BON VOYAGE

spent my last night abroad in the helsinki airport again, and was happy to be able to sleep from midnight to six in the chilly basement lounge. there are still eight hours until takeoff, however. melissa and i woke up to the beginning of the day´s flight announcements and were sitting on the benches we have claimed as our beds when i looked down at the necklace which i have worn without removing for the entire trip; a beautiful little talisman given to me by hayley for my birthday, a small copper life preserver ring from which hangs a circular pendant engraved with a grand steamship and bearing the inscription: BON VOYAGE. it has been, this whole month, sometimes a perceived and always a subconcious reminder, a mantra, pressed close to my skin- to my heart and the core of my body. bon voyage. what a good trip indeed! i know on this last day of my journey i should say some words in reflection, but i wonder if i could even find the words to properly convey the bon-ness of this adventure? nor, for that matter, could i ever express the richness of my life: the accumulated experience of all my roamings. and now my passport if full, and now i must replace the backpack that has been so near and dear to me ever since it was purchased for my post- high school western european excursion with ginger and corina.
despite all this, bon voyage at this moment recalls another scene, a very particular scene entirely removed from the continent where i now stand: monday night sin williamsburg at black betty, listening to the reverend with his tom waits voive and his alligator shoes wailing, `bon voyage, you bastards, bon voyage!´(and we girls are singing along with everyone, raising our glasses with everyone, and secretly admiring the bassist, who also happens to be the beautiful drummer from tv on the radio....). so, i am brought simultaneously back to the past and into the future- to my life in brooklyn which i have temporarily abandoned and to which- though sad to leave these wanderings- i cannot wait to return. i look forward to returning to scenes such as this, to the shows of my own musically talented friends, to the creative energies of all my poets and artists and stylists and healers and laugers all those who know how to live at our age, in our age. in short, to my extensive new york family. to quote eliot, as usual:

you do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

and how, how rare and strange it is, to find

in a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends...

to find a friend who has these qualities,

who has, and gives

those qualiities upon which friendship lives.

how much it means that i say this to you-

without friendships- life, what cauchemar!

and yet, in my case, it can hardly be so very rare and strange, wonderful friendships being more the rule than the exception, and for that i will be eternally grateful. i am incredibly blessed with my friends, in their quality and quantity. i often feel there is no girl luckier than i, and i sometimes fear that i know too too many good, good people and there can´t possibly be room in the human heart for more, but always there is! indeed, the past few months brought a few of them to the magnet that is brooklyn and i have the arrival of three more incredible, important people to look forward to upon my return! i have waxed sentimental. pardon. just know i am so happy to come back to you! i simply can´t wait to see you!
i can´t wait for autumn- just around the corner- and the promise of scarves, and the specific contentment granted by the gradual chilling of the air and the changing and falling of leaves from trees, and the changing of all things in general. i have an entirely new life to look forward to: once again the life of a student! (and in the field to which i will, it seems, devote my life. to have a path!) i look forward to the small details of my life, such as walking home from the subway in the evenings towards the water, into the setting sun sittingly blindingly at the end of the street- the street which is filled with kids throwing balls around, the sidewalk which is crowded with younger kids zipping by on their tricycles and pogo sticks, the stoops which are crowded with older kids and adults shooting the breeze, the simultaneous sounds on a friday night of reggaeton and the sabbath siren. i look forward to our roof with its view of manhattan, our treehouse, to having a dog and my girls and wine in the evenings and brunch on the weekends and my own bed to sleep in. the first bon voyage is sadly over, but it has now become something equally amazing: the journey home. i will see you so soon.

safely made it through the russian border, a process that took just as long going into finland as coming out of it. we crossed sometime between midnight and one am, so technically i had had my cinderalla moment- i half expected to see the bus turn into a pumpkin as i myself turned into an illegal immigrant. the ice queen on the other side of the passport control window made a few phone calls and took a few minutes longer with my passport than with anyone else´s, but i was granted entry into finland in the end. after all, i was on my way out on the 30th, and what could they really do, deport me as i was crossing the border? no, it was really no trouble at all, it went just as i hoped it would. except...unfortunately, our bus was not totally overnight...we got in around 3am, so we slept on some benches in the helsinki airport and now are drinking overpriced coffee and about to go into helsinki for the day, our last day abroad. someone just passed by me and said ´boy, that was a fast two weeks!´if only they knew that a month in a way can be even quicker....

from russia with love

this is the final day in saint petersburg. tonight we take an overnight bus back to helsinki for a day, and then back to dear, dear new york city. this morning after breakfast we said goodbye to masha and her mom, which was very hard. they gave us a russian skirt and scarf by which to remember them. today we are catching up on all the last minute sights we have not yet seen in this beautiful city of too many things to be seen. yesterday we wandered around the ruins in the gardens of pushkin palace, deciding for money's sake not to enter the magnificent palace itself (one sees enough of decandent interiors in the hermitage to last a long time). i found it slightly more charming with its crumbling buildings and wide expanses of long, slightly unkempt grass under big black trees than the manicured lawns of peterhoff (though they had their neglected areas as well), particularly so because we were exploring them with masha. the previous night, we met up woth some of her friends and walked around in the rain along the river for a long time. finally we ended up at the apartment of one of them and had opened many bottles of wine and made a huge feast of mostly sausages and other meats and passed the time into the wee hours with a guitar and a mouth harp and a violin and many russian songs, the most memorable involving a horse who carries the singer's lover away. we were able to crawl out the window onto the scaffolding surrounding the building and get a magnificent view of the city, then we all went to bed on various beds and couches and patches of floor. i am in a post office at the moment and have to run to go do many things. let us hope that i have no issues crossing the border, as the bus may cross into finland after midnight and my visa is good only through the 30th. weeee!

there is soooo much to say and i haven't been keeping up with this! let me see if i can say it all as briefly as possible. first of all, i am writing from the hermitage museum in saint petersburg, a museum to rival the louvre. we've been here for many hours- the perfect rainy day activity- and every day has been rainy and cool (but last night, when the clouds cleared for a spell, it felt distinctly autumnish, oh joy). yesterdy we saw peterhof palace (this is where one finds all those golden fountains you always see in pictures of st. P) and the day before that we saw the church of the saviour of the spilled blood (st petersburg's one moscow style onion-domed cathedral, covered floor to ceiling inside with splendid mosaics) and we've probably spent as much time or more riding or getting lost on public transportation, trying to decipher cyrillic, ordering completely the wrong food (feeling like big bird lost in tokyo), and dealing with the general headache of being a foreigner in russia. it is incredibly, amazingly beautiful here, however, and i am loving it.
we are couchsurfing with a girl our age named maria (masha) who is a celltologist and her mom tamara who speaks no english in their small, old soviet flat in a little suburb about forty minutes outside st petersburg by mashrutka (minibus with a fixed route but without fixed stops, so that you can exit wherever you'd like). all the pipes in the area are dug up fro reconstruction, so the neighborhood looks like one big excavation site. needless to say, there is no hot water, but there is always a pot on the stove waiting to be turned into tea or mixed with cold water for a bucket bath. they give us their sofa, and soup and bread and pickles and tea, and in the morning muesli and yogurt, and they give us so much more than that...a real sweet pair they are. last night we all watched jesus christ superstar together, after they welcomed us with open arms of thankfulness when we finally arrived home later that we had planned. this is why couchsurfing is the best thing on earth.
ok, sorry this post sucks. i hope to be able to write more ( and better) later!

in case inquiring minds would like to know, i've made it safely to the most beautiful city in the largest country in the world (or so everyone here would like you to believe). though i remain in one piece with all my possessions, it was still a very interesting journey that needs it own chapter. in time i shall post this. for now, i am too excited to write much and despite the morning's rain i must get out into the streets of saint petersburg!!

Kiitos Suomi!

in iceland it was takk, in latvia it was paldies, in estonia it was tänan, and in russia it will be spasibo. it is perhaps the easiest and most practical word to learn in a foreign language, besides hello. in finland, it is kiitos.
so kittos, finland, thank you thank you thank you for the memories!!
it is bittersweet, now that Navetta is empty and quiet and all the cots and sheets except ours have been folded and put into the common space. i am sitting here in the kitchen drinking vanilla tea with the door open to the night and it is only crickets i hear. i went downstairs and walked through the maze of deserted printing facilities and was reminded of lonley late nights in the oberlin silkscreen studios, trying to perfect my sloppy registration and admiring the drying racks full of posters for concerts at the 'sco: blonde redhead and the like. i feel i haven't said enough about this week. our workshop was great, the perfect pace. we worked a lot- we were always working- yet it was easygoing and flexible. we played with light in the woods and the lake and in a beautiful mansion and an attic. it was a small class: there were ole and henry, two dutch boys of grad school age, and there was middle-aged oldrich from czech republic (but living in imatra with his finnish girlfriend who worked at the school next door). also living in imatra was laura who just finished her first year at the very same school where we had our workshop, and esko, a delightful old finn who spoke hardly any english and who must have felt so out of place taking part in a workshop conducted in a language of which he has only the most basic knowledge...an outsider in his own city. yet he made such an effort today during our final critique, and he was so sincere. he had prepared some kind words and translated them and written them down to let us know how happy he was to have participated in the program. then there's melissa and myself, the two american girls ('you came all the way from america?! why?´ to which i say, 'why not?') and of course also jan pohribny, whom i have admired since i took his class in prague. we all left with very warm feelings, a bunch of decent photographs, and some knowledge and experience we didn't have on arrival.
paivi, another photo teacher, has arranged for some woman to drive us early tomorrow morning across the russian border where we can catch a much cheaper train to st petersburg after spending some hours in a small town. the anticipation is building, and i fear i won't be able to sleep from excitement, like a kid on christmas eve. the contrast will be great from this little city- this little town- to that grand city, which contains probably as many people as in all of finland.
finland for me will from now on be mushrooms and black lakes and suanas, instant coffee and bulk candy and tall trees, a perpetual train taking car after car of felled birch trees to russia and a perpetual truck taking luxury car after car there as well, people power-walking with ski poles and washing their cars and their rugs at the edge of the river, and of course it will be painting with light.
i will take with me a wooden toy boat found in the woods and a woolen sweater found in the free box of our hostel on the lake and also a bit of a cold. i will leave here my baltic states lonely planet and my travel tripod lost in the shuffle and also my two final prints from the workshop.
it is midnight and i must pack.

moomin mania

thanks to finland, and the all-encompassing knowledge of anna carlsen , the moomins are now perhaps my favorite little trolls in the entire world. if i have any money left over when i pass through helsinki en route to america, i will surely go to the moomin store in the airport and splurge. if you are wondering how to honor my returning to the homeland, you can buy me all the books compiling this treasure of a comic. browsing through one of the books the first (of three) time i was in the helsinki airport, i came across the most charming little story in which the moomin family nestles down to hibernate for the winter because it is what thier ancestors have always done. however, the younger moomin doesn't feel sleepy, nor does he want to eat pine needles to fortify himself for his long sleep, and so decides they don't have to follow tradition blindly. they venture out into the winter landscape, where they meet a friend who teaches them how to ice skate and ski and all about the athletic joys of the winter, and while the moomins are fairly terrible at all this in the beginning, they of course have fun.

some things i've seen so far: vol 2, latvia

so many words,
so little time.
i can barely keep up with my journal,
let alone this blog.

last night...

...was imatra night, a night celebrating this weird little town that has been my home for the past ten days. after sitting in front of a computer screen for hours and hours as we edited our final images from the workshop, melissa and i headed into the small city center and sat at an outdoor table in the chilly evening next to a bandstand listening to covers of 'penny lane' and such in finnish and other american rock songs in english and some jazzy, soft-rocky finnish songs we had of course never heard before. this is where the older crowd and the very young were hanging out; dancing in pairs by the bandstand, strolling arm in arm in light jackets, saying hello to neighbors and friends as they passed - a night on the town in a small town in a northern land. around ten we headed to the dam, which during the early summer is released every night but it now happens only on saturdays. since the whole population of imatra was out anyway celebrating their city, the bridge from which we watched this event was so so packed that i had to snap this imperfect photo standing on my tippy toes with my hands above my head. at about five of ten, classical music began playing and a chorus standing on the edge of the dam began singing something that sounded like a mix of traditional choral songs and gregorian chants over an incredibly powerful sound system that projected their collective voice all the way down through the long, steep, dry gorge that was about to become a river again. when the waters were let loose, it was much less impressive than we had expected, but the height and velocity of the river grew and its mist formed clouds above the bridge, and people started zip-lining across it, and ot was certainly worth sticking in town for two extra hours to see. as we left, we encountered our third musical event of the evening, this one was for the highschoolers, about whom i might say a word or two. our building (which i learned today is called 'south karelia university of applied sciences imatra unit of fine arts') is right next to the combined elementary, middle, and high school, so i have had some time to observe them and the strange phenomenon of their freakish homogeneity... not only in their northern complexions but in their style as well. they all dress in some mixture of metal and emo, melissa describes them as 'straight out of a SoCal emo-pop music video.' they must all shop at the one h&m in the town...you couldn't even create that cliched teen movie shot that pans all the different cliques in the cafeteria with these kids- it seems that there are no geeks, no jocks, and certainly no ethnicaly oriented groups...maybe a few goths. they all arrive at school doing wheelies on bmx bikes or riding mopeds and mini-motorcycles, but even under their helmets and even if they have facial piercings, seem to maintain perfectly preened 'dos and perfectly made-up (and acne free) visages. forgive me if i seem critical, i do not mean to be, i am just fascinated. there are probably few places in the world more diverse than new york, so melissa and i are particularly sensitive to so much of the same. anyway, back to the events of the evening. it was the second night of a music festival called 'rock to the river,' which one has been vaguely been able to hear from school even in the afternoon...muted bass and a lot of screaming. jan calls it 'forest metal.' the festival was taking place in an athletic field not far from school so that we had to walk by on our way home. the little paved path through the woods was crammed with the aforementioned teens, standing in groups flirting and drinking and being crazy as teens do. the path exits the woods and runs along the river, and there they were also in groups by the river, in whose black, smooth surface you could see reflections of the strobes and spotlights from inside the field. i can't describe how interesting it was, the energy coming from that place, and how strange for it to feel like such a big event and yet such a small one. i am sure every person between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one who lives in imatra was there, it was a big event, but tiny comapared to any similar music festival i have ever been to. so that was saturday night in imatra (and not just any saturday night, but imatra night), from tame good old rock to river worship to forest metal...and all this even before we got home and talked about st petersburg with the russians over vodka and potatos (seriously) until three in the morning. they warned us against pickpockets, suggested many things we should see, helped us with our pronunciation and laughed for over and hour at the three pages of russian phrases melissa had photocopied from the back of a lonely planet. it must have been written by an idiot, they said, as many of the words were ukranian, many were misspelled or incorrectly translated, and included phrases such as 'may i breastfeed here?' while omitting some of the more, uh, typical phrases. what fun! we have received much warning about st petersburg, but more encouragement. it is going to be magnificent, i can feel it. for now, everyone has gone but melissa and i, and we are spending our last night in finland alone in this big old re-imagined barn of a sculpture facility and eating all the leftover food in the fridge.


there is no way to describe this place.

early this morning...

melissa and i walked through fields. we crossed paths twice with an old lady walking her bicycle, both times at the exact same spot across train tracks, once going and once coming. it was surreal. 

another rainy morning, a long morning, we have it to ourselves today. but since we can only do our work for class in the later dusk and dark hours, or indoors, i can't do any work for class, and i can't do any work for myself because rain and cameras are not such good friends. i can't even fiddle with my installation for tonight because unkown to me-as we are always gone from Navetta by this hour- there is a large class taking over the common space. but sit shut in the kitchen and drink tea and tell you about yesterday, starting with image that today remains the most potent of them all, the mushroom feast.
when i came in last night after working outside until dark, i came in through the kitchen to find the table completely covered in mushrooms. the russians (there is a group of about eight russians who all came here together for a printmaking workshop) had been out mushroom picking, and had come home with literally hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms, ten or fifteen different types, even some rare and delicious finnish black mushroom delicacy. i've never seen so many kinds of mushrooms! they were all sitting around the table washing and chopping them, and there were already two full pots of mushrooms on the stove about to boil over. i find this an incredibly charming part of the way of life in these parts: go out in the forest, pick mushrooms (not the red ones) wherever you find them (and berries, as well), and there you have your dinner. even in a little public park where we were working the other day there were two figures in the distance, stooped over scooping mushrooms into their bags.
we got to experience yesterday another charming part of finnish culture, the sauna, pronounced voluptously in the finnish tongue 'saownah.' this trip was arranged for us by the school and we had no idea really what we were in for. we drove down to the harbour next to ukonlinna, the hostel at which melissa and i stayed for two days, and hopped onto a tiny ferry that carried us across the lake (saimaa lake, 'the most extensive lakeland in europe,' containing some 7,000 islands...so i am told) to a a little island called kaapeli. there was a beach with a volleyball court in the dirt and the rest was thiny forested, with a wooden buiding containing the sauna, a smaller pentagonal structure with an open fire in the middle for roasting sausages, a whole village of quaint little outhouses in a hill farther in the woods, several firepits and piers and scattered cabins. i took a nap on a bench by the water, chilly but warmed by the sun, and i couldn't help thinking of myst, that beautiful computer game of my childhood, an enchanted island, silent. unfortunately i could not partake in the sauna because of the cast situation, but i watched with amusement as my companions came all fresh pink out of the sauna, trotted down a boardwalk stretching over roots and moss all the way to a pier, and jumped into the cold, deep black lake...then back to the sauna, and back and forth several times more. what fun! we then roasted sausages and corn and had a beer and warmed up and then set off again across the lake back home to work for the rest of the evening with the installations we had earlier prepared in the woods. we had a model this time, i pitied the poor beautiful girl naked with all those mosquitoes, but she was a trooper.
ah, here comes the sun. where does the time go? in the earlier parts of my trip, time was flowing at a perfect pace. the days were long in a good way; i could get most everything done without being rushed, and time seemed even to move slower than i am used to, yet it never crawled. but now, there is hardly time for anything! we wake, we walk, we work, we talk, we work, we eat, we sleep. time is strange indeed, think of all the things you can do with it: you can kill it and make it, you can keep it and waste it, you can lose it and save it. and despite all of this, time always flies in the end, it is escaping me even now...ten more days, can it be?
time to go work.

some things i've seen so far: vol I, iceland

looking across the fissure between two continental plates drifting apart

 

old man in landscape (hayley this is you in some years)

typical little farmhouse on a dark and stormy day

steam at geysir

gullfoss

troll!!

 the cousin of the 20 x 200 pony

rejkyavic, 10:30pm

trail ride on the moon

cemetery in rejkyavic

more pics to come later, please excuse that they unedited as of yet. 

when the rain dampened our plans yesterday for shooting outdoors, we decided to explore the attic of the school building. after crawling through a maze of discarded artwork, we found this installation of dresses and coccoon like things, all translucent and perfect for painting with light! here is what it looked like when we stumbled on it, but throughout the afternoon, under the sound of rain on the roof, we made it it glow with light of all colors. i had the strange sensation i had once dreamed this very same scene, and indeed, i know i tried to create something similar once with lucia's grandmother's wedding dress. 

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

spooning instant coffee into my cup this morning, this passsage came to mind. i don't usually associate spoons with coffee as i don't stir (i drink drip, black), so i suppose it isn't too strange that i shouldn't always think of it when having my morning coffee, even though i live many of the moments of my life with this poem playing in the back of my head. i don't know why, but prufrock has made its nest in a corner of my brain mind is in it for the long haul, it has become a part of me, i think of the words as my words, words i can use whenever i want or need.
i just got the shivers for no reason, what i jokingly call my my tourette's and what hayley seriously calls 'my soul catching up to me.' it has been happening less and less on this soul-searching journey- indeed i can't remember the last time i had this sensation- so i believe your theory more than ever now hayley, my soul is keeping the pace with my activity.
but! i feel like i can't even stay on top of this blog! forget the past and the present, how am i supposed to stay on top of them when i am already having what nabokov calls future recollections...as i sit here writing i know that definitely, without doubt, at some point in the distant future i will look back on this very moment, or this very situation at least. in that way, i am not even experiencing this moment in real time, i am out of time somehow.
and out of time to write, though i did want to mention that we spent from dusk til dark last night on a glassy lake with the mosquitoes and a half-sunken pier and many multicolored flashlights. i sunk a small wooden toy boat and nearly ruined my camera in the wake of a real boat. i promise more concrete information and maybe even some more photos soon.

Off, damn'd cast! off, I say!

as most of you know, i was involved in a little collision with the grill of a landrover while on my bicycle (well, corina's bicycle...corina: i hope you are using mine! we will find you a peugeot when i return!) shortly before i commenced this little round of globe-trotting. the result: a scaphoid fracture in my left wrist that while teeny tiny looking on the ct scan images, can cause chronic arthritis and other painful things if it heals incorreclty, so they tell me. so, the short of it is, i am backpacking in a cast. my orthopeadic genius told me not to do any heavy lifting for the next six weeks...this is fairly impossible, given my current lifestyle.
my EBI electromagnetic stimulator has stopped charging, perhaps due to some confusion about voltage on my plug adapter's part. this was a crazy thing i had to wear to bed at night to stimulate bone growth...when i wore it around the airport everyone was looking at me strangely, until i realized that with its boxes and cord it must have looked like a bomb strapped to my belt buckle and took it off. i cannot tell which is more unfortunate, the fact that i can't use the thing until i get back or the fact that i have to lug around its ridiculous weight unneccessarily.
it was high time i did some laundry, seeing that my clothing situation is very limited and i have worn everything multiple times, and i realized that i couldn't even handwash it with the handy sink-sized detergent packets i packed, so i had to drop it at a laundry facility yesterday. i am sure they will charge me the arm i couldn't use to wash it myself, and a leg, too.
another thing that has become a little harder is typing, because there is no flex in the wrist and plastered thumb always hits the space bar when it shouldn't, so please forgive any typos and grammar mistakes i may have made in the past and the general hurried nature of some of these posts (not only have i been writing with a very minor handicap, but also often on a budget, since until imatra it was all done in internet cafes, and they charge by the minute).
one doesn't tend to shower as often as normal when backpacking but when one is confined to tiny and unusual showers already, the extra trouble of trying not to get the cast wet is slightly unwelcome. my hair has become more of a bird's nest than usual from washing it with one hand and not combing it...there is definitely a dread forming in the back. oh well. yesterday it rained and my cast got a little wet (and i got a lot wet). all i really wanted to do was pop it out of the sleeve of my raincoat and hold it under the downpour and watch the plaster strips disengage from each other and slip onto the sidewalk...but instead i had to deal with a soggy, sticky thumb for 24 hours. my thumb has been prepetully pruny for the past three weeks, goddamn thumbs, thumbs goddam you! as devendra says.
opposible thumbs are a miraculous part of the human anatomy, and one that we may bring up in discussions of evolution but we tend to take it for granted most of the time. my thumb isn't even injured but since it has been stuck in place i have really, really come to appreciate it (and hey, now i am a perpetual optimist and could hitchhike easily, if i wanted to...and use the cast as a weapon, if i had to). but of course, even in wielding cameras and backpacks i have learned to manage almost normally without my left thumb; humans are such adaptable creatures.
all of this complaining is meant in jest, a little peep into the minor comedic trials of my condition. before i left, when i was shopping for a travel tripod at adorama, the jolly old cashier inquired about my injury. after telling me he lived in my neighborhood and the hasid ambulance would have been there in thirty seconds (if i were part of that network), he asked me the date of the accident. july 2, said i. said he: then you must henceforth make the independence holiday a long weekend for yourself, and spend the 2nd in particular reflecting on your life and giving thanks that you still have it. i thought that was kind of amazing. not only do i have my life, but it is good, extremely good at the moment,a nd i do give many many muchos beaucoup thanks.

morning musings

i find myself anticipating the alarm, waking minutes before it begins to ring, but only minutes. i really enjoy waking up in my studio room, perhaps because of the quality of its light before 8am and the simplicity of its clean white walls and soft/hard blue/gray linoleum floor and the promise of walking across that great expanse of harder, colder floor- with its bizarre screens and sculpted heads and empty frames (and filled) and tables filled with tools and the great high and beamy barn roof with light pouring in- to the kitchen for some instant coffee and a few minutes, before the rest of the barn begins to stir, on the computer with its big old clickclackety keyboard, obnoxiously backlit by a window into the trees. that is where i find myself now.
i had no dreams last night that i can recall, but i woke up looking at melissa and thought i should a word or twenty about her for those of you who don't know. melissa and i met the summer of 2005 in good old praha, we were suitemates, both photographers, and shared a class with annette fournet. we have done and seen many things together, melissa and i. we have walked singing at dawn down the danube, and stayed out all night at on the suburban hills of prague, finding at first light a hedgehog-a symbol of good luck in czech republic- and falling asleep next to him on a traffic island to wake up without him, covered in dew. we have lived on bread and nutella and becherovka and kinder eggs and dirtied our chucks at a queers concert and lost friends in the middle of the night on a train through slovakia and visited the ateliers of countless phenomenal czech artistes and acted the part of bohemians in bohemia and kicked up the cobblestones together. all this some years ago. i once washed my hair with her special redhead shampoo and that is when i first got the idea to become one myself. there is music and art that to me means only melissa, because she introduced me to it or we saw it together for the first time. now, we find ourselves some years older and both living in new york, but i can very vividly remember when in the summer of 2006 i came home from my second summer in prague she and i and jeff and sean had a little reunion in new york and i brought back this crazy dream of a workshop in finland. it was late and we were staying in astoria and walking along the streets of williamsburg (before she knew she would live in astoria or i knew i would live in williamsburg) when we excitedly hatched the plan that yes indeed, we would go to finland! and while it didn't happen the following summer...look where we are now. hold fast to dreams, for they will come true if you want them badly enough.

i am currently drinking a glass of red wine from a coffee mug in the kitchen of this week's home while a russian puppeteer cooks two whole pots of mushrooms; they smell marvelous. this week's home is the sculpture facility of the school where my photography classes are being held. the building looks like a big red barn and is about 3km away from our classrooms in a wooded area next to a big yellow mansion with delightful art nouveau interiors that sits high on a hill and looks out over the river. melissa and i are living in a student studio room on the first floor of the building that has been converted to a dorm for the week with the addition of two little cots; there is also a sink and a window and plenty of floor space. above us there are two light-filled loft spaces which are scattered with paint-covered easels and chairs set against voluptuous backdrops, devoid of models for the time being. in the basement is a dark maze of print-making facilities, lithography and silkscreen and who knows what else, large flat stones and gargatuan paper cutters and drying racks, old work hanging from lines and scattered on the floor as if class was just let out...except for a thin veil of dust covering it all. the whole place- all three floors- is littered with paint brushes cans thick with dried paint and scattered sofas and bottles and ceramic busts and bodies; all these faces, faces, faces, who made them? it is magical. melissa and i have been loaned some bikes belonging to the school, and we bike the 3km to and from the art building on a gravel road along a lake, in the morning, in the rain, in the twilight hour. this is our third night but class started today, and i will be spending the next week painting with light under the tutelage of jan pohribny, a professor of mine from prague two summers ago. thw whole thing is 75 euros, workshop and board and so far a little bit of food. that is what you get from a country that provides universal higher education for nothing, essentially. there is too much to say, and i will say it all later, i hope.

a school, a school! the smell of a school's art building- the smell of paint and creativity. canvases (both the kind that is stretched on a wood frame and converted into art and the kind that covers the floor during that process), loops and light tables, the hum of computers, ceramic busts perched in windows of wide, stone stairwells, dim hallways hung with crooked student art of all genres, bookshelves upon bookshelves and long, long tables, skylights streaked with rain, excited chatter of ideas, the smell of coffee and cigarettes and rain and plaster. 

we came out of the wilderness into this.

melissa and i have spent the past two days and two nights biding our time at a small hostel on a beach at the edge of the forest. we have done a lot of sitting at picnic tables and docks, reading and writing, admiring the quality of the light and the layering of the clouds. we have done a lot of sleeping. we have paddled out on black water (but saw no mermaids combing the white hair of the waves blown back / when the wind blows the water white and black) under a blue sky, and we have walked at night around a blue harbor under a black sky...yet the last bits of blue still remain at the horizon until midnight, beneath the shooting stars. we have eaten a lot of potato and ham hash (yes), and we have tried tried tried to communicate in finnish: kiitos, huvaa iltaa. we have listened to the bacchanal sound of  guitar and the russian language out of male mouths echo out over the water into the wee hours, and we have done our best to best to take a few days of stagnation for all the goodness it is worth.  

this morning we were picked up by jean erik and brough into imatra proper, to the school facilities which will be home base for our photography workshop. it doesn't start until monday, however, contrary to what we originally thought, so we are sitting here in a computer lab ( a computer lab!) while the printmaking class does their thing next door. we will be staying in small room that is- during the normal school year - a studio for a fourth year art student, though we haven't been taken there yet. 

for now i am content just to be inside a school, to feel the 'creative juices' start to flow, and to acquiesce to a nostalgia for the art building at oberlin- to its similar smell on a rainy day and all the memories and emotions it induces (and to the subsequent chain of memory that flows ever-onward from that).  

melissa and i slept last night on a bus from helsinki to imatra, because there was nowhere to sleep in helsinki under one hundred fifty euros. then we found our way to some hostel and slept on a beach from 6 in the morning until 9. melissa, jetlagged, has been sleeping all day, and i slept for a good portion of it, too. i have no clue where we are, really, but it´s pretty; somewhere outside imatra in a forest on a lake with a breeze. wandering along a lone little highway i found this spa resort and i am stealing their internet for a moment, though i am not a customer. tomorrow we hope to move into whatever free accomodations they have for us at our photography workshop, though it doesn´t start for a few days...for now i am enjoying taking a pause and sitting around all day looking at the water and speaking without language to the gentle little hostel proprietor, knowing only that i am definitely in finland, about 8km from russia, and nothing more.

i've been wandering around in the light rain all morning listening to joy division because they are playing control at the theatre here and i keep passing posters, getting the song stuck in my head. yesterday it was depeche mode because there is a 'depeche mode baar' up the street from my hostel and everytime i walked by it a different dm song was pouring out of the doorway (shanna, stop looking for a job and open a morrissey bar- then we won't be limited to sunday nights only!). needless to say, rain and jd and thinking about my impending journey to russia make the mood a little heavy, even without my backpack. then again, heavy in a medieval town doesn't feel so very out of place.
wandering through the handicraft market in the middle of old town where they sell overpriced souvenirs (nice ones, though) and through the real market out across the train tracks where old russian women sell soap and underwear, ducking into little overpriced cafes for coffees and postcard writing and drying off, slipping on wet cobblestones in back alleys while trying to avoid hordes of people with their protuding umbrellas...thus ends the first half and solo part of my journey. in two hours i shall once again don my turtle shell of a backpack and walk to the harbor, hop on a ferry, and ride the waves from estonia to finland, where melissa will have arrived from the air. everything will change with a traveling companion, and a photo workshop, and a steady home for more than four days. but, i must say, i could go for a laundry machine and time in the evenings to read and project to keep me busy. i don't want to leave the baltics, i've had nothing but great experiences here, but i am excited for imatra, and for st petersburg.

the city is redundant; it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
- IC, IC

tallinn, capital city of estonia: more cobblestones, cathedrals, castles; more shops selling knitted socks and nesting dolls and amber necklaces. and yet, in tallinn it is different, as it was different in tartu and cesis and riga and sigulda. different arrangements of the same elements and the feeling is changed completely.
i arrived here this morning, around 10:30, after boarding an 8am bus in tartu, full from another homemade breakfast prepared Tiu and her sister, my couchsurfing hosts in tartu. unfortunately, i slept through two and a half hours of spectacular scenery, but buses and cars are like a watch dangling on a chain in front of my face: you are getting very sleepy. after checking into my 7-bed dorm room in a hostel in tallinn old town, i've just been walking walking walking all day, my legs already sore from all the walking of the past two days. i love this place! i don't know how to describe it to make it seem any different from the other medieval old towns i have seen in the baltics, except to say that it is a little more alive, and yet time passes more slowly. i poked around in many little shops, which was nice as i have not done much poking around thus far. i climbed a hill through crooked thin alleys and then through shady park greenery and saw from above the city and beyond to its bay (from where tomorrow i will take the ferry back to helsinki). i went to the museum of occupations where i examined relics from the soviet era: uniforms, suitcases, cars, stereos, telephone booths, documents, medals, gas masks. i went into a large used bookstore which, while lacking in any visual atmosphere beyond rows of peeling earth-toned book spines, had the smell! that smell, old books, up there with horses and matches as the best smells on earth. the smell reminded me first (with more than a slight tinge of nostalgia) of long hours and days even spent in oberlin's library amidst the stacks, sleeping sprawled surrounded by scattered books and papers. second, the smell reminded me that this time last year i was workig at the strand - 18 miles of books! - certainly the best bookstore ever. but -despite of my love of everything it contained and its smell and the strange and seductive constant creaking of the floorboards - i can say thank god i am not where i was a year ago, spending all day, every day, day after day in the vast unairconditioned second floor art department between shelves bowed under the weight of decades of books and feeling bowed myself, under both the physical weight of incessant hoisting and reshelving and the abstract weight of knowing i wll never, ever, become intimate with even one tenth of those titles i have hoisted and shoved and alphabatized. i will never be as well-read or as well-traveled as i desire to be. i suppose that means there will always be something towards which to strive, and boredom will be kept at bay.
ANYWAY. that was my proustian madeleine of the day, now i must rush through the past few days. two days ago, on the advice of tatiana and felikss, i took a day trip from cesis to sigulda, another castle town halfway between cesis and riga. i must have walked at least 7 miles that day, from town to krimulda palace (which was oddly abandoned because, as i learned later, it is now a sanitorium and not open to the public) and then along country roads (hayley, we could have continued our field photo project!) and through wooded and steep hiking trails up to the turaida castle estate. there was rain, there was sun, there were not too many people, there is a lot more to tell but i will just say it was lovely. i spent a third night at birzes guesthouse because i just couldn't bring myself to leave, and yesterday morning was on an 8:22 train to valga. i had this vision of getting off on valka, which is the latvian side of town, and walking across to estonian valga, but instead i just got off in valga, no passport stamo or anything, and caught a bus to tartu, estonia's second biggest city, its university town, tartu. i wandered here all day in the rain, along streets and through a park that reminded me of the walter reed annex, and at 5:30 i met tiu. we went to her soviet block apartment with its leather-padded doors and we peeled potatos, made dinner, watched the olympics in estonian, and then wandered through the deserted town at night...a university town, not many people are there in the summer, and all those who were there were in the main square watching a screening for the film festival. i wish i could describe more, but my internet time is almost up! ahhhhh, internet cafes!

i have made it to estonia! but unfortunately, since i lingered in latvia, i have to rush through tartu and tallinn. therefore, i have only time for seeing right now and not for writing. more later.

Cesis

...what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
-italo calvino, from invisible cities

by this trip's end, if i haven't forgotten anything, i will have seen twenty countries, who knows how many cities. i have begun rereading italo calvino's invisible cities, which was first introduced to me by craig during my first summer in prague, he made us read it as part of our photography class...to enhance our appreciation of the city. i think i am the only one who really read it, and i reread it the next summer as well. i passed it on to alia and it has been through her hands and back to mine, and though i said i was rereading it, it is closer to skimming the underlines and stars and checks and exclamation marks that cover the pages. if i really reread it i am sure there would be other pertinent passages i would want to highlight, but now it is as if i am also rereading my past self and the things i found important at a specific point in time. anyway, anyone who travels should take this book with them, it is short and it is genius and it will add another dimension to your experience.
yesterday, after and hour and a half of staring out a train window (beyond a young green plant that had managed to grow between the two panes of glass) at latvian countryside, i reached the cesis station. tatiana and felix were waiting and came right up to me immediately, as they had been told i would be recognizable in a fedora and a cast. these are the owners of the Birzes guesthouse, which i wound up at quite by chance when my other two plans for accommodation in cesis fell through (1. nora's cousin, as i mentioned, was unable to, and 2. it being the weekend, most of the hostels are booked up). i had no clue what i was getting myself into, i just tried some of the cheapest guesthouses i could find and this was the first with a vacancy...in my rush i hadn't even really done much research beyond how many lats/night. so anyway, they put me in their truck and drove me out 2km into the countryside, passing through the town of cesis and its castle. tatiana speaks decent english and felix tries (i wish i knew some latvian), they are a middle-aged couple with a young baby, and they have owned the place for only 2 weeks, though i think it has been a guesthouse since 2000 when it was sold by the family of someone Birzes, a famous latvian writer (indeed, it feels like the perfect writer/artist retreat!). the story, as tatiana explained it to me, was that the house was built during the soviet occupation when there were very strict codes on how buildings could be built, but because this guy was a beloved and famous writer and had some clout, he was allowed to build how he wanted. it's a medium-sized wood house (that feels somewhat like an old ski chalet with its wood interiors and fireplace) that sits on the edge of both field and forest; picturesque. self-portrait on a perfect evening: sitting outside the house on a log stool at a log bench in a tank top and scarf, a little cool. dusk settling in, cicada song and bark of dog overpowering the sporadic and very distant noise of a car passing- just two little headlights floating past along the far distance, on a country road...in the middle of latvia...no a soul to be seen. i have a book, a journal, some pencils, a scotch and soda, and the light fades to night, the forest growing darker faster than the rest. what luck! the world, as they say, works in mysterious ways.
bailey had asked me yesterday, 'what is the color of the room you are in?' i was in a room full of computers, it was hot and sticky, and i had to tell her it was blah dingy, dirty white. i had hoped for a more colorful room in the country, and to my great delight and astonishment (because the very particular color of the room was in question, and i was sure it would be typical), i was given a room in lilac and lavender, with blue and purple accents, at the end of the hall. i showered for the first time since iceland (eee!), in a real shower that didn't smell like rotten eggs, and putzed around in my own room for a while until settling in for a most peaceful sleep, alone except for felix who came to sleep in the house just in case something happened, to the sound of rain and nothing else. i think there might be more guests when i go back today, so i milked that solitude to the extreme.
when i woke up this morning there was a king's feast laid out for me on the dining room table, more a meal for four than me alone. there was bread, butter, cheese, jam, hard boiled eggs, cucumber and tomato, yogurt, sausages and salami (which, despite my icelandic transgression, i did not eat), tea, orange juice, and a large french press full of strong black coffee, which is SO hard to find in europe...joy! felix showed me pictures of his 70's rock cover band and his gigantic (empty) bottle of tequila, both of which he called 'my jubilation,' and then drove me to town. i've just been walking around all day, starting with an art exhibit inside an abandoned brewery. i wandered around the park on the outside of medieval castle ruins where there was a stage set up and they were testing the sound system by blasting whitney houston. i also went into the castle, of course, and to a market, and all around the cobbled streets, and to the train station without having to catch a train...where while i was standing taking pictures i made friends with four drunk latvian boys, who demanded i take their picture and wished me happy travels by giving me one of their very special Cesu beers. in between all this, which took place in the sun, i took shelter from frequent spurts of rain in various places: a dark nook in the castle, an internet cafe, a regular cafe where while writing postcards i was joined by a british man who was in town participating in a saab convention (which, by the way, i also saw). he was very nice and tried to get his norweigian friends to give me a lift to tallinn, but they couldn't (good thing because i want to go via tartu, anyway).
so. i must now return to my nature oasis, i have about an hour's walk ahead of me, so i should be taking off. tomorrow i hope to rent a bike and ride to the erglu cliffs before catching a bus to tartu.

i have some time to pass before my train to cesis, so quick update. yesterday was sort of blah in riga, walking around the old town. . i quote my rough guide:
"nineteenth century german guidebook writer, j.g. kohl, could easily have been addressing today's tourists when he compared [riga] to a 'huge mass of rock, bored through, with holes for houses,' adding that 'the temperature of the town is that of a cavern, and there are parts of it which the sun has not seen for centuries.'"
well, yes, it was built in the middle ages. and the temperature...i didn't find it cavelike, it is quite warm here compared to reykjavik and helsinki. it is also the southernmost place i am visiting, so i can't expect that to last. not that i am complaining. anyway, back to old town, it is very nice, but i've learned that i'm just not a huge fan of medieval architecture, though i am a lover of cobblestones and narrow alleys. there is a beautiful park right outside the old town where i sat for a while by a river and watched people pass by on paddleboats. then i got lost trying to find the bus out to the home of my couchsurfing hosts for the night but of course i made it there eventually.
i fell in love with nora and normunds instantly, they are both incredibly sweet, funny, helpful, hospitable, and all the rest of those positive adjectives. they have a beautiful, clean flat about 1/2 hour outside the city with a huge window that looks out onto nothing but trees, 2 parakeets, and a great projection system for watching movies on their wall. when i arrived, they were cooking a meal of potato pancakes, a raita-like substance to put on them, and peppermint tea. two of their friends, an equally delightful couple, showed up for dinner and there was a lot of converstaion in english and a lot in latvian that they would then translate for me and we all laughed a lot and compared our respective cultures. then we watched a hilarious and sad short documentary on this old man who lives on the border of latvia and estonia and hasn't much, but makes the most of what he has, what a personlaity. normunds and nora then made it their personal mission to plan the rest of my baltic trip for me, which occupied the next hour or two. they have been basically everywhere (and i mean everywhere) either by bicycle or defender, in latvia...estonia and lithuania as well. they are so much better than a rough guide or lonely planet!! so, next stop: cesis, a castle town northeast of here. i was going to stay with nora's cousin, but there were complications with that, and there were no couchsurfers who could host me, so i bit the bullet and i am going to pay for my lodging for the first time since i have been here, but it will be worth it. i plan on staying at a lovely-looking little guesthouse and spending all day tomorrow exploring the castle and the nature, since cesis is located in the middle of a gauja national park. maybe i will even rent a bike...must always get back on the horse and all.

today i woke up at 7 when chico and pedro the parakeets were uncovered and began chattering....what a clever and subtle way to wake me up! N 'n N made me breakfast of latvian black bread topped with butter and homegrown tomatos and coffee, and sent me to the bus stop. they both bike to work everyday, so nora met me in the city at the train station and helped me book my train and showed me the platform from which it will depart- she says it is very difficult for a foreigner to figure out, so she probably saved me about an hour of time! i really hope these two decide to come to new york some day so i can repay their kindness!
i went to a huge huge market which was phenomenal. they have seven seperate buildings made from recycled zeppelin hangars from one of the WWs. each one has it's specialty- meat, poultry, fish, dairy, veggies, etc. all the fruit sellers were outside. i later learned that this is supposedly the biggest covered market in europe. i sat in front of st peter's cathedral for a while in the breeze listening to a street musician- a 10 year old boy (all the street performers here are 10-20 years old!)- play a most hauntingly beautiful staccato piece on his cello, then at noon i met up with this 'alternative tour' normunds had told me about when i told him i often prefered abandoned buildings and cemeteries to monuments. the company (just 2 guys, really) is called eat riga and they are dedicated to showing you things you will not find on a tourist map, and avoiding at any cost walking by a mcdonald's. we walked for 3 hours and along the course of our roving we went to an off-the-map flea market consisting mostly of stolen goods and heaps and heaps of metal parts, the old russian and jewish districts- which are 'not such great places to hang out after dark anymore', a building that housed first the lativan police, then the gestapo during wwII, then the kgb during the russian occupation. oy. we also walked around the new city, which no one tells you about really, and it's STUNNING! there are over 600 art nouveau buildings! riga is such a beautiful city, if you look up. alex, our guide, told us that tourism is the pillar of latvia's economy, and the tourist board does not promote any of these areas because they are not as good or intersting or safe as the old town. but wow, i disagree, they are SO much better. what a treat!

there are two guys outside dressed up like babushkas, one playing a horn and one a tuba, they have only two songs in their repetoire, i think. they have played the lion sleeps tonight twice and currently this is the third time they have played eye of the tiger while i have been sitting here. that us my cue to leave riga. onward, to cesis.

thanks alyssa!

alyssa pointed out to me that 20x200's edition just two days after my icelandic riding adventure was this.... now that's an icelandic horse! what a coincidence!

(photo by bob o'connor)

this is what jen bekman had to say about it:

"It's one of those pictures that makes me want to tell a million stories, like one where I get to be a bold heroine with a trusty steed who waits patiently as I do some good deed. Saving penguins? Rescuing polar bear cubs? I don't even know if there are penguins or polar bears in Iceland, but suspend disbelief, won't you? Me riding a horse bareback in the middle of nowhere is a wild yarn in and of itself, trust me. "

that's totally how it makes me feel too! but sorry jen, iceland has puffins, not penguins. and they don't have polar bears either, but two visited from greenland earlier this year, by floating along on icebergs and swimming and such. they were both shot :(

the bearble heaviness of backpacks

today i have been thinking about a quote from john updike's the witches of eastwick that i like a lot:

"we must lighten ourselves to survive. we must not cling. safety lies in lessening, in becoming random and thin enough for the new to enter."

as i've been walking around riga, latvia, where i arrived this morning after a weird twelve hours in the helsinki airport, i have been thinking about all the things i've had to - we've all had to - discard along the way to become who we are. all the things we have tried that didn't work out were easy throw-aways, but there are also so many things we tried and loved and had to discard nonetheless to get where we're going. like, in my case, there's music: i've given up on the cello, which i was never very good at, and the piano, which i was, and the guitar, which i never gave a real chance, and the dream of drums, which never even materialized (now i've got myself a concertina, and as soon as i can use my left hand again, i'm gonna give it a go). then, all the sports, my gosh, and diving in particular, which turns you at once into a bird and a fish, owning for a few second two elements that don't belong to bipeds. horses and soccer will never really be gone, but even those are gone for the time being. and that's just the beginning. anyway, you always wonder what if... and why did we choose what we chose? whatever. these are just my thoughts rambling out while i take a break....and i'm sure i was really thinking of this quote because i was wishing i was lessening my load, thinking that one is better fit to allow 'the new to enter' when they don't have like five thousand pounds on their back. for example, i am sure i would have enjoyed that cathedral more if i didn't have my whole big backpack with me, but i'm not meeting up with my new couchsurfing hosts until this evening so i have no place to stash it for the time being. i wish i were more like johnny cash: "I ain't takin' nothin' that'll slow down my travelin' while I'm untanglin' my mind." but alas, it is impossible to travel lightly - no matter how few clothes you packed - when you are lugging camera gear. this will forever be the bane of my backpacking existence. and, in the end, the point of all this is that it really is extremely enjoyable! i am indeed "gone as a wild goose in winter," and i envy the turtles.

in praise of smoky bay

i feel a little guilty about what i said about rejkyavik, having not said much at all about it previously, and since i have some time on my hands i think i will elaborate more on my time in iceland, and iceland in general.
rekjavik means 'smoky bay' (corina and ginger, reyk sounds very similar to roken, no? totally dodelijic), for the fog and clouds that decend upon it and the steam that rises from the surrounding countryside, certainly not for the pollution (not that there would have been pollution in the viking times)...in fact, rejkyavik is practically pollution free. sitting as it does upon a volcanic and geothermal hotbed, houses get natural heat and hot water straight from the ground. you won't see a chimney on any of the new houses, unless the owner's wanted a fireplace strcitly for the aesthetic quality of having a fire burning in their home. rejkyavik is located in the southwest corner of the island of iceland (indeed, 'Island' in icelandic), and 75 percent or so of the population lives there. this area is more habitable than the rest because it is affected by the gulf stream. more factoids: by my calculations and those i have heard, there is one horse and one square kilometer for every icelander. people love golf; there are thirty some golf courses!! looking out the window of a bus, i saw a little blonde girl (there are also more little blonde chubby cheeked girls in pink clothes here than you could imagine!) of about four years old practicing her swing with her father. the roads outside of the city are treacherous, and their safety campaign is to mount real wrecked cars mounted on billboards in the countryside. talk about scare tactic!! soil erosion is the biggest natural disaster type problem (very few trees) and there is no military, nor has there ever been. the icelanders i spent time with all joked about what lousy criminals they have. church and state are not seperated, and iceland has the world's oldest parliament, though it is said the be the world's newest country, geographically speaking. they have trolls and hidden people and sagas and a strong literary and storytelling tradition. also, did i mention this?...the world's most amazing clouds. icelanders will tell you it is the most beautiful place on earth, and i might agree.
i am thinking back to what rejkyavik meant to me before i came here. it was one of those places that is just a name you knew all along, vaguely, but then you can remeber exactly when it burned itself into your consciousness, exactly when it began pulling you nearer...nearer...for me it was in prague, summer of 2005, the beginning of my month there. i remember a very specific street corner near old town square, and searching for a restaurant, perhaps there was also a restaurant called rejkyavic, but sean began talking aboutit, i don't remember what he said, probably something about fish...but it was spoken of at length and i became intrigued...later that month, another street corner, this time up on the hill, this time there was rain, and again with sean, waiting for a cab...he had meant to go to berlin to see sigur ros that weekend, but was sick. he made a bad joke...'i could have seen sigur ros, now i just feel sick and gross.' iceland and rejkyavik again. and now it has become something completely different. the idea of the city before you reach it and what it is in reality are two completely seperate cities, andboth can exist in your mind. i'll have to pull out some calvino quotes from 'invisible cities.'
ok. so, a quick list of things i did i have not already mentioned. my first day i saw the president and i spent twelve whole hours with my hreinn and his friends, eating, drinking, and at 11pm it was bright as day and when i walked home at 3am it was the light of dawn. i went on a tour of the golden circle, which eberyone does, and though it was a huge tour bus filled with people (and there were three buses doing the same tou!!), it was well worth it, even just for the scenery out my bus window for 8 hours. first we saw Geysir, the original geyser after which all other geysers are named. then Gullfoss, a magnificent waterfall. then Thingvellir national park. to quote my pamphlet, 'Thingvellir lies within a belt of volcanic activity and fissures which passes across iceland, a part of the mid atlantic ridge, the junction of the american and eurasian tectonic plates....over the past 10,000 years, the earth's crust has been subsiding and diverging here...moving east and westwards apart from each other at rate of 3mm annually (so that's 70 meters). ' so, i stood on the edge of the fissure of the american plate and looked out across that gap which has been filled by magma and then vegetation and pools at the long black wall of rock on the other side that is the eurasian plate. it is also the site where the parliament met for 900 years.
it is here you come not only to contemplate but to visualize the working of nature...of the drift of tectonic plates, of the earth spinning on its tilted axis around the sun..the midnight sun.

20 hours in helsinki

so, i've made it safely across the ocean and to helsinki. i got in around 2 this afternoon. finland time is 3 hours ahead of iceland time so there's another jolt to the old jetlagged body. anyway, having until 9 tomorrow morning until i take off again for riga, i decided to hop on the bus from the airport to the city center and spend a few hours in helsinki. what's on my ipod, can you guess? equally cheesy. i'll give you a clue, i've been admiring the architecture here.... anyway, here i am, safe and sound and happy as a clam. already i think i like it more than rejkyavik. don't get me wrong, rejkyavik was brilliant, but i think iceland is a country i admire more for it's nature and history and mystery than it's capital city. helsinki is a real metroploitan capital. i'll have more days to explore it later in my trip, this is only the first of three stops i am making here. i'll head back to the airport later tonight and catch some winks there, hopefully, before my flight. what has happened to all the internet cafes??! they are so few and far between these days. i hope all of you back home are well, i miss you!

two degrees of bjork

in america we have six degress of kevin bacon, in iceland it´s two degrees of bjork. everyone knows someone who knows her...(i met someone who´s cousin is in mum, too). today i had my second degree, if you can call it that. hreinn´s brother has a record shop called 12 tonar, it´s also an icelandic indie label...it has thus been a meeting place for famous icelandic artists, bjork included. i went there today and asked for a suggestion for some new icelandic music that i didn´t already know and was given a lovely cd which i put in a lovely cd player and i sat for a long time on an old sofa with some espresso, listening and loving, lovely.

oy, i´m sorry this is my first real post in iceland, but there really aren´t internet cafes here, only exhorbitantly priced computer stations at the tourist center where a million people are crowded around to book their tour for the golden circle. anyway, i shall start with yesterday, a near perfect day, and work my way backwards to cover the beginning in due time. yesterday i rode icelandic horses!!! it was a 3 hour tour with a company called Ishestar (hestar meaning horse) that has a farm of 80 icelandic horses....little guys, sturdy and adorable, with thick fur and shaggy manes, all descendants of the original viking horses due to a ban on the import of foreign horses that has been maintained for centuries. the farm is only about 20 km outisde of reykjavik. i was on a little dark brown mare named prithi who is about half the size of patrick. we rode out through the moss-covered lava fields of the reykjanes preservation area, over a river, and to the base of mt helgafell, an old volcano. the ground was soft and ashy and scattered with small pebbles of perforated hardened lava, with bigger black boulders covering the sloping base of the volcano. i saw my first three trolls among these boulders! the clouds were low and dark and dramatic, and spat rain for a bit. basically, it was perfect. as we we re ripping along (a relative term for someone who has spent ten years with an ex-racehorse), one of the other horses lost a shoe, so we had to turn back and wait around for a while while the horses grazed by the river until another horse was delivered from the farm. though i was disappointed at not being able to circumnavigate the volcano, the lost shoe was a bit of a boon, as we got to take another route after that, heading for greener pastures....the sun came out full force as we galloped through bright grassy hills and trees (there aren´t many of those here) and around a lake with children bathing and looked back at helgafell, still covered by dark cloud. having a cast didn´t matter one bit, even though i didn´t experience the famed fifth gait of the icelandic horse said to be so smooth one could carry a glass of champagne and not spill a drop. the whole thing was well worth my money, and brought me back to my magical teenage years with patrick all alone running the trails of rock creek park after school. everyone should have horses in their life, take every opportunity to smell them, touch them.
anyway, once i got back to the city, the weather was so unbelievably gorgeous after a few gray days. the clouds in iceland are always fabulous, whether the cover everything in a white fog or on a blue day billow above the bay, white with dark bellies. i started to wander around outside of downtown and found, of course, one of my favorite things to visit, a cemetery. compared to the clean, bright, simple architecture of the rest of reykjavik, this cemetery seemed more european, with its crooked trees growing out of graves and rusted iron and moss-covered stone. there´s something so particular about the light in cemeteries like these, it´s ability to penetrate the trees and cast long shadows of crosses and pillars on the occasional bright patch of grass. it always feels so peaceful, as it should.
i spent the rest of the day walking by water, first the lake and then the atlantic....where i sat on rocks by the bay in a sweatshirt and flannel reading until midnight by natural light and went to bed only because i got too cold.
what has been on my ipod during these wanderings? can you guess? i bet you can. the trifecta... what erin wrote on my cast the night before i left: 'holler bjork! (--sigur ros, mum.' cheesy to do this? i don´t think so, i am trying to make the connection between the music and the land. i hear it. this place is magical.
so...i leave tomorrow for helsinki and then riga. there is much more to tell about the other wonderful things i have done here, but let me reflect for a moment on those i have left undone, for i am a firm believer of the philosophy that one must always leave things undone in country one loves in order to have a reason to come back. i have not seen puffin nor whale nor glacier, and i have not seen the blue lagoon, and i have not tried putrid shark meat (sorry stephan)...but that reminds me, i did eat fish my first night here and...wait for it...three bites of BEEF. wow. next time i am in iceland, i will be in an off road vehicle seeing the remoter interior and driving the cicle of the entire coast.

6.05 am, plane lands. baggage retrieval is easy, customs is unmanned, it feels like the airport is covered in snow, it is so clean and quiet in the morning. a 50 minute bus ride through what i assume were lava fields, 'looks like the moon,' and indeed i had thought it otherwordly. a nap, and now i'm exploting. more to write later, of course, but i am here!

Anyway...in reality it is early in the morning and the dog just came in to say good morning and everyone else is asleep, except for Annie doing yoga on the floor and she is covered in the dappled light coming through the leaves of the tree of our Treehouse, which I am leaving this evening for Iceland (then Lativa, Estonia, Finland, and Russia). I kept a blog in India and rather enjoyed it, so I'm giving it another shot this August to keep posted those who are interested and at the very least to let them know I am still alive. Lots to do today and this cup of coffee is done (and Stephan is now awake) so I must run, but stay tuned in because I promise I'll have interesting things to say, otherwise what would be the point of this trip and the all months of preparing and saving I have done? Farewell New York!

On the eve of the next great adventure, i find myself thingking of Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, wisest woman in Europe, and her wicked pack of cards. I don't know what brought her to mind, but those verses have been running through my head and pehaps it's because I'm hoping to find her somewhere on my travels. I'm convinced she's not in London, but farther east, farther north....Unreal city. I will find her, the wisest woman in Europe, and she will read my cards, and mine will not be the drowned Phoenician Sailor but The lady of situations.