sadness

Tonight is the last night that I will spend snuggle up cozily in my Hotel Prestige bed, with mosquitoes buzzing in my ear. Tonight is the final Thursday night dinner that Meridyth, Vouj, Felty, and I will spend fixing food and feasting upon it late into the evening in our spacious apartment. Today was the last day I trudged over to the Katolicka Jednota to our classroom for CHOW II and American Writers in Europe. Tomorrow will be my goodbye trip to Tete, Tesco, and the Building...because tomorrow at 3 am, my bus departs for the Bratislava airport, jetlag, and home.

I'm sitting here, having cranked out one full essay and researched and outlined another, listening to Shawn Mullins while Felty dissects some aromatic chicken breast on the burner. The sunshine is glowing through the shades in our window. Books and articles of clothing are scattered across the beds and tables, and our Billa trash bag gapes open from the handle of the interior door.

I'm going to miss it here.

blameless

Have you ever thought about that word, "blameless"?

I just realized, last night, that I've never appreciated what God means when he calls me to be blameless. It means that I live in such a way that I am above reproach--above blame--above suspicion. Like Christ.

That shakes me. That is NOT my life. Thousands of self-judged "minor" infractions characterize everything I do.

I need to stop rationalizing my sins away, and recognize that if I act in a way that could incur blame, I sin.

Just a thought.

a memory...

Ah, the men of Italy. Tall, dark, handsome, amorous, and persistent—their kind has peopled the annals of art and literature for centuries. No woman, I was told, could ever visit Italy and leave feeling undesirable.

I visited Rome, and I encountered men who fit the pattern…some, embarrassingly so. But my most memorable meeting was with a quite different individual.

It was the final day of our stay in the eternal city: a gusty, cloud-swept night. The lights of the city and the noises of traffic made me question whether I was, indeed, walking the venues of that ancient city—it felt so industrial, so modern. As my doubts gained credibility, the street blossomed in front of me into a vast flagstone piazza, dominated by a massive sculptured fountain: the Piazza del Populo. Now this was Rome. Lovers walked arm-in-arm across the wide area, or draped themselves in various attitudes on the benches and the stairs of the sculpture. The patchy breeze and the plashing of the fountain mythologized even the distant roar of traffic. My companion and I seated ourselves on the cement stairs of the fountain and looked about us in silence.

The stranger annoyed me at first. Another grasping peddler, destroying my experience by trying to exploit my tourist’s purse. He approached us hesitantly at first, hovering from a distance of several yards as if weighing his chances. In the darkness, I distinguished a short round figure in jeans and a sweatshirt. In his arms he bore a bunch of roses. His dim outline gradually gained clarity as he gained nerve and approached us. I guessed that he was of Indian origin by his pigment.

He extended the rose to us with a fawning sort of smile.

“No thank you,” I shook my head apologetically and smiled. “They are beautiful—but I have no money.” I hated this aspect of tourism. All week, I had been turning down the wares of wandering vendors, speculating whether this was their only source of income, and how much actually depended upon my reception or dismissal.

This man appeared unfazed. “Where are you from?” he questioned, his already timid voice so confused by his accent that it took a moment for me to decipher its message.

“Umm....oh! I’m from America,” I replied.

“America,” he nodded and smiled, lingering.

Maybe he had gone all day without exchanging more than a haggling conversation or two with a handful of self-important tourists. His posture and the eager expression on his face told me that he desired to stay. And I, on my part, was intrigued.

“Where are you from?” I returned.

Without need of further prompting, the man unleashed a torrent of words. It took all my powers of concentration to be able to interpret the unfamiliar cadence and articulation, but I understood the gist of his speech. Originally from Bangladesh, he had moved to Rome three years ago to earn some more money. He planned on returning to his homeland soon—within the year. I asked if he had family there, and he shook his head.

He began questioning me then. Did I like Rome? When did I return to America? Did I have a boyfriend? Gradually, his voice had acquired vigor, and I found it easier and easier to understand what he was saying.

After a few minutes, he shook my hand with an enormous smile, wished me and my friend a good final evening in Rome, and bade us goodbye.

So much of his story remained a mystery. What had inspired him to leave his homeland in the first place? Why Rome? Where did he stay? Did he find it difficult to make ends meet? Why roses?

As I wondered about that man, the people teeming around me took on a new strangeness. Every single one of them had a story like that of the Bangladesh rose-vendor, a story that had led them to Rome: Rome, the city that had drawn people from all civilizations and walks of life to it for centuries. On every face, the genetic material of ages of human life had blended to produce an absolutely original individual. How many of our ancestors had encountered each other in the past, in other settings, under other circumstances? And there we all were, cheerfully breezing by each other in a starlit piazza of a Roman spring.

Even as I sit here reminiscing, I wonder if that man still walks the streets with his armful of roses, telling his story to anyone who will listen. I wonder how many people from all walks of life have his blooms, dried and pressed, adorning the pages of their scrapbooks. Perhaps he has returned to Bangladesh, and there entertains his friends with tales of his adventures abroad.
And I wonder…does he tell the story of two American girls he met on the stairs of a fountain in the Piazza del Populo, who would not buy his roses?

Do I have to go home?

ah, the benefits of travel...

Foreign places help your mind to float free

And reduce you to such simplicity

You only know the words for Good night and Good day

And Please.

You don't know how to say

"My life is torn between immutable existential uncertainties."

Garrison Keillor

shantih shantih shantih

Happy belated Easter!

So in my American Literature class we are reading The Wasteland, which begins "April is the cruelest month." NO WAY. I love April! (Aside from the little important detail of it being tax month...but I don't believe that that's what Eliot meant anyway.)

I just returned from a trip to Vienna and Salzburg with Lauren. Tra-la-la--What can I say? (In the words of our exuberant hostess, Monica Byers...)

The first day we departed from the Trnava train station directly after class, and got a connecting flight to Wein Sudbonhof through Bratislava. On board, we met a fellow American--this guy was studying medicine in Martin, Slovakia and took the weekend off to party in Vienna. He gave us a lot of advice about what sort of things to look for while we were in Vienna, and then two other American guys heard us talking and came over. I cannot describe how great it was to be able to communicate freely in American English. We arrived in Sudbonhof and Lauren's friend (an elderly patient of her father's who insisted we call her Monica) picked us up and took us to her apartment, where we unpacked and then took off for the metro. We spent the evening wandering around Stephensplatz...looking at all the mimes and street performers, window shopping, and picking up some bratwurst for a euro in a sidestreet. Bed in a real homey environment was indescribably delicious.

The next morning we both felt so rested! Monica fixed me a whole pot of real drip coffee, with fresh bread from the market and yogurt and granola for breakfast. We got ready, and then took the train back into Vienna again. There, we explored the Belvedere--I got to see a lot of Klimt (not my favorite, to be honest), Kokoshka, and some other famous (and by now over-familiar) painters' works. After that, we went to visit the Schonnbrun gardens, and got sidetracked into checking out the Easter markets. There were so many gorgeous things for sale, and delectable dishes--it was great to just sniff and ogle everything. The gardens were gorgeous, and offered a marvelous view of the city as the sun set.

The following day, Monica took us on a personal tour of some of the quieter, more scenic Austrian cities: Baden (the place that Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and others all went to rest and rejuvenate when they were fed up with Vienna), Gumpensdorf (which had a lovely church), and Modlin (where she treated us to lunch on a panoramic hilltop outdoors). We returned to Vienna in time to catch Verdi's Simone Boccanegra at the Opera house--standing room tickets, which cost only two euros.

At seven am the next morning, Lauren and I were standing in Westbanhof waiting for the train that would take us to Salzburg for Easter, clutching our prepurchased tickets. I have never missed Sunday morning Easter service so much in my life. There seriously is no place to celebrate Easter in a non-Catholic fashion in Vienna...so on the train there Lauren and I read the Easter story and prayed for awhile. It was okay, but I was seriously homesick for Cornerstone, and coffee with the family afterward.

Arriving in Salzburg was a bit rocky at first, because we realized that we hadn't planned anything for once we actually arrived! But we scrounged up a tourist map, hopped on a bus to the center of the city, and found ourselves smack-dab in the middle of the Sound of Music Tour (and, I might add, a large number of elderly American couples). We traipsed through the gardens, picked a street, and started walking down it. It took us across the Danube, to the oldest part of the city, where we wandered through beautiful shopping streets and cafes, bobbing in and out of ancient cathedrals, and checking out stunning view after stunning view of the city as we climbed higher and higher in the foothills of the Alps. We took a trail that led to a castle, and took pictures of the view. Then we went back down to the Danube and just sat on the banks for about an hour, before heading back to the old city and finding a Franciscan cemetery. Just as we got there, the bells started tolling for Easter, and the air was full of them for about a half an hour! Transporting. Finally, we got dinner in an Italian restaurant and caught our train back to Vienna. Several train-switches and metro-rides and a ten-minute walk later, we were back at Monica's apartment--dead tired, and o so happy.

We left the next day, after visiting St. Stephen's cathedral (my favorite church so far!) and Starbucks.

It wasn't all spectacular, though. We were waiting in the Sudbonhof station for our train to come in, and the only open seats were across from these four men (probably late twenties), and next to a girl about our age. She had a half-empty bottle of Vodka in one hand, and she was so drunk. Her teeth were horrible, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she was wearing a very short skirt and boots and kept knocking these off her seat and muttering under her breath. The men started pointing and laughing at her, and she looked at them and started talking to them, asking if they could tell that she was "on drugs", saying she was waiting for "her man", that she had a little daughter but her mother was taking care of her because she was on drugs...all in broken English. Then she talked to us, asked us where we were from, and said she wanted to go to America because she heard they had great "disco-techs" there. She told us not to talk to the men because they "just want to fuck"...that they had propositioned her before we arrived.

I don't know--she was so kind and sweet and friendly to us, but so incredibly messed up! I was so upset that the minute we got on the train back to Bratislava I just completely lost it and started crying. After the "high" of being in Vienna and visiting all these marvelous places and experiencing Easter in a foreign country...to be reminded so graphically of the evil in this world... I just kept wondering if there was anything I should've said, any way I could've offered her hope, instead of just chatting sweetly and abstractly about "America." Just reliving the memory makes me sick to my stomach. In that sense, Eliot's poem makes more sense...I'm sure that girl would agree that April is the cruellest month. Without a risen Christ, this world is a horrible, horrible wasteland. Praise God that He is powerful enough to overcome death, and bring "shantih shantih shantih" (peace that passes all understanding...the last words of the Wasteland).

I think I want to teach English here once I graduate--and work with the Building in their ministry to the Roma here. I know I could get a job, and I really am beginning to wonder if God gave me this opportunity to point me in that direction. And there's such a need for people to work here and spread the Gospel! Slovakia is dark in so many ways, and most of the time I'm oblivious because I'm being a tourist, or sticking with my safe little group of Covenant friends. But that incident (along with a few others on a lesser scale) have made a really strong impression on me, and I'm wondering if God wants to use me here.

We return in two weeks, and every time I think about it, I get a sinking feeling because I LOVE IT HERE. I definitely want to come back someday.