Mustache Money!

Check our the mustache on this guy.  50,000 Colombian pesos is about $15. How excellent, yet slightly disorienting, to be thinking in money with all these zeros tagging along.

Where else can you get 300,000 out of an ATM?

Our hostel (private bath, three beds for us three) is costing us each only $8/night in Cartagena. At a tiny nearby supermercado we loaded up on fresh fruit, cheese, eggs, and veggies for a (wildly delicious sassy-fresh) homemade dinner and spent all of $12. Buying that in Ithaca would have been probably about $50.

"You must really want to go where you're going"

The objective: bicycle trip with my incorrigible and beloved Lady Elise (of Southeast Asia fame), exploring the colorful and beautiful Colombia, going to South America for the first time, being away all of February (using my sacredly saved-up vacation days and taking unpaid leave), revelling in a month of sunshine to escape the Ithaca gray, tapping again into travel-adventure me even though I do have a cat and a dreamy apartment and a job I love. I never want to lose this facet of myself, the one that, through changing my global circumstance, is forced into boldness and bathed in curiosity and where each day becomes a savored epoch.

The problem: its 4:30am this morning and I'm standing there with a giant cardboard box in the middle of the airport floor, my father just driven away, the JetBlue flight people informing me I CANNOT actually take that box on my flight. Under no circumstances. ESPECIALLY to Colombia. Not even with that pleading face.

That screen of puncturing disbelief and panic filled my view for a moment. "Oh my, this IS actually happening." I'm not easily going to go where I want to go today. I wondered how I would respond to this; in a slightly detached way I watched myself in this new drama.

Forming thoughts at 4:30am, completely alone, under the pressure of a looming flight to catch or not...I was facing a traffic jam in my slushy brain. Do I take this flight and ship my bicycle via FedEx? But unable to reach my dad before that flight left, FedEx inaccessible on a Sunday... Do I take this flight and leave the bicycle box behind? That totally would deflate the central desire of this trip...

I was in the midst of studying a hard decision requiring immediate attention that would have repercussions no matter what I did, under a countdown at an unforgiving and graceless hour.

What did I do? I hefted my huge box under my arm, this both beloved and now hated bicycle box, and marched to the Delta airline counter. I explained my pathetic story to the unfazed Mr Delta, "is there ANY chance there is an open flight going to Cartagena today?"  Tap-tap-tap, computering. I waited. And I watched this movie and was pleased to note, from my distant vantage, that the main character was not in fact throwing a hissy fit; its rare that I actually go through stressful things and I was curious how it would be.

And there WAS a flight. I didn't so much think it over, my gut flashed a light that was the closest I'd seen yet to green through the murk, and so I gave myself a small nose-bleed and handed over my credit card. Ouch. This is why people don't purchase flights just 1 hour in advance. I thanked my parents for helping with my college education way back then, so that I could do something extravagant like this, and continued to cringe as they then also charged me extra for the box.

I then noticed a Bossman standing over my bicycle box looking dour, the offending box left in the no mans' land of the ticket area, unawares of how much trouble it was causing. "That's MINE" I explained. "Let me help you move it" he suggested. --"NO" and I waltzed over and picked it up, all oversized dimensions, and hefted it to the counter lightly by myself. "She picked that up like she was superwoman," remarked Bossman. It was the only outlet of my frustration I reasonably had and I was not going to let that be taken from me. I am carrying my own box THANK YOU.

Later:
"How are you," said Mr Security, more cheerful than I see Securities usually. "Its been a long morning, already" I said, amazed that I was somehow articulating, instead of say, roaring. I briefly explained my flight plight and the enormous sum of money I had just spent. "You must really want to go where you're going" he commented cheekily. "I DO," and then added, because in at least that moment I truly believed it: "its only money."  He grinned, "I tend to believe with you on that one", and there was a brief bright moment there before I moved on, a platitude perhaps but also profound. That little human interaction lifted me considerably.

Maybe I could have done something else and saved myself that money. I could wallow in the waste of it flushed to something that could perhaps have been avoided. But more importantly, I choose to accept my decision and charge forth. Its about reevaluating the importance of things. It IS worth that much money to me to have a bright outlook. 

But that moment though, when the air ship has reached velocity and it separates from the gray runway, and my stomach lifts to my brain momentarily, and that childhood wonder upon flying breathes anew, and then gliding up we burst into the light. THAT moment effectively erases all woes for me.

This whole morning has brought me to thinking about the zen statement: that we should expect pain as well as pleasure in this life, not feeling entitled to either. Both will come along in their measure. I can't waltz into an airport expecting my bike to fly free like it did to Thailand, or expect a hunky police officer to rescue it for me from the drug-ridden streets of Rochester. Likewise though, I refuse to live expecting nightmares and turmoil. I want to welcome, as gifts, the hunky policemen and four-leaf clovers when they do happen. 

Reenacting a Scene, or: The Brunch

 

Just about over a year ago, when I made the decision to consent to Cornell’s wooing and move to Ithaca, I wondered what it would be like to live here.  Along with wondering, I had little preconceived settings of what it might be like.  I had a scene in my mind, unsupportedly detailed, the scene which represented What My Social Life Would Be Like, and it was a potluck, people of mixed ages all wearing earth tones, eating curried squash or the like, and talking about wind energy. Also for some reason, in my mind, this was occurring at the little Buffalo Street book store. That’s just how I imagined Ithaca might be.

Because reality is rarely like the churning whimsical creations of the brain, this scene from my imagination hadn’t happened. Until today. Just minus the bookstore.

It was a birthday brunch at an artist’s cooperative space, far enough out of Ithaca that I felt I was on a little journey. 

I love the story of how I became to be at this brunch. Once upon a time this fall, I was out dancing downtown, and with the late-night post-groovin’ munchies, I waited in line (with residual neon green hair from some Halloween function) for some duck-fat fries. A tall woman with short hair caught my eye and her partner reminded me of Peter Watson, bearded and plaid and rugged and I learned later, amazingly, also spent time in Vermont and made cool art creations. Somehow we all ended up chatting; who even knows how this starts, “I like your hair”?, “Amazing fries, huh?”  Some way to reach through the welter of people all strangers and connect with another. We had some good laughs on the same eccentric wavelength and there was such pleasure in connecting with people like this.  

The best part is that the next morning I was waltzing down State St, and happen to notice enthusiastic waves through the window at the State Diner. They were my Miss Tall Shorthair and Mr. Vermont. How wonderfully serendipitous. So I went in and sat with them while they waited for omelets to come out. “How did you possibly see me just walking by?” I asked disbelieving. Oh yeah….green hair.  May have served like one of those irritating flashing beacons atop a lighthouse.

So this brunch was in honor of Mr. Vermont’s 45^th birthday and I was tickled to be invited. We ate eggs baked adorably in a muffin pan, the requisite bacon and mimosas, my massive purple bowl of cinnamon ginger popcorn. “This popcorn has a wear mark in it”, observed Mr. Vermont, as he gestured to the large concave area he’d been scooping from methodically.

We spanned many generations. From a quiet lurking teenager to the hippies gone to seed, the wood worker who had made the beautiful long table we sat around, the table winding naturally with the curves of the wood. I loved being in this old farm house of someone I didn’t know, studying the postcards on the wall (“wait! I’ve also been to that very temple in Cambodia!”), and taking in someone’s kitchen, which is really a window to a soul in some ways. Like the beautiful table, there was a wooden counter top curving naturally with the character of its tree, part knife block as well, all these handles mysteriously protruding from the smooth wood.

I perched on a high chair, another beautifully contoured work of wood, taking in the scene before me reuniting with the one in my imagination. The yellow-grey hippies (one wearing gray camo pants with a grey plaid shirt, all atop crocs) rolled joints and puffed contentedly into the room, people served themselves more hash browns using the machete-recrafted-to-spatula, we swapped snow storm and road trip stories. Sentences starting like, “when I was hiking the Appalachian trail.” We discussed colony collapse disorder and yoga. “Yoga is the gateway drug to The New Age”, said one seeded hippie, making a funny.  “No, yoga is the gateway to gluten intolerance,” said Mr. Vermont and we all laughed.

Amazingly, a statistically unlikely proportion of my friends in Ithaca I met arbitrarily like this. Not introduced through a friend, not met in a class. But random people unconnected, seen at a park or an event, and someone was brave enough to extend a sentence. I have found Ithaca to be a cornucopia of fascinating and engaging and passionate people; people I just itch to be friends with and cannot help being curious about.