Looking for things underwater

It’s surprising (or maybe it isn’t) just how quickly the beautiful and exotic can become mundane. Pretty soon, fish caught hours before you eat it is just the standard (Silvia: This fish was caught yesterday? Gross); if the water is less than absolutely clear for fifteen feet down, it’s not worth going in; and the scooter becomes more of a hassle than a pleasure (actually, that last one’s not true, I still really love driving the scooter).


But then this past Friday, we went snorkeling for the first time in a while. (Although once again, I didn’t actually have a snorkel, just flippers and goggles, so I guess it was really just goggling. Kind of like Googling, but underwater.) We swam for quite a while, and at around the midpoint we found ourselves on Crab Cay, the islet we had been to before about two months ago. There was nobody else there at all, so we had it all to ourselves for the afternoon, and took advantage by lying down on the dock in the late afternoon sun for half an hour and doing nothing in particular. Sitting there on the dock, with the entirety of Providencia y Santa Catalina spread out in front of us and the sun setting into the mountains, it struck me anew, being as isolated and far away from normalcy as I’ve ever been. And then we jumped back in the water, and startled a cloud of calamari into spraying their ink and darting away, and the feeling stayed. Coral reefs will do that to you.


So will meeting other people who are just as intent on savoring the experience, culinary and otherwise. The other day we made friends with a Swiss couple who was here on their honeymoon, and met up with them several times. The first time, they brought along a Spanish couple they had met, and after a not insignificant period of requisite awkwardness, we all ended up talking about Christmas traditions in different countries. (Turns out the Swiss Santa is considerably more violent than the U.S. version, and the Catalonian manger has at least one figurine you would never expect to be there. Hint: the Spanish name is el Cagon*.) The Spanish couple left the next day, and later in the week we went out for dinner again with the Swiss couple and one other Swiss woman they met at their hotel. To the extremely incongruous sound of Enya playing from the restaurant speakers, I ended up talking with the Swiss couple for a while about health care, but more generally about medicine (they’re both med students in their residencies, she’s an OB/GYN and he’s focused on public health). It was really interesting to hear them speak, both from the perspective of doctors who know a lot about medicine and members of a different system who have an outside view on the U.S. And though health care can’t really compete with miles of clear blue water, afterwards it did seem just a little bit new.

*it means "the shitter." It's apparently pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

One Month Left

Things left to do: go snorkeling at various places around the island; kayak through the mangrove forest (possibly); make it to Mancanillo on a weekend; go to the highest point on the island, from which you can see the next island over, San Andres. Return to our original shack before we leave, just to look at it again with a very different perspective; go with the waitress at our restaurant to some of the nightspots on the island, where she said she would show us around. Try and learn as much Spanish as I can. Say goodbye to Mario and Ingrid; Suzette and Herman and Sandra; Greg; the slightly crazy guy who runs a bar on our beach; Deibis and Teresa. Return our moto (sadly), and figure out a reliable way of getting to the airport early in the morning. Then go to Bogota, explore the city for three days with Silvia as a guide. Pack up and fly home the morning of December 21, leaving behind Christmas celebrations in Bogota for the ones at home.



Things done: swim and eat, and a lot of both of those; learn how to ride a scooter; sample tamarind wine (very sweet and a little firey). Overcome many obstacles in pursuit of living on a small tropical island, albeit temporarily. Discover Kitty Wharf, and explore the island; go scuba diving and snorkeling; develop better Spanish comprehension, if not speaking so much. Resume running; read a lot, write a lot, and listen to a lot of music. Attempt a diet for three months that consists almost solely of seafood, rice, and plantains. Watch a large number of mediocre American movies dubbed in Spanish—action and horror movies are better, romantic comedies worse. Make some acquaintances, though not really many friends. Look at the water a lot; develop a new appreciation for laundry machines and high-speed Internet connections. Engage in all-out warfare with the entirety of the insect class. Come across as a complete tourist, despite having been here three months. Forget things I’ve done, and things that I should still do. Pre-empt nostalgia.

Disliking Things

Since I’ve been here, the scope of my leisure activities has been reduced significantly. There are some very notable new ones, to be sure (scooter-driving, beach-going), but generally, I read, write, listen to music, and watch the occasional movie when the appropriate channels decide to work at the appropriate time. Consequently, my consumption of all those things has gone way up, and one of the nice perks of being here is that it has offered me the time to really delve into worthwhile projects and reconsider things that had become so familiar as to probably need that reconsideration.

One of these projects has been educational: I’m trying to introduce Silvia to classical music. This has the potential to be a more difficult project than it sounds: the term “classical music” encompasses such an incredible variety of styles, sounds, moods, and ideas that it seems self-defeating to just put my iTunes on random and click “play.” Not every incarnation of classical music might be to everyone’s taste, and there is a definite tendency towards extreme generalization when encountering classical music initially, a tendency to dislike or like a single piece by a single composer and then apply that judgment to the rest of the repertory. This almost inevitably results in disappointment.

Part of the problem here is the tendency for classical music to be viewed as something distinct from the rest of the arts. While few people would dislike a particular painting and infer that they then must dislike all painting, that attitude ends up turning a lot of people off to classical music. I completely (well, mostly) understand that impulse: classical music is intrinsically a lot more nebulous and harder to get a handle on than many other things, and the way that you absorb it is drastically different from the way we generally absorb popular music (two key differences being classical music’s length and kind of narrative as compared to pop). Furthermore, there tends to be a pretty big culture of elitism and pretentiousness (or at least a perception of one) surrounding classical music, and that air of “Unless you play three instruments and know the key of Chopin’s fifteenth nocturne from memory, you’ll never really be one of us.” (It’s f minor, incidentally, and thank you iTunes.)

But all that is a totally valid way to encounter classical music for the first, or even fourth or fifth time. It’s true: it’s hard, it’s abstract, it’s opaque and it can be pretentious as all hell. If that’s your reaction, then don’t try and ignore it, and don’t try to tell yourself that you just don’t “get it” and that you’re just not a classical music person. Use that reaction as a starting point: if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s okay. Visceral, emotional responses—informed or uninformed, biased or unbiased, strong or mild—provide the starting point from which to move forward, and the one point of secure leverage around which you can pivot the whole world.

Figure out why you don’t like it, and know that for now, that particular stimulus generates that response in you. Try listening to something else; the breadth of the art is so large that there is probably something you will react to well. (If you really just don’t like anything at all, nothing whatsoever, then I got nothing. You just don’t like it. It happens.) When you discover something you do like, figure out why it appeals to you and leads you to feel that way. Encountering something new is a process, like anything else, and progress doesn’t come overnight, or even over several. But as long as you’re starting from a place of honest reaction, that journey can be undertaken with as much confidence and surety as any self-proclaimed connoisseur .

And to a certain extent, I think that same process can inform one’s encounter with other things as well. When it comes to traveling, it can be immensely counterproductive to force yourself to acknowledge the beauty or history or richness of a place. For sure, all of those things should be acknowledged, but forcing that judgment renders it hollow, all form but no content. In a way, you have to be unafraid to find things uninteresting, to let yourself be bored, so that the moments of genuine meaning are free to be truly genuine. Not everything comes in earth-shattering revelations or even revelations at all; some things are exactly what they seem and no more. Some things are more than that too, and as always, it’s a tricky process of negotiation. Sinking into complacency and apathy is at least as bad as seeing only what you want to see, so this is definitely a case of “everything in moderation, especially moderation.”

So while I will probably continue to find Kitty Wharf beautiful (see below for supporting evidence) until the time I leave, I have to remind myself that sometimes, negative reactions can be a valid way of encountering the world as well as positive ones. And though you’d have to ask her, Silvia can probably testify to this as well with classical music. Not everything I’ve played for her has been a well-received by a long shot, but openly acknowledging the lack of appeal or understanding in reaction to particular pieces has allowed for some overwhelming successes: she is currently in the midst of a love affair with Tchaikovsky that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. (And if you’re looking for a place to jump-start listening to classical music, or just for something to do when you’re procrastinating at work, check out the first 3-4 minutes of his piano concerto. It’s the kind of thing that storms out of the speakers, that demonstrates the full, bombastic potential of music in all its overwrought emotional glory. Even if you don’t intend to listen to another classical piece ever (and you should! it's good), it’s worth checking out. I’m sure it’s on youtube somewhere.)

And in the interest of full disclosure (and to belie all of this), I should confess that I've been listening to energetic pop music like nonstop lately.

Kitty Wharf in Pictures

I had planned to put the pictures below in order so that you would be seeing everything as though you were walking there, but I cannot for the life of me get blogger to let me arrange my pictures as I want, so they're a little discombobulated. But here they are, more or less in sequence:

Getting off the scooter, the stone wall with the path is just visible in the background.

Fire ant tree


Coconuts!

Here you begin to come out of the forest



















standing on the wharf, looking to the left













The beach to the right


















The beach on the left, with a waterfall and a rope swing.
















Looking back out towards the ocean, and trying to give a sense of the clarity of the water.
















Some more views, and some conchs
















And my semi-successful attempt at using my camera timer

I will never complain about mosquitoes again.

That's a lie. I almost certainly will. But I will never mean it as much as I mean it now.

Unknown Beaches

Because this island is so small and there’s really just the one road, it’s easy to think that we’ve seen everything that there is to see here. But when we stop and explore we keep discovering new things, primarily new beaches. The first one we found is a few minutes past where we live. It was bigger and emptier than our normal beach, and is supposed to be one of the hot nightspots on the island. The road to this beach is a long, windy and hilly one that seems almost entirely uninhabited and is great fun to drive on the scooter, and on the way back reveals a good portion of the island spread out between the palm tress lining the road.

The other beach that we went to more recently (sorry, no pictures yet), may or may not be called Kiki Wharf (it’s unclear because everyone always says it in Creole). Silvia found it on her own first, after having four or five different people guide her closer and closer to the place. It’s very well hidden, and unless you knew what you were looking for you would never notice it. You have to park on the street, and go through a break in an old stone wall and hike down an overrun path for a few minutes, which just generally contributes to the feeling of seclusion and secrecy of the place. You eventually emerge along a little freshwater stream onto a rock outcropping that divides two beaches. The two beaches are both backed by cliffs, and are clearly known only to the locals, furthering the perpetual quest of overcoming our tourist status. We explored the one on the left first. The beach is small and crescent shaped and nestled into the cliff wall behind it. The rock extends fairly far on both sides so that it feels wonderfully private and secluded. In the middle, falling from the cliff above there are two freshwater waterfalls that land in the middle of the beach. There’s no way to walk there so you have to swim to get to the beach after jumping off the rock outcropping in the middle. The water there seems even clearer than usual; standing several feet above water that was maybe four or five feet deep I could still see everything crystal clear on the sea floor. It’s an incredibly idyllic spot, easily one of my favorite places on the island so far. There’s also a rope swing tied to a tree on the top of the cliff that hangs all the way down to the water and requires some probably inadvisable climbing to get to. We used it a little bit closer to the water, but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as it probably would higher up. I made my way around to higher ground, but after contemplating just how far away I was from the water as well as the fact that it was low tide, I decided to wait until another time to actually give it a shot.

We swam past this beach to find another one just around a bend in the island, this one almost entirely rocky. The water is so clear that every swimming expedition turns into chasing after fish, and there were a few rock and coral formations that had huge numbers of colorful fish I could see from above the water. There was even a ray that Silvia spotted, then lost track of, just before I realized we were basically standing on top of it and sprinted away (or whatever the swimming equivalent of sprinting is) because the ray seemed agitated by our proximity and neither of us particularly wanted to be on top of an agitated stingray.

Other updates:

• I had an actual dialogue in Spanish with someone! And they didn’t even look at me like I was an idiot. Admittedly, it was mostly because all I said was “Bien,” “Si,” and “Mas o menos,” but it was still a big moment for me.
• Our channel lineup changes randomly and inexplicably, but the one constant is the local Providencia channel, whose sole purpose seems to be showing b-roll montages of the island set to reggae. We did get to watch most of Aladdin in Spanish the other day (or should I say Aladdín), during which I got to enjoy the classics “Tienes un amigo fiel en mi” and “Un mundo ideal.” (Thankfully, melody transcends the language barrier.) Unfortunately the cable decided to go out just as it was about to show Kill Bill, which I had been looking forward to for days (it was basically my Friday night out), but from what I could see it was in Spanish anyway, and that is one movie that really should not be dubbed. The Queen of the Crime Council speech, which is one of my favorite things in that movie, is just not the same when Lucy Liu is standing on the table holding that guy’s head and mouthing words while somebody else screams curses in Spanish on the soundtrack.
• Having automotive transportation is great.
• One of the things I love about Providencia is how chill everyone is. On multiple occasions, when we have not had exact change and the vendor couldn’t make change, they just give us the food or whatever and we promise to come back and pay them later. That just seems kind of great to me.
• I just got La Traviata from Silvia and am listening to it now, and man, I am not always the hugest fan of opera, but Verdi knew what he was doing.