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| The last time I posted i was in the middle of the school month. Now I'm at the end of my European vacation/wandering period, in an internet cafe in Venice, vaguely understanding the computer lingo between two Italians behind me, probably going to be using up the rest of my euros on this internet even though he's kind and charging me the student rate: 1.50€ for 20 minutes.
So the most unexpected encounter occurred last night. It might be the most unexpected occurrence that's ever happened, because every action that I took seemed to have led me on a specific path that I was completely unaware of. I arrived at the San Lucia Train station about 3:30, and I was starving. But I had to look for my hotel. The directions to the hotel said take a waterbus, but I looked at the price, and it was like 12€ a ride. I said no thanks I'll walk and set out mapless and clueless of what I would see and who I would meet.
As I walked through the narrow streets, full of tourists and guys selling those fake Prada bags I wondered what Venice would have been without all the commercialization. Gondolas everywhere, and every small bridge over every winding canal seemed to have been crafted for the backdrop of some romance movie or a for a postcard face. But yet the city was lifeless: a city without inhabitants, a collection of hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops. Venice is truly an enchanting city, but it's a curious one. Hundreds of tourists walked past me looking in the shops and every one of them was carrying an ice cream cone. I didn't see one Venetian, and there was no presence of life.
Well I basically got lost, went way too far south where I saw this southern island thing for which I don't know the name and it's not important. I kept trying to get to San Marco Square, where the hotel directions were from. I saw one landmark though: The Peggy Guggenheim collection. I knew this art museum was south of San Marco. So I kept walking and finally crossed the Academia bridge bearing a sign that said "I [heart] Tourism". On the other side of the bridge I knew I was close, cause there were these yellow signs directing me towards the square.
When I finally approached the square I was fascinated how it was kind of trapezoidal, and not square, like a square. But I stopped at a small shop to ask for directions. And walking past the Cathedral coming a little closer to where I thought my hotel was, something happened that made me realize every single decision I had made, to reserve an afternoon ticket, not to take a water bus, my getting lost, asking for directions at the square, everything had somehow led me to this.
"Jason, is that you?!" Passing on the side of the Cathedral I looked up and couldn't believe it. "Amy?! " I had run into my OBU friend from Alicante, who I hadn't expected to see until September, maybe early May. "I was just going to go meet up to have dinner with Jeff and Stephanie!" she said. Now I was in a complete state of shock. Our trips which had not parallelled at all were now crossing paths. I followed Amy and met up with Jeff and Stephanie, who could not have looked more surprised. That evening over a few cheap pizzas, we shared our Europe experiences and memories, ones we did not expect to share until months from now.
Jeff and Stephanie left today for Florence, and Amy is spending the day at a local island and will leave tomorrow. Our crossing of paths was brief and seemed like it was a chance encounter, but for some reason I have a feeling it was not accidental.
The church bells outside say it's time for lunch. I think I'll have a slice of pizza. That is, if I can afford it.
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| We always go off on a tangent in the class with Chitty Chitt Bang Bang. Always. (but it's so much fun) Ok, so today almost everybody was in class (once in a lifetime) so there were seven kids and Chitty, and everyone in the room is from a different country. Chitty from Spain, Marlena from Austria, me from USA, Svetlana from Russia, Tania from Sweden, Susan from Great Britain, and Riri and Hiro from Japan. And all of us speaking Spanish. How awesome! Well, we were reading this text on the Big Bang theory, and Chitty is to blame for our tangent. She says, "You know, sometimes I have a harder time believing the Big Bang theory than I do believing in Adam and Eve." Everyone entered into a fascinating conversation about existence and whether there was a God. The Swedish girl held firm that there could never be a God and that religion was simply an archaic way of explaining scientific phenomena we couldn't explain at the time. Chitty also explained how the Greeks had "mythos" theories which were mythological ways of explaining life and history and "logos" or rational ways of explaining life. I mentioned Aristotle's theory of the Prime Mover as being a logos theory and the fact that belief in God still has supernatural undertones and I consider it to be a rational theory. The conversation moved into different territories. Our class works so well together despite the strange differences: Susan from Britain is actually Catholic, not Anglican, but she doesn't really have a Christian worldview (whatever the heck that is). We started talking about Adam and Eve. Everyone in the room, British, Austrian, Swedish, and Russian, had received religion classes in public school and knew the creation story of the Bible quite well. "We are taught religion in school but none of us follow any church." How strange that never would the creation story of the Bible be mentioned in a public school in the United States yet everyone there has heard of Adam and Eve through Sunday school. I was simply amazed that Europe still has religion classes in elementary school. But the cinversation got deeper still. What do we believe. Svetlana said that she believed in God and was baptized as a young baby but couldn't understand how evolution could have brought us to Earth. "Do you believe in the Adam and Eve?" asked Tania from Sweden. "I don't know, but I cannot believe in that we came from monkeys." Suddenly many of the stereotypes I had once held dear were crumbling before me. A European doubting science? All this time I thought that religion/belief in God was extinct in Europe, and that the USA was the only nation lagging behind in accepting scientific theories like evolution and the Big Bang theory. Tania is the only atheist in that class. Chitty says she believes in God but has not been to church in so long that she cannot remember how to genuflect. She was still questioning how Tania could not believe that there was a begginning to the world. "If there is no God, then where did we come from?" asked Chitty. Tania half-joked, "Well I heard one theory that maybe Martians colonized Earth." "But that only puts off the problem further. If that's true, where did the Martians come from?" asked Chitty. With my very limited understanding of Eastern philosophy, and being a bit intimidated with two Japanese students sitting in the room, I felt a little uncomfortable making assumptions/generalizations about Eastern verses Western conceptions of time and reality. "If I may speak for the Christian worldview, it is generally linear, having a begginning and an end to time. God created the world and humans, we lived on this earth for some time, then the world will end with Jesus coming back. This is of course a mammoth generalization and simplification of thousands of years of JudeoChristian theology. But this establishes the basis for how we view life--We are born, we live and we die, some theologians even consider our short 9 months in the womb as the experience of the Garden of Eden for every individual--a physical metaphor that God wanted us to experience." "Eastern philosophies view existence as cyclical, without begginings or endings. Buddhists have the wheel of life and both Buddhists and Hindus have reincarnation into another being. Perhaps our quest for a beggining or a prime mover are somewhat influenced by our "Christian " worldview." But then Marlena added "Wouldn't there still be an end in Buddhist or Hindu philosophy since the ultimate goal is to reach Nirvana or Enlightenment or reach the Priesthood caste? It couldn't be completely cyclical because there would have to be an end." The Japanese students on other side of the room were quiet. I learned in my last class from Riri that it is very rude in Japan to speak loudly and interrupt someone, so now that I'm used to interrupting everyone and their uncle the Japanese kids can't find space to jump in. We asked them about this philosophical worldview and Hiro said "The closest thing to religion we have in Japan is Shinto, but nobody practices it and religion is basically nonexistant in Japan." "So, what does a Japanese mother explain when her younger child asks who created the world?" asked Chitty. "The mother has nothing to say, because Shinto myths are no longer circulated. Japanese culture has essentially been mixed and blended with so many things that it is hard for me to even explain it. We just don't have myths or stories anymore." I thought quietly to myself, "Could WWII and when the US basically rewrote Japanese government and laws somehow influenced Japanese culture? Was Japanese culture generally abandoned after the 1940's? How weird is it that they don't have stories or myths in their culture and life." I thought more and remembered that even the stories of Creation and of the world "we" as Americans or Europeans did not derive from native soil, they came from Israel, or the territory of Palastine. The myths and stories the Germanic peoples had about life were crushed by Christian ideas, when Clovis converted to Christianity in the seventh century. I mean, they had ideas and myths about creation and stories with religious figures like Thor and Odin, and these are not commonly known by the Germanic cultures of today. Christianity has certainly been synchretistic (thanks Dr. Auffenberg :) over the years and it's interesting how it has touched and influenced so many cultures in Europe and even Asia. Riri was saying that it is "de moda" or "fashionable" for a Japanese couple to get married in a church. How weird. No Shinto ceremonies or Eastern traditions. Western culture has certainly evolved into a strange amalgamation of different stories and ideas and it's broad precepts continue to influence the rest of the world. But even Eastern traditions are making their way over too. Most of the class seemed to be more comfortable with a cyclical view of life and reality signifying that an eastern understanding is permeating and influencing Western culture. We really do talk about some interesting stuff in that class. "Ok enough about religion and culture, let's get back to our favorite: Grammar!" said Chitty. All seven individuals in class, with separate worldviews and religions, groaned as we got out our textbooks. (yeah, if you read all of this you are a trooper and three fourths for real). | | |
| Yeah it was pretty weird. So, we're off on a tangent with Profesora "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" today talking about who knows what, and the Swedish girl (what's her face) said she'd heard a news story saying that a meteor was aimed directly at the earth and NASA predicts its collision with the Earth in 2036. I heard this and I was like, "really??" I was quite stunned to hear that this is true news. All of the sudden I started having thoughts. I looked out the window. "What'll I be, 50 something?" Birds were flying out and landing on the palm branches right outside our window. There's a nest above our classroom and every day we can hear them chirping. "Surely my parents will still be alive in 2036." The class grew pretty silent and Chitty took the opportunity to help us practice our Spanish. Susan from Britain said, "Bueno, que será será." We joked about how much the scenario sounded like a sequel to Armageddon. "Bruce Willis probably won't be alive in 2036 though," I said. Svetlana, from Russia and who we call "Lana" for short ("wool" in Spanish) laughingly said "Let's just go out and party the next 30 years then! We can have a party celebrating that there will not be a future! Only 30 more years to live!" We all laughed but a sense of disturbance was noted in the classroom. Passing over the different faces of the people there it was certain that individual realizations were being discovered. At that moment I sensed a collective reinterpretation of the premise of life. We were formulating new theses on concepts such as purpose and fulfillment. In my mind, the manifold abstract I had labeled "time" was quickly dehydrating--all I could see was a miserable, burden-ridden block of air. In the "pausa" I looked on NASA's website and read that a meteor could hit in 2036, but there is a 1 in 5000 chance of that happening. That means that we can be 99.98% sure that nothing will happen. Although I am usually skeptical of other people's interpretation of the news after reading the truth online I can't deny that I felt a deep feeling of relief pass over me. We never know "when" it's going to end. I mean, we have deadlines for nearly everything: essays, book reviews, drivers licenses, milk, cheese, meat, Rotary Club International Ambassadorial Scholarship Essays (that finally were finished and translated this afternoon), among other things. But life doesn't really have an expiration date--that we know about. Once we give it an expiration date, life seems to have a different meaning. | | |
| It´s bout time for another post. Wow! February is here! Apparently it´s still wintertime back in the US, but we´ll all have to check in with the groundhog later on today to see if winter is there to stay for a while. I ate lich today with a group of people from Mississippi College and one of the girls said that they celebrate Groundhog´s day every year, with a party and everything. I was like, "You´re from Mississippi right? Gotcha." And I´m always messing with them like "Arkansas schools are 49th in the nation, a step above Mississippi!" We mess with each other a lot about Arkansas and Mississippi. It´s quite interesting that I´m claiming I am from Arkansas although I´ve only loved there maybe 3 years of my life. I´ve lived eight years in Virginia (though not all continuous) and eight in Costa Rica. But home is still an undefined concept. I still don´t really consider a specific location my "home." Sometimes people say "if you had to choose then which would it be?" and even then my response always depends on who I´m talking to. Home truly is an undefined concept for me, very difficult to explain or even think about. Most of the time I just forget about it and pick something less complicated to think about. Pumba said "home is where your rump rests." Likewise, I agree Pumba, I guess I could call this very hot and enormous computer lab that I´m sitting in "home." Wouldn´t be to bad. In a class I had to take with Mark Miller, History of the American West, we learned that "The Frontier" perhaps was not a place but rather a concept. Traditional historians like Turner considered "The Frontier" somewhere east of the Mississippi, but huge debate existed regarding where exactly the Frontier was. Was Arkansas the frontier? Not to Arizona, but to North Carolina it was. That class really made me think about labels, and how differently you can look at these labels from different perspectives. Spain has a fascinating character. People have less of a sense of personal space, and are more direct when speaking. Yesterday me and my buddies were hesitating in ordering our hamburgers so the waitress basically said "whatever [expletive] let me know when you´re ready." So we returned the favor and got up and left her restaurant. But that´s expected. This is my learning experience, being with people and figuring out how to interact with them has been totally new and interesting. I also love being in a city that dates back to a Phoenician settlement way back when. The other day we climbed another hill and were able to see parts of the city and of the castle from a different angle. I thought about how many different types of people have lived in this one city. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moors, etc. Such a rich collection of societies that over time have come and gone--they have all impacted this small town in different ways and shaped it into the curious city that it is. Being away for a semester has been very good for my development. It has posed questions about future plans, approaching events, people back home, and forced me to look at them from 5000 miles away. This distant perspective has been surprising in my view of these "things," surprising in how I notice my opinions are changing and my conceptions are shifting. "Home" has come up quite a bit in my self conversations. But living in Spain had led me to one conclusion: I am not home. Despite the richness and the passion, right now at least, Spain is not my home. Perhaps these realizations could lead me to a better understanding of where or what "home" actually is, and I am glad for having observed "things" from a different perspective. First month has been enlightening and wonderful. And I´m ready to further explore Spain and its surroundings. If you actually read all of that you are a trooper. No, you are a trooper and a half! | | |
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