Night of the Italian Road of Pedestrian Death Hazard

I have just survived one of the stupidest acts I have ever committed in a foreign country. This is precisely the sort of thing that my mother is trying to avoid ever hearing about when she says "With Matt, no news is good news."

Dinner ran late. I was in Rome in the Travestere neighborhood. I could have rushed back across the river and over to the Colosseum Metro stop, but worried that I'd miss the last train. Having spent the day walking around the city, I had a pretty good sense of my map's scale and it looked like walking back to the hotel wouldn't be too far. I just had to take this big, wide, main road that happens to have park land on both sides. Possibly a sparsely populated, but there would be lots of cars and it would surely be well lit. No problem. Off I went. The early parts of those parks turned out to be pretty cool. I saw a couple lesser monuments and a big fountain.

I hit a snag when I reached the main stretch of that big, wide main road. You see, it sorta dropped into a groove in the ground with 20 foot walls on either side, with no shoulder on the road. At first, I thought it would only last through the next curve, so I barreled along. After 50 meters, I thought twice and doubled back to ask the opinion of two Carabinieri standing guard in front of some gates. They were charming and friendly. We fumbled through their limited English and my wacky Italio-spanish. They looked at my maps, I looked at my maps. One of them put on his glasses to read my map, which makes one think twice about the fact that he was wielding a loaded machine gun without his glasses on.

After some discussion, the Carabinieri concluded that the path I had chosen was my only way. I still had my doubts, but when two handsome guys with machine guns tell you 'go for it', it's hard to turn back.

Let me tell you, there was no shoulder. At all. The road was really curvy too, so I was constantly on the invisible side of a bend in the road. Had this been a Saturday night, I certainly would be dead by now, splattered on the road by some drunken dude in a Fiat.

Worse, not only was there no shoulder, there was nothing along that road for hundreds of meters. Talk about a walking target. Over a hundred cars must have passed me. After thinking "what kind of idiot walks on this road? At night no less?", any one of them could have then thought "huh, he's got nothing but 20 foot walls on either side of him for hundreds of meters, and I've got a car/vespa. I could easily take advantage of him." Well, actually, they probably thought something like "Ho potuto facilmente approfittare di lui." (thanks google translate).

Eventually, I emerged on the other side of the Italian Road of Pedestrian Death Hazard. If you still don't see why I have dubbed this one of the stupidest things I have ever done in a foreign country, let's add a couple of facts to the list:

• It was drizzling. I failed to think about the road implications of that.
• I was wearing a dark sweater, dark shirt, and dark jeans (though I did consider taking my shirts off for sake of visibility.)
• I had just arrived in Rome for the first time ever merely 24 hours prior
• Did I mention that I was walking alone down a dimly lit, unpopulated roadway in Rome at midnight?

On the other hand, there was an old Roman aqueduct running along one side of the road. That was pretty cool.

Mangio Solo

07 March 2009
Catania, Sicily, Italy
Grand Hotel Baia Verde

Day two of traveling alone in Italy. Mainly I only notice that I'm alone at mealtime. Today I went to the Hotel's centro benessere (Wellness Center) for a massage and a facial. I felt alone there too, soaking in the sea salt therapeutic pool and exploring the row of "emotional showers" that take turns changing colors, intensities, temperature, and scent according to a programmed succession. (Think of a cross between night clubbing, Twister, and musical chairs, add water and aromatherapy.) I wanted someone to giggle in amusement with.

Has it been only two days? I've been traveling solo since November. At every stop I've had some mix of old friends to visit, new friends to dig into, and family to catch up with. I didn't think of myself as being alone all those weeks. Roughly 100 nights and I rarely dined alone. I would be challenged to list all of the wonderful companions with whom I've shared bread in these travels. None of it has served to dispel the solitude.

In Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa describes the Bodhisattva path as being deeply lonely. I feel as if I have achieved the loneliness while completely neglecting the spiritual point.

I've been avoiding restaurants in order to dodge that moment when I tell the host tavolo per uno (table for one), and he inevitably says "solo." (alone.) in a declarative yet questioning way, as if he hopes I've spoken wrong.

Paradoxically, a powerful part of me seeks even more solitude. There's so much writing, reading, contemplation, and མ་སེམས་ (ma sem, non-thought) that I yearn to immerse myself in. I would love to go on a month-long silent retreat right now. Nothing sounds more appealing than slow yoga under a tree somewhere - rain, sunshine, or otherwise - and a plain mat to sleep on.

Yet here I am in Sicily in a four-star hotel. Tomorrow I will move on to Rome, a capital of civilization for thousands of years. I've been flung here by circumstance over which I have little control, though I do choose to engage and I did dictate the terms of engagement.

I could have passed this one by. Could have skipped the conference, or simply flown home after the conference ended. Round trip to Sicily for three days of networking and then straight home .. it just sounds too stupid. My whole life, I've intended to come here but never found the right time. Thus, here I am. I eat the tasty food, I drink the vino della casa (house wine). I stumble through the national tongue, learn the local mass transit, and wander their streets gradually constructing that visceral mental map of each city - the one I absorb through my feet, bound to my eyes and annotated by my other senses.

Arriving in Washington DC, sick as a dog.

Besides a quiet dinner with friends on Tuesday evening and a morning flight from Minneapolis to DC, I spent a straight 48 hours in bed. Fever, delirium, chills, the works ... all because of a sore throat.

This morning I managed to get out of my hotel and wander around Dupont Circle. It's interesting to see how people present themselves on the street here. The best way I can make sense of it is to remember that this city is all about power. Money is a form of power, as are influence, affiliations, titles and such. Creativity, on the other hand, is a power that this city seems to see as a secondary. People's clothes aren't very colorful here, and their hairstyles are relatively tame. This is not to say that people here don't flaunt what they've got. It's just that what they choose to flaunt is somewhat different.

Teaism in DC

For some reason, I always expect Tea Shops to be either snobby like Kuan Yin in Seattle or quiet and formal like La Societe du The in Minneapolis. I certainly assume that they don't serve food beyond the occasional scone. Gladly, when I walked past Teaism near Dupont Circle in DC, I was just looking for plain, cold, unsweetened iced tea to soothe my throat. I ordered the iced French Vervene Tisane (Lemon Verbena) but also noted that they had some yummy looking lunch foods on the menu.

I sat down to catch up on my emails. (I don't know if they have wifi, I was using my phone.) About an hour passed and the lunch rush had started to arrive. The food they ordered smelled delicious, so I gave the menu another glance. My eye immediately honed in on Ochazuke "Japanese Rice & Tea soup", available with either Salmon or Plum. I ordered the plum version. What arrived on the counter was even cooler than I had imagined. A bowl of rice, covered with shredded veggies, cilantro, and some dried flavorful stuff like seaweed and toasted rice. Perched atop this were two ume plums. Beside it on the tray were a teapot and a tea cup. I was perplexed for a moment until I put 2 and 2 together, pouring the tea over the bowl of rice and veggies. The soup was incredibly flavorful and surprisingly filling. I did discover, however, that I don't like fresh ume plums. They're the only thing I left in the bowl.

The greatest delight was filling that teacup with the spare green tea and sipping at it. The flavor was unnervingly familiar. I'm tempted to claim that it tasted like comfort in tea form. It reminded me of salt water, toasted grains, and soup broth.

After finishing my meal I grabbed a free refill of my iced tea, this time iced assam, and went back out into the DC heat.

Next stop: Mr Yogata frozen yogurt with a friend.

On mom's balcony, reflecting.

There's nothing quite like being cooped up in your mom's place after 5 months of solo travel. I returned to Minneapolis on the 10th of April. It didn't make sense to get an apartment of my own until June, so I've been staying with my mother in her downtown condo. Between old habits and the cable TV, I've been completely out of sorts. I don't feel like myself here. The late spring hasn't helped either.

During my first week back in the USA, I spent half my time freaking about business development logistics and spent the other half of my time figuring out how to leave Minneapolis.

My second week back, the biz dev logistics freakout got the best of me, I celebrated my birthday, reconnected with some friends and discovered (again) why I love this city.

On week three I was bowled over by the JA-SIG conference, which happened to be in St Paul this year. I gave presentations on three days out of four. The info was good and the conversations were great, but my presentations could have been better.

It's now week four and I've finally started meditating again. I think this is my first moment of reflection since leaving London. As I sit here and look at the midnight skyline, I'm trying to call up a bit of perspective. These past month's travels are like a dream. This moment is like a dream. Why do I always forget to pay attention?

Saturday Afternoon in Berlin: A snapshot of my brain at the moment

The uber cool Ruby Users Group in Minnesota has an increasingly large faction that really digs functional programming. A few months back, an offshoot group formed who aspired to tackle the eponymous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) with the help of MIT's OpenCourseWare. Though I've never finished even half of SICP, I have set out to read it on my own a number of times. Each time I come back, the supporting materials online have increased. Though my current travels prevented me from participating in the group, I subscribed to their list out of curiosity.

After a few months of stop-and-start, an email cropped up on the list pointing to another SICP study group with a similar schedule. The link referenced the inkdroid blog, which I recognized but couldn't place. I assumed that it was one of the numerous Ruby/Rails bloggers out there, but as it turns out inkdroid is actually part of the code4lib galaxy. He also has a lot of Buddhist books on his bookshelf. Small world.

Sadly, I will be missing the code4lib conference in Portland, Oregon next week. I love the Pacific Northwest and want to hear the latest buzz from the lib-coder backrooms, but it is too far and too complicated to get there from Berlin. In the meantime, I've been tending to MediaShelf, launching the MediaShelf blog, discovering Berlin, meditating more, poking around on Gay Romeo (disappointing), and reading Gravity's Rainbow.

Here's a wonderful video from inkdroid's feed:

Getting all misty in transit

I've been reading The Time Traveler's Wife while flying between Minneapolis and San Antonio. It's been a long time since a book has captured my emotions in this way. Every few chapters I come across a passage that makes my stomach drop and my eyes well up with salty droplets. I feel so silly sitting there, crying briefly in the airline terminal, in my seat on the plane, on a bench waiting for the hotel shuttle. It's wonderful.