As we went we listened

We decided to take the bus this morning, a hundred Moroccans and me

From Moulay Idriss, one of the country's most holy cities

To Meknès

To Bab el-Khemis, the medina's western gate

We passed through olive orchards

By roadside agave and artichokes

By carob and cacti

It felt like rain

As we approached the city

The people standing in the aisle had to duck

Lest the police notice

The overcrowded bus

And as we went we listened

To the voice of the man on the radio

As he sang sacred verse

From the holy Koran

Rehumanization

A few people have asked me why I am in Morocco as a part of my current travels. I have quoted various superlatives involving Fez; biggest this, oldest that. But that does not really get to the heart of why I am here. And so the question has stayed with me. And really, it goes even deeper than that. Why travel at all, regardless of destination? This is a question that haunts me. By traveling am I being selfish, wasteful?

I flew into Casablanca yesterday afternoon from Geneva. I hopped on a train at the airport and ended up in Meknès, albeit late--like midnight late. But no worries, Hotel Majestic was right around the corner and exactly what I needed.

This morning I walked about 20 minutes over to the old town, the medina, from the new town, the ville nouvelle, where I am staying. I proceeded to get lost, literally, in the various markets or souqs of the medina--and a couple of times, at that. The souqs are quite a sight--and smell and sound and taste! Vegetables, spices, fish, meat, clothes, shoes, leather products, wood products, silver, etc. Each with its own collection of a few or a lot of nearly identical little shops. Feels like how shopping used to be, you know? All open air, little signage. No branding. Not corporate. Had shawarma, a meat and veggie sandwich, in a little place on the main square.

By this evening I had made my way to a nice open green space back in the ville nouvelle, just a few blocks from my hotel. So many people out for a post-dinner walk! I feel like I have seen this before, say in Valladolid, Mexico or Gresham, Oregon--could be anywhere, and that is starting to get to the point.

Seeing all of these people, just out enjoying the evening... couples, families, individuals; young, mid-life, old; traditional, progressive; all kinds. I was just walking around, quietly taking in the scene, when a couple of girls carrying a heavy bag walked by me. The must have been about ten years old. Their load was clearly heavy, and they started to argue a bit about it. In Arabic, of course. That was when it hit me. Rehumanization.

(The sun just set. The fairly modern guy running the internet cafe I am in turned off the cheesy French music that had been playing. The call to prayer echos in through the windows.)

That is at least part of the reason that I choose to spend some of my precious time and money on travel. The word just occurred to me hearing these girls speak, the guttural and emphatic consonants, the glottal stops of their Afroasiatic language. I do not know whether it is a real word. I certainly had not heard it before, although a cursory google search reveals that others have found a use for it, as well, e.g., here.

I feel vulnerable when I travel. I make mistakes. I do not understand things--a lot of things! It is a feeling. It is emotional. It helps me to learn to have empathy. What does it mean to be on the outside?

Moreover, I see more of the nuance and complexity of the world. Of course the world is complex you say from the comfort of your home. But it is something else entirely to feel that complexity, to smell it, to taste it. Television cannot do that. Google cannot do that. Wikipedia cannot do that.

There is such a drive to categorize, to quantify. To place people in nice, clean boxes. To stereotype. To turn people into others. But we are all human. We all feel. We all matter. We are all part of us.

That is what I was reminded of this beautiful evening in Meknès. Rehumanization. A good of a reason as any to take a trip to Morocco.

This one's for you, Kev

May 20, 2010. Moëns. That's the real deal.

Person, place, thing

This morning, now that the Kolbs have gone, I could take time to write about Genève and around, about places and things. I could focus my attention on facts and figures. On hyperlinks.

But that would miss the point, wouldn't it? Really, it's about people and relationships. About learning from one another and sharing. About conversing and lending a helping hand. That's where I'll try to focus my attention today.

By now the Kolbs, grandparents and all, are well on their way to Italy. Tomorrow, with any luck I'll be spending the night in Meknès. But for now it is simply quiet. A bright sunshiny day.

I can think back on this last week spent with the Kolbs. The beautiful singing Ruthie, the kids and I heard in John Calvin's cathedral.

The picnic lunch we all shared in a vineyard outside of Russin.

Of course, there was alone time, too. Appreciating how international of a place Geneva is. Home of the WHO, UNHCR, IFRC, etc. (The people from all over the world, speaking languages from Swahili to Vietnamese, dressed in their suites and professional-looking dresses, riding the buses into town to go to work at these places were such a stark contrast to the suped-up UN trucks I saw all over Nepal, in Kathmandu and on half-built roads in the countryside alike.)

Appreciating the Swiss sense of order on roads and hiking trails in the Jura Mountains. (Note: This is not technically an Alpine meadow.)

Simply appreciating being in a European city like Geneva, lions and all...

I've been traveling for nearly two months now. That's a while! It has given me an opportunity to think about my priorities, my values. I can get caught up in details, in information, in trivia. But really, so much of this journey has been about spending time with people: friends, new and old.

I'll fly to Morocco tomorrow afternoon, and take a train into the interior. I'll have a little over a week to eat tajines, practice my Moroccan Arabic, take in the call to prayer. (Incidentally, you can listen to the call to prayer, for example, here. And please don't misunderstand my sharing of this. I'm not Muslim or really even particularly religious. But something about hearing the call to prayer just gets me.)

And in a way I feel like this trip is coming to an end. Before I know it I'll be back home, with good people, yes. But it has been so wonderful to spend this time with my friends who are living for a time in Asia and Europe. That is something I'm truly grateful for.

What is the difference between a tuk-tuk and a rickshaw anyway?

Having a lazy afternoon in Ornex with the Kolbs. It's beautiful and sunny out, nice little breeze. A perfect spring day for mowing the lawn and barbecuing. Ribs will be had shortly. Doing some daydreaming about Nepal for now, and mentally gearing up for the journey to Morocco in a few days, as well.

One of the many things that was striking to me about Nepal was the variety of vehicles. That reminds me that Ruthie referred to me as "the alliterator" earlier this afternoon. I'll try not to get too carried away.

Anyhow, so vehicles, yes. I've already mentioned the Tata Sumos that provide a nice alternative to buses around the country. Here is an example of a typical stop on the road from Kathmandu to Hetauda in the south.

Another very common vehicle is the Tata truck. They are wonderful in so many ways. So colorful. Invariably covered with paintings of gods and other religious imagery. Things written in Nepali, which I couldn't read. And things written in English: Slow Drive, Long Life; Speed Control; etc. Here is an example from a side street in Hetauda near Tiffany's work. Note the swastika, which I discussed previously here.

Motorcycles are, of course, extremely common. Generally driven by a man, who nearly always wears a helmet. There is often a female passenger, who essentially never wears a helmet. Incidentally, both of my trekking guides for the two different treks I went on explained that owning a motorcycle is one of the surest ways to a girl's heart in Kathmandu. For the most part in Nepal dating does not happen. Marriages are arranged by parents, and there are one or more viewings of the potential bride. I was led to believe that while things are changing a bit in Kathmandu, they are still quite traditional in the rest of the country. Anyhow, so here are some motorcycles on School Road in Hetauda.

And now the answer you've all been waiting for to the question posed in the title of this post. My understanding is that these are tuk-tuks, right off of Main Road in Hetauda.

And that this is a rickshaw, also off of Main Road in Hetauda.

In Nepal rickshaws are very common, both in places like touristy Thamel in Kathmandu, as well as in ordinary everyday places like Hetauda. Honestly, I never took a ride in either. They are omnipresent, though, and very exotic coming from the US. Their utility seems fairly self-evident.

And now the smell of the ribs is beginning to completely overwhelm any thoughts I might have had an hour ago about distant Nepal. Time to eat!

A reminder that physicists are frequently furry

A few days ago the Kolb family and I visited CERN, where Jeff is currently working. An interesting note, the acronym CERN does not stand for the lab's current name, but rather for the council that originally set the lab up in 1952, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, see here. What is CERN? Well, perhaps most interestingly for most people reading this post, it is the birthplace of the World Wide Web, although of course that has essentially nothing to do with the main purpose of the lab, physics, which I'll get to in a moment. Here is a photo of the office where the web was invented.

So why does CERN exist? I suppose at the simplest level the point of the bulk of the research being done at CERN is to improve our understanding of how subatomic particles behave and interact with one another. Incidentally, this is not too dissimilar from the research I did as a graduate student. You can think of a particle accelerator like the one at CERN like a really big microscope. The reason it costs so much is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to "see" these phenomena.

Jeff is working on the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment.  Oh, I almost forgot to say, CERN, and the Large Hadron Collider, in particular, is huge. Like 27 kilometers around huge. Here Jeff is pointing to Ornex, France, where his family lives. Note that it is within the ring of the LHC. Crazy, huh?

Anyhow, in the morning he took me over to the CMS site. Here is the control room. Very cool. A lot of CERN feels like it could be straight out of a science fiction movie.

In addition to being on call from time to time, Jeff works in here occasionally, monitoring various components of the CMS experiment.

As you might imagine, it takes quite a bit of computational power to make a machine of this scale work, let alone to crunch through all of the data that is produced. Here is one of many rooms full of computers at CERN. And by the way, a very significant portion of the data processing is actually done in other sites all over the world.

For lunch Jeff, Ruthie, their kids and I went up to one of the cafeterias at CERN. It was here, in particular, that I was pleasantly reminded of just how frequently physicists are furry. And really, whether or not an individual physicist is furry, they are certainly likely to be at least a bit eccentric, and that's wonderful.

Towards the end of my tour, we walked by a statue of a particular manifestation of Shiva, apparently a gift to CERN from the Indian government.

In a way I kind of felt like I had come full circle. There was also a quote by Fritjof Capra, author of the Tao of Physics among other books. I read this book when I was a rather young and impressionable seventeen year old. And I realize that reading it may be part of the reason why I decided to study physics and theoretical high energy physics, in particular. He painted such a beautiful picture of the world. I think in some ways, though, I think I misunderstood what he was trying to convey, and just took away a somewhat naive, if not downright crude caricature of his profound ideas. In graduate school, as I learned about the scientific method on a much deeper level, about assumptions and approximations in science, about experimental error, I became a bit jaded and came to strongly disagree with arguments such as those put forth by Capra. I found them misleading at best. But now I feel a little more relaxed about the whole thing. You could call it intellectually laziness if you like. I'd rather say I'm a bit more at peace, a bit more wise maybe even. I should be careful, though. I don't want to get ahead of myself... Regardless, it was great to visit CERN, and be reminded of all of this, in particular after just having been in the East. Way to be.

Color in Nepal

One thing I really noticed during my time in Nepal was how colorful everything was, and I have a few examples I'd like to share. A picture says a thousand words and all that.

In between the two treks I went on, in Langtang and the Everest region, I spent time in Kathmandu and Hetauda, a medium-sized town in the south where Tiffany is living and volunteering. I especially noticed color in these more southern, more Hindu places. The more Buddhist north was somewhat colorful, as well, I suppose, but not nearly to the same extent.

For example, this was a very common scene walking into town from Tiffany's apartment.

I love the saris and kurta surwals. But maybe even more than the clothes, I really appreciated the judicious use of the umbrella for blocking the sun in Hetauda. This was the most southern and therefore the hottest part of the country that I visited, and the umbrella usage was unlike anything I saw anywhere else. Very nice.

Another colorful part of Hetauda and the surrounding region was all of the red flowering trees. This photo starts to give you a sense, although it doesn't quite capture just how brilliant these trees are this time of year.

One my last Tata Sumo ride back up to Kathmandu from Hetauda the day before I left Nepal--which was just a few days ago, crazy--we stopped at the Dakshinkali Temple just a few kilometers before reaching Kathmandu. Incidentally, the goddess, Kali, and Hinduism more broadly, is so interesting to me these days. I know quite a bit more than I did before my trip to Nepal. I guess at this point it pretty much just blows my mind. So for example, I honestly don't know what the goddess, Kali, is all about. From what I've read and some of what I saw in Nepal she seems like a pretty dark character. But I've heard and read things, too, about her somehow being viewed as a mother goddess. Who knows? Anyhow, when we stopped there by the temple to change a flat tire, a young man came over and offered everyone in our Tata Sumo this tray of tika powder, etc.

All of the Hindus in the Tata Sumo, i.e., everyone but me, took a healthy portion of the tika powder on one of the flowers and applied it judiciously to their forehead. I believe it must have been some kind of minor festival of some sort, as I had never seen anything along these lines on any of my previous Tata Sumo rides past this temple.

In Kathmandu there was quite a bit of color, in particular at Pashupatinath, which is one of the holiest if not the holiest Hindu site in Nepal. Pashupatinath, by the way, is a temple of Pashupati, a particular version of Shiva associated with animals. As you walk in towards the temple complex, you are bombarded with stalls full of color. There are the beautiful marigolds, which would appear to play an important role in Hinduism that I don't quite understand.

There was the tika powder, and not only the most common reds, oranges, and yellows, but other colors as well.

And there were the widows, the female sadhus, or Hindu holy people, who hang out at the temple.

So much beautiful color all over the country. Really, this is just the smallest little taste of what I saw. One of the most important things that is missing is the clothing that women wear and the tikas that men, women, and children so commonly have. Hard to get photos of people sometimes, I suppose...

And now as I sit in Jeff and Ruthie's place outside of Geneva, the color is starting to fade. But I know Nepal is just as colorful as the day I left. I don't see that changing anytime soon.