Archive Page 20

Grottaglie Or Bust!: Fame Fest ’10

Published September 27, 2010 Abandoned Places , Budget , Grottaglie , Independent , Italy , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe 1 Comment
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Siesta-dazed and still covered in little bits of glitter, I’m holed up in my hotel room in Grottaglie. Laptop on my lap, balcony door open a crack, listening to the moan of the fan, I don’t know where to start.

I could spend the next two months writing about this weekend, here in this random little Puglian town, wedged between plastic-tarp-covered vineyards and industrial, cloud-coughing skylines. It’s at times like these when you realize just how insufficient your own words are—how close they can sometimes come to capturing this thing, this thing you’re always circling and chasing, but that ultimately always goes “fluttering through your nets,” as Virginia Woolf said.

This weekend has been a little of everything I love in travel: discovering killer art, adventuring around abandoned buildings and ancient caves, eating great food, meeting awesome people. I came here for the opening of Fame Festival, a DIY street art event put on by the one-man-powerhouse/party Angelo Milano, that is slowly transforming the forgotten little town of Grottaglie. I’d been following the build-up on various art blogs, and it seemed like a pretty damn good excuse to go on an adventure.

There’s about 100 different angles to write about this from, and I’m sure I’ll be torturing everyone with posts for months on end. So instead of giving the 3000-word play-by-play (you’re welcome), I’ll give you the highlights. And some pictures.

Fame Festival
“Success, celebrity” in English, “hunger, starvation” in Italian, Fame Festival is the blood, sweat and glitter (more on that later) of one dude, Angelo Milano. Three years ago, he started inviting international artists to his little hometown for short residencies. The artists produced prints at his studio, Studio Cromie, produced ceramics using the town’s ancient ceramics studios, and threw up street art pieces all over the city. The festival has grown, gained a fair amount of notoriety, and a small crew of artists/collectors/enthusiasts/fanatics make the mission down to Grottaglie for a complete and total adventure.

Angelo welcomes you with all the enthusiasm and graciousness in the world, arranging hotel rooms and rides from the airport. On the evening of the preview, he takes the gang load of visitors back to his grandmother’s house, where his dad shakes your hand and his mom cooks a huge traditional Italian dinner. The opening party is complete with DJs, Puglian wine and a diverse mix of locals and art lovers; you then trek across town to Studio Cromie, where Angelo goes ape shit on the dance “floor,” dumping about 8 bags of glitter on everyone and generally having about as much fun as humanly possible.

You see everyone stagger around town with glitter stuck in their hair the next day. You’re given, on preview night, a map of the city marked with all the street art pieces, and you wander around, ticking off the 60+ list and snapping photos. It’s like a treasure hunt.

Coolest part: adventuring around an abandoned monastery filled with art.

Grottaglie
The town itself is awesome. Not in a knock-your-socks off way, but in a slow, subtle way that sneaks up on you. It’s got an old town, complete with winding roads and a couple UNESCO sites, as well as a new part, devoid of billboards and with only one corporate chain. The whole town siestas from 12-4. You can get dinner at a restaurant for 6 euros. Old women say, “Ciao, bella.” Teenagers hang out in cafes til 2am.

The city’s surrounded by ancient caves that were inhabited until just a few decades ago, when the Italian government kicked everyone out. You can go and poke around in them, see the remnants of old cooking areas, frescos peeling off the walls.

The Peeps, and The Adventure
So what kind of wingnuts travel all the way to bumfuck Puglia for an art festival? Awesome ones. I met so many fresh people, one of those this-is-why-I-travel experiences that you know is going to linger with you for a long time.

There’s also the adventure aspect. No guidebooks mention Grottaglie. The bus from Naples dropped me off on the side of the road; luckily I’d had the wherewithal to print out a Google map the night before. You traipse around the random town that epitomizes off-the-beaten-path, and it reminds you, again, why you travel.

Street Art
I’m no expert on street art, but I got to meet a lot of people who were. And it’s clear that we’re on the brink of something, something bigger than just the art world. Street art is a kind of dialouge with a city, and it’s changing cities. Street art as architecture, urban development, tourism—there’s a lot to discuss.

But right now, legs crossed on this hideous hotel bedspread, I’m feeling incredibly tired and incredibly grateful. I gave myself an extra day here, to hang out with the wifi and sleep, before I take off for Dubrovnik tomorrow. But even if I were going home tonight, it would have all been worth it. Fame Fest was one of the best parties I’ve ever gone to, and one of the best adventures a traveler could hope for.

See Naples, And Then…

Published September 23, 2010 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Italy , Places , Sola , Sola 2 Comments
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Die, the saying goes. They’re not fucking around.

I’d really wanted to go to Naples when I was last in Italy. But my then-boyfriend read the LP description—chaotic, dirty, somewhat dangerous—and nixed the idea. He liked Copenhagen, Scandindavia—clean, calm, safe cities filled with bicycles and crisp air, low unemployment and Nordic blondes with pale beautiful skin.

He can have it. Give me Naples.

I got out of the Metro stop and walked the five blocks to my hostel. It took about that long to totally fall in love with the honking, swarming, spinning mess of it all, wedged with sharp shadows and bright sun between stories of faded facades that seem too tight, haphazard, overgrown. There seems no law or order to the flow of life on the street—cars and motorinos and pedestrians—but rather a kind of rhythm. Not a heartbeat, even and steady, but a wild palpitation, erratic and oxygen-deprived, that somehow keeps beating, keeps from careening.

It only seems like chaos. There’s something actually there, holding it all together.

I want it.

Give me traffic and noise. Give me trash piles and laundry lines. Give me jackhammers and roaring motorbikes. Give me a honk of warning but don’t slow down.

Give me scaffolding and shadows that swallow whole streets. Give me littered ruins surrounded by sidewalk. Give me a small dead bird flattened against the black stone of the street. Give me the smell of fish in open-air markets.

Give me gypsy beggars and business men; give me round bellies on white rocks, tanning in the sun. Give me a woman bathing in a baroque fountain. Give me stray dogs sleeping. Give me 1000 cigarette butts and worn skin on beautiful women. Give me immigrants selling purses; give me hustlers pawning cans of salt.

Give me graffiti. Lots and lots of graffiti.

Give me Naples—give me this city and its swarm, give me something inside my own soul.

Pigneto: The Rome For Outsiders, and Me

Published September 22, 2010 Independent , Italy , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Street Art , Subculture , Western Europe 9 Comments

Here’s a little rule of thumb I learned yesterday: if a neighborhood has a shitton of street art, it’s probably the neighborhood I wanna be in.

It’s funny coming back to a place; I never really do it. I was interested to experience the difference. Three years ago, Rome was hands down my favorite European city—probably because it was the most vivaciously chaotic of the cities I’d visited in Europe. Life was different then; for one, I was traveling with my then-boyfriend, who I’d break up with a month after returning home. Nuff said.

Rome didn’t seem so intense and frenetic this time around; it felt much more manageable. I landed with 8 hours of scattered sleep within the previous 48 hour period, and decided to power through the day in order to acclimate myself to the time difference (it worked).

I wandered through the city in a haze of memory, surprised by how my legs took me to all the familiar spots—muscle memory of a city. There was the Colosseum, aching in its magnificent crumble; there was this piazza and that piazza; there was the terrible Chinese restaurant I dragged us to in a vegan moment of tofu craving. It’s funny when a place has only existed in your mind, at one very specific time, funny to see it still going on, living and breathing, like going back into a dream that had kept on dreaming without you.

I remember my dad saying that Rome made him feel his own mortality, and I can definitely say that’s still true for me. There’s something about the ancient greatness, the ruins and remains of glory, that really serve to check you. Just in case, you know, you got to thinking your shit really mattered, there’s Rome to remind you how inconsequential it all is—how small, how much of one shining moment you are. All your joy and heartbreak, your own impending ruin—it will all come and go, and Rome will still be there. You’ll be lucky if your bones last as long as Rome’s.

That being said, Rome isn’t really about anything I’m about. It’s one of the world’s great cities, and has been for thousands of years, and I love it for that, but everything that I get stoked on—diversity, punk rock, hip hop, street art, tattoos, counterculture—Rome doesm’t give a shit about. Why should it? It had Julius Caesar; Rome doesn’t have time for trends.

Walking around center, you get to feeling like an absolute slob—an(other) American slob. Everyone has so much style and grace in Rome; how do their clothes fit so well? How do they all look so effortlessly chic and beautiful, and what the hell is wrong with you in your Toms and Talk Is Poison shirt?

And then you take a rickety street car down, along desolate tracks and amid rows of block buildings, into the rundown side of town, and you realize: that’s because all the Romans in the center are rich. Rich people of any culture look good, and are inherently alientating (to me at least). You get amid a neighborhood a little more like your own, and you realize there’s more to Roman life than tailored suits and killer shoes.

Pigneto is the Mission Dolores/Williamsburg of Rome—an old-school, traditional neighborhood first overtaken by immigrants, now overtaken by hipsters artist types otherwise entirely abscent from Rome. Along its shady streets, you see little old Italian men shuffling around; African, Chinese and Bangladeshi immigrants hanging out, free of their blankets of goods to sell; young Italian sitting in doorways smoking. I love dynamic cultural collisions like that; they’ve been known to bring much of the forementioned things I love. Including street art.

I’d headed out to Pigneto in the first place to meet up with Jessica Stewart, who runs the very kick-ass Rome Photo Blog, covering contemporary art, street art and other radom wonderful things around Rome. I had some time to kill before we met, so I roamed around and took photos.

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I met Jessica at Necci, a bar/restaurant that’s been around since the 1920s and was featured in an issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller last year. We sat at a table under a tree (which only kind of shielded us from the rain) and she told me about the neighborhood, about the art scene and ex-pat life in Rome.

“Rome is a very play-it-safe, stay-with-the-pack kind of city,” she told me. She spoke about the city’s slowness to accept street art in its galleries. “It’s a very traditional city. It’s hard to impress people in Rome—you know, when you’ve got the Colosseum right there, it’s hard to feel like you can do anything in comparison, or anything that matters.”

There were, she told me (and as she’s documented on her blog), a small handful of artists, living out in Pigneto and San Lorenzo, that were doing their own thing. And acceptance was growing, along with recognition.

“The one thing one of the artists said that was true,” she told me, our shoulders hunched under the branches and drizzle, faces half-lit from the barroom light, “is that, if you can make it in Rome, you can make it anywhere.”

It seemed true enough.

Serendipity, Street Art and the Best Layover EVER

Published September 22, 2010 Damn, I've Got It Good , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Lonely Girl Loves , New York , Places , Sola , Solo , Street Art , Subculture , Transit , USA 5 Comments
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It’s a fantasy common enough to warrant TV commercials, (porno) movie plots and a voyeuristic story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: you get seated next to an attractive person on an airplane. And you’re stuck beside each other, awkwardly negoitiating the small space for hours.

As most travelers will readily tell you, this is about as rare to air travel as getting bumped up to first class. No, rarer. The cast of characters usually beside you in the sardine can of coach include snorers, fidgeters, wiley children and consumers of mysterious day-old food. It really serves to drive home to actual percentage of datable people in the world’s population. I, for one, had given up on the fantasy and resigned myself to the mere hope of a recently showered individual that can fit in their own seat (which is also more or less when I’ve resigned myself in dating—and have been known to compromise on as well).

Well, holy shit if the travel gods didn’t smile down on me. And homeboy wasn’t just attractive—he was rad. As I discovered, not just during the flight, but on our 10-hour layover spent adventuring around Brooklyn together, spotting street art and searching for obscure vinyl.

I’d noticed him passing through security (as I was being pulled aside to have my purse dismembered in search on nonexistent weapons): hip without being pretentious, stubble beard, cowboy boots, a bulging bag of records. But I didn’t give it much thought until I was settling into my dismal seat in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms. I watched him struggle to jam his record bag into the overhead compartment and smiled. When he looked down at his boarding pass, scanned the aisle numbers and ended up standing right beside me, we both smiled.

Sebastian had been traveling around the US for 5 weeks, and was on his way back to Zurich. He had a couple lines in his forhead, the well-traveled beginning of wrinkles. He had the worn-smooth hands of a cook, the black strand of a necklace peeking out from under his shirt. He had killer taste in music.

We chatted about life and travel and bands (“I saw some great shows in San Francisco.” “Like who?” “Ty Segall.” “On Wednesday? At the Rickshaw Stop? I was totally there!”). We talked about his trip and my trip (“I’ve got a 10 -hour layover.” “Me too. I was gonna go into the city, hang out. Better than being at the airport.” “That was my plan too.”) We fell into the fitful half-sleep of confined space and over air-conditioning; woke up stiff necked and lip smacking, ditched our bags at a luggage locker and rode the subway into Brooklyn.

It was a shuttered-up and bare-sidewalked Sunday morning on Bedford, ground zero of Brooklyn hipness. There was a record store Sebastian wanted to get back to, that wouldn’t be open for hours. We rubbed our aching eyes and looked for coffee.

I consulted my iPhone. “Oh shit, there’s a Blue Bottle?!” I exclaimed. “Yeah,” said a girl passing by, “it’s around the corner.”

We sat in the sun and drank our hand-dripped cups of black, watched the parade of dogs and toddlers and cool kids. We bombed around the neighborhood, going nowhere in particular, until the shops thinned and the wide walls of warehouses took over. And we began spotting some kick-ass street art.

All the pictures are on my phone, which for some reason my new (new to me, that is) netbook won’t download. So expect a post when I get home. But just to tease, I saw Roa, Faile, Space Invader, Gaia, and a whole bunch of folks I didn’t know but really wanted to.

We hit the record stores that had brought us there. Sebastian confessed to me that he was a music nerd with a record fetish. “There’s so many more records in the States,” he told me. He’d already shipped a crate back to Zurich. “It’s okay, though, it’s still cheaper than trying to buy it in Europe. If you can find it at all.”

We got back on the train, dazed and subdued with our long flights looming. We looked back through his pictures—he’d ended up going to Burning Man, on (another) serendipitous whim, and I leaned in over his shoulder to look at the small viewfinder, its story of dust and fire, the wind that moves through desolate places.

Our shoulders touched, just a little in the shudder of the train. I felt no desire to make a move, so to speak; it was enough to have a small flutter in my stomach. It was enough to have met someone awesome, totally serendipitously. It was enough to have wandered around sleep-dazed and discovering, to have sat on stoops smoking in the Brooklyn sun.

Sometimes you don’t need a big climax, don’t need to get all flirty and sleezy or anything at all. Sometimes it’s enough to feel liked, not just desired, and to genuinely like someone back. Not cause you want to make-out with them necessarily, but just because they’re rad.

We sat at the bar of a jokey airport restaurant, where Sebastian indulged in the last American hamburger of his trip. NFL games were flashing on the various television sets, the jarring loudspeaker announcements of boardings and departings echoing through the space.

“Sebastian,” I said, “you are by far the coolest person I’ve ever sat next to on an airplane.”

We hugged. “I had a great time,” he smiled. “Me too.”

And I walked away, through the terminal to my own adventure.

In Transit, Transitory

Published September 18, 2010 Sola , Sola 3 Comments
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Grey fluorescence and thin carpet, pacing and staring, the crackle of walkie talkies—the sanitized restlessness of waiting.

I don’t mind airports, waiting in airports. I almost look forward to it, to the ritual of it—buy a trashy magazine, a bottle of water, go to the bathroom, watch the faces, cross and uncross my legs: a small moment of imposed stillness amid the go! go! go! of traveling.

I like traveling. And not just the Getting To, Arriving In, the Being There.  I enjoy the process of traveling, the physicality of moving from one place to another, the inbetweenness, the great equalizing of bodies in motion.

I used to dream in trains. I say “in,” the way some people dream in color or in black-and-white or in impossible tangles of Freudian metaphor. I’d always be moving, always in route—changing carriages, transfering trains, walking down long dimly lit corridors, riding escalators deeper and deeper into the earth, underground, to grey platforms where something would howl and headlights would gleam like little pairs of eyes.

In these dreams, I’d never be still, never sitting. The stations and trains were always crowded; I’d never be alone. And I’d never, never arrive. I wouldn’t even know where I was going, what my destination was. I’d just be moving—in transit, transitory.

I’m not sure when the dreams stopped, maybe a few years ago. I still get them, from time to time, and it’ll be like an old familiar place—a dingy station somewhere in my mind.

I’m en route again, in my real life, my waking life (which may or may not be my real life, depending on how you look at it). I’m at the beginning of a journey, bags checked and tickets printed, legs crossed and waiting.

This isn’t the “wow” moment—there’s no story here, no picture to take or pearl of wisdom to unearth. Just the waiting, the stillness, the reflections on the glass.

Traveling Itinerary-less

Published September 9, 2010 Independent , Sola 8 Comments
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I have a confession: I love planning.

I love itineraries, I love train schedules, I love booking reservations. I love figuring out exactly how much I can cram into a trip, how many overnight buses I can take, how much ground I can cover in how much time. I love scheduling in “cushion” days—two or three, no more—for rest, buffer days, and I love burning through them by packing in more shit to see. And I really love guidebooks.

This, I’ve been assured, excludes me from the illustrious elite of Real Travelers. “Ditch the itinerary!” “Slow Travel!” “Forget the Guidebook!” (words I’ve actually written for jokey articles I didn’t really believe in). You get this vision of Real Travelers: soulful types who tote around their ludicrously light backpacks, free of weathered books and long hours in internet cafes, guided by some impeccable instinct that brings them to the Right Place at the Right Time. Their buses depart whenever they happen to show up at the station; they meet kindly strangers who led them through dark streets; they happen upon “undiscovered gems” and spend weeks lazing with locals, learning their ways, nursing their orphaned children.

But most of all, I imagine these Real Travelers as open to the whims of the road. They don’t lock themselves down to itineraries, don’t construct little prisons of time constraints and force themselves to rush! rush! keep up! with some sort of idea they’ve forced upon themselves, an artificial timeframe not too dissimilar from the things we lock ourselves into at home. I imagine them listening—ears like stethoscopes to some pulse, some rhythm of the world that I can’t even feel, am only vaguely aware is even there—listening and hearing and heeding.

And I imagine, or rather I see, myself, scrambling and rushing and running myself ragged. And needing a vacation after my vacation.

I was revving up to do my upcoming trip in much the same fashion: after FAME Festival, I’d have two weeks. Two weeks! I’d cruise over to Croatia, work my way down through Montenegro and Albania, cut across Northern Greece, hightail it all the way to Istanbul, soak in the city in a furious two/three days before flying back into Rome. I was checking bus routes, maps and schedules; I was calculating days. I was getting exhausted.

I finally said fuck it. In five years of traveling, I’ve finally learned to say fuck it. True, I have no idea when I’ll be back in that part of the world, and true, there’s a lot I want to see. But when I tie myself down to self-constructed itineraries, I end up seeing everything and nothing. I’m tired. I get sick. “Oh, I’d really like to go to the Sahara, but I just don’t know if I’ll have time.” Time, time, always time.

I’m ditching the itinerary. Kind of. I’m going to Grottaglie, yes, but for the two weeks after that, I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. I don’t know. I’ve been relishing in those words, smiling when I get to say them (“Where all are you going?”), feeling them warm me up, a hot sun on a languid beach.

Maybe I’ll end up “wasting” days doing nothing, swimming and eating and strolling around tangled old streets of torn-up cobblestone. (When you’ve got nowhere to be, you can’t be late.) Maybe I’ll just go to one other place, or maybe I won’t leave Italy at all; maybe I’ll go back to Rome and spend days wandering into dank old churches and eating too much gelato. Maybe I’ll listen really really hard and get some sort of answer, not in words, but in impulse—“go here, do this.” Or maybe I’ll just fucking relax and enjoy myself.

And you never know, maybe I’ll become a Real Traveler.

Alone With Everybody: My First Post on HuffPo

Published September 2, 2010 Lonely Girl Loves , Sola , Sola , Solo , Travel Writing 7 Comments
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You know how I say on my “About” page that I’m not actually that lonely? Well, I lied. Or I half lied. What I should say is that I’m more or less, to one degree or another, constantly lonely. Except for when I travel—alone.

If that seems to make no sense to you, well, you’re in good company. For my first post as a blogger over at the Huffington Post, I muddled around with the quandary for few hundred words. Check it out here.

Boiler Room, Angel Island

Published August 27, 2010 Abandoned Places , Bay Area , California , Northern California , Places , Subculture , USA 5 Comments
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Abandoned by time but not escaped from it. Rust and debris, peeling paint and the pages of old magazines, broken glass so old its become smooth. Like some dim chamber of our hearts, we climbed into the boiler room.

Angel Island is full of abandoned buildings, the crumbling concrete and sagging frames of old military structures. A big mound in the middle of the Bay, smack in from the Golden Gate, the island is more than brown grasses and hiking trails. It was a detention center/”immigration station” during the Chinese Exclusionary Act, then an Army Post during World War II, later a missile center. Now it’s a state park, filled with picnicking families, kids on field trips, tourists on Segways.

Summer in San Francisco...

It’s nice to spend a day roaming around, out in the middle of the Bay—packing a sandwich and riding the expensive ferry and taking the long, gentle walk around the perimeter. But what I love most about Angel Island are the abandoned buildings.

Some are open to the public, stairways smashed out so there’s no chance of climbing up into the desolate upper stories. You wander around the ground level, the empty gutted rooms, staring up past the chicken scratch graffiti, wishing you could poke around the dusty remains above, crunch your sneakers through the silence.

Other buildings are fenced off, doors bolted and windows shuttered, large signs warning of the repercussions of trespassing. The grass grows up around these buildings, consuming them; sometimes you catch shadows in the broken windows and they look like your own.

We circumvented a large, fenced-off building, found a spot relatively hidden from the main path. It’d been a long time since I’d hopped a fence, wedged my toes between chainlink and landed ankle-sharp with a laugh.

We tiptoed towards the building.

The boiler room. Heavy, huffing machinery now silent, steamless, bellies swollen with the memory of a howl. Old basins and the criss-cross of empty pipes, useless and buckled. Nameless parts of an old operation. A map on the wall of where tools once hung.

We crunched around, slats of wood and indistinguishable debris, the flattened beer cans of some lost era. There’s something about crumbling places that make you whisper, a kind of reverence—not just for what has passed, but what has remained, aged and weathered and somehow still standing.

It reminds you of your own ragged heart, those places you’ve closed off, chained off, boarded up and shut. But they’re still there—forgotten, maybe, but not empty, bloodless pipes waiting, dreaming of steam.

And sometimes, something goes traipsing on in there, flicking lighters and echoing voices and leaving new footprints, in a place you swore no new footprints could go. A place you swore was sealed shut and secretly dying.

We trespassed into the abandoned boiler room, then stepped back out into the dim squint of a fog-heavy noon—our lives.

Gaia in Seoul

Published August 18, 2010 Inspiration , Lonely Girl Loves , Street Art , Subculture 5 Comments
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Something excited me. I wanted to write about it.

That’s pretty much how it goes for me, and even better when it goes well. Making my internet rounds a couple weeks ago, I came across some coverage of US-based artist Gaia‘s recent work in Seoul, a five-piece street art project that explored conflicts in Korean culture.

All my little interest antennae were piqued. But coverage was all on art sites that focus mainly on photos rather than text. I needed to know more: Why Seoul? Why this project? What was his connection? How did the project come about? How did this dude, this outsider, this traveler, find a way down into the pulse of a place, the cement aorta of the city—and leave a mark on its walls?

So I found him and I asked him. Lovely guy. You can read the text version of our 45-minute conversation over at Hi-Fructose, here.

What interested me most about the project was its deep interaction with place. It goes beyond site-specificity, for me. All street art, one could say, involves a very visceral, physical interaction with a place, its architecture, cement, rooftops—its placeness. Which I love. But this project went beyond that. The pieces spoke to very deep conflicts within the culture—tradition versus modernization, internal versus external—conflicts you could say define the culture. The project did this, not in essays or lectures, but in art, on the street. It spoke to the cultural elements of the place through the physicality of the city itself.

Pretty bad ass. And some damn good travelin.

Sunday Morning on International

Published August 16, 2010 Bay Area , California , Home , Lonely Girl Loves , Oakland , Places , Sobriety , Subculture , USA 8 Comments
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Sunday morning on International Blvd. A sidewalk laced in fog, car exhaust, the sick-sweet smell seeping from panderias. Little girls in patent-leather shoes, dudes crouched and smoking and speaking in Vietnamese outside the street shop: “Good tattoo ain’t cheap, cheap tattoo ain’t good.” The rattle of shopping cart wheels, the bark of fenced-in dogs.

I’m running late. I’m going to the 11am meeting at the In Between, a beat-up converted barroom now filled with folding chairs and faded banners, where we sit and curse and laugh, talk about God and booze, “hmm-mm”ing and “uh-huh”ing and drinking cheap coffee that stains our teeth. I love that place, its dusty corners and dying plants, the sag of the window frames.

I pass the bright blue letters of Iglesia de Buen Sabor, a storefront church with white bars over its frosted windows. The tambourine rattle and exalted voices of its congregation pours out the open door, from a faceless place—always black inside, when looking in from the street.

I make eye contact with a man standing in front of the doorway. He has a look of well-groomed desperation: cheap suit, overly combed hair, shoes shining like little black teeth. He’s got one crippled arm, bent and with a tangle of underdeveloped fingers; he cradles it next to his body as though he were holding an infant, or a small injured bird. I give him the half-smile and nod of a hello in passing.

He steps towards me. “Hello,” he says. “My name is Juan Carlos…” he continues on with a couple more names, surnames and second middle names. He leans his small hand towards me.

I pause mid-stride, take his small hand. “Right on, man, good to meet you.” It feels limp and strange in my momentary grasp, and I try to amend my handshake, make it softer, let it fit the contours of his curled-in fingers. “I’m running late, though—” I start to step away.

“You have a lot of joy in your heart.”

I stop, look at him with a slightly cocked head. “Thanks.”

He nods, smiles, then steps back into the black swallow and tambourine roll of his doorway.

I cross the street and squeak my own door open.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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