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The light-hearted answer to Robert Pirsig — travel author Allie Sommerville

Leave a comment Posted by on September 28, 2011

I know what you’re thinking. They can’t seriously be planning to feature Allie Sommerville in a month where they’re celebrating the joys of the open road?

For those who haven’t heard the news yet, Sommerville is the author of Uneasy Rider: Confessions of a Reluctant Traveller, and we’re doing an interview with her today, as well as an e-book giveaway (for DISPLACED DISPATCH subscribers only — sign up NOW!).

But before we proceed, allow me to say a few words in Sommerville’s — and our — defense.

As much as Sommerville may moan about her travel misadventures, as one of her Amazon reviewers puts it: “Methinks she doth protest too much.”

I would concur. In my own interactions with Sommerville, I’ve come to think of her as a gentler, more light-hearted version of Robert Pirsig, who penned the brilliant, if opaque, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, on which we’ve based many of our posts this month.

The two have much more in common than it may at first seem. Like Pirsig, Sommerville has faced the reality of sustained travel on the open road and the many challenges it entails — particularly if your vehicle of choice is a motorcycle or campervan.

Also like him, she has concluded that for a road trip to be a success, you must have a yin and a yang.

The main difference is that for Sommerville, these concepts are physical, not metaphysical — as in two people, herself and her Other Half, Harry.

She is the yin — the dancer, the poet, the writer — to poor Harry’s yang. He is the driver of the couple’s broken down but beloved RV, in charge of all repairs. And when things go awry, as they very often do, Sommerville injects a philosophical sense of humor for some perspective on the situation — a technique on a par with Pirsig’s philosophical musings.

Take, for instance, the very first road trip the couple made in this rickety vehicle, to Spain — all because Sommerville had developed an obsession with British poet Laurie Lee‘s memoir about tramping through Spain.

So far so predictable: Sommerville as driving force behind the adventure, her Other Half as driver. But then what happens when the campervan proves too wide for a Spanish street? He sweats it while she searches for an entertaining story in their predicament:

There was no room for manoeuvre. … With both sides of the van threatening to add a new dimension to the walls of the houses, it was nigh on impossible for either of us even to climb out…

By now we were becoming aware that we’d attracted the interest of several ancient and well-oiled patrons of a bar just up ahead, and our little drama turned into a full-scale pantomime as they began gesticulating and beckoning us on.

“Sí! Sí!…Se puede!” they exclaimed excitedly and at the same time doing what could only be described as some sort of grotesque ritual dance.

This was a good time to remember the meaning of those words in my favourite scene from the language video.

“Se puede! They seem to think we can do it!” I translated helpfully.

So, without further ado, I give you the light-hearted Robert Pirsig: Allie Sommerville.

Tell me a little more about your background.
I was born in Croydon, which was in the county of Surrey at the time — now though, notoriously part of Greater London — and my husband is from London. After setting up home in Croydon for a few years, we moved to the Isle of Wight in 1976 to build our own house and give our two young children a better area to grow up in.

We are both, even after all this time, what Islanders call “overners” (an abbreviated form of “overlanders”). Only people actually born here qualify as “caulkheads.”

Uneasy Rider, which was published in 2009, was my first book. I’ve just published my second, a memoir about my childhood, on Kindle. It’s called To set my feet a-dancing and takes a light-hearted look at a time when children were allowed play in the park until dark, clothes were home made and owning a car meant you were rich. I draw a lot upon my time as a young amateur dancer, telling about my appearances with my older sister in shows arranged by our rather eccentric dancing teacher. I also look at schooldays, Christmases past and seaside holidays in an age of innocence.

I began this project after researching my family history for many years. It occurred to me that our children have no idea about how my generation lived as children in late 1950s England. Life has changed beyond anything we could imagine.

I conclude the book with the life stories of my grandparents and their predecessors — things I have gleaned from censuses, birth and marriage certificates, old photographs and conversations with my late mother. These are the lives of ordinary families: people whose lives are not in the history books.

I’m also in the process of writing about a trip my husband and I made around mainland Great Britain in the same old camper van, from the South (i.e., Isle of Wight) to the North (i.e., Scotland). The provisional title is: Miss Potter and the Mathematicians Rabbit — Allie Goes Oop North. The main title is taken from an experience we had in the Lake District.

Moving on to Uneasy Rider: How many road trips have you and your husband made together over the years?
We made six road trips in the converted Leyland Daf campervan of the book, from 1999 to 2004, though our very first trip in a motor caravan was in 1991, with our two teenagers on board.

Do you ever travel by other means?
Of course! We’ve traveled many times by car in France and Switzerland, staying in gîtes, chalets and apartments. My favorite “trip” of all though was on the Cunarder, Queen Mary 2, to New York. Much nicer than “roughing it” in a camper van! I absolutely loved New York and the glamour of the six-day Atlantic crossing, despite sailing through a force 11 gale.

So what made you decide to write a book about your campervan excursions?
During our trips, we had so many events that each time I said, “There’s a book in this!” Before we took off on our first trip (to Spain), I hadn’t found any similar book on the subject of campervanning or caravanning, apart from site-finder guides; it seemed there was a gap in the market.

Whom did you see as the primary audience?
I had in mind other campervanners who would identify with the joys, trials and tribulations of this type of independent travel. I didn’t want it to be one of those “everything is fantastic about travel” books. I hope I tell it like it REALLY is — the ups and downs, the good and the bad. Some campervan “purists” don’t appreciate hearing about the downside of their preferred method of holidaying though. They appear to have gotten together to leave negative reviews on Amazon. But I’m not too sure, by some of the comments, that they’ve actually read it…

Bill Bryson is the master of modern travel writing as far as I’m concerned, and it’s his light-hearted touch that I hope in some way to emulate. A tough act to follow!

Many people take road trips when they are young, to find out more about life and themselves. Does the purpose change once you become middle aged?
Middle aged? I still feel about 17!

As you’ve already mentioned, the purpose of our first trip (to Spain) was to follow in the footsteps of my literary hero, Laurie Lee. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, he tells of his walk across Spain on the cusp of the Civil War in the early 1930s. This book, for some reason, holds a big fascination for me.

That trip was meant to be a one-off. But afterwards we weren’t able to sell the van, so instead of letting it sit in the drive, I seized the opportunity to see as much of the art and architecture of Italy and France as I could. I suppose you could say my purpose was educational!

Which was your favorite place of all those you visited?
Florence has it all. I could never tire of it. We visited this amazing city three times. I was studying Art History at the time, specialist subject “The Early Renaissance.” The Italian people are fantastic, too!

Which was your least favorite?
Spain, especially the Costas (various coastlines), which were full of half-finished blocks of flats. Whether we were unlucky I don’t know, but it was not a friendly country — apart from a few honorable exceptions which I mention in the book: the helpful policeman in Seville who strode into and held up four lanes of speeding traffic for us, the patient shop assistant in the flamenco boutique. I have the feeling that relatively recent history may have altered the Spanish character: George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia found the Spanish people cheerful and friendly.

Robert Pirsig says “It’s a little better to travel than to arrive.” I’m guessing you might not agree with him?
Err…not really. Like Dorothy, my mantra is: there’s no place like home! Having the campervan, however, was almost like taking your home round with you. My best moments during these trips were when we found pleasant campsites to put down temporary roots.

Pirsig claimed there are two types of people: “classical” — practical, DIY fixers, boy-scout prepared types; and “romantic” — those who thrive on surface appearances, don’t want to get involved with the nitty-gritty, and thrive on gestalts.
As you noted in your introduction, I’m definitely “romantic,” and my husband is certainly “classical” — which probably explains why we work as a couple. He drives and sorts out problems, I look forward to seeing the Da Vincis.

Each chapter of your book is a stand-alone story, describing a particular incident. Do you have a favorite?
“The Parable of the Parador” is my stand-out favorite. As I said, it is typical that I get these romantic ideas — and my other half goes along with them, most of the time. That particular chapter though, sees a bit of role reversal, when we get “stuck” on the road into Arcos de la Frontera, to reach the parador (state-run hotel). For once he thinks it’s all hopeless, and I have to be the optimist. When he feels like this about a situation, I know we are REALLY in trouble.

Pirsig advocates traveling on a motorcycle because it puts you there, in the moment, without the barrier of a windscreen. What do you think of his philosophy?
To travel on a motorbike would be my nightmare! I just would feel too exposed. I like to be safe — hence the theme of Uneasy Rider.

Many of the Displaced Nation’s readers are expats. Can you imagine living anywhere besides the Isle of Wight?
We’ve often thought we should have relocated to France some years ago. I’d love to live in a place where you can walk to a baker’s every day for fresh baguettes and croissants. Now, the only place I’d move to is Central London: the London National Gallery and Covent Garden Royal Opera House are big draws.

How well do you fit back into the Isle of Wight after your journeys? Do you suffer from any counter culture shock?
The flippant answer is that being a “townie,” I suffer counter culture shock on the Island every day anyway… even after all this time. However, the main feeling after being in the ‘van for four weeks, though, was that our house did seem HUGE for the first few days .

So what’s next for your travels?
Next year I am fulfilling my long-time ambition of visiting St. Petersburg — on a cruise ship rather than by road. Russia and especially its Tsarist past, fascinates me. Hopefully there will be a book in this, though for all the right reasons!

Readers, do you have any questions for the Amazing Allie? Ask away, before she takes off again!

Images: Allie Sommerville’s author photo and book cover.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s installment from our displaced fictional heroine, Libby, as she prepares to welcome the pitter-patter of little feet. Clawed, furry feet, that is: Fergus is now a canine expat! What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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An un-American in an All-American diner

5 Comments Posted by on September 27, 2011

Continuing this month’s theme on road trips founding contributor Anthony Windram weighs in with some thoughts on the American diner.

There’s neon tubing that emits a purple glow around the clock that tells me it’s nearly 10pm. The dinner service is long over, the families now dispersed and only a scattering of drifters and loners are left. It’s still, at least, another 45 minutes before the late-night drunken crowd makes an appearance.  This diner is more Edward Hopper than Norman Rockwell. Across the parking lot is a strip club, as the night draws on and into morning some of its patrons, I imagine, will head over here to have a burger or to take advantage of that most American of institutions – the 24-hour breakfast.

There’s a still sadness to the place despite the best efforts of the waitress who exudes a friendly busyness. She could be anything from her late-40s to her early-60s. She calls me “sweetheart” when she comes over to give me a refill of greased coffee. She doesn’t, however, call it “a cup of Joe” — that would be one cliché too many.

Mentally, I take a step back from this scene and try to view all around me as a tableau and can’t but help but think this is Americana that I am sat in, this is America.

Perhaps this is the “real” America; a banal phrase uttered by a banal politician, but a phrase that does strike at something deep in the American psyche.

Dr George Lewis, director of American Studies at Leicester University, has started what the Guardian claims is the “first sustained historical analysis of the term un-American.” While there may be some confusion over quite how one defines being “un-American,” what seems certain to me is that this cold burger and this diner is decidedly the opposite of “un-American”. Though I am in Bakersfield, California, I could be anywhere in the Union, be it red state or blue state.

When I first moved to the US, to my now shame, I found myself fascinated by the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, hosted by the hyperactive Guy Fieri, a man with the cholesterol levels of someone twice his age. Fieri is a TV host with absolutely no sense of discernment. Everything that he comes across, everything that he tastes, must be spoken about in glowing terms to the point that nothing that Fieri says has any real meaning whatsoever.

And yet I did find myself compelled by the show for illuminating further for me the American diner and showing me places that occupy a place in the country’s cultural milieu that the English cafe doesn’t even come close to back home. I soon stopped watching Diners, Drive-ins and Dives — not because my view of diners changed, but because it was (and is) a God-awful program and there’s only so many times you can watch an overweight Fieri eat some barbequed pork and then pronounce it “awesome”. But there was one thing in particular about Fieri’s show that they always got wrong. They would always show the diners when they were packed and buzzing with a family friendly atmosphere. And while I wouldn’t suggest that that’s not the case, what I find interesting is that when you roll into a strange town late at night and find yourself at a diner, regional and political difference tend to dissolve. You are in a place that is resolutely American rather than California, or Colorado, or Vermont, or…I could go on.

Fieri’s show, a sort of televisual equivalent of Pravda which can only emphasize the positive, misses out on what I am experiencing here in Bakersfield as the clock, that has neon tubing wrapped around it, hits 10 and I ask for my check. Here, and which Fieri always misses, is a quiet efficiency mixed with a low-burning malevolence. It’s that mixture of warmth and fear you get when your waitress flashes you a warm smile but you know you’re in a moment going to be stepping out back into that parking lot — and in the back of your mind you’re just a little concerned that this might be the night where you get shot by a drunk coming out of the strip club.

Question: What’s your experience of American diners?

Image by awindram.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s interview with the travel writer Allie Sommerville. NOTE: All DISPLACED DISPATCH subscribers will be entered in our giveaway of Allie’s book, Uneasy Rider.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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“My country, ’tis of thee” applies to my expat mum but not to me

14 Comments Posted by on September 23, 2011

We take a break from road trips today with this guest post from Lawrence Hunt, a recent graduate of Warwick University (UK). Followers of The Displaced Nation may recall that we interviewed two cross-cultural married couples last summer. Hunt is the product of a cross-cultural union between an American mother and an English father. Let’s listen to what he has to say regarding the oft-perplexing matter of cultural identity. NOTE: This post has not been edited for British spelling or punctuation.

One of the things that expats like to tell themselves is that home is a state of mind.

But for me, the child of an English father and an American mother, home stands for a physical place: the one where I was born and grew up, England.

For years my mother has sipped her morning coffee from the same extravagantly large mug, Stars and Stripes boldly printed around the outside. She picked it up at an airport in Washington DC where we were visiting her sister. It’s curvaceous and welcoming, a daily caffeinated hit of homeland comfort. I’ve started drinking from it, too — but more as an ironic gesture.

Mum grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in class, but in ultra-PC Britain, patriotism has to be decidedly lower key. It seems commonplace to see flags hoisted outside American homes, but over here the very act of being seen with a St George’s flag in any context other than sporting events or royal weddings is infrequent enough to draw stares. People see you with it and instantly wonder what fanatical scheme for national purification you’re plotting behind closed doors.

Now, I don’t fault my mum for being proud of her cultural upbringing. I think in some ways her extended absence makes her all the more keen to assert her identity and share it with us.

She did some family history research recently that confirmed we’re the distant descendants of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic and longest surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence. That’s my strongest claim to fame, and I’m holding onto it.

Chocolate — the way to an English child’s heart

That said, America has never played much of a role in our regular family rituals. For one thing, traditions like the Fourth of July and Labour Day just aren’t compatible with the British calendar.

I do remember Mum hosted a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner once with some other American expats when I was little. Without having the next day off to recuperate, however, everyone left early and I think she found the mountain of washing up too colossal to repeat the effort.

The one institution she has passed down to us (and this is something I cannot thank her enough for) was the American Easter basket hunt. The concept, as I explain it to my friends, is simple but ingenious – essentially, it’s what all kids in England do but with two key differences: 1) More chocolate, and 2) Baskets.

While other English kids were being handed single Cadbury creme eggs in flimsy cardboard boxes, my brothers and I were racing around the garden looking for mighty hoards of chocolate hidden among the shrubbery by a miraculously literate bunny that knew how to spell our names on post-it notes.

As American as everyone else in Britain?

Basket cases aside, it’s difficult to say exactly how ‘Americanized’ I am as a result of my mother, and how much of it is just living in a country where America’s influence pervades almost every cultural platform.

The most differentiating feature of mum’s background has always been her accent. I can do a pretty convincing American accent on a good day, and I used to mimic my mother so often when I was a child that I still lapse into it sometimes without realising.

But even my mother, having lived here for almost thirty years, isn’t really that American any more in her diction. I think the few Americanisms I sometimes find myself using, like ‘movie’ rather than ‘film’, or ‘take-out’ rather than ‘takeaway’, are more because I hear them in American movies and prefer them than because I’ve picked them up from her.

I certainly feel something for the States — a fondness and a familiarity, I suppose. I’ve been lucky enough to go with her on visits to her family almost every other year since I was a baby. Some of my favourite memories have come from spending summers at lake houses in North Carolina, climbing the mountains of West Virginia and walking down endless blocks of New York.

When I was seventeen I took a position teaching at a French camp in the woods in Minnesota, and made friends who I still keep in contact with.

America as distant entity

But America lives for me, as it does for many Brits, more in fiction than in reality. From the moment I read JD Salinger, I was hooked, and I’ve probably read more American writers than British ones: Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Kerouac, right through to more recent contemporaries like Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen.

They all essentially seem to be commenting on the same thing: the tragic failure of American life to live up to its promises. Paradoxically though, in the richness of the characters and landscapes they describe, they evoke a utopia in my mind that’s been hard to shake.

In my final year at university I enrolled in a contemporary American Literature module — ‘States of Damage — US Writing and Culture in the Post 9/11 Context’. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It was a step-by-step dissection of everything wrong with free market America, from George Trow’s attack on media culture in ‘Within the Context of No Context’ to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, an expose on America’s foreign policy over the past 40 years.

The critique seemed appallingly one-sided to me, and an hour a week for an entire year I felt compelled to fight America’s corner against the scathing intellects of my fellow students. Truth be told, I just like a good debate, and this was a difficult one. There’s a lot about American politics that we find objectionable in British culture — even though we’re implicated in most of the same hypocrisies ourselves.

To be fair, however, my fellow students showed a very different side on Obama’s inauguration night. The Students Union had been decked out in American flags and YESWECAN posters, and multitudes of students were queuing up to buy hotdogs and other American staples. I voted in that election, and it was a night when I felt nothing but pride to be half American.

My mum’s sweet land of liberty

I sometimes think it would be nice to use my dual citizenship and live on the other side of the Atlantic for a while, preferably near the coast. Mum believes that on the whole, Americans are more open, friendlier (at least on the outside) and more honest than British people. She’s even been known to point out these qualities in my brothers and me, when they appear, as our ‘American side’.

I’m sceptical that you can generalise about such vast groups of people in any meaningful way, especially as the world becomes increasingly mixed.

Ultimately, I think when you spend very little time in a place, and you miss it greatly, you begin to feel connected to a idealised version of it, one that’s perhaps better than the reality. When I ask about America, the memories my mother recalls from behind the vapours of her star-spangled mug are those of the pioneering Midwest. She tells me she always wanted to be one of the pioneers in Little House on the Prairie, struggling against the elements and striking out on her own.

That adventurousness is, ironically, probably part of what made her leave America for pastures new in the first place.

I can see the real things she’s had to give up in establishing her new life here — the family, the friends, the holiday traditions, a million different flavours and details that in some cases are only slightly different here from what she grew up with. Those are also the things I take for granted about my own life in Britain.

I was born here, and that counts for a great deal more than where my mother was born.

img: Lawrence Hunt with his mum’s stars-and-stripes mug, at home in Chorley Wood

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, in which Matthew Cashmore, aka The London Biker, relays his personal “Zen” of this rather risky, albeit exhilarating, mode of travel.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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The Displaced Q: Road trip – a simple journey, or a life-changing event?

7 Comments Posted by on September 13, 2011

Every year, a small number of people in biking leathers get on their motorcycles in Minnesota and set off on back roads toward the Dakotas. From Montana, they swerve briefly into Idaho and Wyoming, before riding across Oregon and down the final stretch to San Francisco.

They’re known as Pirsig’s Pilgrims — bikers who faithfully follow the route that Robert Pirsig took in 1968, as chronicled in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

San Francisco is not the destination, but merely where the journey ends. It’s a pilgrimage, sure — but the whole journey is the destination for these dedicated riders.

Still, the question is — Why? Why do they do this?

I’m not a fan of biking (despite being married to an enthusiast) and traveling 1700 miles in this fashion seems…well. Uncomfortable at best, downright dangerous at worst, is my view of bikes. But perhaps there’s more to this journey than the automotive experience for these people?

Pirsig’s account of the journey  is interspersed with philosophical musings, meanderings, and revelations that make light bulbs flash bright in the reader’s head.

Could his Pilgrims, in fact, be searching for an epiphany?

Many cultures demand a period of time in solitude in which to grow spiritually. Australian Aborigine adolescents, for example, would live in the outback for many months, tracing the paths of their ancestors and, one assumes, learning deeply from the experience.

Today, the nearest equivalent we have in the western world is a few years at college, and while you can argue that the experience transforms, it’s not exactly spiritual. (Not that kind of spirit, anyway.) However, many young people choose to take a gap year, remove themselves from their everyday world, and backpack their way through Asia or Australia.

Could it be that this yearning to travel to nowhere in particular, where the journey itself is the point of the exercise, is part of our make up, a necessary part of everyone’s growth?

And what if we missed out on the experience in our own youth? Backpacking isn’t for the faint-hearted, or for the achy knees that come with a certain age.

Road trips. That’s what happens.

We all know that living abroad as an expat is life-changing, but even expats want to travel within the confines of their new location. Our first vacation while living in the US was a road trip. Armed with a minivan, a preschooler, a four-month-old baby, and all the paraphernalia small children accumulate, we set off from Connecticut toward Maine, Montreal, Toronto, Niagara, and back home through upstate New York. (Readers of last week’s Libby’s Life might find some of this itinerary familiar;  I hasten to add that Libby and I have only the itinerary in common.) It was a good trip, even accounting for children’s travel sickness.

Was it life changing, though? Not really — the most memorable moment of the trip was upon checking into a hotel room in Montreal, to discover that Princess Diana had been involved in a car accident in Paris. I didn’t need to be on a road trip to be affected by that.

But one day, in a few years’ time, we will take another road trip, minus toddler and small baby, and drive across America, coast to coast. Maybe we will ditch the car for a motorcycle in Montana, and by that time I’ll be brave enough to view the Big Sky state without the encumbrance of a windshield. And maybe I’ll have that epiphany.

Or — here’s a thought. Perhaps it’s already waiting, within me. To quote Pirsig:

“The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”

Question: Have you ever taken a road trip, and if so, was it the best or worst thing you ever did? And did it change your life? 

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of the week’s posts from The Displaced Nation. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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The John Steinbeck Encyclopaedia of Road Trips

Announcing September’s theme: Zen and the Art of Road Trips

Image: MorgueFile

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Budding Slavophiles, welcome to my kitchen’s-eye view of Russia

5 Comments Posted by on August 29, 2011

As we learned from her Random Nomad interview with us in May, Charlotte Day is torn between three countries: Australia, USA, and England. As if this weren’t enough, it turns out she harbors an obsession with Russia, going back to when she discovered classical Russian novels in 8th grade. Here she spins a travel yarn about the her month-long sojourn in Saint Petersburg this summer, where she studied Russian language while living with a homestay family. So, did the real Russia live up to Charlotte’s expectations, or had her overactive imagination led her astray? Let’s find out…

Bolshoi Kazachiy Pereulok is not a notable St Petersburg street. It is a bent elbow between Zagorodniy Prospekt and the Fontanka embankment.

Emerging from Pushkinskaya metro station, one walks past a travel agency of sorts, a faded basketball court and Kazachiy Bani, a green-tiled 24-hour bathhouse from which emerge oiled men, rubbing their hair with threadbare towels. Peering through the open door, one can just about discern a gleaming ticket window, half plastered over with out-dated rate notices.

In the crook of the elbow stands Number 9, a magnificent turn-of-the-century apartment building, with geraniums tumbling over the serpentine-patterned grilling of occasional balconies. The building’s green façade, tinged as if by an eternal sunset, smiles mournfully over the street — watching as beer bottles clink and smash on the pavement, cats stalk along beneath decades-old cars, and the high gates open and shut in a kind of eternal song.

The plaque outside Number 7 reads: “In this building lived and worked Vladimir Ilich Lenin,” and on a rack beneath, three red carnations wilt.

I lived for a month at Number 5 — past the automated bell at the gate; through the courtyard, painted a warm, yet exhausted, yellow; up the shallow, concrete steps; and behind two locked doors — in the home of Nadezhda Skarinova, her husband, Kirill, and their son, Vladimir.

Striking up an acquaintance with the Skarinovas

While in theory I shared a home with entire family, the two male Skarinovs managed to be absent for the majority of my stay. Kirill, a chemical engineer, offered a smile — sometimes a privyet (hi) — whenever we met in the hallway.

But as he left for work as I was getting up, and had dinner immediately upon returning home at 6:30, we saw very little of each other.

Vladimir, or Vova, had been a source of much speculation before I set off — in the way that only unknown 21-year-old sons can be — among my well-meaning friends and relatives. (I am only sixteen.)

But he turned out to be largely taciturn, spending his days facing a computer screen (he was studying to become a programmer).

We had one two-sentence exchange — when he helped me down with my suitcase, on departure.

The only stories I can spin about my month in Petersburg involve minutiae. Such had been my idea of the perfect adventure before I left for Russia, in anticipation of what it would be like to be free from parental dictates for the first time.

Indeed, I did very little.

Not prone to escapades, I spent my evenings, after class, wandering along the Griboedov Canal Embankment (where I saw a drowned corpse—lying, swollen, neglected, and only haphazardly covered by a tarpaulin), or taking the metro into a far-flung, neglected suburb to spend ten minutes looking at an exquisite church.

But if my journey had less geographical displacement than those of most adventurers, my nightly dinner conversations with Mrs Skarinova made up for the lack by advancing me along the path of greater understanding of that strange thing — Russia.

A series of stove-side conversations

The first time I heard a bang on my bedroom door, and a gruff mozhno uzhinat? (roughly, “is it possible to have dinner?”) at 8:00 p.m., I hurried a nervous da, closed my book, and sidled into the kitchen.

The news was on, as it would be every subsequent evening — the twin anchors of channel Rossiya speaking too quickly for me to understand, their journalistic jargon blending into an unvarying mumble.

There sat Nadya, looking terribly bored, with large bags under her eyes. She poured me some tea from the eternal teapot. (Russians make tea by brewing a pot, which can keep, it would seem, for over a week—and then pouring a small amount, diluted with hot water, into your cup.)

Kuritsa — normalno? She presented me with a plate. As it was chicken, I nodded in assent.

Sitting down opposite me, shelling sunflower seeds — aimlessly, it seemed — she began to comment on the news.

Before I knew what had hit me, we were traipsing through the hardships of the 1990s — lining up outside an empty supermarket, clutching a prescription for baby formula. Mothers would rush from work during their lunch breaks, Nadya said, to secure a ration of bread for their family’s evening meal. And she’d had to bring up the infant Vova without the help of her mother — who died in her early sixties, from exhaustion.

And this was not the only thread Nadya spun over the course of our four weeks together. Another was the Orthodox Church. Her grandmother, who had lived through both world wars and the Russian Revolution of 1917 — and consequently wasn’t afraid of anything — spirited her granddaughter off to a church to be baptized, at a time when any hint of religion could make you a social pariah.

As a member of the Komsomol (“because everyone was in the Komsomol then”), Nadya hid her crucifix under her pillow. She told me that when religion resurfaced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, young couples longing for a church wedding were in a dilemma. How could they know if they had been baptized or not? Perhaps their grandmothers, like Nadya’s, had had it done in secret.

Nadya scowled as Patriarch Kirill appeared on the screen, leading a service in Kiev. His cardinal offense was the purchase of an expensive designer watch, several years back.

Many don’t like Patriarch Kirill so much… I’m an Orthodox person, but Patriarch Kirill… And he’s just one of the problems: for instance, why did they have to make Tsar Nikolai* a saint? What did he ever do? In his youth he was just a normal young man — women, alcohol, all that. What should I pray to him for? And his wife? Nothing wrong with her — German princess, worked in hospitals… And her little boy had that illness. But go to church and ask them for help? Yes, it was a tragedy, a crime — to kill all those children, too. Yes, the revolution oughtn’t to have happened. But Nikolai II a saint?

*With his family, Tsar Nicolas II, Russia’s last emperor, was recognized as a martyred saint and canonized as a passion bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1981.

A samovar too big for the kitchen

On my last night in Petersburg, Mr Skarinova came into the kitchen bearing a large 1830s, wood-burning samovar — complete with chimney.

Nadya was not certain about this new addition to their lives.

It’s going to the dacha. No question about it. Wouldn’t fit in the kitchen anyway. And what am I going to do with a samovar like that? Put it in the bathhouse — na dachye. There’s no electricity in there.

The family had been to their dacha — a few hours south of the city — once while I had stayed at their apartment. They came back laden with berries: bitter and smelling of evergreen.

“All the men want to do there is drink,” Nadya told me one night. “I personally don’t drink — only wine. But Kirill…”

And another evening —

At least Kirill’s never come home drunk in the evenings. On holidays, yes — New Year’s… But the rest of the time — I don’t tolerate that sort of thing. What would have happened with Vova, a child, if dad kept coming home drunk? But it’s a common thing…

And judging by the beer bottles littering the street every morning when I walked to school, I doubt not that it is.

But this seems a catalogue of complaints — when my own experience of Russia was quite the reverse.

There was a moment when, crossing the Neva River on my last evening wander, I saw the spectral moon, blooming into fullness over the Winter Palace embankment.

And faced with that glut of unabashed beauty, I made an inarticulate noise — half of despair, half of exaltation — as people do in Russian novels. (It was only my English reserve keeping me from falling to my knees and weeping: the truly literary gesture.)

As it was, I left the next day feeling I would like to spend the rest of my life in Petersburg. But before I advance any further along that path, I must brave a winter without being killed by a falling snow drift. (“It happens,” says the Voice of Wisdom…)

But no matter how many tracks I beat in Russia, it is somewhat sobering to think of Nadya sitting, through endless reports of train crashes, patriarchal visits and state holidays, in that desperately uncomfortable chair, shelling sunflower seeds and passing the time.

img: The Skarinova kitchen, where Charlotte’s nighttime chats with Nadya took place.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post taking a parting glimpse at summer’s millinery enchantments, by our Alice awardee Sebastian Doggart.

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6 celebrated women travel writers with the power to enchant you

3 Comments Posted by on August 24, 2011

Any wannabe expat/travel writer would do well to consult with Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, herself a novelist and former expat, before beginning their Great Works. Kristin offers a wealth of writing tips on Writerhead, a blog that she launched on April 1 of this year (which, coincidentally, was the same day we launched The Displaced Nation).

Of the helpful hints Kristin has offered thus far, I have many favorites, but if I had to pick one, it would be her post entitled “Write Wee.” In her breathlessly inimitable style, Kristin assures us that producing a multi-volume series on one’s overseas adventures is not the way to go:

Instead find a nugget. A moment. A single object. One exchange. One epiphany. One cultural revelation.

Find one story and tell it.

Just it.

The only thing I would add is that in general, women are better at extracting such nuggets than men.

Actually, what got me started in thinking about the difference in travel writing styles of the sexes was a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago on Edwardian novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, who penned the much-loved work, The Enchanted April, about four women who escape to a medieval castle in Italy for a much-needed break from their routines.

For me, von Arnim typifies one of characteristics that makes women’s travel writing so special (no doubt there are many more!). As she wandered far and wide across Europe and America, she paid extremely careful attention to the details of her surroundings.

A forerunner of what today we’d call a nature freak, she could get lost in telling the story of watching a “nightingale on a hornbeam, in loud raptures at the coming of the sun…” — I quote from her largely autobiographical novel The Solitary Summer, about a woman, also called Elizabeth, who is anything but solitary. She has a husband, to whom she refers as the Man of Wrath, small child and household to care for.

Perhaps such descriptive powers are born of necessity. Women have little choice but to make the most of spinning tales out of the moments they snatch from lives that are otherwise spent ministering to the needs of others — even when they’re technically on vacation.

Having combed through the pages of The Virago Book of Women Travellers (ed. Mary Morris with Larry O’Connor), I think I may be on to something. I discovered any number of women travel writers with the power to enchant their readers by capturing in their works the moments, exchanges, and personal ephiphanies their wanderings have yielded.

Here are six whose “nuggets” continue to gleam for us modern-day nomads:

Frances Trollope (1780-1863)

Who was she? Mother of Anthony and like her son, a prolific writer of novels (34 in total!).
Key work: Domestic Manners of the Americans, a travel book that made her name, about the four years she spent pursuing opportunities in the United States after her family suffered financial setbacks.

from DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS
At length my wish of obtaining a house in the country was gratified….But even this was not enough to satisfy us when we first escaped from the city, and we determined upon having a day’s enjoyment of the wildest forest scenery we could find. So we packed up books, albums, pencils, and sandwiches, and, despite a burning sun, dragged up a hill so steep that we sometimes fancied we could rest ourselves against it by only leaning forward a little. In panting and in groaning we reached the top, hoping to be refreshed by the purest breath of heaven; but to have tasted the breath of heaven we must have climbed yet farther, even to the tops of the trees themselves, for we soon found that the air beneath them stirred not, nor ever had stirred, as it seemed to us, since first it settled there, so heavily did it weigh upon our lungs.

Still we were determined to enjoy ourselves, and forward we went, crunching knee deep through aboriginal leaves, hoping to reach some spot less perfectly air-tight than our landing place. Wearied with the fruitless search, we decided on reposing awhile on the trunk of a fallen tree; being all comfortably exhausted, the idea of sitting down on this tempting log was conceived and executed simultaneously by the whole party, and the whole party sunk together through its treacherous surface into a mass of rotten rubbish that had formed part of the pith and marrow of the eternal forest a hundred years before.

We were by no means the only sufferers from the accident; frogs, lizards, locusts, katydids, beetles, and hornets, had the whole of their various tenements disturbed, and testified their displeasure very naturally by annoying us as much as possible in return; we were bit, we were stung, we were scratched; and when, at last, we succeeded in raining ourselves from the venerable ruin, we presented as woeful a spectacle as can well be imagined. We shook our (not ambrosial) garments, and panting with heat, stings, and vexation, moved a few paces from the scene of our misfortune, and again sat down; but this time it was upon the solid earth.

We had no sooner begun to “chew the cud” of the bitter fancy that had beguiled us to these mountain solitudes than a new annoyance assailed us. A cloud of mosquitoes gathered round, and while each sharp proboscis sucked our blood, they teased us with their humming chorus, till we lost all patience, and started again on our feet, pretty firmly resolved never to try the al fresco joys of an American forest again.

Flora Tristan (1803-1844)

Who was she? French reformer who campaigned for workers’ and women’s rights; grandmother to artist Paul Gauguin.
Key work: Peregrinations of a Pariah, about a trip she made alone to Peru to stake her claim to her family’s fortune.

from PEREGRINATIONS OF A PARIAH
Mr. Smith took me to the house of his correspondents, and here once more I found all of the luxury and comfort characteristic of the English. The servants were English, and like their masters they were dressed just as they would have been in England. The house had a verandah, as do all the houses in Lima, and this is very convenient in hot countries, as it gives shelter from the sun and enables one to walk all round the house to take the air. This particular verandah was embellished with pretty English blinds. I stayed there for some time and could survey in comfort the only long wide street which constitutes the whole of Callao. It was a Sunday, and sailors in holiday attire were strolling about; I saw groups of Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Germans — in short, a mixture from nearly every nation — and I heard snatches from every tongue. As I listened to these sailors, I began to understand the charm they find in their adventurous life… When I tired of looking at the street I cast a glance into the large drawing-room whose windows overlooked the verandah, where five or six immaculately dressed Englishmen, their handsome faces calm and impassive, were drinking grog and smoking excellent Havana cigars as they swung gently to and fro from hammocks from Guayaquil suspended from the ceiling.

Mary Anne Barker (1831 – 1911)

Who was she? Jamaica-born, England-educated author and journalist who with her second husband tried to run a sheep station in New Zealand (they later traveled to Mauritius, Western Australia, Barbados and Trinidad for his colonial appointments).
Key works: Station Life in New Zealand (1870); First Lessons in the Principles of Cooking (1874); A Year’s Housekeeping in South Africa (1880).

from STATION LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND
All this beauty would have been almost too oppressive, it was on such a large scale and the solitude was so intense, if it had not been for the pretty little touch of life and movement afforded by the hut belonging to the station we were bound for. It was only a rough building, made of slabs of wood with cob between; but there was a bit of fence and the corner of a garden and an English grass paddock, which looked about as big as a pocket-handkerchief from where we stood. A horse or two and a couple of cows were tethered near, and we could hear the bark of a dog. A more complete hermitage could not have been desired by Diogenes himself, and for the first time we felt ashamed of invading the recluse in such a formidable body, but ungrudging, open-handed hospitality is so universal in New Zealand that we took courage and began our descent. … We put the least scratched and most respectable-looking member of the party in the van, and followed him, amid much barking of dogs, to the low porch; and after hearing a cheery “Come in,” answering our modest tap at the door, we trooped in one after the other till the little room was quite full. I never saw such astonishment on any human face as on that of the poor master of the house, who could not stir from his chair by the fire, on account of a bad wound in his leg from an axe. There he sat quite helpless, a moment ago so solitary, and now finding himself the centre of a large, odd-looking crowd of strangers. He was a middle-aged Scotchman, probably of not a very elevated position in life, and had passed many years in this lonely spot, and yet he showed himself quite equal to the occasion.

After that first uncontrollable look of amazement he did the honours of his poor hut with the utmost courtesy… His only apology was for being unable to rise form his arm-chair (made out of half a barrel and an old flour-sack by the way); he made us perfectly welcome, took it for granted we were hungry — hunger is a very mild world to express my appetite, for one… I never felt more awkward in my life than when I stooped to enter that low doorway, and yet in a minute I was quite at my ease again; but of the whole party I was naturally the one who puzzled him the most. In the first place, I strongly suspect that he had doubts as to my being anything but a boy in a rather long kilt; and when this point was explained, he could not understand what a “female,” as he also called me, was doing on a rough hunting expedition. He particularly inquired more than once if I had come of my own free will, and could not understand what pleasure I found in walking so far.

Vivienne de Watteville (1900 – 1957)

Who was she? British writer and adventurer who accompanied her father on a safari in Kenya. After he was killed by a lion, she finished the trip on her own.
Key works: Out in the Blue (1927); Speak to the Earth: Wanderings and Reflections among Elephants and Mountains (1937).

from SPEAK TO THE EARTH
Finally, it was the boys themselves who pointed to the summit and said it was not very far.

Enviously, I admired the way they could climb. As for me, … I was badly spent; my knees trembled as I panted up through the reeling boulders. …

At last I climbed above the forest zone, passing beneath the last outposts — stunted trees ragged with beard-moss in whose chequered shade lay a carpet of tiny peas … whose blossoms were a lovely transparent blue. Above them flitted miniature butterflies, as though the petals themselves had taken wing. …

The top, when I at last reached it, was, after all, not really the top, and beyond a dipping saddle another granite head still frowned down upon me.

But meanwhile, below me the south side disclosed a grassing depression girt about by the two summits and bare granite screes; and amid that desolation the grass stretched so green and rural that you had looked there for shepherds with their flocks. Instead of which, on the far side of a quaking bog, I saw — grey among the grey slabs — two rhino.

… I drew to within forty yards of the rhino, yet they still looked like a couple of grey boulders as they browsed off an isolated patch of sere grass. …

The wind had risen to a tearing gale, and nosing straight into it I approached the rhino somewhat downhill. There was no chance of this steady blow jumping around to betray me, and it was strong enough to carry away any sound of my footsteps. Precaution was therefore unnecessary, and I walked boldly up to them. Just how close I was, it is hard to say; but I felt that I could have flipped a pebble at them, and I noted subconsciously that the eye of the one nearest me was not dark brown as I had imagined it, but the colour of sherry.

… he now came deliberately towards me nose to the ground, and horn foremost, full of suspicion. … In the finder [of my small cinema camera] I saw his tail go up, and knew that he was on the point of charging. Though it was the impression of a fraction of a second, it was unforgettable. …

… I read the danger signal, yet in a kind of trance of excitement I still held the camera against my forehead. Then Mohamed fired a shot over the rhino’s head to scare him, and I turned and fled for my very life.

M. F. K. Fisher (1908 – 1992)

Who was she? A preeminent American food writer, whose books are an amalgam of food literature, travel and memoir.
Key works: How to Cook a Wolf (1942); Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964); Dubious Honors (1988); Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991).

from LONG AGO IN FRANCE
Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this, and I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks, because I had no extra money, but I often spent hours in his cluttered shop, looking at books and asking him things, and sniffing the fine papers there, and even sitting copying things from books he would suggest I use at his worktable, with his compliments and his ink and often his paper. In other words, he was polite and generous to me, and I liked him. …

In Monsieur Venot’s shop I learned to like French books better than any others. They bent to the hand and had to be cut, page by page. I liked that; having to work to earn the reward, cutting impatiently through the cheap paper of a “train novel,” the kind bought in railroad stations to be thrown away and then as often kept for many years, precious for one reason or another. I liked the way the paper crumbled a little into my lap or my blanket or my plate, along the edges of each page.

Mary Lee Settle (1918 – 2005)

Who was she? American writer, novelist and expat, one of the founders of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Key works: “Beulah Quintet” novel series (1956-1982), about the history of her native West Virginia (and hence of America); Turkish Reflections: A Biography of Place (1991).

from TURKISH REFLECTIONS
I hadn’t heard anything move, yet he stood there in front of me, smiling, quite silent, a large strong Turkish man, holding in his hand a small bunch of sweet wild thyme. He held it toward me, saying nothing, still smiling. There was something so gentle about him that I could not be afraid. I took the wild thyme, and I thanked him, in Turkish. He smiled again and touched his mouth and his ear. He was deaf and dumb. I still have the wild thyme, pressed and dried, kept like a Victorian lady’s souvenir of the Holy Land.

Dumb was the wrong word for him. There was no need for speech. He was an actor, an eloquent mime. I pointed to the atrium below and held my hands apart to show I didn’t know how to get down into it. He took my arm, and carefully, slowly, led me down a steep pile of rubble.

He mimed the opening of a nonexistent door and ushered me through it. He showed me roofless room after roofless room after roofless room as if he had discovered them. …

I think he had scared people before, and he was happy that there was someone who would let him show his house, for it was his house. Maybe he didn’t sleep there. I don’t know. I only know that he treated me as a guest in a ruin ten feet below the levee of the ground, and that he took me from room to room where once there had been marble walls and now there was only stone, where he was host and owner for a little while.

He showed me a small pool, held out his hand the height of a small child, and then swam across the air. All the time he smiled. He took me to a larger pool and swam again. Then he grabbed my arm and led me through a dark corridor toward what I thought was at first a cave. It was not. He sat down in an niche in the corridor, and strained until his face was pink, to show me it was the toilet. Then he took me into the kitchen where there were two ovens. …

For the first one he rolled dough for bread, kneaded it in air, slapped it, and put it in the oven. Then he took it out, broke it, and shared it with me. I ate the air with him. …

When I gave my friend, my arkadaş, some money, he kissed my hand and held it to his forehead, and then, pleased with the sun and me, and the fact that someone had not run away from him who lived like Caliban in a ruin, he put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Then I went down the hill to Ephesus. When I looked back to wave he had disappeared.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, a tell-all from Kate Allison on what inspired her to create her fictional expat heroine, Libby.

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A glowing moment of enchantment in a displaced summer

9 Comments Posted by on August 16, 2011

Continuing this month’s theme on Enchanted Summer, contributor Anthony Windram weighs in with his opinion.

Elizabeth von Arnim, who wrote The Enchanted April, was right in selecting April as the month of enchantment. Spring charms me in a way that summer doesn’t. The budding boughs are full of fresh scents, to borrow from Christina Rossetti, and the land restores itself. Nature, in a universe governed by entropy, pulls off a majestic conjuring trick.

By contrast, I find summer a little unenchanting. Let’s face it, it’s not a good time for the English. We can’t really be trusted with summer. We should be banned from it, it’d be for the best. Pack us all up and send us to the Arctic for three months. That way we might avoid the collective fever that descends upon us where we dehydrate our bodies with copious quantities of lager and show off our sun blistered skin and bad tattoos.

So, as you probably have gathered, I’m not much of a summer fan and that hasn’t changed having now lived in places that have actual, proper summers as opposed to England’s illusion of a summer. I can usually be found in the summer months (when not enjoying a self-imposed seasonal exile in the Arctic) wandering from one airconditioned building to another. If I do have to venture out into the heat, I only do so after liberally applying sunblock (factor 100).

But this post is about enchantment with the summer, and it’s only when the sun has set and the temperature has lowered that such moments have occurred. I share Simon Wheeler’s thoughts on the sounds of crickets. To me, it’s a foreign sound. A memory of childhood holidays abroad. Hearing that rhythmic sound each evening reminds me that I am in a foreign country, and as I listen the everyday mundanity of my setting dissolves away.

I am not, despite what this post might suggest, an amateur entomologist. If anything, I have an immediate revulsion with most creepy crawlies, but my second summer enchantment also involves them and like the music of the crickets it was a fleeting moment that stripped me of cynicism and returned me to childhood. It was my first summer in the US, I was in my in-laws’ garden. I was listening to the crickets and feeling very happy with myself when an insect flew past me, its lower abdomen pulsating a yellow, illuminiscent light. I knew the answer, but I couldn’t be certain as I had never seen one before. “Is that a firefly?” I asked.

And where there had been one, there was another, and then another. Looking around, thrilled in the same way I would have been as a child, it seemed that there was a swarm of fireflies captivating me utterly — a glowing moment of enchantment in the summer evening.

DISPLACED Q: What’s your most enchanting memory of a summer spent in your adopted homeland(s)?

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s discussion of The Displaced Nation’s themed posts.

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Some enchanted drinking: Summer cocktails that send you round the world

17 Comments Posted by on August 9, 2011

After spending many a summer in England (summer, what summer?) and Japan (beyond brutal!), I now live in New York City, where summers can best be described as a hot mess.

As the dog days set in, I’ve been known to sing out: “Drinks, glorious drinks! Don’t care what they look like!”

Actually, that’s not quite true.

Well, the part about my singing aloud is true — we’re all barking mad in this city, especially around mid-August.

And the part about drinks being glorious is also true —  what could be more glorious than an icy cold drink that cuts through the moisture-laden air, offering the possibility that this steam bath may end one day.

(I’m talking about alcoholic drinks, of course — anyone of a puritanical frame of mind can slake their thirst at one of the city’s fancy new portable water fountains, connected to fire hydrants.)

But the part about not caring what my drinks look like — that’s simply not true. For me, the ultimate summer refreshment is a well-made, well-presented cocktail.

As Penelope Wisner writes in her introduction to Summer Cocktails: 50 Tantalizing Recipes,

Everything matters: the taste of the spirit, the taste of the ice, the temperature of the drink, and the look of the drink.

My drinking history, in brief

During my expat years, I would happily down a half pint of lager in the pub with my English friends, or drink Kirin beer and sake on outings with my Japanese office mates.

That all changed when I moved back to my homeland.

Maybe it’s in my cultural DNA. The cocktail — a mixed drink with two or more ingredients, one of which must be a spirit — is one of America’s more inspired culinary accomplishments.

Or could it be my actual DNA — one of my earliest memories is of asking my father if I could chew on the lemon peel he put in his night-time martini.

In any case, not long after I became a resident of New York City — home of speakeasies and the only city I know of with a cocktail to its name — I was driven to drinking…cocktails. Particularly during summers.

You see, I’ve never been one of the lucky ones who can escape to the Hamptons or the Jersey shore.

Instead of the sea, sun, sand, and sky, I’ve had to grapple with sweat, smog, dirt, and skyscrapers.

Now, I could have gone the conventional route and drowned my sorrows in a beer. But why do that when a cocktail is so much pleasanter, and can transport you to places you’d rather be in — places much more exotic than an overcrowded beach?

Cocktails are a trip

My hunt for the transcendent cocktail experience has yielded several noteworthy finds, among them:

1) The mojito at Victor’s Cafe on West 52nd St. A single sip transported me to 1950s Havana, where I found myself salsa dancing with a Ricky Ricardo-look-alike. (And that was before I’d sampled the roast suckling pig!)

2) The vodka martini in the Russian Vodka Room, also on West 52nd St. I thought I was in Moscow from the moment I entered this swanky establishment, greeted by the sight of a curved bar at which many natives are downing shots, and behind which are these enormous jars of flavor-infused vodkas. Once I’d tasted my martini, I was well on my way to an enriching cultural experience. Oh, so that’s how they get through daily life in Russia. It all comes down to homemade vodka and to music — sublime combination! (Misha Tsiganov, a prize-winning jazz pianist who studied in St. Petersburg, is the bar’s official piano player.)

3) The classic martini at Angel’s Share, a tiny gem of a bar in the East Village. This drink made me feel I was in Tokyo again, even though I wasn’t really a cocktail person there. The Japanese bartenders had the mix, shake and stir down to an art form — which is soooo Japanese. And no one is allowed to stand at the bar — ditto. But by the time I’d polished off my divinely-inspired drink, I’d left Japan far behind for heaven itself — an effect enhanced by a ceiling mural that appears to have been inspired by Botticelli’s playful cherubs.

4) The Negroni at The Smith on 3rd Avenue. The Negroni — one part gin, one part sweet vermouth and one part Campari — is said to have originated in Florence in 1919, the invention of one Count Camillo Negroni. The first time I sampled one at the bar at The Smith, I fancied I’d become E.M. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch at the very moment when she witnesses a murder on the Florentine streets, and is about to faint. (Where is George Emerson when you need him?) You see, the Smith version is anything but aristocratic: it packs quite a punch.

Next up? I hope it will be the Mexican martini, which I read about it in the New York Times last month. Basically, it’s a margarita served in a martini glass, with olives on a spear.

The drink is said to have been introduced from Matamoros, Mexico, just across from Brownsville, Texas, when a bartender from Austin visited there and was served a margarita in a martini glass.

It has since become Austin’s signature drink. Being Texan, it’s twice as large as a regular drink, so customers are given the cocktail shaker and urged to pour the drink themselves.

I haven’t been to Austin — and would love to go (though preferably not in the summer). I reckon a Mexican martini may be just the ticket…

The only issue is, the drink hasn’t really made it out of Austin yet.

So if you happen to hear of any Austin expats working behind Manhattan bars (yes, that’s how they’d refer to themselves), be sure to inform me.

For now though would you kindly join me in a refrain of “Drinks, glorious drinks, wonderful drinks!”

QUESTION: Can you recommend some summer cocktails you think have the makings of a mini-escape?

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe to The Displaced Dispatch, a weekly round up of posts from The Displaced Nation, plus some extras such as seasonal recipes and occasional book giveaways. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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CONTEMPORARY DISPLACED WRITING: David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

4 Comments Posted by on July 29, 2011

A few weeks ago I found myself in Claremont, California. I hadn’t intentionally planned to stop there, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I’d been at a wedding in Southern California the day before, and as I made the long drive back home the next day my stomach began to rumble, and there were signs on the highway for Claremont. That name rang a bell with me, but I couldn’t quite recall why. Possibly, being not the world’s greatest driver, I was too busy concentrating on the road, and the suicidal, kamikaze driving of the locals, to really stop and think on why the name Claremont was so familiar to me. My wife told me that it was probably because I’d heard of Ponoma College, a liberal arts university, which is based in downtown Claremont. That certainly sounds familiar. Yep, it must be that, I thought. And being a college town, it seemed like the perfect place to stop for lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

It was only as after lunch as I was getting back into my car – already dreading the thought of getting back onto the highway, staying on it for another 6 hours, and sharing it with mad men – that I realised why the name Claremont and Ponoma College had seemed so familiar. It wasn’t through a synapse suddenly working, finally passing a neuron to that part of my brain that stores all my thoughts on Claremont. No, it was my wife googling Ponoma College on her iPhone. Reading its Wikipedia entry, she said, “Oh, David Foster Wallace was a professor here. You must have known that, surely?”

David Foster Wallace had taught at Ponoma College, and it was in Claremont that he had sadly taken his life in 2008. You probably already know about him, so I won’t waste time repeating things here that you already know. What I will note is what an important writer he has been for me. Foster Wallace was not, as far as I know (or as far as I can remember, and as we have established, it’s not clear if we can really trust my synapses) an expat, which is what this blog focuses on. His writing does, at least to me, convey better than any other writer of his generation a sense of displacement with himself and with his America.

Moving to the U.S. in 2007, Foster Wallace’s essays were something I eagerly reconsumed. I’d read them early, but that was from the position of being a young Englishman in his early 20s who had never been to the U.S. Somehow, it didn’t count as much. Now with an I-551 visa stamped in my passport, Foster Wallace’s essays, along with de Tocqueville were the first books off my shelf as an American resident. Like de Tocqueville, Foster Wallace, though American, gave me an outsider’s perspective on my new homeland.

So this week’s displaced writing is David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It was first published in Harpers and has since been republished in book form along with other Foster Wallace essays. It’s the Harpers version that I’m going to link to as it’s still available for free on the web. The essay details an assignment Foster Wallace had, trapped and displaced, on a Carribean cruiseliner and which is the supposedly fun thing he’ll never do again.

Click below to read.

“I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to. I have (very briefly) joined a Conga Line.”

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post, when we explore next month’s theme: “An Enchanted August.”

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Travel author Janet Brown channels Alice in Wonderland’s “tone deaf” adventures

40 Comments Posted by on June 10, 2011

SPECIAL TREAT FOR TDN READERS: JANET BROWN, author of the travel gem Tone Deaf in Bangkok, has kindly agreed to “come in” and respond to your comments and questions. 

As you may have noticed, The Displaced Nation has gone Alice-in-Wonderland mad since around the first of June. To take just a few examples:

And now, to top that all off, the extraordinary travel writer Janet Brown is paying us a visit. Brown could almost be a stand-in for the Lewis Carroll heroine herself, having published a book on travel to and life in Thailand called Tone Deaf in Bangkok, to much acclaim.

“Tone deaf” — it puts one in mind of poor Alice’s plea to the Mouse, “I didn’t mean it…But you’re so easily offended, you know!”

But if Brown sees herself as tone deaf, her readers regard her as anything but. Here is a sampling of her reader reviews on Amazon:

It has been ages since I have loved a piece of travel literature…, and so when I read TONE DEAF IN BANGKOK, I was thrilled. This is a good travel book, and it is a good book, period.

I am not a traveler, nor do I typically read travel books. Shame on me, I know, but here’s the thing: … The author brought Bangkok to life in a way that made me want to go there, yes, but it was her own story that captivated me and kept me turning the pages. Now I’d read anything Janet Brown writes!

Janet Brown’s TONE DEAF IN BANGKOK is a travelogue, to be sure. Yet it is more, so much more. It’s also an investigation into how dislocated we can become by ourselves, by our priorities and by all that we demand of the cultures in which we live. … That she has a gift for spotting the universal in the exotic makes this collection all the more profound.

Janet Brown has graciously agreed to answer some of my Alice-related questions. After that, dear reader, I urge you to chime in!

Before we go down the rabbit-hole, can you tell me a little bit more about your background?
My parents turned me into a gypsy before I was two, by taking me on their journey by jeep from New York City to Alaska when the 49th state was still a territory and the Alcan Highway was still an unpaved trail into the frozen north. I have wandered ever since, most recently in Southeast Asia with Bangkok as my home, writing down the stories I encounter as I explore. My books include:

Maybe because I’m so steeped in Alice-of-Wonderland lore this month, I think of you as Alice Personified. To what extent can you relate to Alice’s sense of disorientation? Going back not just to the first time you went to Thailand but also when your family dragged you to Alaska…
I was 18 months old when my family moved to Alaska from Manhattan. I coped with any displacement issues by making my mother read my favorite book over and over again — a truly saccharine Little Golden Book called The New Baby. The main character had the same name as I so that was the big attraction — all about me!  My mother swears she can still recite it verbatim after having two martinis.

Alice came to mind constantly in my first months in Bangkok — and frequently thereafter. I knew I’d gone through the looking glass — or had entered the postcard — and asked myself often if that experience had been as painful for Alice as it often was for me.

Can you describe your worst “Pool of Tears” moment in Bangkok, where you wished you hadn’t decided on living there?
I’ve tried to make light of that time when I wrote about it in Tone Deaf in Bangkok, but it nearly demolished me. When the manager of my apartment turned me into Ryan’s Daughter by listening in on my phone calls and then entertaining the neighborhood with highly embroidered versions of my life — and when people fell silent when I walked down the street and began gabbling excitedly after I’d passed — I felt as though my life had been stolen from me and I shut down to the point of hypothermia. If my students hadn’t helped me find a new neighborhood, I would have gone home a gibbering mess.

Thailand is renowned for its distinctive cuisine. Was there anything that carried an “Eat me” label that you felt hesitant about at first, but then discovered you loved?
I’ve written about durian in Tone Deaf, how I thought its smell in the market was sewer gas and then how I was forced to taste it, with happy results. Fried grasshoppers were another thing I didn’t warm to at first sight and then liked as much as I do popcorn — they have much the same crunch and texture.

By the same token, were there any foods that you thought might be good but then didn’t acquire a taste for? (For Alice, of course, that was the Duchess’s over-peppered soup.)
One night I stopped to buy green papaya salad from a food cart to take home for supper. There was something in a little plastic bag that looked like a sort of relish, so I bought that, too.When I opened it at home a smell of rot filled the air, but remembering the delightful surprise that durian had proved to be, I took a generous spoonful. It was pla ra — fermented fish, a Northeastern Thailand culinary staple that is meant to be added and mixed judiciously with the salad, not eaten like peanut butter. There wasn’t enough toothpaste in the world to rid my mouth of that thoroughly foul taste.

As already mentioned, Alice finds it’s easy to offend the creatures in Wonderland without even trying. Why did you choose the expression “tone deaf” for the title of your book on Bangkok? 
“Tone deaf” can be taken quite literally. Thai is a tonal language with five different tones giving meaning to every word. Use the wrong tone and at best you’re incomprehensible, at worst shocking. The most common mistake for foreigners is to tell someone their baby is beautiful, while actually announcing that the infant is bad luck. Another pitfall is confusing the word “near” with the word for “far” — they are the same sound, differentiated by a crucial tone.

But travelers to Thailand can also be “tone deaf” when it comes to figuring out the Thais’ communication style. As a Thai-American friend has observed, the important things are what remain unsaid. “You looked so beautiful yesterday” probably means today you resemble dogfood and ought to go home and rectify that at once. Subtlety is the hallmark of Thai communication, and is often expressed through a quirk of an eyebrow or a famous Thai smile, which has at least one hundred different meanings — including disdain or outright menace.

Describe the biggest faux pas you’ve made since settling in Bangkok.
Oh, how to choose — it’s impossible not to make faux pas every second because Thai etiquette is demanding and complex. The one that makes me cringe most is in my first week when I set off on my first solo bus ride. I was clutching a twenty-baht note, which like all bank notes in Thailand bears the countenance of the King. He is revered to the point of near godhood in his kingdom and his picture is always elevated to the highest spot in a room — nothing is above the King. But I was fresh off the boat and when I dropped my money and it was caught in a little breeze, I put out my foot (the lowest and most ignominious part of the body) and stepped on the picture of the King’s face to secure my bus fare. I was too clueless to pick up on the ripples of horror that this caused others at the bus stop, but now I writhe when I remember this.

“Off with her head!” as the chief royal in Alice’s story is wont to proclaim. Actually, never mind your head. Your mention of your foot makes me think of how physically awkward Alice feels around the creatures in Wonderland. As a farang in Bangkok, do you often feel self conscious?
I’m short and dark in a family of pale-skinned people, so I was used to being an anomaly from early childhood. In Bangkok, if I dressed like a Thai woman and wore sunglasses and walked slowly, I felt as though I blended in. But one day I walked down a quiet street on my way to a class, and someone looked up and said, “Look at the foreigner.” “How did she know?” I asked my class of teenage girls. “Your hair,” they said. “No, lots of Thai women have dyed their hair brown,” I replied — to which they responded: “Your nose.” It was my big American nose that gave me away every time — and since I hate pain and surgery, I just had to accept that.

Have you tweaked your personal style at all so as to fit in better? 
Yes — I adopted the conservative “Don’t show your bare shoulders” school of dressing that prevailed in Bangkok when I first arrived and slowed my pace to that of the women around me. I learned to keep my facial expression as bland as I possibly could to achieve the quiet Thai “public face,” and I ironed everything, including my Levis. Now women are much more casual in the way they dress but I’m still stuck in the cultural mores of the 90s. To foreign women who live here now, my introductory years in Bangkok seem like fiction — things have changed so drastically in the past 16 years.

Time for a quote from the Cheshire Cat: “…we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” Can you relate?
Riding on the back of a motorcycle taxi down a crowded city sidewalk, buying a glass of Shiraz to take with my popcorn into a movie theater, being drenched to the bone during Thai New Year’s — this is actually the most difficult question you’ve asked so far because at this point it all seems normal.

If you were to hold your own Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Bangkok, whom would you invite, and why?
Anais Nin, because she would love the unbridled hedonism of this place, Evelyn Waugh because he would satirize the expat scene so well, Ho Chi Minh because he could help put together the revolution that is needed here, Emily Hahn because she has always been my role model since I first read her when I was twelve, and Elvis because in Bangkok he is still the king.

Alice becomes aware that Wonderland is turning her into a different person, unrecognizable to the one she used to be. Has your identity has shifted in fundamental ways since living in Bangkok?
This is a very complex question — I’ve written one book about it and am working on a second one, Almost Home. I’m always drawn back to the US because my children are there. Seeing them for two weeks a year doesn’t work for me. Once I get back to the US this time around, I’ll return here but plan to spend the bulk of my time near family in the Pacific Northwest. I won’t know how much I’ve been changed by this recent incarnation in Bangkok until then. Ask me again in several months.

Can you offer any advice for newcomers to Bangkok, who aren’t sure who they are any more?
Tone Deaf in Bangkok and my next book, Almost Home, are where I directly address the challenges of feeling like an Alice in Thailand. In addition, the recently published Lost and Found Bangkok, for which I wrote the text, may be helpful for newcomers. It’s a book in which five different photographers — two American men, two Thai men (both from Bangkok), and one Taiwanese-American woman — show the city they live in. New arrivals can look at the photos and see some great places to get lost — and find out who they are — in this Wonderland-like city.

img: Janet Brown with friends at an all-you-can-eat DIY barbecue at a huge restaurant under a bridge in Bangkok, by Will Yaryan.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post on the problems one can anticipate in trying out one’s humor on Wonderland’s inhabitants…

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Nation. That way, you won’t miss a single issue. SPECIAL OFFER: New subscribers receive a FREE copy of “A Royally Displaced Tea.”

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