A little Cheese with your Valentine's Chocolate?

This is simply too precious not to share with the world (even be it the mini cyber world that reads this blog).  My dad is adorable.

He wrote:

Dear Kates,

                      I'm glad that you are seeing life

                              in places old and new

                     but it seems so long since you've been gone

                             and I miss my Katie Lou.

                     I marvel at how well you meld into

                            a world where blondes are few,

                     but when, oh when, will you come back

                            and lift my heart from being blue?

                     Your enterprises and creative ventures

                           are amazing and give us all a clue

                     of how talented and sharp you are though

                           I've known forever this is true.

                     How I wish we could sit together and

                          talk as we sometimes used to do.

                     I wish I would have done more of that

                          and maybe you do to.

                     My hope and prayer to God above,

                          from whom all blessings must come through

                    is that one day soon you'll come home

                          and I'll be there to hug you when you do!!

                    Until that day, I'll have to be content

                         with asking you this plea;

                   "Please, oh please, my Valentine's will you be?"

                           

And I respond:

Dear Dad,

Although quite far I have sailed away

To seas seemingly beyond the light of day

In what appears to be a vessel untethered

Drifting along at the mercy of the weather,

Unanchored I am not.

Despite relentless tides carrying me horizonward

Towards waters unnavigated by traditional cartographers

Through vast expanses of dizzying possibility

The fog of indecision causing low visibility,

Lost I am not.

Though perilous storms and fearful gales

Crash upon the starboard tearing my sails,

Oft threatening to swallow in merciless thirst

My courage to face demons accursed,

Helpless I am not. 

For my anchor finds hold in the rock of my home,

In the love unconditional I’ve always known.

My compass points steady to a North innate

Instilled in me from a very young age.

My rescue has never failed to heed my call

Even in tempests of pride and rains of gall.

So I fear not voyaging into the unknown,

Even as I venge forth alone.

Because just as my eyes are blue,

I know the best of me has come from you.

So in your response to your plea, I reply,

Yes, I will be your Valentine.

Me and Steve

I’m too lazy to cook, too cheap to eat out, and I’m getting tired of empanadas and pizza.  So I decided to become a restaurant critic.  It was a foolproof plan.  

Domain name: $9.99.  Business cards: 5.000COP.  Tall black boots: 20.000COP.  Playing dress-up as a professional journalist and eating free food: Awesome. 

It was all fun and games until I started listening to the audiobook of Steve Jobs’ biography (ironically I’m listening to it out of order because my iPod is broken).  There’s something about listening to books that makes the ideas seep deeper into my brain, as if the headphones are a direct portal infiltrating straight to the core of my cerebellum, bypassing the filter that my eyes would normally put up if reading in the traditional way.  When holding a book in my hands, I am the reader in the audience and the author is on stage--we are two separate identities.  But when a book is in my ears, and its words are passing through my mind while I’m walking down the street or riding on the bus, I become enveloped.  The line between myself and the story blurs.  

Over the past five days, a small voice has inhabited the top of my spinal cord constantly musing about things like perfection, design, creativity, integration, minimalism, greatness, and beating out the competition.  So my little side hobby of masquerading around Bogotá as a restaurant connoisseur  quickly evolved into a slightly obsessive mission to become the Zagat.com of South America.  It seemed doable.   Of course it was a crazy idea, but in Track 17 Steve Jobs had just released the iPhone and he whispered to me, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that do.”

Skip to Track 12.  Steve gets ousted from Apple.  I do a more thorough Google search of online food guides for Bogotá and find that there are hundreds.  Pop! goes my balloon.  Some of the sites are stupid and ugly, but there are three or four that are beautiful.  Simple, elegant interfaces, search bars by categories, maps, comment windows, and professional photographs.  When I reopen my page, it looks like an 11 year old drew it on Paint.  The pictures are fuzzy, the fonts are mismatched, there’s no search bar, and I have a grand total of four restaurants listed. 

Skip to Track 24.  Steve is dying from cancer.  All of the sudden my hobby becomes an existential crisis.  Do I want to spend the rest of my life doing half-assed mediocre projects that are erected, deflated, and never remembered?  I’ve never stuck with anything long enough to be excellent or perfect. I’ve spent 22 years just floating around from one thing to the next, never really failing, but never achieving greatness.  What impact will any of this have on the world?  Steve is reflecting on his work revolutionizing six industries but worrying about how long his company will survive without him.   I am reflecting on my happy-go-lucky life and wondering how long it will be before I get serious about something. 

Skip to Track 5.  Steve is building Blue Box telephones with his friend in his garage.  I have my first meeting with a restaurant owner.  I do an interview, take some photos, eat on his tab, and walk away feeling like a million bucks (or at least the 30.000COP that my meal was worth).  Everybody’s gotta start somewhere. 

Skip to Track 1.  Steve is illegitimately conceived by two unwed 23-year-olds.  I guess you never know what will come out of unexpected accidents.  

The last stretch

Breath in.  Breath out.  There are worse tragedies in the world.

But with my goldfish memory capacity, being cameraless in Cabo de la Vela renders my experience to something on par with going to see The Beach in theaters--I will vaguely remember the spectrum of blues from the sea to the sky and the faces of the people I met will be faded and blurry.  And that is sad to me. But I’m trying not to dwell on it.  Anyway it’s against my “religion” of present-mindedness.  

I never actually committed to coming up to Cabo de la Vela, but I mentioned it out loud three times in one day and before I could disclaim, “Just curiosity,” I found the forces of the traveller’s wind blowing me northward--the bus dropped me at a car that took me to a jeep that left me with a band of Australians in a tiny dessert village on the edge of a waveless ocean.  I did’t even have a chance to find an ATM or buy provisions, so I survived in the Colombian Outback on a packet of saltines, a bottle of water, and COP60.000.  Thankfully, one of the Ozzies was dating a Colombian, so at least I had a friend (for some reason I didn’t click with any of the other backpackers).  

To be honest, after a month of beach bumming, my eyes hardly glisten at the sight of watery horizons anymore.  But in spite of sunburns and bug bites, there were still a few moments worth relishing.  That afternoon I dropped my mango (which was my breakfast and lunch) in the sand.  I was not about to throw it away, so I washed it off in the water.  That’s when I decided I never want to eat a mango outside the ocean ever again.  The sticky juice on my face and arms was washed away by they waves.  The perfect combination of sweet and salty.  And there’s just something about eating while standing in water that feels forbiddenly delicious, like brushing your teeth in the shower. 

Later that day when the sun went down, we ate fish with our arms flailing like horses' tails to keep the flies away.  But at night I couldn’t help but feel a heart flutter staring out into the abyss of the night on the edge of the world.  The thumbnail crescent moon gleamed yellow and low.  It must have been hovering just above the ocean, but it was impossible to be sure becuase the blackness of the night rendered the earth in a state reminiscent of the day in creation before God had separated the sky and the waters.  

A paradise, without a doubt.  But I think I’m ready to go home.  I’ve been squeezing my travel toothpaste tube from the lip for several days.  My flip flops are on the brink of disintegrating into dust.  My hair is perpetually salty and my pores are clogged with sunscreen.  Sand grains seem to spill out of every article of clothing.  I miss mirrors and drawers.  

Lucky

I thought it would just be a little white lie, forgotten by the next morning.  But then Sadys went off and recounted the story four times before the night was over and I was smack in the lime light I was trying to avoid.

The problem is Sadys is generous.  Too generous.  There I was, sleeping in her house, eating her food, going out with her friends, and she wouldn’t let me pay for anything.  She’s a flautist with a combined weekly salary from her four jobs barely totaling $30 and she was paying for our taxis, ice cream, concert tickets, everything.  So when she went out to smoke a cigarette at the restaurant where we were drinking mojitos, I called over the waitress to pay the tab in advance, order two more, and instructed her to act as if the couple from the other table had paid for them so that Sadys wouldn’t put up a fight.

But apparently anonymous invitations aren’t common practice in Havana.  Sadys was so amazed that perfect strangers would buy us drinks (and the night before, some British guys had treated us to beers at the hotel where Sadys works), she broke the story to Regla, Yadira, Francie, and her mom as if it were headline news.  And that's when they all decided that I must be some sort of magical good luck charm.  

And, I suppose, to some extent they’re right.   I might not be the good luck charm, but I definitely have had an unfair share of good karma in my life.  I have no other explanation to offer them when they peruse the photos of my camera--Bogota, Santa Marta, Bucaramanga, Rinon del Mar, Cartagena, beaches, waterfalls, parties...  They smile half-heartedly, their eyes stretching out to the tiny screen as if the power of their stare might transform the images into a portal, a magic miror, to transport them somewhere far away.  When I say that I’m not sure where I’m going next when I fly back to Colombia, they nod silently and politely in a way that says, “Must be nice.”  

Luck is the allusive red balloon that floated to my doorstep and lifted me up and away to smell lovely roses and drink lovely wine.  Its shiny roundness forever looming above me--to the resentful envy of those who stand in its shadow. 

I don’t like to flaunt it, but sometimes I am careless.  At Sadys apartment I said something about not having checked my email in several weeks and Sadys said, “Oh, and that’s a long time for you isn’t it?”  Then I remembered how she told me that she once waited four hours for a webpage to open.  Later, I mentioned something about sleeping in airport gates.  Her blank nod reminded me that she has never been in an airport gate. 

As I look out the window of the plane flying over the Caribbean, the worlds is a firey sapphire marble--the horizonless sunset above the clouds that I have seen so many times I almost forget to be breath-taken by its ethereal beauty. 

I think back to the night Sadys and I went to see the sunset from the top floor of the tallest building in Havana, 32 stories up.  Sadys wrote a poem on a napkin about the tranquility of being above all the chaos and gasoline fumes of the streets below.  Thirty-two stories might be as close as she ever gets to the clouds.

She told me that she’s heard of some flautists getting sponsored and chaperoned by the government to travel to Quito for international Cuban musical festivals.  I excitedly told her she should go for it and started asking more questions about when and how and for how long...
Her answers were short and unsure.  Her eyes grew distant and drifted upward above my head, fixated on the invisible red balloon. 

The good, the bad, and the ironic

There seem to be two species of foreigners in Havana--those who love Che Guevara, and those who don’t know who Che Guevara is.  The former come with camera lenses the size of traffic cones and leave with bags full of first edition contraband books.  The latter come with dinner reservations and leave with cigars and tan lines.

I didn’t have a plan, per se, as to which category I would fall into (or really much of a plan at all, considering I bought my tickets only a few days before my arrival).  I wasn’t particularly interested in museums of the revolution, but I wasn’t particularly interested in piña coladas by the pool either.  I just wanted to meet people and see things I’d never seen before (that, and return with my badge of Badass saying that I’d been to Cuba).  But despite the fact that I never intended to be The Tourist nor The Political Commentator, in my mini 8-day trip I ended up dipping my toes a little in both worlds.

The first day walking around town, I felt like a kid in a candy shop.  Ten inch pizza for 50 cents!  Coconut ice cream in a coconut shell for 40 cents!  A whole bag of churros for one dollar!  But after three days of nothing but sugar, oil, and bread, the novelty began to wear off.  I would have renounced pizza for a year in exchange for a fruit or a vegetable.  But in Havana, finding fresh produce is like finding a hamburger in New Delhi.  In fact, unless you’re at a restaurant with stemmed water glasses, you’re pretty much relegated to eating cheese and bread--in the form of a sandwich, or a pizza, or a pizza folded like a sandwich.

Once I rubbed the stardust of salsa dancing and palm trees out of my eyes, I began to notice other undeniable realities of life in Cuba.  Fruit isn’t the only endangered commodity: beef is actually illegal for most people, the “Supermercados” are practically empty--the bottles of rum and vegetable oil cast shadows on the sparse shelves.  Street vendors offer their art in exchange for soap or deodorant and Sadys (my host) had to ask her friend from Spain to bring her bandaids.  When one of the flautists in her quintet mentioned a Brazilian man had visited her, the other four gathered around like teenage girls at a sleepover, “What did he bring you??”  Their hands touched their hearts and the jaws opened dreamily when she told them of perfumes and CDs of portuguese music--products impossible to acquire for a local on the island. 

Cell phone calls are enormously expensive, one text message costs the equivalent of 25 loaves of bread, and the internet is a luxury--not to mention extremely slow.  In order for Says to get in touch with me, she has to give her email password to her sister in Argentina, who sifts through the junk, forwards the important emails to their mom, who then calls Sadys and reads the messages over the phone, and then types up her dictated responses.  

I have no credentials to speak to the political, economic or social merits of communism.  The teenager in me wants to give Cuba a high five for sticking it to the might-means-right war-mongering imperialists.  But in Havana I observed an ironic paradox in Fidel’s game plan.  It must be tricky to maintain a nation founded on the culture of Anti-Man when you become The Man.  There are more images of Che Guevara in Havana than of the Pope in the Vatican, but the people of Cuba seem to be burning for a new revolution.  Now that the Spaniards are out and the Yankees don’t have missiles aimed at their eyeballs, the spirit of rebellion boiling in Cuban blood is aiming its fury at its most present oppressor.  

The propaganda billboards encourage the proletariat to unite against tyranny.  And so the artists flee to Madrid and Buenos Aires and send back satirical hymns of revolution. 

Havana

The classic Latin colonial plaza meets Marty McFly travels back to Hill Valley 1955.  That is Havana.

Yank tank Thunderbirds rumble down the cobblestone streets in front of towering gothic cathedrals.  Salsa music floats through the alleyways while lovebirds stroll hand in hand with chocolate ice cream cones.  Panaderías sit next to old school barber shops.  Big-booty black women walk alongside gangs of Danny Zukos with gelled hair and wife-beater tank tops.  

When I burst out of the salsa club with the flautists (my host and her friends) giggling with our elbows linked, a convertible Chevy Chevelle overflowing with people rolled up, and the guy leaning out asked us where we were going and why we didn’t hop in with them.  The next thing I expected was for everyone to burst out in choreographed dance and song about summer nights.   Instead we went to the boardwalk on the shore and listened to shirtless trovadores on acoustic guitars.  

Every day in front of the statue in the main plaza, the men gather to debate, fifteen at a time, arms waving, fingers jabbing, back hand clapping, forehead slapping, all shouting at the same time.  It looking like a typical South American machista pow wow, but they’re not fighting about soccer or women--they’re talking about baseball. 

The juxtapositions are endless...

Rincon del Mar

Iris' friend's sister's friend knew people who might have possibly been able to find us a place to stay in Rincon del Mar, a fisherman's town a couple hours south of Cartagena.  This opportunity, naturally, was not one to be passed up.  Sixteen dollars, one bus and two motorcycles later, we arrived at the entrance to Paradise... with one slight complication: the gatekeeper didn't want to let us in.  We tried to explain that we weren't just random foreigners, we were practically family with Martin--they guy who knows Claudia, the sister of our friend Eduardo, also known as El Mono (the blonde guy). "You know El Mono, right?" we pleaded. His eyes, a striking white contrast in a black raisin face, narrowed as grey smoke curled slowly upwards from his cigarette, as if it was a great effort to rise below the weight of the hot costal air.  It didn't help that neither of us speaks Co'teño, an S-less spanish spoken by Caribbean Colombians. "Y cómo e' que u'tede' vam pa' ya?" (What business do you have there?) Making ourselves understood was even more challenging.  Every sentence we spoke was met with another unconvinced look from the corner of his eyes and then a repetition of the same question.  Eventually, he warmed up enough to flag down a motorcyclist to take me to Martin who, by an amazing stroke of fortune, was more than happy to receive friends of El Mono, Claudia's brother. Within the hour we had reached heaven--drinking beers and eating fancy cheese, sitting in hammocks and rocking chairs on a marble patio discussing the tragedy of the impending development of the area.  In the stretches of white sand behind the house, dwarf palm trees fluttered in the sea breeze like the eyelashes of a flirtatious woman shyly blinking as if hiding a wonderful secret.  Beyond their shade, a bright aqua iris glistens, seductively, speechlessly luring onlookers into her light.  Emerging on the other side of the trees, the ocean is an illusion.  Is it there?  Or is it a blue-green tear welling up in the bottom of my eye, blinding me to everything below the middle of my vision? Martin, a Spanish-speaking Bill Murray, lounged shirtless on the white cushions of the sofa debating with his significantly younger Colombian lover about Idealism versus Realism.  "I was a dreamer all through my 40s," he said reminiscently, "And then I realized that some things in this life will simply never change."  He shrugged his shoulders.