I'm off again (6/22/05)

Hello my dear friends. I know I have been bad with keeping in touch with some of you…although then again, you’ve been bad at keeping in touch with me so I guess we’re even. Since I leave for Mexico tomorrow where I’ll be volunteering for 7 weeks in a remote village without internet access, I thought I would write and let you know what has been going on in my life. You can reach me however and I will place you on my everchanging love list depending on whether you send me something during the summer (no packages though and you must put the full address):

Amigos de Las Americas
Maya Smith
Apartado Postal 31334
CP 68000
Oaxaca, Oaxaca
Mexico

If you want me to send a post card, email me your address and I’ll see what I can do, although I won’t be checking email but maybe once or twice.

So, what’s been going on with me….Hmmm…I start my PhD at Berkeley in August for Romance Languages and Linguistics. I hope people will come visit me since supposedly I’m not allowed to leave the state for residency purposes. Boo. Save me! Can you imagine me not traveling? Not a pretty sight. (And those of you who think my life merely consists of traveling, I do do work, just on my own time. The French translations have been keeping me busy…but I digress).

As for big things in my life, it looks like I will have gallery space in the 6th arrondissement in Paris starting in the next few months. You can go to my curator’s website at www.fionasze.com and click on “her curating.” It’s not completed yet and I have not had time to get my pieces to Paris but they have made slides of all my works and I will worry about logistics when I get back from the great abyss. Those of you in Paris should try to stop by if you have the chance once that gets rolling.

So you’ll have to excuse the lack of creativity in this email. It’s after midnight and I just spent the last couple hours packing so all my creative juices have been stifled. Feel free not to read it all but it’s the last one you will be receiving in a while and the story is actually pretty interesting.

Not much more has been happening except for my trip to Greece, Italy, and Croatia, actually one of my best trips yet quite stressful at times. So, I was supposed to fly into Greece with a friend and travel up to Bosnia, passing through Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro etc. A last minute emergency meant I would be taking this trip alone. While this was quite nerve-racking at first, everything worked out pretty well and now I’m wanting to do things alone all the time! So much easier to meet people.

I ended up meeting a friend in the Athens airport (thank goodness he stands at a whopping 6’8” so that I could spot him in baggage claim since I wasn’t supposed to meet him there at all) who was a huge help being that I was in a less than happy mood since the Air France/Alitalia megamachine lost my luggage for 3 days after a missed connection due to air trafficking problems in New York caused me to be rerouted through Milan. Then I was informed by several calls to the Lost Luggage center that my precious bag was trying out for the transnational world champion pingpong tournament as it went from Paris to Milan back to Paris and then Milan again and then I think finally to Athens, only to get there when I was off on the Greek isle of Spetses. And oh do I have fond memories of Spetses…which I say quite seriously except for the slight undertone of sarcasm which subtly highlights how I stepped on a sea urchin and then preceded to spend the next 30 minutes with a sterilized needle trying to get all the spurs from my foot. 3 weeks later I can’t tell if they’ve all left my foot. But, I was able to walk with limited pain and return to Athens (which is not nearly as dirty as everyone says it is) to bask in my newly returned suitcase, rolling around in the clean clothes and deodorant with which I had been reunited.

Next stop: Milan, where I spent two relatively low-stress days with a friend of mine who graciously cut his vacation to Venice short to make sure I would have a place to stay. I had never been out of the Milan train station and was actually pleasantly surprised by what I was to find, although that was mainly because I got to visit dear friends who I don’t get to see that often. My next plan was to take a train to Ancona and catch an overnight ferry to Croatia, but was quickly convinced that this might not be a good idea since if I missed the ferry there would not be another one for a few days. Thus, I bought a train ticket to Zagreb, which was also quite nerve-racking as I was informed that my 16 minute connection in Venice probably was not sufficient since the Milan-Venice line is notorious for its unreliability. However, while I would be 0 for 2 on plane connections on this trip, I succeeded in hopping to my connecting train and took a seat in my reserved cabin. This is when things started to get interesting…

I was not alone in my compartment as a whispy-haired indifferent looking guy was sitting by the window surrounded my guitars and other miscellaneous items. He said nothing as I entered so I, a southern-bred woman, naturally said nothing back. 10 minutes later he peers at me from behind his strands of hair and in a gruff voice asks if I minded if he smoked hash. I simply told him to open the window and returned to my book. A few minutes later I noticed the ticket controller walking down the aisle and informed the boy who in turned thanked me by opening up and talking to me for about two hours. Turns out he’s from Croatia, currently living in the states (studying chemistry in order to learn as much as possible about drugs…I soon learned this seems to be a trend-- school=drugs--in Croatia, at least in the crowd I hung with). And while most of the time he was too far out for me, we did strike up this weird, albeit, shallow bond. But he was nice and told me that if I needed anything while I was in Zagreb, he and his brother’s dreadlock-sporting friend would be happy to help me out (and I actually think he wasn’t talking about where I could score hash by this point).

So after the conversation died down I fell asleep, sprawled out on three adjacent seats, only to be awoken by a very cranky passport controller grunting something in Croatian. I gave him my passport; he gave it back without really looking at it. While the world hates Americans, it’s still quite easy to get through passport checks and other fun state-issued activities with little problem. And since my new hash-inhaling friend was Croatian, I figured it would be the same for him…until the yelling ensued. While my Croatian is seriously lacking I understood words like “guitar” and “synthesizer” and “get all your belongings and come with me” (actually the last one I just inferred when Ilija (my new friend) abruptly gathered his stuff and left the compartment, not without turning to me and saying he’d be back shortly. 45 minutes later I arrive to Zagreb and still no sign of Ilija. So I have two options. Either I can forget about everything and go on my merry way, finding a hostel and taking in the sights, or I can do the more exciting thing and give my dad a heart-attack by finding the dreadlock-sporting guy Ilija spoke of, insuring that the adventure would continue. Intuition beat out common sense and when I saw the blond Croatian dreadlocked man standing alone and looking perplexed that his friend’s brother never showed up, I decided to go up to him and introduce myself.

He figured I was a traveling companion of Ilija’s and I didn’t think to correct that assumption. I told him what had happened and he asked what I wanted to do, head to his place and figure out this mess or go on my way. Yes, you all know me. I chose the former. So I get into his car with my luggage (yes, I actually have luggage in this half of the story) and go to his place, greeted by the sweetest dog ever. We dropped my stuff off and proceeded to call the border, customs, the train station, and everyplace else until we realized that Ilija was trapped in customs. Apparently, you are not allowed to bring non-personal items into Croatia and guitars are non-personal. Not having the money to pay the tax, Ilija was detained until he could be bailed out, instruments and all. So now that he hadn’t been thrown in jail for hash possession, things were looking up. We went back to Nino’s (dreadlock guy) and hung out with his wife, some friends, and the dog Bora.

Nino and I had a connection. He spends his days translating biology texts from English to Croatian, working from home on his own schedule. (he’s another one of those who decided to study science for drug related reasons…although he was much more coherent than Ilija). He also plays drums in a reggae band and promotes concerts and festivals. He ended up taking us to a bar that night where we stayed until almost 5, dancing and meeting people. I’ve never been anywhere where I was so openly accepted and taken care of. People would come up to me, introduce themselves and after short chats, give me all their contact info and tell me that if I was ever in their town, I had a place to stay. Go eastern European hospitality! Oh yah, prior to the bar we went firefly watching. While this sounds fun, and it was, it’s easy to second-guess your decision to venture into a pitch-black woods with two guys you just met a few hours prior. And with my sense of direction, I would’ve never gotten out of there by myself. But I felt much better as we’re sitting around the lake and hearing these weird man-made sounds coming from the bushes. However there was no light and the sounds had a nefarious ring to them. Luckily, I wasn’t alone in this assessment as I turned to them and said “maybe we should go.” They readily agreed and we ran out of there.

The next day it rained and rained so we stayed in listening to music, telling stories, and eating food. Sounds like a good day to me except for the part where the dog woke me up by licking my face. Ick!!! That night I took the 11 hour night bus to Dubrovnik on the coast in the south. It continued to rain the whole following day. Me, not being able to sit still at the private accommodation I was at (the woman was kind of weird, nice butweird. For instance, she showed me and the two Australian girls also staying with her these stones. We thought she had found them on the beach although they seemed suspicious. Lo and behold they were her gallstones. Who shows gallstones to people! We also rescued a kitty that was drowning in the flash flood. The rest of the day I spent walking around in the pouring rain trying to see much of the city as possible. I would duck into shops and chat with people. The English level in Croatia is quite impressive and the openness of the people is even more impressive. I got to talk with people about living during the war and hear stories of bombs and shells dropping while Dubrovnik was under siege in ’91. It was an eye-opening experience. By that night it had cleared up and the Australians and I walked around the old town looking for things to do. That’s when we heard the drums. Samba! These guys were playing Samba in the streets, hoping to make a little money. They asked me to dance and I sambad to their music, helping them make some money, which we then split on drinks. They were Portuguese college students studying in Bratislava for the year (those of you who have seen Eurotrip know all about Bratislava). So I got to spend the evening speaking Portuguese and trading stories.

The next day after basking in the sun that finally decided to come out, eating mussels on the shore, and tanning on the beach, I flew back to Zagreb, where I was met at the airport by Nino, and went out for another late night of dancing and meeting people. I must say, I was quite sad to leave.

Of course this is the abridged version of my trip but I should probably rest up before 7 weeks of mosquito hell. I hope you have wonderful summers and I look forward to catching up when I get back.

Kisses, besos, bisous, baci, beijos, etc etc

Maya