There were so many blogs we meant to write; so many planned and partly executed; so many blogs we wanted to write about our new adventures in Las Americas. From the joys of arriving home and the reemergence of our business lives, to family, to new places we have never been. A blog is something that works as a semi-permanent placeholder; but this doesn’t work for us.

When we were in China we blogged like Julie in Julie and Julia, daily; and, we did it in spite of the great firewall of China. But, this is lost in intention. Here the blogs are not prepared. We have not been as determined to write behind the curtain and during the actual scene. Blogs put off are never as good. But, thankfully, they are demanding. They demand that they be published. This, of course, deserves the effort. They demand photo companions. We must deliver. Then, they demand you the reader to trace us at least this far again. So, we are writing about the rainforest and rivers and reencounters.

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Blog Reentry - Lessons from Abroad Practiced at Home

At this point in our returning, there is no doubt that we already incorporate new behaviors - now in our reentry - learned abroad.

We have new characteristics which we gained abroad last year. These are parts of ourselves reinforced or conditioned to draw out our urgency to do work on our own home continents - Las Americas.

We are still drawn to the connections which our experiences strike chords of in conversation.

This unfortunately already dims as the foreign gets blended with the shocks and learning curves in our own culture.

It is good to be home.

Some of what we were introduced to in our travels has new manifestations at home. For example, couchsurfing and blogsherpa. Both of these, a website and a blog, opened doors for us as we made acquaintance and broadened networks.

Our own websites for our honey service year @ shutterfly and blogspot dot com have worked for sharing photos and composition across the globe. There is facebook. There are others we will join; and, we aim to do more with utilizing the abstract engagement of social networks and other shared interests.

So, what next? How do we continue to draw out lessons taken from abroad to practice at home?

We are searching for the themes taken from outside our normative parameters of society which we can account for and be intentional about continuing. Whether this means new projects, shared ideas, or a slow filtration from our blogging into cyberspace, we are being met with impossible limits. It is in these new limits which we aim to plunge into.

Our story is a collaborative effort at writing about what pleases us, how we are learning, and what works.

Stay tuned.

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New York, New York, New York

It was a strange touchdown in New York's JFK. The shocks squeezed lower. The wheels seemed to push against the earth with an unnaturally heavy load. Our travels came screeching into the same runway from which we had lifted off to Tokyo nine month's earlier.

We are so enjoying the NYC welcome. While it feels like another stop on a long adventure, we are happy to be in familiar places and spending long, languishing warm days with family.

This morning, the two of us walked the Highline Park While there, we remembered our best suits as travelers: we feel our presence and community spirit brings us into harmony with what locals love about the places they live. We do not live in Chelsea, New York - yet we know it, feel it, understand it in the space of hours and days.

Yet, even as we relish the slow pace of long family visits, tomorrow we are back on the road. Labor Day for us means early rise to share over breakfast our newest fun travel recipe rice pudding with Indian spices.



While we are not feeling thrilled about donning our packs again and walking across the width of New York at dawn, this will be business as usual, breakfast with a lovely Aunt and Uncle, public transit and bus through four states to Boston and Salem, Mass; more visits with old friends, and round off the evening with genuine local cuisine 'steamer clams,' fresh coastal corn-on-the-cob, beers, loads of fun and laughter.

Our journey departing Beverly, Mass on Tuesday morning repeats our favorite late-Summer circuit. New York to Maine, back through the Cape and Islands (hello M.V.!!) to East Canaan, and back again. This year will also wrap up with Fall colors in Vermont. From here we will visit grandmothers and old friends. Tomorrow's journey takes us up our family pathways through Boston, onto the Atlantic Coast of New England.

At the end of the month we will celebrate Yale-in-China centennial back here in New York. After that our journey will head South, overland from Northern Vermont, through Ithaca, NY, to Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio, to visit my parents in Berea, Kentucky, before finally making it home to New Orleans.

Around the world and a half? People ask us sometimes when our journey will end. It is a reasonable enought question. The truth is, we both look forward to settling on some piece of land and staying long enough to plant and raise crops, to grow trees, and to garden.

For now, this is not in the cards for us. After only a couple months on our beloved Gulf Coast, it will be back on the road again when we will begin traveling again back to South America, to Taganga, Colombia and our hotels El Miramar, Santa Marta and Oso Perezoso Hotel in Taganga. From Taganga, we may find our way circling through Amazon voyages or up the Rio Orinoco with our friends from Posada Don Carlos to distant villages cut off from modern devices. We do not pretend to know where all we are going.

Will we see you on the Colombia beaches next Winter? Or will our paths cross some other way? Who knows where our fates will lead us to exactly?

Keep up with us. We hope to continue to not only feed you our stories and experieces; we want to share our advice, our research, our ambitions and dedication through this blog.

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging

I.

Pro-blogging. I am pro-bloggin.

On this piece of paper, I am blogging in our dear friend Martha's London flat. I am alone with a crashed computer. I have for tools a pen and a torn scrap of paper.

We have come up with all sorts of new widgets and apps in the course of tracing histories of ancient dialogues. This is what fills the empty space when the cyber has quieted. These are emerging technologies, too delicate even to reveal, which flew by in conversation too fast to write down.

We did discuss campfire apps (those which keep mosquitoes and biting insects away) - until we arrived at teenager apps (those which emit pitches from your phone to keep those between 11-21 years old away). We discussed million dollar apps for shopping and those for keeping our conversations on track. You see, we live in modernity.

Yet, I sit here a-scribbling. I am pro-bloggin.

I could bore you with our reams of data and news... it would be more noteworthy or worthwhile than this. Instead, I can take you where we have been. I am pro-bloggin (or is this proto-blogging). I am doing the type of exercise which takes place on pen and paper. And, I am reduced to pen and paper. I blame planned obsolescence.

So....our computer crashed. If you have been reading, you know this.

With a crashed computer and a race across four very historical (and yet very new to us) countries over a little less than two weeks; I am asking myself to run the last dash efforts as travel blogger. In this case, for this blog, what does it mean to lose all our travel technologies?

As I sat down and composed what thoughts defining these two words might mean to me ('travel' & 'blogger'), I came up with some formulaic answers which (a) might be of some use to our fellow travelers and blogging or blog friendly readers; and (b) I realized, yet again, that by unpacking our mission of exchange, service, exploration and discovery, I could discover deeper within myself sources of inspiration, language, and action. In the blogosphere, I realize in the actions and words of myself and others, that we are all becoming forces of combining self-interests.

Travel: involving every facet of life in relation to its other; ability to succeed; management of staying busy; preservation of health; enjoyment of self beyond (1) either self; or, (2) selected zone of self protection and/or self-awareness.

Blog: to publicly share and garner interest in travel.

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (Part Two)

II.

When my world was inverted (instead of pleasurably introverted as it is as a cyberwriter); when all that I could do from dawn to dusk and then into the wee hours of the morning was put the nose to the grindstone and achieve work, I was not alone. Everyone around me was tweeting me - or so it seemed; metaphorically. When I had adopted this pro-forma project philosophy, all I could breathe was work.

Lucky for me, I was in disaster recovery-mode. I was nurturing my resiliency, personally, socially, culturally, I was at one with the need to use physical and intellectual rigor to fight for the existence of the place where I was from (which through the work of the US Government and the natural phenomenology of hurricanes had wrought severe damage to this hometown). I...digress.

When one is caught up in one's projects, it is hard to turn off the phone.

In our modern world, the evolutions from beepers to tweeters ties us to technologies in ways which we love and absorb. Sometimes, we hate these technologies too; but, usually this sense is frowned upon or considered anti-social. So, let's assume that we love our technologies.

Anyway, when I was in the thrust of these previous epochs of my work life, I loved taking airplane flights. I used the airplane as analogy for what I encouraged my fellow disaster recovery comrades to also embrace - the retreat from 24 hour phone and message cycles.

In travel, we have so many opportunities to be something temporarily. This ambiguity speaks to the case of our modern life.

Last night, we watched a theater production of the "Prisoner of 2nd Avenue," a 1970's play by Neil Simon. It was a surprisingly hip and current rendition of times changing around those who cannot move forward. I could not place it fully in my own life. Yet, it had angst and urbanity.

At the beginning of theater and cinema, as the curtains rise, the managers they have conceived of nice ways of asking us to turn off our cellphones.

It is too bad there are not more ways of finding out how to do this. It is too bad that as a blogger I have not found better apps and widgets for helping me manage the distance between the objective to blog, write, and serve the communities at home (or those we visit on our trip), and how to enjoy the spirituality of travel once the netbook [laptop] gets sick. In previous millennia, it was your own sickness from the elements which brought you down; now, it is sickness from removal of portable media. I am unsure which illness is graver.

That said, I am off to take in more of London (camera in pocket, pen and scrap of paper in breast pocket).....

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (trois)

III.

Do we blog therefore to exist? Or, for us, is blogging an individual act of reaching out beyond mores of public acceptance (therefore being as an insidious and rebellious act)?

Is blogging the newest and least developed version of formal editorial publication?

Do we bring forth emerging concepts for a radical individualized project?

What does it mean to be a travel blogger?

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We found solutions for our world problems

We are not completely finished.

We are excited to return home. We have learned a lot.

The most important thing we may have learned is something which we have been struggling the whole trip to give back to the planet - We have found a solution for our world's problems.

The solution is this: All the major problems (or opportunities) which our planet and humanity is consumed with already have solutions. The solution is us (it began a long time ago).

Further, we know what these 'opportunity solutions' are. In fact, we agree on what they are. And, we agree overwhelmingly. We have been finding difficulty discussing our solutions together. What we do not yet understand how to do is to manifest the solutions and put them into practice.

How we are able to turn our agreements into actions is another description of human dilemma.

For sometime on this sojourn, we became convinced that those marketing and selling to the world must be put in charge of convincing and recruiting mass participation. This plan has many flaws. Most of the flaws are human. Human solutions, however, are necessary.

For most of this trip, we have had discussions which would end here. The problems are human caused, owned, and proliferated. Because our human condition is such, and we are not evolving from self-centered behaviors, human solutions are impossible. We grasp at straws....

Let me tell you again, we have found a solution for our world's problems. Yet, we have learned this also in our short sojourn - between just a few countries and over very little of the world's territory the solutions grow smaller, less complex, more agreeable.

We are thought farmers. We plant and nurture and spread the thoughts which we harvest across the planet. But, there was no need to travel to do this; once we left our closed fenced domain of assumptions we were able to accept them all around us.

Here are some principles we agree on as humans, universally and by vast democratic majority:

a.) Saving the world is more important than individual self interests.
b.) Community benefits from safety, culture, local and regional collaboration.
c.) Communication is convergence of agreement by education and facilitation.
d.) It is hard to get along but we must.
e.) People want to live by community quality standards of health and welfare.
f.) People want education and improvement increases for future generations.
g.) Humans, plants, and animals all benefit from ecological stewardship.

Please add those which you are aware of.

Once you apply your own community and individual versions of these to your own possibility of a miracle (or simply existence through participation) you are building actions to embrace out future opportunity and securing more pleasant, dynamic, equitable and artistic futures.

We have found a solution for our world's problems - but we want to know yours.

We are not completely finished. We have a few days left before we land at John F Kennedy. JFK, as the airport is commonly referred to, is where our round-the world journey began nine months back. But, we return as ambassadors to our own country - with solutions for our world's problems.

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London, Edinburgh, and Dublin are FREE

Oh what a delight it is to realize one's worry and travel expectations rise to frenetic and paranoid levels only to be relieved to discover the opposite is true: London, Edinburgh, and Dublin are FREE!! We spent months worrying about our time in Europe. A friend, Andy H., had smartly told us that we had a great beginning to our itinerary, 'You are smart to begin with Tokyo, Shanghai, China and Hong Hong,' he said, because if you start with the more expensive countries it makes it much easier to enjoy your travel. Everything seems to always get cheaper.'

While it is true that after India, entering Africa, the prices started to tick up; the transition from Ethiopia, to Ghana/Togo, and then Egypt was acceptable, a mild expenditure curve. The curve got steeper traveling from Turkey through the Balkans into Europe (however, we had a brief but very scary insight in Greek southern Cyprus - and thus were prepared. Again, between Italy, France, Spain and Morocco the prices seemed to by consistently high and arbitrarily excessive at times. But, as our readers know from previous blogs, we found wonderfully inexpensive ways to thoroughly enjoy such exquisitely costly locales as Barcelona and Paris. Thus we had a sense of confidence crossing the channel.

London (the British Pound) is quite expensive. But, all of its National Museums are free. I cannot begin to cover all the other great aspects of London which are free but save it to say that between very reasonable theater tickets, the Oyster Card transfer option on buses (maximum £3.50 per day usage charge), the Globe Shakespeare Theater and the numerous local performing acts daily across the city; there is no reason to avoid London because of costs.

It is expensive to buy food, and even more expensive to eat out. If you make friends, use social networking (sites like couchsurfing.com or hospitality club are great for finding hosts really interested in meeting travelers - or if you find camping or cheap hostels), once you get past the daily costs of housing the rest can be very same, close to home. We will definitely consider house-swaps the next time we visit Europe so that we can both stay in one place a while and share our own empty place back home with someone who can enjoy it (and water the plants).

We have written numerous times about how our best experiences of nine months of world travel are those that are free (friendships, public space, sharing meals, and attending public museums, libraries, parks, graveyards and the like always bring us heightened joy). There is a corollary side effect to this philosophy - when people are not paying for activities they take them more lightly. People want to get there money's worth even if they are disinterested! Those who are paying for special exhibits in museums, for example, try and nurse every minute out of the painting and clog the view points (we saw a Turner exhibit at the Prado that was hard top enjoy - whereas the whole Turner wing at the Tate Britain in London was nearly looked over by passersby.

Dublin, like Edinburgh and London just before it, for us has been an utter delight because we wander in and out of public space, museums, libraries, graveyards and the like unencumbered. There is a nice flow. IT is not so crowded as London. Certainly not nearly as crowded as Edinburgh during its myriad of simultaneous festivals happening in August (Fringe, International, Literature, and Tattoo just to name a few). Some of our own favorite finds here have been the campus of Trinity College, the Pub near us in continuous service from 998, Glasnevin graveyard (a graveyard containing many dead including over 1 million plague victims, the museum is modern and disneyesque - to be skipped) and Chester Beatty Library next to Dublin Castle. The Beatty library is easily one of the best overviews for understanding the worlds major religions that we have come across in nine months.

Both of us felt that if our round-the-world adventure through lands of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Dadaism, Maoism, Jainism, Confucianism and more had been informed early on the trip by this museum it would have been a lot easier to feel that we had some fundamental understanding both of the culture and the morays. Dadaism and Maoism I added. Just wanted to see if you were paying attention. In the graveyard there are much more simplistic examples of the world's religions including Scientology and humanism but I find Dadaism and Maoism just as poignant.

We entered Dublin knowing it's rated by travelers as Europe's most expensive city. Having passed through Monaco, Nice, Venice this seemed really scary. It's as expensive as you make it.

Enjoy Dublin, it is almost free.

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Poem for a Scottish Walk (for Doug)

Do we remember

Or is this walk

The very same one?

Almost flat

Rotunded

Hume's land

Heaves

Gently

It eases up

Onto

Short hills

Over

Summits

To Troll

On forever

We visited

In between

Thinning

Skies

Woven

By Ariadne

String

That pull

Gently

On green

Marsh

Meadows

We felt

Hot-cold

Drops of carmel

Sunlight

Breezes

Burnt on lengths

of hair

Roughied

Against

Our necks

Our walk

This happened

At the sum

Of another

Unnamed knoll

Cloaked

in Pink

Firebrush

The land

Beaconed

In blue

Insistence

Weighed in

Thoughts

From rambling

Last year's

Water

Me, pulling on

Clotted heels

Hefted

By many

Centuries

Weight

From soggied

Peat fields

Filled with

Vanished

Bones

Of captured

Souls

The grounds

Greener

The shades

Blacker

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The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?

Microsoft is corrupted.

For the third time on our nine month journey, our computer is dead. On a blue screen it screams, “your computer has been corrupted – please restart in ‘Safe Mode’”. Travel with a computer has become, for us, common place.

We left New Orleans in early December with a less than one kilo netbook. It has performed flawlessly and been heavily abused. It’s one drawback, though, is that it keeps allowing Microsoft to corrupt it. When corruption occurs, I think of it as the computer’s gone for vacation. The computer is still there. Its office space is occupied. But when you try to contact it you get this passive blue screen – a sort of ‘I will be out of the office until September 2nd – please try and contact me when I return,’ type message.

So, our computer is corrupted. Thinking about our current computer problem leads us to feeling that we are letting down our blog. We love our blog. It is a part of our promise of service and exchange between home and abroad. We have a dedicated group of readers to whom we are very grateful. Our readers give us a sense of mission, engagement beyond our common surrounds, contact with home, and exchange. We do not mean to let you down.

When at first the computer goes on vacation, we enter into a revolving conversation. I always defend the internet. When we were in developing countries I would throw up my hands, “Let’s just give away the computer here and be done with it.” My latest response in Bretagne, France was different, “We are close enough to home; let’s just carry it around broken until we get back.” I look at computers as apparati of planned obsolescence. Computers are disposable. They are meant to be treated this way. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. But, it is a fact.

My wife, coblogger, and traveling companion has a much younger and healthier opinion and usefulness for a broken down compute;. “It is not the computer that is malfunctioning; it is Microsoft,” she will tell me. All we need is a reasonable techie in an internet café and we can reinstall Windows. A simple fix. Of course, she is right.

We have had our computer put back together from Mumbai to rural Turkey. Our computer has recovered from two previous complete meltdown, several close calls, Chinese worms, spyware invaders, reckless luggage handlers, overnight bus rides under foot and much worse… So, it seems obvious enough that now that we are back in the West; now that we are back in the birthplace of western civilization; now that we are in the country of all things cosmopolitan and worthwhile for consumption (France); it would be easy for us to find techies and internet. In Mumbai, when the precious blogs on our ‘desktop’ had not been properly backed up to the hard drive, our lovely techie buddies did the equivalent of open heart triple bypass surgery to our computer. Not really being surgeons; but having our full faith; they got their 10 minute surgery education from YouTube. The surgeons downloaded a video of cutting apart and putting back together our exact victim and then for the course of two hours played Dr Jeckyl and gave rebirth to our traveling Mr Hyde.

This of course brings me to our point: We need the internet to publish. We need the internet to travel (our itineraries, maps, contacts etc reside in email or other forms). So it is important that the internet remains ubiquitous. It does not.

When the internet quits working our Marco Polo lifestyle collapses. For those of us who begin travel from a computer savvy country, we may have to accept changes in our technological world view. At the beginning of our trip I imagined the world was broken into two classes of internet use.

My internet worldview was developed between my experiences in the United States and Latin America. I believed that there was either a culture of computers (with wifi flowing freely from every house and business), or, there were internet cafes in every neighborhood where single available twentysomethings teenage facebook fans, tiny video game addicts, and midlife male losers met like a small community to laugh about or hide behind computer terminals under whirling fans. I believed that the internet was ubiquitous. As it turns out, internet and computer culture changes as dramatically from country to country as language. In what I thought would be the most computer savvy countries t visit (China and Japan where computers are pioneered and built) there was not the public I.T. culture I had assumed.

Early readers may remember us bemoaning the ‘Great Firewall of China’ which kept us blocked from such important web communities as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In Ethiopia, internet had really only arrived in the capital (Addis Ababa); the rest of the country waited for periodic signals and power to be turned back on. In Ghana and West Africa, there was internet as I had known it in South America, existing in small internet cafes. However, they were so completely local we needed guides to find them.

Each country, it turns out, has a unique relationship to computers. In Turkey, wifi was everywhere. However, the country was struck by some great paranoia (so that while wifi comes streaming from every possible nook and cranny, none of it was accessible). A grand conspiracy to sneak in and destroy your computer, your home life, and probably your fridge and TV caused streaming paranoia. In three weeks in Turkey, we never came across an open wifi signal. In Europe, there appears to be internet. I think people are using computers. But it is not a public thing.

In Paris, Madrid, or Venice, the great café culture has not been upended into becoming the great internet café culture; people leave their laptops at home and still enjoy old fashioned conversation.

As for our blog, we are going to work hard to find internet. If we can find a sprightly twenty-something techie we will beg them to help us reinstall our windows and return our tiny netbook from its extended vacation. Until then, we will seek out internet hotspots and wifi cafes, borrow beg and steal our friends and others computers, and publish, where ever possible, our blogs.

Our computer is corrupted. This means, you can expect fewer blog postings for a while.

The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?

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Land of Opportunity: Questions about the Future of New Orleans and Beyond

As long as we have known her, Luisa Dantas was making her documentary about post-Katrina, New Orleans. Now, on the heels of the 5th Anniversary of the disaster, she is releasing her documentary film, "Land of Opportunity". A great trailer for the film can be seen on the Land of Opportunity website.

Luisa spent a lot of time attending the meetings which planned the reconstruction after the disaster. She spent a lot of time listening. She attended the community meetings and got to know many of the passions which guide New Orleans' determination to exist.

Her documentary will raise questions which we should all be asking about how our lives may be affected by disaster. It will ask us to become more aware of how major events such as natural or man made disasters, war, economic crisis etc can be major shifts upsetting the lives of individuals, communities, entire peoples, even the planet.

Today's headlines described economic shudders felt globally, climate changes gone unnoticed, wars without certain end, continued environmental degradation. Luisa's film takes one relatively small event - the human and nature caused destruction of an economically insignificant city in which mostly peoples' communities were severely affected. Yet, it transposes these events onto us all. Could this type of event, could this type of disaster, affect your community? If something like a Katrina hurricane happened in your country, how would the community that you live in recover? What makes for a resilient community? What are efforts governments and others can support or enhance following disasters to grow human restoration, community engagement, and cultural resiliency?

A free community screening of the movie, "Land of Opportunity" by Luisa Dantas is an appropriate way to view this film and begin these important conversations. If you can't be in New Orleans for the sneak peek - make certain to support it coming to your town.

Happening Here: An Evening of Film,Theater, Poetry, and Food

Featuring Poet Sunni Patterson, The New Orleans Day Labor Theater of Revolution, and a SNEAK PEEK of the documentary film Land of Opportunity!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14TH • 5PM-9PM • WARREN EASTON HIGH SCHOOL 3019 CANAL ST • FREE EVENT • FOOD AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE

Doors at 5PM, Program begins at 6PM

This event is organized in partnership with JoLu Productions, New Orleans Video Access Center, PATOIS: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival, The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, Survivors Village, and the Louisiana Justice Institute. Land of Opportunity is a multi-platform documentary project that follows people from different walks of life through the last four and a half years of the reconstruction of this city. During this time, footage and short pieces have been used as tools for organizing and education and even featured in art exhibits in New Orleans and across the country. After years of filming, we and our partners want to share this work with our friends and family: the entire New Orleans community! Please join us as we present this evening of performances and film designed to inspire, educate, and galvanize.

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Un Dia Gratis

August 2, 2010

We want to go to the Prado. It is within our grasp now.... instead we spend a day embracing the city as it is.

Today, we went to community art centers, foundation museums, centers for alternative work and thought and action. We just went out and took in Madrid. And, it did not costs us more than our lunch.


We are couchsurfers. Normally, we would have planned our trip in Europe around visits with new friends. This time we have a nice hotel we like and we are not inclined to move. We are in the last month of an over-extended honeymoon. We are treating ourselves special - and that feels right. No better city, we figure, to treat yourself special than Madrid, Spain. Madrid is a city for lifestyle lovers - a pioneering culture of quality of life ethos.

Remember, we are hotel owners first, hostel providers, tour operators; even if our businesses are small, our first love was getting to know travelers in backpacker guest houses - and we like to give back! We want to spend money locally as we have it. Plus, it is nice to have your private balcony overlooking the square and no one counting on your conversation save your beloved.


Please join us once again as we ramble. We cover the tiny alleys and vignettes without you here, so please forgive us our lack of details - what is important is the feeling - the free travel by design. Our pace, our joys, our happenstance endings are what we do best as travelers.

Museums - What are we doing. Political acts, saying things that are not said in mainstream, open to all, working, all ages. What we are doing with museums is to survey and feel our humanity.


Museums have so much in the way of education, of shared experiences. But, they are also storage sheds. More often, they are examples of historical reservoirs. They contain residues of what we choose to remember. We prefer museums and exhibits which challenge us and our society. Often, just by going to museums we provoke new ideas and creativity in ourselves. There is a tried and true difference between Big National, famous collections and the work that is taking place in small contemporary public spaces. We would not suggest that you miss any of it. But, for our 'dia gratis' we stuck to those of the beaten path. We found these uncrowded, filled with challenging and exciting materials, and very very contemporary.

Other spontaneous adventures we had along the way: lying in Retiro park, visiting rose gardens, and finding a graffiti park - built over parking garages tucked behind Retiro Park.

That is but a small taste of what we did and saw this one day. When we are in these amazing historic cities it is always clear that a lifetime would not be enough to explore them, to learn their intricacies and most intimate and personalized magic. Madrid is this way. Madrid has an aura of history. Its people are wonderfully individualistic, personal, self-confident, engaged, open.

Other great free options we have discovered in Madrid include the Train Station, Archeological Museum, The National Library, and Exhibits on Government Planning, and Urban History at Los Nuevos Ministerios -which has a nice park garden that is great for picnicking (or, if you are looking for another cool picnic spot try totally hidden but surrounded by dense offices and shopping plazas Plaza de Picasso - sorry no Picassos - but a great fountain, quiet, and lots of cool shade!).

Of course, there were things we had to pay for on this day of free Madrid. We walked, but we would have just as easily enjoyed the bus or Metro. Ten passes are 10 Euro, and may be used by multiple riders. We paid for a great hotel. We had a fantastic $20 lunch in Madrid.


Spaniards take lunch as the most important meal. It is large, usually three course. We like to split the lunch and order a smaller side dish or salad. This keeps our price lower and leaves room for drinks and tip for under $20.

We think and talk and write a lot about how to explain to people what we do. It is not how we do it that is important. How you do it is your own thing. But, when we choose to attend the free hours at the museum, we do so as supporters of the arts. We would like to think we find other ways to contribute, support, and spread our love of art around. We go to smaller museums, attend special exhibits, patronize small galleries, and buy art from artists whenever we can.

****

Contraposition - there is another choice for what to do with a day in Madrid. It is surprisingly cheap - the cost is $40 ticket for 24 hours of use for the Madrid Tourist Pass. After all we describe that can be done for nothing - why do it? Because it too provides a way of seeing things. This could be the marathon adventure. You could challenge yourself to try and see as much as possible : Having a museum pass (and a 10 euro Metro pass) will allow you to see much more than you ever thought possible in one city in 24 hours. This route asks you to see things opposite of what we described above asking yourself, 'what happens differently in a rush'?


Magic is always happening around us - how we choose to encounter it is personal. We do choose - we twist and alter our fates accordingly.

Un dia gratis - un otro dia de gracias!!

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Only months after forgotten disaster: Haiti

I.

It seems it must be more time. It is mere months after their disaster: Haitians deserve not to be forgotten by the world. But an excuse is not for any nation or individual to give: Why have all our efforts efforts have not done enough for Haiti? We are all responsible. There is no excuse left for any one of us: We are all responsible to act.

What have we done to change the suffering of Haitians? What do we know how to do?

Our efforts for Haiti are for our whole humanity. What we do for the least among us reflects on our entire human ethic: frail, incomplete, resolute, impossible, merciful, self-interested.

Even our poorest nations (maybe more importantly our poorest nations) should be treated with equality, respect and dignity as our world finally decides once and for certain if we are all to be judged together: integral, decent, connected, dependent by standards of international solidarity.

The case of Haiti's disaster was a result of legacies of colonialism and geographic centralization by monopolies of capitalism and military industrial complex. Our response and quorums to restore nature and humanity for Haiti matched the call for equity in the rebuilding of our City of New Orleans healthfully, holistically, with an engaged and empowered population of democratically governed five years previously. Haiti gives us a positive reason to reevaluate strategies and opportunities for implementation of more humanistic and scientific responses to disaster: the standards which we mete out in Haiti really are our minimum respect for our humanity.

II.

Disaster is an opportunity which can benefit corporations, government, people, and/or the environment. It is past time we began treating it as such. While on the one hand Naomi Klein and Naomi Zack both painted true portraits of the political and corporate backing for philosophies of planned responses to disaster (which, incidentally, got the USA into our current roles on the Gulf Coast, after Haiti, or in Afghanistan/Iraq theaters of war).

Taken positively, there is are some possible positive interpretations of the quality of world reaction to disaster which says that disaster offers us the chance to see our common self interests, how they are connected, and ACT.

In her analysis of Disaster Capitalism Klein points correctly to the ways governments have behaved and used disaster to push through unpopular economic plans. This news, taken together with the consistent failure to establish recent protocols and new global conferences and it may be fair to argue that we have come away with little results from the pressing changes of our climate.

However, the world has a consciousness dilemma which can potentially be an arbiter of change using the same terms described by Klein and Zack. If communities are organized for participation, engagement, and, as possible, for local controls and decision-making, disasters (whether they occur to us or effect us from around the globe) may be arbiters of good sense and positive actions. [The same agent of change used for enormous economic and political change can become an agent for local change, local governance, and/or change of personal or communal responsibility.]

The nations are still not together; (Copenhagen 2009), it is still obvious that any of our recent disasters point to unwillingness, either by our planetary orb or its people, to any longer accept either individually self-interested motivation of nations; or, world's unrelenting environmental changes that demand new actions and world multinational endeavors be cooperative.

III.

What we are doing from where we are today and on our trip? What do we know that we can share with Haitians? What are the actions we know of now which make positive changes occur?

Raising awareness...acting constantly
Supporting local actions, dignity, and participation-based engagement of communities
Acting to reduce global inequity
Acting to reduce environmental degradation
Purchasing fair trade products
Support macroeconomic benefits for human restoration in disaster
Shrinking our carbon footprint
Blogging about our Actions (for Haiti)
Supporting businesses that benefit poor countries economies

We want to continue discussing disasters, how they happen, how they are mitigated, how to prevent them, how to use them for good.

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What will replace the notion of a land of plenty? A fiction.

I.

This is a fiction.

Our destruction, my Gulf of Mexico, La Louisiane, Luisiana, Land of La Cadie, the lands I grew up in, it sickens me.

I know intimately and love dearly, how our destruction came. It came by truck, by an avoidable human waste called oil slick that imitates life... disaster hits the swamps. It makes me want to ask the world a question: What will we do to replace the notion of our planet as a land of plenty?

This land was named after the Micmac word for, “land of plenty.” Yet, we have took more than land could bear. It was new land. It was land for unkempt flood and excessive natural wealth. Our land - Louisiana.

News and continuing shock comes from another disaster in our homeland. Tears of mine reflect on me in the oil sheens of streetlights. The reels turn. Where will our lands rise hence?

II.

Life here mirrors the suffering of our city and countryside in small but no less absolute terms.

Children dive off rocks and swim in to a harbor that glistens with the coat of motor oil exhausted by the boats at anchor. Near the 400 year old Portugese fort there is a sheen that coats plastic bottles and washed up detris along with a thick grass in bright green algae and mosses.

On top of a brutal hard breakwater six small children are playing, they look up to me on a wall and smile… the sharp jetty will not cut their feet.

We never leave where we are from, where we are conscious, when we are from here.

III.

Valdez. Perhaps this one place where I gained my first memory expectation of the disaster. A human disaster in gold rush following a real disaster (black gold - slickening our natures)!!!

Louisiana and Alaska share much in common for being world’s apart. They are colonies in impossible to reach lands found critical for natural resource and natural human pathways.

....

I am walking the otherside. Beaches in Africa. Yet, their brutality and hard living make for only a small number of residents who can ‘make it’ where others try and give up. The salt air curls.

IV.

Martha Serpas, in her beautiful opinion article is summarizing the sweep of environmental, cultural, and economic destruction brought on us all with the most recent BP oil spill disaster. Her biases refer us to our state flag of Louisiana - where a pelican tears at its own flesh to feed its young. She writes - this 'message... stood too long.'

“Ecological self-sacrifice is not pious; cultural self-destruction is not our duty,” she says.

This is an analogy which I find applicable to the place where the world stands today.

Our citizens and civic leadership ready and willing to lend hands as stewards of our planetary health - but under what conditions? When will our efforts begin? Who will shepherd the costs?

V.

Pictures, images, stories from home are always so valued to us as we are off in these distant lands. When we read about what you are reading, when we hear the local anecdotes and your news, it reminds us of the similarities which all of us share with the world.

This week in Morocco, we were invited to attend a wedding, we visited festivals, passed funerals, saw school groups taking field trips to the sea. If you are involved with something special, please share it. We love to hear about you. Many other people do to. You are the shepherds of our trail.

This was my excerpt, a personal fiction, devised for response to a very nice piece of Louisiana literature. ‘Well done, Well said,’ I say. Beautiful Op-Ed by Martha Serpas.

....

It is also a beautiful and morbid reminder of how environmental degradation, human oppression, sordid incongruous power histories - through them all - that it is human resiliency which has overwhelmed the events of disaster. We are the caretakers because we contain a memory of soul on planet Earth. I can remember. I was in VALDEZ, AK, just after the oil spill. It was external and internal. There was a convergence of the sacred, the profane, and our time.

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Global Harvest - Entrepreneurial Energy Bears Fresh Crops of New Ideas/Actions

Everywhere we have been, entrepreneurial energy bears fresh crops of solutions to emerging opportunities and constraints that our world community bears together. We have to continually relearn that we have enough products/projects here on the planet already to serve as remedies. for our hardest problems. There are ideas which need refinement, updates, distribution - but, we have only to scientifically rearrange conditions/circumstances to save our planet. We are finding our resolution. We are acting with fresh energy and actions.

As Brittany and I make our circumnavigation of the planet this year, we have encountered many friends and colleagues old and new who illustrate for us a great creative propensity. to use their skills and resources for the benefit of the world. In 20th and 21st Century fashion, these creative entrepreneurs exist independently, working at existential projects. They act as individual units (though some manage people and 'portfolios'). Each are radicalizing responsibility in their own way - but not as hermits or recluses. They are generally aware of coexistence and cooperative ideas - they self-market and microenterprise as individual actors - economically competitive yet aware of collective self-interests.

We are more aware than ever of what a powerful group of friends we have made. These are the change agents of the world: While their aims can solve many societal social, environmental, and economic problems (if and when they would be organized) the psychology of their core business principle is a new interest - to act collectively; and save the planet.

The people we have met are a new power base - their efforts are in producing bi-products to save the planet.

Take Benson, an industrial engineering production specialist in China - he helped us to understand the power of science and sources of energy. His proposal to prevent catastrophe from global warming - giant ice generators pointed at the Greenland Ice Cap.

Jessica and Martin. Jessica can manage consumers, labor, and the internet. Her other half Martin can create a capitalist world trading net tying consumers in China and the West to purchasing in ways that build actions of sustainability and fair trade economics.

Roddy is training our governments to accept LBGT human rights campaigns and tying these rights and freedoms to liberation of other marginalized and repressed groups in Asia and worldwide.

Rajib Roy is extending life through inventions in health and green urban sciences.

Perry is connecting volunteer labor to new and emerging markets of western economy to build new responsible forms of tourism and retirement.

All these friends came before our recent entrance and subsequent rush across Europe from Cyprus through Turkey, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean Riviera to Gibraltar. It is expected in our western economies that we share efficiencies, values, and critical analysis. Because of our mutual assumptions, we can work off of each other.

Since then we have met Tim in Bulgaria, trying to find time between starting and running small businesses to applying himself to really learning to live by the rules from the 4-hour Workweek. There is Clivia in Marseille producing functional purse art from tape (mostly duct tape). Or Mohamed, in Marrakesh, who is not only an importer of unique quality Morrocan products to USA; but, in either country he is surrounded and admired by other entrepreneurs, industrialists, biotech start-up chiefs, and local sales and tour vendors - trying to scratch off a little of his huge luck and charisma. So many different ideas for businesses that are connecting to each other. Our friend Natalie in France, for example, would help us to link programs we hope to create when we get back home, Ashrams of service, voluntourism, ecotouristic business enterprises.

Between us all we can close the loop. As we develop new economies of mutual collective self-interest, our business ideas and productivity grow together.

What do we all have in common? In a tiny taste of an immense world of dense hardworking and compassionate human societies, we have met Turkish land tycoons, evangelist collectivist socialists, microimperialists, postmodern economists. Taken as individuals, they were all devoted believers in doing the most good with what they had each been given. But, taken as a group, and, moreover as a random sampling of ethics, values, efforts, and attitudes, they are a remarkable and forceful lot with a message to share with the world... [**** Footnote #1]

Maybe you know an unrecognized entrepreneur whose day in the spotlight has not come. Write about them here. Tell them you admire them. Threaten to tell the world how brilliant their ideas are if they don't make them public. Social network them. Suggest to them that they should connect, distribute, self-promote, integrate and collaborate these good ideas and projects with others. There is a rising tide of good works. Our acts are becoming increasingly interconnected.

**** Footnote #1
...as we rushed, we did so at times with a Zen footing. Forgetting the stones and shale, we ran blindly on the edge of an impossible steep precipice. The Abyss, Death, would not accept us. Our (ill) communication blindly driving the sands of our fates in front of us. Blind, our shadows, ran.

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Rewards for Travelers of Time and Patience

Two key ingredients which we have found for enjoying and getting the most out of your travel are patience and time.

One must have the patience to enjoy your time. And you get more time with patience. We have been told this any number of ways by other travelers and locals we met.

A reader may be surprised to know that we cannot describe with any confidence places that we have been in Japan, Italy, Egypt or the Balkans (and yet, we have impressions and still might recommend them).

Due to our impatience or to a lack of time when visiting these wonderful lands, the times there have faded quickly. What we do have from each are place markers signaling to return whenever we can.

But, could we have done any differently?

There are experiences which linger. Even in Morocco, where I am writing now, I might best describe a moment, a sound. We just have acquired enough patience to be in a new land.

We have still not described above what is for time to come to a traveler. But, finding time or living it - it has its own rewards.

Time is strange. Time is often blurred with jetlag, different daylights, late nights, or morning confusion waking up to an uncertain new space. It is lit up, fluorescent, flickering, passing.

Time is never within our control - and that is its reward. Time is less our control while traveling. It will take place when we let it, no sooner.

The rewards of these qualities which are critical to finding your way out of tourism and into new forms of in-place, culturally contacted, and local travel are Time and Patience.

It is hard to visit any place quickly and get more than cursory glances of a passer-by, [train] stations, and blurry highways.

Being patient, however, earns friendship and respect abroad.

[This blog I would partly connect to not traveling as light as possible - more weight on your shoulders (or precious cargo) - less inspirationally jumping to places without planning. Time is patient.]

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Bearing the Real Costs: Relativism and Absolutism

This is a dialog built from conversation we have with fringes, elites, and mainstream power (individuals as we encounter them) between North Africa and Europe; in Spain particularly.


[Scene: There is a light breeze blowing through apartment curtains, a long porch patio of the 5th floor is bathed in bright summertime light of 9PM sunsets. It is cooling and football is on TV.]

“There is No Relativity. In suffering, there are only Absolutes,” he says to me.

I have an Uncle who has grown more resolute with old age. He does not accept our modern age’s use of relativism to lessen human acts which outrage him. He can become incensed with inhumanity.

“I was twelve and we had escaped our country to Havana,” he told us, “when we first saw the images of the Russians' discoveries in the Nazi concentration camps...we could not believe it.”

“I have friends who are survivors,” he went on, “I can assure you, there was nothing relative to theirs and their families suffering. What they lived was a pure horror - brought on by others.”

We could not agree more. I try to say as much, "As we have visited places of suffering from slave castles of Africa, mass graves of Egyptian pyramids, festering and old war zones on a Cambodian/Thai border, in the Balkans, in the horn of Africa, in our own town - from sites of mass starvation or disasters in Ethiopia, to the Concentration Camps of Serbia, the one characteristic that has united them is that the suffering which took place was absolute."

"I cannot stand this modern tendency to use relativism to dismiss people's pain!" he says.

I tell my uncle, “We relativize suffering then diminish it with our media. We teach violence to our youth. Our children see 20,000 acts of violence on TV and videos before they are seven. What craziness!!”

My uncle is elderly, he does not realize this much desensitization exists from TV and video games. His was a liife of full experience. While fiction and radio existed, a priori experience was valued above all else. He makes this case. Again, we agree but unconvivially....

“Human suffering, murder, violence and war are personal acts of outrage. They affect people’s lives.” I say to him.

I realize I am not aware of the absolute in suffering. There is absolute suffering in inhumanity.

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From: 20 Short Pieces from Barcelona

Because all my other posts are DRAFTS, I am posting these recent writings. Part of several series I wrote - taken from "20 Short Pieces from Barcelona"....

From: 20 Short Pieces from Barcelona


5.)

Walk #1

Sea Rustle (Leaf) walk
Restlessness Walk
Costume Walk

Totem Walk,
Child
Hurricane, Crab Walk

Sleep Walk


Walk #2

Walk on hardened Oceans
Walk - a hard turn right
Walk 2gether Rock 2gether

Walk side - Right side
Sideways Walk
Sidewalk

Side Walk



12.)

Look for Signs

Pointing
Sign (s)
Maps of Shapes
Right
Right with Face
Right, Left
1000 Feet
Cezanne
300 Meters
Pointing
1000 Feet
Right
Gate
Black Gate
A ways Open
Maps
Maps of Shapes
100 Feet
Impressive
Lights
With Greens
Light greens
Maps of Shapes


19.)

Convergences

Convergences
Happen





**** I published less to spare the rest. If you are interested in any of the existing fuller drafts of these 20 Short Pieces; or, if you would like other creative and longer writings - email me


Here is one more - not from Barcelona



Mulate’s Discovery (21)

Discovery
Varying strains
World
Socio-cultural
Labeling
From economic
Fabric

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Visiting a Mosaic School outside Venice

Our energies and aspirations to ‘know’ a portion of Italy in too short a window of time was luckily informed and bolstered by our experiences in the region of small hamlets north of Venice.Thanks to our wonderful host and the lovely countryside surrounding Pordenone.



The region is a historic wonderland. It is a place to see villages almost entirely intact dating back a thousand years. There are towns filled with frescoes covering insides of churches and outsides of normal buildings. These are public art murals dating back 400-600 years!! People will be warm to your visit. In many places, they only get some regional tourists, maybe an Austrian bus tour or two, but not very much in terms of distant travelers (these people rarely leave Venice).



Our best find was one of the only two Mosaic schools in Italy. At the School Mosaicisti del Friuli, Spilimbergo, Italy, Students come from around the world to spend three years studying the Mosaic arts. The school itself is basically a museum of sculpture and mosaic arts right down to floors and walls which were created, designed, installed by students and staff. Types of Mosaics on display range from historic reconstruction, to portraiture, to abstract and contemporary arts. A visit to this venerable institution will likely broaden your appreciation for craft arts and sculpture, for trades and guilds, for public art, and for a general respect which the arts are given in Europe.

Try and visit while classes are in session to meet some of the students. Their dedication, craft, and work ethic will amaze you. It is a place of living history supporting the crafting of art - modern, contemporary, restorative, public.

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Creating and implementing service programs

Creating and implementing service programs that are sustainable at home and abroad...

When we travel, we want to be at our best; and, we want to have our eyes wide open. To be sponges of interest and dynamism, to represent with confidence, humility, and genteel ambassadorship the best of the places we are from. We want to take in new cultures, habits, and customs; while not being unduly harsh and/or not accepting of the quirks and contrasts which are new to us.

But, if we are traveling with a sense of service, exchange, and equitability of economy or position, we may also want to use our skill sets, our interests, our profession, our social skills and ambitions for the benefit of the people we are visiting (and, thus, in turn, for ourselves). As experienced and ostensibly benevolent minded travelers, Brittany and I set off for our 10 month ’honey service year’ with the ambition of service right smack in the middle of our highest aspirations. We made a point in our wedding registry to include an option of donations to go towards projects we would find of the highest merit as we traveled.

The truth is, we have found some wonderful organizations - some formal, some informal - doing work in different arenas range. As anyone who knows us might suspect, we also build more informed critiques of NGO’s in general; mainly from perspectives of provenance, utility and sustainability.

Setting up sustainable programs that are sensible and beneficial to the community we come from, to the community we are exchanging with and/or to ourselves as individuals depends on many factors. How long do we plan to work or collaborate on the project. Is our local partner informed and willing to participate as needed. What is the long term ownership management potential for comprehensive oversight and growth. How necessary is the project? What are expected or unpredictable mitigation issues for damages and challenges of the project? How will financing be sustained and initiated? Is this a highest best use project for limited resources? How can our project partner, collaborate, exchange and reproduce in other ways?

There are infinite good program development possibilities brought on by cultural and multinational exchange. New ones arise daily. While possibilities are endless, fine tuning projects to match the culture sensibilities, timeliness, and appropriateness of countries we visit is equally confounding and inexact. Oftentimes, due to our backgrounds, we see project possibilities in government/civic collaborations, NGO/Non-profit, and community participation and engagement. Those with different backgrounds and expectations will have other challenges, dreams, and possibilities. We all have a responsibility to act.

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