So- I'm leaving today for a tour that include eight countries, eight weeks, and large numbers of architectural wonders and World Heritage sites. People keep asking me what I'm most excited about, and the answer is "Borobudur! No-wait. Pyramids! Or the Acropolis. No Zanzibar! Definitely Zanzibar! Or Rome..." and so forth. Right now it all sounds great- other than the 32-odd hours of air travel it will take to get me to my first stop. Don't feel too sorry for me, the fist stop is Bali. I have made a brief to-do list for the trip:
- lie on a beach in Bali, although I might be convinced to move long enough to do a yoga class.
- take my Episcopalian self up to the top of Borabodur, to see what the valley looks like through the eyes of all of those Buddhas.
- haggle in a bazaar in Istanbul. And see what makes the domes in Hagia Sofia stand up. And hear the calls to prayer five times a day.
- eat something that terrifies me
- climb the Acropolis and sit on the steps of the Erectheion, mainly because that was the topic of my first grad school paper.
- stand on a hill on a Grecian island and see the blue domes against the white walls and the blue sea, and maybe even get lost in the Labyrinth (they say the minotaur is gone.)
- embarrass myself in Italian. I’d like to learn a curse word in every country I visit.
- stare down The Sphinx.
- hear some crazy loud music in Zanzibar, and hang out with my old friends at a rooftop bar on a narrow windy street.
- If I see a Maasai warrior silhouetted in a sunset somewhere along the way, I will be ecstatic. I want to fly past Kilimanjaro on the way back to Dar es Salaam, just so I can say that sentence aloud to somebody.
- visit Italy as a grown-up, and slap my 21 year old self for having no idea whatsoever what architectural and cultural treasures she was half-appreciating as a backpacker.
- pet the lions in the Court of the Myrtles, and have coffee in Parc Guell, and start dinner at 11 pm like the Spanish do.
- see if I can love Paris (I don’t.)
- go back to London (which I do indeed love) and visit Primrose Hill, and Covent Garden, and Camden Town. And see what my sister’s been up to in Belgium, and drink a beer at Delirium Tremens with her exotic friends.
- secretly sketch people in airports (not in a creepy way) and stand on the deck of a ferry somewhere gorgeous, and ride some trains. I want to wear out some shoes.
- appreciate getting warm, after a day spent in the windy cold. Or, appreciate a cold tropical beer after a day on the equator.
In short, I want to step entirely out of my life, my routine, and my comfort zone and see what the rest of the world has been doing while I’ve been sitting at a desk for 3 1/2 years. I need, quite literally, to lay my hands on some of the treasures I’ve studied in architecture school. The people who built these temples, monuments, marketplaces, duomos, cathedrals, hamams, and public places had something they wanted to say to future generations. Now seems like I great time to find out what it was, and then maybe I'll be better prepared to go build some of these things for myself. *
*or, at least think about lovely things while I'm waiting tables and job hunting.
