I grew up in Southern California. Current statistics show that the majority of inhabitants in this part of the world speak Spanish before they speak English. In high school, all students are required to take some form of language learning and I chose Spanish being the practical minded person that I was. However, I treated Spanish with the same sort of attention I have been giving my latest cycling injury, couldn’t care less. My worst grades were in Spanish. I can remember Mrs. Contreras calling on me always right when I was in the middle of goofing off with Matt Comeux, and I would always respond with a barely intelligible combination of badly ordered pronouns and horribly conjugated verbs. In university I avoided further Spanish training by taking a multi-cultural class which taught me all sorts about seven different religions, but no language. But then 18 months ago I decided that it was absolutely critical for me to learn a new language to move forward on my quest of becoming a renaissance man.
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From Argentina, I went to California for two weeks thinking that was enough time to settle my life in that continent before heading off to England. The complexities of “settling my life” in that continent will be saved for another entry. Two days after arriving in England, I boarded a plane to Istanbul. In Istanbul I had enough time to buy a bottle of fine tequila and then get on another plane for Izmir where my good friend and fellow blog author is currently living. I spent two weeks in Turkey with three days on some Greek islands where I learned about the intense problem of middle eastern immigrants trying to get into Europe and the idea that certain generations of people just simply hate each other regardless of any sort of reason. But I will not pass judgement on some of the things that they had to go through. Charles was a fantastic host as always and a play by play of the trip should be given to give him full respect but instead I will go through a tattered page of my journal that I found with a bullet point list of things I needed to remember. In order as I wrote them and to the best of my memory. When I was eighteen years old I visited my brother in Madrid and travelled to several other european cities, completing the perfunctory right-of-passage European trip Americans feel obliged to do (for more on this topic see Steinbeck’s America and Americans, written mostly when he was old and crotchety). Anyway, we found ourselves in Rome on New Year’s Eve and the following entry is equally a description and an inquisitive request regarding the custom practiced at Piazza del Popolo every year. Every friday I walk a few blocks to the local vegetable market to meet the villagers who come to sell there weekly harvest. It’s a misnomer really, because it also consists of vendors of fish, cheese, fruits, seeds, spices, breads, oils, many plastic Chinese-made household items, clothes, and delicious gözleme (a pancake-like treat with potatoes, meat, or parsley and cheese inside). The food products are fresh and delicious, I can’t rave enough, and the non-food items are, well, very cheap. Every neighborhood in Izmir has one, and in Kahramanlar, it is the place to be on fridays. If you plan on sharing a conversation with anyone in England, you better be prepared to discuss the weather. Without fail, it will be the second thing talked about regardless of the encounter you find yourself in. For example: “You alright?” (Equivalent to ‘how are you doing’ often said without the ‘You’.) “Ya, excellent|lovely|not bad.” (excellent is heavily used here and on par with ‘like’) “So how ’bout that weather?|What crap weather.|Beautiful day we are having.|Absolutely pissing down.|…” (many more but all roughly the same) The other person will usually take a long hard look into the sky, and then agree with the given conclusion. Last night, apparently there was one of the most visible meteor showers of the year in the northern hemisphere. I was meandering down a very dark lane blasting my iPod to “The great gig in the sky” and gazing upwards into the lightly misting rain wishing the cloud cover would move. It got me thinking… Way back in 1996, my friend Peter asked me to come with him and his twenty-six year old brother Matt to Costa Rica for ten days of surfing. Now, we had recently been getting into surfing, like good Southern-Californian youth do, and the trip sounded unbelievably cool to my teenage ears. We left the next year after a lot of planning and saving. The trip itself had lots of golden nuggets worth sharing, but for readability’s sake I’ll truncate it to one story about having no money the last couple days. My usual method of planning a trip is to make absolutely no reservations and simply pick a few things that I must do while I am in the area that I am going to. For my European two month train journey with a rag tag bunch of friends, this list included; visit Rikard in Sweden, start in England, run with the bulls, try and goto the olympics in Greece, stay with friends in X, Y, and Z. This is always a loose list and liable to change. A last minute addition to this list came from a long lost friend from high school who randomly got a hold of me and suggested I visit her in Siena Italy and if possible, arrive on these specific dates to watch the Palio. I had no idea what the Palio was, but it was a welcome respite to stay with someone after being in hostels for ages so in a very warm August, we arrived in Siena. So as I stumble through life trying to make sense of what exactly it is that I am trying to accomplish, I absolutely love hearing stories of how other people are dealing with that very same experience. Even more so when it doesn’t involve the all too common answers that I have heard back . . . → Read More: http://www.thesoccerproject.com/ I’ve been warned not to go many places. It seems every city, especially in foreign countries (not the U.S.), a concerned citizen will warn me about the perils of some particular neighborhood. I left Charles in Izmir for a three day galabant through two Greek islands called Chios and Samos. These islands were filled with extremely dangerous moped driving, investigative journalism sneaking around the coast guard finding wet back packs with Somalian photographs in it, drinking really cheap wine and eating pork which does not exist in Turkey, and generally good times. I landed back on Turkish soil and boarded an eleven hour night bus that would drop me off in Istanbul at 7am. The over night was not so bad minus the guy next to me who had no problem leaning his head on the crook of my shoulder. My first day in Istanbul was not as bad as it could have been thanks to Charles’ amazing friend Gizem who saved me from carrying my heavy backpack and also got us tickets to the final Galatasaray game that night. |
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