r o m a

“If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family” - Ram Dass

•• 

Arriving at the Vatican was the proper conclusion of the Via Francigena adventure. 

But in the words of Joe Strummer, 

What are we gonna do now?

After a few days off, I feel, I want to keep writing daily. I have always enjoyed writing and taking pictures. The path from Canterbury to Rome made me feel like I was doing something and going somewhere everyday and making discoveries worth writing about. That, of course, is all subjective. What was I really doing on the path besides walking, talking, eating and sleeping towards the holy direction of Rome? But, I have to “go somewhere”and “do something” and discover things every day to keep writing, than so be it. I will!  

So after the first look at the Vatican, and the Via Francigena testimonium... 

I tried for some angles in the spectacular architectural landscape of Rome that night.

I put my hard head in a helmet to make a small tour of Rome by Vespa! 

This was a small challenge and a thrill. The scooter company, with good intent, strongly discouraged me from the new endeavor of driving myself around Rome on a Vespa. But someone who knew me well from walking the Via Francigena vouched for me, so they stretched their faith and let me play.

After a slow start and a little fumbling with the mechanics, I doubted too, but all was well that ended well. I experienced a huge feeling of freedom on that little bike, the culmination of every happy moment on a bike I’ve had in my life so far, plus the buzz of a motor coming through the handlebars. 

The next day, I met my parents at the airport for an encore tour of the city on another  new kind of vehicle for me - the double decker tour bus!

As the quote alludes to, I tried to keep 100% cool headed professionalism as their new Italian translator and tour guide, but sometimes felt my voice lilting back teenage frequencies, when I wanted more influence on the group itinerary, and honestly, to do less walking! Don’t be fooled by the 65 and over card, my Dad is closer to his Bersaglieri heritage than me, especially when in Italy for the first time!

But if I didn’t gain 100​% cool-headed enlightenment from completing a long pilgrimage, I did pick up some new strategies. 

When the vibes started to hit an all time low in the mass of humanity queued for entry to the colosseum, I sent myself on a gelato mission!

There are no concessions directly outside the colosseum entrance, probably for good reason. But gelato is never far away in Italy. I have a pretty good sense of how fast and far I can walk by now. I exited the collosseum, crossed the street, and walked three or four blocks to find a small grocery store that sold ice cream bars by the piece and by the box.

My Italian-American grandmother, sometimes to my American mother’s dismay, never passed up a sale on ice cream at the grocery store. Even if it meant a freezer full of Neopolitan Breyers. So I took out my pencil and did the math- more ice cream was bargain! I ran back up the long line with a box of frozen treats, enough to share.

b u e n o s • a i r e s

Peep the non-ortho shoe choice — was it worth it??

A marathon is a prolonged moment of glory.

From the time when you or I cross the starting line, to 2-7 hours later when a volunteer hands over your piece of medal, there can be this exhilarating feeling. You’re just running, like so many days in training before, but now It counts. You have a number pinned on and you’re competing. The seconds you use will be recorded somewhere forever. There are spectators. There’s adrenaline. Strangers give you high fives and hold up signs that say you’re awesome. I guess as runners, we talk about the pain and discipline that goes into marathons, but on the other hand, there’s something so childish and easy about just moving forward for hours, one foot in front of the other, in this whole atmosphere that screams “you’re doing great”, and carefully gives you water.

Never mind the runners high, no wonder it feels so great at the end. Of course, all this comes at a price. The entry fee, the training, and days of soreness and recovery that follow.

For me, traveling to run marathons in different cities has amplified every part of the experience. Connecting with people over a new place and language, covering new ground, and then -

All the walking that comes with sight seeing in new city is done on marathon legs!

Which is a) humbling b)therapeutic c) necessary d)all of the above.

There are no rules to this thing, so of course because Buenos Aires is a great-looking city, and I wanted cute pictures, I wore cute shoes that matched my dress. What you should wear when you’re footsore after a marathon is probably   sneakers or recovery flip flops. 

Recovery flip flops (oofos!) after Comrades - a sensible choice

 Instead I wore the below, on a footsore tour of Buenos Aires that started with...

La Boca / Caminito

Appropriately, Caminito, the name of one of the most popular sightseeing places in Buenos Aires, literally means “Little Walk”. The eye it has to travel, even if the legs are screeching sore from yesterday’s marathon. Actually, the best way to recover from exercise is movement over being sedentary. So on we went.

Caminito is designed for tourists with movie-set like colorful allies, lots of street vendors, tango performers, and landmarks looking back at the Italian influence on Buenos Aires. We strolled through mid morning and I ouched my way up stairs like the ones pictured to take photos.

The other name of Caminito, “Boca” orients it in Buenos Aires, its right outside the Boca Juniors soccer stadium. The rivalry between Boca and River Plate, the two BA soccer teams, is TOO REAL. So pick your souvenirs wisely.

El Messi is always a good choice though  

Oh hi!

Casa Rosada

OK, next I inched my way to the Casa Rosada and Plaza de los Madres for some political history! Actually we took the bus. The regular bus, although these are pretty much the same stops on the tourist bus.

If you want to go inside the pink house, it’s free but you need to reserve a tour online ahead of time. It’s like the White House but pink. Also the head of state in Argentina is a woman which is cool. She is doing a lot and lives with her family in the Air Force base actually to be protected.

The Casa Rosada museum shows more political artifacts and presidential portraits, plus these real life soldiers who are part of a special military branch that wears period costumes

hi!

Puerto Madero 

Inch inch inch. From the casa Rosada you can walk over to puerto madero!

classic shot of Buenos Aires taken in puerto Madero  

the walk over from the  casa rosada- many people passed us on the sidewalk because I was walking so slow !

and we had to take a break because Marathon legs! It’s a decent walk. age an apple and shared with this pigeon. 

Hi pigeon!

Oh! A very cool Argentinian versión of high tea is called facturas- late afternoon cake and coffee / mate. It’s a good habit to have in your back pocket for when you need a break cause you’re a post marathon baby, but still want to have a cool experience

Mmmm... Facturas

Puerto Madero is an important commercial center in BA. A lot of office buildings and hotels/ conference spaces like the Hilton and Sheraton. A nice place to have lunch - a lot of places have “executive menus” which are 3-4 courses for lunch and about $20 USD? but not to place to find an empanada, apparently, for that we walked on

We also toured this old timey ship with old cannonball guns you can pretend to fire over the water

And then we were on the quest for empanadas because, Marathon appetite

The Kirshner Cultural Center was a short walk and temporarily took our (my) mind off empanadas

We saw this sick photography exhibit shot in the north part of Argentina where the JuJuy culture lives. There are a ton of stairs here if you really want to test your tired legs ! Or take the escalator, whatever!

Walking back to the Main Street for empanadas was slow going for me! Also the sidewalks are this tile that pops out in places so you have to be careful!! I even stopped for a dulce de leche latte at Starbucks before making it to the empanadas. A lot of stuff was still closed for Columbus Day, and well, I needed a moment of *basic* comfort

We finally found empanadas!! And enjoyed them with the Argentinian beer Quilmes and peanuts

These are actually different empanadas - the ones that came after the Monday post-marathon sight seeing and beer were devoured way before the camera could get a bite :)

n e w • o r l e a n s

i felt like i learned a million things about new orleans and myself in just a few days. i was coming off of a couple of months of learning how to be really strict on myself - about being tidy and clean, beauty rituals, eating, reading, sleeping,  exercising and spending. even writing this kind of makes me shudder with a guilt about how i've somehow lost this. but i haven't. i just haven't really had to focus on these things because the time i spent on them for a few months for the most part turned them into innate habits.

anyway, as you might imagine, new orleans blew up a lot of the ideas i had about being strict and puritanical and planned and ritualistic in just a few days.

i was forced on the first day to get out my own head and communicate with the friendly and open people i came across to learn how to get around and where to go.

i listened to jazz music, and people. i scratched the surface of jazz's improvisational history sitting in cafes. like this amazing little story a wizened saxophonist told me about how jazz may have started. the story goes: when the church-goers stepped out on sundays into congo square with the sounds of worship music lingering in their ears  this music melded with the african rhythms of enslaved people who were allowed to practice their music outside on sundays. the mix of these sounds is maybe the beginning of jazz in new orleans . this little story- told as if rehearsed by an old salt over coffee - just blew my mind. 

i realized my own history - with my old friends from college - was evolving, and even thought sometimes the group text dies down with everyone in different cities leading different lives, our shared past is always coloring our future in ways we can feel and laugh over, but sometimes can't all the way recall. 

i learned to listen, find more rhythm in conversations and learn from the experts all around me, and wait for genuine connections to speak or act or just listen some more. 

i had a million pleasant little conversations since about the city, as it is heavily visited and liked by a lot of people i know and meet in new york.

i started listening more openly to music, giving every song a chance to connect with my life and myself a chance to connect with the music. i learned a lot of the music already in my personal history like the rolling stones and led zeppelin was also influenced by new orleans jazz. that led me to some great running music, conversations about music with my family and new artists.

and i'm excited about life and its contingencies and the creative process again, thanks to a very nice trip. 

a z o r e s

I rented a car for the first time in my life in the Azores! I learned a lot from my little rental car that week! I drove the equivalent of three times around the perimeter of Sao Miguel, the biggest island  of the Azores, where I stayed on my trip.

The roads were open with little traffic in late October, not their high season for tourists. the roads are well-marked with signs with pictograms for the beach and main attractions. Some places I drove to were Lago do Fogo, Sete Cidades, Praia Santa Barbara and Praia Monte Verde. Driving added a dimension of music, history and responsibility to my trip. From playing the radio constantly to feel comfortable behind the wheel, I was turned on to  the pop music they listen to in Portugal. Some is English, some Spanish, some Portuguese, but the top 40 varies. I made a playlist from the songs I heard for the first time that week or liked for the first time that week. I can still listen to that music and remember all the fun I had. I learned about driving in an city center that predates cars. When a taxi driver gave me detailed directions on which one-way streets to take from the main road off the highway, I memorized them for the week. One of the best driving landmarks was a church with road paved in green glass. The glass stood out to me from the driver's seat, and I learned after that it was to protect church-goers knees as they genuflect on the streets during the Good Friday parade. I saw a few places like Salto do Prego that would have been hard to fit into my week visit without a car. Salto do Prego is a beautiful waterfall near a city called Povocao. I decided to drive there at the last minute and see the waterfall before dark. The drive was a steady climb blocked in places by herds of cows and tractors. I saw tons of purple and blue lilacs along this road too, a staple of Sao Miguel. There is an awful lot of paperwork and signing involved in renting a car, but it's pretty much OK as long as you return everything in one piece.

c l o n a k i l t y

I didn't get into the New York City marathon in 2014. I was running the most I had ever run in my life that fall. I just moved to the city and I hardly knew what to do with myself. I ran home from work when the daylight was long enough. I ran to from Battery Park to Central Park once I found the way. I ran to the Fairway in Harlem one time (16 miles from my apartment) just to shop for gummy worms and coconut water in a salty daze. With all my running, people asked the perfectly natural question, "Are you training for the Marathon?". 

Like when people say "the City", the "New York" in "the Marathon" is implied. It's the biggest event in the local running circuit by far, the only one that really breaks into the greater sports event calendar. Even small races in a big city are well-attended and energizing. I only ran one marathon event in college (The Spinx Half in Greenville, SC). In my first season in New York I ran three.  Yet, I always thought of a full marathon as a faraway dream. I was familiar with the 13.1 mile race. I just couldn't imagine, though, what it would feel like to end a half-marathon just to be at the start of another.

The hype around the NYC marathon was enough to make me want to give it a shot anyway. I became a member of NYRR (the organization that has put on the marathon since the 1970s) and I wanted to be a part of all of it. I learned in just a few clicks, however, that there were only 3 ways to gain entry: luck, speed or money. The lottery, my best hope, had already ended by the time I was keen to give it a try. The qualifying time for entry would require lobbing 20 minutes off my best ever half-marathon. The charity option, still open into the fall, offered a brief glimmer until one of the porters in the building where I live set me straight. The $2,600 fundraising goal for NYRR youth programs, he said, was $2,600 of funds that I would have to cough up myself (it's a New York thing). I shied. 

It was a mild disappointment, but fortunately, I had other things to look forward to at the end of 2014. I just replaced my passport! I had friends who lived in the city and did exciting things. One of them encouraged me to buy into a road trip, flight B&B package for Ireland. Two weeks before my birthday we would be on our way. I had no imagination for Ireland, no Celtic ancestry, and I had never been across the Atlantic before. But I had a latent desire to see any and every new part of the world and needed no other reason to jump at the chance.

I had never been a true tourist before and the planning phase bewildered me. I didn't think of taking pretty pictures as an activity and brainstormed ways to maximize the experience. Some thoughts were truly misguided, like seeing the group Foxes in Dublin (although I only knew one EDM remix of their one massively popular song). Another thought, "What if I ran the only marathon in taking place in Ireland that week?" was, by some estimates, equally harebrained. The difference between this idea and all others, though, was that I already possessed a huge motivation to see it through.

My birthday and the end of the year were looming, and I wanted to definitively accomplish another one of the goals I set in the previous year. The disappointment of shaking my head when anyone asked me about November 2nd was there. But then, I was running in New York almost everyday. When would I have the chance to pound pavement in the southwest corner of Ireland?

s a n • s e b a s t i a n

The 7-hour local train to San Sebastian is a trip.  It is the train to Irun. About an hour outside of Donostia, the arid red clay courts of Spain turn to a lush, mountainous green.

When the moment came to jump into this scenery from the train platform, I forgot the weight of all my possessions stuffed into a tiny backpack. The setting sun gave me a familiar sense of urgency to get to the beach before the ocean's forms were covered in darkness. I stepped furiously in any direction, until, realizing my error, I overcame my shyness to ask in a painful accent, "Donde esta la playa Zurriola?".

San Sebastian follows a beautiful design around the coastline. There are three beaches. Two are placid, swimming shores separated by a wall, and the last, Zurriola, the surfing beach, lies on the other side of a  river and is exposed to rough ocean. Flanking Zurriola is the Gros neighborhood, a culture of its own within the Basque city, filled with surf shops and sunburnt pagans, both local and not. 

A black wetsuit zipped past me with a shortboard stowed on one side of his bicycle, and I felt relief. After thousands of miles, I must be in the right place.

m a d r i d

When faced with a trade-off, my first thought it how can I have it all anyway? It turns out, there are absolutely cases where you can't. When I chose to marathon on vacation, this meant I could only spend 12 jetlagged and bleary-eyed hours in Madrid before heading to the starting line. Madrid! If I retained anything from my K-12 education about the world, I knew Madrid was the capital of Spain and that Pablo Picasso painted Guernica.

Unfortunately, my stumble around the city only crossed the most obvious of monuments- here's a  run through of what I found before falling into an exhausted slumber while the light still shined through my hotel blinds.

MADRID BARAJAS AIRPORT

PARQUE DE AVENIDAS (metro stop and neighborhood)
NOVOTEL PUENTA DE LA PAZ
PLAZA DE TOROS DE LAS VENTAS (metro stop and bullfighting ring)
BANCO DE ESPANA (metro stop and central bank)

LA CIUDAD INVISIBLE (cafe)
ROYAL PALACE OF MADRID
MADRID CHAMARTIN TRAIN STATION (small, local trains)
MADRID ATOCHA TRAIN STATION (bigger, high speed trains)
 

I planned a full half day of sights for Madrid, which, the city certainly merits, however, exhaustion set it and I let myself aimlessly wander in the delight of a new place. The metro system in Madrid is very easy, similar to New York and Barcelona, and many of the top tourist attractions double up as metro stops. A lazy way to knock out some "must-sees" is to see all the places with their own subway stop! Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, the colossal bullfighting arena in Madrid and quintessential Spanish monument inspired this move. It was actually the one of closest metro stops to my hotel and an accidental destination for my short time in Madrid. For my half day in Barcelona, I found Sagrada Famillia this way. I knew precious little about Gaudi until I got there, but one of my favorite moments was ascending the subway escalator on my tired marathon legs to see the delightful and grandiose four towers of the cathedral slowly come into view!