#awakeaugust 21

At the nature sanctuary, Aoife is enthusiastic and her tongue goes faster than her memory sometimes as she explains and conveys the excitement of geography, palaeontology and botany to us; exulting and bountiful in her welcoming of us to her corner of the world.

In the rain waiting for the Galway Hookers, a pale youth with dark shaved hair squints as he smokes outside the Pier Head, wishing the two visitors dancing in the puddles to be out of his corner of the world

#awakeaugust 19

My room looks over Copper Alley, a slender street where two people would have to be very friendly to pass. Sitting on window ledges at Darkey Kelly's, two pigeons huddle out of the rain. They've never heard the maxim "don't shit on your own doorstep"

Jerusalem

I have never been a religious person, so I had mixed feelings on visiting Jerusalem, centrepiece of organised religion and religious dispute too. We drove there after a fraught day of work, and a slightly fraught drive, although as we arrived early evening most of the traffic queued it's way in the opposite direction, not so much streaming as leaching from the centre. 

The old city walls were pale and warm in the evening light, like bleached sandstone. We entered the old city through the Jaffa gate and plunged through into the Suq al-Bazar, a narrow stepped street dividing the Christian and Armenian quarters. My feet slid on the polished stones, more marble than sandstone, worn shiny rather than down. In the street were triangular wedges abutting the steps, positioned to allow cartwheels to go up and down without being shaken apart, but standing on them in flip-flop sandals took the soles away from you. 

My friend led us surely through the streets, and quickly, I had time to notice the side streets, the doors set into walls and cave-like shops behind them, time to notice the graffiti, and the sun piercing shafts through the lace-like stonework on the tops of the walls. We abruptly turned a corner and went down steps into a courtyard and into the church beyond, this turned out to be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. By the door we entered, a slab of stone that Christ's body was said to have laid upon, and several women kneeling, rubbing it with cloths.

Naively, I did not know that this is where the body of Christ was supposed to lay, I suppose I assumed that with the resurrection that there was no tomb. I read later that it is also the site of the crucifixion. My friend told me that the church was administered by several different Christian sects, and in the queue for access to the tomb, the group behind mentioned that wars would break out over the placing of candles. The arches drew the eye upwards to the domed ceiling as we waited. 

I was a little unsure of being there, knowing that I do not believe, but that other people do, I hate to be a tourist of belief. I told myself it was silly to be so timid, as this was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunity, and decided to go into the Aedicule. It was irrelevant anyhow, although dressed in a T-shirt like a couple of my (male) colleagues, the guardian decided I was improperly dressed and turned me away.

After looking at a couple of the other sites within the church, we left and again followed my friend. Unsure of the way, we went through back streets in the Muslim quarter, walking through boys and young men playing street football games. I hadn't realised that even in the Old City, it was still a living neighbourhood, it was heartening to see that it was not only a tourist trap. Past a street of shops, under cover, a high roofed tunnel where men sat and smoked through water pipes. A boy ran alongside us and told us "It's closed", and sure enough, as we headed to the end of the street, I saw the outline of the Dome of the Rock; and guards told us that it was closed to non-Muslims at that time.

Back out, taking a left, and through another broad tunnel, after sending our bags through a security tunnel, we emerged into the broad expanse under the Western Wall (the presumably politically correct term for the Wailing Wall). More barriers. There was a wall which allowed people to look over at the Jewish worshippers, and they were themselves segregated into a men's and women's side. The sun was setting behind us, and we walked up steps to a viewing point to watch it finally disappear. The battery in my camera died.

Back through the Armenian quarter, where the shops were all closing up, most of the tour buses having left for the day, and retracing some of our steps up the polished stone steps. Stopping for a coffee by the Jaffa gate and reflecting. I had iced chocolate, the cocoa grains gritty with ice against my tongue as the temperature swooped downwards. 

I think I approached Jerusalem with an open mind. I loved the streets and the stones and the buildings, the archways, some vaulted and turning into tunnels, the living part of the town cut into the walls. It felt like somewhere to explore at greater length, but somewhere you would need to explore for a while before it seemed familiar. I recalled getting completely lost in one area of Venice, even though we had a map, even though we followed the street signs, but still not being able to head in the right direction; Jerusalem had that air about it. 

But, despite the closeness and consanguinity of the different parts, the different quarters and religions, the impression I took away was of difference, of exclusion. Each religion, or place of worship I suppose, each of them excluded others for grounds sometimes religious, sometimes (it seemed to me) due to blind prejudice. It reminded me that religions are built on the "If your name's not down, you're not coming in" principle; worship as we do to be included or else. I do not see a religion of inclusion, of acceptance of the diversity of humanity. Jerusalem is indeed an exclusive symbol

Be careful what you wish for

This is the technicolour tourist version of my street, on one of the handful of days when the sky is blue and dry and the wind moves only as fast as a cat brushing past my ankles.

Not like the days when the wind from the moors darts its way to the sea through many fingered lanes, and turns the planes of my face to cold metal edges. It does not speak of the weariness inside my elbows from carrying too many shopping bags at once, to save having to make a second, a third trip back to the top of the hill where a car can be parked. In the winter storms, we can be cut off for days on end, safe from the lashing waves behind our thick stone walls, but the windows rattle and I pile old blankets against them, mostly in vain as the drafts will always send their tendrils through to find me. 

Not to mention the icy days, the foggy icy days when to step out is always to risk being whisked to down to the sea wall, bumping over the cobbles.

I first saw this place on a balmy blue day, and had no understanding of its changeable nature in the face of the weather. The streets were full of tourists milling around, looking in windows where people lived. I felt the intrusion and I longed to be here when they were not, to feel the rhythms of a normal life, to call out to the other residents and exchange snippets of gossip, opaque to the visitors. To be a regular in the tiny pub, with its copper surfaced bar, and have the gruff but good natured bearded barman ask if I wanted the usual. 

I am part of the tourist trade now, I searched to find a way to be more involved in this place, and I put my name down for a cottage. The interview went fine, although I was asked to stop dying my hair, as they felt a grey haired lady would be more authentic. I signed a contract for two years to live as a local, and I look at this damn picture every day, every day and count the number of days that are really like the tourist dream. Not quite on one hand. And I count down the days until I can leave

I'm gonna rain on your parade

I saw Frankenstein waiting at the bus stop this morning.  Her hair was pulled back tight against her skull, and she had a perfect lipsticked rosebud pout, and a beige overcoat, but the extra lines on her forehead looked like a deep frown.  In my office I have three colleagues, a red & white clown, a parking disc and a banana.  In my grey top and black trousers, I say, grinch-like, that I have come as a stormcloud, that I will rain on their parade.

I can't really pinpoint why I feel uneasy about Karneval, partly it is the dressing up which always seems childish verging on sinister; there is no tradition of this in my past, the only time costumes were allowed was for Halloween, and once you'd gone to big school, even that was out. I read in books of masked balls, revels, Carnevales, all colourful backdrops for darker deeds. 

The attraction I suppose is that it is a time out of time, where things that are done are out of character, and not mentioned in the cold light of day. In a costume, less recognisable if not actually disguised, you can be someone else. There is not exactly a conspiracy of silence, more a recognition of 'but for the grace of god' that observed indiscretions could have been your own, and keeping quiet is the norm.

I think it is the organised nature of the fun that makes me itch.  The Karneval season 'kicks off' on the 11th of November, and the next three months are spent planning parades, with several practice parades as Rosenmontag draws ever nearer. That's right, they spend three months practising to walk through the town. They have bands playing, and floats from which sweets, badges etc are thrown, but a parade is basically a bunch of people, some dressed up, standing at the side of the road to watch another bunch of people who are definitely dressed up go past. There is a whole subset of songs, all rousing and earnest and 'fun!' and almost all indistinguishable from each other, all to be yelled along with while swaying from side to side. The Kölsch flows, a gassy lager beer, lubricating the whole occasion, hardly transmuted when expelled as urine. The expectation that you will have fun is high, admitting that I don't particularly want to join in is puzzling evidence that foreigners are different.  I drive home, and the roads around my house are filled with people milling, and some plainly staggering, there are six Rotes Kreuze vans in my street alone to cope with the alcohol related injuries as the day wears on. 

I sound like a puritan, unable to bear other people enjoying themselves, but I think for me the key niggle is that it lacks spontaneity.  These five days are when you are sanctioned to go have fun, to drink to excess, to wear outlandish costumes.  When they are finished you have to wait seven or eight months, then you can start planning to do it all over again.

At the bus stop on the way home, a pirate and an airline pilot, both checking text messages.

It's here!

Countdown >language >place

Edition #3 is due out on 25th January

This round is hosted by Michael Solender at not from here, are you?

This one has a theme, "A place I felt I really belonged" and my piece, "where I live/where I love" has been chosen for inclusion.  This piece inspired a number of other authors over at the 6S social network, check them out here

Hoek

Here at the edge, waiting for the ship, looking out across the baleful night.  The lights of the industrial complex on the other side are white and orange, but only the orange ones are picked up by the overcast sky, glowering intensely.  And the water, half river, half sea, the water performs a strange trick with the light, it steals and swallows all the bright yellow tones of the sky, and reflects back a blood orange red.

The water moves constantly, rolling and roiling, a twitching throat, and the red painted barriers in front of me are contrasted sharply against the white snow covered quay, it is not an auspicious start to a journey.  The wind whips up the petrochemical flare and the whole sky flickers.  I shiver, and hope that the homecoming will be warmer than this.

2x Glühwein recipes

Recipe n° 1:
Place 1l red wine, 0.5l orange juice, 0.25l rum or cointreau into the slow cooker.  Add 75g demerara sugar and stir until dissolved.  Add cinnamon stick and grated nutmeg.  Stick 12 cloves into a small orange and add.  Turn slow cooker to auto and heat for approximately 2 hours, allowing the flavours to infuse.  Serve in heat proof glasses or beakers.


Recipe n° 2:
Place person into shower, shampoo and condition hair, wash body, drying time approximately 30 minutes (to include cleaning of ears, rubbing and combing hair, inserting contact lenses, moisturising dry skin on legs, looking in the mirror and wondering.)  Dither for 90 minutes, including drinking coffee, playing at the computer, wondering what clothes to put on.  Dress person (5 minutes after dithering is complete).  Chefs note:  extra dithering for outer layers of clothing may be required.  Add purse, gloves, scarf and leave house for Weihnachtsmarkt and walk to nearest Glühwein vendor (approximately 4 minutes.)  Serve in convivial surroundings.

Spatial memory

I got into my car again today, the first time for a week.  My memory, so bad in some areas is fine when it comes to learned tasks such as driving.  I perfectly executed the wiggle reverse to get to the door of the garage, and all in the thirty or so seconds between pressing the remote button for the garage grille to slide up, and before it starts to grind down again, thinking no-one is coming.

The car was mostly well behaved on the way to the tyre garage, but I was distracted, as I went into Industriestrasse from a different direction to normal, trying to pick the most used and hopefully least slippery route.  It was not only the physical memory of driving, moving feet and hands in autonomic rhythms that I was thinking about, but also the memory of driving down particular streets.  I have driven the same street to work most weekdays for the past three and a half years, a pulsed drive, stop-start with it's seventeen sets of traffic lights.  There are alternative routes which take around the same time, even though they are kilometres longer, but my mind likes the directness of this one, almost door to door on the same road except for the last couple of hundred metres.  Definitely an autopilot road, point the car in the right direction and I'm almost there.

A more satisfying feeling is that of sneakily beating the traffic, from knowledge of side streets, or the sequencing of traffic lights.  I only have one chance to do this on my current way home, I can nip in round a couple of Einbahnstrasse and pop out at the road into the garage when other cars get held up by cars turning on and off the street the other way around.  Is it sad that I can still remember my 'favourite' traffic cut?  I guess it must be a little, especially since I haven't driven on Canal Road in years, but I reckon I could still pick the moment to shoot around the red lights on the main road and jump the traffic waiting there by using the Valley Road loop, pretending I am going to Tesco's and veering back onto the main road at the last minute.

These are hard wired memories, through repetition I suppose, and I wonder why 'normal' memory doesn't work the same way?  Words, feelings; they fade faster.

Winter morning

As the winter draws on, my summer car hibernates in the Tiefgarage, and I criss-cross the laces on my trekking boots to prepare for going to work.  The Bahnhof is only a couple of minutes from my flat, but from the Strassenbahnhaltestelle I have a twenty minute walk to the office, along little used village streets like skating rinks.  The tram is crowded because the one due before it did not arrive, this seems to happen every second or third journey at the moment.  At least you can breathe in and out, and bring your hand up to your mouth to cover a sneeze without molesting the person next to you, not like the Shanghai underground in rush hour.

First the tram crosses the bridge out of town, underneath the black water swells up to the whited out land.  Worrying more the older I get, I start preparing to get off as soon as the tram gets to the stop before, in case I somehow offend the other travellers. I "Entschuldigung" my way to the doors, wishing I could emulate the native speaking woman who asked to be let through, confidently, a couple of stops back.  The people crammed inside slide away as the tram leaves the stop and I pull on my gloves again.

I wallk.  The hot coffee I had to keep me warm before I set out has already transmuted to a cold full bladder. My feet crump on the frost crusted snow as I walk towards where the sun will rise, but the sky is that shade somewhere between navy and midnight, light enough to be called blue but by no means actually light.  I get to the main road, and the lights of the passing cars make shadows on the rutted path.  I feel the warm fluid inside me, and idly wonder if I would feel warmer or colder if I were to piss myself, on balance colder I assume.

The office block my destination ahead, grey walled against that difficult to describe blue, and random lit squares of early workers glow.  Invitingly, I would say, if it was not my workplace.

it's here! >language >place blog carnival #2

Yup, it's that time of the month again, when the blog carnival rolls into town!  This month the town is Hong Kong, courtesy of host Nicolette Wong on her blog "Meditations in an Emergency"


For those who are not familiar with the concept of a blog carnival, check out these pages from the founder of the >language > place project, Dorothee Land of the BluePrintReview.  A blog carnival is similar to a magazine, but each edition the host can change.


>language >place is dear to my heart as an ex-pat and global traveller, I love reading all the different perspectives of people around the world, and it brings back a sense of wonder at the many things the world contains.  Beautiful pictures and beautiful words await, so click on the image above and join the fun!  Pictures from  my travels can be found here.  My featured piece in this months carnival is "Musings on Travelling"

intemperate

I love the cool feel of this New Orleans doorstep, captured on a day where the temperature and humidity were high enough (and the exercise of ambling around strenuous enough) to send rivulets of sweat down my back and into my waistband.
A handful of weeks later, back at home, today the temperature is not forecast to go above freezing point, suitable for wrapping up in scarf and gloves and visiting the first day of the Weihnachtsmarkt and the first Glühwein of the year.  Outside the leaves are limp, those on the bushes with cold, and those on the ground sodden with yesterdays snow.  My Aran jumper, knitted twenty years before as a student in Bradford, is fished out of the cupboard in honour of the start of Winter with a capital 'W'.
The underfloor heating, turned up in my bathroom, bathes my toes after the shower.  Like walking on a beach under the evening sun.  But it is not so easy to imagine myself there, I cup my hands around the coffee and wait for the sun to come up.

discovery

Last weekend, on a lazy morning blog browsing I discovered the concept of Blog Carnivals from Dorothee Lang.  Intrigued with the idea, I then lost several hours exploring a heady mix of people and places from around the world, checking out blogs with pictures, poems and writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
Dorothee has now created a blog roll page (automatically updating) for all the people who have already contributed to the carnival, and I recommend checking it out.  It has updates from Germany, Finland, Ukraine, Slovenia, Switzerland, UK, Canada, USA, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, India, Zimbabwe and hopefully more to come in following carnival months.  Go on, have a look!

 http://languageplace.blogspot.com/

Tokyo rain

sometimes it rains

sometimes it feels bad

sometimes it washes

things clear

travels in rural China

When I arrive I have an executive suite, there are rose petals in the toilet bowl, and a choice of condoms, sex oils and "repressed towels" on the mini-bar menu and the obligatory bowl of fruit, this time full of familiar western fruit except for the one I would probably call some sort of custard-apple.
Driving here, west into the sunset, I could see the rice fields in the valleys, strip farming, and many of the fields were empty.  Whether this was that the crops weren't yet ripe - and how many harvests do they get a year when the temperature barely drops below 20°C - or whether the people had been drafted somewhere else, I wasn't sure.  I heard of people being forcibly moved from their farms to go plant trees on the central reservation of the highways around the cities, but I don't know how true this is. 
There are some people in the fields, wearing blue overalls and the wide conical hats like upturned fruit bowls.  There are abandoned terraces on the hillsides, in this place the greenery is coming back.  Sometimes you can see whole hills in demolition, devastated hills blasted so recently that there are still a couple of trees clinging to the hilltop, although the sides have been precipitously removed.
Wild rice grows at the roadside, tall and elegant and the heads of rice are segmented and drooping, illustrations of showers, or prettified tapeworms.
Past fields of banana palms, slightly browned at the edges of their leaves.  Their fruits are shrouded in blue plastic bags, thrust into artificial condoms to ripen seedless in another part of the world.
In the morning, we drive over dead rats on the road on our way to the government owned petrochemical corporation.  They are proud of their company, proud to be set apart from the rural background.  They feed us with fish stomachs, this is a delicacy, a rubbery tube that tastes of pepper.  They graciously allow our driver to join us at the lunch table as there is nowhere else to eat in this one-horse town.

For Olivia

I stand on the balcony in my nightdress in the nacreous white morning sunshine, a cup of coffee steaming in my hand.  The slow warmth of the sun, even at 7am slips under the flirty breeze on my skin and grounds me, even up here on the 14th floor.  I can see the fish swimming below in the lake, shoals dispersing and coagulating around the rocks and the turtles.  The other balconies around me are mostly empty, although there is an old man gazing purposefully downwards from the next block, about two floors below me; a little too far away to see if he is a lawai like me.
Best of all, Olivia sleeps, all 7 weeks of her.
This is what peace is like.

The country is another past...

I went on a Tokyo tour today.  I wanted to not have wasted my time here, to have seen some of the sights and so-ons of the city, to have picked up a flavour of the place, an alien bustling buzzing place where I did not naturally belong.  However, Typhoon Chaba was paying a visit, although it was not really noticeable from my hotel room - I saw that people were scurrying about with umbrellas down below, but I had no idea of the size, the impact of the rain from watching up here.  The brake lights and indicators of the cars in traffic glow, not too brightly in deference to the presumed daylight, although if you tilt your head back, the sky doesn't look all that dark.
But after several stops, trudging through shrines and gardens on wet sliding gravel, my feet are too cold for me to ignore.  I could have spent the day idling, doing less, doing nothing which is what any sane person would do after taking a look out of the window.

I guess I am still battling my inner mouse, much as I would wish to be indomitable and independent.

don't stop

I know I will fall
apart one day, maybe soon
as the typhoon comes

HoWs of the Rising Sun

Click below to see some great writing from Michael Brown, Teresa Cortez, yours truly, Sandra Davies, Joe Gensle, Jared Handley, Mike Handley, Shauna McClure and Gita Smith.

http://issuu.com/pompetous/docs/hows_of_the_rising_sun