Random images

I like the analogy that was shared with me in a Buddhist monastery, that when you’re meditating and thoughts just pop into your head, it’s like sitting under a bridge where traffic goes over it. You don’t know where it’s been and you don’t know where it’s going and you just leave it at that and let it pass on. That’s fine, but, I’m not very good at meditating and I am very interested in the random things that pop into my head.

In this world of technology and social media, we all have a completely ridiculous amount of photos on our phones, laptops and whatever. I always think that when I have a few hours to wait at an airport, I’ll sort out my photos but I never do ……but just imagine, compared to that, how many images are stored in your brain. I’ve been to a lot of places, drank coffee and beer and ate stuff in a load of bars and cafes in piazzas and around dingy corners and don’t forget that I’m 72 so that multiplies the images somewhat. They’re all there somewhere and sometimes, randomly, with no conscious signal from me, one of those images pops into my head.

Yesterday it was a balcony in Honduras at a chocolate farm where I was drinking hot, chilli chocolate and admiring the jungle. I liked being there so while I was weeding in a flower bed in my garden in Bulgaria, I relived that cup of chocolate…..but why did my brain pick that? I could add here that this was one of the few very positive images of Honduras which is probably the most boring country I’ve ever visited. How can a whole country be boring? Two things in this case – it’s a very dangerous place – when I went, a few years ago, it was in the top 3 places that you don’t really want to go to. It’s been overtaken in the charts by many places with wars but that doesn’t mean it’s a safe place now.

This took up a lot of energy. Being a woman, I have a particular level of awareness about my surroundings at all times – all women do, but in Honduras, you had to be so much more alert and be ready to recognise danger everywhere so that eventually, you just can’t be bothered to go out. It also restricted wandering – I like to see what round the next corner but not only could that be quite dangerous, there was nothing there. No little bars or cafes selling local peasant food or lovely little bakeries because here’s the other thing that makes Honduras boring – the food. It’s all remarkably bland and if you don’t like fried plantain, forget it. And the worst thing of all was the lack of street food. You’d starve wandering about looking for some interesting hot snack that someone had just made up.

In case you’re wondering why I went to Honduras in the first place, I wanted to visit an old friend that I hadn’t seen for about 40 years. He was living there but fortunately, he eventually realised this wasn’t the best idea and now he lives on a beach in Morocco.

I usually eat things, when I’m travelling, on the basis that I don’t know what it is – that’s the delight of street food….but there wasn’t any in Honduras….and this is not about poverty. The poorest people in India or China can stand at the road side with a chapatti plate or a wok and produce something tasty for you to buy. The chocolate place was the only one that didn’t disappoint although it was very, very difficult to actually get to.

I think I’ll just pause here and wait till the next random image pops into my head and see where it is. I think of it like a river flowing through my memory and now and again something slips down the bank, silently splashes in and floats away to the front.

Today it was a piece of grassland in Mongolia. I stayed in a ger for a few days outside of Ulan Bator and got a very small taste of the sense of the vastness that is Mongolia. The ger is like a yurt and in this case was a small bit of income generation for the people who had the animals. A family lived in two other gers and their herd was a quite large and was an interesting mixture – cows and lots of horse and these other things that seemed to be a cross between sheep and goats. It was incredibly peaceful and beautiful and I had absolutely nothing to do all day except wander about the meadows and trees, dangle my feet in a stream, look at the animals and take pictures of all the skulls that I found.

Someone brought me food three times a day and I had a flask of hot sweet buttery tea. I’m really happy that this memory fell into me head although it has made me think about one of the most confusing conversations I’ve ever had. It was in the train station at Ulan Bator and I was buying a ticket into Russia. I wanted to get there exactly when my visa started and I thought that I had worked out the timings for this. The woman insisted that I was wrong and after a very long confusing conversation, not in English of course, I had no choice but to do what she said.

About a week later, I understood what she was telling me.

I’m very easily confused by time zones but when you generally accept that they change when you’re going east or west, you’re half way there. But time changes when you go north was a bit mind blowing and I didn’t fully get it till I had been on the train in Russia for a couple of days – all train related things in Russia are on Moscow time – doesn’t matter where you are in the country, all train timetables are Moscow time. That’s what the woman was telling me in Ulan Bator. If I’d gone with my plan, I would have arrived at the border a few hours before my visa started – good job I paid attention to her.

Cape Cod - today’s random memory. I went to University when I was about 40 and as well as the study, I took advantage of every opportunity as a student. That included a student working visa to America where I worked for a Jewish charity in Boston. My sister came over to visit me and we explored Cape Cod after almost failing to find the Empire State Building. We had met up in New York and were walking around looking at our (paper) map trying to find it, when we had the brilliant idea of looking up…..there it was, above us.

Clam chowder, wonderful creamy butterscotch ice cream and the Mexican blancket that I bought and had to carry around. Its sitting on the sofa with me now, connecting with those memories.