15/02/2013

Bangalore, I will say it once before swiftly moving on, was dirty. It still doesn’t breach the top ten list of the countries most polluted metropolises, but it was more than enough of a big-city experience for us to have become afraid of them, considering that 188 out of 190 cities in India have recently been shown to have high or critical levels of pollution.. It seems unfair, derogatory almost, towards the city and the country’s great people to dismiss a place as simply “dirty”, but India is not like Europe. A dirty city in Europe is a harbinger for dirty people who could not care less. In India though, the Industrial revolution has taken a stranglehold, and when one takes all into account – history, culture, population size and density, wealth disparity, infrastructure, economic growth, and climate - the abject waste that decimates the health of the city is essentially inevitable. Which is why Pondicherry took us by such great surprise. A trading town that was under French colonization/occupation for three centuries - from the 1600’s until 1954, almost a decade beyond Indian independence – Pondicherry, the city at the heart of the French district Puducherry, clings somewhat to its recent European history. As you enter from the bus stand on the outskirts, travelling down Streets that become Rues, the architecture swiftly takes on an all too familiar but peculiar feel. It becomes French. Unfamiliar with the nuances of architecture, my description remains simplistic – stone carved balconies, elegant porch ways, creeper plants that themselves seem important and adapted for the climate, and endless courtyards. Also, a first for India so far, in an unnecessary grandiose European gesture, functioning, raised sidewalks! The buzzword for tourists here is “heritage”. But what impressed me was not the beautiful city that the wealthy colonists managed to create (most likely with the help of unwilling laborers), but the pride and utmost care that the current, Indian Pondicherrians undertake daily to maintain the aged architectural beauty that would have otherwise faded if the current new Indian lifestyle were to have its way. Every morning, women gathered at their doors to sweep what little dust and dirt that had amassed in the past twenty four hours into neat piles by the curbside, and then a parade of female rubbish collectors marched alongside their truck, collecting the rubbish in buckets and spilling it over the lavishly painted tailgate. The buildings, both public and private were all seemingly freshly painted in the most vibrant colours. There was a library of aureolin yellow, a blood red hospital, and delicately designed houses of fuchsia, spring greens and watery blues. Craft shops sold locally made, tribal made and French imitation handicrafts, there was a burgeoning health movement, be it through sincere concern or from the unbridled wealth the city seemed to have amassed, or both; fair trade and organic food stores were scattered throughout, gracing a select few streets in the relatively dense and small city. Everywhere, croissants were sold.

You could almost, for a brief moment, fool yourself into thinking that you were in an old French suburb, that you had stepped through a Midnight-in-Paris type wormhole. But the moment is very brief. Like everywhere else on the subcontinent, from village to city to national park, Pondicherry is unmistakably Indian, in that way that can only be understood once you’ve been here, once the humidity secretes its thick film on your skin, once the dust has gathered to grey and blacken your feet, once the hum of motorcycles near and far has begun to play ceaselessly on your eardrum wherever you may be. They all hold the same, slightly nuanced characteristics. British, Mughal, Bharat, old, new, urban, rural, Hindu, Muslim, Portuguese or French, it is all India.

Throughout this clean and structured city, it does not require a keen eye to spy the two common denominators running throughout everyday Pondicherrian life. His name can be seen adorning the premises of all of the most successful businesses: “Sri Aurobindo handmade paper factory”, “Sri Aurobindo Guesthouse”, “Sri Aurobindo Fromagerie”. Her words of wisdom have been appropriated and proliferated upon every notice board, portraits of her face gaze with a matronly but caring consternation from inside every public space: The Mother.

These two left quite a legacy in Puducherry. Sri Aurobindo’s story is one not too unfamiliar or farfetched, and is not unlike the stories of those others graced with the prefix of Sri, meaning “one who radiates light”. He was an India freedom fighter and author, who found inner peace and all of life’s answers through following a yogic and spiritual path

Her story comes across as quite remarkable, goes through profound, right past unbelievable, stops at laughable, and doesn’t quite allow the mind to linger on any one of those adjectives for too long. Born a French aristocrat, “The Mother”, or Mirra Alfassa, began meditating at the age of four. Soon after, she realized that she was not human but was a divine being, sent to earth in human form to help propel human beings toward attaining spiritual ascendance to the next level of existence.

Photographs of The Mother are well styled and well executed. She is always wearing light, breezy gowns, whose lightness leads them to float with each of her graceful footstep, providing the appearance of them blowing in the wind. Like any supernatural being of great power, her eyes are deep and eternal, heightened by a thick smothering of misty eye shadow, for effect. On occasion, she wears fancy French headdresses. It seems that even the Supreme Being is not immune to the flights of fashion.

Throughout Pondicherry her word is taken as gospel. The most simple, often inane words of advice are often transformed into the profound. One organic grocery store housed a blackboard, reading, in the cutest of handwritten fonts “Honesty is the best protection – The Mother xo”.

In a less harmless twist of idolatry, above the doorway to our hostel read “Always behave as if The Mother is watching you, for she in fact is. – Sri Aurobindo”. There is even a billboard by a gas station that shows the blown up image of a post-it, left by The Mother some years ago: “I always buy my petrol from this gas station. - The Mother xo”.

Her writings, upon my minimal inspection and under Jeremy’s doubtful scrutiny, appear to be the writings of any thinker – the profanity of the words being imbued by the belief that she was the divine. She wrote once about the perfection of the unadulterated nature of animals who ‘live their life the way nature intended’. She has also written an entire tome on the perfection of Japan and the Japanese gardens, the way in which nature is manipulated and constrained to bend to the will of the Japanese gardener. Of the two theories of hers that I took the time to ponder over, I had already found a very human discrepancy in her simultaneous faith in and adoration for the unadulterated and unbridled simplicity of the natural world, and the adulterated world that man creates of nature.

At the risk of offending any of The Mother’s devotees, Jeremy and I came to the conclusion that she was a very wise, incredibly smart, business savvy egomaniac, with a great knack for words. But maybe that is what people thought about Jesus 2000 years ago.

—

Before he died, Sri Aurobindo set up an Ashram in Pondicherry, for reasons not dissimilar to those that govern the creation of any ashram—it was a holy place in which to learn and grow spiritually. After he died, The Mother, in an act that was either cosmically profound or wickedly calculated, claims that she felt the spirit of Sri Aurobindo leave his body and enter hers.,cementing the two as one; doubling the dose of reverence she would now receive; cementing her on the podium of superhuman. At this time, in her 70s, began to set the foundations of her legacy— she founded Auroville, an “experiment in human unity”. Planned cities – designed from the top town and built from zero - were all the rage at the time, and so Auroville was planned by French architect Roger Anger, the land was purchased, and The Mother and her devotees were given the rights from the Indian government to begin creating a city like no other. The Auroville Charter reads:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

Most people that I have met who lived in or spent some time in Auroville have some great criticisms of it. Rather than try their damn hardest to achieve the lofty goals set out by The Mother, Aurovillians, or at least those who have power and sway within the supposedly democratic community, would rather pretend that the goals have been achieved, and bypass every effort to engage in unending education, constant progress and in boldly springing towards future realizations. A friend who lived there for seven years sees Auroville as heading down a dangerous road, a road in which it will have found itself trapped by all of the problems that the outside world has become immobilized by – inequality, debt, regulations, bureaucracy, religion. Money and possessions are theoretically rebuked, yet are used rampantly, and the visitors centre houses two bourgeois, “yummy mummy” type yoga boutiques in which t-shirts with John Lennon quotes “You may say I’m a dreamer” sell for 30 dollars. The experimentally socialist post industrial city relies on being financed by a capitalist industry. Life for new inhabitants who must hand all of their possessions over to Auroville is beginning to look like life under Chairman Mao.

Jeremy’s anger at the visitors centre was explosive. Apparently unable to exist inside the Auroville boundaries, he left, dragging me behind him.

Back in Pondicherry, we came across a stunning park. This park, much like the one in Bangalore, was chained up at the gates, but unlike the park in Bangalore, it was not guarded by military personelle, and local people had crafted ladders of bamboo, pitched against the fence at various locations, so that people could scale the ten foot spiked metal wall and recline on the grass feeling like fugitives of some sort. We were baffled as to why every park seemed to be closed off to the public. I remember reading that it was to stop homeless people from sleeping in the park at night, but seeing as homeless people seem to outnumber those with homes in some places, the practice of locking away the only safe and clean area for them seems cruel.

As we left the park and the sun began to set, we walked to the beach, as we had done every night in Pondy. Every evening, the city beach was host to a wonderful town-wide party, with plenty snacks (my favourite being cornflakes and cabbage in curry sauce) and single use plastic toys. Every night, the beach was left strewn with plastic bowls, plates and toys, and every morning the beach was clean. My fears that the detritus of the hundreds of family celebrants was washed into the ocean were likely accurate, but the stress of worry of a nation of people unpracticed in the preservation of the environmental damage and a nation without any waste infrastructure was beginning to numb me. Perhaps cities in south India where I stayed for no more than a week were the wrong place to get het up and motivated about exacting change among strangers. There was one occasion, in Auroville (itself lined with garbage bins, and anti-waste), while Jeremy was venting his distaste for the double standards of the city, when another visitor trotted past, unwrapped his Cornetto and threw the wrapper into the painstakingly reforested tropical dry evergreen forest – an ecosystem unique to this part of India, and to the whole world. “What are you doing! Throw your crap in a trash can you idiot!’ Jeremy shouted into the man’s dull eyes, waving his arms about and gesturing to the rubbish, to the forest, to Auroville in general, and to his own head, symbolizing the mans idiocy. The man and his friends, embarrassed, kept walking, leaving the cornetto paper to stain the carpet of vegetation. 

—

Our brief visit to and learnings of the ways of Auroville aside, Aurobindo and Mother’s legacy in Pondy has been positive and profound, their moral and social teachings leading to an apparently more cohesive, clean and prosperous neighborhood. My feelings toward the beach detriment could be put on hold for the moment. Perhaps The Mother’s fearful and unending gaze just hadn’t reached that part of town yet.

6:06 am  •  17 May 2013  •  1 note

We spent 18 hours in Bangalore— a layover on our trans-peninsular journey to Pondicherry. I wrote two different accounts in my diary - alternate views from different perspectives on the city, and was, and still am, unable to decide which would be the best to publish on here: the gritty and very British overreaction, or the quaint lie to appease any Bangalore fans out there. I’ve decided to write about Bangalore fresh, with the perspective of our old and mischievous friend - hindsight.

We arrived at six am, at the bus station. We ate breakfast – a masala dosa each – at a road side café, before setting out toward our destination for the day - Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road, which was said to be “tourist friendly”, with shops, restaurants and internet cafes - the perfect place, we assumed, to spend the day in an unknown city. We had found an outdated Lonely Planet guide in a pile of junk, back in Palolem, and thought it best to recycle it. The guide had a map with both the bus station and MG Road marked out, it was as simple as navigating between the two. But nothing in India is simple for a tourist, as we were fast learning. The book was 6 years out of date, and so new roads had appeared and old ones vanished, in this fast evolving “technological hub” of a city. The map was also not to scale. Still, steadfast in our belief that we were capable adults, we refused all the taxis and rickshaws that assured us we needed them, and made our own way to MG Road. It was not tourist friendly. It was a dirty side street. We decided to ask for directions.

“Excuse me. Is this MG Road?”

“Oh yes. Very much MG Road,”

We knew it wasn’t. So we asked another person. His response being “Oh no. MG Road is very far. Too far. You are needing to get two buses.” He listed the buses we would need to get and the location of the first bus stop.

We didn’t listen, because we knew that he too was lying; MG Road was walking distance. We ignored our advisers, knowing that the vast majority of Indians who aren’t acquainted with white folk, are so enamored that we have approached them that they would sooner lie just to see a grateful smile line our faces than say those three truthful and painless words - I don’t know. Words that I can confirm, with assiduity, that I have not heard in four months here, despite being constantly in contact with people who clearly have less of an idea about what’s going on than I do.

We eventually navigated our way toward the real MG Road, and had the street in our sights three hours after we had set off, just as we were beginning to feel the familiar sensation of a hungry belly, eternally unsatisfied with foreign cuisine. Relieved that we were almost there, we could now concentrate more on our surroundings: dust caked cars, eight lane roads choked with diesel engine HGVs and oil tankers, a stagnant uncovered sewer snaking alongside us, no matter which way we turned, the acrid smell of urine mixed with petrol fumes, human feces littered strategically on the road side, a rotting dog carcass shorn in two by a fast moving car, left to fester and decompose in its own coagulated blood on one of the cities main roads, hundreds of unemployed and underpaid rickshaw drivers smoking, and eying us with contempt.

We arrived at MG Road which, predictably, was nothing like what we had imagined or hoped for. Perhaps it was more picturesque before the park across the road had been fenced off and scaffolded over to build a four lane overpass, parallel to and directly above MG road, casting the touristic and commercial haven into a huge piss stinking shadow. We wanted to spend most of the day in a Café, recharging our phones, reading, and relaxing in preparation for the next bus journey. The only place that fit that bill was Café Coffee Day, India’s answer to Starbucks, but with worse coffee and higher prices, and an inane and poorly written theme tune that claims that the world’s problems can all be solved by sitting on your arse at Café Coffee day and drinking bad coffee. The Sit Down Anthem reads as follows:

Sit Down for Love
Sit Down for peace
Sit Down to talk
Sit Down with me

Sit Down against drugs, guns, exploitation, moral policing noise pollution
Not enough pocket money and inflation
Sit Down and take a mini vacation

{Sit Down for Love}
Sit Down to eat
{Sit Down for peace}
Sit down to read
{Sit Down to talk}
Sit Down with me

Sit Down against donation, distraction, discrimination,
Addiction, frustration, intoxication,
Lack of attention; too much information,
Sit Down to start a conversation,

Sit Down against Castism, racism, egoism, Pessimism, chauvinism,
This ism, That ism, ism, ism, ism, ism.
How about some Sit Down Ism?

Sit Down yaar!
A Lot Can Happen Over Coffee!
Café Coffee Day!

We had plenty of time to learn the 2:20 song off by heart in the five hours we spent there. And as it played on repeat and became more familiar with the lyrics, or detest grew ever more for the Coffee giant, who viewed inconveniences such as not having pocket money and distractions, as equally as problematic to society as chauvinism and castism. Also, that the song writer dared to add in the line “this ism, that ism, ism ism ism ism” because s/he ran out of words to rhyme with perhaps goes someway to explain the lackluster attitude toward the coffee itself, which tastes like flavoured stagnant water.

While sitting in our awkward bubble of wealth, surrounded by overbearing Baristas, I received a message from a friend who had been to Bangalore before, “I found Bangalore nice… very green for an Indian city, no?” she pushed me for an agreement. “No,” I thought back, “I can’t see past the human shit or the dead dog.” So we decided to venture out to a park, in the hope that we could be swayed to see the greenness of the place. The park across the road was blocked by industrial fences and scaffolding on all sides, so we began the long walk to the next park on the map, which we approached from behind. The  wall was only waist height, and looking inside we could see that the park was a dense and vivid oasis, but something was awry, was stopping me from jumping over the wall. There were no benches inside, no people, and no entrance in sight. A breakable and tense silence emanated from the shrouded depths of the bamboo groves. We began to circumnavigate. As we approached the large wrought iron gate, we spotted a sign sitting cosily between two bushes,

“Trespassers will be shot on sight.”

Our eyes immediately caught hold of two young soldiers toting rifles, parading along one of the elegant winding pathways under the canopy. The gate was padlocked, and a plaque beside it relayed the following script:

THE CONCEPT

The protectors of the Nation are protecting the environment. In keeping with the army’s philosophy of environmental protection and ecological well being , this park was conceived in August 1994 in order to enhance the garden city’s natural beauty. It serves the important purpose of bringing the army closer to the people, protecting the land and at the same time providing much needed lung space.

Searching online for any statistics on how Eco-friendly the Indian military is proves fruitless, but with their being big fans of Nuclear, I fear a dose of doublespeak here, or of outright lies. For whatever reason the army is occupying one of the only green spaces in downtown Bangalore, I was saddened to see that in exchange for warmongering, the military and its personnel got to enjoy nature as an apparently scarce luxury, while the rest of the cities inhabitants were left to skulk in the shadow of overpasses, squatting unceremoniously between sewers and corpses.

—

I have since heard only great things about Bangalore, and so would consider returning (in the distant future). In my efforts to remain optimistic at all times, writing a joyless piece as above doesn’t sit easy with me. It turns out that even after allowing myself a re-write, the perspective that hindsight allows me is almost identical to the one that I earlier described as a “gritty overreaction”. But I know not how else to write about the constant flow of ecological disappointments that greet me in India. Even after lowering ones expectations, how do you stay positive when you are in a country that you know to be so ecologically rich and biodiverse, yet find yourself surrounded by filth and feces, being threatened with state sanctioned murder for attempting to sit under a tree?

5:15 pm  •  7 May 2013  •  1 note

As well as its widely famous trains, India’s cross-country coaches, or buses, number in their thousands, constantly working to shovel Indians and foreigners back and forth, up and down the country, in a way that is at the same time well organized and hopelessly chaotic.

While on the trains, you may not get a seat, or even space inside a carriage, the general consensus is that once you know which train you want to get, you turn up at the right platform at the right time, and deal with the consequences of not  having a ticket when you are already well on the way to your destination. The buses have a neat and simple online booking system, which is where their organization ends. The small print online states something along the lines of “your bus may change driver, operator, model, start point or destination at any time, without any notice”. This requires no explanation from me as to the worry it causes considering that even if the bus does not change any of these factors, they are always at least an hour late, leading to a worrisome period in which you wait in vein hope that the bus you’ve already paid for will still come.

—

Departing Palolem, we were told to go to the “New Bus Station”. Our rickshaw driver dropped us outside an enormous abandoned depot, just off the main highway, devoid of light, footfall or attention. We were assured by the chirpy group of tourists one hundred meters down the road from us, under a brightly lit awning with benches that theirs was the “Old Bus Station”, affirming that we should remain in the shadows, somewhat arbitrarily, at the ginormous bus depot, which, like so many abandoned buildings in India had either expired in its function, or had been abandoned before it became functional. Given it’s moniker, I guess it was the latter. Eventually we were joined by four other people, all thrown out of their rickshaws in this dark alley without explanation. After watching a quartet of buses go to the Old Bus Station, picking everybody up en route, our bus finally arrived, two hours late. While the bus company had the option to alter its destination without notice, it thankfully did not, and we boarded, assured by the conductor, that we were embarking on an overnight trip to Hampi!

Sleeper buses can be delightful, as this first experience proved. Each passenger gets a coffin sized compartment to lay down in, couples getting a double width coffin. On one side is a sliding lockable door, and on the other side is a full length, sliding, lockable window. It was suggested that we keep the window closed, so as not to roll out when we hit a pot-hole.

The window ajar, we slept in our floating coffin with ease, the breeze cooling us, the gently bumping road soothing us. I would awake every hour or so and peek out the window into the blackness. I remember looking out, barely able to differentiate the passing foreground from the nights sky, and then closing my eyes to sleep for but a few minutes before opening my eyes to be greeted by the heart wrenching sight of the sun rising over Hampi, dumbfounded at its glistening rays, which seem closer in this part of the world, shining on the lush oasis, surrounded by mountains, interspersed with dauntingly precarious rock formations, each gargantuan boulder piled indescipherably and incalculably atop the one below it. Upon later questioning, we were told that they were placed there millenia ago by Hanuman, the monkey God. Upon further insistence on a rational explanation, it was insisted, with slight indignation that the piles were Hanuman’s doing. Sitting cozily among these Jenga’d constructions were numerous ancient temples, some obviously Hindu, others seemingly Aztec. A river flowed perfectly through the center, the miniscule village of mud huts and lush paddy fields lining it.

My eyes caught all of this, absorbing it in mere seconds, my jaw draped open, unconsciously gasping. I frantically tapped the sleeping Jeremy on his shoulder. His eyes bolted open, and his jaw too dropped, his pupils narrowed and eye balls engorged, as he glimpsed a sight truly otherworldly and plentifully wonderful. For sure, Hampi has caused people to react in this way for an age.

At first arrival, it was hard to understand the village. The streets were sprawling and winding, hilly and unpaved. Disorientation was inevitable. The population was also hard to judge. The Indians were, quite obviously, local. But among the tourists were hippies who, being so entirely laid back, appeared in their demeanor to be more comfortable in Hampi than the Indians living and working there. It led me to ask myself - how long have these people actually been here? Some in fact worked in shops, selling simple stone carvings or renting WiFi access, There was one guy - who I imagine, three months later, to still be there - who always wore huge glassless spectacle frames, torn jean shorts, a leather waistcoat draping from his skeletal torso, and one lone flip-flop, dragging solemnly under his left foot. He was partway through the dubious process of trying to dreadlock his hair, by backcombing it into knotted clumps, and tying these bunches of varying thickness up with bits of string and elastic. Some locals would laugh at him when he passed and refer to him as “magic man”. On one occasion he raised his middle finger and called them dicks, to which they just laughed again. The situation looks to be that he is lost there, eternally, condemned to wonder the tiny village of Hampi forever. In reality, his visa is a six month tourist visa, and Hampi all but shuts up in the winter season, so he cannot be here for long, which confused me even more - why did he, and other Europeans like him, see it as acceptable to come to India and abandon any sense of personal hygiene, instead choosing to take great pride in intentionally appearing unkempt and dismally bedraggled. Does he present himself like this back home too - a wondering fakir, able to buy a 500 euro plane ticket to India, but unable to replace his missing flip flop?

There were also two young families in Hampi, both couples suitably dreadlocked, and their respective young children were well on their way to achieving the same look, with matted, clumpy unwashed hair. One of the kids spent all of it’s time with it’s parents, as any child would. The other, whose lineage I am not sure of, could be seen on any given day parading around with, or sitting on the lap of, or perched on the back of the motorbike of a different adult. At the time of writing this in my notebook, he was sat across from me, on the lap of a Spanish hippy, who was smoking weed and discussing his most memorable acid high, the pitfalls of modern society, and the fact that school is “evil”. My intention is not to be critical, I’m merely wondering how these people live when their Indian visas run out. Most of them European - do they hold down jobs? Do they live in wonderfully sustainable off-the-grid communities?

These Hampi’ites ability to relax entirely in the face of India and all of it’s chaotic might heightened my self-consciousness at my inability to do the same. It was, while the focus of my judgmental scorn, at the same time, the secret focus of my admiration. Eventually, we ourselves began to take on that air of contentedness, walking forever at a snails pace, smoking weed cheaply and often, traipsing between the paddy fields from our 50 rupee hut to the main street where we would spend the days idling, ending each day on a hilltop, surveying the semi arid savanna, all the way to the horizon.

The insatiable desire to give in totally to the relaxation commanded of us by the surrounding geography was only curbed by the presence of our old foe - plastic waste. It gathered in great piles along the dusty lanes, and was burned by locals, in huge putrid smoky mounds on the outskirts, forever reminding us that while we were escaping the physicality of outside institutions, like everyone else there, we were doing absolutely nothing to combat them, alcohol proving to be the single western vice not yet able to take a ferocious grip on the village.

There is a very small, but burgeoning green movement in Hampi, which came as a great surprise. The most popular restaurant, The Mango Tree, which sits overlooking the valley, set among the great roots and trunk of a humongous tree - whether it is a mango tree is doubtful - is approached via a 200 meter walk through a banana plantation, which is devoid of any rubbish thanks to something I was yet to encounter in just over a week in India - trash cans. I am pleased to say that they did their job, with the help of some nifty signs indicating what it was exactly that the bins were. The Mango Tree and the surrounding areas were spotless, and the menu in the restaurant reserved its back cover for the following message, in a large, explosive font:

“SAVE HAMPI

KEEP IT CLEAN

DO NOT LITTER

CHOOSE LESS PLASTIC

KEEP OUR LOCAL CULTURE ALIVE

CHOOSE INDIAN FOOD

SAY NO TO NARCOTICS”

The final, seemingly unrelated part about drugs aside, the message positively fazed me, delight beamed from within at the discovery that there were small pockets of resistance to the cultureless wave of globalization sweeping across India. There were a handful of businesses in Hampi selling water-bottle refills, from their tanks, to avoid plastic waste, and to keep the water commons in use. The largest and most populated of the guesthouses in the sprawling village sported a number of solar panels, perhaps just to heat water, or perhaps to power all of the rooms, I’m not sure, but their mere presence in the steaming and baking dust plains of Karnataka provided ample inspiration to all who set eyes on them.

—

The lure of Hampi proved overpowering. What we were certain would be a two or three night stay, quickly became an eight night stay, It seemed to provide a near perfect equilibrium for the typical traveler in India - it was relatively clean, traffic free, laid back, and combined touristic inevitability with friendly and interactive local village people. We slowly began to morph into those very people whose length of stay in Hampi was questionable. Fearing that one week in the idyllic and timeless valley would turn into two, and two weeks into two months , we quickly left for the East coast, via Bangalore, trading the phenomenal martian rocky scenery for the unmanageable turmoil of the Indian city.

3:19 pm  •  30 April 2013

After worming our way out of the 23000 rupee tour of Karnataka, I felt decidedly paranoid. The travel agent knew where we were staying. He had already proven to us the formidable, mouth-foaming nature of his temper, he had already threatened us with a slap, and had insisted that he had a penchant for police bribery. So even though we had escaped without paying, I for one did not want to stick around.

Jeremy claimed that I was “working myself into a frenzy”, but the idea of the travel agent realising that we had not in fact bought his tour, and coming over to our hostel to kidnap us sounded perfectly plausible to me. In the end, we booked a bus to Goa, and left the very next day. The bus ride to Goa was mostly uneventful. Somebody vomited on Jeremy’s foot.

We arrived in Goa a few weeks too early to catch our friend, the elusive Raffaella, in North Goa, so we headed South, to the “quiet” beaches.

Goa’s coast is divided into “beaches” in the same way that most other places are recognised by their towns. Each beach is supposed to maintain its very own unique character, charm, personality. The charm of Agonda beach, in the south, was its role as a turtle nesting ground, or it was until the turtles were scared away by the encroachment of tourist huts, bursting out onto the beach from further inland. The number of huts here is supposedly restricted to inspire healthy turtle populations, but nonetheless the nest populations are plummeting dangerously, and so we preferred to stay on Palolem beach.

Palolem beach had its fair share of charm. Our tiny 500-rupee-a-night stilted beach shack was quite humbling as it creaked under our weight, and we felt a great deal closer to nature, waking up to the simultaneous calls of wild dogs, pigs, cockerels and crows. I image that the other five thousand people staying in similar huts on Palolem felt just as special as we did.

The huts are equipped with flushing toilets, which is absolutely modern and marvelous, until you take a moment to realise that the shit you are flushing away from the sandy beach is going straight out into the bay that you are about to go swimming in. Apparently “it’s fine, as long as you don’t swim out too far… Oh, and don’t ever swallow the water!”

Maybe that’s why the turtles are leaving.

While the human sewage was unpleasant, and possibly dangerous, it hadn’t reached concentrations that would toxify the waters, as is the case in Mumbai. What was murderous about palolem, though, was the other type of human waste. Every day, as the tide changed, whether we found the waves to be rushing up the beach toward our huts, or whether they were retreating rapidly to rejoin the Arabian ocean, the shoreline carried with it a great swathe of beer bottles, beer cans, drinks cartons, plastic bags. To avoid seeming like a litter Nazi, I want to let it be known that litter is not the issue here. In England we have bins, and we have landfills. This does not get rid of the litter problem, just moves it, hides it. In India, the infrastructure for hiding litter is less, almost non existent, so the problem is in your face, there, here, everywhere, forming mounds on streets, blocking drains. While unsightly, it is just the same problem, simply unhidden from the public eye. Our issue was with where the litter on Palolem, and most likely on the rest of India’s beaches was going - into the water. The item from Palolem that the ocean swallowed in greatest quantities was, ironically, empty water bottles.

Water. The elixir of Life. Necessary to everything living. Undoubtedly people cannot be denied access to their two litres a day. But here, in drinking to sustain our own lives, we are inadvertently killing others. The containers that once held this priceless liquid, and for a moment parched our thirsty lips, are thrown into the ocean, their fate certain - to be eaten by, or choked on by all manner of wonderful ocean dwelling creatures. Predominantly sea birds, but also fish, and even whales, are constantly being found dead, their stomachs filled with what they thought was food. They starve to death because they ate too much plastic.
 

On several occasions, Jeremy and I collected what we could while walking down the beach. Futile as it may seem, each item of plastic has the potential to kill, taking us one step further along the path of the earth’s present mass extinction. A bottle cap can choke a seagull, in the same way that a plastic bag can kill a sperm whale. Every item retrieved from a beach certainly contributes to a life saved.

The two of us have managed to avoid contributing to the great pacific garbage patch, not by simply not throwing our water bottles into the sea, but by not having any water bottles to begin with! As soon as our plans to visit India began to form, advise from every side assumed that drinking bottled water was mandatory. We were scolded at one point for suggesting otherwise, by somebody who frequents India regularly, and others simply assumed that there was no other way. One friend advised, on the topic of learning to speak Hindi, “You should start off by learning basic phrases. You know - ‘How much is this?’, ‘Where is the hostel?’, ‘I would like some bottled water.’”

Assuming such a thing is not only wrong, but dangerous. To think that a subcontinent of 1.2 billion people, many of whom live outside of the formal economy, require their drinking water to be processed and packaged and sold as a commodity, rather than given to them by nature as has always been the case is the exact same thought process that has lead to the privatization and diversion of India’s major rivers - essentially pricing the poor out of affording water. While it is true to a degree that tap water in India is not as reliably safe as that in the developed world, and that Indians’ stomachs are more “used to” the microbes in their water, suggesting that natives drink from taps, and tourists from bottles is ludicrous. The truth is that there are no hard and fast rules, and that more importantly, water is a democratic and nature given right to every being on the planet. Any process that presents one person with safer water (at a price), to the detriment of another person is inherently a process of great injustice. There is just about enough fresh and safe drinking water on this planet to quench everybody’s thirst, but it is precisely buying water from privatized sources that causes an imbalance in access to safe water. The issues regarding drinking water, and water democracy are broad an complex, lest I say that not contributing toward plastic waste is a tiny but pleasing side effect of not drinking bottled water.

In researching water purification techniques, Jeremy concluded that a SteriPen would be most efficient at the required job. It looks as its name suggests - like a sterilizing pen. A three inch handle, coupled with a three inch long light bulb which emits UV light when submerged in water, it literally sterilizes any and all living things in the water, rendering them impotent, unable to replicate, and therefore harmless to the body. It is said that UV treated water is the safest drinking water available. At £70, the SteriPen works out to be more or less the same price as would be 150 one-litre bottles of water, at 20 rupees a piece - what one person would drink over the course of five months. Since two of us would be using it, the pen has worked out to be half the cost of drinking bottled water, as well as being an investment for any future trips/just in case any dead pigs are found in the river Thames.

With SteriPen in hand, we can now drink from any water source we chose to, though we usually stick to tanks and taps. As of yet it has proven to be reliable in rural areas, where other tourists seem stuck for lack of shops, and thanks to its medical appearance, it has provoked much inquisitive attention from both foreigners and Indians as regards to what this strange tool could be, hopefully proliferating the idea that bottled water really is, by far, not the only solution to drinking water from shrinking sources.

I suppose it seems that I wasn’t too pleased with South Goa. While the sewage and trash were huge downers, the case was simply that there is not much else to write about here. While Palolem was marketed to us as one of the ‘quietest’ beaches, with “no hotels”, it was still full from North to South with huts and their respective restaurants. The restaurants themselves were identical, and lacking. It would be no surprise to find out that they photocopy each others’ menus, all of them serving a suspiciously vast array of food, each being “specialist in Chinese, Mexican, Pizza, Indian, Thai, Goan,Continental, Nepalese, Israeli and Sea food”. Any sense of entrepreneurship abandoned, there was not much left for us to do than to have a beach holiday. We spent days walking, crab spotting, sunset watching and swimming (remembering not to swallow), before we began to feel a restlessness within us. After five nights, the desire to move on led to us pack hastily on the sixth morning, leaving without notice, boarding a “sleeper” bus to Hampi.

2:32 pm  •  5 April 2013

“24th January 2013

“I have had to switch to writing this by pen and paper, in the hope that I will be able to transcribe it onto a computer with an internet connection at some point in the future.

“Jeremy and I left London eight days ago, and already it seems like a lifetime, London being a distant, rainy nightmare, that I have long since woken up from. We spent six days in Istanbul, where I tried to transform six months of previous life experience in this city into six days of nostalgia, the success of which was questionable. I had some experiences that jostled me, that I hadn’t had in 2011, my hair colour (pink and blue at the time) apparently being a big issue for Turkish men.

“In an event that, at the time, seemed insignificant, Jeremy’s only pair of shoes were stolen from a Mosque.We checked the CCTV and saw that the thief had been an old man who frequents the Mosque once a fortnight. The security guard reimbursed us with a pair of dusty rubber slippers that somebody had thoughtfully left behind [which we have deservedly kept hold of to this day] , and somebody gave us a book explaining the pillars of Islam. Whatever they may be, I wasn’t filled with confidence, as my boyfriend was left to traverse the winter-time city wearing flip flops and socks.

“I feel as though sustainability is not even worth a substantial mention here, in this hopelessly old city. In the documentary Ecumenopolis, inspired architects and renowned city planners claim that unless urban sprawl halts and density within Istanbul’s current limits increases, the Megalopolis will reach a permanent gridlock, and logistically cease to function, imploding under the weight of sixteen million people, and virtually no public transport infrastructure.

“In the year I spent away from Istanbul, the steamrolling development and expansion has continued at full speed. The part of Tarlabasi - the charming “slum” I had previously lived in -  closest to the city centre has been reduced to a humongous gaping hole in the ground, to prepare for the foundations of yet another shopping complex. I saw the beginnings of what seemed to be yet another bridge spanning the golden horn. This coupled with the potentially environmentally catastrophic building of the third Bosphorous Bridge, led me to have the obnoxious thought that maybe the government should just cut to the chase and infill both of Istanbul’s waterways with cement, perhaps leaving space for a charming fountain or two. 

—-

“On all of my previous trips, I have struggled with my Baggage allowance. Coming back from San Francisco, I overstepped my 23kg limit by an additional 15kg. I was made to empty my bags out and scramble through the piles on the floor, choosing the most essential two thirds of the tat that I had accumulated. I remember leaving behind a 15kg pile of perfectly good books, clothes and toiletries, and being surprised at the accompanying intense feeling of relief. I don’t actually miss, or even remember any of the stuff I left in the airport, and I can’t be too sure that I have even used any of the stuff that I did bring with me.

I have been reading of the countless benefits of having less stuff - both environmentally and psychologically. So the first step on the road to becoming a minimalist was to bring less stuff to India. A lot less. Between Jeremy and I, we left London with a trim total of 18 kilos. Much less than the 55kg limit that we were given, which I ordinarily would have felt obliged to fulfill. We left everything unessential, laptops included, and stripped down our list to the bare necessities. The most space-economising purchase we made before leaving was Dr. Bronner’s ‘18-in-one’ soap, whose multiplicious uses include Shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, breath freshener, fruit washer, laundry detergent, and “post-coital vaginal douche”. There are another eight or so uses, but those are the most useful/bizarrely memorable.

Packing lightly has become addictive, and since the theft of Jeremy’s shoes, we decided that shedding our possessions - whether by our own admission or otherwise - was inevitable. So when we left Istanbul for Mumbai, we left both pairs of jeans and both of our winter coats - neither of which we would be needing for a long time - with our host. Then, somewhere along the journey between our AirBnb accommodation, and Istanbul’s international airport, we managed to lose my (dad’s) chunky SLR camera. The type of thing people usually carry around their necks, neither myself or Jeremy could even remember picking it up. Having just intentionally left our winter wardrobes with a perfect stranger, we could only laugh at the loss of the camera, and move on, subconsciously vowing to leave, lose, or have stolen everything else in our possession.

—-

“Two days later, readying ourselves to leave Mumbai, I found that I had again parted with something highly valuable - most of my lung capacity. The smog in Mumbai is dense, and eternal. It refracts the morning sunlight to create a beautifully glistening cityscape. The sunlight dazzles the Banyans and the Palms, but the beauty created by these microscopic particles has a nastier side. I can feel the fumes in the air seeping into my eye sockets, the dust gently coating my face, and lining my throat. Having only been in Mumbai for 48 hours, I could not escape the physical feeling of being a life-long heavy smoker. When I wake in the mornings, my phlegm runs black. It is no wonder though, considering Mumbai’s age and history. Bigger than Istanbul, yet with even less of a public transit infrastructure, Mumbai is just nearing completion of it’s very first metro line, leaving Rickshaws, Taxis, and 1930’s Double Decker buses with the job of hauling the cities 18 million inhabitants around, spewing misty diesel every axle-turn of the way.

Mumbai proved to be a trial by fire for us, and I expected no less. “The poverty” seems to be the most common deterrent people have from journeying to India. It is indeed tough to witness, and even tougher to attempt to comprehend. But it is not poverty like any of us know it, London’s homeless - the haggard and dirty fellows slumped in alleyways, are unfamiliar in India. Nor is it the poverty that we come to fear and expect, thanks to ample propaganda. - emaciated children, laying naked by the wayside. India shows us that there are innumerable ways to be poor, and those that we are used to are just a few examples. Some of the homeless do not even appear to be phased by their situation. For all we know, they may not even see it as a situation. Our first walk through Mumbai took us past one of it’s most famous sites - the Gateway to India. Along the promenade toward this monument  where tens of families, sleeping, just waking, brushing their teeth, folding away their bedsheets, going to the toilet, smiling, laughing. They did not really seem to be homeless. Their home was this section of the street, their neighbors those who slept beside them. We weren’t “hassled”, as we had been expecting. And those beggars that we eventually did come across, begged with confidence and grace, asserting their rite to demand a small portion of the mountains of wealth which they were sure that we (Jeremy and I/westerners) had access to.

The most stressful aspect when it comes to “poverty” is not seeing those that are poor, and feeling bad, but unexpectedly falling prey to deceptive businessmen, liars, and dangerous “long cons”. There is an extremely shady area in India between a legitimate business, and a scam. For example, I have encountered toilet attendants who charge everybody 2 Rupees to enter, I have also encountered toilet attendants that add a “white tax”, charging 2 Rupees for Indians, and 5 for whites, and then I have encountered toilet attendants that aren’t actually toilet attendants, who sit outside public bathrooms, letting everyone enter free of charge, then trying to force white people to pay 10 Rupees when they leave. Paying for a service you thought was free, after the event, is the most common scam. It’s how a lot of people part with money here. Otherwise, there is a network of Indian men who derive commission from each other by bringing in tourist clients. Were you to walk into a certain hostel and ask for the cheapest room, you would get a 200-Rupee-a-night room. Were a rickshaw driver to bring you to the very same hostel, the very same room would cost you 300 a night. The extra hundred being paid to the driver, without your knowledge, for no logical or fair reason, other than that the rickshaw driver wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. These commissioned men take all forms, each as unexpected as the last - the homeless man with a baby, who insists that he does not want money, but milk to feed his hungry child? He gets commission from the shop owner who sells you the milk for 500 rupees instead of the 50 that it is worth.

It did not occur to us that these men could even take the form of somebody who did not even want anything from us, other than conversation. Which is why we wholeheartedly jumped into our new friendship with an innocent looking “university student” who “just wanted to practice his English”. He went by the name of Ganesh, and said he’d help show us round town. Except he completely refused to take us to the train station so that we could buy tickets to Goa. “The tickets they sell at the station are false. Overpriced. Fake tickets. So many touts.”

“Okay. Well we just want to look at the stations architecture.”

“No. You can’t go near the station, it’s dangerous. You’ll be robbed.”

He told us that he could find a “government travel agent” that gives the best price with no commission, because it’s regulated by the government. He also told us that there was a festival going on in Goa at the moment, and that everyone (population of Goa: 1.4 million) in Goa would be wearing a specific type of Indian outfit. If we were not wearing this outfit when we arrived, we would feel out of place and would not be able to participate in the festival. It just so happened that he knew just where to get these outfits, at a very cheap wholesale price. We smelled a rat when the outfits, at a special “we are friends with Ganesh /student /wholesale” discount were still ten times more expensive than any clothes I would buy, even in London. Both Ganesh and the shop owner could not understand that we didn’t want to pay 8000 Rupees for two outfits that we didn’t actually like, or had ever even expressed an interest in, and seemed shocked when we said that we didn’t want them at that price, nor at 6000 rupees, which was the shop owners new super discount because we were his first customers of the day. .

Ganesh then proceeded to take us to his trusted “travel agent” (read “snake-like con-man”). We inquired about trains to Goa, and over the course of the next half an hour, the travel agent spun a complex and believable web of lies, trapping us into believing that a. all trains to Goa were fully booked, b. so were all the buses, c. we would have to be rerouted through Hampi, d. his travel agency was due to close any minute, and we had not time to confer or check prices, e. a five day public holiday was about to commence, so if we said no now, we would be trapped in Mumbai for five more days. The whole time, Ganesh sat silently (and unknown to us at the time, awaiting his commission), no longer offering any friendly advice. The travel agent got more and more desperate as we hummed and hawed, managing to get a hold of my passport, and having it “taken across the street for photocopying”. I could have it back when I paid the 23000 rupees for the trip we never wanted, I was informed. After the ordeal. Ganesh, clearly remorseful, could not help but ask me for ten rupees. I scowled a “no” at him, and he replied “that’s okay. I have a five hundred note in my pocket”, before slinking off to buy some food.

10:00 am  •  16 March 2013

Mid-august. I hadn’t done half of the things that I had hoped to, but I’d learned a great deal more than I thought I ever would from a trip to America. Having been away from my boyfriend for almost three months, my priority was him, He hadn’t seen much of the U.K, so we decided to go on a short trip. My journey of conscientious discovery in America ran in parallel to a similar journey Jeremy had in London, and so we wanted to make our getaway as sustainable as possible. We eventually found ourselves cycling through the Sussex countryside, tent and clothes strapped to our bicycles, seeking out our campsite, in a farm just outside the quaint twin villages of East and West Wittering.

We spent our long weekend on Stubcroft Farm, an Organic sheep and honey farm. They have a camping field, which rotates seasonally with the grazing fields, so we found ourselves sleeping just metres from the sheep, and oddly, two al paca’s. If you arrive at the farm either by foot or by bicycle, the cost of camping is discounted, so we slept quite smug knowing we’d saved on both fuel and money. There we several young families camping out with us. They all had pretty big cars, and pretty huge tents. They spent their time trying their utmost to replicate home life - blow up beds, gas stoves, the implementation of “bed time” for the children, who were just as bewildered as we were at the idea of being forced to go to sleep, when there’s fields to run in, al paca’s to ogle at, and stars to stare at in awe.

Being as we were - conscious of our carbon footprint (as well as overwhelmingly poor), we opted to cook, not with a stove, but with the free wood offered by the farm. We sought out kindling, and twigs, and did our best to do Bear Grylls proud. We initially aimed for three meals a day by campfire, and so we spent the first night covered in dirt, eating luke-warm beans on charred toast, and drinking ashen tea, which is tea with bits of ash floating in it, not a fancy twinings flavour. The next morning we reassesed our culinary aims and decided that eating local was as good as cooking our own food, so we headed into east Wittering, whose high street consisted of a few cute cafe’s, a butchers, a bakers, a fishmongers, and a pretty huge Tesco. We avoided the latter, and spent the next few breakfasts’ and lunches getting to know all the local business owners. This was the type of place where everyone knows everyone, and the local shop owners all quickly came to refer to us as “the lads”. It made me feel quite special, seeing as no shop owner, in my twenty years in London, had ever even pretended to recognise me. The sandwiches in the bakery were pretty damn impressive. They were cheaper than Tesco’s offerings, but were made of thick slices of home made bread, encasing hearty slabs of fresh cheese, or chicken, or “whatever filling you like, lads”, as the baker lady informed us.The bakery sandwiches with every possible filling, with the help of the local cafe, won us over, and i’m sorry to say that the camp fire was relegated to just being used for charring marshmellows and brewing ashen tea.

The toilets on the farm are worth mentioning. Modern, water flushing toilets seem to be the one part of our society that people hold onto fiercly. While sleeping in a freezing tent and descending into ravaged cavemen at dinner time, the composting toilets were actually a welcome relief from farm life. Contrary to popular belief, non-flushing toilets don’t stink to high heaven. In fact, they didn’t smell at all. And by getting rid of the water, there were none of those slushy brown mud stains on white floor tiles that you often get when water and dirt mix in a sterile environment. Instead, the toilets were on raised wooden thrones, in the centre of little wooden outhouses, that were actually warmer than our tent.

Camping is something we’ve all done before, but I thought it was worth mentioning from the perspective of sustainability. Simply lowering the prices for those coming by bike would make one think twice about driving, and the tranquility of the sussex coast was a blessing, helping to prepare me for launching back into the terror that is London life.

I spent the next four months working as a waiter in a really badly paid job that I despised. I wrote at length about my disdain for it it in this draft, but then thought twice. Best I just mention that apart from the wage slavery, most disturbing was the food waste. Plates full became bins full became trucks full. After reading my book about Cod, and while working in a restaurant, I made it my mission to learn as much as I could about the food I was eating - a connection, it seems, that most of us have completely forgotten about. After becoming more informed, I attempted to make some changes in my culinary lifestyle. I gave up seafood and beef, both for environmental reasons. People that ask me about this find it almost uncomputable. “So you’re like…a half vegetarian? But fish is really good for you! How will you survive without Omega 3, and why do you think it’s still okay to eat chicken?”

Other than my grandmother and parents serving me various combinations of “Surf ‘n’ turf”, giving them up has been quite simple. I haven’t gone anaemic. Apart from the occasional, mouth watering craving for fish, I think I am doing well. Beef has even begun to disgust me. The changes one can make to their lifestyle to help “do their bit” or merely just to ease their own conscience, are vast. I boycotted a ridiculous range of things throughout winter, only afterward realising how unnessesary each of them were in the first place - plastic bags, fast food chains, any food that comes from a dubious source, leaving taps running. They’re all things that we know we shouldn’t be doing, but it’s quite unnerving sticking to it. It does become quite satisfying, though, when somebody wraps your food in paper, puts it in a box, then puts the box in a bag with a napkin and a set of plastic cutlery, and you then proceed to remove everything but the paper, and walk out. I may look like a dick, but it’s satisfying. And it’s about time that doing these things became cool, not embarrassing.

The rest of the year in London remained duly drab. Respite was provided by constant cycling. Cycling has been proven to be powerful, theraputic, medicinal. The constant effort required, the rythmic, cyclical movement of the feet, the hyper awareness of ones surroundings. Knowing that you are weaving in and out of London traffic, driving solely on self propulsion, for free, and for very little energy expenditure. It has magical results on your mental health. And your glutes. 

Jeremy and I also found ourselves attending a farming and cooking course in Hackney. The farm, based in Clissold park, is fully Organic, and provides vegetables to the local box delivery scheme. The cooking part was in a local food kitchen which provides delicious organic meals and classes to the local community, for free. 

We also had a weeks break in Amsterdam, which allowed us all the cycling hours god could send, as well as providing a beautiful winter atmosphere. Eerily calm and empty, Amsterdam was clean and socially equal. I found myself slightly freaked out at the slow pace of life that existed in a major city just an 8 hour bus ride from London.

Eventually Christmas came, and New year. Jeremy and I quit our jobs, and without much notice, left the country for five months in India. 

7:13 am  •  30 January 2013

Having made the decision, almost six months ago, to cut my losses and quit my search for employment in San Francisco, I found myself a new-found abundance of guilt-free spare time and an ever shrinking overdraft.
The path I then embarked upon, with plenty of time, and no money was a fascinating one, and is one of the primary reasons I stopped writing here - it led me toward the decision to change the focus of my personal writing. The last piece I wrote (but did not post) was about somebody offering me money for sex. The end of that thousand word piece contained a loose moral message about feeling sorry for prostitutes. During my game changing final month in San Francisco, I decided not to put this piece online, and to instead transition to writing about things which I see has having greater value. It’s neigh on impossible to sum up, coherently and succinctly, the changes I’ve gone through since August, and it’s proven daunting to try.

America. A single country whose inhabitants have polarised so far ideologically, that over half a million citizens petitioned to secede and form their own country just to spite the incumbent president. With a population of over 300 million people, spanning an entire continent, the cultural differences between Americans are vast. Britain, in comparison, contains three countries, all patriotic, and all steadfast in their beliefs of differing from each other. As well as between the countries, there are differences within them, such as between denizens of London, who seemingly have a distaste for nature and well-being, and those of Cornwall - a charming county, overwhelmed by its own natural beauty, whose inhabitants have cute accents and make the worlds tastiest pasties. To inspire perspective - the contiguous US is over fifteen times bigger than Britain. If distance were the only contributor to cultural differences, that’s fifteen times more cultural variety, all constrained by a single government. Vast geographically variant landscapes separate states, across six time zones. We are all overly familiar with the idea of a petrol loving, deep fried cookie eating, flag waving “hick”, somewhere in the deep south. This extreme stereotype of an “American” is often abused, leaving little space for his opposite. It only makes sense that, in a land of extremes, this man (however fictional he may or may not be) have his opposite. Lo, he does. His opposite takes the form of a back-to-the-land, vegan, who meditates, practices yoga, and cycles. While both of these stereotypes may or may not be exaggerations, they go toward expressing the sheer variety in American subculture. These holistic yogi’s can be found concentrated in Cascadia - also known as Ecotopia (to the seventies hippy) or Chinook Illahee (to the pre-Columbian Indian) - the northwestern bioregion, comprised mostly of British Columbia (Canada), Washington, Oregon, and northern California. Would-be Cascadian secessionists dream of the bioregion breaking from the rule of its two sovereignties to form a state defined by its geography and ecology, and maintained by its inhabitants respect and reverence for the environment.

Unwavering respect for the environment has been an aspect of the bioregion’s inhabitants for quite some time, and though the hippy movement has subsided somewhat since the 1960’s, the sentiment has not departed the region. Weaving itself through the streets and blocks of San Francisco was a sense of living sustainably that I find hard to come across in even the most rural of areas. Small businesses have been set up on numerous street corners providing the population with respite from the “American dream”, from a life fuelled by gasoline and credit. These range from independent coffee shops, to independent food co-ops, to independent meditation centres providing free classes, to independent community farms providing free food. Two words ring through San Franciscan life quite consistently: independent, and free. Having given up my hopes of providing myself with an income, free was the word that enticed me at the beginning, but I soon realised that learning to meditate, and working on a farm should not be things that people should ever have to pay to do anyway. They are things people have always done, for free.

Although I’d like to imagine that I spent the entire summer meditating and grafting away sowing Quinoa, I spent a lot of time sat in, on the Internet. Google, knowing my every online move, fed me exclusively American news, and my appetite could not be sated. I found myself, day by day, becoming more and more involved in following the political campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. I learned about the promises they made, and the trails they campaigned on, and I learned about all of the upcoming ballot initiatives. The one that really drew me in was proposition 37 - a Californian referendum on food labelling. The “yes” on 37’ers wanted Genetically modified food to be labelled, the “no” on 37’ers didn’t. It seemed straightforward. Everyone I spoke to, and every news outlet proclaimed the benefits of labelling - GM food is untested, and when tested, has proven dangerous; People deserve the right to know what is in their food; people deserve the right to chose whether to buy food labelled as GM or not. This seemed simple enough. However, the “yes” teams advertising budget was bolstered by small, organic, local farms and organisations, such as “Seed Savers Exchange”, “Sky Valley Foods”, and “Frey Vineyards”. Heard of them? The “no” teams advertising budget was bolstered by large, international GMO producers, “Monsanto”, “Pepsico”, “Coca-Cola”, “Kellogg”, “Nestle”. Heard of them? Proposition 37 didn’t pass. The “No” team won by a margin of 3%, simply because their funding pockets were six times deeper.

The extreme left and extreme right appear to exist in symbiosis, their only motivation is to perpetually defeat, and be defeated by the opposition. It was fights like this, where the right and the left are at their most extreme, that captivated me in San Francisco.  I was in a hub of extremely liberal thinkers and doers. I read and I talked and I listened. I learned about the American agricultural system - controlled by a small handful of humongous companies, I observed extreme poverty and wealth side by side, I witnessed the awesomely frightening array of drugs available in Walgreens, I tried my hand at community farming, and I followed the global economic downturn.  As I followed these issues in America, and the world, I began to notice that all of them - food, the economy, the drugs industry, the American obesity epidemic - have one thing in common -the environment. It came in whispers at first, pieces of moral advice that didn’t necessarily overtly point toward the global environment - eat local, organic, seasonally, cycle instead of drive, walk when you can, buy things from family-run stores instead of supermarkets. But the more I read, the more I realised that the things we eat, the fuels we use, the money we spend, all comes from the earth. It sounds so simple to say it that I wonder if I’m just writing what everyone else already knows. Every item of furniture in our houses, every road, every burger box, it is all a product of nature. We are an integral part of, and live inescapably within nature, and abusing that nature, and the balance it holds, has dire consequences. I learned that this food industry, the one that feeds the whole continent, does so using short term solutions. These solutions (monocrops - planting field upon field of one single plant, such as soy, or corn) when used in the long term have catastrophic consequences. They start out as cheap, and very high yield. But the soil gets tired, and pests come to eat the corn, so fertilizer and pesticide are manufactured and sprayed, causing costs to rise. The yield stays high, but the soil dies and the pests grow resistant, the fertilizer is sprayed, and the pesticide is genetically engineered into the crop, killing any animal that comes near the food. Carbon is released by the fertilizer, and by the crop itself, and by the vehicles that traverse these monolithic fields. Groundwater is poisoned by the fertilizer. The soil can no longer sustain any life. The fields are left dead and more land cut down to make way for larger fields, which are then planted with more of the same crop. So much GM soy is produced, taking up so much space, that cows, who are at their natural productive peak roaming fields, eating grass, are forced into battery farms and fed soy. Eating soy gives cows wind, and they release methane - twenty times more potent than carbon. The cows, the crops, the vehicles, the fertilizers, the pesticide, the deforestation. All contributing to the release of greenhouse gasses, which are themselves the main contributor to the elusive “global warming”. Temperatures rise, and there is drought. When a field contains only a single crop, if you skew the conditions - even only slightly - against the favourable growing conditions of that crop, the entire yield perishes, and so the biggest drought in US history this summer occurred, leading to record grain prices across the world.

You know when you take such an interest in something, it’s hard to comprehend that other people may not. Like when other people don’t watch “LOST”, you retain a perverse curiosity as to how and why they have never heard of the black smoke. That’s the point I have now reached with global warming. To me, everything I’m writing here is common knowledge. The relationships in modern conventional farming between the practices used and the dire consequences are, understandably complicated and interwoven, but I like to think that I know what they are and understand how they interact, and I tend to assume that everyone else does too. But they don’t. It isn’t common knowledge, not in the slightest, and I only realise this uncomfortable and bewildering fact when I discuss these matters with people who don’t have a special interest in the environment.

Just before I left London, a mysterious Australian handed me a book called “Cod” by Mark Kurlansky, which details the millennial journey of the Atlantic cod and how it has helped to benefit and sustain life throughout Europe and North America for the better part of a thousand years, only to be wiped to the brink of extinction in the past 50 years. As I read this, in the cafe’s of San Francisco, I came upon the unsettling realisation that Cod is an endangered species. Before I started the book I viewed Cod as a commodity to be paid for and gobbled in as vast quantities as are desired. By the time I finished the book I saw the Cod as a sacred beast, on par with the Sumatran tiger or Blue whale, and I arrived at the assumption that everybody knew Cods’ endangered status. Come September, I was shocked to see it on the menu at my workplace. A colleague of mine asked why I think that Cod is endangered, “everyone eats cod. There’s billions of them, everywhere.”
 ”But there isn’t”, I replied to her, “there’s almost none.”
 She responded with a look of absolute bewilderment.

My adventures into environmentalism were not limited to finding out about the population statistics of fish, but the feeling of general ignorance around the issues persisted no matter what the topic. With every environmental issue that I have considered talking about, I wonder whether it is naive to assume that everybody already knows, or whether it is in fact naive to assume the opposite; that people really don’t know. I’ve decided to assume the latter. I’d rather potentially bore people in the hope of disseminating valuable information than assume that everybody already knows, and disseminate nothing. So I’ll hedge my bets and tell everyone anyway. If they know, I’ll tell them, and if they don’t I’ll still tell them. Because right now, we’ve almost run out of Cod, and nobody is any wiser. Meanwhile, we’re running out of a lot of other things too, including a liveable environment. Cod becoming extinct is kind of sad. This sadness becomes devastation when it’s the entire oceans that are extinct, when the arctic has melted, when Bangladesh is underwater, and when there’s no safe drinking water to be found anywhere. This all sounds very alarmist, which isn’t my intention at all.

I remember watching “An Inconvenient Truth”, about five years ago. i remember being really excited at the start, and I remember getting bored 20 minutes in and switching it off. I understand that such alarmist statements as those portrayed in Al Gore’s movie, can be very off putting. And I know that the above paragraphs may indeed do a great job at being somewhat incoherent and perhaps inconsistent. But I’ve finally found something to write about that fills me with passion. It was fun and easy writing about sex and taking photos of badly dressed people on the tube, but those are things that I don’t see any value in anymore. I’ve changed the direction of my personal writing, to be wholly focused on the environment. It will still be personal - with an cacophony of catastrophe unfolding around us, there is no reason for me to write about events I have never experienced or witnessed myself. I’ll be writing about my personal struggle with environmental decay, from the point of view of somebody who used to not care at all but who now cares a great deal. And don’t be alarmed - the rest of the posts won’t contain raging hippy rants like this one, I just needed to get it out of my system.

4:04 pm  •  9 January 2013

josuezavala:

Josue Zavala

Untitled (Lukas), 2012

7:33 am  •  8 August 2012  •  2 notes

wonderfulending:

Independent Olympic Athletes at the London Olympics 2012

They were so funny

(Source: innocuous, via tigrahtales)

7:44 am  •  29 July 2012  •  77,135 notes

Living on David’s kitchen floor was beginning to prove somewhat of a hassle for me. Sure, it was $10 a night in one of the most densely populated cities in the States, but there were more downsides. The biggest downside was David himself, I’m afraid to say. A lovely man, by every means, who means well. But he is paranoid beyond belief. If you are going to illegally rent out both your kitchen and bedroom as well as letting your couch to needy Couch Surfers, you need to live with the possibility of facing the consequences of doing so.

Not if David can help it!

He has a strict policy that anybody sleeping in his apartment, lodger, surfer, renter, or even a lady-interest, must, in no uncertain terms, leave the premises by eight o’ clock in the morning, seven days a week. This is because, as his Landlord theory goes, David once saw the landlord lurking in the building at eight thirty AM, and another time saw the landlord lurking in the building at three PM. According to David’s logic, this meant that the landlord potentially lurkx around the building on any day between these hours. Now, this “landlord” owns the entire block of apartments, as well as others, I’ve been told. He’s a big time property investor, who occasionally comes to oversee maintenance work to the building’s electrics. But David believes that on his numerous (possibly only two) trips to the building, the landlord likes to note all of the people he sees leaving or entering, writes a description of them on his notepad, then goes home and cross references it with the files he has of all of the people he rented out to, and deduces from that that anybody leaving the building that he doesn’t recognise must be illegally subletting from David! Also, David smokes a lot of weed. Which yes, I categorically blame for this paranoia. He smokes every single day, and never leaves his apartment.

I won’t analyse David’s personal and sociological make-up too much because he’s a decent guy. But I’ll just say that when you live in the kitchen of somebody constantly plagued by the munchies, you don’t get a minute of peace.

I began an elaborate hoax whereby I would drag myself out of bed at seven AM, dress and prepare myself for the day, and leave the house by eight AM. I would then hide in the surrounding area until ten AM, when David left for work, and would return, to have breakfast, change my clothes, or more often than not, sleep, until I decided it was time for me to leave. Forcing me out of the apartment by eight o’ clock, earlier than I ever would leave, inadvertently resulted in my staying later than I ever would.

Some days, I would walk the 20 metres to the beach, where I would plant myself in amongst a smothering of reeds, protecting myself both from David’s possibly prying eyes as well as the bombardment of the Pacific Ocean’s breeze. There I would sleep, then go home only to change out of my clothes that had become covered in sand, before leaving again. One morning, I went down the back stairwell and hid in the building’s laundry room for two hours, instant messaging my boyfriend and my mother. I sat on the floor by the washing machines and waited until I heard David’s door slam (a sound whose frequency and direction I have come to recognise with masterful precision) before going back in to the apartment.

At the time, David was renting his master bedroom out to a French student. François claimed to be 23, though he had the face of a 40 year old and the demeanour of somebody retired. He would rise earlier than everyone else, and was always the first to leave, always well in time of David’s curfew. Some mornings he was so astutely punctual that he left before anybody else woke up to notice that he had gone. He returned at six PM, cooked his dinner, and retired to his room to study, keeping to himself the whole time.

On one trip back to the apartment (possibly from sleeping on the beach, possibly from hiding under the stairwell), I unlocked the door, and was greeted by the alluring smell of frying bacon, and the distant erotic murmurings of a french voice. I went into my room, and there was François, in his briefs, hands-free in his ears, talking in french whilst making a fried breakfast. He didn’t seem in the slightest alarmed that I had walked in on him doing this, and so I too showed no alarm. I then, however, recollected that there was no way that David would allow François the luxury of sleeping in and cooking, and deduced that the French mastermind was pulling the same scam as I was. Over the next few weeks, both François and I would continue to leave by eight AM, go our separate ways, and then return at ten to carry on with our normal home lives. On the days that he got up and left so early that nobody noticed, I learned that he actually got up, faffed around for several minutes, shut the door and hid in bed until it was safe to come out. I began to feel uneasy as to the fact that we were two young men sneaking into a third mans house without his permission or knowledge, on a daily basis, so I tried to make my morning returns less frequent and less lengthy.

Whenever I felt suitably satisfied at the amount of time I had spent in the house, I would straddle my bicycle and head town-ward, where I would undertake my as-of-then full time occupation of job hunting. I had been advised by BUNAC, my visa sponsors, to bring $1000 to get me by until I found a job. What BUNAC don’t advise, though, is spending your American Summer in a city, or on a Coast for that matter. Only after I had paid the hefty visa fee did their “Massive job database” reveal itself to be a database of jobs in rural American holiday destinations. At best, think Brighton and Cornwall, at worst, think Blackpool. I was told over the phone, in no uncertain terms that “we don’t have many jobs in San Francisco, or any coastal city”, well after I had already planned my summer. So dealing with BUNAC’s half truths, I went with $2000 and the determination to find a job within a fortnight.

My mission initially seemed prosperous. A lot of places were hiring. I began spending my money, almost certain I would have a job before June was out. San Francisco is home to “The Best Dim Sum in the world”; the Chinese food here beats the Chinese food in China, as does the Japanese food, the Indian, the Mexican, the Irish, and all the other ethnic delicacies. So that’s what I began spending on. I ate myself happy, and spent my afternoons searching for jobs: handing out Resume’s, filling in application forms. All to no avail.

I searched and I searched. My logic led me to start in the Mission district (think Shoreditch, but less pretentious). In escaping from the tourists, and other foreign workers, I would have less competition. Apparently not. For the Ice cream scooping job I applied for, I made it to the first round of interviews. I wasn’t scoopy enough to make it to the second round. For the job in the grocery store, rotating fresh produce, my video interview was ignored. I never heard from them again. I did everything right, but apparently I didn’t have the ultra-keen, somewhat autistic eye needed to ensure that no tomato goes on show bruised, no pineapple upside down. They didn’t even thank me for the interview.

The Chinese man who ordered me to list off all the different types of Sandwiches I could make was visibly impressed by my “crayfish and lemon cress” recipe, which I stole from Pret a Manger. He took my number and said he would call on Monday. He didn’t.

I spoke to a girl in Whole Foods. It was her job to provide people with $5 taster boxes of the vegan lunch on offer that day. “Well why don’t y’all apply here! It’s easy. All I did was fill in the application form, hand it into the manager, and then I phoned every single day, and I told them “Yo. Sherene is the one. You ain’t gonna find nobody better than me to work for y’all in Whole Foods. I’m’a be on time e’rry day. I’m gonna serve that food like nobody else can. I was born to work in Whole Foods.” And I just kept at ‘em until they just gave in and hired me, just to shut me up. That’s all you gotta do to get a job here.”

On advice from some friends, I decided that I should swallow my pride and apply for joba in Pier 39. Pier 39 is a pier. An American pier. Ten times the size of Brighton Pier, and double decked, it is home to tenss of restaurants and pointless corporate outlets designed to take money from Italian tourists. The first shop you arrive at on the pier is dedicated solely to selling glass and porcelain statues of dogs. They sell every breed, and even have fridge magnets of dogs with halos and wings, so you can replace your live statue with a dead statue when your dog dies.

I made my route around the Pier, and things seemed more promising than ever. Employers knew what visa I was on. “You’ve come just in time!” one even exclaimed, with a wink. I was hailed with “Great!“‘s and “We’ll call you!“‘s, that seemed a helluva lot more sincere than the ones I had received throughout the rest of the city. I went into Lefty’s, the left handed store, and asked to apply. The girl pulled out a pen and paper, and wrote me some instructions. She then read her own instructions back to me. “So what you’re gonna do is e-mail Joan. Tell her you want to apply to all six stores on the pier”, I still don’t know whether this meant there were six left handed stores on the pier, or six stores owned by Joan. “Now, Joan loves to e-mail. Keep an eye on your phone, but you’re gonna wanna check your email every day this week, because that’s how Joan does things.”

Joan’s e-mail address didn’t even exist.

I was filling in an application form for a Organic, Vegan, Mexican restaurant (think about that one carefully). It included such jewels as “what is your biggest failure in life?” and “tell us what truly inspires you about the possibility of a career in the service industry.” I really tried. I was really inspired about the possibility of a career in the service industry. My answers were really good. After this, I went home and carried on into my night time shift, of online applications. Upon starting one cover letter, I changed my attack plan. Here is my e-mail, verbatim:

Hi,

I recently graduated and am looking for work immediately. I am a fun, open and understanding person. I am a fast learner, adaptable and all the other things you’d want in an employee. Basically if you don’t hire me now, you’ll be just another fool who has missed out on a great opportunity.

Regards,

Lukas

That was the last application I sent. No, I didn’t get the job, not did I get any of the others. I quite happily gave up. In a month, I had rinsed quite swiftly through my $2000 savings, and was no closer to finding a job, nor a place to rent, in possibly the most overcrowded city in the developed world. Were I to get a job, miraculously, the next day, It wouldn’t make a significant dent in the pile of crap I had found myself in.

So my plan of action for the summer, in a matter of minutes, shattered and rebuilt itself. All expectations that I had had were now gone. This trip came together, wonderfully and with ease, like a blooming flower, in the early spring months. I was student-rich, had tickets to Burning Man festival, and I would be single in the Gay capital of the world. What a Summer lay before me! But the whole thing crumbled with even more ease than it had came together. The underestimation of rent prices, the half-truths of BUNAC, the impossibility of the job market. I now, too, faced the devestation of my best friend not being able to make it to the States for the Burning Man trip we had been planning for six months, and there was also the small matter of Jeremy - the man who found me, fell in love with me, and is now waiting patiently for me back in London.

So things had changed, not necessarily for the worst. Instead of working full time, spending full time, and having loads of sex, I would now do things very differently. I would sell all my assets, live off of the money I made, survive until I ran out of money, and return triumphantly to the UK, having survived a second lonely and underfunded trip to the foggy city in the West.

—-

Back in my first week, I missed Jeremy so much that I inexplicably wanted to deal with that by toying with the idea of seeing other people. Obviously I had gotten over that impulse after my first and only adulterous kiss, which was more than enough to sway me from the path of infidelity. But I had begun speaking to a couple on Grindr. Their display picture is of them embracing in a passionate kiss. The image displays, with no uncertainty, that they come as a pair. Our intentions were not exactly clear at the start, but at some point they saw pictures of me naked, and I saw pictures of them naked.

Deciding that a friendship far outweighs a potential threesome, we decided to meet for breakfast. Their mere turning up at the breakfast diner instantly dispelled any sexual tones in our relationship. Not that they are not attractive, but I see sharing breakfast with somebody as a sign of a meaningful relationship. Lunch, or “coffee” reek of informality. You’re not bounded by anything and can meet at whatever time, for however long you want to, escaping when you see fit. Dinner is reserved for formal occasions - you have dinner with friends to celebrate a new job, or with your parents when they meet your new partner, or with other heads of state to talk about trade and prisoners of war. Breakfast though, shows effort and commitment. After a one night stand, you make breakfast if you feel like your new mate holds potential, it is a common family ritual to serve breakfast on a birthday - to get up earlier than the person you are trying to please, and to cook for them so as that they can recline and spill food over their naked body jovially. In this case, the three of us climbed from our own beds and travelled across the city, to sit in a diner and pay an extortionate amount for pancakes we could have made ourselves, simply because we wanted to meet each other. The fact that Andy and Justin agreed to this, rather than a coffee, meant that we had subconsciously decided to put the naked photos behind us and persue a friendship.

This in itself is quite miraculous, when you consider the rules of Grindr. At any one time you are presented with 100 men or couples in your local radius. Of those 100, you will be attracted to maybe thirty, who you will start a conversation with. Twenty will reply, but only ten of those will form any sort of coherant conversation before descending into smut. Three conversations will make it to the point of civility, and only one of those will you meet. If you’re looking for sex then there’s still a chance that this one person won’t meet your expectations. If you’re looking for anything more meaningful than sex, the chances that you’ll get on with this person are even slimmer, having met on a sex-based app.

So it is with great praise to the Gods that I somehow managed to meet Andy and Justin, and over the course of a breakfast, charm them into inviting me to live with them, indefinitely, for free. Of course, that wasn’t my plan when I met them, but my time with David could only ever be limited, so I made the journey from Outer Sunset (think Balham, but with a beach) to Hayes Valley (think Islington, but with community farms), and it is where I currently reside, as an unemployed guest worker in America. Living the dream.

8:42 am  •  27 July 2012  •  3 notes

negritaaa:

(via bbearrawr)

3:47 am  •  27 July 2012  •  49,816 notes

gendurr:

Hayao Miyazaki’s beautiful mind. 

(via tigrahtales)

3:33 am  •  27 July 2012  •  192 notes

(Source: thehipsterkids, via acemarksthespot)

12:15 am  •  24 July 2012  •  5,690 notes

thehellishdimensions:

LOL 

YOU CLEARLY DON’T LIVE HERE 

(Source: dominiquemorgenstern, via tigrahtales)

1:41 am  •  20 July 2012  •  12 notes

About 18 months ago, my good friend Abi and I were observing a map of Istanbul. The only downside apparent to us at this point of living in Istanbul would be the university. While it was the impetus for us moving there, we began to suspect the Bogazici University, over ten kilometers outside one of the most highly populated and congested cities in the world, would eventually become a thorn in our side.

“Well we can live here!” One of us exclaimed, pointing to the dead centre of the city, “and then, see that road, it goes alongside the bosphorus. We can just leisurely cycle to university every day along that road.”

Skip forward six months and I was somewhat more adamant about the proposed idea than Abi was. She’s a heavy smoker, so arriving in the smoggy gridlocked city probably didn’t phase her dainty lung capacity. I felt sick and unhealthy, though, and thought that the 20k daily cycle would do me good. The only hindrance was that nobody in the fifteen million strong metropolis cycled. Revealing my intention to people led to many aggressive, Turkish style rebuttals. “I would die”, they said, “drivers are mad”, they said, “you’re an idiot”, they said.

“Maybe we should just get the train”, Abi suggested, empathising with what she thought would be my disappointment. One hellish train commute later, on the first day of school, and I was decidedly adamant at making the impossible true, at cycling in Istanbul. 

Abi and I spent the morning linking arms and bitching about everyone and anyone that crossed our paths at university. A sort of defense mechanism, we mocked peoples style and the way they carried themselves, asserting and reasserting to each other that we were the best thing that ever happened to Bogazici.

In one of those strange coincidences that sets off a beautiful chain of events, in our first class we sat next to a girl whose charisma and friendly charm were above and beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. With a glowing smile, she revealed her name - Yayouk, her nationality - Dutch, and the contents of her left hand - a bicycle helmet. Among our first conversations, I elatedly asked about her bike. She told me that her and her Parisian friend Martin decided to cycle to school every day. On his first journey on two wheels, though, being too careful of the traffic in front of him meant that he would not spot the foolish pedestrian stepping out in front of him. He crashed into the pedestrian, flipped over the handle bars, and broke his arm. That was the end of Martin’s cycling adventure in Istanbul. I wasted no time letting Yayouk know that I’d be her new co-commuter. She took me to the tiny bike shop she had happened upon - one of only a handful in the city. I bought a bike, a helmet, and the various other paraphernalia, and we were off!

Now, it wasn’t that easy. The drivers really are alarmingly hazardous in Istanbul. Without sounding too Orientalist, it seems to me as though the European road system has taken the middle eastern population by surprise. Highways without pavements being shared with pedestrians, two lanes of traffic driving down one lane roads, cars driving on the wrong side, swerving cars, reversing motorbikes, opening doors, swerving trucks. True mayhem, and a true risk to someone’s life. But I vowed to be no Martin. Indeed I didn’t crash a single time in five months. However there was never a smooth journey. I once had the idea of snapping a go-pro camera to my handle bars and filming myself cycling. I’ve never had so many obscenities leave my mouth in such a short period of time. I would arrive at University, and later home, thoroughly emotionally exhausted, and feeling disappointed with humanity.

The other obstacles, the most off-putting, were the hills. Istanbul is known as “the city of seven hills”.

I would tell people “No. That’s San Francisco.”

“No.” The Turks would say bluntly, “It is Istanbul.”

And seven hills there were. Seven huge, insurmountable hills, made all the more insurmountable by the accompanying Mediterranean-cum-middle eastern-cum-megalopolis temperature. It wasn’t easy, and some days I would resign myself to the public transport commute. Not to avoid the murderous motorists, but to save my thighs from the steep ups and dangerous downs.

We did it though, in the end. New Year came and went, and I sold my bike to another foreign student, passing on the torch of healthy/deadly commuting. I actually read an article at one point, about cycling in cities. It claimed that the cons actually outweigh the pros in cities like Istanbul: the lack of infrastructure, the danger, and of course the fumes prove more often than not to be counter-constructive to a cyclist. Anyway, the bike wasn’t mine anymore, and I returned to London.

In London, I could breath easy in the relatively clean air. That is until I took my first tube journey. Boris Johnson, it seems, Is a bumbling prick (who knew?). The fairs shooting ever star-ward shocked me into making a vow to never take another London public transport journey again. A similar process to the one in Istanbul ensued, and I bought a bike. Except this time, I cycled fucking everywhere. The cycle bug caught me, and I would cycle come rain or shine, relatively uneventfully.

So, skip forward six months. Same story, different city. I was pleased to hear San Francisco to be a “Cycle City”. I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. Does is mean that everyone cycles? Is the city built on a giant wheel? Actually, I’m joking. It’s pretty obvious what it means. So I bought a bike. Everyone loves cycling here. There’s lanes, we have right of way, etc etc.

Remember the arguments I would often have with Turks about who deserves the title of the city of seven hills? Well we were both right. In fact, “Cities claiming to be built on seven hills” has its own Wikipedia page. There’s sixty of them. Why San Francisco calls itself this is beyond me, because this tiny 49 square mile peninsula has 47 named hills, and over 75 in total. That’s one named hill every square mile. And seeing as not all hills require names, a lot of those square miles have surprise hills thrown into them. Today, for example, in a relatively flat part of the city (by relatively flat, i mean not flat at all), my map indicated that “Lone Hill” was in between me and my destination. Savvy little me took a detour, only to realise that Lone hill has an unnamed brother, right next to it, who I was forced to climb. I think Lone hill is so lonely because everyone tries to avoid him, and ends up climbing his neighbour, who gets cyclist upon cyclist panting and sweating all over him, while he slowly curses them all for going out of their way to avoid him.

San Francisco is best imagined not as a piece of land with hills on it, but as a giant hill will a few deflated valleys and cross streets in between. It reminds me of a huge Pin Cushion. Imagine the peninsula, fully inflated, and gracefully rising out of the pacific ocean. Then imagine violently sticking pins into different parts of it to create inexplicably steep slopes, leading to crevasses and valleys hidden from view. Even more unexplainable is why people thought it a good place to build a city. Sure it’s great for the rich, as I discusses in another post, looking down and surveying the poor who are constantly milling about with shopping trolleys. But I’m honestly surprised that people had the capability to drive uphill in cars back then, never mind make the roads in the first place. I had a go at cycling down Lombard street last week. A street so steep that if you were to drive straight down it you would crash and die, so they put several sudden bends in it to stop people from crashing and dieing. Even so, brakes firmly squeezed, my bike almost forward flipped twice on the way down. I’m not sure people knew what gravity was when they built this street.

I read an article about a man who was sentenced for manslaughter for cycling into a pedestrian and killing them. Apparently he was going at 35MPH. “Pish Posh,” I thought, “impossible without an engine!” The very next day, I was flashed by a speed camera in a 30 MPH zone. I felt kinda cool and rebellious. That’s how steep the hills are: they make you feel cool.

In comparison to Istanbul, these hills would be insurmountable. But America’s customer-oriented culture and it’s “we’ve got everything you need” mentality, coupled with the counter-culture movement in San Francisco (or San Frisco, as nobody calls it) makes it a much more pleasant experience. There’s a thing called The Wiggle. It’s basically a cycle route, painted fluorescent green, that weaves its way through the city, wiggling, as it were, between the seventy-plus hills, to provide cyclists with the flattest ride. While easy on the thighs, it’s certainly harsher on the watch. My four mile cycle into town, as the crow flies, would take me twenty minutes in London. Here, utilising the wiggle, it takes an hour, and is doubled in length. Sometimes the temptation is irresistible to go the “short” way, over the hills. This, however, takes just as long, bathes you in sweat, and has the potential to give you herniated thighs, all while also putting yourself and pedestrians in a potentially murderous situation.

Even with the wiggle, though, the enjoyable ride is somewhat of a uphill challenge, and the lay of the land comes with quite a steep learning curve, so by the time I return to London, I’ll rejoice the possibility of flat land, and I’ll most certainly be able to crack a Blue Whale’s hip bone between my thighs.

8:52 am  •  13 July 2012