Hungarian Parliament Drooling

I got more orientation materials about my upcoming trip, and today it included a lot of photos of the beautiful Hungarian Parliament building. It was meant to get us excited about coming, and let me tell you, its working.

My New Habitat

is a bit of a strange one, or at least not what you imagine initially for someone is living in New York. At the moment I am staying with family in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, sometimes called Little Odessa, which is just down the boardwalk from Coney Island with its famous amusement park. The Cyclone is one of the last wooden rollercoasters left and it is certainly one of the most jarring.

Stepping off the train here I'm only a block from the boardwalk and beyond that is the ocean. It is immediately relaxing. The pace of life suits a suburb, which it certainly is being an hour by train from Manhattan. I've been commuting back and forth for almost a month now and I assure you it is a long ride. Between that and not having internet at home, I'm planning on packing up my suitcase again in the near future.


But for this little piece of summer, it's a fantastic place to be. Living here makes me feel that my travels are not over, for its boasts a unique, sometimes campy, bizarre mix of elements. In fact, its mix of cultures and customs it might be more typical"New York" than I realized.

Photographs via Racoles on Flickr.

Transitions

Lots of transitions this past week, from flying out of Mexico and landing in New York in the evening to the glimmer of city lights...

To a new (temporary) home by a different ocean in a rather chilly, wet climate....

Interspersed with lots of long subway rides...


Into Manhattan, which hasn't changed a bit.

I'm going through a bit of reverse culture shock. Even now that I've gotten some clothes out of storage and settled into a new space and seen old friends, I still answer people with a "si" instead of a "yes" and am overwhelmed by the subway at rush hour. This week should be a bit easier, so hopefully I can tell you about my (incorrect) assumption that visiting the New Museum's Skin Fruit exhibition would help me ease into things by reminding me how much I love the art scene here.

Last Day in Mexico

Please excuse me- the ocean is calling.

Empire State of Mind

If all my tweets are about things happening in NYC:

1. Five Art Shows to Catch Before Closing -- New York Magazine http://ht.ly/1HXyt about 15 hours ago via HootSuite
   • Delete
2. RT @artnetdotcom: Today's 1,000-point market plunge may be because Citi trader hit "b" for billion instead of "m" for million... about 17 hours ago via HootSuite
   • Delete
3. RT @MuseumModernArt: RT @JackRicofficial: Lady Gaga was at the MoMa museum today: http://tweetphoto.com/21317606 about 18 hours ago via HootSuite
   • Delete
4. Pitch @Art21 a post on Art&Expereince--maybe web and art? tweet art? : ) http://ht.ly/1HLs7 about 21 hours ago via HootSuite
   • Delete
5. Looks fun! RT@RSHotel: First ever Great Nude Invitational @RSHotel May 13-16, we are SO excited! For info and RSVP http://bit.ly/dssKSL about 22 hours ago via HootSuite

and my favorite things to write about were seen in NYC, hello William Kentridge! and New York art fairs, then maybe it's a sign I should go back soon. Which, conveniently enough, I am. May 17. That is really soon (eep!).



Time to get in an Empire State of mind...

Such Great Heights

can be scary looking down.


Especially if you have a fear of heights that the idea of a rope hanging down the side of steep, ancient steps on the open face of a 15 story building can't quite reconcile. Coba is one of the last Mayan pyramids that visitors can climb. At least they have a rope.

Cenotes...

are difficult to photograph.


You walk down a spiral staircase 40 or 50 feet, and walk out in this egg-shaped cave half full of water. The artificial lighting casts shadows on the crevices in the limestone and the stalactites drip into the crystal clear water.


The water is so clear, it's hard to imagine that the rocks you see so clearly are 30 feet below the surface.



So you take multiple photos, trying to capture the effect.


Once again, you curse yourself for not buying some really expensive, nice camera before you started this long adventure. You think of all the shots you missed over the last few months of traveling. Then you jump in the cold water and swim with the black, eyeless fishies.

The Jig is Up

I've had an amazing five months, been to some beautiful places, and seen some amazing things, but for better or worse the jig is up. I'm moving back to New York city next month.

I am ambivalent about the move. On one hand, it will be great to back in a city I know and love, but on the other I will miss the itinerant lifestyle. Also, while I'm excited by the prospect of finding a new job and working on new projects (somewhere besides my kitchen table), I'm going to miss the luxury of waking up whenever my body tells me to to do some writing.
What all this boils down to is that my last few weeks in Playa del Carmen will be spent job hunting-- never the most fun task. I crawl through the job boards, craft up cover letters, and then send them off with little expectation of hearing back. I'm off to the job boards now in fact. At least hiring seems to be on the upswing and I have had a pretty encouraging response from the past week of applying. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Guantanamera

It's my new favorite song, because of or despite the fact I heard it a lot when I was in Cuba the past 10 days. In many ways the trip was an eye opener for me, and I took 538 pictures to prove it (Holy Fidel!). Music is in all the squares and streets from radios in the morning to the ubiquitous live bands at night. I was staying in casa particulares, private houses that rented rooms, and I began to suspect after a few nights that every Cuban knows how to play an instrument and dance salsa.



The cheerfulness of the music and the dancing glosses over some of the harder aspects of Cuban life, but at night in Havana when the dim lights hide the cracks and dirt of some old square, and the musicians play Guantanamera, it can be truly magical.

Mayan Clothes, Contemporary Painters

The show Panaramico de la Plastica Yucatanese at the Center for Visual Arts in Merida, with its focus on contemporary Yucatan artists, caught me by surprise by including many pieces of women, specifically in traditional Mayan costumes.

Carol Acereto, Belleza indigena, 2008

Having been in Merida about a month now, I would no longer make the mistake of thinking the artist is idealizing the past--rather it expresses an opinion about a changing present. Acereto's painting features young girls in traditional Mayan dress, white embroidered around the square neckline. Even today in Merida women wear the traditional white shift dress to go about their lives, as do Mayan women who come into Merida for the markets. Surprisingly, perhaps, I also see younger women wearing a top in the same style with jeans--is traditional Mayan dress as in vogue as a t-shirt?

Sandra Nikolai, Chismorreo en el mercato yucateo, 2009

Sandra Nikolai's women you might see at any market, which is as frenetic as the scene above suggests, and the colors remind me of the brightly-painted buildings. The florid palette and bustling brush strokes make sense to me after walking through the sensory cacophony of the markets.

Sandra Nikolai, Otra garnachita, 2009

A tortilla maker? Whatever little street food is being made, the artist treats the subject with dignity and I love the strong lines of the hand. It seems like the Mayan heritage is being explored, and valued positively, in these works. As a middle-aged man on the street told me yesterday, Spanish was his second language--Mayan his first, and his village an hour outside of Merida continues to make hammocks as its industry.

Jaime Barrera, Homenaje a Cy Twombly, 2009

On the other hand, he spoke fluent English and worked as a waiter at a restaurant called Main St. It's a changing world. A homage to one of my favorite painters hung in the show as well, which overall testified to a variety of influences and interests among contemporary Yucatan painters.

Visitors in Mexico!

Friends have come to visit, and having the pleasure of showing Merida to them makes me realize what a special place it is. Mexicans have a saying, "Nothing ever happens in Merida," and it is meant in the best possible way. The city is a peaceful haven even within the safe, well functioning Yucatan peninsula. The turmoil and issues in the other parts of Mexico don't seem to reach here.
Today we are going to walk around the city center and look at the cathedral, the beautiful candy colored facades that hide dark rooms and spacious courtyards, and the bustling plazas with their vendors, pigeons, and children.


Maybe later we will stop at the market for a bite to eat, or at least some churros (my favorite) before dinner.

Falling In Love with Mexico

Or more specifically, the Yucatan, which thinks of itself as rather different from the rest of the country. People here are so nice--plain old nice. I've asked for directions and had a man lead me to the bus and flag it down for me, and three times when I asked the way to a certain street at a stoplight, the other driver told me to follow him. (I get lost a lot.) The people here are genuinely warm and kind, and seem completely family-oriented. Utopia.

So it's fascinating to me that every museum and religious site I go to, be it ancient Mayan or contemporary Catholic, and book about Mexico I read, stress death. I can't wait to see what the Easter celebrations have in store.

Chichen Itza: New Wonder of the World

The seven NEW wonders of the world might be a suspect commercial ploy, but the actual site of Chichen Itza, with its glorious central pyramid and extensive other buildings, is anything but. Chichen Itza was built largely between 700 and 1000 AD.

El Castillo, below, is about 80 feet high, and contains a smaller, older pyramid inside. It was dedicated to the feathered serpent god Kukucan, and is aligned with the stars. Around this time of year, the sun will the right side of the pyramid that you see here in a manner that causes a shadow along the left side that looks like a serpent. Carved serpent heads sit on either side of the stairs at the bottom of that side.


All these years later, it is astonishing to see the perfect lines of the structure.


Many other temples and buildings such as a steam bath and an observatory encircle El Castillo. The carvings, weathered and lacking their original colors, remain intricate and fascinating. The skill it took to create and decorate such structures is astonishing, and made even the heat and all the tourists worth it. This wall of skulls was was part of a smaller sacrificial site nearby.


The eagle and the jaguar were important symbols for the ancient Maya. Here you can make out eagle holding something up in its claw: a beating human heart. Removing the heart from living prisoners was done to placate the gods and ensure the return of the sun.


On a lighter note, who knew the Mayans invented tic tac toe?


Chichen Itza is one of the largest sites, and the most heavily touristed--it even has a lightshow on the pyramid at night. However, Mayan ruins abound across the Yucatan peninsula, where I am, and I can't wait to see more this weekend and learn more about the people who originally created them.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

To Do: Create New Life...

Life has been a little overwhelming recently, but in defense of my opting to sleep rather than finish my video of the SCOPE art fair preview yesterday, let me explain what I've been up to:

1) Deciding to give up our apartment in New York to keep traveling, meaning I had to come back early to pack up
2) But my flight was delayed because of snow
3) Giving me less time to pack the contents of my life
4) And move them into storage while sleeping on friend's couches and trying to get a temporary phone set up
4) Finally finding the perfect place to live in our next destination: Merida, Mexico!
5) Packing my suitcase and finding a flight for this weekend because we have to move in immediately

So between leaving one country, coming home, moving, and then planning to move to a different country...everything has been a little up in the air, to say the least. I haven't been able to say anything about this new plan because it only just evolved! While we had talked about going to Mexico, we weren't sure until a few weeks ago, and then we needed to find a place to stay. Even now, we aren't sure how long we will be staying. Merida is a beautiful city on the Yucatan peninsula, and I'm beyond excited to see it.

For the moment though, it just feels great to be back in New York--coincidentally enough, with art fairs galore! Today, I'm planning to see Verge and Independent, and hopefully the William Kentridge show at MoMA as well.

Stop Motion Sunrise

Mosquitoes woke me up just in time for the sunrise yesterday. I can't think when the last time I saw one of those was. I expected the sun to rise up in a burst of glory, but instead it came up rather slowly, in a series of moments. So here I played with stop motion animation-- not that the sun needed help from me in rising, but because it gives a better sense of movement and perception. Now I wish I had taken the photos from a fixed point, like a tripod, and taken more of them, but you get the idea.

It's a beautiful and peaceful way to begin the day. I'd like to rouse myself out of bed one morning to see it again, without any prodding little biters helping me along.

Back to the Expected Problems...

The sheet covered all my extremities save for my head-- specifically my now-lumpy forehead. My prophecy of sunburn, hangover, and mosquitoes came 1/3 true. Mosquitoes here are murderous, greedy little suckers.

On the bright side, they woke me up to this:

**Pics on Pinel Island added to the prior post

Pinel Island

Yesterday we went snorkeling on Pinel, an uninhabited stretch of of rock and dune grass about 1000 meters from Saint Martin. It is on the French side, which is why I spelled it Saint Martin (as opposed to Sint Maarten as they do on the Dutch side where we live). Saint Martin/Sint Maarten itself is quite small, and almost overpopulated with its 60,000 inhabitants plus the holiday crowd down here now. So we took a tub of a boat over to another rock for some good snorkeling.

I have done a little snorkeling since we arrived on Saint Maarten, and I love how you can just float on your stomach and watch everything. The grasses waved as if in a breeze and I had seen a few fish. That was enough for me: apply lots of sunscreen to back, lean in, breathe through tube, paddle about. But snorkeling around Pinel was like being in a whole different ocean. It was beautiful, and we lucked out with great visibility. I could see 15-20 feet around me. I was very excited to see the first fish. Then there were three fish. Then I realized I was surrounded by fish on all sides. There were little striped guys, and thin silver ones by the surface, and some glowing electric blue ones. They were unfazed by the big creatures with gangly limbs in their midst. Soon I was seeing tiny schools of fish as well as bottom feeders.

An eco tourist company took over what had been a overpopulated reef, and we rented special snorkels from them. The Snorkels had radios!! You bite down on the mouthpiece, and the sound travels up your teeth and jaw to your ears. The sound was crystal clear. An antenna runs up the tube to get the radio signal. They can even tune them into normal FM radio stations, but they put us on the tour. To the accompaniment of Caribbean music and descriptions of fish and coral in the area, we were off. I was too distracted to pay attention to the recording telling me the fish names, but all the same it was pretty neat.


Everything moved so slowly and gracefully, except probably for me using flippers for the first time. With the music in your ears and so much to see it was like being in a different world. Then we were lucky enough to see a spotted eagle stingray. Once the internet man arrives, bearing civilization on his truck, I will share photos too. As it is, my connection isn't good enough to upload....**

**Connection fixed and I added photos--underwater ones not of my own taking