Four Countries

Granada, Nicaragua, 2007

We all came back to Parque Xalteva for iced tea last night and sat and watched leaf-cutter ants. This place is feeling like a memory already. There’s a lot I’m going to miss, but it isn’t painful, at least not yet.

A Town No One Has Ever Heard Of, Poland, 2008
(from a first draft written with Susan Estrada)

It was Pete’s first day in Poland. He was on his way to Rzeszów to meet his girlfriend, Lucyna. She had given him directions, but he began to doubt that he was on the right train, so he asked one of the passengers if this was the train going to “Jeshov.”

“Tak, tak,” confirmed the passenger, nodding. Pete asked how far it was, but he asked in English, which the passenger didn’t speak. The passenger pointed out the window, which Pete took to mean that the next stop was his. When the train came to a stop, Pete barely got off before it began to move again. He didn’t know how to open the door. There were instructions in four languages, none of which Pete understood.

Pete found himself alone on the platform. There was no sign of his girlfriend, so he phoned her to let her know he was there. As he listened to her phone ring and ring, he began to look around. He noticed that this place didn’t look like a city.

When Lucyna found her phone and on it a series of missed calls, she called Pete and learned that her boyfriend was lost somewhere in Poland. She told him to go back to the railway station because she couldn’t figure out where he was. At the railway station Pete gave the phone to the clerk, who spoke with Lucyna and looked troubled as he handed the phone back to Pete. “I’ve never heard of this town,” said Lucyna, “no one’s ever heard of this town.”

The clerk pushed a ticket into Pete’s hands, and pointed at a train pulling into the station, emphatically repeating, “Terrace, terrace.” Pete was mystified, but he had a gut feeling that this could be his train. Unfortunately, by the time he reached the platform the train was pulling out of the station.

Luang Prabang, Laos, 2010

Okay, the city is growing on me. Not so the guest house, where the dim light has gone out again, probably some electrical problem bigger than the proprietors are able to fix or want to, so they change light bulbs every couple of days.

Why does backseat get to be one word but light bulb has to be two?

Tiny frogs the color of the mud beneath them, the size of the nail on my little finger, and apparently not poisonous, since I touched one, were hopping about on the other side of the bamboo bridge across the smaller river whose name I can’t seem to remember.

I found an ATM that dispensed 1,000,000 kip. This probably won’t be enough for my stay, but at least I don’t feel poor. I bought a lemon sugar crepe to celebrate. Lots of unusual food yesterday, much of it at the restaurant across the river. I liked the seaweed best, though the pork and sesame and Luang Prabang sausage were nice to try. The eggplant dip wasn’t seasoned in a way that I really took a shine to, and the strange jelly-like substance was…well…strange and jelly-like.

Arlington, Massachusetts, USA, 2011

We talked about how strange it is to change to Daylight Savings Time rather than to change the schedules of our activities. This time before 5:00 A.M. – which I still think is really 4:00 A.M., as if any of this had anything to do with reality – feels like the forbidden hour I’m never awake for at the change to Standard Time, probably never even in this country for, come to think of it.