Canary Current

Happy Birthday, Julie Zickefoose!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 03:07:00 +0000

In my family, the written word has always been a prominent love language. Every year since I was 10, my mom has dutifully crafted a celebratory blogpost on my birthday--a couple of weeks ago, she published the 15th! Some are poetic while others are more of a narrative, and all include a highlight reel of photos that sum up my recent history. Anyone who has me mixed into their Facebook algorithm has probably seen them. Liam gets them, too, as did my dad and our first dog Chet Baker (Curtis usually gets a gotcha-day post). So I'm not sure why it's taken so long to strike me that I would like to write a birthday blogpost for my mom. I'm drafting this post on the actual day of her birth, July 24th, but given my ~creative process~ it probably won't see the light of day until it's a bit belated. But good things take time, like the pot roasts and fruit crisps and chicken pot pies she puts in the oven. Since I moved away, I've been trying like hell to recreate her meals, so I know how it works.

Simply put, I am so proud of my mom. I've always been proud of her, but the feeling has expanded even more these past few years. One of her main fears around my dad's passing was no longer having someone around to do the big land maintenance tasks he'd always (albeit infrequently) done, like weed whacking and mowing the fields with the big tractor. With me living elsewhere and Liam at college, she was essentially alone with our property. If only she could have seen herself now! She has fearlessly figured everything out and tackled the biggest projects of her life on that land, pruning and planting and mowing and growing with a keen eye for beauty and the utmost respect for native wildlife. She has made great connections with local landscapers and Amish roofers (who she also sometimes hires to hop on the tractor), and taught herself how to weed whack. She spent months doggedly heading out every day with hedge trimmers and eventually freed our overgrown orchard from the multiflora rose and grapevines strangling it. She has reclaimed and maintained all of the trails on our land that had been grown over for years. She completely cleaned out and reorganized our basement and garage, which both formerly looked like portals to hell. And now that all the refuse is gone, my favorite part has been watching her dream up and indulge in small but significant aesthetic improvements; namely her new patio. I know she's made my dad so proud with this--he would always sit in the yard with a beer on summer evenings and dream up ideas just like that one.

Grilling surprise steaks for my birthday after she cleaned the cobwebs off of my dad's old gas grill and taught herself how to use it. I honestly never thought I would taste that again. (And before you ask, Liam's tattoo is temporary!)

Just a few of the dogwoods freed

While undertaking everything listed above, my mom also continued her life's work of supporting and documenting all of the wildlife around her. All by herself, she creates a bastion for birds, bugs, plants, animals, and everything in between. Within her considerable sphere of influence, baby bluebirds don't starve when there's a late spring cold snap. Monarchs, fritillaries, skippers, and swallowtails have ample butterfly weed and milkweed to sustain them. Rare and beautiful orchids thrive on what was once barren cow pasture. And bobcats have clawed their way back from near extermination, leading kittens down the well-maintained meadow paths each summer. My mom has stacks of journals filled with her observations of every kind of living creature, and can tell you things like exactly how many unique species of butterflies she's found on the property (77 with a new addition last week!) and the approximate arrival dates for any migrating bird. Through her actions and wisdom, she has shown me that one does not need to have a PhD in order to make meaningful and valid contributions to science.

Showy Orchis on our land!

Painting by her, of course

The amazing thing is that most everything I've written so far will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone connected with my mom online. She's not only made these observations for herself--she has crafted them into alluring stories and shared them with the world through books, her blog, and social media (@juliezickefoose on Instagram if you're not already there). She has made the wonders of nature accessible to anyone willing to read. It recently hit me that when I marvel at how much she's taught me about the natural world, I have to multiply that by at least a few thousand to even begin to capture her influence in this world. In a time when the natural world needs well-informed allies more than ever, she has provided a spectacular and invaluable service.

And of course, to top this all off, she is an absolutely incredible mother; the details of which I hold close to my heart sometimes. Being able to go home to her is my greatest privilege in this life and truly keeps me sane. She has taught me lessons and ways of being that will echo down through generations of our family to come. Every day I am a little more like her, and it's always something I'm thankful for. Because to be like her is to save the world. Happy birthday, mama.

Beyond Luck

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 22:44:00 +0000

Tonight, I'm coming to you live from the 8th floor of an airport hotel in Lisbon, Portugal. My room primarily overlooks a BP station and a roundabout, but in the distance I can see the city proper under a cloudless sky. Under normal circumstances, I'd be taking pictures of the incredible tiled buildings and watching the sun set over the water, but Lisbon (and much of Portugal) is in a bad spot with COVID right now. So instead, I've ordered in and am remembering the layover Oscar and I had here two summers ago on our way back to the States. While the words "overnight layover" may make some people cringe, I have had nothing but great experiences with TAP Air Portugal connecting to the Canaries through Lisbon. They service much of Europe and actually have really good airplane food, so check it out if you're in the market (#sponsor #me #TAP). Pictured food is not from the airplane but rather an amazing little restaurant called Alpendre that we stumbled upon while in the city.

Back to the present, because I have a story to tell from today. Today was the day that I left the island. (yes, many tears were shed, but that's another topic!) My original travel plan was as follows:

-Wake up at ~5:15 am to get ready, finish packing up, eat breakfast, walk the dog, etc.

-Leave around 6:15 for the hour-long drive across the island to the port

-Take the 8 am ferry to the southern port of Tenerife (the ONLY ferry leaving the island before 2 pm. If you ever travel to the Canaries, take my advice and do not arrive or depart on a Sunday)

-Arrive at 9 am and use a walking/taxi/bus combination to leisurely make my way 20 minutes over to the southern airport

-Fly out to Lisbon at 2:15 pm

Sounds easy enough, right? There are two ways off of La Gomera (ferry and plane), and I had chosen the ferry because it would get me much closer to the Tenerife South airport, which is where my flight to Lisbon was departing from. There are two daily flights to Tenerife, but they only service the Tenerife North airport, which is a full hour's drive from Tenerife South with traffic. I hope this makes sense for the sake of the story--It's all second nature to me now, but sometimes I look back and marvel on how I managed to piece together the inter-island travel systems largely through TripAdvisor reviews before heading to Canarias for the first time. It is really confusing!

From https://eas.unige.ch/EWASS2015/travel.jsp

Anyway, I finally got to bed last night around 1:30 after a marathon packing session. Oscar and I sat together and both set our alarms for 5:15 am, knowing that we couldn't miss it. My head hit the pillow, and the next thing I knew, Oscar was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and saw light outside, and had one of those classic stomach drop adrenaline rushes. We were supposed to be leaving in the pitch black. What happened?! It was 7:30 am--I should have been aboard my ferry, but instead I was still in bed an hour away. How could it be that neither one of our phones sounded? I've definitely had mishaps with mine a couple of times in the past, but we'd been setting and waking up to alarms the whole trip without a problem, so setting two almost seemed like overkill. And no, we did not sleep through them--I am incapable of doing that and Oscar is sensitive as well.

Still bewildered, I jumped up to get my laptop because the only other way off that chunk of basalt was by plane at 10:30 am. I coughed up the euros for the last-minute price hike, and we got out of the house with just enough time to drive the hour to the airport. The lady at the check-in desk very graciously ignored my 30-pound baggage excess (moving across the ocean is hard, okay?), and before I knew it, Oscar and I were saying goodbye. As hectic as the morning had been, we were so grateful to have had a few more hours together. When you're in the final stretch, each minute feels like a gift, and we had really gotten a windfall.

I boarded the little propellor plane and braced myself for a stressful transfer upon arrival in Tenerife. The flight was set to arrive to Tenerife North at 11 am, and my flight to Lisbon was boarding in Tenerife South at 1:30 pm. I would need to get my bags and find a taxi immediately for the hour-long ride south, and just pray for short check-in and security lines once I got there. It was doable but very risky, and would have a disastrous domino effect if it didn't work out. I put in my headphones and tried to relax, but after a while I noticed that we weren't descending like I would expect. The flight is just 30 minutes long, so it's pretty much up and right back down. The captain eventually came on over the intercom and said that Tenerife North was experiencing some strong gusts from the vientos alísios (trade winds), and had a thick blanket of clouds drastically reducing visibility. His plan was to circle the airport to see if things got better, but if not, we would have to divert to Tenerife South.

Tenerife South.

WHAT?! As everyone else on the plane groaned, my eyes got wide. There's no way I could be that lucky. I've flown that route probably 15 times and it's never been diverted. I kept my hopes low as we circled above the northern panhandle of the island 10+ times. The chances of landing in the north and making my flight in the south were getting slimmer and slimmer. I watched the compass on my phone go around and around until finally, it held steady moving southeast. Sure enough, the captain came on again, this time leading with an apology because the flight had officially been diverted. I'm telling you, I could not believe my luck. Not only was I saving the large chunk of money I would've spent on a taxi, but this was actually even easier than my original plan. I felt terrible for everyone else (because I was definitely the only happy person on that flight), but Binter Canarias (the airline) would take good care of them, and many of their connecting flights had been diverted to Tenerife South as well.

Scratchy plane windows and beautiful weather everywhere in Tenerife except the north

As soon as we landed, I called Oscar and told him the news. He was just as incredulous! We have concluded that this must have been the work of our dads. We talk about them all the time--what they must be doing up in the sky, what they'd think of our lives now, and how they might be looking out for us. My dad was the #1 travel logistics expert, so I know he must have had a hand in today's events.

Thank you clouds <3 I spy with my little eye four Canary Islands!

Any remaining doubt was wiped away as my little plane from La Gomera was about to touch down and "Citywide Rodeo" by The Weepies started playing out of a shuffle of my 569-song playlist. My dad played me that song as we roadtripped across Ohio when I was probably 10 years old. Some things are just beyond coincidence; beyond luck.

Until next time, my loves!

What's Changed

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 21:31:00 +0000

It's been a few weeks since I landed back in my nest in the Canary Islands. After I got over the initial head rush of seeing Oscar IN PERSON and not on a FaceTime call, the rest of my return felt far more mellow than I'd been expecting after all my yearning and nostalgia. It was like I'd just hit pause on this part of my life and stepped away for a while, but the play button let me resume things seamlessly. Throughout college, I was petrified of changes taking place back home in Ohio, like sections of familiar forest being leveled to make way for fracking platforms. But thankfully, these fifteen months haven't changed too much in La Gomera.

The most obvious mark of the passage of time is in my students. I gave myself one day to recover from jet lag before I popped back into the school for a visit (a moment I'd been dreaming of since I'd left). I made it there around recess time, and let the wave of "PHOEEEEEEEEEEBEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" crash over me. We were all so excited to see each other. They were all a bit bigger, their voices a touch deeper, and all just a little more sure of themselves in this world. They had clearly been broken of their hugging habit during the pandemic, which hurt my heart, but just laying eyes on them was enough.

One of the best comics I have ever read

4 años giving me their autographs

A few of my youngest students had trouble remembering me, and some reverted back to being just as shy as they had been when I first met them. I can't say I wasn't HURT, but I guess I can't be too offended by the workings of the rapidly developing brain. Many students of different ages haven't recognized me when I wave hi in the street, probably due in part to masks, but it's also the toll we pay to the march of time. It makes me feel the same way I felt when I triumphantly returned to my high school to visit over Christmas break during my freshman year of college, only to find that everyone had been living life PERFECTLY FINE without me and that the impact of my graduating class had been gently washed away like footprints on a beach (happy Cancer season to all my fellow dramatic little babies out there). Anyway, it prompts a period of self reflection and mini ego death that is necessary to keep on living and putting down new roots in different places. Closure, I think they call it?

I've found that stepping back into life here also regresses me in some ways to the headspace I was in when my dad got sick and passed away during my first Fulbright year. Not really in a bad way, though. It's just that my newly established life in North Carolina has never included my dad alive, whereas this one in La Gomera has. I even caught myself thinking "woah, wait, my dad is dead" as I was walking down the street the other day. While digging through my closet here (and absolutely dreading having to pack all the clothes I left behind in March 2020), I found a little bag that he helped me stuff full of miscellaneous items in a way that fit just right in my suitcase. It's remained largely untouched, and I was immediately hit by the memory of him shoving things in while I held the bag open and spiraled about moving to a random island. I think I miss him the very most when I'm packing/preparing for a trip, because he was the most well-traveled person I knew and always had answers to all of my questions and solutions to the infinite problems I invented in my head. A lot of times the answer was just "worry 80% less", but it helped so much.

One of approximately 1500 bad photos I have taken of Spain's highest point, El Teide

When I first got back here, the streets were very quiet. While June is typically a very calm month for tourism in La Gomera, travel restrictions and general hesitation have made things even slower. There's currently no ferry arriving to the port of Valle Gran Rey, so the long road filled with hairpin turns is the only way to get here. Many of our favorite restaurants are closed for a month of well-deserved vacation. While the local economy could always use the boost, I have selfishly loved the relative peace, being surrounded by familiar faces, and hearing almost exclusively Spanish being spoken.

And as for Oscar and me, we've both changed in subtle ways, largely for the better. After more than a year of being apart, we both agree that we know each other better than ever before, having relied exclusively on verbal communication to keep our spark alive. We're obviously far more appreciative of our time together now, which has led to some very fun excursions, acting like fools in public, lots of selfies, and healthy doses of ice cream and Spanish wine. The fine lines around our eyes and mouths have settled in more, and Oscar has developed a few canas (gray hairs!). Every time the light catches one, I get a little emotional that I get to be the person by his side as we move through the years. He's just so good.

Well, I reckon that's enough baring of the soul for one blog post, so I will take my leave. Coming back here has unlocked the part of my mind that thinks in intelligible sentences, so I hope to keep things rolling as I settle back into the States. That is IF I can come up with a rebrand I'm happy with--while I will be back to the Canaries as much as I possibly can be, it just won't be Canary Current. Like I said earlier: closure. Stay tuned!

Photo by Carinna Nikkel AKA my first loved one to make it to La Gomera TWICE!!

Homecoming

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 15:17:00 +0000

As I write this, I am sitting on a boat bound for La Gomera, my island home of a year and a half that I left in a rush when our global nightmare began last March. As the pandemic roared toward us in March and the prognosis got worse every day, I made the decision to leave Spain and go back to America, largely motivated by the believe that I would be back by June to close out the school year and collect my things. I took only the things I couldn’t live without, and left the rest in its place in the apartment that I shared with Oscar. He stood vigil in our home (under a much stricter lockdown than America’s) as weeks turned to months and months turned into… well, a year and a half. Once June 2020 hit, I started to fully realize the magnitude of this thing, and that it wasn’t going to get better any time soon. Together over FaceTime each evening, we stared out over an abyss with no horizon, and distracted ourselves by talking about the future, like when he might come to America and all of the things we would do together. Looking back, I can’t believe the motivation and hope that we maintained in the fall and winter months, when the promise of vaccines wasn’t even fully realized yet.

In March, I got my second dose of the vaccine with my fellow educators and allowed my spirits to be lifted by the buzz about what summer might look like. When it came to international travel, though, I couldn’t identify any sort of hole that would allow me into the European Union. However, things changed once I spoke to a fellow Bowdoin and Fulbright alum, Camille, who also found love in her host country. She told me about a certificate that she was able to obtain as the unmarried partner of an EU citizen that would allow her entry to reunite with him. And it worked! So I took a shot in the dark and wrote an email to the Spanish consulate in DC, and much to my surprise, I got an affirmative answer after working hours. The process was incredibly simple and validating, like Spain genuinely cared about reuniting two hearts separated by borders. It stood in stark contrast to US policies, which we became familiar with while investigating the visa process for Oscar.

With the certificate saved to my computer, I bought my flights but still didn’t fully let myself believe it might actually happen. I just put my head down and worked all spring, focusing on my job and keeping the idea of the trip close to my chest. Oscar and I started a countdown around ninety days, celebrating the diminishing number each day. As I look at my phone right now, the screen says 34 minutes.

I wanted to write in this moment, because it feels monumental. It is monumental. I am standing in the light at the end of the tunnel that has kept me going since I hugged Oscar goodbye 15 months ago. As I flew in to Tenerife this morning, I marveled at the jagged coastline and thought about how different I felt the last time I saw it. I had timed my music just right to play the saddest part of the saddest song as we struck out over the ocean and left the islands behind. This time, I couldn’t stop smiling. I thought about all the life I lived in between those two moments, entrenching myself in two new school communities and working with a batch of incredible students and dedicated staff. Making a new home in a new place and celebrating a different kind of beauty. And through it all, the Canaries kept a firm grip on my heart. I am so excited to get back and spend a month in worship of landscapes, people, food, and the ocean, and I feel so lucky to have so many reasons to return.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…. I have an Oscar to hug!!!!

The Day Sky Fell

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:23:00 +0000

Hey, everyone! Full disclosure, I have no idea how to start this blogpost without A. beating an already very dead but omnipresent horse or B. sounding tone deaf. So I will acknowledge the big, ugly elephant we have in the room and leave it at that. I could go into how it's personally impacted me, but I sort of hate writing up a story before I know how it ends, and we are a long way from knowing that. I had to leave La Gomera and return to Ohio to ride this out. I'll wax poetic about it at a later date.

⁂

For now, I'd like to share a story that came to pass just a couple of weeks before things went left, just after Carnaval wrapped up and things were settling down (or so I thought!). On March 4th, I was having a typical afternoon of lunch, tidying the house, and teaching private English lessons when I got a call from Oscar. While at work, he'd picked up some fallen palm fronds and was taking them out to the dumpster when he spotted a nestling Eurasian collared-dove on the sidewalk. He instinctively knew it was too young to be out of the nest, much less in the middle of a cat-infested street. He looked everywhere for a nest but couldn't find one, so he was going to bring it home where it would be safe.

This wasn't the first time I'd gotten a call like this from Oscar. He works overlooking a well-vegetated courtyard, and has a huge heart and a keen eye for creatures in danger. And I have experience caring for birds, as well as access to the bird rehab oracle (my mom). Usually, the situations that crop up involve doves with cat injuries that we can't do much for (here's an obligatory plug to KEEP YOUR CATS INSIDE!). Another time, he found a nest of Canary Islands chiffchaffs in pin feathers that had fallen to the ground while the maintenance crew was pruning the courtyard. With my mom's guidance, he relocated the nest to a tall bush, and the parents went right back to feeding them. But a few days later, maintenance pruned again, and unknowingly threw the nest into trash bags that then went to the dumpster. Oscar arrived to work later that day, immediately noticed the nest wasn't there, and went sprinting out to rip open the bags and dig through them. He managed to rescue two of the three babies (one didn't make it, unfortunately), salvaged the nest, and once again relocated it. The parents swooped in within minutes, and all was well once again. A week or so later, the babies fledged successfully, and to this day chiffchaffs sit right next to Oscar while he works.

spot the newly-fledged baby

My sweet guy

So, an hour or so after his call, Oscar brought home the baby dove. Upon seeing it, I knew it was about a week away from true fledging age, especially after watching a pair of the same babies grow up in a nest right outside our bedroom window in December. When they were its size, they started looking around a bit more, and eventually took a few steps out of the nest, but didn't actually go anywhere for quite a while. I stretched out this baby's wings and looked it over for any sign of injury and saw nothing. It was just scared, and probably pretty hungry. But I was going to do my best to help it.

It was a bit scary to undertake my first rehab project without my mom's physical presence, but we were in constant contact on WhatsApp and she was firing instructions my way. At 6 pm on a Wednesday, the local pet store and the vet were already closed, meaning that I'd have to improvise for its food for the night. My mom recommended I use gofio, the flour-like substance made of toasted and milled mixed grains that's a staple in Canarias. I also mixed in some ground almonds and made a loose paste with a bit of water. Luckily, I'd been able to acquire a syringe at the pharmacy, so I loaded that up and got to work. Feeding the little thing was not as easy as it had been with the other species I'd worked with, because baby doves don't actually gape. Instead, when the parent comes to the nest, the babies reach into the mouth of the parent to eat the nutrient-rich food (called "dove milk") that it regurgitates. Fun!

At least giving it water was easier.

After we'd gotten a full syringe of makeshift food into its stomach, things settled down a bit and we could really take in its presence. I felt decidedly feminine energy, but left the naming to her original finder. Oscar has a knack for naming that always makes me laugh. I like to test it out by asking him to name dogs we pass on the street, as he has a strict but made-up system for it that is not to be questioned. All golden retrievers are named Chester, all mid-sized black dogs are Firulais, all mid-sized brown dogs are Whiskey... and so on.

He looked at out dovelet for a second and settled on the name Sky (pronounced "eh-sky" in Oscar English). It fit her quiet, reflective nature and pointed to our goals for her.

Sky it was.

Rental Car Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 17:19:00 +0000

In my second year living on La Gomera, I’ve had to get creative when it comes to escaping monotony and claustrophobia. As beautiful as it all is, I’ve explored just about every accessible inch of the valley I live in, and any boat or plane off the island costs me roughly 80 euros. There is a bus system that runs between several larger towns, but planning excursions around the sparse schedule is difficult, and if you accidentally miss your bus home as it goes whizzing by, you end up a lot like Spongebob in that episode where he can’t escape from the valley where people speak in fart noises. Plus, bus rides on La Gomera are NOT for the faint of stomach. I’ve noticed there’s a stretch about two-thirds of the ride to the airport where the most vulnerable passengers give up the ghost, and the bus driver calmly stops in the middle of the road and opens the door to make way. In short, not the most pleasant experience.

Beautiful? Yes. Nausea-inducing? Also yes.

Instead of stressing myself out with buses, boats, or planes, this year I’ve opted to rent a car a few times to get out and explore the island on my own time for a couple of days. Unlike last year, it’s convenient because a rental agency in my town finally procured an automatic car. It happens to be a two-person Smart Car, but it works for me! Although I’m driving it around the same 14-mile diameter chunk of basalt, every valley is incredibly different thanks to varying microclimates. In general, the southern half of La Gomera is very arid and usually sunny and warm, while the northern half is moist, green, cooler, and cloudier. In the middle of the island lies the laurisilva, as well as several towering volcanic plugs. Even just a half-day trip to the next valley over completely refreshes me and makes me feel as though I’ve been somewhere entirely new.

A few weeks ago, I decided I’d like to strike out in search of some blooming almond trees. It caught me by surprise, as my previous experience in Ohio and Maine hadn’t exactly taught me to expect flowers in February. But sure enough, just 20 minutes up the mountain, I passed my first tree.

It seemed the almonds preferred the more arid half of the island, so I stuck to the south and aimed for La Dama, a town I had never been to before. I’d seen it a hundred times from below while passing by in boats, but never in person. It sits just one cliff over from my town, but takes about an hour to reach on the zig zag roads. This was a particularly good time for me to go, as Oscar was in Tenerife for the day and wasn’t there to tell me that there is literally nothing in La Dama and no reason to go. Sure, he was probably right, but I wanted to see for myself.

Before beginning the descent to La Dama, I stopped in Chipude, which is the largest town in the center of the island. To give you an idea of just how bustling it is, when I parked the car and turned off the engine for a moment, the utter silence made my ears ring. I took a couple of almond blossom photos, bought some chocolate, and headed down to my unknown.

A peek at Valle Gran Rey from an overlook in Chipude

It took me a good 20 minutes to reach the beginning of town, which was strikingly industrial for such an isolated location. I passed what looked like a defunct factory, some heavy machinery, and then several miles of enclosed banana plantations. It was such an odd feeling to drive between the translucent walls, sheltering the largest industry I’d seen on this tiny island.

I was feeling a little strange about my choice of destination until the banana walls stopped and I came into the residential part of town. It felt much more familiar, albeit a bit post-apocalyptic with no people in the streets. At the bottom of town on the edge of the cliff, I came to a beautiful church plaza overlooking the sea.

I parked my little car and sat for a long time in the silvery calima-tinted light, listening to a mirlo (blackbird) sing in the tree behind me. I felt such peace in that moment, and such a sense of belonging even though I was alone in a town I’d never been to. I thought a lot about the saying here that if La Gomera wants you, it will do what it takes to keep you. There are so many stories of people showing up and being totally unable to find long-term lodging, or encountering some other obstacle in their attempt to settle. Everything for me has been the total opposite. Just two months into my stay, I was blessed with an angel who has made everything so easy for me. I never felt out of place or unwelcome. If anything, I’m wondering how the hell I’ll ever tear myself away.

As the sun set, I got back in the car to head home, still in my reverie. I’d seen just one moving car in the hour and a half since I’d left Chipude, so I could stop at my leisure to take photos of the skyscape, landscape, and almond trees.

Each photo I took was more beautiful than the last, especially as I got closer to the cliffside leading up to La Fortaleza, La Gomera’s famous plateau.

Rounding a bend, I saw an almond tree nestled against the rock face that I’d meant to take a photo of on the way down. It was right next to a grassy pull-off, which made things easy. Instead of slamming on the brakes to pull in, I slowed down and started to back in. In front of me was level grass and behind me was level grass, but suddenly, my back wheel dropped off quite a bit more than I’d been expecting it to. I shifted into drive and tried to pull back out and correct, but my back tires just spun and I felt the car tilt to an angle I was NOT comfortable with. I put it into park and got out to have a look. Sure enough, I had somehow completely missed the fact that there was a ~7-foot deep culvert dug in between the two flat grassy sections, and my back tire was just a couple of inches away from dropping in completely and leaving my little (rental!) Smart Car nose up in a gulley. Panic set in pretty quickly from there, as I was scared to even touch the car for fear I’d push it in. But before I could even come up with a plan, I saw headlights coming towards me. Considering I hadn’t seen another driver in roughly an hour, I felt pretty lucky. I sheepishly flagged down the driver in his big, green all-terrain car. He slowed to a stop and gave me a look I’m quite familiar with: local sizing up stranger in need. I’ve received the look many times and have also given it back home in middle-of-nowhere Ohio. The crease between his brow smoothed a bit when I started speaking in Spanish, and he gave a low whistle when I pointed to the precarious position of my back tire. But he pulled over, got out, and started thinking. He was a large, bearded man who would make a convincing Gomeran Santa Claus, with several buttons of his shirt undone at the top and bottom. He stood behind the little car and pushed as I pressed the gas, to absolutely no avail. Several times. Oh NO. My wave of panic crested again as he started punch numbers on his flip phone to find someone to come tow the car. As he put the phone to his ear, another car rounded the bend, and he flagged that driver down. They clearly knew each other, judging by the way they started barking back and forth in the pure Canarian pueblo Spanish that still lies just outside my comprehension. New Guy took a look, kicked a big rock out from under the problem wheel, and positioned himself on the side of the car while Gomeran Santa took the back again. Three, two, one… And I was out!! I threw the car into park, pulled the E-brake for good measure, and jumped out to give them both a huge hug. They laughed and gave me a good dad-like warning to be CAREFUL, and sent me on my way. I drove off into the twilight, shaking my head at the whole encounter and how much I love this island. And how much the island seems to love me.

The rest of my weekend with the car was rather uneventful in comparison, and just involved more beautiful scenery and a lot of me enjoying my own company. After a brief attempt to describe it, I realized that the main soundtrack—my inner monologue—is really not that interesting nor coherent, so instead I’ll leave you with some photos. My darling friend Katie from Galicia emboldened me by telling me she loves the photos on my blog (which are taken on an iPhone but are VERY carefully curated!!!), so I’ll let them speak for themselves.

As the day came to a close, that Gomeran angel I was talking about (one of many, now that I think about it) finally got off work and joined me for the sunset at my favorite overlook. It was the kind of sunset that brought all my gratitude together and wrapped it up in a beautiful package. Lucky me.

PS: Gomeran Angel número uno, if you ever step up your English reading comprehension and start reading my blog, sorry I didn't tell you about the car mishap! My pride got in the way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Mi casa es su casa

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:36:00 +0000

In order to inaugurate my return to blogging about nice, happy adventures and not... um... existential crises, I thought I'd write up a summary of my family's visit to La Gomera last month. My mom might want to throttle me for beating her to the blog punch on this one, as she's been plugging away, writing about our time in Extremadura and building up to the island arrival. Don't get me wrong, Extremadura was fantastic, but the true gem of the trip for me was bringing my loved ones back to the place I've called home now for almost a year and a half. Sorry, Ma, but you told me to write today! Readers of both blogs, consider this a spoiler alert if you'd prefer to see my mom's take first.

As I just said, Extremadura was wonderful. We ate and explored and laughed and birded and had an excellent time--the only hitch was that we did all of that under almost exclusively cloudy, blustery skies. As I had never been to that part of the peninsula and have essentially no experience with winter on the Iberian peninsula, I didn't know quite what to expect, but I packed all my coats and gritted my teeth for the cold. In reality, it was never really colder than 50°F, but it chilled us to the bone. And my poor Ohioans arrived expecting at least a little relief from the grey flannel skies that blanket our river valley in winter... Think again! I kept reminding them that sunshine awaited us in just a few days, and that hey, doesn't that [castle/cathedral/rock outcrop/etc] look way cooler and more foreboding against a grey sky anyway?

As soon as we landed on La Gomera on the 23rd in the buttery evening sunshine, the sweaters were off. This shot still makes happiness bubble up in my throat like seltzer.

We grabbed our rental car and set out on the hour-long drive home from the airport valley to my valley, just 8 miles as the crow flies but a whole lot more as the ribbon of road falls over the cliffs. I pulled over at every single overlook so we could get an eyeful of the sun setting over the mar de nubes (sea of clouds). And of course, we couldn't miss El Teide glowing pink and blue in the fading light. Isn't this a great photo of my dude?

When we finally reached my apartment, we ran inside to meet the (in)famous Aráfo. He was (as always) a really enthusiastic and loving bull in a china shop, and they loved him right away. Sweet Oscar and his mom had set up a Christmas tree, and he made us all a giant tortilla española for dinner, accompanied by a salad made with lettuce we grew on our balcony.

The next day, I woke up so excited for my family to see everything in the sunlight. It's a bit disorienting to arrive in Valle Gran Rey in the dark, as you have no idea that there are enormous cliffs towering over the town. If there's no moon, there's just a point in the sky where the stars stop, but you have to wait until morning to see what's blocking them.

Our first stop was Oscar's plot of land, lovingly referred to as "our terrain", because the word is terreno in Spanish and terrain was way easier for him to learn in English. He's poured so much work into it, and took great pride in showing my green-thumbed mom his corn, potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers, papayas, and more. Being Julie Zickefoose, she immediately took to weeding.

After a few hours in the sun, we walked back down into town for a little tour of the neighborhood. The first person we ran into was Tete, the mysterious one-legged man who rides his scooter several miles down the valley every day to sell lottery tickets, advertising by yelling "LA SUERTE" as he cruises through the streets. No one really knows his real name, but he calls everyone Tete and everyone calls him Tete. I was sort of scared of him at first, as one of my first days on the island I came out of the grocery store to find him yelling something at me in a language I couldn't recognize. Months later, I told Oscar about this, and he told me that Tete tries to get tourists to buy lottery tickets by yelling in what he thinks is German. Apparently the Germans can't even understand it. Anyway, Tete had been donning a Santa suit for the past few days to spread Christmas cheer, with the catch that anyone who wanted a photo had to pay him. When he spotted us, however, he told us we could take a photo with him for free. You can see the pure shock and joy on my face at this encounter. It was only amplified when a tourist tried to piggyback on our free deal, and Tete told him it wasn't free for him and that he'd have to pony up two euros. He obliged.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with sunshine battery recharging and wading in tide pools. Once the sun went down, we slowly got ready for Christmas Eve dinner, cooked entirely by Oscar's mom Vicky. The only thing she did not make herself was the traditional Christmas pan de jamón, which is like a giant, lightly sweet calzone with ham, cheese, raisins, and olives. That puppy was made by the mom of Oscar's good friend in their family bakery down the street.

Worlds colliding! Moms colliding! Even little brothers colliding!

The next day--Christmas Day--we got off to a slow and steady start, deciding to spend the morning making cookies. At my request, my mom brought a bottle of almond extract across the Atlantic, and we put it to good use with our friend Lucy's almond-frosted sugar cookie recipe. We hadn't made Christmas cookies since I was a tiny girl with my grandmother Ida, but starting a new tradition felt right.

After the last batch of cookies was out of the oven, we decided to drive up the mountain to get the lay of the land. Somehow I managed to take no photos of that excursion, because there was an ugly, heavy calima haze in the air and the control freak in me was really mad about it. How dare the Saharan dust cloud these vistas for my family? My jaw was clenched all day until we descended back into town just in time to witness one of the most spectacular sunsets I've ever seen. Typically, calima dulls the colors down to steely blues and watery yellows, blotting out the sun's rays so it's just a ball sinking over the horizon. But we were in for a Christmas miracle.

The colors were vibrant and spreading all over the sky and water, growing more intense every moment we sat in awe.

The day didn't feel much like Christmas, but I was more than fine with that. I had everything I needed and more.

⁂

A day or two passed before I felt ready to face the bitter disappointment of calima blotting out our beautiful mountain vistas again. But one morning, I woke up and peeked through the blind to see the view of the cliff across town wasn't as hazy as it had been. My heart leapt and I piled everyone in the car to go see my favorite overlook.

As much as I love this place, I'd been avoiding it during our whole trip because I refused to let my family see it in such "bad" weather. If calima persisted the whole week, well, I'd hold out until the very last evening for a chance to see it in all its glory. But luckily we didn't have to wait that long.

We took a little hike I'd done a few times, which starts at the overlook deck and follows the cliffside before eventually plunging down to the tiny town at the bottom of the valley. We wouldn't go that far, but we would find caves and rockface flora and a million beautiful views.

Eventually we tore ourselves away from the cliffside and overlook and drove into the laurisilva, which is the special Canarias laurel forest. All islands from Gran Canaria west have patches or swaths of it, but La Gomera's is perhaps the most celebrated. It's incredibly beautiful but extremely hard to photograph, because nothing accurately captures the way the light filters through the twisted branches, or how the total silence brings everything into sharper focus.

I had a spot in mind for lunch, but it was on the other side of the island. No problem! We wound our way through the laurisilva and eventually popped out on another ridgetop, this time facing Tenerife. I had never been to this area in weather that was not foggy, windy, and drizzly, so I was just as blown away by the blue sky vistas as the newcomers. We also happened to whiz by a fig tree that STILL HAD FIGS, prompting me to slam on the brakes and pull a U-turn. I'd talked so much about fresh figs that it really hurt for my mom and Liam to miss fig season, but we got our redemption. I pulled the branch in with a stick and my mom held Liam's arm as he leaned out over a precipice to grab the one reachable fig. It was so worth it. I would post a picture of the victory, but our fig faces aren't exactly blog-ready. So here's a cool plant.

We visited and ate at the Mirador de Abrante, which is glass-walled restaurant sitting on the edge of a cliff overlooking Agulo, one of the island's most picturesque towns. We were lucky enough to catch a silbo (whistling language) demonstration being put on for a tourist group, which blew everyone away. After lunch, we stepped out onto the martian landscape for some photos.

you know we had to do it to em

the queen prancing!!

After we'd gotten our fill of the reds and the blues (although who could ever really get their fill of that?), we rode the hairpin turns down the mountain to Agulo, which ended up being a favorite stop of the trip for those of us more botanically inclined. Because Agulo is on the northern side of the island, it gets way more precipitation than Valle Gran Rey, and the vegetation--both planted and naturally occurring--is lush. There also seems to be a generally more discerning eye for aesthetics.

Roughly 20 minutes were spent looking at this!!

The sun sank behind the cliff and we hit the road to go home. That night, thanks to Spain's drinking age, Liam and I got to go to a bar together for the first time! We ordered fruity drinks and Oscar got a Heineken, the smell of which reminds me so much of my dad. We played a couple of rounds of darts in his honor, and Liam managed to win both times, pouring water all over the heated rivalry Oscar and I have going.

Before we knew it, it was the last day of the trip. We decided to stick around town to let our road-weary travelers rest before their marathon journey home. There was lots of loving on Aráfo...

...A somehow entirely fruitless (but beautiful nonetheless) whale-watching excursion...

...And one last big family meal.

The next morning, we got up early to get them to the airport for their flight out on the little propeller plane that services the island twice per day. Of course I was sad to say goodbye, but something in me just felt so complete. I accidentally missed my bus while watching them walk through security, but in typical Gomeran fashion, my friend who works at the rental car agency drove me down the mountain to catch the catamaran back to Valle Gran Rey.

This is my home. And now they've seen it.

2019 Holiday Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Tue, 21 Jan 2020 23:02:00 +0000

Recently, as I was taking my daily mental stroll through my thoughts in search of inspiration to write, it occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea to write a holiday letter on my blog. So much happened in 2019 that picking one thread to follow is extremely difficult, as many are woven into deeper fabrics that I just don't have the strength to put into words yet. Or maybe ever. And as I've noted before, writing about the mundane feels like a betrayal of these bigger experiences that take up much more room in my head. So a holiday letter feels like a nice compromise--I'm tasked with recounting the year but must do so with brevity, coherence, and chronological order. I was inspired by my grand aunt Toot, 89, who sent me a Christmas letter right on time last month. Of course, I started in on this and then had to turn my computer in for a 3-week long keyboard replacement (island time), so please excuse my belated reflections in a moment when everyone has shifted back to looking forward.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), I began writing this letter exactly one year from the day my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It's been a full year since I've known a world without that pain. I'm sad of course, but also strangely relieved that I've managed to survive the first year. Of course I'll have to start preparing for the anniversary landmines, but I hope and believe I'm correct in thinking that things will continue to get a bit easier rather than harder. I really have noticed change for the better recently--my bouts of sadness are shorter and the time between them is longer. When I first got back to Spain and settled in, I was an emotional werewolf, transforming every two to three weeks for at least a few days. Poor Oscar bore the brunt of it and lived to tell the tale.

January 2019 started with me at home, making an unplanned visit to see my family. At the moment the clock struck midnight, I had my arm around my dad as we swayed and listened to Auld Lang Syne playing from the television. It felt kind of like staring down a really long, dark tunnel and knowing that you had to start walking through it. I made no resolutions.

After the first week of the year had passed, I flew back to Spain. It was not what I thought I would do, and it was actually not my decision, but my parents insisted I go back. I had a life on the island: an apartment, a job, loved ones, and happiness. Staying home would have afforded me more time with my dad, but there would have been a cost. I really can't say what my mental state would have been if I had stayed in the cold, gray Mid-Ohio Valley indefinitely, awaiting the bitter end. Instead, I returned to sunshine and my students, and lived relatively happily (all things considered) in that bubble for a couple of months. I went for a lot of walks as I let my ankle heal from a bad November sprain. Oscar started bringing me a fresh papaya/orange/ginger juice at school every day. We woke up at 4:30 one morning and climbed the stairs to my roof to see a blood moon.

In February, I slowly started running again. I eased back in with just minute-long intervals, and very gradually worked my way up to 10 and 15 minutes at a time. Exercise combined with lengthening days helped me quite a bit. I also got to visit the peninsula for Fulbright's mid-year seminar, which was held in Valencia. The trip was 5 days of paella, wine, cool art and architecture, and connection with other Americans (something I hadn't realized I missed so much).

Madrid's Parque El Retiro

L'Albufera, Valencia

Las Fallas exhibit

March is perhaps the blurriest month of them all, and seemed like an entire year on its own. It started with a visit from my dear intrepid Elizabeth, which happened to coincide with Carnaval in Tenerife (the second largest Carnaval celebration in the world!).

Unfortunately, at the end of her visit, bad news from home got worse, and once again, I found myself booking last-minute tickets to Ohio. I was disconsolate for many reasons, but especially because Oscar and I had just bought tickets home for June, when we thought he'd get to meet my dad. On the day before my departure, we were eating breakfast when I asked him if there was any chance at all that he could find coverage for his business and come home with me for a week. He paused for a second, and then said "¿por qué no?" The next thing I knew, we were on our way, following the sunset across the Atlantic. I can't possibly describe how much it helped me to have him there by my side, whether I was using him as a pillow or just feeling the comfort of his presence. And best of all, when Oscar walked through the door, it was a total surprise for my dad, who thought he'd never get to meet him. Their meeting will forever be one of the most heart-bursting moments of my life.

The heartbreak of the goodbye at the end of that visit isn't something I'd wish on my worst enemy, but we survived it. A week later, my dad left the Earth.

⁂

To be honest, I really don't remember much of April or May. I think I was numb for quite a bit of that span, although a major bright spot was a solo trip I took to Toledo, Spain during Semana Santa (Holy Week). I spent four days wandering through the streets, smelling lilacs, eating marzipan, and revelling in how every corner I turned afforded me another beautiful eyeful. No bad angle in that city.

Near the end of the month, my dear friend and Bowdoin/Fulbright comrade Lillian came to visit from Madrid. We rented a car so she (and I!) could see more of the island, and had a blast.

Why yes, we are holding a Fulbright bandana at this scenic overlook!!

Unfortunately, life delivered another wallop on the last day of her visit, when I found out my grandmother Elsa had passed away in a house fire, exactly two months to the hour after my dad took his leave. The sense of loss I felt and continue to feel is tremendous. Not only did I lose my loving, supportive grandmother, but also the entire house in which I spent a large chunk of my youth. I'm still very puzzled by the cruelty of it all. I guess I thought I'd earned immunity for a while, but that's just not how life works.

⁂

June marched right through the door and there was little I could do to stop it. I ended my Fulbright year by planning for another, as I found out I was to be the mentor for the Canarias contingent the next year. I got to know this group of superhumans who would be working with me from across the country, and felt so thankful to have another year ahead of me.

Mid-month, I packed up all of my things, dropped them off in a new apartment, and flew home once again with Oscar for that June trip we'd been planning. We stopped one night in Lisbon before the transatlantic leg, and then headed straight from Boston to Maine so that I could show him a little more of where I came from.

The cheapest flight I'd found back home was actually from Portland, ME to Pittsburgh, which thrilled me beyond belief because it meant I could take Oscar to his first baseball game!! It felt like the perfect way to honor my dad. Our dear friend at the Pirates, Greg Brown, made sure it was an extra-special visit, and I got to meet the announcers I've been listening to on the radio my whole life. More heart-bursting moments.

After all that excitement, summer at home was a dream filled with flowers, birds, our new dog Curtis, and my mom's cooking. I spent much of it working on materials for our Fulbright Orientation, bursting out of the house around 5 to hit the country roads on my bike. There's really no place I feel more at peace than under Appalachian summer skies.

Photo by the wonderful Amy Parrish

Toward the end of summer, Liam and I took a fantastic sibling's trip to Chicago, where we ate all the foods we'd always admired from afar (deep-dish pizza, bubble tea, authentic ramen, authentic tacos, etc) and laughed a LOT. Here's hoping it was the first of many such trips!

Soon after that, I was invited to spend a week in Bermuda with Elizabeth and her family, which was such a wonderful and relaxing experience. It was fun to visit a totally different kind of island, and even better to reconnect with my best friend out from underneath the shadow that had been with me in March.

After a quick turnaround, I was back in Spain again and ready to take on the year. I met all of my wonderful grantees at Orientation, and just loved being the person that got to introduce them to the region and job through conversations and presentations.

Equipazo canario!!

Once I was back on La Gomera, I settled into my new home with Oscar and his American Staffordshire Terrier, Aráfo. I have to admit, I was pretty apprehensive about living with Aráfo. I was used to dogs of a more delicate size, and was worried I wouldn't even be able to walk him. But my mom armed me with a good harness, and Aráfo worked the magic that all dogs have, and now we're the best of friends. It helps me SO much to have a dog around that I'm fairly certain I'll never live without one again.

Celebrating 1 year in October!

Since then, I've just been living my life, which (aside from the island location) is remarkably normal. I wake up, go to work, come home, cook, clean, exercise, and fall asleep in the middle of movies. Sometimes I forget I'm 23. It feels like I've lived a lot more life than that, and that I should really be something more like 35. But hey, sometimes I escape the island and travel a bit. This fall, I finally ventured north of Madrid to Asturias and Barcelona. Each trip deserves its own write up, but there's already a subpar Toledo post rotting in my drafts, so they may well remain in my 2019 memory box. That's okay. Fresh slate.

My Asturian mentor counterpart and all-around shining star Carinna!!

La Sagrada Familia

⁂

It sounds weird to say, but if I had to hand out superlatives, 2019 wouldn't win Worst Year Of My Life. Certainly Hardest Year Of My Life, but not Worst. Too much good happened in between the awful that it somehow tipped the scales. Living in the moment was the key (and still is), as any step outside of that took me somewhere I probably didn't want to be and robbed me of the joy I desperately needed to embrace. Does that mean I'm still clueless about my future? Yep. But did I survive 2019 and come out far more intact than I should have? Yes. And that's what is really important to me now and moving forward.

So this is my attempt to wipe my mental slate clean by acknowledging (however briefly) the major events of the last year. We'll see if it works to clear this long-standing writer's block and helps me return to the present moment. I'm hopeful it will. Regardless, if you're reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

Love,

Phoebe

Saturdays in Arure

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 15:20:00 +0000

*decides to restart blog* *writes and uploads post* *promptly stops any blog-related activity for almost two months*

Woof. Yeah, it's been a while. Coming back to the island and re-settling into the culture, work environment, and daily routine has consumed my time and energy, leaving me with a lot of thoughts and not much time to sit down and write them out. This also happened to me last year as a new arrival, of course, but a key difference was that I was seeing it all with new eyes and felt much more of a call to record it in some formal manner. I also had lived a lot less life at that point, and didn't have the feeling that writing casually was somehow betraying all of the deeper things that deserve to be brought to the light, too. Literally every time I've tried to start a post, I write one mega-paragraph about the swirling cocktail of emotions and thoughts in my head and why it's so damn hard for me to write about them, and then I get tired and/or distracted, and step away for long enough that the cycle begins again.

So I am CUTTING myself OFF here, and forcing myself to write about something inane and beautiful!

A couple of weeks ago, fueled by boredom and a touch of claustrophobia, I decided I'd hop on the guagua (bus) to visit Arure, the town at the top of the valley. It's a 15-20 minute ride up, which is about all I can stomach these days. After one too many 1.5 hour bus rides to the capital last year, I've decided I'm no longer willing to put myself through the hairpin turns and mountain switchbacks unless absolutely necessary. Now I wake up earlier and spend the extra euros for a boat ticket, and save myself the nausea. Worth it.

(taken while extremely nauseated)

I came to know Arure last year in October when my dear Fulbright/soul friend Sarah came to visit from Tenerife. I was already wary of the bus, and didn't want to put us through a long ride prior to a hike, but definitely wanted to show her the incredibly varied landscape of the island, and what it looked like from atop the cliffs that tower over my town. So we braided our hair, hopped on the bus, and got off with no plans other than to eat at a restaurant known for its comida típica.

This was really only my third time venturing into the "interior" of the island, and my first time visiting a pueblo, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. When we stepped off the bus, we were taken aback by the silence, which was punctuated only by goat bells and the occasional raven calling.

As we walked up the narrow street, Sarah spotted a tree loaded with ripe figs, and we stared at it longingly, wondering how we could get a taste. We must have looked pretty desperate, because an old woman appeared on the rooftop across the street, and yelled "¡¡CÓJANLOS, CÓJANLOS!!" ("Take them! Take them!"). She motioned for us to climb the stairs next to the tree for better access, and we began picking. I had never had a real fig before (yep, just Fig Newtons), so I had no idea what I was in for. But the minute I tasted my first, I almost cried. They are so delicious! We loaded our stomachs and then our backpacks, and as we picked, a parade of goats ran down the street below us, bells clanging. To this day, I think it was one of my favorite moments of the grant year.

With what little room we had left in our stomachs, we ate a delicious cheese-heavy meal, and continued wandering around.

At the edge of town, we had spotted something that looked like a bridge, and wanted to investigate. On our way over, we saw signs for a mirador (lookout point/vista), and started half-running out of excitement. Turns out the bridge was just an aqueduct, but as we crossed under it and looked ahead, we both teared up as the view took the breath from our lungs.

Most lookout points are beautiful, sure, but I swear on my life I've never seen one as incredible as this. On the left, a sharp razorback cliff juts forward, mirrored by a slightly softer cliff on the right. Between the two is a green valley which holds the town of Taguluche. The buildings of Taguluche are just sprinkled down the valley, surrounded by palm groves and a road that looks like a fallen ribbon. At the bottom, the ocean crashes dramatically against the basalt cliffs, leaving stains of white foam on the deep blue water. On the horizon, puffy white clouds buffer the dark blue masses of La Gomera's neighbors La Palma and El Hierro. The air smells of sweet juniper, and sound of goat bells is accompanied by kestrels calling and the distant roar of the ocean. As if it didn't already have my heart, Arure took it and ran.

So, in my second year on La Gomera, I've resolved to get up here a lot more frequently. October is prime time because the weather is still sure to be good (in "winter" it can be very blustery and even cold and rainy), and the figs are ripe for the picking. On my first trip up this year, I snagged a couple from trees in town, but felt weird doing it without the permission of a benevolent abuela, even though all of the trees are loaded down and the ripe fruits are bursting open and falling to the ground because no locals eat them. So I focused my energy on taking a hike up into the laurel forest, which marks the beginning of Parque Nacional Garajonay. When my best friend Elizabeth came to visit back in March, we took a similar route and had an excellent time until I received very bad news about my dad's outlook, at which point everything came crashing down. I'll be honest: taking this route again brought back a lot of traumatic memories, but it felt good to retrace the beautiful trail in a stable frame of mind. It just feels so good to get into green woods from time to time--as much as the ocean calls me, the woods are really where I feel most at home.

Mysterious berries--if you know what these are PLEASE TELL ME

After a couple hours of hiking through the silent, misty, decently spooky forest, I popped out into the sun and decided to take a side road back into town. It was, of course, gorgeous and peaceful, and gave me some awesome vistas that reminded me a bit of North Dakota (but with, ya know, the ocean).

As I was strolling along, a sweet smell flooded my nose, and I whirled around. A FIG TREE! In the middle of nowhere! Oh baby, this was the jackpot!! Unfortunately, most of the figs were still little and green, but I found a few ripe ones and memorized the location for my return.

So, of course, yesterday I found myself in Arure again, having given my precious fruits two weeks to ripen. I went up with two goals: to eat figs and to find a shady place where I could finally write. As soon as I stepped off the bus, I made tracks for the tree in town across from the nice lady's house. I lingered for a few minutes and stared longingly, but alas, she did not appear to bless me. Well, that's okay! I practically ran up the hill to the side road, and as I was on my way to my oasis tree, I caught the scent of another more hedge-like tree that had somehow evaded detection last time. So I pulled on my fig-picking pants and filled a container with them, then did the same just a few hundred meters up the road at the original tree. I could not possibly describe how good they taste, especially when eaten in the blue-sky sunshine and sweet breeze. Just imagine the best thing you've ever tasted, but better.

After a very successful harvest, I slowly made my way back down to the mirador for a final sensory indulgence. I took one of those paths across the landscape that is clearly not meant to be a path, but where enough people have uncertainly made their way in the same direction that it kind of is a path. I scared up a bunch of common quail and watched kestrels and ravens glide overhead as the town sprawled out below me. I finally made it to the overlook and found a shady corner where I wrote undisturbed for an hour. These days feel like a balm, like exactly what I've been needing. I can't wait to have more.

Riddle me this, riddle me that. Watch out girls, the blog is back!

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 07:43:00 +0000

Well, what do you know? Here I am, one year after the creation of this blog, blowing the dust off the URL. I’m sitting in a window seat with no one next to me on my flight back over to Europe, feeling much calmer and more comfortable than the 2018 version of myself ever did. I’ve found a favorite long-haul airline (TAP Air Portugal!!), I know exactly how to get where I’m going, and I’m doing the trip in about half the time it originally took me. There’s a pink and purple sunset outside my window, and the girl sitting behind me finally finished her bag of cheese puffs. Life is good.

After losing my dad and grandma in terrible ways within the span of two months, my world narrowed to a pinpoint. Going to work and taking care of my basic needs felt like enough to consume every last bit of my time and energy, as so much was being expended in the background by grief and processing. The only people I could bring myself to really talk to were my mom, brother, and boyfriend. All of the rest of my thoughts and feelings stayed inside, weighing me down like sandbags. I stopped writing altogether, preferring instead to consume media that didn’t pertain to any aspect of my life. Escapism.

Although it sounds really sad, and it was, I didn’t fall into a seven-month bout of depression like book characters do after they lose a loved one. There were still good moments and I still felt some happiness. I think one of the biggest misconceptions I had about grief is that it absolutely consumes you. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely can in spurts—but beyond that, it’s just not that constant. Life isn’t painted exclusively in bright colors before a loss and only in dark colors after. So one tip I’d give you if you’re interacting with someone who’s grieving: don’t project your preconceived sad narrative onto them. Sensitivity is nice, but pity… not so much.

This summer really helped me. I mean it really helped me. I was back in my nest at home in Ohio, and my mom did everything in her power to ensure I felt loved and safe and comforted. She cooked my favorite meals, planted and nurtured my favorite garden flowers, and even welcomed this wild, smelly dog into our family just so I’d have a friend. (okay, that's not really why, but sometimes it feels like it)

I got to relax and regroup, I went to therapy, and I also went on a lot of adventures in places like West Virginia, Bermuda, and Chicago. Hiking, kayaking, swimming, zip lining, snorkeling, cliff jumping, spelunking, deep dishing, jet skiing, and white water rafting, just to name a few.

And now, I'm returning to my beloved Canary Island for another year, now with a recharged battery, a sense of purpose, and someone there to leave the light on for me. Funny how things can change in a year.

This year, I'm the Culture & Pedagogy Mentor for the 32 new grantees coming to Canarias for Fulbright's second year in the archipelago. I've spent much of the summer researching this wonderful place to put together an all-purpose regional guide for Fulbright, and hope to ground truth my findings by visiting each one this year. I've been really trying to avoid sounding like a nerdy camp counselor, but I'm just so excited for this new cohort to arrive in their new island digs, and hope they end up loving it as much as I do. I have a feeling it won't be too difficult!

Onward.

The Other Side

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 20:53:00 +0000

Well, folks… We’ve arrived. Four and a half months ago, when my dad got one of the worst cancer diagnoses out there, I tried to imagine this moment: life post-death. I had a few misconceptions: one, I didn’t think it would arrive so quickly. Two, I focused too much on the death part and forgot that life goes on. But bad news turned worse, worser, and worst, until finally even the bad news was more forgiving than the actual progression of events. It was kind of like the classic cartoon montage of a character first falling through an attic floor, then through the next floor, and then unexpectedly through 10 more floors. I’ve been using this metaphor for months now, and it’s still the most accurate one I can find to describe how it feels to have a loved one with terminal cancer.

And now we’re here in the cartoon basement, which is terrible because it’s sad and scary and lonely, but slightly comforting in an odd way because at least you know you can’t fall any further. A week and a half has passed since my dad shed his meat suit (his words, not mine), and I still don’t know how to picture a world without him in it. To me, it feels like Bill Thompson III the public figure has died—not my dad. Reading the flood of tributes online, I feel somewhat detached. They don’t really make me cry like you might expect. I guess it’s because they’re mourning just a part of the person I knew. Even my sweet mama accidentally fell into this trap—when she sent me the draft obituary full of his accomplishments to look over, I felt I had to add a paragraph about how much he loved things like the Pirates and grilling. These were the somewhat less spectacular but nonetheless wonderful things that rounded out who my dad was.

My dad was a visionary. That man had so many ideas it made my head spin. If you were anywhere close to him, you were destined to get caught up in his creative tornado at some point. Many people are aware of his brainchildren such as the podcast This Birding Life, as well as various Bird Watcher’s Digest events and associated acts. But many never knew he had dreams of installing a pond on our dry ridge top to round out the bird checklists with some waterfowl. He was always planning something, whether it be a music party, a birding outing, or what to grill for dinner. Every weekend we were all home together, he cajoled Liam and me into some grand project like cutting up a felled tree, building a sweat lodge, or going deep into the woods to cook burgers and beans over a hot fire. From an astrological perspective, he was a sensitive Pisces dreamer with an Aquarius persistence, intellect, and worldview—a powerful combination.

The man knew how to have fun. And he chased it constantly. Obviously, music and birding were two major outlets, but he also loved playing just about any sport or game. Liam and I spent so many endless summer evenings with him in the yard, rotating between whiffle ball, frisbee, basketball, bocce, and more, as swallows chattered on the telephone wire and my mom tried not to get hit. In winter, he was always game to go sledding, and GOD help you if you became his target in a snowball fight. He was also amazing at darts and was the NYC Metro League champion one year, a legacy I am now trying to live up to in the bars on La Gomera. Sometimes we’d go outside with one of his rifles and practice our aim on some old fruit, beer cans, or a stale gingerbread house (you know, Ohio things). There was always a Heineken nearby.

Travel. Boy, did he love to travel. I think passing along his ability to get up and go and make friends anywhere in the world is one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me. He sparked my wonder by bringing back “surprises” from any trip he went on—beautiful handcrafted earrings, unique toys, fun candies. As I started to venture out into the world little by little, he equipped me with everything I could possibly need, from outlet converters to binoculars. Before I left, he always assured me that if I ever needed him, he would jump right on a plane, and send one of his countless birding friends to help me out in the meantime. Anywhere I told him I was going, he presented me with the contacts of multiple people who would care for me as their own. He’d developed this network effortlessly, just by being himself and genuinely engaging wherever he went. As I prepared last August for my biggest journey yet, he was there with me throughout my panic about moving to a tiny island, and (correctly) assured me it would be absolutely amazing as he expertly packed my suitcase. Any possible problem had a solution when my dad was there.

The Pirates. This wouldn’t be a proper impromptu eulogy if I didn’t mention this man’s undying love for his hard-luck team. I signed on as a fan when I was 12 or 13, much to his delight. He was convinced it all started back in the mid-90’s when he’d give me my bottle and rock me to sleep on his chest while the Bucs played in the background. Together, we watched the Pirates finally break their 19-year losing streak in a manner not unlike watching a baby giraffe struggle to take its first steps. We had the highest highs—chanting while floating back across the Clemente Bridge after an amazing win—and some really low lows, like when the Bucs slid from playoff contenders to basement dwellers in a couple of consecutive Augusts. Now, when I watch or listen to baseball, I know exactly what my dad would be saying (or rather, yelling): “THAT WAS A HANGING CURVEBALL!” “C’MON!” “How could you swing at that?!” “I could be a commentator.” “LAROCHE, YOU BUM!!!!!” At the last Pirates game we attended together, he managed to do something of which he’d always dreamt: he caught a home run ball on the fly. Made it on TV and got a shoutout on multiple networks and everything. Unfortunately, it was tainted with Cardinal victory, but he was so triumphant it didn’t matter. As we walked out of the park, countless people congratulated him after seeing us on the jumbotron. At his request, I am now the proud owner of the ball.

I can’t say I planned to write something like this, but es lo que me salió. I miss my dad so much already, and will spend the rest of my life doing so, but I am so incredibly grateful for the 22+ years we spent together and the fact that we got a chance to actually say goodbye. That was the hardest and strangest thing I’ve ever done, but I know that so many people lose loved ones without ever getting the closure of thanking them and hugging them one last time. His life was far too short to live out all his dreams and execute all his plans, but then again, 100 years more still wouldn’t have been enough.

I’ll leave you with some of his typical wisdom that became a mantra for me. He knew we shared the same tightly-wound and restless mind, and told me a version of this almost every time we spoke.

“Don’t fret. Almost every problem is a small one. Let them pass, confront them head on, just don’t let them consume you. Worry 80% less.”

Workin’ on it, Daddy.

La Calima

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 15:16:00 +0000

Contrary to popular belief, living in the Canary Islands isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Well, maybe 98% of the time it is, but certainly not 100%. One of the few less-than-ideal situations that plagues the archipelago from time to time is none other than la calima: a hot and dusty wind blowing from the Sahara directly to your front door. Close your windows and don't even THINK about putting your laundry out to dry unless you want it to end up plastered in dust and/or in the Atlantic.

Where I live, calima is a relatively infrequent visitor that stops by once every month or two just to remind everyone just how close we are to Africa. Here in Valle Gran Rey, it's about 250 miles. But the easternmost point of Canarias is closer to Africa than Cuba is to Florida. While calima is just a colega to me, it's a true [en]amiga of my friends on the eastern islands.

For most canarios, calima is just a minor annoyance. But I always get a little worked up thinking about our first encounter. I was flying back to the islands after Fulbright orientation in Madrid. I was exhausted, and was really looking forward to resting and settling down in such a beautiful setting. As we neared Tenerife, I glued myself to the window... but all I saw was haze. Uh oh... I had read about calima before leaving the States and was relatively prepared, but wasn't expecting her to be on my welcoming committee. Upon deplaning, I noticed my nose stuffed up immediately. This didn't bother me much until I drifted off to sleep in my sweet friend Nelli's apartment, and woke up in a panic 40 minutes later because I couldn't breathe. I looked out the windows and saw the neighboring buildings cloaked in haze. I then proceeded to have the closest thing I've (thankfully) ever experienced to an asthma attack, which was most likely just an anxiety attack with a stuffed up nose. I called my mom and dad and frantically texted my brother and best friend, and eventually calmed down enough to sleep again. But the grudge was fully in place.

ugh!!

Lately I've been trying to be more perceptive of colors. The past few days I've taken my journal along to watch the sunset, and attempt to put the flash-in-the-pan colors I see into words. One night I was writing about the glass blues and greens and pinks of backlit waves, and the next:

"Today everything is metallic and steely. Calima hides the vivid colors behind its dusty back, settling over the valley like a lethargic cat. I see mostly gray blues and blue grays, but directly in front me there's also a pearly almost-gold. It's like if you made beige shine. All the valley has this hue thanks to the haze. It sits atop the gunmetal of the waves like a glaze, dimpled by capillaries and interrupted by foam. The foam itself looks like white fabric that was accidentally put in the wash with a new pair of jeans; there's a subtle blue hue that just won't let go. The sun, meanwhile, hangs tired in the sky, ready for this blustery day-that-sort-of-wasn't to be done."

As I finish writing this post, calima has mostly blown away, and the bright blue sky is back. I'd love a cleansing rain to rinse off the thin layer of dust stuck to (literally) everything, but that's a pipe dream. For now, I'll just breathe freely and deeply.

_________________________________

I'm back on the island now and away from my family. But here's a beautiful personal update from my dad: https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/bt3updates

Hang On

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 03:25:00 +0000

Roughly two weeks ago, on Tuesday, December 18th, the world as I knew it flipped upside down. I was wrapping up my first semester teaching in Valle Gran Rey, and was preparing for a weeklong Christmas trip to Lisbon. I had been experiencing moderate anxiety for a couple of weeks leading up to that day, but had been unable to pinpoint a source or a trigger. I just woke up one day with that familiar pit in my stomach and couldn’t shake it. Normally, I can chalk it up to hormones or something in the stars, and it eases after a day or two. But this anxiety was different, and settled in my mind in a way I hadn’t experienced since my sophomore year of college. I wrote it off as homesickness and frustration with my ankle injury and tried to move on with my life. When my mom asked to call me that afternoon, I immediately shot down the thoughts in my head that something could be wrong, and told myself she just wanted to talk. After two weeks of anxiousness, I was mentally loaded for bear and was working hard on redirecting unhealthy thought patterns. But just seconds into the phone call, my unexplained uneasiness suddenly had root. My dad had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer.

Thinking back, I’ve never had such a clear turning point in my life. Basically all prior change has been pre-meditated. The events that rolled out after that phone call with my mom were anything but. In the following 24 hours, I canceled my Lisbon plans, booked flights home, alerted those close to me, packed a suitcase, cleaned out my fridge, pleaded for and (thankfully) retrieved a return authorization from the Spanish government office on the other side of the island. By the grace of some all-powerful entity, I found a transatlantic flight for just 350€, despite the fact that I was booking just two days in advance. The JFK-Ohio leg was nearly the same price. I spent 39 hours in transit, completely numb. I hadn’t been expecting a return to the United States until June, and much less one under these circumstances. I had also been planning on avoiding winter for a year, having lost my ironclad Maine cold tolerance completely. But shock and disorientation make for a fine coat.

I am home now. The days have been slow and gray, with little bright spots here and there. I am relieved to be in the arms of my family, taking in these precious moments with them in our little rural bubble. Nearly everything is different, but a few things remain unchanged. My brother is still making us laugh, my mom is still holding everyone together, and my dad is still first and foremost concerned for everyone else. I have to laugh when he asks me “What’s wrong?!” Of course, I am still the family’s emotional weak link.

Against my Gemini stellium nature, I’ve had little contact with the outside world—I can’t seem to muster the energy to maintain lengthy text conversations or even answer many messages at all. All of my processing has turned inward. Spiritually, I feel full of mud. I know that I have to seek a “new normal”, but it seems like such an immense effort right now that I’m not yet inspired enough to face. I’ll get there, though—I know people get through times like these by leaning heavily on their spirituality. I welcome any recommendations.

I know for certain I must recapture my sense of gratitude. It will come back to me as things settle down and the seemingly constant flow of bad news stems a bit. For now, I’d like to officially publish a list of the things I am thankful for in this moment.

My dad starts chemotherapy tomorrow. I know he will head into this battle with the same optimism and intensity he’s always carried inside. Though it’s going to be a tough road, we’re all relieved that tomorrow is the day we start fighting back.
We have an incredibly supportive network of friends. I always knew that my parents had a lot of connections because they’re nice people and great birdwatchers, but I never fully grasped the sheer number of amazing people who care about my family. Thank you.
I’m so lucky to have had the privilege to race all the way home to Ohio from a tiny rock halfway around the world. And though there’s no good timing for something like this, having it line up almost exactly with my Christmas break is incredibly fortunate.
The sun still rises every day, even if Ohio hides it behind gray flannel most of the time.
I am healthy.
Everything in our lives has rapidly been distilled into things that matter and things that don’t (there’s a great Rascal Flatts song about this). Problems and worries that once seemed insurmountable are now entirely irrelevant. Sprained ankles will heal. Money will come back. Happiness should come first whenever possible.
I have a sweet, thoughtful, and patient boyfriend who’s certainly gotten more than he bargained for when he invited la americana to watch the sunset back in October, but who has handled every twist with grace and understanding.
I also have a big family of wonderful coworkers waiting to welcome me back to Canarias. Thanks to them, I will leave one home and return to another.
My current anthem: Hang On by Guster.

Thank you for your time spent reading this journal-entry-turned-blogpost. I’ve been drafting it in my head for a week now to explain tone changes/delays in posting, but I realize it also helps me immensely to distill and transcribe my thoughts. I am grateful for this medium and hope to bring more joy here soon.

If you would like to keep up with my dad’s story, please visit https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/bt3updates.

Eating in Canarias, Part 2: Out on the Town

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 20:09:00 +0000

Bueno! Now that I’ve chronicled my adventures as a #home #chef (#homechef), it’s time for me to try to describe the experiences I’ve had dining in restaurants here on La Gomera. Though I transited through Tenerife, my experience on other islands is nil. However, this past weekend, I left La Gomera for the first time since early September to attend a meeting, and got to explore another chunk of basalt for a few days. I was very excited to go, but also felt like an octopus clinging to a rock with four tentacles. I was not entirely certain I wanted to leave!

In our pre-departure guidance and orientation, it was stressed over and over again that Spanish social culture revolves around food and drink. That we should never be afraid to apuntarse, AKA to join a group for coffee, dinner, or drinks. Of course, I’ve found this to be spot on, especially in this sleepy little town—time is spent with friends at cafés, restaurants, and bars. The typical American budgeting of only eating out once every week or two is totally incompatible here. Every Thursday evening, a group of at least 6 teachers goes out to eat and have a drink or two. This has been aptly dubbed juernes, which is the combination of jueves (Thursday) + viernes (Friday). Plans are always announced in the group chat, and everyone responds with either “me apunto” (I’m in) or “me quedo” (I’m staying home). I almost always apuntarme, and have kind of been throwing financial caution to the wind in favor of new experiences. I didn’t come to Spain to sit at home alone!

The typical dinner structure is as follows: Once everyone has arrived to the restaurant of choice (usually around 8:30 or 9 pm), one seasoned veteran orders for the table. They typically ask around prior to ordering, but people generally put their faith in this spokesperson and don’t even crack their menus. After ordering, we get bread and mojo to start. Mojo is a staple of Canarian cuisine, and typically comes in two different flavors: red and green. Mojo rojo is made from garlic, vinegar, and peppers, and usually has at least a little bit of a kick. Some restaurants have reputations for having very picante mojo rojo, and someone at the table always gives a warning if that’s the case. Mojo verde, on the other hand, is cilantro-based and mild. Though rojo comes close in some restaurants and has certain niches where it excels, I am a strong verde ally. Bowdoin people: this is a debate on par with that of Moulton versus Thorne.

Los dos mojos--image from spain.info/es

Though the food we order varies on location and attendees, we typically get one or two appetizer-ish dishes and two meat-based entrees. Dishes are placed strategically in the middle of tables, and everyone takes a small portion to try. I still have trouble with this when something is particularly delicious and I feel like I could easily eat the full plate myself (if not two), but I have come to appreciate the method for how many different things I’ve been able to try for the price of one meal. I also think it’s very interesting to watch people share food so regularly—in the US, there’s the classic “you HAVE to try a bite of this”, but that’s just one bite and then it’s back to your regularly scheduled eating. In Spain, I eyeball the dish, lock in on a target, serve myself an appropriate portion (making adjustments if I accidentally take too much), and only go back for more if I’m certain it would be fair. One thing that always makes me laugh is that it seems to be customary to leave one tiny portion on the group plate. I think it’s a symbol of politeness; a candle left in the window for anyone who might want more. But no one EVER eats it. It could be a single chunk of pork loin or steak, or one more spoonful of dessert. People gradually finish chewing, put their silverware down, and carry on conversation as the lone bite chills in the evening breeze (we always eat outside!). I have spent many an hour locked in a stare down with these sad remnants. I’m also apparently not very subtle—if there is significant food left over, it’s usually offered to me. My teacher friends have also learned to interpret my indirect American tap-dancing of “no, I’m good” to mean “yes, I will 100% eat the rest of that.” I feel so seen.

Without further ado, it’s time for some food description. To start, I’ll detail one of the most typically Canarian meals I’ve had. It blessed my life about a month and a half ago, when my fellow teacher and friend Mariola invited me to go up into the interior of the island with her, her daughter, and her daughter’s friend for a day. We went to La Laguna Grande, which is not actually a big lagoon but instead just an open expanse of grass with no trees. A lot of people go there to hold barbecues and picnics, but one of the main draws is the restaurant. I knew I was in for something good because Mariola is one of my favorite people to dine with—as a native Gomeran, she knows exactly what to order, and also always advocates for ordering more food for our dinner groups just to be safe.

Of course, we started off with bread and mojo, but soon after, I was introduced to one of the loves of my life: queso asado. Queso asado is basically a triangle of super fresh goat cheese that has been roasted/grilled to perfection, such that the exterior is browned and the whole thing is slightly smokey and really flavorful. It’s often topped with mojo or miel de palma (palm honey), which is a Canarias staple. Queso asado is typically just consumed straight up with a fork and knife, which always makes me feel like I’m getting away with something because Americans rarely consume large quantities of cheese without some sort of medium (fries, chips, crackers, etc). However, I’ve also had it in bites throughout a walnut and arugula salad dressed with miel de palma… Oh lord.

You could play Canary Islands bingo with this picture: queso asado, almogrote, mojo verde y rojo, and a gofio treat all in one!

Our next dish was one that I can confidently say was one of the more peculiar things I’ve consumed: chicharrones con gofio. You’ve heard of pork cracklings—now, imagine them hidden under mounds of floury roasted grains mixed with a little sugar. When each forkful enters your mouth, you’re first almost choked by the gofio, which is the consistency of powdered sugar. It’s slightly sweet with a wholesome grainy undertone, and dissolves quickly. You then feel the heat of the pork crackling (insulated by the topping), and taste the rich and savory flavor set off by the touch of sweetness from the gofio. Though I wasn’t entirely sure if I really liked it or not, I could not stop eating it. My current preference for consuming gofio is in a dessert mousse, but people here use it to top soups, mix into smoothies, and hold together terrines. It’s nearly impossible to imagine until you’ve tried it. I ate a gofio-based cookie the other day, and the closest flavor I could think of was really good cereal milk. Below is a video courtesy of my friend Gara, who toured a gofio factory today and recorded the entire process!

Chicharrones con gofio--image from La Abeja News

After drowning myself in pork fat and gofio, we moved on to the first main dish, which is rather universal but executed extremely well in Canarias: chicken breast in a mushroom sauce. Pechuga de pollo en salsa de champiñón. Oh man, do they know how to serve chicken here!! This is a staple at most restaurants, and it’s hard to go wrong ordering it. It typically comes with rice and some roasted/sauteéd vegetables, and always has potatoes on the side. You get your choice of fries or papas arrugadas, which is the typical Canarian preparation (wrinkled with salt). We usually opt for fries which we can drag through the remaining mushroom sauce, while arrugadas are best enjoyed with mojo or even almogrote (a pâté made from hard cheese, olive oil, peppers, and garlic).

A classic dinner plate--image from Pizzería da Luiggi on Tenerife

Following the chicken in quick succession was an enormous bowl of puchero, which is a traditional Canarian stew. The recipes seem to follow an “everything but the kitchen sink” policy, and every spoonful brought me something different. Chickpeas, pumpkin, squash, beef, chicken, pork, green beans, sweet and white potatoes, carrots, and more, with a corn cob to finish it all off. Everything was totally tender and harmonized perfectly. Since it was my first puchero, I was given the honor of eating the corn. One pot of this could probably feed me for a week! I want to attempt it soon, but I’m not sure I have a pot big enough.

Image from hiperdino.es

To finish off our meal, we ordered leche asada covered in miel de palma. This dessert is very similar to flan, but slightly less uniformly dense, which allows the miel de palma to infuse it all with sweetness. As I mentioned earlier, another popular dessert is mousse, which comes in many different flavors—gofio, passionfruit, chocolate, and mango. It’s always a nice, (texturally) light way to assuage my sweet tooth… And I love seeing it on English translation menus.

Image (and recipe!) at cookpad.com

tag yourself I'm cocolate Mouse

This post really ran away from me, but in the best kind of way. Of course, I’ve only described a portion of what I’ve experienced, and have so much more to tell! I am now being frequently fed by a Canarian mom, and let’s just say I reaaaaallllyyyyy need my ankle to heal so I can get back to running ASAP and counterbalance things a little bit.

¡Buen provecho!

Eating in Canarias, Part 1: Home Cookin’

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 17:09:00 +0000

Happy Friday! I am sitting on the roof of my apartment building, listening to waves crashing against the shore as my laundry spins in the washing machine. I spend a lot of time up here, taking my time arranging my clothes on the drying racks while scanning the water for dolphins. On normal laundry days, I’m zipping up and down the four flights of stairs to do other chores between cycles, but today, I’ve been forcibly sidelined by a sprained ankle. So I hauled my laptop up to the roof and am here to write about what really matters: Canarian food.

the view from up top

When I found out I’d be in Canarias, one of my first Google searches was, of course, “Canary Islands cuisine”. I was initially a little sad that the famed Spanish tapas didn’t seem to have a strong presence in the islands, but was very quickly appeased by the mention of cheese, fresh avocados, papayas, and cilantro, as well as the incorporation of almond (one of my all-time favorite flavors) in many desserts. It was still hard to get a grasp on platos típicos and general themes, however, as every website said something different and many descriptions were written by tourists and highly subjective. The one thing everyone mentioned but failed to really describe was something called gofio. Every so often in my ocean of pre-departure panic, “what if I don’t make any friends?!” and “do I actually know how to speak Spanish?” would be replaced by “What the hell is gofio?” (to be explained in future post)

Bananas are also everywhere!

Before leaving the States, I remember having a conversation with my best friend Elizabeth about cooking for myself in a foreign country and the kinds of things I thought I’d eat. I wondered aloud about whether or not I’d gain weight. “Oh, I bet you’ll lose weight”, she said. I agreed, picturing myself wandering around in the sand hungry and barefoot, fueled exclusively by fruit. How wrong I was!! The food I have eaten since arriving on La Gomera is some of the best I’ve ever had. When I video chat with my mom, she often says “you look like a cream-fed cat!” Well, I feel like one, too. I’ve had so many satisfying meals, both in restaurants and in my very own kitchen. In this first food post, I’ll talk about how my home cooking has translated over here, and in the next, I’ll dive into what other people have fed me.

In comparison with the US, grocery shopping here is cheap and efficient, and I’ve been able to find a lot of surprising ingredients I never thought would be available on this little rock. German ex-pats have opened up many markets with imported goods, and there’s even an Italian specialty store owned by my new friend Nando who gave me free wine for the chicken marsala recipe I wanted to try. Sure, a single head of broccoli may only appear in stores roughly once a month, but there are plenty of other more exciting things to try. Predictably, I’m hooked on the avocados, and am also currently heavily dependent on my daily kaki, which is an (imported but fantastic) variety of persimmon. I was hesitant at first, used to the little wrinkly Ohio winter variety, but my mom gave me so much persimmon envy that I had to go for it. Most days during my walk home from school, I stop in the frutería and pick up whatever looks good. The owner now loves to feign surprise when I plop three kakis on the counter, and sometimes throws in a little almond candy for me to try. I love it here.

A typical frutería haul: a kaki, an avocado, an almond candy, and... shallots?!

Grocery shopping is always something I look forward to doing here in Valle Gran Rey. The one chain grocery store, SPAR, has two locations in town, and I go there for all of my staples. I’m now a recognized community member (as opposed to a tourist passing through), which means that the guy at check out greets me with “¿Cómo estás, mi amor?”, and my friend at the meat counter always says “¡Hola, preciosa!” Our friendship started the first time I did a big shop, after I apologized for staring at the selection for ~10 minutes without speaking. I told him I was utterly unprepared for shopping in Spain after a lifetime of buying prepackaged meats in the US and largely ignoring the metric system. Of course, he was incredibly patient and gave me suggestions on what to buy and how to cook it. Now, when I’m having a bad or lonely day, I go talk to him and buy something new to try. To top it all off, meat is blessedly cheap here, and cooking just two recipes can feed me all week.

I’ve never considered myself an intensely creative person in the generic sense of the word. When presented with a blank canvas, I totally freeze up. My little brother, on the other hand, can come up with a character, scene, or comic strip off the top of his head and fill the page with color and humor. He clearly got the artist genes. However, over the past few years, I’ve realized I can be creative as long as I have some sort of constraint. If I’m at point A and need to get to point B, but can choose my own route, I’m thrilled. Thus, cooking here is a challenge I very much enjoy. I find recipes online knowing that I won’t be able to follow them exactly, but put my all into recreating them to the best of my ability using the resources I have here. Innovative is what I think they call it!

This is where the magic happens

My biggest constraint in cooking here is that I do not have an oven. Or a microwave! Just one 2-pot electric stovetop. When I put my big sauté pan on, nothing else fits. But I’ve managed just fine, and am now very skilled in the art of reheating leftovers on the stovetop. In the past month, I’ve cooked cilantro lime pork chops (Iberian pork is truly unrivaled), steak fajitas with black beans, Thai coconut chicken soup, broccoli with fried shallots and olives (pounced on the broc when I saw it), pork ragout, mango sticky rice, and chicken marsala. While these aren’t Spanish dishes, I do try to select recipes that put Spanish/local ingredients in the spotlight. More recipes will come with time! Each meal has been surprisingly successful, but I also think my pride is the world’s finest seasoning that can mask almost any error or ingredient shortcoming. But hey—I’ve had a few guests and think they came away happy.

My biggest cooking feat thus far: Thanksgiving! Yesterday, I ran that little electric stovetop into the ground making a four point menu. Up until about a week ago, I wasn’t planning on anything special—I’d go out to eat with the teachers and just be quietly thankful in my head. But then I thought about my dad’s mashed potatoes. And realized I didn’t need an oven to make them. Then I mentioned mashed potatoes aloud to my favorite Gomeran, Oscar. And he said he’d like to try them. Aaaaaand then I decided I’d just do the damn thing!

I wasn’t expecting to find turkey here, but lo and behold, when I went shopping on Wednesday, SPAR had one fresh turkey breast. I found a stovetop recipe with fresh herbs and sautéed vegetables that seemed doable. I also bought a ton of potatoes, re-upped my butter supply, and grabbed some green beans to stir fry in garlic and soy sauce in my mom’s style. I was fretting over dessert until I realized that I had all the ingredients for the beloved grapefruit (+ avocado + pomegranate + honey + lime) salad my mom and I make each winter. Yesterday, I cooked for ~5 hours, and finally invited Oscar over at a quarter past 10 pm (had to make it a little Spanish, ya know?). I think everything tasted quite good (my guest said it was buenísimo), but really, I was just deliriously happy to have pulled off a Thanksgiving meal given the constraints and to be sharing it with someone who has made this place feel like home.

well would you look at that... I'm a teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 00:50:00 +0000

Alright, alright... It's time to talk about the real action!

So. I got a month deep before receiving an official schedule at my school, meaning that my introduction to formal teaching was wild, unpredictable, and wonderful. The one native English speaker in the school (who is the 5th and 6th year teacher and also happens to be the bilingual coordinator) was on maternity leave for the first month, and her substitute did not speak English. We’re still missing a permanent teacher for 1st and 2nd year, and the guy filling in had never taught before and also did not sign up to teach English!! This meant that I immediately had a much larger role in the classroom than I had been expecting. Though it was very stressful to be thrown off the deep end with admittedly very little prior experience, I think it was the best thing for the development of my confidence and my bonds with my students. Instead of someone who just sits in the back and observes, I think they see me as more of a legitimate teacher, and our mutual respect has grown markedly.

unexpected/unexplained double half rainbow seen during my walk to work

As everyone who survived an elementary education probably knows, teaching is rarely glamorous. I was a member of an elementary school class with a bad reputation, and now I really feel the pain of our poor teachers who tried everything to maintain order. Even as an empathetic teacher’s pet, you don’t realize how frustrating it is to be in a chaotic classroom until you’re legitimately in their shoes, trying to get a point across. Some kids are listening intently, others are quiet but in their own little worlds, and still others are fighting, yelling, and running around. I’ve had a few tear-my-hair-out moments, compounded by the fact that my younger students do not understand me at all when I’m asking them to behave. In order to encourage English use, they are not supposed to know that I speak or even understand Spanish, which I have found to be a debatable teaching strategy in general. In terms of behavioral policing, “please be quiet!” just doesn’t have the same effect as a biting “si quieren, CALLAR!!!”

Of course, some classes are more challenging than others, and a lot depends on the time of day. For example, my 1st year students (~6 year olds) are baby angels first thing in the morning, but would drive nearly anyone to drink in the last hour of the day. Regardless of the hour, I’ve had a particularly challenging time with my 2nd year class, which has about four ~difficult~ students whereas other groups have just one or two. Yesterday was actually the first time I felt like we had a slight breakthrough—their behavior was a little bit better and the majority demonstrated a good grasp on the vocabulary we’ve been building over the past month.

Recently, in my younger classes, I’ve tried taking students aside during free moments for one-on-one conversations on the balcony. This has helped both parties exponentially. For one, I can quickly gauge levels of understanding and see what content each student hasn’t grasped yet. I can also personalize our relationship a little bit more—rather than just being the talking head at the front of the class, I can ask questions specific to the student and make them laugh. I also cheat a little bit and throw in some Spanish if I know they’re not understanding me, which I think humanizes me more in their minds. Finally, at the end of our conversations, I like to elicit a pinky-promise from my more challenging students that they will behave and listen to me. The success rate isn’t 100%, but things are a hell of a lot better than they were when we started.

me being a very relatable human teacher fending off a sneeze next to a cactus

Luckily, for every frustrating/difficult moment, I can count five moments that made my heart feel fit to burst. Some students latched onto me immediately, particularly those who already speak English quite well. Others were on board after about a week. The ones that really get me, though, are those who open up after we speak one-on-one. The other day, I spoke to a girl in 2nd year who routinely shut down and glared at me when I called on her in class or tried to nudge her in the right direction on worksheets. Out on the balcony, we spoke about her Hello Kitty earrings, her family in Germany, and her pretty dress. Part way through the conversation, she put her hands on my knees as she was talking. When I walked into the classroom the next day, she ran up and gave me a big hug for the first time.

I’ve noticed that my students generally demonstrate trust through physical gestures like these. The most engaged and open kids give me hugs and high fives every day. When I kneel down to talk to students at their desks, they’ll often lay their hands on mine while they ask a question. My most endearing example came one day when I pulled out Sergio, one of my most entertaining 1st year students. As one of the smallest and youngest of the bunch, Sergio routinely melts my heart but couldn’t give less of a damn about English. His focus in class is non-existent. He knows I’m not supposed to be able to understand Spanish, but rambles on at length to me anyway in the most adorable squeaky voice. On the first day, when my co-teacher Roboam asked the class to draw a picture of the two of us, Sergio drew a penguin. “Penguin” happens to be the only English word I have successfully taught him. I noticed one day that he was struggling with a worksheet on colors, so I pulled him out onto the balcony for a chat. As we slowly worked through the sheet, he climbed onto my lap and tucked his head under my chin, displaying physical trust for the first time. To say I melted would be an understatement. Now, when we do group activities like meditation or dancing, he plants himself directly in front of me and won’t budge.

To help reinforce the vocab we've been building, I had the kids come up to the board to draw a random animal with a random number of one body part (i.e. A Shark With Six Eyes), as dictated by me. Here, the master himself works on a Penguin With Five Legs.

During the first-day portrait drawing activity mentioned above, I also came to know Enzo, one of my true standout students. Earlier in the day, I prompted him to count to 10 with me in English. He didn’t take a full breath until he’d reached 50, so I knew something good was up with this kid. As I was walking around to see the drawings of Roboam + Phoebe, Enzo’s caught my eye:

For comparison, here’s what I looked like that day:

My current aesthetic is basically just to look like I google image searched "teacher" and dressed like what popped up

It’s important to note that this 6-year old captured every detail of our appearances—the colors and designs of our clothes, my blue eyes, my (slight but exaggerated) height advantage over Rob, his beard and arm/leg hair, and my freckles. I was blown away, and sure enough, Enzo has continued to amaze me. He speaks to me only in English, and I can see his little gears turning as he chews over a question and thinks up an answer. He also spelled CHAMPION and PINEAPPLE yesterday without my help. If I had to make a list of Things I’d Look Into If Given A Crystal Ball, Enzo’s future would be top 10.

One more little thing I’ve noticed about these kids that has captured my heart is what they do when left to their own devices. There are individually charming behaviors, of course—for example, I have one first grade student who loves to look at himself in the mirror. I always catch him turned around in his seat, smiling at his reflection. But what really gets me is what happens when I turn the class loose on a creative activity like drawing. Many students talk to their neighbors and run around to borrow colors, and the ambient noise inevitably builds. The majority of the sound, however, is singing. It stopped me in my tracks on the first day—at least half of the students in the classroom were immersed in their artwork and singing their own special songs. This wasn’t an isolated event, either—idle musicality just seems to be the thing here. Maybe my teacher friends in the United States have noticed something similar—either way, it’s so precious. Equally entertaining but maybe less precious was when I asked my second grade students to sing me a song on the first day, and a group of boys gathered in a circle and chanted “DAME TU COSITA, UH UH” in the stylings of this video:

But this is all just a regular day at school.

The view from the balconies

How the turntables turn

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 16:37:00 +0000

Well! I’ve officially been in Spain and living on La Gomera for over one month (????!!!!!!!!!!), so it’s probably about time for me to write some posts about what the hell I’m actually doing here (teaching). When I was just an applicant stalking Fulbright blogs, I sometimes wondered why there was so little content about the actual teaching experience. I think I know why now—for starters, there’s a lot going on outside of work. So many side missions, cultural quirks, and thoughts about transition are also vying for space in my mind. I didn’t just start a new job—I started a new life (this sounds incredibly navel-gazey, but it’s true). Really, the Fulbright experience encompasses all spheres—professional, social, and private—and it’s unrealistic to expect one of those to outweigh the others. #MÁSqueunabeca

me thinking deep thoughts !!

Another challenge involved in blogging about teaching is that every day is entirely different. I had a nice and tidy mental summary of my first day all ready to roll, and then the sun set and rose again and I had a completely different experience. Finding a way to corral all of the unique experiences and emotions is really difficult. However, after a month on the job, I think my sample size of days is starting to inch toward “respectable”, so I’m going to give it a whirl.

Here's a picture a fellow teacher took of me on my first full day in infantil classes. Not pictured: marker stains on my pants

In this post, I’ll start with the facts. I am assigned to teach English to infantil and primaria students at the only school in the Valle Gran Rey municipality. The school is small, but hosts students anywhere between the ages of 3 and ~16 years old, mostly from La Gomera but also from other islands and many different countries (Germany, Italy, Moldova, Venezuela, Cuba, etc) thanks to tourism. In Spain, children can basically start attending school straight out of the womb, but this of course depends on resources and availability. In this area, students officially start in infantil around age 3, move to primaria at age 6, and then to secundaria when they’re 12. After they finish four years in secundaria, they’re done with obligatory education, but the next step for many is bachillerato and then universidad. It’s a really interesting feeling to return to the beginning of the process after just crossing the finish line in my own education. I’m teaching ages 3 through 12 every week, and my youngest students are still a few years out from reading. I look at them and wonder if they’ll be pulling all-nighters to finish research papers in ~16 years.

The school is charming, built around an open-air patio where all of the students have recreo (recess) together. A map of the islands is painted on the ground, and plants and student garden projects line the perimeter. The classrooms have big windows and balconies with a casual ocean view, and the walls are painted daffodil yellow. The students I teach begin class at 8:30 am and leave around 1:30 pm, with a ~45 minute break in the middle for lunch and recess. Factoring in my long bus rides, my days in elementary school were about twice as long.

The hub of activity for teachers is, of course, la sala de profesores. I was told ahead of time that Spain takes teachers’ lounges seriously, and it’s true. Every teacher in the school must enter the room at least twice a day to sign in and out, but it’s also the only place in the building to get coffee, print, and store personal belongings and classroom materials. My favorite part is the community snack tin that always has an assortment of my new addiction: Gomeran cookies (more on these later). There are always people in the lounge, and it’s an unspoken cultural rule that anyone entering should always announce themselves with a greeting. Generally, when starting a new job, my approach is to be quiet as a mouse until I feel comfortable (former co-workers reading this will laugh), so this initially made me nervous. But I have to say, after spending an evening alone, it’s really nice to walk in the next day and receive a chorus of “buenos días!”

The teachers at my school have been incredibly welcoming to me, and I feel very lucky to be a part of their cohort. I didn’t know this until recently, but small islands like La Gomera have a high teacher turnover rate because of A. isolated location and B. Spain’s requirements for tenured positions—at the end of every year, all teachers vying for a plaza fija (fixed position) must take the infamously difficult oposiciones (exams), and if they don’t do well, they’re sent to another school. I started at the school a week later than everyone else, so by the time I arrived, people knew each other and were relatively settled in. Little did I know, all but ~3 infantil and primaria teachers were also new to La Gomera! Many of them are Canarians in their mid-to-late twenties, and already have a group chat to announce plans for things like dinner and drinks. This dynamic is my saving grace—La Gomera does not have a university, so there are very, very few people my age around town. But because all of these teachers are new and looking to make friends just like I am, they’ll put up with my stuttering Spanish and pesky kid-sister vibes for the sake of companionship. I love them already.

Snapshot from a typical Wednesday night spent poolside with my coworkers

Next up: my classroom experience!

hiking ALONE!! (SO EPIC) (NOT CLICKBAIT)

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 22:36:00 +0000

Friday, September 21st was my first day off after a wild and wonderful beginning to my teaching year. I intended to spend it creating a plan of attack to clear the last few ((painful)) bureaucratic hurdles of moving to Spain, since nearly everything important closes at 1 or 2 pm every week day, and I'm in school four out of five possible days to go. First, I went to the photo shop on the other side of town, where it's not only possible to make photocopies, but also to buy postcards, shop for clothing, have t-shirts printed, and surf the internet for 0.50€/10 minutes. The role it plays in the valley is sort of like how in rural US high schools, the English teacher is also the drama teacher, cross country coach, assistant track coach, and senior class advisor, among other things (Alana Cunningham of Fort Frye High School lore was all of this for me!!).

Here you can see an example of the vast distances I must cross to do important things

After making an obscene number of passport photocopies, I hoofed it up the hill to the Ayuntamiento to retrieve a form, then stopped by the bank to pay for the processing of a different form. Since I'm the first and only Fulbrighter on my island, I'm kind of flying blind through these steps, which are undoubtedly subtly different from those my friends are taking on the other islands and on the mainland. The poor Commission team has been working nonstop to update our online guide with instructions, but they only have as much information as they can extract from the individual offices if and when they get people on the phone. Multiply the relaxed no pasa nada Spanish attitude by island time and you get ........... very little done!

I finished all of my errands much earlier than expected, so after buying some kiwis, plums, and a papaya from my favorite fruterías, I returned home and ate a big lunch. As the afternoon rolled on, I started to realize I had nothing to do and a whole empty weekend ahead of me. For normal people, this is a treat. For people who operate like Border Collies, this is anxiety-inducing. Lately, I've been trying to acknowledge but disregard my discomfort with free time by following the impulses I get to do things. So, when I looked up the valley and saw the marine layer breaking up to reveal blue sky, I decided it would be a nice time to go for a walk.

Behind me...

And in front of me!

The very nice French photographer staying in the AirBnB room of our house had told me the day before that he had a great walk up to El Guro, which is the next village up the valley, tucked back into a cliff. He also mentioned visiting a nice little waterfall, and that in total the hike was about 1 hour each way. Perfect! I'd burn a couple of hours and then it would be dinner time, and I would bridge the gap between activities with more activity. I put on my old pair of running shoes and set out for a nice stroll.

On the dirt footpath running up the valley, I passed multiple farms growing so many interesting things. I saw trees loaded with mangoes, avocados, and oranges, and saw a few vines growing what I think is maracuya (passionfruit).

Look closely and you can see everything I've ever wanted

After a while, I saw a staircase cut into the cliff on my right, and decided to take it. Much to my surprise, at the top was La Ermita de los Reyes, built in ~1515 and strategically hidden in the landscape so that pirates would not spot it from the sea. It was locked tight, but the outside was beautiful enough that I didn't mind at all.

I descended the stairs and decided to continue up the valley just a bit more to check out El Guro. It was siesta time on a Friday, so everything was very quiet. I had actually forgotten about the waterfall until I came across a sign that said "SALTO DE AGUA", and immediately hopped on the trail. The signs made it seem like it was pretty close! I started listening for rushing (fresh) water, which was going to be a sight for sore eyes after settling down in a place where it never rains.

El Guro from the beginning of the trail--already much greener!

Boy, was I wrong!! I hightailed it up that trail like a bloodhound on a scent, especially once the vegetation got a little more lush. Around every bend I expected to see the cascade, and was wrong each time. Time was passing slowly as it does when I'm totally alone, and 10 minutes of walking felt like an hour. The trail markers started to wane, especially once it became clear that the trail was actually just a mostly dry creek bed. I was freaked out about getting lost for a while until I realized that following the creek bed HAD to get me to the waterfall at some point. So I went on.

It was clear that this was a fairly well-trafficked path, with detours cleared around deep water and a couple of ropes and ladders engineered to help with tricky passes. But (probably since it's the low season) I only passed 7 people total (not counting three goats), all in groups heading back to civilization. It was quiet, with very little bug or bird noise, and it was dark, with deep palm shade making me forget the late afternoon sun still beating on the cliffs above me. I checked Google Maps a couple of times to see if I could tell how close I was, but after a while I lost service and then had to force myself not to feel like a forlorn subtropical Gretel.

There were a couple of times I came upon micro-waterfalls and sat down to rest, wondering if this could be what the signs were referring to. But they didn't seem spectacular enough to warrant a walk of this distance, so I went on each time (curiosity, meet cat).

After what felt like 4 hours of walking by myself (I have lost all concept of time so I have no clue if this is accurate), I sat down and weighed my options. Lacking constant positive reinforcement from trail markers, I was losing courage and steam, and was getting nervous about nightfall. It was only about 5 pm, but getting nervous about nightfall felt like the thing to do. I was seriously contemplating turning back and trying again some other day, but then remembered that mama didn't raise no bitc--... uh nvm you get the picture. So I GOT UP, put on a BRAVE FACE, walked 3 MORE MINUTES and what do ya know: there was the waterfall!!!!!!!!

As one German tourist put it on his travel blog, "it's no Victoria Falls", but it was beautiful and enchanting and worth the walk. Though it confounded my camera, the best part was the golden clifftop looming in the background. Amidst the cacti and sun, it's so nice to know that fresh water is coursing down from the mountains and jumping off a cliff somewhere nearby.

The walk back was much more enjoyable with a goal obtained and a familiar path to take. I filled the silence with the closest thing I know to birdsong--Lorde's 2017 album Melodrama--and enjoyed the ride. I did happen to get a few life birds along the way despite not bringing binoculars like a total fool. My favorite was the bouncing Gray Wagtail.

Photo by Thomas Varto Nielsen of African Bird Club

My multiple mid-hike crises paid off when I moved back into view of the ocean just in time for the sunset. As I descended into the valley via the winding street of La Calera, I stopped to buy some jamón flavored ruffles to carb up after the big game. I had, after all, walked 10 miles that day!

Mightily pleased with myself, I settled down for the evening feeling my favorite feeling: much more grounded! I Am Here!

pure & good

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 07 Oct 2018 17:56:00 +0000

I want to start this post by acknowledging how incredibly privileged I am to be living in my little island bubble, roughly 3500 miles away from troubled US soil. This (and my status as the only American in town) affords me a distance and remove from the relentless bad news, and dulls the ache we feel when somehow, once again, things get even worse. I will never forget being in Panamá for the 2016 election. Though it was incredibly strange and disorienting to watch a national disaster happen from the outside, my cohort and I were so lucky to be able to grieve together and then move forward, distracted and sheltered by our host country 20° to the south. My host dad, Irvin De La Rosa, greeted me that night with a big hug, and told me I would always have a home in Panamá. Meanwhile, people who were on Bowdoin's campus that week told me the dining halls were silent and the atmosphere was funereal, and that I was lucky to miss it. I imagine things have been somewhat similar this week, as survivors and allies on campus grapple with the baffling decision of one of their (female) senators. I feel for everyone currently hurting in the United States, and wish I could bring you all here to find peace.

The best I can do for now is to convert my moments of peace into words and pictures. I've had predictable fluctuations in emotion thus far, though I've experienced far more ups than downs. I've only had a few days where I've felt forlorn/frustrated/truly lonesome, which has surprised me given my penchant for emotional volatility. There have even been several moments where things have just clicked, and I feel more and more that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I think my first click came one night a couple of weeks ago as I was eating dinner on the roof of the house where I'm staying. I had made it up the stairs with my meal just in time to catch the sunset, and was thoroughly enjoying my food in the gloaming. Scanning the horizon, a faint shape caught my eye and made me sit up straight. At first I thought I was seeing clouds, but I quickly realized that I was actually seeing a another island across the pond!! I confirmed my suspicion using the helpful little directional pointer on Google Maps. Sure enough, I was looking at El Hierro, roughly 40 miles away! It's the smallest of the 7 major islands, and current home to my Fulbright friend Sadie.

Though I'd been on La Gomera for about 2 weeks at that point, it was the first time I'd seen another island from Valle Gran Rey. I suddenly felt so grounded and somehow less alone. Staring at El Hierro, I picked up one of the smooth basalt stones used to weight down the couch cover and held it in my lap, still hot to the touch from a day of absorbing solar radiation. The breeze was gentle and nightfall was slow. I felt so happy.

Since that night, El Hierro has made an appearance on the horizon a few more times, but almost exclusively at sundown and only when the air is very clear. Once, I was even lucky enough to see La Palma, which lies 40 miles to the north. My host Tanja has told me that occasionally you can even see the roads and lights on El Hierro. I look forward to it!

Other major good moments have come--unsurprisingly--when I've been in the ocean. When I arrived on La Gomera, I wasn't really in any hurry to get to the beach. There were too many things to attend to and not enough time. Plus, the main beach in town didn't seem to have any fun waves due to its semi-sheltered location. But when I finally went at the end of a hot and busy day, I was hooked.

On my first visit, I was a little apprehensive as I always am when wading into the ocean for the first time in a while. Though I've studied it for years now and have lived within close proximity for the last 4 years of my life, it always takes me a few minutes to relax and trust a new setting. I have to get to know how the floor feels under my feet, identify the wave patterns, and adjust to the temperature. I'd never been swimming atop black sand before, and it's definitely a little unsettling to look down and just see a dark void! Luckily, the water is typically quite clear, so I can always see my feet moving beneath me.

Now that my number of visits has reached double digits, the water greets me like an old friend. I've even started to drop my embarrassing dependence on plugging my nose when going underwater! There is no feeling like the first dive under a wave; nothing like popping up, refreshed, to see the horizon stretching out in front of me. Barring the occasional smooth stone wedged in the sand, the floor is even beneath my feet, and the slope is gentle. When the tide is low, pale striped fish swim around my legs. My students have told me there are large mantas, but I try not to worry about that!

Turns out the waves vary greatly at this beach. Some days, they're no more than slight changes in sea surface height that timidly break and retreat. Other days, sets roll in so tall and fast that all the kids scream with excitement. There's also some interesting resonance going on that I haven't seen before: waves roll in and break, but then pull back with such force that they often crash into the incoming line as reformed waves. It's not really an undertow (as I said, this beach is too sheltered for crazy rip currents, etc), but instead probably has to do with the slope of the beach and the tide. It's especially fun to stand at the node where the inbound and outbound waves meet.

After jumping waves, floating around, and attempting a few handstands during the lulls, I like to haul out and air dry on the warm black sand. Most of the conversations taking place at the beach are in German, so I zone out as the foreign words mix with the sound of the waves. The energy of the water hums inside me, and I still feel the push and pull despite my position on the sand. I can never fall asleep in public places, but I do reach the outskirts of consciousness occasionally, letting my thoughts trail off as my brain zooms out.

I always leave the beach feeling relaxed and renewed, dotted with a few more freckles (yes, I wear sunscreen!!!!!!). I often wonder if I'll ever be able to part from the ocean after this. For now, I'll just enjoy my lucky moment.

Madrid Moment

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 22:56:00 +0000

PREVIOUSLY seen on BABY'S FIRST EUROPEAN ADVENTURE: I went to Madrid!!

I wish I had a better opening picture for you, but this one pretty much sums up my experience--profoundly historical (I think), beautiful, blurry, and taken on my way to find food after dark.

I arrived at my AirBnB in Madrid's center (after a flawless Metro commute 💅🏼) just in time to see the sun setting between buildings. I was sharing a room in an apartment with two other Fulbrighters--Fayeza and Sara--that I'd met waaaaaaay back in ~December in the infamous Slack chat I mentioned in my first post. After about a week of speaking to almost no one but myself, and just saying "perdón" to strangers a lot, I was so excited to see them. I rolled my SUPER LIGHTWEIGHT CARRYON-SIZE suitcase into the room and we talked nonstop for over an hour about our application experience, traveling, and placements. Eventually, the intrepid Sara (who had flown into Madrid from POLAND where she had been teaching!!) offered to lead me to one of her favorite places to eat, and I followed her like a lost puppy. At that point, I was way past hungry and running on fumes, and also lacking the patience for a sit-down meal, so her suggestion of Walk To Wok was absolutely perfect. I stood glassy-eyed watching two incredibly talented guys make noodle stir fries over roaring flames, and before I knew it I was vacuuming up my very own takeout box. At that point, my last 3 brain cells were begging me for anything but sodium, but I hushed them and happily carried on.

The next morning, we got up and made our way out to Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Miguel Cervantes and home of 2018 Fulbright Spain Orientation. Though we had a good time hauling Fayeza's suitcases through the Metro stations, I was so thankful that burdened travel was firmly in my past. As we boarded the bus that would take us ~40 minutes east, we ran into a bunch of other Fulbrighters and jumpstarted the conversations that dominated Orientation: "Where are you from?!" "Where are you placed?!?!?" "Have you been there yet???" It was so great to finally put faces to names and so wild to think that all of us were on the same sort of precipice. Finally, my post grad plans of moving to a tiny island to work in a school weren't so crazy!

After checking in with the Commission staff (who had apparently been studying our photos so they could greet us by name), we were treated to a fancy lunch at our hotel complete with ¡¡Spanish Wine!! I decided it was finally time for my immature taste in alcohol to put up or shut up, and thoroughly enjoyed a couple of glasses. Even at my most hydrated, well-fed, and well-rested I still have the tolerance of a flea, so the results weren't very pretty, but A Great Time Was Had By All.

That evening, we were all scheduled to attend inauguration and other celebratory events on the campus of la Universidad de Alcalá, which was founded in 1499 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. We knew we'd be hearing from the US ambassador and program heads on a beautiful campus. What we didn't really know was that the campus was roughly a ~20 minute walk away from our hotel! I was ashamed of being repeatedly schooled in airport fashion by Europeans (why is American culture the only one that encourages looking like a slob while traveling??) and eager to try out a new dress, so I threw on some heels and a brave face, even when we were warned about the walk right before departing. Whatever! I could handle it.

As a self-described "huge fan of ceilings", this ceiling really did it for me

Spoiler alert: I could not handle it. After a long walk there feat. cobblestones and multiple hours of standing/mingling/ice-breaking, I was ready to tap out. When our Canarias group mentor apologetically told us that the restaurant was another 25 minute walk away, I cursed my poor decision-making and looked around for another person in my situation. There was no way in hell I could make it through that walk AND the walk back to the hotel in these shoes. However, I was also really upset that I was making myself look like Someone Who Hates Walking. I love walking!!! Please believe me!! I'm simply incapable!!!

After a few minutes, I teamed up with two other girls in the group who were also in desperate need of a shoe change. We decided that we would walk the 20 minutes back to the hotel, change our shoes, take a taxi to the restaurant, and then walk home with the group. Looking back, it's evident that the Universe had a plan, because it was during this walk that I met my new great friend Sarah!!!! We talked a mile a minute the whole night and then stuck together for the rest of orientation. She's placed on the big island next door to mine, and has been warned that I will descend upon her as soon as I have my residency/ferry discounts.

Once we had switched into our vastly more comfortable white sneaks (pictured), we were ready for a wild 10 pm dinner at Restaurante Rus. The English-translation menu they gave us speaks for itself:

The rest of Orientation was a blur of Not Wearing Heels, panels, new friends, and important information. Also walking a lot. I call this the Fulbright Effect:

When we had free meals, all ~165 of us spread throughout Alcalá and ate incredible amounts of bread and ham. In fact, the water making up ~50% of my body was almost completely replaced by bread and ham after just 4 days in Madrid. Though I was born and raised dangerously close to America's breadbasket, I am poorly conditioned for mass bread intake thanks to the loosely Atkins Diet lifestyle of my household. But when starving and in Spain.......

if you're ham museum and you know it clap your hands

The last night of Orientation closed with a formal cocktail where we all dressed up again but few wore heels. I had eaten a big lunch with some great program friends, so I wasn't all that hungry for dinner and decided to make a meal out of the hors d'oeuvres being served. Every time a waiter walked by with a new offering, I was on it like a cartoon character putting on disguises to get more free samples. The wine was once again flowing, and I think we were all feeling grateful to be together.

Fellow Canarias TA Claire is placed as far away from
me as she could possibly be without leaving the
province but... distance means so little when someone
means so much < 33

Lillian and I thoroughly enjoyed heckling each other all week

When all was said and done, I headed back to Canarias feeling ready to engage. Though I'm the only Fulbrighter on my island, it's so exciting to think that I know people living on the six other islands, AND in basically every part of Spain. I mean, look at this network!

I'll let these two pointy trees close the show, because they earned it.

Blind Date

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sat, 22 Sep 2018 14:07:00 +0000

As soon as I sat down and slowed my breathing, heartbeat, and mind from the whirlwind 46-hour journey (COUNT EM: 46 HOURS) and took in The View To End All Views, I was sold on La Gomera. Didn’t take long. I don’t know that I believe in love-at-first-sight, but I am prone to… um.. throwing myself head over heels upon a good first impression.

I remember when I first found out that I’d be in Canarias, I began obsessively researching each island to create a ranking of where I’d like to be placed. Definitely not a great practice, given that it was completely out of my hands and I was probably just setting myself up for disappointment, but it passed the time until I got my carta de nombramiento. I read about each island’s quirks, crept through the streets on Google Earth, and followed the Instagram accounts associated with each. At one point, I came across one of the best sunset photos I’d ever seen, so beautiful that it stopped my scroll dead in its tracks. The location was Valle Gran Rey, La Gomera. The tiny, round, 14-mile diameter island slid into my #1 slot and stayed there as I read about its unique biomes and its strong connection to the traces of indigenous culture that escaped the fukú of Columbus. I’d like to say I thought my dream into existence, but I think I just got lucky.

Photo by NASA's MODIS-AQUA satellite

Upon arrival, the bilingual coordinator of my school gave me the contact of a teacher, Elena, who could answer any questions I had that weekend. I asked her for a restaurant recommendation for an early dinner (apparently forgetting I was in Spain), and worked up my strength to walk across the valley to Playa de la Calera. The website for the restaurant she recommended said it opened at 6:00 pm, the sign on the door said 6:30 pm, and when I asked the hostess, she said it wasn’t until 7:00 pm. Okay! Knowing what I’ve learned now about Spanish dinner customs, I’m very lucky they’d take me that early regardless.

As I waited for 19:00, I wandered through the streets, going in shops and getting a feel for this specific part of the valley. The entirety of Valle Gran Rey is so small it would be considered no more than a town in the States, but there are distinct little sectors with their own names and features. As soon as I understood that, I was oriented. It was even easier than orienting at Bowdoin, which basically just required knowing where the Polar Bear statue was located. Definitely helps to have the ocean as a border. God help me in Madrid.

I stopped by the main beach in town and planted my feet in black sand for the first time. I was so excited!!!!! Even long after the sun’s intensity had peaked for the day, the sand was hot on the bottoms of my feet. The water was cool (thank you North Atlantic gyre!!) but not cold (thank you, low-latitude sun!!), and the contrast of the white foam against the dark sand was so beautiful.

Finally my time came, and I sat down to a meal of fried pork and vegetables. It was not a plato típico, but it was one of the best meals in town according to Elena. I was beyond famished at that point and eating at breakneck speed—I figure I probably looked like Eleven from Stranger Things when she walks out of the Upside Down and into Benny’s restaurant (the sole purpose of this reference is to make my brother happy). Going against Spanish custom, I asked for the check right away and walked home alongside the ocean as the sun set. The waves crashed against the smooth, round rocks that line much of the coast, producing an amplified sound and rhythm as it pushed them up and pulled them back.

Predictably, I fell deeply and profoundly asleep that night for 11 hours straight. I woke up so dehydrated that my vision was blurred, which would’ve been terrifying if A.) this hadn’t happened to me before while traveling and B.) I hadn’t worked at an ophthalmologist’s office this summer (I love you The Eye MD’s!!!!). I chugged some water with electrolyte powder, put in some lubricating drops I scored at the office, and I was good to go. After having a photoshoot with my first Canarias papaya for a series on my instagram (please validate me @phoebelinnea22), I went out to explore again.

With fresh eyes, my new home was even more beautiful. Every step showed me a slightly different angle of the cliffs, and every turn presented me with 10 photos I had to take. To get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, I have to remind myself that I have 9 months to photograph all of these scenes. But some can’t wait.

I’ve truly never lived somewhere that shows so well every day. It’s like I can’t take a bad photo. Having the anchor of these cliffs in every shot is something I could really get used to. I’ve been notorious for neglecting the land in favor of the sky in my shots, but these rocks refuse to step out of the spotlight.

I walked over 15 miles my first three days on the island, getting my bearings and taking in the scenery. It’s still hard to believe I’m really here. And that it really is incredible and more than I expected. I knew things were going well when I was a little bit heartbroken over having to leave to go back to Madrid for Orientation. I’ve never been on a blind date, but it kind of feels like my friend J. William Fulbright just wingmanned me into a best-case scenario match. I have the sun, the sea, and the earth in one of its most spectacular forms. Checks all my boxes.

There and back again

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 22:07:00 +0000

Well, I’m writing this post from a ferry I just barely caught back to Tenerife (the larger island with major airports), where I will catch a bus, then the metro, and then a plane to go back to Madrid for Orientation. While I’m very excited to see Lillian and meet other people in the Fulbright program, I am in a bit of a funk about having to turn around and do all this traveling again so soon. But, on the plus side, I now know where I’m living for a bit, have opened a bank account, got the lay of the land in Valle Gran Rey (through walking ~15 miles in three days), and have made contact with multiple teachers. That makes it all worth it.

My first look at my new home!

Anyway. Let me talk a bit about arriving!

Upon landing in Tenerife, my wonderful AirBnB host Mari sent her roommate to pick me up from the airport. With as much luggage as I had and how incapable I was of speaking Spanish at that point, I was so relieved to not have to figure out the late night buses or taxis.

packing light is not living my truth

I got to their apartment and collapsed before I could go into full-on breakdown mode, sleeping soundly until my alarm went off at what I thought was 7:45. I woke up disoriented, looking around and realizing it was pitch black outside. I immediately googled “sunrise in Canary Islands”, which told me it should have been happening right around then. Hmm. After thinking on it for a few minutes, I finally realized I had never changed my phone over from Madrid time, which is an hour ahead (the Canaries are 5 ahead of EST, Madrid is 6). Well, thank goodness I didn’t wake up an hour LATE. I may have lost some sleep, but at least I had given myself a huge pad to make my ferry.

“Why does she need a huge pad?”, you may be wondering. Or, “why is she acting like it’s so hard to take a ferry and then a plane?” Well, let’s just say that planning this trip is NOT for the geographically challenged. When I was booking my flights a couple of months ago, I had a vague awareness that there were two airports on Tenerife—one in the north and one in the south. What I did not realize, however, was that they are SEPARATED BY OVER 50 MILES. And the only port with ferries going to La Gomera is on the southern tip of the island, conveniently located near the—you guessed it!--southern airport. Where am I flying in and out? The northern airport. Which means that I, resident backwoods ignoramus, have to navigate public transportation for that distance.

I tried and failed my first time, running into huelgas, which is the name for what happens every Thursday when public transportation operates on a bare-minimum schedule as workers demand higher pay. I had no idea about this until I got into a desperation taxi (after taking the wrong metro line and ending up in the wrong part of a midpoint city) and the driver patiently explained to me that it didn’t matter anyway—there were only two buses going the long haul south (red line on map) that morning. One had left at 8 am (long gone), and the other wouldn’t leave until 11:30 am (when my ferry was long gone). Did I end up taking a taxi ~45 miles? Yes. Am I proud of it? No. But if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have arrived in Valle Gran Rey until probably ~8 pm. And with just three days there, I wanted to maximize my time. Like I said! Worth it.

views of Tenerife from my chariot

I arrived on La Gomera a little after noon, completely ragged. I had decided that after my Tenerife taxi incident I would NOT be taking another to save me the ~20 minute walk from the port to my AirBnB. That was the price I had to pay (#self#care). So I gritted my teeth and hauled roughly my weight in luggage off the ferry and down the street, incapable of seeing anything but the finish line in the distance. I’m not saying this entire journey was the hardest physical challenge of my life, but I’m not not saying that. Finally, I made it, hauled my cinderblocks up the stairs and around the corner, took a dumb mirror pic, and collapsed on the terrace.

When I opened my eyes and saw this view, it hit me: I MADE IT!

First impressions of Spain

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Sun, 09 Sep 2018 22:06:00 +0000

Wednesday, September 5th was a day spent entirely in transit. I arrived in Spain in late morning (by their standards), with the sunrise sneaking up and over us as we flew east. I could tell my body did not agree, though, especially not after remaining completely conscious for the whole 7-hour flight. I know economy isn’t really comfortable for anyone, but times like this are when I really curse my height. Whatever, though! I planned on hitting the sack (a real bed!!!!) as soon as I could upon touchdown on Tenerife, though it was around 6 pm Ohio time. Maybe the secret to beating jet lag quickly is to pull an all-nighter on the plane?

Though I was seated in the middle row of our huge Boeing 757, I could still catch a few glimpses of the country beneath the curved Dreamliner wings once it was light enough. My first thought was “wow, that’s dry!” As my mom said, it’s bound to be a harsh transition coming from the lushness of a wet Ohio summer. I like it, though, with its sharp lines and earth tone palette dotted with shrubs. As we descended into Madrid, the sky was an odd gray-tan that had dissipated by the time I left the airport. My friend Lillian—fellow Bowdoin grad, Spain Fulbright chaos partner, and city expert—was kind enough to write me (pathetic country bumpkin) step-by-step instructions on how to navigate Madrid’s Metro all the way to her new apartment so that we could meet up during my layover. I was so nervous about this on the flight across the Atlantic, especially because I had yet to purchase a Spanish SIM card and therefore was unreachable/incapable of googling when not on WiFi. I honestly didn’t even know the Metro was a subway and not a bus until I was leaving passport control. But Lillian’s instructions paired with the fact that the Metro is actually great made everything easy.

My only prior subway experience had come from spending time in Boston, which did not exactly warm me to this particular mode of transit. To me, the T felt rickety and incredibly confusing. Plus, every Bostonian I know makes fun of me for liking the Blue Line best (it just has the nicest atmosphere, ok?). In contrast, the Metro and its stations are well-lit, spacious, and make it very hard to miss a stop or lose your way. Plus, the relaxed no pasa nada Spanish attitude means no one is sprinting down stairs or anything crazy. To T sages: I respect your craft immensely but I’m good luv, enjoy.

appropriately patriotic color scheme

I arrived at Lillian’s apartment after an unintentional but pleasant walk around the Argüelles/Moncloa area, during which I was convinced I had stumbled upon some famous Madrid landmarks I’d seen in movies. I think they were just nice buildings. [Side note: this ties into a larger issue in my life, which is having INCREDIBLY poor long-distance and mid-range facial recognition. More on that at some point] After I refreshed and pulled myself out of corpse mode, we set out to find my first real food in ~15 hours. We ended up at a place called Cilantro Madrid, where we ate gazpacho, bistec a la parrilla (steak), pan, and sandía (watermelon) from their menú del día.

We then walked around the area in search of a certain wireless carrier store for my SIM card. We passed hundreds upon hundreds of darling boutiques, hair & nail salons, cafés, and restaurants. There was a fresh breeze blowing and a blue sky over our heads, making the architecture even more enjoyable. Running on no sleep and just being generally overstimulated meant that during our walk I had to constantly remind myself that I was in SPAIN! I’d finally made it to Europe! All the movies set in Madrid that I’d watched for my Hispanic Cities in Cinema course no longer had to be abstract. The language that I’d spent 16 semesters studying was suddenly surrounding me. I may have been tired, but I was not too tired to revel.

As my plane for Tenerife took off this evening, I thanked my lucky stars that my usual randomly-assigned-seat gamble planted me by a window. My favorite airplane activity is to listen to music and watch the world pass by below me, and this was a particularly special opportunity. While taking off, I listened to one of my all-time favorite songs, “Hasta la Raíz” by Natalia Lafourcade, and then queued up “Tajabone” by Ismaël Lô. This song plays in a very powerful scene in Pedro Almodovar’s film Todo sobre mi madre (1999), and has always stuck with me. As it was playing, I looked out of my window and happened to see a train pop out of a tunnel JUST LIKE IT DOES DURING THE SCENE IN THE MOVIE (set in Barcelona, but w/e!). I almost lost it. As we rocketed southwest, we were treated to a long sunset that my phone could not begin to do justice to.

As the great Lizzie McGuire once said, this is what dreams are made of.

It's the cliiiiiiiimb

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:42:00 +0000

Well, I am officially underway! I am coming to you live (kind of) from the international terminal at JFK. There seems to be one computer at one group of desks that belongs to my airline, and atop it sits a handwritten note to return in a couple of hours to check in. Predictably, my travel plan to get to the Canary Islands is just about as drawn out and complicated as my application process was—“streamlined” is probably not an adjective I would use to describe my life. Part of that can be attributed to having my home base in rural Appalachia, where things like next-day delivery and walking-distance grocery stores are unheard of. On the other hand, Nate is currently trying to get to the airport to hang out with me during my layover and is having one hell of a time with the train system. What would be a mere stone’s throw in the country is an almost insurmountable, undriveable, very expensive distance to travel here in NYC. With all its relative isolation and inconveniences, I’d pick the country any day. But that’s just me!

As in my last post, I thought it might be fun to outline my path to give some insight into what’s actually going on in my life. As many people have noted before, the pictures people paint on some social media platforms (Instagram, for one) can distill life into only its sweetest moments, leaving out all the twists and turns. I personally find too much comedic gold in the less-than-ideal parts of my life, and I definitely don’t want it to go to waste.

So! Have you ever wondered how one would travel from Whipple, Ohio, USA to Valle Gran Rey, Canarias, Spain? This is how I’m doing it:

Drive from Whipple to Columbus, OH, approximately 2 hours.

a. Stop 45 minutes in to pick up ailing hawk from random farm for transport to Ohio Wildlife Center (not required unless your mom is the valley's preeminent bird lady, of course).

Fly from Columbus to New York, NY, approximately 2 hours.
Take AirTrain from terminal 8 to terminal 1.
Wait 8 hours in JFK.
Fly overnight from New York to Madrid, Spain, approximately 7 hours.
Wait 9.5 hours. Try to find your friend, lunch, and a SIM card in the mean time.
Fly from Madrid to Tenerife (one of the larger islands), approximately 2.5 hours.
Take a bus across the island to the southern side with the correct port.
Take a ferry across the water to the smaller island of La Gomera.
Take a smaller ferry/catamaran around to the other side of the island. (I have no idea how long any of this will take)
Walk…….. and then……. collapse???

To the seasoned traveler, this probably sounds like a cinch. I’ve traveled quite a bit within the US thanks to my parents’ birdwatching careers (see photos), but have only traveled internationally once before.

North Dakota...

New Mexico...

...and Maine! (clear foreshadowing)

Luckily, though, I think the enormity of this trip is such that my mind has turned on some kind of autopilot or enforced tranquility. I have been remarkably relaxed about it all, which is …atypical of me, to say the least. Anyone even remotely close to me has probably picked up on the fact that I am a very emotional person.

I am also capable of displaying some Type A tendencies, though I think this is changing for a couple of reasons. Back in 2015, I fell into an almost year-long bout of significant anxiety, which was previously something I had never experienced for more than just a few minutes. There were multiple factors at play, some that I’m only just starting to understand. At the core, though, was my tendency to imagine and expect every event and scenario in my life to go a certain way. In this sense, I had been ~cruisin’ for a bruisin’~ for a long time, and finally, it had all come to a head. After suffering the consequences for many months, I had to claw my way out of the whole mental and emotional mess using tools and tricks recommended by my friends and family, my counselor, books, and the internet. Once I finally found what worked for me and climbed out of the metaphorical hole, I looked around and realized I was never going back there. If that meant letting things go to a point way past my former comfort zone, so be it. My semester abroad in Panama helped me immensely with this, as the entire country operates in a Type B reality.

This photo taken just before we all got drenched by an aguacero (extremely heavy downpour) right before meeting our host families.

There were a few drawbacks to this transition in my way of being, of course—the days of turning in essays and projects a week in advance were far gone (after the way my senior year went, it’s hard to believe they ever existed). I also found that, in general, my reaction to events (good or bad) was much more measured, which was certainly an adjustment, but not necessarily a bad one. For the promise of general stability, I was glad to sacrifice a little bit of my emotional range.

As my dad always tells me, worry 80% less. If I stop to check in with myself when I’m worrying, I almost always realize that fretting does nothing to improve the situation. So, here I am, cool as a cucumber, miles and miles from home. It’s all good!

yes I am crying but yes it's ok!!!!!!

freeze frame record scratch

noreply@blogger.com (Phoebe) — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 04:30:00 +0000

You're probably wondering how I got here. And by "here", I mean less than 48 hours from embarking on a multi-day journey across an ocean to settle on a tiny island where I will be charged with helping Spanish-speaking youth learn English.

Yeah, me too!

In mid-July 2017, I was living on Bowdoin's campus, soaking up my first Maine summer and working in the Office of Events & Summer Programs. I had no plans for the future, but at this point on the twenty-something timeline, that's okay! My roommate Nate (who bravely suggested this blog be named "Scooby Doo on Zombie Island") and I had started to have joint late-night panic sessions about our impending senior year and the idea that we soon had to make CAREER DECISIONS when neither one of us felt certain about a path. I had met with Career Planning a couple of times but couldn't seem to motivate myself to research consulting firms; Nate had been devoting his entire summer to an honors project that ended up being an incredible year-long labor of love (and hate?). We had heard through the grapevine multiple times that some of the other seniors on campus had arranged meetings with the Office of Student Fellowships & Research to begin applications for big name post-grad national fellowships: Marshall, Mitchell, Rhodes, Watson, Fulbright. On the morning of July 10th, I scrolled back through my inbox and found e-mails from the office sent in May encouraging us to make appointments before the end of the academic year to get the ball rolling. Oops. I booked the next appointment slot that worked for me--August 1st--and hoped no one would notice.

(I was easily distracted...)

Cindy Stocks noticed! That night, I had an email from the director of the office gently noting that August 1st was "a bit late" to get started, but that I could make up for lost time by reading through fellowship information and thinking about what I might be interested in doing. I don't remember all that much about how our first meeting went, but I know I came out of it feeling genuinely excited and like I just might have some direction. Cindy had taken my directionless rambling and distilled it into a plan, and before I knew it, I was applying for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to northern Spain. It was the first time I could remember feeling like all of the pieces of my personality, passions, and aspirations fit together toward a common goal. There was no stretching the truth or highlighting one part of myself over another. Though it sounds incredibly cliché, this was something I felt like I was destined to do.

Those who have been close to a Fulbright applicant or who have applied themselves know that it is a LONG process. The typical timeline (at least for Bowdoin students) goes something like this:

End of junior year (April/May): Identify award type/country/angle & begin application
Summer before senior year: Draft essays
Early September: Submit initial application to advising office
Mid- to late-September: Interview with campus committee
Early October: Submit final application to advising office and resubmit to Fulbright after last-minute edits
Late January: Receive notification about semi-finalist status; successful applications forwarded on to individual countries
Mid-March to April: Receive notification about finalist status

Looking back, maybe my late start set the tone for my experience, because my timeline broke the mold in January. I had been on the edge of my seat for several weeks, to the point where every notification on my phone made me jump. On Thursday, January 25th, Cindy sent all applicants an email to let us know semi-finalist decisions were on the way (a week later than normal), and would arrive before the end of the day on Friday. I decided I would go to the gym that afternoon to burn off nervous energy before 5 pm. This ended up being a poor idea--I almost fell off the treadmill at 7:20 mile pace when an email from Career Planning came in at 4:58 pm. 5 pm passed, as did 6 pm. Many of my friends had already received their notifications. I was a wreck, wandering around the quad in sub-freezing temperatures until my sweat froze, awaiting disaster. I returned to my dorm and drove my roommates crazy before exiling myself to my bedroom. I was just about to throw in the towel and go to dinner when the email came in.

After that, it was a good Friday night.

With the initial notification out of the way, I could relax for a bit. In fact, I almost forgot about Fulbright until mid-March, when the first of ~160 countries sent out finalist notifications. In the past several years, Spain had been in the front of the pack, notifying around March 15th. That day came and went with no news. In the interim, I had joined an online chat/support group full of speculation and stress, which served only to ramp up my anxiety each time I checked it. My worst fear was that I would log on and see Spain applicants celebrating long-awaited emails, only to switch tabs find a rejection lurking in my inbox.

By the time April rolled around, I was feeling fairly jaded. I realized that checking the applicants chat for news was largely a waste of time--one that I couldn't afford in the midst of senior spring. For the time being, I just decided to let it go and focus on school. This was increasingly difficult, though, because deadlines for summer internships and permanent jobs were looming, and I didn't want to expend a large amount of energy focusing on those when I still had a bid in another pool.

Despite my ironclad will, on the evening of Friday, April 9th, my worst nightmare (partially) came true. I was taking a brief break from reading about C3 and C4 photosynthesis (thanks, Phil!) and decided to quickly glance at the chat. The first thing I saw (before going blind from panic for a few moments) was a string of Spanish flag emojis and exclamation points. Multiple people were reporting finalist status for Spain. Others were posting about rejections. Shaking, I checked my email. Nothing. I checked my other email. Nothing. I checked both spam filters. N o t h i n g. I looked at the time stamps on their messages: the last one was posted around 7 pm. My clock read 11 pm. I fired off a hysterical email to Cindy and Kate, my other beloved advising guru, and then had to be forcibly calmed down by Nate. By the next morning, we had deduced that there were one or two remaining regions still making decisions, and rather than hold up the entire Spanish Fulbright program, they would announce later. Cindy said that based on previous years, it could easily be another 2-3 weeks. Way back in October, I had submitted my application with a preference noted for a rural school in either La Rioja or Asturias. The one common thread I could find among the handful of Spain applicants still waiting for notification was that we had all applied to these areas. But much to my dismay, these two regions had already notified their finalists. Technically, though, it appeared I was still in the running.

This meme reached peak popularity just when I needed it most <3

April came to a close with no news. I had long since given up the ghost and began applying to jobs in the US. I had several interviews lined up, and was beginning to envision my post-grad future in another way. I realized that mentally, I was dealing with Fulbright much like I would deal with a boy who had trouble committing: if it's meant to be, it'll be, but in the meantime, I'll pursue plan B.

I entered my last week of undergraduate classes with no decision to speak of. Only 1% of Fulbright semi-finalists were still waiting for news, and I was one of them. Early in the week, I received a strange email from the Spanish Fulbright Commission celebrating the fact that the country's program had been distinguished by King Felipe VI with the highest award of civil merit in Spain. I figured it was a glitch of some sort, or maybe even highly personalized spam, but the last line said "As a former grantee of this Commission, you have been part of this journey and therefore share this accomplishment." I shrugged, forwarded it to Cindy and Kate, and went on my way. Later that morning, Cindy sent me an email saying she thought it just might be good news. I ran upstairs from the dining hall to her office, where Kate joined us and we all cried. Well, I know I cried. Enough for all three of us. But after wiping my eyes, I resolved to treat it as if nothing had happened. After all, I still had no official decision in my inbox. And if life had taught me anything in the past year, it was to be patient.

For the next couple of days, I held my tongue and my breath. I am a chronic oversharer (which should already be obvious to you), so this was incredibly hard. On my final day of classes, May 9th, I suited up to go to the Giant Stairs (a natural stair-step basalt formation on Bailey's Island, ~20 minutes from Bowdoin) with my beloved Oceanography students for my last lab section as their TA. It was a blustery day, warm and sunny on campus but cool and gray on the coast. We climbed around on sedimentary rocks, admired tiny garnets and huge quartz intrusions, and watched the waves crash against the jagged coastline that had once been connected to Africa before Pangaea rifted apart.

Toward the end of the lab period, I was standing on the basalt pictured above, right next to Collin Roesler, professor of Oceanography, who had changed my life through her teaching and advising. I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the waves and foam, and right there on the screen was the email notification I had been waiting for since October 2017. I gasped, turned to Collin (who immediately knew what had happened and threw her arms around me) and burst into tears as our class cheered. In that utterly perfect moment, all of the stress and frustration evaporated. For this, it was all worth it.

Happy people...

...and my happy place.

After receiving my notification, I was deliriously happy. So much so that I almost forgot I had no idea where I had been placed! At the end of the next week, I received an email from the Commission that made my head spin: Instead of being placed in La Rioja or Asturias, I would be a part of Fulbright Spain's first year in the Canary Islands. At first, I panicked a little--I hadn't even remotely prepared myself for this possibility. But then, after some quick googling, everything began to make sense. These were volcanic islands where the people spoke Spanish... And I just so happened to be an Earth & Oceanographic Science/Hispanic Studies double major! I've researched and found thousands of other reasons to be excited, but I'm so close to arrival now that I might as well ground truth them before sharing.

Image taken from PMF IAS

And thus the Canary Current was born! Thank you to my dad, namer of all things important, for the brilliant idea. One part eastern boundary current in the North Atlantic gyre, one part life update blog for friends and family who would like to follow the next 9 months of my life. If the lead up was any indication, it should be anything but usual.