Travelin'Round Brown

03/07/2016It’s confirmed… Travelinroundbrown yes. Travelinroundpriviledged yes. Travelinroundmoroccan, no. I got $40 US dollars stolen from my wallet in the dresser in Morocco. “A fool and his money are easily parted.” Travel tax. Get robbed first day on the street or get robbed second day in the hotel. What am I supposed to do? What was interesting is that it was surgically removed, they didn’t take all $60, just $40. It was tricky alright, it was like a kid stealing money from their dad’s wallet, just enough oAt least now the taxi drivers aren’t the only robbers around!

30/06/2016
Finally I have a charged battery and a wifi connection…
So, my story…

One of our good friends from the US, she is from a Muslim family, encouraged us to fast at least one day while visiting Moroc during Ramadan. Knowing that travel can be tiresome we were concerned that we would fail. However, it happened that we left our apartment in Madrid very early and had prepared breakfast the night before our departure. So the universe was coming into alignment that positioned us to participate in the fast. It was a desperate attempt to get to the plane on time. We had assumed that we would cheat our fast and get coffee somewhere on the way. However, that was not the situation. Due to a traffic jam, our bus was stuck on the freeway. After rushing through the airport, we arrived at our plane with only 5 minutes to spare.

Having only 3-4 hours sleep the night before, we both passed out on the plane. During that sleep, I dreamed of farmland in the desert…

We landed. We came out of the plane, taking our first steps on African concrete. A moment that I had envisioned for decades. In my visions I always saw myself falling face down and kissing mama Africa. However, the jet fuel and concrete deterred me…

We passed a coffee shop as we passed through the terminal. Giving up yet another opportunity to break our fast. We purchased our train tickets from Casablanca headed toward Rabat! There were no opportunities for coffee.

Traveling on the train was nice, with intermittent sleep. Waking, sleeping, gazing dreaming. Stop after stop. My mind grasping for comparisons of Africa/Moroc and my birth country. Many things are common, the landscape, the plants, the people. 

Finally, Rabat Ville! We have arrived. Upon exit of the train station, we were indeed shocked. Bom Dior, wee wee, vou les vou, parle vous, do not go far. Our taxi driver was as confused as us when we tried to explain where we were going. Having been taken advantage of by Portuguese taxi drivers, we wondered if we were being taken again by the Moroccan taxi driver as he circled the Medina. We parked on the far side of the Medina, he grabbed a bag and in we went. Filled with new words, sounds, and smells, casual and confused we followed our unexpected guide. Sure enough, he walked us down a narrow street and pointed to a sign that was the name of our hotel!

After checking into to the most beautiful room I have ever been in, I rinsed off in the shower and walked to the bedroom. I was tired, hungry, and my head hurt for the wanting of just a sip of coffee. Am I really going to be able to sleep in this condition? Before my head hit the pillow, I was asleep. The time was 2pm or 3pm. I was briefly awoken to the sound of the mid afternoon prayers that awoke me like a police siren! Then I drifted back into a deep sleep…

 
I have had intense dreams my whole life. Often, as a youth, I would entertain my classmates of the dreams that I had of them the previous night. And as I slept on this day, I dreamt of waking from my sleep. In this waking dream, a friend, Chris, also known lovingly as “Lost” knew the prayers and chants. It was strange because In waking life, he is not Muslim. When I awoke in the dream, it was night time!!! The only thing strange was that the sky was purple! My friend told me, “it’s time to eat!” I was ready to eat.

Then, my love woke me from my slumber. “It is 5pm. We need to get up.”

I was saddenned when I realized that it was not time to eat. Like a child I wondered how we would pass the next few hours.

We got out of the hotel in search of the Kasbah. To my delight, after some walking, not only was the Kasbah, but the beach which is perfect for beginner’s surfing as described in the travel guide. I was saddened because no women were in the beach and despite my deep desire to surf, how can I enjoy the beach alone? So we asked some foreign ladies if they understood the culture. They were actually French and they were a tremendous trove of information. Of course they spoke English. They assured us that even though my love may receive some comments, it will be acceptable. They directed us to some sights to see and informed us of some costs. They said that we had poor luck because the sky had been clear for six months, and now it is cloudy.

We parted from our French friends and proceeded to walk to the breakwater. The time was quickly passing. We noticed that people were gathering on the beach. Families, friends, children, lovers! Despite having no water or food since sunrise, everybody was in good spirit. So we sat overlooking the crowded beach as the sun set. People were taking pictures of their meals along with selfies. And the feast began. What a beautiful experience it was.

So we began making our way back to the village where we would look for our meal. As we were leaving the board walk, we hear people shouting in French and signaling for us to come over. “Welcome, eat, welcome, sit…” Of course we obliged. First, we were offered milk, then strawberry/banana juice. Next we were offered bread, fish, and an array of other delicious items. 

We had no dictionary, no internet, only smiles, names, broken French, English, Spanish, and Arabic to share. We were then offered an after dinner Moroccan smoke from our new Moroccan friends. As if it could not get any better, our friends began to serenade us. We had a chance encounter with a Moroccan Band!

As we relaxed with full bellies, I looked up, the sky was purple from the reflection of the city lights off of the clouds. It was then that I recalled my dream. Purple night sky, Time to eat. Time to eat. A hum du Allah!

28/06/16So…my American is coming out. I’m at the Prado… What’s the Prado?
Oooooooh?!? That’s El Prado!

No photos allowed. However, travelinroundbrown tip 8,347,565: take pictures of the gift shop😉

That looks like the Mona Lisa! It is, but only a perfect copy.

So if you didn’t know, El Prado has a lot of paintings of dying Jesus, Spanish Royalty with Greek/Roman mythology salt and peppered in.

 
And poor, poor Bosch. He was only 400 years ahead of his time😔

He must have been really lonely.

6/27/16

Leaving Portugal! Gettin bussed to the plane! 

It’s kind of like the seventies, except no smoking!

6/26/16Cascais, Portugal. Has it been 3 months already. Seems like it anyway. So got a nice traveling around brow experience today. I need to amend my jet lag experiment. It didn’t seem to work.
We found the bairro turista. If Portugal is the Mexico of Europe, we found Cancun. It is beautifully manicured. So beautiful it is surreal. It is a place that we would want to live. Until I realize that indeed it is a tourist town. In the day time like most beaches in the world; the locals dominated. It was great healthy bodies everywhere. We fit right in. So I was right by the way. I do look Portuguese. Even the locals think I’m local. At least for simple exchanges and transactions even when I talk they think I’m local. So arriving at my point, I loved Cascais, until the sun went down. All the locals went home and we stayed back because we didn’t want to leave. It is an hour train ride back to Chiado-Baixu (I love the trains in cities). Besides even though portuguse food is healthy, sardines and potatoes, it is nothing compared to Indian food. So after doing some excellent souvenir shopping👏🏽, our noses lead us back to the Taj Majal, Indian/Italian. The food was the bomb. We are now on the train heading to Lisboa. 

I have already failed to write everything I would’ve liked to, but it ain’t easy. That jet lag thing was and is intense. Last night after a looooooong party/parties I couldn’t fall asleep until the sun came up. It was stressful because we had this beach day tentatively planned. So we started stirring at 9 or 10 and we were up by 11. Went grocery shopping made some breakfast and finally got on the train by 3. When we finally found our beach, paid for an umbrella and two chairs.  We have arrived. 

Why didn’t we do this yesterday. Reality knows, but we could have already been doing this for a week. Again not really, but given infinite time and resources, everything is possible. So we just chilled, took a quick dip, had drinks, dozed in and out of consciousness and finally I started warming up to relaxation. We were where we were supposed to be. What an amazing feeling. So you know me, time goes slow when having fun, so it felt like days in the sun. 

It was getting late in the evening and the locals stated packing up at an exponential decay rate. So you in a way that means, the beach starts opening up.

Time for some aus! So aus it was. Tens, hundreds, millions. Front, back side. My partner even joined. Now that I am hot… Time to flip. Same story as above. I am nailing round off back flips. It feels better than it sounds. It feels like Agua de Beber. I didn’t stop there. Just to put I in perspective, I accomplished a New Year’s resolution. Foia seca from my left side!!!!! I have been working on it for ten years at least. I am also approaching mariposa’s on my other side too, which is another decade long project. 

Why is this important? Because it represents the power of freedom. It hurts me to know that my life shackles my mind and inhibits my power. This is why travel is so important. It allows for moments of relaxation which lead to an environment conducive to the creative process and true self expression. It allows for that Axé to flow the way it is supposed to.

That is why Cascais became Cancun for me. As the sun went down, all kinds of people of privilege just staying at another hotel that is maintained and operated by brown people. What a prison, working in paradise. Sounds a lot like hell to me. Enough of that, it’s time to foia seca (jump)off the soap box. I would not be here with all of these privileged people if I weren’t privileged. Like seagulls on the beach.

I got to swim in the ocean today. #feelinprivileged

I am working on a recipe to beat jet lag!!!! Lol

PART 1

First, we gotta go back in time. All the way back to yesterday, 6/22/16. The premise is that since Iberia is 8 hours ahead of Española, NM, the plan is to stay up as late as possible tonight, ideally until 0200. We then wake up at 0600 am on 6/23/16 and finish our last minute items. Like making copies of passports and itineraries. So we can then capitalize on both burning the mid night oil and take advantage of the old saying morning is wiser than the evening. 
ALARM!!! 0600. So far so good, Baby Brown, mama brown, and papa brown all were all grumpy and tired. Not so surprisingly, our chariot driver, Gpa Brown, was quite chipper and a much better driver than Gma Brown has insinuated.
PART 2
Stay awake til Newark! Our itinerary is Albuquerque to Denver (0945), Denver to Newark (1238), then Newark to Lisboa (2035).

We did it😜. We made it on our flight with 20 minutes to spare e en with a one hour delAy from Denver. Our beautiful agente viagar timeD it just right. And we also stayed awake the whole flight. So the experiment is in full effect. Although we are getting some help from the homeopathic world.
This coupled with my soon to be revealed airplane pillow, my hypothesis, even though I forgot to state it earlier is no jet lag. So fingers crossed. All I need now is a beer!!! 

 PART 3

Eagerly await beer service while I enjoy the snacks that we brought with us.

Engage travelin’roundbrown poorman’s patent pending pillow. It is a beachball and a tee-shirt to use on my fold down tray.

Dream eagle boy dreams. Awake in Lisboa pra cafe de manha!

This plan is not working at all! I can’t stop looking at this revolving screen of us traveling around the planet. 
The screen changes ever so subtly. So we are traveling against the rotation of the earth so we are going the angular velocity of the earth + 577mph(.81 Mach, 927 km/h). So basically time is going slow for us compared to you. Right now. Tomorrow the space time continuum resets as we again resume the same velocity as each other (I.e. We land). So you know my motto, time goes by slow when in having fun.
Anyways, the free IPAs at 36999ft (11279m) are kicking in. I am feeling very drunk. I definitely must edit this beer blogging session.
Fast forward to the future… 7/1/16. My jet lag recipe didn’t work at all. I was a wreck in Lisboa. I was a wreck in Lavapies, and it wasn’t until we finally got to our hotel in Rabat, that I passed out and had the dream that you will hear about in a future post..

I look forward to people giving their own jet lag recipes.

06/27/2016

Before leaving to Lisbon, my friend Greg asked me, “what’s the one thing you’re looking forward to doing when you get there?” Being that I’m a desert rat, I told him I couldn’t wait to go to the beach. While I admit that the call of a cool cocktail and silky beach sand are what initially summoned me to the shore, I gained much more than a day-drinking hangover during the afternoon I spent there.

Choosing among the many beautiful beaches surrounding Lisbon proved difficult, but ultimately, our AirBNB host recommended we go to Cascais, Portugal, because it was among the easiest to get to using public transportation. When we arrived, I was shocked by not only the sheer amount of people (tourists and locals included), but also by the sheer amount of women wearing thong and pseudo-thong (tanga) bikini bottoms. Coming from the US, where swimsuits are comparatively modest, I felt…well…overdressed in my full coverage bikini bottoms. Women of all ages and all sizes donned their thongs with confidence and dare I say grace, giving me lots to think about in relation to my own hang ups about my body. 

Whereas US mass media creates what feminist philosopher Susan Bordo has called an “empire of images” that serves to normalize tall, thin, ageless, plastic, white, cellulite-and-stretch-mark-free bodies striving for perfection, it was empowering for me to see women–grandmothers and mothers even–owning that beach and not being subject to gross objectification for it. Men weren’t stopping to whistle or cat call or stare. Everyone was interacting as though they were clothed in winter coats. Seeing this way of socializing prompted me think about rape culture’s most tired and fallacious of arguments: she must’ve been dressed too provocatively. 

And it also made me wonder why I have ever felt insecure about my own body. I have always thought I didn’t belong in a barely-there bikini, let alone a thong. I have a pancake booty and my teenage years branded me with stretch marks (tiger stripes). Then again, I live in a society that has conditioned me to be fearful of my sexuality and to see myself as other because I don’t fit the standard mold of beauty produced by the empire. 

Even though my family and friends call me pretty, and even though on good days I feel deserving of that title, I, like most women I know, feel doubts about this body that carries me. This body that has birthed a son. This body that grants me the privilege of travel and of adventure.

So, in seeing all those beautiful women rocking their barely-there bottoms on the beach, I felt a moment of sheer gratitude. I felt a wave of confidence come in from the tide and, as it washed over me, I too felt beautiful.

06/23/2016

Yes! Pulling out of the gate. I have completely forgotten all of my blog topics! I am further impeded by a cricked neck and a second thumb/knife accident in as many weeks! Due to the band aid…index fingers it is. 

Using my index fingers typing sideways on my iPhone 6 make me feel even more like the giant I feel like. Wh Wh what? Exactly. Heading 33,000 feet in the air. Scratch that, I actually don’t feel like giant at all. I feel like an spirit! I feel the Gs holding me against the upright seat. The crick is gone… I , I , I’m flying. We are flying! Me my love, 70 other comrades, and my quilombo, my village, my ancestors. We are all flying.

I have been holding it in, but my eyes tend to water at 30k. I’m reminded to have one last look at our river, our mountain, our mesa. Endless desert, endless life. Kaweshtima, Rio Puerco. The words,the language, the view melt together to form the silt and mud slowly crawling through the veins of the overgrazed basin. Haak’u, To’hajiilee, Kawaik, Katishtya, Kewa, Kotyit, Tewa and Tiwa.

I love the story of eagle boy in his eagle suit. Flying so high to the eagle village. Seeing all across the land. Looking down on the mountains and trees below. Freedom. The power. The story fades as I see Walatowa! Yakoke, Mitakuye Oyasin.
Lakes hidden from the weary featherless twolegs.

What did happen to eagle boy anyway…?

Red earth, forest green trees, bandaid color earth. I’ve seen these mound mountains of the lower Rockies on relief maps. But I see them now in 3D.  

El Vado, Rio Chama. Enough with the commas!!!!!!!!!!! 

What’s better: A to-do list or a checked off list? Depends on the list I guess…
So many cradled lakes in the billion year old bosoms of our mother. Oh, we’re in Colorado! No wonder my mind is wandering.  

When I am no longer excited about looking out of an airplane window… Please slap me!  

That was a brain dump alright.
Where are we?

 Descending towards Denver. Time to take off the eagle suit and be a man again. 

06/23/2016

In 2002, I was a junior in college with plans to study abroad in Spain. I had honed my Spanish skills, passed the obligatory language test, selected a college–Universidad de Navarra at Pamplona–and chosen courses for the following semester. I moved with my mom in the summer of 2002 so I could live rent free and save money. The plans were set in motion, but the universe had other ideas in mind for my foreseeable future.The previous winter, I was at a friend’s birthday party where I met the man who would father my children. There I was, standing in the kitchen with my friend Johnna when a handsome engineering major wearing sunglasses (at night) tucked behind shoulder-length dreads approached us with a simple hello. He walked away and I remember Johnna saying, “he’s kinda cute for a Rastafest” and I agreed. When I ran into Brutha Brown a months later, he remembered my name, and we exchanged numbers.

Then what was supposed to be a study date turned into a kiss, which turned into me falling in love months before I was set to leave.

While I was living with my mom, Brutha Brown and I continued to send each other letters and poetry and drawings and pictures. When I was ready to return to Albuquerque, where I’d been going to school, I needed a short term lease with cheap rent. Brutha Brown owned a house and offered a room for $200. Not only was the rent affordable, but living with him would allow me to enjoy what I thought were inevitably going to be our last months together. 

I hadn’t lived with Brutha Brown for more than two months when I learned I was pregnant. When I realized the gravity of my situation–pregnant just months before I was set to leave for a dream trip Spain–I was, to put it lightly, heartbroken. Moreover, coming from a family with numerous unplanned pregnancies, I felt like I had disappointed everyone. I’d always prided my parents with my academic success and ambition–I was going to be the exception, the one who got out–and learning that I’d become pregnant felt like failure.

I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions I’ve had to face: to abort my pregnancy and continue with my plan to study abroad or to birth and raise a child far before I felt ready. I have always been staunchly pro-choice, and I will admit that I seriously considered abortion. Ultimately, though, it was a conversation I had with Brutha Brown that confirmed my ability to succeed with option two. 

So, I became a mother far before I felt prepared to be a mother and I canceled my enrollment in Pamplona. But I never forgot about Spain or about my desire to go there. 

In the thirteen years since my son was born, I finished college, got a PhD, helped raise two boys, went from minimum-wage poor to middle class, learned a lot about love and about life, experienced brokenness and healing, and had some adventures. But I have never forgotten about Spain.

It seems like the past thirteen years have all been leading to this trip. It has taken years of saving money and PTO and years of trusting, but here Papa Brown and I are: on a plane, headed to Lisbon to Spain to Morocco. To Pamplona, finally, where I was called to over a decade ago.

I’ve never looked back on my decision to have my son, for he is so much more than any experience in Spain could ever be. I just kept looking forward, trusting, knowing that Spain would always be there.