One week to Bloco X

ONE WEEK TO BLOCO X! I can't really believe it. It seems so hypothetical, still.

A little explanation for my European readers: For most Americans, Europe is so remote and unreal that it seems like a myth. Most Americans can't travel much - we're geographically isolated over here, we only get a measly TWO WEEKS VACATION! criminy! (and we have to spend that visiting our families, since most of us live at least a thousand miles away from our families). And we just can't afford it, with plane fares these days. And we're terrified by foreign languages, since most of us get crappy instruction in school, and if we know anything it's Spanish, which is of limited use in Europe. So Europe's an exotically strange place that springs to life only two or three times in one's life, on the fleetingly rare visits overseas. Visits that you save up for for years!! Knowing you might only ever be able to go once in your life. A twelve-hour plane trip; a thousand-dollar (or more) plane ticket; all your vacation time saved up for a year or more; the other side of the planet.

To be able to say "I've been to Paris," or "I've been to Rome," really means something to most Americans. I have plenty of friends who've never been able to travel outside of the United States even once. And plenty of others who've been exactly once, twenty years ago when they were in college, and they cherish that one memory. "Once, I got to go to London..."

(No wonder we end up behaving like such illiterate country hicks when we finally get there! We're very inexperienced.)

For us here on the West Coast - we're three thousand miles further away than even the East Coast! Europe seems (and is) even more remote, like a very far away planet, a fairy story told to you long ago; unreal. Real is California sea lions & chinook salmon swimming up the Columbia River. Real is the hometown killer whales of Seattle, wild blackberries coming into bloom everywhere, peregrine falcons zooming overhead from their nests on the Portland bridges. Funky Portland girls in their tight wool miniskirts over long wool pants, tossing their blonde dreadlocks over their shoulders as they bike with their latest load of art supplies through the drizzle back to their organic-vegetable-gardened, backyard-chicken, plus-maybe-one-little-backyard-goat, cute chilly unheated low-carbon-footprint Portland houses. Real is spring-skiing the extinct volcano of Mt. Hood (or is it extinct, really?). Hearing the news reports that the gray wolves of Yellowstone have walked all the way to Oregon. Well, like I said, Europe seems unreal.

But it's REAL, my ticket says NEXT TUESDAY, I'm wrapping up my teaching at the University of Portland with shocking suddenness, moving out of my house already. Tuesday! I'll be gone for a month. I'm torn about leaving - part of me really wants to stay and see a Portland spring, and see the Gatas through their very first ever gig! and work on repinique with the Lions, take candomble lessons with Jesse, practice caixa and pandeiro every day. Instead I'm flitting off again. So distracted by my packing-up frenzy that I actually forgot about Gatas rehearsal (I can't believe I did that... it really shows how much I've mentally disengaged from Portland already).

Today three different friends offered me free housing in Istanbul, London AND France. ISTANBUL! I swore to myself years ago that I would return someday; now I will return in the company of a dearly beloved Turkish-fluent friend who I met playing samba. How lucky am I?? Bloco X, Istanbul, maybe Prague, from there to London, and maybe I'll fit in that France trip too.... Lucky lucky lucky.... I have to go pack now.