Five Seven One

So Paris! Paris has three governing colors: orange, blue and grey. When Paris is grey, it’s grey as if the entire color spectrum had been eliminated from existence, but when there are blue skies shining over head, they vibrate with the yellow orange of the buildings, and every other color becomes an accent against the dominant, reflecting it’s light that much stronger. It sometimes seems that the people here are ruled by the same ambit of Parisian tones. They push and bark, encapsulated in a begrudging prism reluctant to demonstrate the different facets of their characters, but the prism is fragile and easily shattered, spilling brightly hued personalities on every surface. Personalities that have retained a good deal of their humanity in the face of the ever growing global hysteria. Maybe we have just been lucky, or maybe we are just in tune with Paris?

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I was sitting in the Berlin Documentation Center, watching footage of people charge through barbed wire to escape from East Germany when the wall was being erected, thinking about the desperation and oppression that would cause a human to ignore their own safety and potential loss of life. All I have experienced moving to different countries is seeming endless bureaucratic nonsense, manifested in mounds of paperwork and lengthy phone calls, and although I sometimes get the notion that running through barbed wire would be welcome as long as there is some relief in the end, I continue filling out the paperwork and making the calls. Maybe I would be willing to take more risk if I could see an actual enemy. Instead I have to deal with people just like me—probably similar upbringing, fairly educated and with a moderate income. It just begs the question, why would I do this to myself?

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Our ten weeks in Nice was the first time in a long while that I was completely happy with what I was doing. I wasn’t helping anyone sell an idea that I didn’t believe in, and I wasn’t occupied with busy work. I was learning—learning how to communicate and how to teach others to communicate. The rest of my time was occupied with new friends, the Mediterranean and living cheaply and simply.

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Traveling in Spain for me was like a second coming of age. Barcelona embodies all the confusion, passion, spontaneity, creativity and uncertainty that make the pubescent mind so wonderful and frightening. It is a combination of dissipation and focus with a lack of experience to distinguish the two, which gives its diverse residents youth and optimism.

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Iceland earns its handle, “the land of fire and ice”, nowhere better than Vatnajökull Glacier. Every inch of landscape on this stretch of Iceland’s southern coast shows signs of millions of years of abuse and upheaval. The glacier seems to be sitting quietly, revealing itself through the massive fissures it has created in the volcanic mountains. Vast fields of black sand, caused by volcanoes erupting underneath the glacier are a reminder of floods rivaling the flow of the Amazon that have laid waste to lichen covered plains. Around the base of the glacier large inland lakes form floating icebergs thousands of years old.

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