A Life in Waiting

Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but apparently today I’m in a reflective mood.  I seem to be thinking about things a tad deeper than normal lately, not sure if it’s because of any particular pivotal moment or just because I’m too tired to do anything and to awake to sleep.  Well actually I probably could sleep right now, but as I just napped and need to go out in an hour or so, sleeping didn’t seem like a great option.  So ignore any typographical or grammar mistakes as I am in a bit of a daze right now and tend to stutter-write when I’m like this.  Stutter-write would be a term I just coined meaning to write the same word more than once in a row row since my hands are going faster than my mind can handle at the moment.

How does that Top Gun quote go?  You’re writing checks your body can’t cash, or something like that.  I sometimes feel like that quote suits me.  As I’m traveling and in new places constantly, I try to get as much in as possible.  Dinners, gatherings, whatever there seems to always be something going on and I don’t seem to know how to say no.  I don’t want to miss any of these amazing opportunities, but sometimes my body just can’t seem to catch up.  Not to mention that for the past days I have been suffering from the worst bout of allergies that I’ve ever experienced.  I rarely if ever have any allergy type symptoms but man I got hit hard this week.  Teary eyed, runny nosed and sneezing constantly.  I think it has to do with the fact that I’m staying in a beach house that was closed up for a few months and there’s a larger presence of dust and mold than most places normally possess.  So sleeping at night is a commodity that I don’t have much of these days.

Wow, staring at the screen again.  Perhaps I didn’t have as much to say as I thought.  I was told that the best way for a writer to break through writers block is to write down every thought in his head.  Which is what you’re seeing right now.  Well I’m filtering all the ones that might get me arrested or in trouble somewhere, but basically this is all my mind is capable of right now.  Must make you feel a bit smarter than me at the moment.  Hmm, so I suppose I was supposed to get inspiration from something I just typed?  Perhaps I haven’t written enough yet. 

Well going back to what I wrote earlier this morning, I am a bit disappointed in the lack of photos that I’ve taken.  Few contain me and surprising less contains other people.  Seems I only take  landscape photos.  I need to work on this.  But it’s hard for me sometimes.  Like yesterday for example, I was attending a very cool festival in Punta Umbria called Romeria.  It is the celebration of the patron saint of agriculture (I probably should know the name) and it is a village wide celebration.  It’s actually celebrated all over Andalucia, but I happened to be around for the Punta Umbria one. 

I had invited Antonio and Carmen (wow, a little out of sync here.  I haven’t written about my week with Antonio and Carmen yet in Malaga and Prado del Rey.  But oh well, you’ll piece it all together later.  Antonio and I were in Pueblo Inglís together and have become really good friends since) over to Punta Umbria as I have had a beach house all to myself for the past week (double wow.  I haven’t spoken about my time in Sevilla with Carlos and his super generous offer of letting me stay in his beach house indefinitely yet either).  Well regardless, they accepted and came for 3 days.  On the second day of their trip here, we went to this Romeria with an old school friend of Carmen’s and all of their friends.  Amazing time, even more amazing people.  I really felt as if I was a part of the core group of friends as I was included in everything, even though only a handful spoke English.  Shit, there was a point I was going to make here.  (pause)  (longer pause) 

Ah well.  As the longer pause represents almost a full day, I will wrap this up here as I don’t think I can reproduce the same feelings I had yesterday when writing.  So sorry for the incompleteness, but I hold no responsibility for it. 

Ok, this is slowly becoming a failed project.  I was really hoping to document my travels for my own posterity and to keep everyone back home up to date, but I am failing miserably.  What one would think to be an easy task, has become near impossible for me.  And even when I do write something, it’s either about not writing something (like now) or it’s a recollection of events from a few weeks prior that is devoid of all emotion and feeling as it is too far back to remember them.  It’s dying a slow death and I can’t decide whether I should try to continuously resuscitate it or just Kevorkian the damn thing.

I wish that I had done a better job of keeping track of everything, but I have no regrets.  See I don’t view myself as a tourist, even though I may be one.  I’ve been in so few churches, no official buildings and couldn’t tell you what the most important thing to see in Sevilla is.  Those things are not important to me.  I mean yes, the history and the stories that those places represent interest me, but I’d rather discuss them with friends over a bottle of wine than get a guided tour.

  I’m not sure I’m getting what I want to say out, so here’s an example.  A few days ago while I spent an evening at a dinner party with Carlos and some of his friends, I met a traveler from NY as well.  Well not a traveler, a tourist.  He was in Spain for 2 weeks and then heading back to NY immediately following.  A typical American holiday.  The problem that I have with his time here is not in the brevity of the trip, but how it was spent.  In his two weeks he has been to every major city in Spain, Barcelona, Grenada, Sevilla, Madrid, Toledo etc.  Because of the great distances between these cities, half of the trip already has been spent in airports and train station and not actually doing anything.  The other half of the trip was spent solely in finding the big monuments and churches in each city by following his travelling bible written by Steve ____.  He spent no time in the culture, he complained constantly to me about how the food was horrible here, not spicy enough, and how he couldn’t get a decent American breakfast anywhere.  By the end of his two week trip he gladly stated that two weeks in Spain was more than enough and that he was happy to go home.  And now as he is back home, he will tell all about his glorious time in Spain as he marks one more place off of his list of accomplishments.  That to me, is a tourist. 

Now if was traveling like the above, I would be almost finished with Europe by now, and not stalled in one of the first countries I arrived at.  I would have a Flickr account loaded to the max with photos of all of the grand sites in Europe and a blog bustling with activity of my adventures here.  Actually I wouldn’t mind the last two, but for me they are not the objective of my trip, but a nice compliment to it.  In these pasts weeks/months of being here, I have met some of the most amazing people, been invited into the circles of tight friends and experienced things that no tourist will ever experience. 

I don’t know.  I really have no idea what I am writing right now.  I shouldn’t even put this up online as most of its drivel, but I promised to myself that whatever I wrote I would put there, because I wanted to capture the feelings and emotions of this trip.  So being as there has been next to none of that lately, I feel the need to do so now.  The funny part of this whole thing is how my outlook of all of this has changed.  The real reason I started writing this blog, was to document my travels not just for posterity, but to have a real account of what is what like to up and move overseas whether it be for a short period of time or permanently.  I had looked long and hard online of someone else’s account of a similar journey, but found none.  So I was going to fill that niche.  Now as I look back I understand why there isn’t any out there. 

The longer I stay away from home, the longer I journey through foreign places, the more I believe in the necessity of it all.  Your perspective truly changes.  Priorities get all mixed up and you really start peeling back the layers of yourself and see something different.  It’s humbling, yet strangely empowering.  Since the very first day arriving here and things not going as planned, I have learned to accept, no love the unpredictability of it all.  I’m not saying that I led a very structured, organized life prior, but well I suppose I did. 

So what now?  As I type those words I’m trying to figure out on what level I want to answer it.  What now as in do I keep writing this blog?  What now as in where do I go next?  What now as in what do I do now that my perspectives, priorities and everything else has changed?  Somehow I don’t think an I don’t know cuts it.  But I don’t know.  On all levels, even ones I didn’t list above. 

Well as the rest of the house is waking, another story I didn’t tell, I should probably wrap this up.  Just know that every day I am experiencing a lot more than my blog reveals.  If I were you, I’d ask me about it rather than waiting for it to appear here.  The chance that it makes it on here is growing slimmer by the day.