Lemons and Beans

Monday, September 15, 2008

United Airlines Flight 58 Memphis to Amsterdam

It should be mentioned that I saw that horse in my neighborhood again yesterday; again the day before a long trip. This time he was ridden the wrong way down Saint Joseph by a rider talking on a hands free, blue tooth, cellular ear-piece. I love that my neighborhood, Beauregard Town, has an eccentric black wireless, urban-cowboy (a new, emerging demographic type? Hockey-Mom, meet Wireless Urban-Cowboy and Millennial Early Adopter) and that he thinks nothing of ordering a McSundae from the back of a neighing and side-stepping quadruped. With high gas prices, he may be onto something. The augurs and the Magic Eight Ball are unclear on the meaning of this sighting. Regardless, here is what I intended to be the closing piece from my last trip. I guess it will have to double as the opening shot from this outing. Pictures from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, Spiral Jetty and the Nine Mile Canyon Petrogylphs are included.

In the cool, dark back bedroom of my grandparent’s house, on the bottom of the closet floor, under forgotten party dresses hanging in cleaner’s plastic and outgrown suits there was a hatbox full of letters. The letters were mostly written on pale blue paper, hard at the folds and marked by the passing of insects and time. Ancient quills had scratched graceful sentences across the paper, as much art as writing. Age had turned the ink brown and burned through the paper in places making the notes look like stencils or lace. The thin, brittle paper was laden with my family’s history and in reading them you could start to imagine the personality of my great-great-great grandfather, Henry Swayze.

From the first glance at these letters, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the documents of our past spread around me, I knew that he was my kind of guy. Henry had finished his education in Natchez sometime prior to the period covered by the letters, the 1830-40’s, and seems to have found that graceful, bluff-perched city to his liking. Most of the letters were posted out of Yazoo City, Mississippi and would have come by steam ship, down the river and into the perhaps dissolute and certainly wandering hands of my ancestor. There he would have broken their red, wax seals, read the contents and been reminded of why he had left the farm in the first place.

The letters to Henry discuss the small-town, agrarian life of the time; parties and weddings, disease, fishing and the state of the crops. Henry’s relatives talk about the new courthouse in Yazoo City and seeing to it that the county turned out for the election of Zachary Taylor. In these respects, the letters could be to anyone of the same time and of a similar position. But, the letters are unique in the picture that emerges of Henry even though he is mute throughout; we only have the letters sent to him, none of his replies, if he ever bothered to write back. The letters make a silhouette portrait, a blackness left behind after Henry had gone, showing us as much about where he was as about where he wasn’t.

“Henry, we have not heard from you lately.” “It has been some time since your last letter, Henry.” “We grow worried from lack of news from you.” The letters almost all lead off with these lines or ones like them and all contain some similar sentiment. My great-great-great grandfather had gotten out of Yazoo and Yazoo was now far from his mind.

I like to imagine Henry, starched cuffs and pin-striped waist coat, broad hat and maybe a percussion cap pistol in his belt, reading these letters over a glass of whiskey in one of Natchez’s wide-planked saloons; Jim Bowie waving his knife in a lantern dappled corner, a game of whist being played between a navy lieutenant and two corseted whores, drinking songs plinked out on a tack piano. The letter finished, another round ordered, Henry returns to his seat at the card table and the night goes on.

His life may have been more mundane, or even virtuous. He might have been busy spreading the Gospel to the Indians or working in a house for tuberculoids. But, I prefer to think of him flush-faced and cheering a line of dancing girls, much too merry for Yazoo City.

The letters to Henry make me wonder what sort of impression develops from reading these multi-year travel logs that I have been sending. Not about me, my personality is plain to see and often all too un-tempered. I wonder what these letters say about you. What black form will be left on the paper once you have moved your head away? Am I writing to the college friend turned poet, turned carpenter, the Texas ladies from cooking school or Domenica and Sebastian who pulled magic out of the stones of old Quito? The starlet, the army lieutenant or the civil rights lawyer? The ex-girlfriends, the musicians, the photographers or the cousins in Beijing? The guitar amp maker, the cartoonist or horse trainer? When I think about the variety of people that I am writing to, the lecture hall of my mind fills with characters all dressed in the uniforms of their kind. The room bustles with archetypes taking their places.

And as much as I know they are only connected through a mutual reading (or skimming) of my letters, I want champagne toasts to old friends and introductions all around, I want to all be together and I want to show my family to the assembled multitude and make it plain why I love and value the whole cast of my life. A life for which I am so grateful.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=241

Sunday, September 21, 2008

3rd Floor, ul. Bytomska 1, Krakow, Poland

When we got off of the train from Gdansk to Krakow it was raining. It has been raining ever since we got to Poland. For all I know, it may always rain in Poland. It is a light rain and not any great trouble; it is sort of atmospheric but I imagine that this country would be even more beautiful if I could see it in a good light. Which is all the more reason to step into a warm cellar pub for a bowl of mushroom soup under the rough-hewn rafters and stuffed boar heads. If you have to spend a trip in the rain then let it be the rain in Poland when the mushroom crop is coming in. Piles of yellow chanterelles sautéed in butter and onion, minced morels in a thyme and potato soup, fresh and thick porcini tossed with linguine, cream and spinach. I have probably eaten five pounds of mushrooms in the last week, and I have no intention of letting up. I may not be able to finish this note for need of a snack.

As the sun came up yesterday morning, I was standing in the passageway of our sleeper car, looking out at the farmhouse dotted countryside. They are angular and stout little structures, dribbling smoke from orange tile chimneys into the sunrise, dark barked fruit trees bent over with apples close in on their eaves and well-ordered gardens run out behind. Between the farming villages the forest is dense with moss covered rocks and white-paper birch trees, occasionally there is a chilly looking stream or a rusting and idle piece of machinery. I like it very much.

If you think of Poland and drab, post-Soviet block housing and borsht come to mind then please begin adjusting your preconceptions. I am not sure what I expected before landing in Warsaw but Poland is not suffering under any collectivized, dingy view of itself. The architecture is a jumble of Baltic-Renaissance row houses on the quay in Gdansk and Gothic, heavy timbered buildings bleeding into soaring city walls and clock towers in Krakow. There are interior staircases with plush but worn carpets leading to balconied bars and cellars packed with wine casks and carved royal crest above the door lentils. The streets are laid out in fans of cobblestones and the rain pours off of the roofs through gutters carved into the shape of dragon’s heads.

We will be heading to Ukraine on Monday or Tuesday and I hope to get some more writing done before we get on the train. But, finding the time has not been easy thus far. We have kept ourselves well occupied. Read into that what you will. Our first stop from here is Lviv, from what I am reading it looks even more spectacular than Krakow. I never want to come home.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=248

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A Train from Krakow to Lviv, Ukraine, Car 27, Passenger Compartment 6

Polish Nuns Quietly Talking in the next Berth

Lewis and Clark had their muskets and sextants and we have a high-powered, handheld computer and an advantageous exchange rate. I will take ready money and GPS over Manifest Destiny and bison jerky any day of the week. The food continues to be wonderful. We had a meal last night that even redeemed Polish wild boar, an act I would have considered impossible after spitting those dough wrapped bits of porcine agony allover Gdansk.

I was able to slip into the Czartoryski Museum as it opened this morning. I love museums in the morning, before the crowds show up, when the radiators are still ticking and the guards sleepily look for their second cup of coffee. You have the place to yourself and there is not much more likely to make you feel sharp and worldly than investigating relics and canvas in all that solitude.

My main interest in visiting the Czartoryski was Leonardo da Vinci’s Woman with an Ermine. I believe there are only four extant portraits of women by da Vinci and while Woman with an Ermine may not have the fame of Mona Lisa it cant be called shabby. As much as I love museums in the morning I dearly love old museums in the morning. Call me a traditionalist but I don’t want touch screen displays showing me a cross section of the painting or coloring book versions of the great works. Leave me in the room with nothing but a da Vinci on the wall and I am happier than an Old Master with a buxom subject to paint. And that is how it was: myself and Woman with an Ermine, nothing else in the room, no guard, no pamphlets in all the languages of the world, just that crackling and sly painting and an unwashed American with the time to enjoy it. I have been to a lot of art museums and stood in front of a lot of famous works, but this one was something special. It was internally luminescent, knowing, playful and almost swimming on its black background. Searching for this painting in your old college Art History book might not call up the same impression but, for me, it was the right way to say goodbye to Krakow.

Now we are on a train for Ukraine. The music in my earphones, the soft voices of young Polish nuns and the rhythm of the train cars whisper us ever Eastward. There are farms outside of the window again, interrupted only by the occasional but jarring violence of a train passing us in the other direction. With the windows open passing trains sound to each other like the world coming apart. This train feels like we are moving back toward a grittier past, the curtains and upholstery are red enough to make Lenin swell with pride and where earlier trains were walled in some off-white plastic, these are wood paneled, the window corners yellow with smoke and exhaust.

There is a cheerful steward who occasionally passes our open door with a tray full of teacups, Collin is asleep in the upper bunk, we rattle on toward Lviv, and everything is peaceful and well, except for my own occasionally boneheaded behavior.

After we left the station in Krakow the lights went out. Being an American who is put on edge when trains start to malfunction or maybe being a bit gun-shy from the recent periods without power following the hurricane, I walked down to the steward’s cabin to tell him that our lights were out. He smiled and patted me on the shoulder with the sort of expression reserved for explanations given to very stupid children and said, “Yes, no lights. It is day.” He then pointed to the sun, just in case I had missed what was responsible for the bright, light filled cabins. In my defense, it is overcast. I didn’t need the lights to be on, but I might, all of a sudden. And then where would we have been? In the dark, that is where. I mention this because long trips seem to be a process of letting go of yourself, your expectation and your demands, allowing the sometimes bumpy course of living alongside strangers to have its way. I suppose I have not given up totally yet, but that point is coming and when it does the real joy of travel comes.

A short while later the steward came down to our berth and told me the lights were “made on.” I guess the strategy of placating pointless desires works equally well for very stupid children and Americans (this one anyway). I was happy, I switched them on and off a few times, just to make sure. But until whatever last hold the world further away has on me are gone and I float lose in the waters of travel, I’ll repeat more Russian and Ukrainian phrases to my self, copy Cyrillic into my notebooks and read a book by the light of the eastern European sky.

Enclosed are pictures of me paying a nun at Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, Nuns in the Rain, St Mary’s Church, Krakow, Flower Vendors in Krakow City Square, A Street Performer in front of St Mary’s Church, my Cyrillic Notes (god help us) and some Ukrainian Hryvnia.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=253

Friday, September 26, 2008

K Largo Bar, vul Yaroslaviv Val 22, Kiev, Ukraine

“My chief would like for me to tell you that you are drinking three-hundred year old beer and that in Ukraine we are proud of architecture,” said the heavily accented voice through the static of the cell phone. The wrinkled and grinning boxer turned oilman and his wife that we shared our sleeper car with nodded with anticipation. The urgency of this message was not clear to me but the couple appeared satisfied when I said “Dat” and handed the phone back. I had told the mystery voice that I liked beer and architecture too, very much even. My vigorous head bobbing and stupid grin apparently communicated that I understood their message and they leaned back, happy. That cross-cultural abyss bridged we got back to eating sausage and bread and exchanging those reassuring expressions unique to people who have know idea what the other is saying.

It would be a serious understatement to say that Collin and I have been an anomaly throughout this trip. When we have finally managed to communicate to the people we have come across that we are Americans on vacation the reactions have been universal puzzlement. Not shock or confusion. We are more often greeted as an unusual surprise, something you don’t see everyday, like a top hat falling out of the sky. You can imagine how it happened; you just are not sure why it did.

On the overnight train from Gdansk to Krakow I squeezed into my sleeping compartment, throwing my bags into an alcove above the heads of two young Poles who clearly were unsure what had just stumbled into their lives. Later they would tell me how relieved they had been to pull a young American in the great lottery of traveling companions. “We were worried we would get a drunk old man… and instead we got you!” I felt like a prize from the state fair.

The further east we have gone, out of Poland and into Ukraine, the more our reception has bordered on fascination. All down the hall of our night train from Lviv to Kiev you could hear melodic, Slavic voices talking about the “Americanski” as though someone had boarded the car with a pair of unicorns. A woman brought her toddler down to see us, he laughed and pointed and seemed to be waiting for us to perform some distinctively American trick. If only we had a football to throw or a hapless country to invade then we really could have put on a show. The oilman and his wife gamely displayed their two new prizes to all who tromped by. And I can’t be sure but they seemed to be showing something like pride at these newfound curiosities.

The Poles and Ukrainians we have met have been kind and helpful and displayed a saintly patience that may be born from lives coping with a socialist bureaucracy but doubles nicely when having to deal with two hapless idiots who can barely say thank you in the native tongue. In the long list of my questionable skills (skin a rabbit, jump a pool ball, break into a 1978 Mercedes 240D, e.g.) is the ability to count to three in many languages. This skill is of limited usefulness unless you are called upon to pose a family picture, threaten a child or help with the launching of a rocket (I can count backwards too!) and usually ends up causing more problems than it solves.

As a case in point, after crossing the Ukraine/Polish frontier, which is a whole other story, several cars from the Ukrainian national rail service were added to our train and the Polish restaurant car was left behind. This presented a problem as the steward on our car had run out of beer. We probably had something to do with this, but I digress. Hoping for a few more beers to pass the time until we arrived in Lviv, Collin went down into these newly added cars in search of more beer and came back rattled and imploring me to go back there and see what we were getting ourselves into. As he told it, the steward in the Ukrainian car, who had his girlfriend with him and might have been drunk, had handled Collin pretty coarsely and only given up the beers after some pulling and exchanging of profanity.

“It’s like a whole different world back there, you have to go see it. Oh, and get a few beers while your at it. You are better with these people than I am” Collin requested after he had calmed down a bit. As mentioned in a previous email, I had spent sometime looking over the language section in the back of our guidebook and felt fairly confident that I could count to two and thus return with the appropriate number of beers. I say that the ability to count to three is a questionable skill because you invariably give the impression that you understand some of the language when you start rattling off numbers.

My exchange with the Ukrainian train steward was no exception. As I stood in front of the drunken Ukrainian, his tie at an odd angle, enormous hat cocked back and sauced girlfriend tumbling around their couchette, I pointed at my empty beer bottle, said “dva” and fired off one of those stupid grins that reveals my general confusion. This, of course, prompted a torrent of bubbling Ukrainian of which I understood none. More pointing and more repeating of the word “dva” and my message was eventually understood. He was happy enough to oblige and even gave me a good pat on the shoulder as I bumped away between lace curtains and gilt icons of the Virgin Mary taped to the wall, warm beer pressed under each arm. I will never know what all was said in that dark train passage, he could have been holding forth on European art or giving me directions to his mothers house, but I think he appreciated the effort at speaking his language.

We continue on, strangers in a strange land, specimens in a zoo where the animals come to look at the people as well. Lviv was the prettiest city we have seen so far. I am including pictures from our day wandering around its narrow streets. The wealth of exquisite, tumble down Baroque buildings was a little overwhelming. The city was not seriously damaged in World War II so block after block of fanciful houses and shops go out in all directions. And now we are in Kiev and the sun has come out for the first time in the two weeks we have been here. The light glints off of the golden-domed churches. Orthodox monks wander courtyards under autumn turning trees and the people are out in cafes drinking coffee and seemingly as happy as I am with the improvement in the weather. Take care, sorry for running a little long in this rambling message and see you all soon.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=257

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Moscow-Chisinau Train Number 47, Wagon 11, Seat 25

The mist is just beginning to burn off of the pumpkin fields outside of the window of our 8:38AM train from Kiev, Ukraine to Chisinau, Moldova. Collin is waylaid in his bunk with a hangover you could drape Christmas tinsel on and I am staring at the chickens, cabbages and woodcutters that lace the fall forests we pass through. Babushkas pass our open compartment door selling playing cards, scarlet grapes in wrinkled plastic bags and twisted homemade bread.

Our train is going around northern Moldova, through western Ukraine to avoid the restive, breakaway region on the far side of the Nistru River, Transdniestr. And then down into Moldova proper, through small hamlets with houses made of course limestone blocks painted red, blackening tin roofs and lace in the windows. Stonewalls, primeval aqueducts, hand-tilled plots waiting for the winter crops and more of these beautiful trees changing yellow, orange and red. There are small sections of laden corn, drying on the stalk, along the rail siding. Women tend shaggy goats with curly-willow switches. More curly-willow is woven into fences to hold empty-eyed brown cows. Grape vines loop over rebar trellis. If it were not for the eye-watering reek of vegetable soup coming off a person we are sharing our car with then this morning would be without fault. The boy must have eaten a singular diet or worked in a bullion factory.

We crossed the Nistru River into Moldova around noon. There was some trepidation as the guidebook describes it as “the poorest nation in Europe and one of the most corrupt countries in the world.” In preparation I had folded one-hundred Ukrainian Hryvnia into my front pocket (and far away from the rest of money) in the event that the wheels of government required some lubrication. But, we were quickly passed through customs by an efficient young woman with a chirping laptop and another of these large, governmental hats. I would not be too surprised to see people goose-stepping past the cabin door for as much as the uniforms remind me of Russian movies. Her laptop was the only whiff of modernity on the train with its cast metal, prison-grade light fixtures, sun weary pink curtains and flower covered tea kettle swinging wildly from a hook above the toilet. I elected to forgo the hot drink service.

These observations may be painting the trip as uncomfortable or rough. The opposite is true. While you do get what you pay for with a $35 train ticket, the whole of the day has been pleasant. And now the sun is setting over round and swollen hills, pink clouds fringe the horizon and there are just a few more hours before we begin the increasingly familiar labor of finding a hotel in the middle of the night in a place where no one speaks English and the taxi drivers are creative in their pricing upon hearing a foreign accent.

I am sending along some pictures from Kiev. The sun had come out and we were at the point furthest away from home. This made leaving that city of golden churches and plunging hills bittersweet. Home soon but, Moldova before. Take care.

Original post: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=261

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Train from Chisinau, Moldova to Bucharest, Romania

I was dreading this train ride like an amputation. We have had some wonderful train trips on this excursion but we have also had some ghastly ones. It might have been the crackling Ukrainian euro-pop that twittered out of some invisible speaker. It might have been the 110F compartment in which we were expected to achieve something like sleep. It might have been the smells floating back from the pressed aluminum weapon of awkwardness unworthy of the name toilet. Whatever it was, something prompted Collin to turn to me in a particularly low moment and confide that, “My mom couldn’t make this trip.” What he said went doubly for mine. She is a great lady but she doesn’t tolerate blankets threatening body lice. I have no evidence that the blankets we found in the bedrolls on these trains were lousy but that has not stopped me from reminding Collin of the imminent possibility. Now, he wont even let his luggage touch them.

So, we were happy to discover that our four-person sleeper compartment had no other occupants. Well, occupants other than a pair of older Moldovan men with enormous bundles swaddled in gingham nylon and trussed with bailing twine that we had to evict. Our state of mental preparation for this, our last train trip, had us in no mood for leniency. They shuffled off, cooperatively enough, to the compartment where their wives were already billeted. I would have spread out too; these compartments are hellish with four.

This is the beginning of one of those pell-mell rushes for the airport of international departure. When you try to squeeze as much as you can out of the time allotted for a trip. When your tastes in travel lean toward the profoundly out of the way. When you are averse to doubling back on yourself. Then you will arrive at a moment, two days before your ticket says you are headed home, when you have no idea how you will actually get to where you need to be. And that is why we are on a train to Bucharest, deep in Romania, a lovely country no doubt, but a country that we never intended to visit. For me it will then be a plane to Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Memphis and finally dearest Baton Rouge. Oh well, you wont get me to complain about Romanian stamps in my passport.

This little spot of earth, Moldova, Dacia, Thrace, Bessarabia, whatever you want to call it has been fought over so many times, occupied by so many armies and so generally pounded flat that everything that the people build looks like it was assembled from parts left behind by those passing empires and armies. A little short of midnight we stumbled off of the train and into the Chisinau station, Moorish peaked windows courtesy of the Ottomans, Russian domed outbuildings and Austro-Hungarian whimsical pediments were all jumbled together. It feels like an outlier, a frontier, a dusty market city of piled carrots, wild dogs and streets lined with beech trees painted white about the trunk.

The Russian Army liberated poor Chisinau during World War II, which apparently means shelled and bombed it until nothing squirmed in the rubble. There is no fine “Old Town.” It will not be luring architecture students to sketch its graceful buildings. But, there is a sort of up-and-coming cheerfulness to the place.

The central bus station is also the location of a large, open-air market of the sort that I have an unnatural fondness for. In addition to the glut of sandals, slippers, brassieres, pirated CDs and other daily objects you find spread out on top of stacked wooden crates across the developing world there was the full bounty of this agricultural countries Fall crop. Beets and garlic still smeared in the soil from which they were dug this morning, tiny rust-colored onions, raw goats cheese, pyramids of pinto-spotted quail eggs, small and horny cucumbers, mushrooms, orange-yellow ears of corn and walnuts recently picked from under the trees that surround the rural fields here. It was a treat. I could spend the rest of my life in places like that, eating figs the size of a toddler’s fist with sun-wrinkled old women in headscarves and talking about the weather.

And you should have seen the grapes. Every color and size, in long full hanging bunches, piled in wicker baskets, tiny pale green and pearl sized ones and big purple jumbles lying on newsprint amid the flagstones. Moldova is wine country. One of the vineyards once boasted that they could give every Soviet a glass of wine with what they had in their cellars. They didn’t actually do it, they just wanted people to know that they could; a conceit of the command economy. Moldova is wine country and the grapes are coming in from skies and fields drawn from Van Gough’s pallet.

All of this is a sort of long way round talking about a trip we made yesterday into those vineyards, labyrinths of cellars with cobweb hung bottles by the thousands and sandstone cliffs cut into the hills by monks for some greater purpose. We hired a car in Chisinau, a rattling FIAT without any evidence of seatbelts or a thought for safety, and headed north for the winery at Cojusna. Words fail any further boosterism of this beautiful place so I’ll just say we drove through more fabulous countryside. More accurately we rocketed through it but the white knuckle, “I wish I had told my mom I loved her one last time” driving of the former-Eastern Bloc is a cliché that needs no additional flogging from me.

Suffice it to say, we were happy to stop for a light lunch and sampling of seven wines in a hollow, limestone hall decorated with chandeliers that looked like they had been built to Torquemada’s specifications, but was otherwise pleasant. Massive dark oak table to seat fifty-five with firm backed wooden chairs, wild boar heads, cases of dusty wine, suitably rustic wall hangings and… two place settings. It was somewhat difficult to relax and sample numerous wines in a room better suited to a medieval punch-up or parking a mid-sized jet, but a few glasses of the grape got us passed that.

From Cojusna we went northeast toward a 13th century monastery called Orheiul Vechi and through more of those swaying, verdant fields. A few minutes after leaving the vineyard and somewhat more unnerved by the hell-for-leather driving, I asked if we could pull over and take pictures of the vineyard workers. Collin (and this is odd for a professional photographer) gets nervous taking pictures of people. I have no such reservations. I don’t try to snap shots of people praying or crying or slipping into the toilet but I figure that if you are out in public then you are fair game. I did have a fist-full of clams thrown at me in a Shanghai market for making this assumption, but I am no worse for it and that fishwife is a few clams lighter, so who’s laughing now? Regardless, our pleasant Moldovan guide made sure our photographs would not prompt a shower of foodstuffs.

After a few words from her, we were welcomed into a sort of wild tumble of hands and apples and grapes and smiling country people. I will never forget it. A lady in a headscarf and three gold teeth (and few others) passed me bunches of sweet, small-seeded grapes. Grinning with the plain happiness of sharing a thing you are proud of. Down from a thick, heavy wooden ladder leaned against their truck a man began handing me compact, red and mottled apples. This may sound off putting but they smelled like horses and wine. Not like an unmucked stall but the smell of a horse’s neck and mane when you lean over to whisper to it after a sudden movement in the brush made the animal spook. If it is possible for a piece of fruit to smell strong and vulnerable and a little like the outdoors and like a wine cork from the day before, then this is what these apples smelled like. My god they were good. I eat a lot of a lot of different things but the purity and complexity of that apple in that green and yellow vineyard, on that blue sky day in Moldova will always be near the top of my list of the wonders of the world.

From then on it was pure joy at the great beautiful riot of the world, all smells and sunflower fields and light off of rivers that sliced canyons into the stone of the hills. We stopped at a monastery and bought thin myrrh candles from a lone, wild as the Baptist, monk with a few strands of grey hair and a brown cassock. We lit them in front of Orthodox icons down caves cut into the rock and trampled around a hilltop like a spine in that lush, river canyon. We ate walnuts off of the ground and sucked grapes by the mouthful straight from the stems.

It was a day unlike any other. And that is why we go to a place no one has ever heard of, in countries that seem not to exist. We go to get to that spot, far away from the television or the detailed brochure or the multi-media presentation. We go far away to eat apples with farmers in a field, thousands of miles away from anyone or thing we know. We go because this is when we feel most ourselves.

Original post here: http://www.lemonsandbeans.com/?p=265

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