Strange Currency (Shannon)
It only makes sense to shop in other countries if you're there for a short time with a big suitcase and are going home. Our trip is like a business. We always have to plan for and consider the next stop, and instead of doing touristy things, we are administrative, which takes time, research, money and foreign language skills. (Okay, we do touristy things.) Our business is not to make money, but to spend it. The absurdity appeals to me,while the practicality has me out of sorts. What's next? Mirrored candles? Alpaca sweaters? More film and CDs.
I do have a lot of images to work with, for the business that is the rest of my life, the book I'm writing that ends with my death. Meanwhile, people are so poor, orphan children, dirty and crying on the street, kicked dogs, old people creaking around begging. The fucked ways of the world we never have an answer for.
I got called an "Aparecia" by an old Quechua woman on the street. A ghost with white skin and white hair. Lost all my native currency when I lost my father. When Papa Indio was with me, the skins smiled at us. Now Í'm just another gringa. That doesn´t stop me from crying in the museum when the next room in the Inca story is called "Conquest." But it doesn´t stop there. The story continues with Indigenous Resistance and Survival. Reason to smile again. History is exhausting.
But I'm happy to be traveling. I like it that we're not 2-week vacationers glued to a guide book with urgency about seeing specific things, being focused on certain places, or else --what? We haven't been here? Not so. It's more here here when we can unravel in a place and be ourselves, mold the strangeness to our desires as much as we surrender to its surprises.
There's a lot to see and it all feels new, good and bad, sweet and scary,like eyes looking back at you out of a bundle on an old woman´s back, or a tiny dirty girl selling you your weight as she sits on the sidewalk with a bathroom scale. There´s chocolate that tastes strange and bugs we can't name. Our lips are blue from alt.sick. And in Cuzco, there are no cats. They've all been eaten.
I do have a lot of images to work with, for the business that is the rest of my life, the book I'm writing that ends with my death. Meanwhile, people are so poor, orphan children, dirty and crying on the street, kicked dogs, old people creaking around begging. The fucked ways of the world we never have an answer for.
I got called an "Aparecia" by an old Quechua woman on the street. A ghost with white skin and white hair. Lost all my native currency when I lost my father. When Papa Indio was with me, the skins smiled at us. Now Í'm just another gringa. That doesn´t stop me from crying in the museum when the next room in the Inca story is called "Conquest." But it doesn´t stop there. The story continues with Indigenous Resistance and Survival. Reason to smile again. History is exhausting.
But I'm happy to be traveling. I like it that we're not 2-week vacationers glued to a guide book with urgency about seeing specific things, being focused on certain places, or else --what? We haven't been here? Not so. It's more here here when we can unravel in a place and be ourselves, mold the strangeness to our desires as much as we surrender to its surprises.
There's a lot to see and it all feels new, good and bad, sweet and scary,like eyes looking back at you out of a bundle on an old woman´s back, or a tiny dirty girl selling you your weight as she sits on the sidewalk with a bathroom scale. There´s chocolate that tastes strange and bugs we can't name. Our lips are blue from alt.sick. And in Cuzco, there are no cats. They've all been eaten.
posted by squid | 3:24 PM
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