it happened quickly and quietly. I was standing in line, waiting for my guide’s help in translating the menu on the wall. out of the corner of my eye a woman approached her… they spoke briefly… and I returned to the menu. but while paying for my meal I noticed that my guide had two bowls of soup on her tray. moments later… smiling, she handed the second bowl of soup to the woman… the homeless woman… sitting in the milk bar. I don’t think anyone else noticed, and my guide didn’t mention what had just happened.

days earlier I was riding a bus in krakow in the early evening. the bus was pretty full with people coming home from work and school. but as the bus stopped near the city center, an elderly couple awkwardly made their way up the steps. near the door, a group of teenage boys were sitting and joking loudly… but as the couple approached them… they stood, greeted the couple, and gave up their seats to stand in the aisle.

I thought about these things on the train to prague… these small things… these quiet moments of human compassion. these things that we truly experience first-hand… not through the internet or television or history book… these things that take place in front of our own eyes… these things we feel with our own hands… 

If the evil of man is well documented… his goodness is surely in these small, quiet moments.

about 30 minutes into my overnight journey to krakow, the train came to an abrupt stop. shortly thereafter, one of the conductors came running down the hall, stopping at each couchette to yell something in czech. I turned to the man sharing my couchette and sheepishly asked if he spoke english… he shook his head and looked out in to the hall. A minute or so passed and I noticed other passengers starting to gather in the hall and peer out of the windows. I went to the hall, pulled down a window myself and peered out in to the dark night.

About 20 meters to the left, men with flashlights were running along the train track. as they flew past, I noticed they were dressed in orange reflective jackets… and looked strikingly like paramedics. I turned my head to the right and peered along the track. about a car and a half away, a few flashlights were waving about rapidly. as my eyes adjusted, I noticed a crowd of people standing around something near the track… a moment or two later I realized that the train had hit a person.

A few teenagers were standing near me… and thinking they probably spoke some english, I approached them to see if they knew what had happened. The young man’s sharp ”nah” to my inquiry made it clear that I wasn’t going to find anything else out. I resumed my perch near the window and watched the medics work. over the next half hour, about a dozen people arrived on the scene… policemen, firefighters, train employees, a photographer, and more paramedics. a small crowd had also formed on an overpass above the stopped train.

fellow passengers spoke to each other in quiet, foreign phrases as more train conductors moved through the train. about an hour later, the team of paramedics loaded the person on a stretcher and headed along the train tracks toward the overpass. I could see the man’s bloody face, bathed in artifical light from the train and flashlights, as the group passed beneath my window. a stressfull hour later, which involved me having to leave and return to the train, I laid my head down and we were back on our way to krakow. 

but as I lay there, I couldn’t help feel something strange about what I had just witnessed. days earlier I was in berlin and I’d spent a day visiting the sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of the city. It had been an alltogether sad experience… to see the physical remains of a place where so many thousands of souls painfully and cruelly left this world. I could still remember the eerie shivers that went up my spine as I walked passed the ruins of the camp’s gas chambers in the early winter darkness. and yet… this evening I had just witnessed over a dozen individuals work ferverishly to save the life of a single man… of unknown race or creed or name. 

how could both of these situations… both of these realities coexist? how was it possible to witness the ravishings of genocide… and the struggle to save a single human life within days of each other?

and as I type this now, from the floor of a dark flat in poland… I’ve just spent the day visiting the auschwitz and birkeneau concentration camps. I’m no closer to being able to reconcile the remains of these atrocities with the what seems like man’s natural desire to protect life. I know that there’s a lot more to this duality… and my discussion’s rather simple… but it was so clearly demonstrated to me by these brief experiences. For man, in all of his capacity for love and compassion, is equally capable of unspeakable and absolute evil… especially against his own.

and this potential for good and evil coexists in us all… both qualities equally capable of being manifested. For all the memorials built to victims in the world… new victims are made each day. does man learn from these lessons? world war I was once called the war to end all wars. the irony of this title is now obvious… but perhaps even more sorrowful, in that it was born out of hope… born out of the idea that man was indeed capable of learning from his mistakes. the images of the ruined crematoriums at birkeneau are still fresh in my mind… but weeks ago I traveled through a nation that experienced bloodshed and ethnic cleansing as little as 13 years ago.

and though it can be perceived as convenient or over-simplifying to take broad strokes at complex human issues… there still remains that basic characterstic of the man-beast… the light and dark sides of the human soul. both equally capable of realizing their potential.

as I left the barbed wire boundaries of auschwitz, I had a heavy heart… for the events that took place there… and the one that took place on the train.

sometimes too many choices can be a problem. endless possibilities cloud decision making… fill it with infinite loops of what if or why not. it’s especially hard when you’re not too picky what the final decision is… or rather, there’s no clear set of criteria available to differentiate between possible actions… other than maybe the obvious finite availability of time or money. but when you’re traveling, everything seems reasonably possible… and because of this, every decison is a sacrafice of sorts.

so as I lay in a hostel bed in florence, I found myself in typical decison making quagmire. I had just spent the last week making my way up the amalfi coast of italy and on through rome…. and now I had to decide where to go next.

the amalfi coast was absolutely gorgeous. it was amazing to dive into the napoli bay in october… with its lucent green water and gentle autumn sun. and parallel to the natural beauty of the coast, rome’s metropolitan elegance was undeniable… superior to the cities I’ve visited to date.

the actual decison to visit florence was largely based on looking at the map and noticing its presence between rome and venice. I’d heard of the city and read about its role in the italian renaissance but really didn’t know much more than that. it seemed logical to stop there on my way up to venice and out of italy. I was interested in visiting venice… but really for no other reason than the image of canal streets streets navigated by men in gondolas and striped shirts.

but time was starting to play a role that it hadn’t really before. I had promised my brother that i would return to the united states for his wedding… and now the late november flight from dublin to dallas was starting to loom in the distance. (don’t worry, an early january flight to new zealand has already been planned… but more on that later).

so as I there I lay… half a dozen locations floating in my head… none of which really presenting any specific glory over the other… the soft sound of time ticking away… I decided to look up some details about venice.

15 minutes later I learned three things… the train to venice was expensive, it was hard to couchsurf there and other accommodations where expensive as well. 20 minutes after that, I’d booked a train to ancona, italy and an overnight ferry to split, croatia.

to be honest… I wish all decision making was like this.

 

I usually like to make blog entries as I go along… but lately, I’ve been traveling faster than I’ve been writing. I’m in Bosnia-Herzegovina… a few hours before taking the train from mostar to sarajevo. there’s a number of things I want to write since leaving italy and croatia but, in the meantime, last night inspired me to write about a subject that I haven’t really touched on…

before I left portland, I was a vegetarian for about 3 years… no beef, chicken, pork, fish, etc. surprisingly, this choice didn’t really have a specific reason. I’d been asked dozens of times during those years why I chose vegetarianism and I didn’t really have a single or compelling answer. actually, I had rarely eaten red meat in my adult life and while living in seattle, I had a lot of veggie friends. part of me was interested in the potential health benefits of a vegetarian diet… and part of me was disgusted by the concept of factory farming. but I’d always described myself as a passive vegetarian. I seediet choices as personal ones… and never really wasted any breath defending my choice or trying to convince others to give up their meat eating ways.

but when I made the decision to travel, the decision to give up vegetarianism while on the road followed shortly thereafter. and surprisingly, it really wasn’t a hard decision.

I really see food as another aspect of traveling, just as important to the definition and sustainment of culture as language. a local dish can be the amalgamation of years of traditions… or perhaps the result of a single event or tragedy or accomplishment. but like many cultural expressions, such as music, there are a multitude of layers and subtleties to food. it’s not only the ingredients… it’s the rituals… the sayings… the way we define ourselves through our common actions… making how we eat just as important as what  we eat.

I  hadn’t really given my decision to leave vegetarianism at home much thought over the past few months. But as I sank in to a plate of mixed grilled meat last night after a long day tour, it came back to mind. I’ve had an amazing time on the road… and a beautiful aspect of that experience has been associated with food. From my first fish and chips the night I landed in london to sardines on the beaches of lisbon to early morning parisian croissants to home grilled sicilian meats to stuffed peppers in the shadows of a diocletian palace…

I plan on returning to vegetarianism when I get home. But for now…

it was shortly after returning from ireland that I boarded the overnight bus from scotland to london. a day wandering in london, a night flight to milan, a few hours sleep on the milan airport floor, another flight south… and like that I found myself in catania, sicily.

my original plan had been to visit morocco. I had a flight booked from milan to fez, and the reverse flight for two weeks later. but while I was in ireland, ryanair informed me that those flights were cancelled. a few hours of research showed that getting to morocco was going to be a cost and logistics challenge. so, with that, my new destination was sicily. I had a friend there who i’d been meaning to visit for a long time.

two months in scotland was making me forget what it felt like to have warm sun on my skin… and stepping out of the plane in catania quickly reminded me. my friend picked me up and off we went, weaving through the Italian traffic (if you haven’t been to southern italy before, driving seems to be more sport than a means of transportation).

the week I spent in sicily was beautiful. catching up with old friends… working in the mid day sun with a view of the mediterranean… visiting the small costal towns of aci reale and taourmina… tasting limoncello, canoles, sicilian pizza and wine, swordfish, and gelato(!)… but perhaps what stood out the most was the unplanned visit back to america.

the first location my friend and I headed off to after leaving the airport wasn’t the beach or some small sicilian café or pizzeria… it was a us military base… naval air station sigonella.

here I was, having been travelling for three days straight in the same clothes with four month long hair… thinking about arranging couchsurf hosts for the Italian cities I wanted to visit… celebrating the recent rise between the us dollar and the euro… wondering about ferry possibilities and costs out of catania. I hadn’t been in the united states in six months and it had been at least three years since being anywhere military. And yet, both of these experiences came back together at the same time… right there in sicily.

it actually felt strange to hear so many american accents… to see people in military uniform… to walk through the navy exchange (think target). these things were all part of what used to be “normal” to me… and now they felt so… foreign. It wasn’t a bad feeling… I harbour no angst or new found ill will towards my country. It was not unlike coming in to a new city or new country while on the road… except that this one was laced with a sort of dejavu.

but when you’re in a new country or city, you should try the local specialties. So, on my last night in sicily, I treated my friends to a delicious dinner…
at applebees.

the last few posts I’ve made have centered around photography… namely, my ever growing love of it as well as the recent and untimely death of my camera (I’m still in mourning). so, it was with a slightly bitter heart that I flew in to dublin… with a loose plan to explore the island nation for two weeks… without a camera.

but it’s absolutely amazing how time slows down when you go back out on the road. a day can feel like a week… and a week… well, that can feel like forever. if nothing else, traveling seems like an act of recapturing time… of taking hold of those moments that would regularly just slip through your fingers. minutes stretch long when you’re sitting on a rock pier, watching the sun slowly set over the celtic sea… or when you lay stretched out on your back in a grassy field… shooting stars streaking across the blindingly bright night sky… with the soft roar of the rolling ocean humming in your ears. it’s these moments… the slow and rich way that these grains fall through the hour glass… it’s these moments that cannot be photographed.

or the good… or the lost souls you meet along the way. the tangled conversations over dark irish beer in small public houses… where the air is thick with laughter and fiddle and bodhran and flute. you see yourself in their eyes… and drink in their stories with child-like wonder. you do your best to explain the fear you felt inside standing at the edge of the cliffs of moher, where a missed step would have sent you to the abyss. or the way you smile, slowly shake your head and recount that you… not once… but twice mistakingly grabbed an electric fence while out hiking… both times with shocking results.

it’s the missed buses… missed trains… apprehension about choosing the next destination… the second and third self guessing… it’s these moments that are pulled taught and weaved right alongside the tranquility you felt walking along the giant’s causeway, marveling that such a place was not made by human hands. weaved right alongside the awe you felt standing in derry, listening to the old man speak of bloody sunday and the years he spent in an RUC internment camp.

it’s these moments that seem to slow the day… that waver on the mind and sink inside… that capture all your senses… that make you feel alive. it’s these feelings that cannot be photographed.

“it’s not just your outside that moves when you travel” the young danish poet told me.
and I agreed. 

my photography project is complete. just a few participants but some interesting photos. click the image above to go to the site.

It happened in aberdeen, scotland. I was standing in the middle of a street trying to take a picture. I pushed the off button on my camera and raced to the sidewalk to avoid the traffic. but instead of dutifully retracting into its body, my camera lens jammed open. it couldn’t be revived no matter how many times I pushed the on button or changed the battery or wished it to work. After returning to edinburgh, I somehow convinced myself that I could fix it… that I could revive it from its coma. And then, with my own bare hands, I murdered it.

And what amazed me is how its death absolutely devastated me. I’ve talked about it a number of times, but exploring my new surroundings through photography has been a truly enjoyable and rewarding experience. And now here lay my precious little camera… murdered at my own hands. I was so frustrated by my lack of patience and insistence on trying to fix it. And I was heart broken to think about losing it… not just because of its cost, but because it felt like it represented losing my ability to take “good” photographs. And somewhere amidst my anguish, I was reminded of a quote I had read months before. I don’t remember it verbatim, but it read something like… “to have material possessions is to suffer.”

And the more angry I was about losing this possession, the more I kept coming back to that quote. Here was an object that I had become so attached to… convinced that my photographic ability was derived directly from it, like some sort of visual divining rod. And the rage and anger I felt at its loss… at its reduction to the broken fragments of plastic and glass and metal from which it came… these thoughts kept returning to the subject of that quote. That it was only my attachment to this possession that created these feelings… and yet this object no more defined my ability to photograph than any other object did or could. And this object was just that… simply an object… no more connected to me than any other object constructed by the hands of man.

I’m still frustrated about losing my camera… but its thoughts like these that seem to put things in a better perspective.

Loch Lomond - from the top of Conic Hill
taken with a borrowed camera

i created another three albums with these “lost” photos. take a look at camino iv, camino v, and camino vi. if you’ve seen some of these before… maybe you know where the pictures ran off to… or maybe you took them.

anyways, here are a few of my favorites from the bootlegs:

This weekend I took a road trip through some areas of scotland north of edinburgh… including loch lomond, stirling, crieff, dunkeld and perth. Even though there’s so much activity happening in edinburgh right now, it felt good to get out and see the countryside. From small farm backroads to tiny cobblestone alleyways hidden between buildings from the 18th century… the day was full of hidden surprises… and hidden beauty.

I love the city. I love its energy… its beat. I can’t help feel a sense of romance when I see a twinkling city skyline pressed against the dark of the night. It feels magical… but the countryside is not without its charms as well. The cool misty air at the foot of the scottish highlands… rolling grassy hills, blanketed in rich purple heather… dotted with countless grazing animals and weeping trees. The calm loch waters lazily lapping against rocky shorelines… nestled between distant peaks.

The city draws us together like a wanton mistress… with a ferver and heat at its lips. It pulses in our ears and burns at our tounge… consuming us in its embrace… invigorating our spirit but briefly… leaving us lifeless in its retreat. And the country beckons… like cool water to our lips… to calm and revive us… to remind us that we were not born from the concrete and block and piercing artifical light… that we came from the  wooded hills… from the windy plains… with grass and sand and rock at our feet. And so we breathe deep and slow… listening… quiet. And we feel… we wait… and leave again.

I’ve decided to undertake a small group photography project while I’m here in scotland… RandomThoughtShot. It’s a pretty simple project… challenging you to take something written… something random… and translate it into something visual. I want to keep the project pretty simple… and open to interpretation. And it’s open to anyone. Including you.

On August 29th, I will post 6 words/phrases/sayings/what have you on the RTS website. Take these words… take your camera… and shoot something. Then… I’ll want you to tell me why you shot what you did. Easy.

It’ll be fun.

I’ve been in edinburgh a little over a month now. It’s amazing how quickly time moves… when you stop moving. The days felt so long before coming here to scotland. But the days here have also been filled with new friends, new places, and new experiences. In august, edinburgh is full of festivals and events. One of which is the edinburgh fringe festival… one of the largest comedy and theater festivals in the world. The city is full of people right now and hums with excitement. I also visited glasgow this past week…  a larger city with a more industrial and blue collar feel but rich with history and character. I’m planning an ireland trip for early september… and will spend a few weeks going through cork, gallway, and dublin. I’m also reserching walking the west highland way - a 95 mile trail near the western shores of scotland. This trail would be similar to the camino - except that I would free camp along the way and the weather would likely be harsher. But the thought of experiencing this beautiful scottish landscape in quiet and by foot appeals to me… as even to this day I miss the experience of the camino.

And as plans are made, plans are changed. My stay in scotland has been longer than originally anticipated… but has been a beautiful time in many respects… and my visit will continue on still. Hardly feels like summer most days… but warm days are quickly replaced by the warmth of the people I’ve encountered here. The scots are a proud people… friendly beyond all expectation… and though I have a hard time understanding them, learning about them has been interesting. And the town is full of other visitors, expats… australians, spaniards, french… a colorful mixture of languages and cultures.

a scottish ceilidh
a folk dance not unlike square dancing. The best good ol’ fashioned time I’ve had in years.