Announcement: blog moving

From now on, I'll be posting at tumblr instead of blogspot.

The new url is thatuntravelledworld.tumblr.com

Life on the Farm: In which Anna discovers she is irredeemably bourgeois

There is something kind of pathetic about the path my thoughts were taking, as I pulled nettles out of a field of potatoes. I was feeling so awfully sorry for myself. How ironic it was and how sheltered my life has been! Do the dishes, weed the potatoes, peel the onions, pull the rusty nails out of those boards...woe is me! Am I the poor girl taking orders from Baba Yaga?

I've gotten most of my knowledge of farm labor and rural life from novels. I'm not talking about the kind that romanticize the work - a pastoral novel about the pleasures of Arcadian shepherd life wouldn't help much. But I grew up on a steady diet of fantasy books, full of characters who have to work hard and overcome all odds to succeed at their quest. Its not that I never faced challenges, but they've rarely been physical in nature, outside of cross-country races. I noticed this while hiking in Tajikistan last year, that I felt like a character in Lord of the Rings, and that by imagining myself as such, the long march on little food seemed like an adventure.

So, picture me, in my field of potatoes in the rain, cursing at nettle stings and my sore back, and trying to imagine myself in a heroic struggle in order to make myself feel better. Of course, to have the real picture, one would have picture the backdrop of the Appenines, or a beautiful view over Lake Como, and a delicious bowl of pasta when I'm done.

Yes, as farming goes, I had the tourist's point of view.

WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) is an organization that matches volunteers with organic farms. In exchange for labor, the volunteer gets free room and board. And, complaining aside, I got a great deal. I'm maybe not the typical volunteer - I support organic farming and the slow food movement, but I'm not likely to use the skills in the future, beyond having a backyard garden. I just wanted a way to fill time between Bologna and Slovakia.

My first farm was in the Appenine town of Montese, an hour southwest of Bologna. Carla and Stefano are artists who decided to go "back to the land" and became mostly full time farmers. Maybe because of my background, those are the kind of people I feel very at home with, and we had a lot to talk about.  I weeded a lot of lavender, but I had companionship in the form of Carla, Amanda, my fellow American WWOOFer, and Rivi, a friendly and excitable puppy.

lavender fields (post weeding)

I liked being in Montese, and it was amazing to me that such a rural and unchanged world existed so close to Bologna. The picturesque town, with its hilltop castle, was one of the last places to be liberated from the German occupation during WWII. It finally was freed by Brazilian soldiers, who are commemorated in monuments all over the area.  The town museum was full of strange artifacts from that time. As I walked through the woods I could easily imagine the partisans hiding in the chestnut groves, but it is hard, I think, to really understand the hardship and brutality of those times.

German Propaganda

My second farm was on Lake Como, perched high on the mountain overlooking the water. The first few days it rained, and I worked hard, and felt sorry for myself. But finally the sun came out and the lake was sparkling, and I could see the sailboats by the opposite shore. At the end of the day, I climbed down the endless staircase that linked my village to Varenna on the shore, and dove into the water. The cold felt so good, and I dried off sitting on the dock, watching the mountains on the North end of the lake turn purple and fade in the evening. From that point on, it didn't matter how many onions I peeled, or fields I weeded,  I was still one of the luckiest people in the world.

Revisited Worlds

This post begins as scribbling in a notebook, as I sit on the platform of the Bologna train station very early in the morning. I've had a total of 17 hours of sleep over the last four days and I'm doing pretty well, considering. I woke up feeling cool and languid, even on the sofa bed.

There's something about Italy in the summer. Before my term abroad, I'd never gone travelling other than in the summer. There is still something about the feel of tired feet on paving stones, and a cool morning that you know will be hot as soon as you move, and sharp shadows cast across the piazza. Its the smell, that's not exactly clean. Its sweat on the back of my neck, and a desperate need to drink Fanta. Bologna in the winter felt like Bologna, but it didn't feel viscerally Italian in the way the two days in the city did. Maybe I was conditioned by my first experience when I was 17. Maybe jet lag has something to do with it too. I feel both extra awake and a little unreal.

Somewhere in that sensual experience, it comes to me: I love Italy again. The glamour that I'd lost by December has come back, but this time its combined with the pleasure of recognition. It's the pleasure of returning to a loved place, and finding things exactly as you left them. And Bologna will always be there.

Oh, sure, little things change. If I come back in 50 years, the stores on the corner of D'Azeglio and Farini will be different - but the corner will be the same. Bologna will always be a little bit my city - because while I loved visiting my friends, and I thought that was the point of this trip, I realized that the city itself is a friend. I think I will return in 50 years to be one of those white haired women who walk arm in arm with their white haired husbands in slow steps across Piazza Maggiore in the evening.

By returning, I've retroactively understood and appreciated just what my semester here meant. So many places seem contingent on a time of life, a certain relationship, an particular activity, in order to be properly appreciated. As I got progressively disillusioned in the fall, and felt like I wasn't doing the things college students do, or meeting the right people, or getting enought "out" of the experience, I felt like I was wasting time. I blamed Italy, I blamed my program, I blamed myself. But the point isn't to get something "out" of Italy. How American of me, to constantly be drawing a bottom line!

Italy's great power is that it doesn't care what you or I think about it. It just goes on being Italian. There are terribly superficial aspects of the culture and politics, and in my disappointment, I missed the point. The real culture is underneath, neither Berlusconi and the reality game shows nor opera and the Renaissance. Italy is all of that - and none of it. It can't be summed up so easily. It has a permanence, that is so hard for an American to grasp. Its something of the feeling of sharp morning sun heating the air over the piazza, the smell of exhaust and coffee, the cafes opening. As it ever was, so shall it always be.

Insterstate 91: Not Quite A Love Song

Nobody loves I-91. There are no songs written about out, no road signs on the walls of diners (or Applebee's). If you live in New England, you know its second only to I-95 in its unavoidability and congestion. But every cross-country ski season, I spend most weekends driving from New Haven to northern Vermont and back, almost entirely on I-91. My teammate likes to compare that road to a pneumatic tube: you get on at one end, and four hours later, you're deposited at the other. I'm short on exotic travels at the moment, but here is my affectionate take on a road I've seen too much of in the last 2 months.

We get on at exit 1 in New Haven, CT. We're heading North, because that's the direction of Friday afternoons, fresh snow, and adventure (South means the weekend's over, work is looming, and the sore muscles are setting in). After 2 years, New Haven's starting to feel like home. It's even kind of beautiful if you catch the sun setting behind West Rock. There's something about East Rock and West Rock, the two sheer-sided hills that rise abruptly on either side of the city, that makes me feel like I can imagine the way this part of the country looked to the first Europeans arriving from the sea.

Hartford's the first real landmark, a little under an hour later. I've never been to Hartford, despite having driven through it about a million times in my childhood on the way from Maine to Philadelphia. Am I missing anything? I have to admit that the blue onion dome that I can see from the highway has always made me wonder if there's more to the city than the insurance company offices that dominate the skyline.

Just north of Hartford is a landfill. I've got a love-hate relationship with Connecticut: I love New Haven, and hate the rest of it. Ok, that's not fair, but I still feel like this about sums it up: Northern New England has mountains; Connecticut has a giant mound of trash. When we got hit by the snowbomination/snowpocalypse/snowmaggedon this January, the featureless artificial hill looked like a bizarre, nightmarish giant marshmallow.

Next we cross into Massachusetts, and quickly come to Springfield, another city I've never been to despite driving through a million times (Worcester completes the trio). Should I see more of Springfield than convenient pit stop gas stations? The Basketball Hall of Fame is shaped like a basketball, which is pretty cool, but I'm not sure thats enough of a draw.

Its better to hold off on the pit stop in any case, if you can wait until Northampton. Not only does it have the Iron Horse, venue of many an Enter the Haggis concert, its got curry at the Haymarket Cafe and a great natural food store.

Northampton (exit 19) certainly beats Deerfield (exit 24). Deerfield, although I'm sure its a lovely place, is home to two things I strongly disapprove of, though of course not in equal measure: Yankee Candle and one of the worst massacres of the French and Indian War.

That war left its mark on another landmark a few miles on: the sign for French King bridge. After much wondering, I discovered that the bridge is named after French King Gorge, which was named for (you guessed it) the King of France. This doesn't answer why 1. if the French lost the war, we kept the name, and 2. it isn't called Louis XIV Bridge, instead of being named for "any generic French king".

Now its the Vermont border, and 91 begins to follow the twists of the Connecticut River. Exit 2 is Brattleboro, home to yummy if overpriced general store, with chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. Putney (exit 4) has a real small-town diner, the type that serves six kinds of pie, and has a Saturday meatloaf special. Its not totally old-fashioned - they were serving "beefalo" burgers - but then, it is Vermont.

For a long time after that, its just the road and the trees. There's plenty of time to listen to music, and invent song parodies for the all-teams talent show. But sooner or later (sooner if our speed-demon captain is driving), we get to White River Junction. That's usually the end of the line. This season, one meet was in Hanover, a little bit farther and on the New Hampshire side of the river, but the other two were in Jericho, in the western part of the state. That means taking the other branch at the junction, and following Route 89, a beautiful road with panoramic mountain views and signs for bear crossings.

I've never driven to the end of I-91, the last 110 miles through St. Johnsbury to the Canadian border. Though it's dangerously near to a cliche that my "road not taken" should be in Robert Frost's home state, its nice to think that even though this is such a familiar route, there's still a part of it I haven't travelled yet. Maybe next winter.

Korean Food in Dushanbe; and Other 2010 Superlatives

Best (and worst) of 2010

Best book I read: The best new book was Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' novel-like account of one man's decency and resilience during hurricane Katrina. I also hugely enjoyed a book I was assigned for class last fall, North and South.  Elizabeth Gaskell had Austen's gift for character, and Dicken's eye for social injustice.

Best movie I saw: new: A Single Man; old: Two BBC miniseries from the '80s: Traffik, the clearest depiction I've seen of the folly of the war on drugs, and First Among Equals, which follows the careers of four politicians vyying to become Prime Minister - not a masterpiece, but I really enjoyed it.

Best song of the year: Neither are new, but I spent the year obsessively listening on repeat to Sodom, South Georgia (here) by Iron and Wine and The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Runner(here) by Belle and Sebastian.

Worst song of the year: I spent three hours in a Tajik taxi whose driver only owned one song, and, just my luck, it had to be Moscow Never Sleeps (here, if you really want to subject yourself to it).

Best restaurant: While I love Bologna's Osteria dell’Orsa, the most unexpectedly wonderful place was the Korean Restaurant on Rudaki Avenue in Dushanbe. It is also conveniently across the street from the Uzbek embassy, and served as a peaceful, air-conditioned refuge to refuel on jasmine tea before facing the bureaucracy. 

Best meal: fish stew, cuttlefish risotto and a sorbet trio at a small italian restaurant in Bled, Slovenia.

Best thing I ate: Tajik fruit – Ishkashim grapes, Shahristan pears, Khorog cherries, Vrang plums.

Worst thing I ate: Tajik ice cream. Comes in many neon colors but has only one flavor: plastic.

Hangumar displaying the bread dough

Best educational experience: bread baking in Tavildara.

Best museum: tie between the British Museum, which feels like it was designed for archeologists and adventurous children, and where all mysterious objects are labeled as "origin not yet known", and the Fra Angelico cells at the Chiesa San Marco in Florence.

Worst museum: the Hulbook, a questionably reconstructed ancient fort in southern Tajikistan; interesting from a propaganda perspective, but would make an archeologist weep.

Best church: Basilica di San Antonio, Padova. I loved its blue-grey domes and the combination of frescos from the 1300s and 1930s. 

Best beach: the endless public beaches of Latvia - where the beach cafes also win the competition for best borscht. The "anti-imperialist" Tajik borscht doesn't use beets, though, so its not a fair competition.

Best hotel: Muminjon’s guest house in Bukhara, in a seemingly-unchanged 18th century merchant's house, with a shade tree, harbuza melon and a friendly cat.

Lonely Planet in action

Best Guidebook: The Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia. Pretty useless for Tajikistan, but we followed it religiously in Uzbekistan with good results. Plus it served as toilet paper, a fire-starter, and a useful child-distractor while interviewing harried mothers.

Most useful thing I brought: my Naot "Scandinavian" sandals - suitable for the Italian riviera or a Tajik village, and didn't give me a blister in 3 months of constant wear, not even when I hiked in them.

Least useful thing I brought: the ankle brace my mother made me take - but I never sprained my ankle, so maybe it was preventative. 

Best bargain: Couch Surfing; also, though I couldn't have predicted it, the extra $50 to fly home from Gatwick, which saved me getting stuck in the Heathrow weather cancellations.

Worst not-a-bargain: £100 train from Edinburgh to London cost more than all the Ryanair flights put together - but the view of the rainbow over the North Sea might have been worth it.

me sketching in Bukhara

Best tourist cities: Bukhara and Ljubljana - beautiful and accessible without being crowded or kitschy.

Worst tourist cities: Kulob or Florence - Strange comparison, I know, but Kulob, Tajikistan may have never seen a tourist in its life, while Florence has seen far too many. It doesn't stop either from being good places to visit, but finding the best stuff takes more work.

Most unexpectedly wonderful thing: Ieva, Rob, Nazira, Mehri Niso, Hangumar, Laura, Shanbe, Matine, Nikita, Uri, Lola, Feli, Veronyka and all the other new friends who I don't have space to list.

Plus the Wakhan corridor (see above). 

Obvious thing totally not worth it: the Registan in Bukhara was bombed by the Red Army in the '20s - there's not much left of the Emir's palace.

Obvious things totally worth it: punting on the Cam, climbing Bologna’s tower, Edinburgh castle, the reclining Buddha at the National Museum of Tajikistan, Venice.