?” or even “Where are you traveling?” Identity is a journey that is unfinished. The title of the exhibition “Unfinished Journeys” can be seen as an extended metaphor for the problem of identity formation. Many artists in the exhibition deal with the questions of identity as explicitly geographical spatial expeditions. Their journeys to real and imagined places show us life as a restless voyage of discovery, both literally and metaphorically.

“Unfinished Journeys” shows us that Heimweh (homesickness) and Fernweh (the longing for distant places) are not in fact two diametrically opposed emotions but two sides of the same problem. Their main common denominator is the notion of longing to find oneself. Robert Smithson’s return to his home town Passaic is a voyage of discovery no less restless than Isaac Julien’s journey to China, Marine Hugonnier’s traveling on the unfinished road of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Åsdam’s abysmal odyssey around East London’s construction site for the new Olympic Arena, or Rosa Barba’s expedition to a “real-and-imagined” moving island in the Baltic Sea – to name just a few. It is the quest to know ourselves in the world that drives us out to foreign countries and back home again.

Artists represented in the exhibition [...]  seem to agree on one thing: it is no longer possible for us to return home and stay.

Besides our affinity for all things Bill Murray, there’s something to be said for foreign language competency at a level of understanding how words are interpreted rather than their literal translations, and Jason Wire has already compiled 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words From Around the World. Language is very much tied to culture, and Americans always get shit for their singularity of tongue, mostly I find from Europeans. I have a theory that if Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and Connecticut all spoke different languages that I’d have been a savant polyglot by seven years old too. The excuse for most Americans is that they don’t need anything besides English, and though I don’t support this, they kind of have a point with how prevalent English is across the globe.  I want to learn as much as possible about as many far reaching and  potentially  useless bits of vocabulary and phrases as I can handle.  I enjoy the connection it allows, and communication is a powerful force among people. I truly take pleasure in learning alternate ways of saying something even if I’m unable to converse. Languages are challenging and sometimes overwhelming, but I’ve grown comfortable studying Thai and it’s only made me eager for this feeling in other languages too. I don’t believe that the desire to speak is enough. An incentive always helps, however, there is certainly effort required to do so, and perhaps Jason says it best in his conclusion:

For myself, the hardest part about learning a new language isn’t so much getting acquainted with the translations of vocabulary and different grammatical forms and bases, but developing an inner reflex that responds to words’ texture, not their translated “ingredients”. When you hear the word “criminal” you don’t think of “one who commits acts outside the law,” but rather the feeling and mental imagery that comes with that word.

Thus these words, while standing out due to our inability to find an equivalent word in out own language, should not be appreciated for our own words that we try to use to describe them, but for their own taste and texture. Understanding these words should be like eating the best slab of smoked barbequeued ribs: the enjoyment doesn’t come from knowing what the cook put in the sauce or the seasoning, but from the full experience that can only be created by time and emotion.”

An image from the Jason Wu for Target ad campaign.

Though made mostly of polyester which won’t help your sweat situation, these pieces are teaching dress code approved with their high neck lines and knee brushing lengths. Mostly we like that the collection plays double duty, because everything is cute enough to wear out as well. Made available February 5th, we presume you’ll have a hard time finding stuff now, and we capped our search at four different Target locations!

When in Sa Pa, you will quickly tire of hearing the following:

The greeting of a child, “Hello!!! ….. Money!”

And that of an adult, “You buy from me. Where you from?”

There’s a few interesting things I’ve noticed about the minority tribes in Sa Pa village. We’ve only seen women and children in the traditional attire, where are the men necessary to procreate and what do they wear? Are they home cooking and cleaning? Are they farming? Does this mean the ladies are the breadwinners? These female and underaged hustlers have a vast English vocabulary, and even know some French words, so our typical sarcastic responses are met with vitality and challenge. These local mountain folks spend their days following and verbally harassing white people, one has to wonder how much of their traditional lifestyles they actually maintain- or is it just a show now? Where and when are all the local crafts created? If the women and children are stalking the tourists everyday, “You said later. I remember you,” then is that where the men are? The husbands are silversmithing and embroidering in mountainous caves?

This is of course infinitely easier if you speak the local language. Or if you find a salon that employs English speaking staff. Or if you’re male and want to be ordained as a monk. I fall somewhere in between all of these categories, so it was a little reckless for me to opt for a Thai stylist, but I paid a fraction of the cost of such services in the home of the free and the brave. I managed to squeak out “chan chawp pom yao”, or I like long hair, and Dragon asked me one word as he fingered through my dried up locks with the largest grin ever, “layer?”. I could feel the heat in my cheeks as I assumed this meant he spoke English, but that was about his limit if you add “beautiful” and “thank you”, the only English words every Thai knows. I wasn’t going a whole year without a haircut so although I held my apprehensions, I had no choice but to offer all of my trust to this foreign stranger with an obvious language barrier and wait for some results, which by the way is a situation you will often find yourself in when in Asia. Cassie likes to describe the climax of this fiasco as interrupting her pleasantly sophisticated conversation with the salon owner in French by glancing my way and seeing hair billowing in all directions out and around my head, entwined with two blow dryers and several round brushes and of course more hair. (If you’ve ever met us you know that we have a lot of hair.)

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Last week at 1:30am, I got a phone call from one of my closest friends.

He couldn’t sleep.  Everything was eating at him-completing his Master’s thesis, the allure of an American re-entry that had vanished faster than he could embrace it, the dismal job market and how living at home was slowly suffocating him.  The usual suspects, the “what if’s”  I find a lot of my friends are encountering in one way or another.  Though no stranger to any of the above, the past two weeks have felt remarkably different from the past 5 months.  Regardless that I too still have a myriad of perennial “what if’s” all resulting in zero stability, there is one constant.

I started running again.

Not just “running” again as in logging in some miles here, a smattering of track workouts there.  I started running again.  The catalyst for all of this came from a phone call with an old teammate.  I got shut out of the NYC Half Marathon on lottery, but had the opportunity to run on a charity bid under the Organization for Autism Research, a cause that hits close to home (and rightfully deserves it’s own post).  I called Lindsay two days before NYE to pick her brain.  Lindsay has run the course twice and is still an avid competitive runner after competing in college for Villanova.  She knows how good I used to be and how much it killed me to give up competing because of my knee surgery.

You see, those who ran competitively in college fall into this weird limbo group within the running community.  The chances of us turning elite are slim to none.  We also will never be able to approach the sport with a sense (for lack of better words) of laziness or lack of dedication that recreational runners get to enjoy.  We envy that.  Recreational runners might feel bad about missing a run, but they don’t walk around with “runner’s guilt” for the rest of the week nor do they wake up at 4am to get in a double workout in order to prevent aforementioned guilt.  Recreational runners also don’t obsess over their pace splits on a tempo run or make mile repeats a priority.  We on the other hand, will never be able to run away from the pressures and ghosts of elite competitions past.

So accepting the charity bid wasn’t just about “can I raise the minimum $1,000 dictated by NYRR for the bid?” (though that did hold some weight).  Running the NYC Half would force me to put all my fears on the table and force honesty; the fear my left knee isn’t strong enough to handle racing 13.1 miles and the subsequent 40 mile training weeks that go with it, the fear of not putting up a good time and the fear of being accountable again.  Lindsay’s response to all of this? “Cas, I know you.  This is the best race course NYC has to offer. If you have the chance and don’t take it, you’re going to regret it.”

That little push was all I needed to resurrect the longest romantic relationship I’ve ever had: the one with my running shoes.  With all the “what if’s” that are still very much alive, this is the one thing no one can take away with me.  My run is by far the best part of my day and though I might not want to lace up and venture out in 23 degree weather, the moment I’m out the door running in Central Park I know I made the right choice.  I’m exhausted, my body is confused and I pretty much live at New York Sports Club now to shower…but I have never felt better.

All scary lake monsters aside, some serious cosmic order is about to be restored. This will be a weekend of snowboarding; something I like very, very much. The wild card of this situation is that I’ll be surrounded by medical school students because I’m actually tagging along on their school organized and partially funded party trip as a “significant other” to my lifetime friend Tina. I’m told there’s going to be a keg on the bus! Should I be wary of the tendency that these people are still students and therefore do not mess around with their social gatherings (however few and far between they are)? Na, I’m too friggin’ excited to ride fast. I learned how to snowboard on the east coast but this will be my first time to Lake Placid. I think most of the weekend is planned out for us already, bus, drink, sleep, mountain, maybe eat, drink, dance, drink, sleep, eat, mountain, bus; but it’s the board part that will make me one very happy girl. To quiet their minds some people run and some turn to drugs, but for me snowboarding is a tremendous release of tension and a form of freedom.

T.G.I.F. snow bunnies!