a peek behind the colorful curtain

It’s easy to be charmed by Cartagena; we certainly were during the 36 hours we spent there. Well-preserved colonial architecture, which earned the city a UNESCO World Heritage Site designation; incredible food scene and lively nightlife; vibrant street art and colorful buildings; narrow cobbled streets in the heart of the walled historic center filled with cute shops and cafes…the list of Cartagena’s modern-day attractions goes on and on. And yet, one has to be almost willfully blind not to see that the glitzy facade of this thriving tourist hub belies the ongoing daily struggles of a large percentage of the local population. Nowhere is this jarring dichotomy greater than in the neighborhood of Getsemani, which was transformed about a decade ago from one of the city’s poorest into one of its hippest.

Meteora monasteries

In one of Pushkin’s most memorable and oft-quoted lines, the titular protagonist of his masterpiece Eugene Onegin “arrives from the ship to the ball.” This is how D felt, arriving in Thessaloniki after taking two consecutive red-eye flights and checking into our hotel mere hours before his friend’s wedding. Fighting jet lag, we made it to midnight, but once the wedding cake was cut and the dancing commenced, we begged off. S would’ve gladly hit the dance floor, but D was fading fast, and we made ambitious plans for the following day — our only day in Thessaloniki together.

blink, and you’ll miss it

“As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade.
But under certain circumstances…this process can occur in the comparative blink of an eye.”

                                                                                                      — A Gentleman In Moscow, Amor Towles

perpetual twilight

Unlike his earlier work trips, D’s most recent travel lasted a mere eleven days – the exact amount of time required to completely get over jet lag after circumnavigating half the globe. In other words, as soon as his mind had finally caught up with his body and gotten over the eleven-and-a-half-hour time difference between Costa Rica and India, D boarded the first of four flights for his return trek back to the Western Hemisphere. That journey, door to door, lasted a mind-numbing 40 hours – a new record for D. He returned Friday evening, and his mind has been struggling to readjust back to this time zone ever since.

digital dependency

In a brutally prescient short story entitled “The Murderer,” Ray Bradbury painted a dystopian future in which the titular character is committed to a psychiatric institution for “murdering” his digital appliances. Written in 1953, Bradbury’s imagined horrorscape, in which people are bombarded by a near constant  nostream of digital communication — through phones, intercoms, and even wrist watches — bears an uncanny resemblance to our actual lived reality at the present moment. Our lives have become so enmeshed with our devices and we have grown so dependent on them that we feel their unexpected loss viscerally. We speak from personal experience, having felt the sting of such loss on two separate occasions just recently.

living in the past

Strive though we might to live in the moment, the task is almost always impossible. The weight of the past is too great, the pull of the future too powerful to resist. The present is all we ever truly have but it seems too ephemeral to hold on to for long; it may, like the current inflection point in European geopolitics, be too painful also. William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Those words rang with particularly sinister clarity last week as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and the Cold War ghosts of Europe’s not-so-distant past took on corporeal form.

always on the move

The first item we had written down when compiling our joint bucket list about a decade ago was to travel for a year continuously. We had met a couple of years earlier at the start of S’s nine-months-long jaunt through South America. The following year, D had backpacked through most of the same countries over the course of six months. Aiming to reprise those travels, but to do so together, we set the bar at a nice round number, envisioning lots of adventures and plenty of opportunities for cultural immersion and culinary exploration. A decade later and with two kids in tow, it feels like we have spent the last twelve months constantly on the move. The last year has treated us well, but it has also been exhausting — and definitely not what we had had in mind when penning our bucket list.

saddle up

The Appalachian Trail isn’t the longest hiking trail in the world — it’s not even the longest trail in America — but it is the stuff of legends. First there was Earl Shaffer, the WWII vet who wanted to “walk the war out of my system” and in doing so became the first person to thru-hike the AT. He accomplished the feat in 1948, a decade after the trail had been completed. Then there was Emma Gatewood, a grandmother of 23 who in 1955, at the age of 67, told her family she “was going for a walk,” bought a one-way ticket from Ohio to Georgia, and disappeared into the woods for half a year, becoming the first woman and only the sixth person ever to thru-hike the trail. Bill Bryson’s humorous, self-deprecating account of his 1998 thru-hike helped popularize the pursuit. Only 3,000 people had accomplished the feat in the trail’s first sixty years. Since Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods was published and subsequently turned into a movie, that number has swelled to more than 21,000.

lockdown lite

To the surprise of exactly no one, the authorities extended Manila’s recently reimposed enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) — the Philippines’ strictest lockdown level — for an additional week. Ostensibly instituted for one week the morning we returned from our island-hopping vacation, the heightened quarantine will now last through April 11, at least, and may very well continue getting extended in one-week increments. It’s hard to tell with these things. What has been noticeable, on the other hand, is how markedly different this ECQ feels to the identically named lockdown we experienced at the onset of the pandemic last year.

lucky seven

Thanks to a pair of weekend beach trips, February seemed to pass much faster than January had. As we turned the calendar to March and kicked off our 100-day countdown to departure from the Philippines, we also celebrated Munchkin’s seventh birthday — a terrific reminder that life marches on apace even if it sometimes feels that the pandemic has put it on pause.