I’ve now been a full-time student for nearly three months. I’ve sat in on every class, every exam and gone to the usual places for breaks (ie. Monaco, Cannes, Paris, Versailles) and i’ve even enjoyed it at moments. At the same time, the maths remain a puzzle unsolved and the specific workings of pipes and channels remain as elusive as if I was a molecule trapped within them just trying to find a way out. Luckily, my classmates say they also haven’t found the door yet. What about this door I wonder. Will it lead to enlightenment or disillusion? Will it lead to a natural place of beauty or just some ugly man-made infrastructure? How many doors are there before you finally do make your way out and is the fun really in the end or in the means to getting there? Hmm…so many puzzles and the leaders say we all need a strategy and I wonder if I have one. My inept fluency in English seems to be my only leverage and now there’s just 5 more weeks of class before reaching the summit of my French education. Then England will get its peculiar grip on me and they say that is when the challenge begins.

Yesterday was a great day leaving behind the books and the dormitory to frollick in the forest in a quiet hilly place outside Cannes. The six of us walked to several summits with Amine showing me the edible berries and plants along the way and stopped to have our lunch of baguettes and cheese on a covered reservoir. It was a nice sunny day and we finished it with a classical gypsy concert in Nice. I hadn’t had a little weekend retreat like this to relax my mind from the daily grind in a long time. The open spaces and crisp clean forest air that accompanied us on the winding pathway up that included climbing with our bodily strength up boulders, was a welcoming relief to the cramped stale little cell of my dorm room. It reminded me that the wily ways of nature are always waiting for each of us when we tire of our self-constructed order.

I feel like I have faced both directly and indirectly, more racism, or ethnical stigmatization, than ever before in my life, right here in the lovely French Riviera. Oh, I can say so much about the French, but I’ll try to just be even more general and wander out loud whether humans have just lost their bloody minds or if I’m just being too sensitive and/or politically correct.

Well, here it goes…errr!!! Of course, the prize for the least favored ethnic group that I know of goes to the Africans, particularly those from the Arabic reaches in the North. I’ve gotten a good taste of the stereotyping and social ostracization since my closest friend here is from Algeria and he constantly faces boundaries in finding work, crossing borders and simply meeting people outside his own ethnic circle, since, quite frankly they are considered a dishonest, sniveling group of sub-humans that most people avoid socializing with. I wondered at this so many times when I used to visit Shisha cafes with my friend in Chartres and realized I was the only non-Arab in the place ever. But, it didn’t matter, because we had one important thing in common and that was that no matter how friendly or sincere souls we were, our neighbors would never give us the time of day — Quelle heure est-il?..silence! — the same, literally and figuratively.

Now, for the Asian question. I’ve witnessed both discrimination and reverse discrimination. A good friend and classmate had bed bugs in his room and was bitten endlessly for two months. When he reported the problem they merely said he had brought it with him from China – “We are always having problems with you asian people, the manager quipped – and he had to endure it until now. There seems to be an air of mistrust and uneasiness in the way our kind hosts look towards these far east strangers.

Now, I’m not saying there is outright racism, but there is certainly an air of avoidance and a stick- to-your-own-kind mentality that in my opinion is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Now, on the other hand Asians, who make up the vast majority in my major of study, receive lofty praise from our English teacher, who is regrettably American born, but Asian proud. She spent a good amount of time in China and speaks Chinese the majority of time in class, and repeatedly bashes any way of behaving which is explicitly “Western.” Those few of us from Europe and North America have to work extra hard to steal crumbs of  praise.

In the past weeks I have almost forgotten that I am even a simple person at all as our program centers on the idiosyncracies and customs that lie within strict cultural boundaries, I feel almost bounded and shackled to my country, which isn’t even my country at all. My “Americanism” is denied and my “Europeanism” is contested and my lack of “Asianism” is lamented. I don’t know if this concept truly exists, but can’t we all just be equal, damn it?? And can’t we just all get along despite the territory we were born and reared in. Oh, what is this world coming to…a march of progress or just around the rusty spiral to the same place we’ve been returning to cycle after cycle leading man to the same tired old historical conflicts, the same mutterings and laws and precepts which will only be reversed as time repeats itself all over again. We really don’t know anything anyway and everything we do know will be erased with time and we will have to relearn it again, like studying in France over and over again only to learn the same things that are to be forgotten once more.

On the train on my way back from one week in Paris. I saw all the sights: the Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Pere-Lachaise Cemetery and walked down Champs Elysee. Also found a great little thrift shop where most everything is three euros or less and also a cous cous restaurant that served full meals of north African goodness for five euros. I spent two days in Versailles walking around the beautiful gardens where Marie Antoinette and Madame Du Berry once strolled in the bittersweet afternoon. I couchsurfed of course in the houses of three very different french guys along with my new travel partner, my language partner from Algeria.

The lights are off now and everyone is going back to sleep and after my very relaxing week of travelling bliss I return to my life of studies. It is becoming more and more difficult as I delve into math, sciences and the digitized land of the geeks. I still have the memories which are keeping me awake here on this dark silent night train, of sitting and praying beneath the golden silhouette of Jesus’s outstretched arms within the Sacre Coeur Basilica and then going out on the stairs and enjoying some musicians do a Jamaican acoustic rendition of a Michael Jackson song. That view high up on the hill I could never forget. How beautiful and romantic is Paris. Even La Defence where I spent my final two nights – the modern business hub that few tourists ever venture to thrilled me nonetheless wi†h its avantgarde sculptures randomly placed among the towering New York style buildings and the giant cube looming above the metropolitan exit. All of it just completes the mysterious picture that makes this city so alluring.

Finally, sleep is creeping its way in and I can no longer intuitively guess the letters on my keyboard, so here’s the time I must leave you dear reader. The shadowy trees and French countryside slide along outside as this train I’m on keeps churning on non-stop just as the countless dreams prepare to take their place.. au revoir.

Today I had a very interesting experience. For my very first class I attended English Communication. The teacher was an American lady who spoke very carefully and simply to us “foreigners.” Even though we were a class of two native speakers – me and a Canadian girl – and around 8 Koreans, a handful of Chinese, a couple Indians, some Southeast Asians and one Serbian with various degrees of English ability from almost nothing to fluent, we all had to take a rigorous writing, listening and reading comprehension test. T’was an almost identical test to what I would have handed out in my formative years as English teacher.

Then, the blue-eyed blonde cheerfully and professionally explained that this would not count towards our grade but was simply for her personal use to evaluate our needs. Brilliant! And of course this didn’t deter my classmates from laboriously writing the test with strained looks and using every possible minute and various scrap papers. I surely got a taste of my own medicine today; I saw exactly what sort of innocent-looking tyrant I really am.

My Park in Williamsburg: From one drug dealer to this

So here I am back in France. Had a whirlwind last 24 hours of saying hi and bye to NYC friends. I got to see some of my old favourite haunts like the sangria places on Park Slope and quality shopping at Beacon’s Closet et al. Then discovered that my little dodgy park on grand avenue off Bedford Ave. had become a mecca for families and couples replete with a new garden walk, benches and newly planted grass to sit and look out at Manhattan just accross the East river. Ah and my spot on a rolling cemented plot along the barbed wire fence was still as intact as ever and I reminisced about watching the fireworks one fourth of July through this concrete cage. Wow! what a really nice relaxing trip walking around the city this time around. Also hit up a sports bar and saw a live international band called Eli-Che who were just as interested in their guests (me) as in their eclectic blend of latin and american music. And sat at a table and chatted between sets and even during. It’s funny how a huge city can become cozy and familiar in a tap of a foot.

After a two day repreve in the city I hopped back on the plane, this time on a $330 flight with Air Berlin. Sprechen Sie Deutsch? I didn’t realize that speaking the language of the airline was a pre-requisite. But I learned more German on that six-hour flight to Dusseldorf than I probably ever will. Even though I again and again said that I didn’t understand, the flight attendant continued serving me soley in her mother tongue, I guess that three-quarters on my mom’s side is to blame. Anyway, I didn’t say Auf wiedersehen for the last time until the end of the second flight and I had arrived in Nice, my destination. A Chinese girl came and picked me up along with an Indian boy. When we emerged to the blistering beach sun blaring down on our already tired and sweaty bodies, he stated repeatedly that he could not handle staying in this place. Even in Indian standards, I guess it’s hot here.

So we took a bus to the dorm room which is kind of in town and about a five minute walk from the Mediterranean. Lucky for me, if only I was a beach person. I went shopping and used my achingly bad French and the clerk tried out her even worse English on me. Oh, Europe I missed you! Well, not completely, this country both makes me cringe and thrilled. I guess it will be a matter of trying a little harder to see the positive side of things. At least so far the madame of the dormitory has called me a beautiful little Slovenian. On to my living conditions: The room I live in is really tiny, I think perhaps the smallest I’ve ever had except in Syracuse where I also had the benefits of a common room. Here it is just a long gloomy corridor of rooms with one shared room of urinals and a large room with a sink (the kitchen?). It’s fine, nothing luxurious, but at least it will get me outside more often to explore what this place has to offer…I have four days until school starts.

For so long I thought I was one of the best at partying. I was the regular mixologist at the basement soirees at college. I could drink anyone under the table in New York, especially if it was vodka. Now I go to a party and just watch drunk people crying, fighting and just being stupid and I just wish I would have spent my evening at a chod ceremony or yoga class where I could actually come back a little closer to the truth. Why does everyone always want to escape reality and then say that they are on a quest for truth? I had one such party experience last Friday that made me never want to touch a drop of alcohol nor spend a weekend ever with someone who does. I truly think it is poison now and understand a little more why so many who’ve had their lives touched by it, including me, would loath the sight of it so much. I also understand a little more why there is a whole world religion which effectively bans it. Interestingly, the word alcohol actually comes from an Arabic word meaning something like the spirit or demon (al-ġawl).

“Satan’s plan is yet but to excite enmity and hatred, between you, with intoxicants, And gambling and hinder you, from the remembrance Of God and from prayer, will ye not then abstain?”

~Qu’ran 5:93

I would have scoffed at such conventionally religious sentiments last week. Even so, I realize it can also be translated into universal ideals. Getting intoxicated is in fact a hindrance from realizing the almighty within. And how can you reach the true heaven in this life if you waste all the potential moments drinking or with people who are drunk?

So that’s it, yes wine and beer can both be medicinal and have been used for centuries in rituals both bleak and jolly, but really how often has their consumption resulted in benefit rather than destruction? Now to explain my title, Uganda, one of the very poorest countries in Africa has the highest drinking rate. The average Ugandan drinks almost 20 liters of spirit per year compared to Americans’ measly eight-and-a-half. I don’t know why but I’m sure there are good reasons. There always are. But after this weekend’s display of enmity and hatred, I haven’t got one.

There is a horrible thing going on in Spain. The government is going to allow a foreign company to mine for uranium, thus destroying a beautiful natural areas in Guadalajara and Zaragoza contaminating rivers and lakes and habitats of people and animals in dozens of towns in one of my favorite countries. The website, which is featured under important websites on the sidebar of this blog page now has an english language version, which my Wednesday night language group, The Bilingual Association of McMinnville has provided. Please click here and check it out and sign the petition to help put an end to this environmental threat.

Last night my childhood friend and I met up in a place we had lightly haunted as fourteen-year-olds or perhaps more accurately had scared us for a day. It was in Canby, Oregon where we had gone one school day when we felt like breaking the rules and visited an old classmate in a trashy trailer park on the outskirts of town. We did every bad deed we could and then I spent months afterward dreaming of emulaing his sister, a beautiful blond seventeen-year-old chainsmoker, pregnant with a second child, living in a romantic dirty campervan-sized trailer. The trailer park has been cleaned up and re-named an RV park and even the bowling alley no longer doubles as a smoky bar so we hit the next town, Oregon City.

Oregon City is the official end of the Oregon Trail and also has one of the oldest paper mills in the country; an enormous sleepless smash of smoke streamed buildings straddling a historic bend of the Willamette River.  As nighttime beckoned we followed stone-walled steps up to historic houses and a park that overlooks the city and down a walkway. From that vantage point the constantly roaring trains and churning factory were perfectly visible. We’d always marveled at this factory with its myriad stairways, strange tanks and mysterious doorways. This time we decided to walk to Emilia’s sister’s house along the tracks where she narrowly escaped a train speeding along a bend as we hopped the fence onto the shrouded tracks. Suddenly a stairway beamed next to us and we ascended it to a cobwebbed portion of the factory that was like a new-age passage to a mad scientist’s office in a tiny box suspended high in the air. Hairy spiders teetered inches from our heads as we squinted to read the dusty papers on the desk inside the dark greasy-paned windows. Then, suddenly we heard footsteps scaling the precarious twisting stairwell. We ascended higher and higher until we remained forever trapped in that moment in a spooky papermill in the same room where countless workers were slain back before the riots and the layoffs and Oregon City was never the same..

So that’s the story, of me stepping back in time with my best friend. And now my childhood is just a thing in the past,as nothing does last forever except in imaginary stories. But I work with children everyday in summer school and play their games in recess and enjoy the wonders of youth and relish in the fact that even if it seems to be gone on the outside, those years gone by can be recaptured at any moment, anytime, in the recesses of one’s mind.

I’m not sure but I’ve been thinking about it alot lately since I returned to the states. Here it seems people my age are much more concerned with their relationship status, getting in a relationship, maintaining it and taking it to new levels. This preoccupation with an attachment as I willl call it is less present in Europe. There I felt like if you met someone it was great, if not life was still great. Things happen in their own time and maybe the older societies are more aware that the infatuation only lasts a short time.  

So in Asia I started feeling for the first time a supreme sense of independence like if I remained a spinster or more specifically a female monk, I would not have anything to regret. In Spain this year the same was true, I was indifferent to the idea of romance because I really do believe we can find complete fullness within ourselves. But when I returned to Portland a few weeks I instantly realized that those who were like me (single) seemed to be scrambling for that missing peice as if their life was only half full until they could find that one other persoon who would somehow make them complete.

I met with an old friend from highschool last weekend for coffeee and I noticed she was preoccupied with guys and trying to set me up with one of her friends. “I know I talk a lot about guys,” she admited, “but everyone needs to find that special someone.” This startled me, was this so? I brought up the fact that Apostle Paul and John the Baptist among innumerable other saints had no need for a relationship. She agreed, but said still in our day and age we do.

I had another interesting coffee chat with a friend today who told me that the reason we were all in this dash for “love” is that many look to a significant other as protection from the scariness of today’s world.  Also the pressures and costs of jobs and apartments are alleviated by having two. I said that I prefer not to have attachments. They keep me from being able to be free to travel.  He said I was the opposite of many people who are obsessed with being in love, I on the other hand fit into the category of running away from it. Is it true? Maybe.

Just a quick blog to let everyone know that I made it safe and sound to the United States. Unbelievable trip, I still can hardly believe the places I was when I’m driving around in a jeep, stopping at cafes and restaurants (no drive-thrus yet!) and dressing up to go out to a club how far removed I am from the days of basking on the beach and bathing in passing streams and waterfalls and dumpster-diving at nighttime. Life is truly amazingly beautiful. 

Just dropped my stepdad off at the train station, he’s going on a trip to San Francisco and it reminded me of my first days travelling, how nervous and stressful and disorganized I once was. I think it’s about time I wrote a couple travelling tips for those of you going off on their first big adventure:

1. always atleast pack as much as you can the night before, if your flight is in the morning be all packed by dinnertime the day before. Not many of us are morning birds and there’s atleast twice more  last-minute details you never thought of.

2. Don’t overpack. You will come back with way more than you need so why leave with a heavy pack? Best to forget a few things and then you have an excuse to check out the local shopping scene. C’mon it can be fun even if you are broke you can always bargain and often end up with a free tea and meal if you’re in the right place.

3. All underwear can last for atleast 2 days by turning them inside out

4. stop washing your hair everyday! It’s uneconomical, inconvenient and not good for your hair. It robs it of it’s natural oils making it work harder to produce grease, so of course your hair will be more greasy. Every 3-4 days is more than enough to start with. 

5. Pack some olive oil and some spices; you may just find yourself in a situation where you need to cook or atleast you can use it on a cheap bland sandwich from the supermarket or as mouth and headwash (turmeric), toothpaste (sea salt) and moisturizer (olive oil). Also a spoon is the greatest asset ever.

6. Travel lightly mentally as well as physically. Do yoga, pranayama, meditate, whatever it takes to make sure you are light and fully present for every moment of your voyage. None of these moments ever repeat in the same way so be there for them. If we can pass through this planet as lightly as possible we will also find transcendence to the next realm that much easier.