Some highlights from our family trip to Peru at the end of March. See more here.
Plaza Regocijo.
Weavers at the Center for Traditional Textiles.
Plaza de Armas.
Cute pair of siblings at the laundromat we used, who were very interested in my camera.
A narrow street in San Blas neighborhood.
The Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel first came on my radar when my mother told me about her debut novel, Last Night in Montreal. In it, protagonist Lilia wrenches holes into the lives of the people she touches by constantly leaving. Partly it's to escape the law, but she's also running away from herself - avoiding confinement and being tethered to one place and one identity. Her life is one of endless reinvention and freedom. Lilia refers to each instance of taking off to start over somewhere else as "vanishing." And, to my mother, I suppose, I have a habit of vanishing too.
I relate to the notion of being drawn to change; of always needing something new; of knowing how to leave but not knowing how to stay. I left my hometown for college in another state. Two weeks after graduation, I moved to Paris. When I was done with France I traveled the world for three months. I made my home in San Francisco for a year. I went abroad again. I came back and took a new job that I love, and yet I can't help but wonder how long it will take before I am drawn away. Every time I throw myself a goodbye party, my friends ask me if I'm coming back and, if so, when.
I am the type of person who never stops asking questions and being curious. It means that I can learn new things quickly but, by the same token, it's hard for me to be content in the place I'm in. Because I am always wondering what is going on everywhere else. Because while most people strive to attain a tangible equilibrium, I thrive in a state of flux.
I feel more restless than ever, now that I'm 25 and more and more of my friends are getting married, thinking about starting families, buying properties and generally becoming rooted through mechanisms that are not easily broken. It terrifies me. For if there is such a thing as hell, my idea of it is not so much a specific place, but rather the understanding and acceptance that I am stuck there for the rest of my life.
Continuing the tradition of spending my birthday in a city and country different from the previous year, I spent my first several days of being 25 in Montreal, a place I'd been wanderlusting after for quite some time. Not even halfway into the five-hour bike tour we'd taken to get acquainted with the layout of the city and its neighborhoods, I found myself thinking, "I could live here."
I loved the external stairs and balconies where, in summer, people sit, smoke, drink and eat; the parks, like in Paris, that are perfect for picnics; the way people greet you with bonjour; the bike-friendly roads; the back alleys where people hang their laundry using pulleys; the patios and terraces; the lively buzz from having over 100,000 students clustered near the city center; the markets; the mish mash of cultures; the townhouses and condos - more formal than pastel San Francisco but less austere than London's brick with iron balustrades; the cafes and coffee culture; the French street names; the blanket of solitude that seems to cover Parc Mont Royal; the bring your own wine restaurants.
I can't say when it's going to happen, but one of these days I'm coming back for you, Montreal.
See more photos from this trip here.
Growing up, summer vacations meant loading the car up with sleeping bags, pillows, the tent, the portable stove, the cooler, the box of dry goods and snacks, and endless books and cassette tapes to entertain my brother and me on the road. For us, there were no hotels or cruises or time shares, just the eight hundred and some odd miles between our house in Seattle and our relatives in Northern California - a distance that we broke up by camping our way down and back up the coast.
When I got old enough to realize that most families don't spend their annual vacations in national parks with the great outdoors, I attributed the trips to my parents' overall liberal, hippie-ish (although they hate that word) sensibility. Later, I learned, it was because (more often than not) they couldn't afford plane tickets for the four of us. My brother and I, for our parts, were happy sleeping all cramped together in our modest tent, hiking, cooking over the campfire, and running amok in old growth forests and along Pacific Ocean beaches.
As we moved into high school, and later college, getting involved in extracurricular activities and internships, it became more difficult to organize vacations together. We still made time to fly down to California to visit family, but I missed the trips of my childhood - the long stretches of highway that seemed to extend forever, stopping at diners in random small towns, washing bugs off the windshield at gas stations, the hiss of the gas stove that my father (and only him) operates, the beckon of a crackling fire to lure me from my sleeping bag on a cold morning.
So when I visited my parents in Seattle last month and begged them to go camping, it was with a little trepidation that it wouldn't be as great as I remembered. But as soon as we made camp in Mount Rainier National Park's Ohanapecosh campground, I realized that the rituals were all the same, albeit the tent felt simultaneously emptier without my brother and yet fuller because I was more grown than the last time we'd all slept in it.
Surrounding us, however, were signs of change. Even though Washington is not as short on water as California, it was impossible not to notice that bodies of water marked lakes on maps looked more like puddles; that all the foot bridges we crossed on hiking trails passed over streams that had totally dried up; that meadows that should be spectacularly lush with flowers this time of year were sparse and barren. Not to mention that most campsites can be reserved online now, at whopping rates of $20 per night.
Each day we set out on a different hike, my favorite being the Burroughs Mountain Trail, which took us tantalizingly close to the summit of Mount Rainier. (Or so it felt, at least). I asked my parents whether the view motivated them to scale the mountain but, alas, they did not share my rabid enthusiasm for mountaineering. As one chapter of my life as an outdoors(wo)man closes, another begins.
See more of MRNP here.
Glimpses of a recent camping trip with my parents.
Along the Silver Falls trail.
Heading back to Ohanapecosh campground.
Mt. Rainier.
Chubby chipmunk.
Receding lake.
When I catch the travel bug, I get it bad. The idea - an image or a description, maybe - of a place worms its way into my brain and emits an irrepressible urge to go there and see it in person. I start planning routes and checking prices - even dreaming about the trip, in some cases. And once the seed has been planted, I can't ignore it. Going is never a question of if, but rather when.
Due to work, my travel radius has been considerably shortened, but that didn't stop me from zooming around on Google Maps last week, trying to determine the furthest possible day trip I could make without feeling too rushed, while also in the company of my uncle and elderly grandfather.
So on a sunny weekday that I had off, the three of us piled into the family minivan and took off down the highway toward Monterey. I had never been; uncle and grandpa last visited well before I was born.
The winding two-lane highway rocked me to sleep, and I awoke to a view of boats dotting Monterey Bay. Having grown up in Seattle and driven along Puget Sound almost every day on the way to gymnastics practice, I find it comforting to be able to see water. We began our day at Cannery Row, essentially a condensed iteration of San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf (read: touristy and commercialized but still oddly charming). We broke for lunch at A Taste of Monterey, a wine tasting bar and bistro with a panoramic view of the bay. As the first diners we had our pick of the tables, selecting one right by the window, which we didn't realize until later had the added bonus of a steady stream of excrement falling outside thanks to the birds perched on the roof. Ah, the beauty of nature.
Upon my prompting we took 17 Mile Drive along the edge of Monterey Peninsula, through Pebble Beach and Pacific Grove, which, despite their modest names are disturbingly garish. Going southbound along the route there is beautiful, rugged coastline at the right and, on the left, velvety golfing greens bordered by faux chateaux and plantation throwback mansions with tacky names like "Villa Eden del Mar;"* the latter a blatant juxtaposition of two of the most pressing issues facing society - the drought and wealth disparity. At each scenic view point that we stopped at along the route, grandpa looked out with great interest and repeatedly lamented the lack of visible sea life relative to his previous visits.
Leaving the manicured enclave of the 1%, we continued down to Carmel to visit the Mission Basilica. Carmel-by-the-Sea, as it's formally known, is quaint and picturesque, full of cottage-style houses and a pedestrian-friendly "downtown" comprising small, local businesses. Likewise, the Mission is a lovingly restored and therefore photogenic complex with a beautiful garden, perhaps at odds with the dark history of Spain's religious conquests.
We didn't make it as far south as Point Lobos, also on my travel bucket list, but I'm saving that for another day.
*Do semicolons belong inside or outside of quotation marks?
Last September I had the chance to go to Cuba. I didn't post about it here because: 1) internet access was practically nonexistent during the trip and 2) I was planning to write a more substantive piece about what I learned there.
I finally published the essay on Medium. You can read it here.
In my junior year as an undergraduate, I took an anthropology seminar entitled Nature, Culture, Heritage from a visiting professor whose specialty was earthquakes. Other than Skyping a documentarian and playing Settlers of Catan during class, what I remember most was my final paper on dark tourism, specifically the preservation of World War II heritage at Auschwitz and Tule Lake. I won't quote my sources (nor myself, even though it's a damn good paper), but the research I did for that project opened up a new dimension of self-reflection.
What does it mean to have monuments that, unlike the Pyramids of Egypt, which are lauded as pinnacles of human achievement, instead serve as repositories of tragedy, trauma and negative memory? What does it say about us that we flock to them in droves and take selfies? This is what I asked myself as I waited in line outside the 9/11 Memorial Museum, driven by curiosity but also dreading what I might see inside.
The museum itself is cleverly designed. Being underground and incorporating some of the remaining foundations of the towers, it feels like a tomb, but I suppose that is part of the point. Hundreds, probably more like thousands, of artifacts are grouped together to help create a painstaking, blow-by-blow visceral account of what happened that fateful morning. Everything from photos, videos and articles to audio, shrapnel and the shoes that survivors wore when they escaped the collapsing building is featured.
The main exhibition is unrelenting in practically every way imaginable - in gravity, in detail and in tragedy. Even if the curators had only half the material, the museum would still be effective because of its location at Ground Zero; multimedia displays aside, its spatial proximity to the actual event is on par with that of Auschwitz. In other words, simply being there changes you.
Arguments against monuments like these generally follow several flows of logic, one being that generating empathy is not enough; that said monuments are politically motivated and thus manipulative; that the coagulation of a collective tragedy commodifies personal experience. For me, the most poignant part of the exhibit was a voicemail from a passenger on one of the planes that hit the towers to his wife. A transcript had been printed on the wall, but one could also listen to an audio clip of the actual message. I did, and felt dirty afterward, like I had violated something sacrosanct between two people who had loved each other. Of course, it was the widow's choice to donate her late husband's last message to the museum, but I still wonder why she didn't just keep it for herself.
I think it comes down to why people visit sites like these. Peculiar souls that are simply drawn to the morbid and the macabre contribute to commoditization like 4chan users to a nude photo leak; they just add white noise rather than substance to what should be an intellectual dialogue. Live and learn, learn and live, and hope that history doesn't repeat itself.