Aún Camino

Three years ago today, my Grams would've been a century old. Also three years ago today, I finished hiking the Camino de Santiago. While I've been feeling especially mushy and reflective about this for the last month, today is strangely quiet. Anticlimactic. Life marches on, and while I'm still figuring out my spirituality (among other things), I know I've grown since the hike. I've become an adult, one I hope my grandma would've been proud of.

For all of it, I'm pretty darn grateful.

Pilgrims' Mass, Easter Sunday

Shorter Days

So long, summer

Walking Faster

I spent a fair chunk of my Christmas getting rained on by the river, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Crappy fisheye I

II

III, until the moon is upside down

Moundridge

Lots of feelings; back again.

Grain elevator; Moundridge, KS

Moundridge

Last weekend, I went to Moundridge. This was significant for several reasons:

1. It's my mom's hometown,
2. my uncle Monte lived there his entire life, until his death in May, and
3. I hadn't been back to visit since my grandma's funeral in 2008.

So my mom and I trekked out to the wilderness of central Kansas, to see houses, streets, and cemeteries. The landscape was more captivating than I remembered, and the sunflowers were in full bloom. There was this unbelievable quiet. All you could hear was the wind skimming the tall grass; the sound of male cicadas calling out to a particularly blue nothingness. The low hills there stretch on in a way that makes it seem that they could contain everything.

It's a special place.

Breathing the air in Monte's house felt unusual. It smelled so specific, in a fleeting way. To see his space, his land...it gave me a sense of closure that I didn't have before. I still often forget he's gone, but being where he lived gave me a sense of peace that I needed. I'm grateful for that.

Along the way, I took a few photos using the cheap fish-eye lens I bought last year. And so this is all I have, for right now.

Potentially southward

From NOLA

A house, wherein lives a man named Chris.

Full Circle

A year ago today, my dad and sister and I set out from our house in Platte County, Missouri to drive across the Western half of the continental U.S. We wanted to see, to explore, and to visit our other siblings (and niece and nephews!) in California. I won't recount the entire journey, because it's already preserved on this here blog, but a year's distance has given me a clearer perspective about that trip, and how lucky I've been to have the experiences I've had in the last twelve months.

The world is such a big place. As I get ready for my senior year of college, that knowledge is seldom lost on me. But I can't help but feel wildly excited to leave, if only for the chance to continue exploring. I can barely wait to see what's in store.

An admittedly "enhanced" view of Wyoming

Things in New York

And here is my weekend, in visuals.

Fireworks from Gramercy Park (or something like that; my NYC geography isn't tops)

Forever a tourist, sometimes with a bad lens

Experimenting

I found a dirt-cheap (and admittedly low-caliber) wide-angle macro lens on Amazon last week, and have been toying around with it recently. It's a lot of fun, and makes me want to take photos of everything, especially because Wellesley and Boston are so darn lovely in the summertime. It's gratifying, too, because even if I don't have time to sit down and write, I can just bring my camera with me and take incidental photos. There's a tiny sense of productivity and accomplishment in that.

Here are a few excerpts from the last three days.

South Station, track two

Sunset over the Pru, the ugliest building in Boston

The South End

Toronto (An Interlude)

I'm back in North America. On my flight here from Dublin, I sat next to a painter named John MacGregor who told me that I "need to find something practical to do with my life" and that he really loves to work while listening to classical music. Here is one of his paintings:

"Cubism Reborn"

Anyhow, when our eight-hour flight from Dublin got in last night at like 4:00 p.m., my body felt like it was 10:00 p.m. There's something weirdly exhilarating about traveling like that. After a certain point, I think the human body just adapts. Certainly my brain is not working at full-capacity, but perhaps part of the excitement of traveling this way is getting outside of your head and considering only what is in front of you.

I'm going to stop switching between the first- and second-person now and instead share a few of the buildings I saw.

Some library, University of Toronto

Rising moon over the Royal Ontario Museum

The closest I came to the CN Tower

The sunrise this morning, with some glare that my makeshift towel-fort couldn't eliminate

 

When I get home in eight or so hours, I will give my parents big fat hugs and drink a lot of coffee and have the world's best shower. I might even get really wild and take a nap. I slept in Terminal 1 last night, and it was more comfortable than I was expecting. The benches didn't even have those annoying armrest dividers, so I got to sleep on a surface that was not the floor. I was probably disproportionately excited about that.

And tonight, because I have the dearest and most thoughtful mother in the world, I have tickets for a Chuck Palahniuk (like "Pall-uh-nick") lecture with my sister. Not a bad way to spend my first night back in the States.

London, pt. II

Some more photos from the second half of the trip (because we took a lot of them):

I was disproportionately shaken when this busker stopped playing and looked at me while I tried to photograph him next to the
"No busking" sign. Sorry, dude.

The Shard

Brick Lane

Some street art by C215, about whom I knew nothing until Diksha pointed this out

London (finally), pt. I

A month or so ago, I took a lovely little jaunt over to the U.K. to visit my friend Diksha in London. She took me around to lots of parks and museums (The Tate Modern, The National Gallery, The Courtauld), and good times were had by all. Being the swell friend she is, Deeks also humored me by taking me to the tourist sites like Buckingham Palace and The Globe Theatre, both of which were surprisingly underwhelming.

To summarize the weekend, we looked at lots of art, walked through lots of different neighborhoods, ate lots of good food, and along the way we took a few photos.

Somerset House, right by where my friend goes to school at The Courthauld because she is impressive like that

Trafalgar Square

Basic; Water Lilies

Hyde Park

Dude really loved birds, I guess

He was putting birdseed on himself to get them flockin'

The Tate Modern

The Thames (if you click this it will get bigger)

Coming Home (An Ode to My Pets)

I leave Spain in twelve days, and I get back home to Kansas City two weeks from tomorrow. In the interim, I'll be spending a few days in Dublin and Toronto, which is way exciting. Though I will miss Córdoba dearly, and feel as though four months wasn't nearly enough time here, I'm eager to be home for a few short days before starting a summer job in Boston. There's nothing quite like spending an early June day in the sunshine surrounded by red juniper trees with planes flying over.

But more than that, I miss my dog, Annie.

We've had her since she was abandoned on our road when I was six or seven years old. She has to be at least fifteen or sixteen years old now, and considering this, I get extremely emotional every time I leave home.

Last Sunday, on Mother's Day, she got lost on our neighbor's property and somehow got stuck behind a barbed-wire fence. My parents found her, and apparently she's alright, but I'm still prepared to give her an extra big kiss on the head as soon as I get home.

I could write all day about how much I love my pets (my cat Summer means more to me than most people), but I realize that that's a little weird. Most people on the Internet really don't care about how cool I think animals are. Consider this post an extrication of long-term, distance-enhanced feelings of adoration.

June 2013

Just because
January 2014

Malta

Following the general trend I've established of posting photos a month after I've taken them, here are photos from Malta.

Before I go too far, here's a history/geography lesson in case you need it (I know I did):

Malta is a group of itty-bitty islands in the Mediterranean. It's approximately fifty miles south of Sicily and has a storied history of attempted Ottoman sieges, colonisation by about every big European world power that's existed from the French to the British to the Spanish, and yet more sieges in World War II. In case it wasn't obvious already, Malta is fairly hot property not because it's beautiful, but because it's right in the center of the Mediterranean and therefore very well-situated with regards to military strategy. Malta finally got its independence from the British in 1964, and has been a neutral member of the European Union for a good minute (since 2004). It was also where good ol' George H.W. and Gorbachev first met in 1989, effectively ending the Cold War.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a public secretary in Malta for a few years in the early nineteenth-century while he was trying to kick an opium addiction. Here is a rather interesting exploration of his role within the government (which seems like it was fairly minimal), as well as a letter he wrote about Malta to his wife Sara. My favorite part is when he writes of the Maltese people:

Of the women five tenths are ugly; of the remainder, four fifths would be ordinary but that they look so quaint, and one tenth, perhaps, may be called quaint-pretty. The prettiest resemble pretty Jewesses in England. They are the noisiest race under heaven, and Valetta the noisiest place.

Yeah.

But to summarize, there's a lot of history here, and though the islands are small, it was still incredibly difficult to see everything in the weekend we were there. We used the time well, though, taking a day to trek to the island of Comino and swim in the Mediterranean, which was rather cold but mostly clean and very clear. We also explored Valetta, the capital, and bummed around Sliema for a day. We failed, however, to see any Maltese falcons. Apparently birds-of-prey have been so heavily hunted on the island that many species have become either endangered or extinct. Sorry to disappoint.

The people we met there were alternately extremely friendly or standoffish, though I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions on the culture and customs of the island based on a three-day trip. There was a woman named Sonia who let us play with her cat and told us all of the best local spots to explore and avoid, but there were also busdrivers who refused to stop for passengers. We met a couple, one of whom grew up in Malta, who were moving away to the U.K. When prompted, the woman explained that she disliked the brash nature of the people she'd met there and that she felt very isolated there. We also experienced more catcalling in Malta than anywhere else in Europe. Unfortunately, it's not too terribly abnormal in many places that a group of young women might receive some street harassment. Therefore, though it wasn't terribly pleasant to be objectified and approached so often, I'm not going to try and infer any grand generalizations about Malta from that. At the end of everything, it seemed like a dynamic, varied, and idiosyncratic country, one which I'd recommend visiting, should you ever find yourself in the mid-Mediterranean.

And now for some (full-disclosure) mostly auto-corrected photos!

Valetta

Friday

Comino

 

Later, Malta.