I am about to wrap up a six-month trip…the “social media” lens would show it as perfect, but life just is not quite that. It was a great adventure, but it had its moments that don’t show up on Facebook. I found this random note on the Social Media Effect that explains why trip photos and reality don’t line up: “I use social media to showcase the best moments in my life, so I can relive those moments and allow my friends and family to see — and hopefully get a little joy out of them. I don’t post photos of sick days or arguments with my wife and children or rough days at work. I don’t want to relive those moments, nobody wants to.”

Hawaii, and especially Oahu, has suffered/benefited from the Social Media Filter since visitors from afar like Mark Twain began reporting about it.  Leis, hula, ukuleles and tranquility float through the Hawaii of our imaginations. I wondered if it was all disingenuous hokum for tourists, but after several long visits, I see the culture is genuine, as is the native and local people’s commitment to maintaining the health of the lovely shorelines, the fishes and corals, and the native language of the islands and the integrity of culture.

But even believing that, when you set aside the Tourist Filter, much of Oahu is sad and wilted. The land of aquamarine and rainbows and breezes and yellow hibiscus bears the weight of an excess of  freeways, vehicles, missile ranges, sewers, powerlines, military bases, hospitals, parking lots, invasive species and high rises and houses crawling up the ridgelines. Many structures and much of the infrastructure is deteriorating, not to mention the air, water and habitat quality.

As the infrastructure sags, affordable housing hides in the shadows and the homeless proliferate. I wonder what this says about the nature of the love that Americans profess to hold for Hawaii?

It looks like a shallow and misleading love. Kind of like the love of a developer for land. Developers don’t love (or know) the land they buy. They love the money they speculate the land will bring when turned into something else. (Any exceptions prove the rule.)

Free-market driven over-development has made Oahu look like a third-world country that used to be first world. Yes, you can have it because you “love” it: island dreams, riches, fishes and housing. But only for so long. Afterwards, you have smashed windows, dead coral, potholes and no place to live.

Many Hawaiians do dream of a loved land where cars are limited, food is grown locally, and the scars of plantations and speculation slowly heal, and something new and truly special and sustainable is born.

And Oahu isn’t ruined yet. The lapping ocean waves and the calving whales and the blue(stormy)blue skies attest to it. I can find easily-accessed deep clear water alive with parrotfish and white-tipped sharks. I’ve visited quiet enclaves for monk seals and albatross. I’ve been in a local market, where people kiss in greeting and buy foods that are found nowhere else. It isn’t ruined. But it is battered.

It needs a break from the free-market. But is there such a thing? Maybe we could make it a thing.

Maybe we could have the guts to listen to Wendell Barry, who offers:

Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare.

And then, the guts to look at remodeling Oahu’s economy and land(city)scape using a more community-minded system, a more local scale – one that acknowledges that free markets cannot, by their mandate, have Oahu’s best interests at heart.

Just as social media can damage your relationships with your friends and family if you believe that posts are a reflection of the whole of their lives, so too can viewing places as idyllic damage them.

Okay, I’m over and out! Thanks for reading these past months. If I start a new blog, I’ll email and let you know…it’ll have a new name and address and you can decide whether to subscribe or not. And I’ll still use the “Everything is Great Except for the Occasional Knee Replacement” filter on Facebook, for that is why I love it – puppies and rainbows for all! Love Ya!

 

From the time we arrived at the castle to house sit planning to stay for four months, we were put off balance by surprises from the owner, Lilian (yeah, not her real name).

The natural setting was glorious, the large drafty chateau had an inherent romance, and living in France was delightful and charming. All this was offset by the confusion of Lilian being there when we had expected her to go away and by her expecting us to help with events and chores that don’t fall under the job description “housesitter.”  After several weeks, she finally left, but then we got phone calls or emails telling us of more and more chores we’d need to do. And then, there was the fact that sometimes she was mean: bossy and rude.

When someone is really nice sometimes, and other times really mean, I find it confusing. I wonder if I’m the problem. Maybe it is my responsibility to make someone like me and treat me well?

But I have a new understanding now. If someone ill-treats me, they are giving me a message about their character, not mine. (Yes, this is Captain-Obvious in hindsight, but I am grateful for the valuable lesson.)

It took us a long time to reach the breaking point because one of our core values is “Be Reliable.” When you ask us to do something and we say yes…we DO it. We do it to the best of our ability. Lilian had asked us to look after the place, and we said we would. We are willing to be pretty uncomfortable to fulfill a promise. We were pretty uncomfortable.

But, again, we were in a great setting that made it easier to overlook some things.

We reached the breaking point when Lilian bullied our new friend (the 80-year-old neighbor) after lying to us. Worst of all, this dear neighbor had confided in Lilian and in me (at different moments) that she had been having troubles that seemed like they might be dementia. Bullying your neighbor when they are struggling with dementia shows a thoughtless cruelty that I would not have believed likely, even from Lilian.

What happened was – the neighbor had connected us with someone in town who was going to help us learn French by taking us to the market, going out to lunch, and so forth. We were excited, because we could see vast leaps forward in our ability to communicate in a new language. It was a revelation to see that basic communication in French was within our grasp! I emailed Lilian with a head’s up that we’d be gone to lunch with a friend of her neighbor on Friday so don’t send any packages to be delivered at that time. She had encouraged us to go out touring during the day, so I never dreamed I’d get a phone call the next day telling us we were not permitted to go to lunch with a local.

She called to tell us (to yell at us) that this would not be tolerated. She yelled at me for many minutes on the phone about how we were endangering the castle if we associated with locals. It was dangerous because jealous locals are “just waiting to break into the castle.” And on and on. We both got the same 20-minute harangue.

When I could get a word in edgewise, I assured her that we were not meeting criminals for lunch. Just call your neighbor and ask her, I said. “She introduced us!”

“No! I don’t have her phone number!”

Sadly, that was a lie. She did have the phone number, and her next call was to the neighbor, we found out later. Lilian called and yelled at the neighbor so angrily that neighbor was sick for two days after the call. We discovered this about a week later, when I called up Lunch Friend to tell her why we had canceled. Lunch Friend told me she had talked to neighbor and what Lilian had said to her. Last straw!

Looking back, we should have taken action sooner, but it was hard, plus very costly and quite inconvenient. Our values had been in conflict before: being reliable vs. demanding a little respect.

Now we had a clear course: respecting neighbors is a pretty reliable core value, am I right?

I walked over to the neighbor’s to tell her we were leaving and found the little makeshift gate between the properties had been wired shut so I couldn’t go through (and obviously neither will her former friend when she returns). I persisted, waving at her when I saw her in her garden. I wanted to apologize for our part in the rift.  She didn’t blame us, she said. We had a sweet conversation and said a sad goodbye.

It was past time to go.

Six months of traipsing around exotic locales sounds blissful to some and like hell to others.

It’s both, plus just normal stuff.

Moving About

We’ve stayed at five different places since October first. The longest was at the castle.  Packing up and leaving everything in good condition was stressful (more on that in the next post). But even leaving a place we’d only been for 5 days was a bit of a hassle, too, because we’d settle in with our gadgets and our laundry and our foodstuffs and then have to schlep it all back to the car and/or airport in the end. Here are some gory details.

GADGETS: We discovered that smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are not really a “thing” in France. We realized this in the attic of the drafty castle, heated by an ineffective hodgepodge of pellet stoves and wood stoves that depended on 170-year-old crooked chimneys. If the wind blew at a certain velocity, the downstairs apartment filled  with smoke so thick, you couldn’t see. It did this even if you’d gone to bed and let the fire go out (and so wake up choking at midnight).  You’d think insurance would require smoke detectors, but obviously not. So, we went to a fancy French home improvement store and bought a fancy Nest Protect detector – and now we set it up in every place we stay. (https://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/overview/) Peace of mind, and a motion sensitive night light!

We also carry two laptops, two phones and a Google home. All like to be plugged in and need adaptors by country. We bought a six-pack of French/Spanish adaptors with us, and a power strip helps.

LAUNDRY: You’ve already heard we didn’t have a dryer (until we got to Hawaii). It wasn’t so bad! But I’m just not accustomed to the planning ahead required. In Spain, we only had one set of sheets, so when we wanted clean sheets, we had to jump up in the morning, shove the sheets in the washer and then fuss over them all day to make sure they dried by bedtime. I’ll admit we only washed our sheets once or twice.

EATING AND SHOPPING: Setting up food prep in places without home-style kitchens was a challenge each time. We got better at it each place. We complained about lack of knives in the Spanish place – but here we don’t have a cheese grater.

If you are only going to be somewhere six weeks (or five days), what do you buy at the grocery store? Are you going to use up that bottle of olive oil? You only have three days left at that place and you are out of butter? Do you buy more, or do without?

At first we relied on French microwave dinners (they were excellent) but in Spain there wasn’t a microwave and there was a lot less convenience packaged foods, so we started cooking. Simple things, no spices except salt. I was not going to buy a bottle of cumin; they last five years, dammit!

WATCHING TV – was a dismal failure. We thought we’d be able to watch Hulu and Netflix, but most of our favorite shows are blocked overseas. We subscribed to a service that masks your location, but it didn’t mask it well enough. I still think if you are a U.S. subscriber you should be able to watch your shows when traveling overseas. Netflix was the clear winner, however. It did offer enough shows that we could watch a few movies and such – we had an “Oceans” and George Clooney marathon at one point.

LIBRARY BOOKS – part of the appeal of traveling for so long was that we’d have time to read and read and read and read and read. The modern library system is a MIRACLE. We read and read and read digital library books checked out from the Hawaii library system. I recommend The Martian, A Gentleman in Moscow, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World by Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle,  Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, and amusing romances by Sophie Kinsella.

For those who say they’ve been “living vicariously” through our travels, how do you like the food with no spices and life without your TV shows?

P.S. Thanks to my fans, especially my Auntie, for reading.

I’ll bore you with the Logistics, in two parts!

Part I of II

We’ve been vagabonds since the end of August, 2018 and plan to move into our new townhouse on March 1, 2019. While embracing the great experiences over the six months, I admit to being ready to nest again.  I’m tickled to be returning to the town of Durango and our friends there in about a month.

Back in August, we sold our house in Durango and bought a small townhouse which we rented out to a local police officer. We sold both of our vehicles and put our stuff in storage with the intent of spending September camping, Oct.-Jan. housesitting a castle in France and February visiting our daughter in Hawaii. (Not the way it happened, but that is another story.)

The logistics of long-term travel have been manageable for us, with just a few irritations. If you’ve moved overseas for work, you know the logistics are hell, but at least you have work support. Just picking up and going requires some disregard for living like a normal person. Here is the rundown.

Phone – Phones are required for a life on the go, if only for GPS and maps. I bought new SIM cards for my mobile phone in France and in Spain. They were only about $10-20 a month and included data and calls. They were a bargain and a cinch to activate.  However, beyond that, when we wanted to be able to get details on our account and fine tune our plan, we were severely handicapped by lack of knowing the language, and of not having a natives’ understanding of the mobile phone system. We were stuck at the “immigrants’ level” of phone service.

We wanted to retain our old U.S. phone numbers, so we kept paying for our previous service, too – which is $20 each a month. Then, we had calls to those numbers forwarded to a Google Voice number, which we then accessed via the internet. We don’t get that many phone calls (other than robo-calls) anyway.

Email/internet – speed has ranged from great to horrible depending on mysterious factors, but we made do. I volunteer on a board of directors, so the most challenging part was the monthly video meetings – my internet was not always good enough for them.

Physical mail –  This was the trickiest and buggiest. First step was going as paperless as possible on all our bills and banking and insurance and so forth. We’d been working on that for years. Then, before leaving Durango we rented a post office box and had all our mail going to our old address forwarded there. Layered on top of that, we had all the  PO box mail forwarded to our daughter in Hawaii and she opened it and sent us a photo of it. The biggest glitch was that, even though the post office will deliver random other people’s mail to our box, they were meticulous about returning any of my business (For the Birds) mail – meaning it took us months to get a check from our vendor. And we only got that because we dispatched a friend to the vendor’s to pick up the check and deposit into our account.

Street Address – us not having a physical street address is a big red flag to companies like Visa and MasterCard and some others. I hadn’t really thought about that note you see on the outside of envelopes, “address service requested,”  but it means that companies keep track of your location via the post office. Thankfully, since we are paperless, most haven’t found out our dirty secret of not having a street address. Yet. I was (am) worried they’ll put a hold on our account if they find out we have no real street address.

Part Two of this post will get to the real CORE of the logistics of being on the move overseas: how we keep up with our TV shows and how we access library books. After that I’ll:

• post the down-and-dirty on why we left the castle early
• a dispatch about how Hawaii makes me equally happy and sad
• and after that I might start a new series about…of all things…cognitive behavior theory

 

 

 

 

First, I have to stress that I’m not comfortable using the words, “us” and “them,” nor with making generalizations about other cultures or people. I’m not qualified. However, I’m always curious and eager to give my opinion on anything — so what follows is just my own impressions. Are my impressions true? Maybe some of them are. Here goes:

You can probably never really see yourself as someone else does. But seeing ourselves abroad, we might learn a few things about being American. I’ve seen one thing clearly in French and Spaniards’ reactions to my traveling companion. Americans are seen as in eyes of these other cultures as super enthusiastic and happy about fairly ordinary things. My companion laughs a lot, especially in slightly awkward social situations…nice big belly laughs. Out loud. In France, especially, whoever he is talking to is shocked by this. They say, “No, really!” and look disapproving. That usually makes him laugh more. He can’t help it.

I’ve read that Americans are seen as “giddy,” by the French. I’d call it “jolly.”

Americans like to smile, laugh and be explicitly friendly; that is what feels normal and right.  For myself, I have a VERY hard time not saying, “Hi, how are you?” to waiters and shopkeepers. But they would find that silly and forward. In Catalonia, you just say, “Hola.” That’s it. Full stop.

Don’t get me wrong…people are kind and they are nice, just reserved. So if you are an introvert, you should be happy here because you don’t have to make an effort.

We lived in Latin America for nearly five years, and I remember there, especially in Mexico, greetings were warm and friendly – so maybe enthusiasm is a North American continent trait, not just American. Also, “Hola,” would have been a lame, lukewarm greeting in Mexico. There, we/they always said the equivalent of “Good Morning!” with a happy smile.

Catalonia does not consider itself Spain, and that is why they speak their own language first and Spanish second. I have wondered if, in far away Castilian-speaking parts of Spain (like Madrid), we’d hear, “Good Morning” and “Good Afternoon,” and the reason they say “Hola” here is because “Hola” is “Hi” in both Catalan and Castilian…  So starting a conversation with a stranger by saying “Hola” might be an unconscious way of stalling until you discover someone’s language. But that is Kristi-specuation.

Also, Americans wave to people – in cars, in crosswalks and so forth. No waving of the locals in this area. We wave anyway, as we cannot help it.

Friends here don’t hug either, unless maybe you are siblings and friends. That can be a problem for us Americans. Even though I am personally not a huge hugger, I just hugged someone today. Again, I couldn’t help it. She had been very kind to us our six weeks here and we were saying goodbye. So I did an awkward mix of the cheek kisses that were appropriate and American hug. I felt like a monster.

Not really. I don’t mind being a little awkward. Being comfortable with discomfort is part of travel.  Keep laughing loudly and carry on.

The holiday traditions of Catalonia are unique and, especially if you have kids, start on Dec. 8th and don’t culminate until January 6th.

We became aware of a couple of traditions celebrated here…

First: tio, or “log,: – every house and business has a small fireplace log that they feed tangerines or apples to starting December 8th (the feast of Immaculate Conception). The face of the tio is a cute smile and red hat. The rest is covered by a festive blanket. On Christmas Eve, the children hit the log with a stick and sing to it, asking for it to poop candy. Low and behold, when a parent pulls off the blanket, candy was pooped for everyone! (This tradition may have evolved from middle ages, when villages lit a large tree-sized log during the darkest days of winter and kept it burning until the days started getting longer.)

Human pooping figures are placed in the nativity scenes in homes by the children, a mischievous touch. A guy in blue shirt and a white cap is squatting with his pants down and a little pile of poo is underneath him. I haven’t seen any speculation as to how this got started, but it has really taken off, and you can get pooping figures of every celebrity from Christmas market stalls. We noticed Spongebob and the Pope, among soccer stars and world leaders.

Nativity scenes or “cribs” are very elaborate in homes and store windows and I’ve been inspired to step up my game next year. They have fountains and numerous tableaus. Entire shops and rows of stalls at the Christmas fairs are devoted to figures and structures for your scene. Of course, a new born Jesus is the center of them all.

New Years Eve comes with the tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight. This is an obligation and the supermarkets were filled with little festive cups containing 12 grapes. You eat a grape during each “bong” of midnight.

But wait, there’s more!

Lucky kids get a gift from both Papa Noel on Christmas and the Three Kings on January 6th (Epiphany). But most are limited to Three Kings and the way the kids accomplish delivery of their lists of desires in the weeks before Epiphany is elaborate. In one scenario, the kings send their three ambassadors who set up embassies where the kids can visit each embassy, experience that king’s culture, and – or course – deliver their list there.

Finally, the towns have parades on the Eve of Three Kings Days that have the kings arriving majestically and with pomp and circumstance by camel, or boat or train – all designed to astound and delight the kiddos!

 

 

 

Spain has the highest life expectancy in Europe and Spanish women in particular have the second-longest living in the entire world. Spaniards get lots of exercise – I’ve been surprised seeing their walking and biking stamina. No one seems to be very chubby, either.

They follow the Mediterranean diet, meaning olive oil, fish and veggies are staples. But one question I have (and Google isn’t answering for me): if cured meats cause cancer, (and these folks love their cured meats,) do they have a higher rate of ham-caused cancer? Along with cancer from chorizo, salchichón, botifarra, or fuet?

Spaniards eat twice the recommended daily amount of cured meat. In late 2015, NPR did a story on Spaniards’ reaction to a dire WHO warning about cured meat. Quotes in the story have Spaniards chocking it all up to a conspiracy theory.

It seemed to me that a journalist would kindly check and see if Spaniards have higher rates of the type of cancer attributed to cured meats, but no! I can’t find any references pointing to rates of cancer by country or by consumption of chorizo!

Meanwhile, we’ve been pretty adventurous in trying some of the Mediterranean favorites – mostly seafood and mushrooms. We’ve eaten lots of steamed mussels, and a few other shelled creatures we don’t recognize. Tuna is found in most salads and many sandwiches. Anchovies and sardines are also omnipresent.

Mushrooms enjoy an exalted place in Catalonian food, and the most prized forest treasures are Bloody Milk Cap, Waxy Cap, Yellow-footed Chanterelle, Black Trumpety, and Panther Cap. Winter mushroom season is a big event. We tried a nice mushroom dish at a restaurant. Here are a few pics of our meals – I’m not a food photographer, obviously.

My, but the walled cities here in Catalonia are old! The churches I was impressed with in Brittany are all six hundred years younger than the ones here. We hiked up to see an old chapel and read that it was destroyed by an earthquake, so they rebuilt it in the late 900’s. And this photo is from a nearby monastery founded before 812.

The book “A Brief History of France told through Food,” (which you can check out from the local library) taught me a lot about the history of this region which I can sum up thus: a bunch of rich guys and religious leaders had a lot of power struggles that lasted around a thousand years before democracy arrived and made things a lot different. The wonders of democracy started here and are cherished here.

One of those power-struggling people was Charlemagne – who has been called the “Father of Europe” as he united most of Western Europe for the first time since the classical era of the Roman Empire.  It is said that the Catalan flag is from Charlemagne’s son, who used four bloody fingers to draw four red stripes on a wonded warrior’s shield.

The town we live near was established in the 900’s, when churches and monasteries and walls were built. The charming bridge we walk over to visit the Tuesday market was first mentioned in documents in the 1,000’s.

I never know how to incorporate ancient history into my world view.  Four hundred generations are too many to get a solid perspective, so here is what I do: I take a deep breath, lean my head against the old stones, and let myself feel small and unimportant, but not – never – insignificant.

Each of us is an important piece in the beautiful mosaic of history.

To Americans, Spain’s schedule seems foreign. (Like, another culture or something?)

In 1940, Spain’s dictator at the time, Francisco Franco, changed Spain’s time zone, moving the clocks one hour forward in solidarity with Nazi Germany, and though geographically nonsensical, it has remained that way ever since. (Because Spain is a member of the E.U., I forget that it was under a dictator for a long time, and still bears the social ills and scars.)

The sun rises late and sets late (clock-wise). For visitors like me, it just means adjusting to when you go out and about. We had to do that in France, too – as lunch is sacrosanct, and held from noon – two.

Here in Spain, nearly all shops and businesses are closed from around 1:30 until 5 pm. This is so you can go home and eat your main, large, family meal of the day. Then businesses reopen for three hours in the evening. So, workers might just have a light dinner about 10 pm. Or during a celebration or holiday, a large amazing dinner lasting half the night.

For residents of Spain, the daily upshot is that they get almost an hour’s less sleep than the average European and suffer from it. The government has been nudging toward changing the time zone, but change is hard.

Festivities around the holidays were way too late for us. Even to go visit a living nativity scene or Christmas concert was out of our reach as they don’t get started until 9 pm. I feel like a real light-weight. But a well-rested one!

Daily schedules is just one example of surprising cultural differences found whenever and wherever we travel outside of the U.S. For me, it feels lucky to stay in one place long enough to get to know the rhythm of the day.

Just outside a small medieval town in Catalonia, at the end of a mile-long dirt road (which is at the end of a mile-long paved one-lane road), deep in oak and pine woods, you’ll find two houses. One is stone and has twelve bedrooms and twelve baths and a huge blue pool, with a terraced olive grove. Next to it, in garish yellow stucco is our two-bedroom place – the staff house for the big stone one. The homeowners visit seldom so they like to have someone living on the premises; hence our house sitting gig.  Both houses have typical small windows with interior shutters, heavy roof of thick with terra-cotta, and walls of a arm-length thickness. The big house is full of beautiful art (we can just peek in), and ours has – maybe the cast offs? There are five nice paintings on the walls here.

Lest you get too caught up in a vision of our glorious place, other than the paintings, there is little to commend the furnishings. We have two very uncomfortable, very old and stained love seats for sitting and a few odds and ends for dishes, but no paring knife. We do have a washer, but no dryer. This is fine except there is only one set of bedsheets, so you have to get those sheets washed early to get them to dry by bedtime. Especially since it is winter.

Back to the positive – this place has great heat and is toasty as can be. Also has a cute dining table with four chairs that I see are also extras from the big house – they are of a really cool rustic design.

We’ll be here a bit less than one more month. Our daughter is flying in for Christmas, so we are excited about that, and the opportunity to visit Barcelona with her (1.5 hour drive south).

Our house looks a lot like many farmhouses of Catalonia, some of which are depicted by the painter Joan Mir…