"If you dine with them cannibals, sooner or later darling you're gonna get eaten" - Nick Cave

^{August, 2005}

I am back!

... in two senses. First, I have returned to Tokyo after two months (!) of study and travel in Spain and Portugal. Second, I am once again revisiting this whole business of writing online.

 

Home Sweet Tokyo

... and it is hot hot hot and wet wet wet. Mooshiatsui, we say in Japanese. It's the kind of heat that makes your shoes stick to the pavement, but you sweat off a nicotine patch. The kind of weather that raises moths to the size of songbirds, and makes your skin itch as if something were growing on it. In this fecund, saturated air shrine flowers look plastic - and plastic flowers in front of the supermarket look real.

Still, it's good for the cabbage gardeners, I guess. More kimuchi, anyone?

Spain & Portugal

As I said, I am back from my summer adventure: two months of study and travel in Spain and Portugal. A few observations:

"Palma de Mallorca is paradise." Yeah, yeah. There are people who will say the same thing about Los Angeles but, as Rumi says, LA is a place that makes your brain smooth. P de M is also a place to erase all the canals on your cerebrum. Visually, Mallorca is striking: dusty olive groves and sandstone cliffs that drop into the wine dark Mediterranean. Island light that starts out gentle but by noon is nuclear in intensity. A place of primary colours. This is, after all, where Joan Miro chose to settle down and paint in his last years of life, and where he produced many of his most striking paintings and, in one case at least, tapestry, with bold yellows (the sun? sandstone?), blues (the sea, of course), greens (olive trees and scrubby pines), and reds (sandstone? the sun?).

The island's interior looks more promising. The clear light brings out a spectrum of reds and browns on the arid hills and fields. Hiking and climbing in the Tremontana is supposed to be glorious, but not in mid-30's temperatures and high humidity every day. Still, the highlights of this trip were visiting the tiny monastery village of Valledemosa, and attending a "night of the demons" festival in a neighbouring village (I will post pictures soon).

There is something relaxing about a place where, for most people (I was doing three grad courses in six weeks, and rarely was not being a student) there is little else to do other than lie on the beach with the other beautiful people, and watch cruising yachts patrol like sharks along the horizon. A place to read The Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter, and eat the fruit at the bottom of a pitcher of sangria.

But it's not for everyone. As John the guitarist once told me, there are New York people and California people. I guess I'm a New Yorker (Toronto, actually, but let's not quibble. we hardly know each other...).

 

Galicia, on the northwest coast of Spain just above Portugal, is famous for the pilgrim's cathedral at Santiago de Compostela, and for having the worst weather in Spain. I fled here when classes were finished to escape the relentless sun and heat, only to find more of the same. all of Spain and Portugal, in fact, were constantly under the heat lamp as the Iberian peninsula continues to suffer through the worst heat wave and drought in recorded history.

Galicia is off the beaten track for North American and Japanese tourists, so most of the people I saw were other Europeans, and most of them were Spanish families on vacation, or solitary pilgrims traveling by bike, on foot, or by horseback, to S de C.

Highlight: eating fried chorizo sausages and pimiento al patron (small green peppers cooked with garlic and seasoned with rock salt) at a plaza-side table.

 

This was my first trip to Portugal, and all I have are general impressions from traveling by train and bus south from Galicia, with a three-night stopover in Porto on my way to a rendezvous with Rumi in Lisboa (Lisbon):

 

Portugal is poorer than Spain. You see it in the worn shopfronts and neon signs from the 1930's, and in the gypsy children who sneak into cafes to beg for spare change when the staff aren't looking. For some reason the downtown city centers of both Oporto (Porto) and Lisboa reminded me of Chicago in the early 1980's, when I used to make trips there with my mother to visit her family. It has a similar funiki (Japanese for "atmosphere"): a working class aesthetic, too busy making a living to be beautiful. 

 

That said, Lisboa preserves the monumental glory of its past (it was the richest city in Europe in the 1500's, during the Age of Discovery) with a curator's intensity, and the Manueline style of church decoration, which incorporates elaborate vegetal details in its traditional Catholic motifs. As Rumi pointed out, this may be where Antoni Gaudi got the inspiration for his flamboyant mix of catholic orthodoxy and, among other things, bowls of strawberries, best seen in the awe-inspiring Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Highlight: eating pasties de nata (egg tarts) in the cool shade of some park trees on a blistering afternoon. The Manueline style of the Monastery of Jeronimos in Belem.

Fun fact: Portuguese sailors, when returning from their voyages to Africa, India, and beyond claimed that the Tower of Belem appeared on the horizon like a beautiful woman in a flowing dress. I've seen the Tower for myself and... it looks like a ship. At high tide, it's completely surrounded by water. Those were some very, very lonely sailors.

Fun fact jr.: the first King of Portugal re-captured the castle at Coimbra from the Moors by disguising his soldiers as cherry trees which, as Dave points, out, makes for an interesting costume option at Halloween.

"tea and copy duty."

Hannah Beech on the plight of women in the Japanese workforce - and the economic and social consequences of okusan ("person at the back of the house") thinking.

 

"... we can look down at the Earth as if we were moonlighting gods."

Pico Iyer's essay on the magic of flight.