Ramblers being silly

Before we take off for Ecuador, I wanted to give you all some highlights of our amazing week in Colombia.

BUCARAMANGA

We began our journey in Bucaramanga, where we were met by our effervescent cultural co-ordinater from Bi-National Center, Juliana. We hit the ground running with a workshop at the Escuela Normal Superior with two big classes of enthusiastic (and energetic!) students. We worked off some of that energy by having them jump, walk, run, swim, drive, & ride around the verbs of motion in Old Joe Clark, & then learned some interesting noises for animals in both Colombia & the United States during Old MacDonald. I especially liked learning about the Chiguiro! Also, I’m always excited for the opportunity to showcase my super-realistic chicken sound, cultivated over many afternoons of serious practice as a child. In between the classes, we were offered a refreshing carbonated beverage called Malta that looked for all the world like cola, but tasted like a dead ringer for the milk in your bowl post-Lucky Charms. Brendan, Matt, Jordan, I were reminded of our time in Russia at the end of the class when all the kids rushed us for autographs & facebook contact info.

Jordan strikes a teacherly pose...

We were delighted to discover that the venue for our first public concert was the stunning Casa del Libro Total Museum & were well-received by the audience there. Our program ranged from rousing songs about Union scabbers (“Casey Jones”), to ballads about the hardships of growing up in poverty in the Appalachian Mountains (Ola Bella Reed’s “I’ve Endured” & Gillian Welch’s “Red Clay Halo”), to songs about the railroad (“John Henry”) and the range (“Home on the Range”) and heartache (“East Virginia”), to silly children’s songs (“The Fox”), and examples of “contemporary American folk music” when Brendan, Jordan, & I each take a turn playing original compositions. I also like to throw in a traditional Irish song called “The Blackbird,” which provides a good opportunity to introduce the idea of The United States as a nation of immigrants & talk about the relationship between some of the traditional music in America & that of the British Isles.

sound check at the museum

One of the main ideas behind this project is that, in addition to being a fun way for ESL students to learn through music, we feel that traditional American folk music is a terrific way to share another side of American culture that is perhaps not very well represented by our most pervasive cultural exports (Hollywood films, pop music, MTV, etc). The United States is a vast & complex nation filled with many different people with rich & varied heritage. The stories told in Folk songs are stories about real people, ordinary people, about hardship & joy & suffering & history, & we are as excited about sharing these narratives of American culture with other parts of the world as we are about learning more about the lives & history of our hosts & the students & teachers we encounter.

Matt & Gillian ramble through the streets of Bucaramanga

One of the ways that we like to explore new cultures is through food! Brendan in particular has made it his mission to taste every local specialty cuisine he encounters, which is how we came to sit around a small plastic table, contemplating a bag of fried ants. The ants were much larger than any I’d ever seen – each abdomen section about the size of a small pea – and (I can personally report) are crunchy, salty, & not altogether unpleasant save for the disturbingly tangible legs, which got stuck between my teeth.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dvFXwcT4uo&w=425&h=349]

After two wonderful, busy days that ended too soon, we packed our bags once again & caught a flight back to Bogota & then to Pereira (interesting fact: we will pass through the Bogota airport three times on this trip without ever actually seeing the capital city itself! Guess that means we’ll have to come back soon for a proper visit). Next update: Pereira!

revisiting a favorite Russian card game

morning run by the golden gate bridge

I’ve been staying with some friends in Outer Richmond this past week to rehearse with the ESL Folk Project in preparation for our tour in South America. I met Matt, Brendan, & Jordan last summer in Tomsk where we began our first tour, bringing a special program using American Folk music as a cultural supplement for students learning English in Russia. The U.S. State Department loved the project so much, they decided to fund us again for a month-long tour in Colombia, Peru, & Ecuador. It’s the first time that we’ve all been together since Ufa last summer & the reunion has been sweet indeed. Tomorrow morning we’ll catch an early flight to Bogata the adventure begins! We expect to be doing some blogging updates from the road, but I don’t know how regular our internet access will be, so I wanted to write a little post sharing some of the highlights of my past couple weeks in California.

Oh, hey there, Hollywood

I flew to Los Angeles on April 29th to visit my dear friend Rosy, who had generously offered to host a house concert for me. We spent the weekend cooking & then celebrated May Day with music, a feast featuring dishes from all the countries I’ll be visiting on the ESL Folk tour, & over a hundred guests.

That there's 70lbs of onions. I cried.

On Monday, fellow Fellow Ted & I visited the Caltech campus to talk about our recent experiences as Thomas J. Watson Fellows on a panel for prospective applicants. Here’s hoping one of their many intriguing proposal ideas gets funded next year! We drove down to San Diego & spent a couple days learning ridiculous covers on harp & guitar, playing them for dear distant friends on Skype, & sampling the finest fish taco stands in the city. Ted also treated me with a breakfast of matzo brie, which is kind of like Jewish French toast (and totally delicious).

Ted! You made Matzo Brie!

I took the train up from SD back to LA (and, as always when traveling public transit with my harp, talked to lots of curious strangers) & then caught a rideshare to San Francisco with a woman who managed to fit me, my harp (in flight crate), & a young australian woman fresh from the airport into her Prius! I was dropped off in the Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood just in time to play another house concert for a super fun audience featuring a surprising number of AmeriCorps volunteers. By midnight, I’d made my weary way to Outer Richmond where the ESL Folk Project has been living & rehearsing this past week.

Brendan, Matt, & Jordan

We’ve been working hard, logging several 9 hour days of solid rehearsal, learning lots of new material & lesson plans for the students we are *super* excited to meet in Peru, Colombia, & Ecuador. This time around, the U.S. State Department is organizing several large public concerts in addition to our schedule with the schools, so we’ve put together an entirely new program! Some of my favorites to learn have been John Henry, Red Clay Halo, Old Joe Clark, In the Pines, & Casey Jones.

lots of lyrics-learning...

In our spare time, we’ve managed to share several delicious meals (Jordan’s a wizard with a cast iron skillet) & visit the Sutro Baths, a 19th Century swimming facility that now lies in ruins on the Pacific Coast, not far from the house where we’ve been staying. When not making a hootenanny in the living room with the guys, I’ve also been learning cover song requests from a kickstarter campaign for my next solo album, locking myself in the (acoustically pleasing & quiet) bathroom to make iMovie recordings, & posting them on YouTube. One of the covers, a version of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Theme on harp, was picked up by the online gaming community & went viral, making this one of the most viewed bathrooms in San Francisco! Big love & thanks to Reddit.com, RipTen.com, Kotaku.com, The Elder Scrolls facebook & twitter feeds, bit-tech.net, & thousands of individuals for spreading the video like wildfire. I stayed up late last night learning the Ultima Online Theme (which was one of the earliest follow-up requests from Reddit.com) & posted it on YouTube this morning as a gesture of my deep gratitude for the outpouring of support that’s come from the gaming community over the past few days.

over 42,000 people have seen this bathroom!

We’ve already started getting some press coverage in South America, like this article: Ramblin’ Across the Andes.. Time to get back to packing – looking forward to sharing our stories from the road!

Much love,
-Gillian

sorry, Pickles, you can't come...

P.S. My next concerts in the U.S. will be on Monday, June 13th at the Rockwood Music Hall in NYC & Saturday, June 18th at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia. The Tin Angel shows have been selling out, so if you’re interested in coming, be sure to reserve your tickets in advance!

I spent the last weekend of January in NYC working with Jazeel Gayle on a music video for Silken String. We built an enormous tent out of satin ribbon, kind of like a may pole sans the phallic fertility symbol. In case you were wondering what 50 yards worth of ribbon looks like, this is it:

I don’t want give too much away before the video comes out, but here are a couple other images from the shoot:

The other shoot I did was a taping for a new NBC Philadelphia series called Inside the Music Box. Gabriel Antonini invited me to come by the NBC Philadelphia studios, play a couple songs and give an interview. Filming always makes me nervous, but I really had a blast working with these guys.

I’ll let you know when the final products are posted online and ready for prime time.

P.S. Notice anything different? I’ve started playing standing up!

Here’s a nifty google map marking the stops on my journey:

(You can view a larger version of this map with all the cities listed & twitter excerpts narrating each location!)

I thought it’d be fun to break down all that travel by modes of transport. The mile estimates, especially in terms car travel, err on the modest end of the spectrum. I actually put 16,000 miles on my car during the three months of the North American tour, but for the purposes of this blog post I was only calculating direct distances between cities. I didn’t feel that I could accurately track the miles I logged by autorickshaw in India, so, sadly, the long, hot, stinky, noisy, fume-filled hours I spent squashed under my harp & fearing for my imminent demise in those three-wheeled, two-stroke wonders of modern transport are not included.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

While my carbon-guilt is great for having flown over 13,000 miles, I was slightly mollified to learn that I actually logged MORE miles by public transport (those 600+ miles spent on boats & ferry’s really sealed the deal). The grand total for miles travelled in 2010? 39,155

Other Facts & Figures

Continents Visited: 3
Countries Visited: 9
Cities Visited: 79
U.S. States Visited: 28
Languages Spoken (mostly very badly): 8
Currencies Held: 8
Hospital Visits: 2 (one for rabies post-exposure treatment in Indonesia, the other for a mystery virus in India)
Passports Stolen: 2
Consular Interventions on My Behalf: 1 (Thanks for getting me out of Russia, Wilma!)
Human-sized Hampster Balls oggled in Tyumen: 1

Now, I know this is a far cry from the wizardry of an OkCupid Trends post, but cut me some slack, okay? I was a Comparative Literature major! That said, if there are other calculations you’d like me to try and approximate, I’m open to giving it all of my XKCD-loving spirit.

Happy New Year!
-Gillian

The goal of the project was not only to assist young Russians in their study of the English language in a fun way, but also to introduce them to sides of American culture that are perhaps not very well represented by Hollywood and other popular mass media. Because the cities we visited were not located in traditionally touristic regions of the country, we were often the first Americans these kids had ever met, and we spent lots of time entertaining questions about life in the United States. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, our two countries continue to have a complex political relationship, as highlighted by the recent espionage scandal. In light of these events, the opportunity to have positive interactions on a person-to-person basis felt especially satisfying.

I was ridiculously excited when Brendan invited me to join the Ramblers for this adventure, and we traveled countless miles to crisscross Russia and present our program at five summer camps. The following is a post I wrote for the group’s blog about our experience at the Gubkin camp. There are many more stories, pictures, videos, songs, bios, teaching materials, etc available online at www.eslfolk.com. Enjoy!

WHERE’S GUBKIN?

One of the best things about this trip has been getting to see towns in parts of Russia that tourists don’t typically visit. At the camps, people are often curious and ask us about the other cities we’re traveling to on the ESL Folk Tour. Whenever we run down the itinerary, there’s always one place that gets the same response: “Wait, Gubkin? Where’s that?!”

with Elena, our trusty camp leader

I was excited to check out this city that so few people seem to have heard of, and waited with no small amount of anticipation by the door of our train compartment with the Ramblers and our gear. We arrived in the middle of the night and our “train mom” had urged us to be prepared to get off quickly since the train would only be stopping for 2 minutes at the Gubkin station before pressing on. We grabbed our bags and instruments and were bundled off the train, and my harp and I fell directly into the arms of Elena, our camp coordinator.

harp sandwich

Elena and her family helped us lug our stuff over to the hotel where we were booked in four single rooms for the first few nights – an unexpected luxury after so much time spent cramped in platzkart bunks and squashed under my harp in the backseats of taxis. We were each handed a key with an ornate swan chain and ascended some sparkling stone diaz-style steps to the chimes of a thousand fire alarm bells set off by sportsmen surreptitiously smoking in their rooms. After some refreshing showers, we collapsed into our fluffed pillows for a few hours sleep.

David Fay, Sarah, and the Ramblers in front of the biggest hole I've ever seen

In the morning, we took a walk to explore this mysterious city. It turns out that Gubkin is a relatively young city, founded just seventy years ago, and built around an enormous iron mine – a vast, gaping crater seven kilometers wide that we visited with some guides from the camp. The town is beautifully laid out, with charming neighborhood apartment complexes each with their own playground and lots of trees. There was a neat park with a mining display and statues celebrating the town’s history and mining practices.

Matt plays with a handicap

We reviewed some new songs, got our materials ready for the next day’s teaching, and then prepared ourselves for the U.S.A. vs. Slovenia world cup match by playing pick-up soccer in the school fields with some of the campers. It was a “no parents, no rules” game that involved all sorts of inventive goal keeping and ball stealing.

The Ramblers practice the Camp Rainbow dance routine

The next morning, we were treated with a visit from David Fay from the English Language Office of the American Embassy in Moscow and his lovely sister Sarah (We’ve been tossing around the idea of re-naming our group the David Fay Tribute Band). They joined us for a rousing set of morning performances by the Rainbow Summer Camp teams. After being serenaded by the four camp groups, who had rehearsed songs for us, we opened up our introduction to American Folk Music with some songs of our own.

Jordan & Brendan getting their teach on

I thought that performing live song examples as we talked about their background was an nice way to break up the opening lecture, especially since listening to a long block of talk can be super exhausting for students who are learning English as a second language. The kids  seemed to especially enjoy an experimental mash-up of jigs in E minor that Brendan and I tried out when we were discussing immigrants from the British Isles and their influence on American culture and music.

the opening lecture/concert

After our presentation/concert, Matt played some samples of traditional folk music from around the world and the students had to try and guess what country each song came from. Brendan had the chance to visit Tuva with some other Fulbrighters this year and brought back some incredible music from that region. It’s always funny when the Tuvan throat-singing track comes on during this game, because none of the kids ever guess that this music is actually from their own country! I think it’s great to bring up Russia’s cultural diversity in these English camps, because it lets us shift the focus off of all the questions we get about life in America and remind the campers about how cool and interesting and vast their own nation is!

with new friends

One of the most remarkable highlights of this trip for me has been getting to experience Russian hospitality. It seems that every camp we visit adopts us Ramblers, and this was especially true at Gubkin. When we asked Elena for a recommendation of a local restaurant to grab some dinner, she responded by inviting us over to her house for some homemade okroshka, a traditional Russian cold soup made from chopped vegetables and hard-boiled egg with a broth of kvass – a beverage made (as I understand it) by straining water through dark rye bread and allowing it to ferment slightly. This is one of our favorite refreshing drinks, but I’d never had it in a soup before!

our family dinner

After a mere two days in the hotel, we were also invited to stay in Elena’s sister-in-law’s parents’ house, which was a welcome respite for both our budgets and souls. Turns out that after living in such close quarters for so long, those single hotel rooms were starting to feel pretty lonely! We were thrilled to do some laundry and cook a wonderful “family” meal, which we ate beneath the approving (I hope) gaze of an impressive collection of Russian icons.

Ramblers reacting to some local press

On our last night, we were also invited out to a dacha for some sensationally delicious shashlik (Russian bar-b-q)! We enjoyed the evening sun, homemade pickles, samagon, and – in addition to the scrumptious chicken and pork skewers – some of the best grilled carp I’ve ever tasted; a veritable feast! With Masha, Olya, Nastia, and Elena among the guests, the feeling was of a family reunion cook-out. Brendan wrote an experimental shashlik ballad on a makeshift guitar, and we finished off the night with some more crazy, hybrid ball games.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN3l6UW8UMg&hl=en&fs=1]
The morning came too soon, and with it the time for us to leave for Ufa. Our goodbyes were heartfelt and teary, but we took with us many memories – and some sweet camp T-shirts the campers signed!

The next time someone asks me where Gubkin is, I’ll just point to my heart.

-Gillian

Group shot!

my kupé berth on the transmanchurian K19

Excerpts from a letter written on May 24th, 2010

Today I bought a small container of sour cream, thinking it was yoghurt, and ate about half of it before deciding it couldn’t just be that Russian yogurt is funky in a way not unlike how Greek-style yogurt is funky. This reminded me of the time I was making dinner for my host Ralf and his five year-old son Raphael in Berlin – a nice gnocchi dish with sautéed bacon and mushrooms in what I’d intended to be a cream sauce, only I’d bought some weird soft German cheese thinking it was crème fraîche and the whole thing curdled in the most disgusting way; it tasted fine but looked awful. Poor Raphael, who is a picky eater to begin with, had a meltdown at the kitchen table and refused to eat the stuff. I couldn’t really blame him and felt bad because he got in trouble for the tantrum when it was really my fault. Oh the joys of buying dairy products abroad.

The train is remarkably empty. Perhaps because we’re just a week or two shy of tourist season or perhaps because we’re on the less popular transmanchurian line (people like seeing Mongolia more). It’s a good thing too, since it turns out my harp simply will not fit in any convenient way in a kupé class cabin. When I had the cabin to myself for the first two days, I left the harp out and played it some, but I got a bunkmate on the third day and had to store it up to the bunk above me. This train seems to travel in ¾ time.

The view out the window could be Wyoming. Plains and hills with brown, gold, and green (almost) grasses, a bit marshy in parts, with cows and sheep and goats occasionally grazing in clusters, and ill-maintained barbed-wire fences, tiny outpost towns now and again, and even the odd Russian cowboy or two. They gave me a bit of trouble at the border for bringing my harp, but not too much. The weird thing was they had to switch out all the wheels on the train when we crossed over from China – apparently the tracks are set wider apart in Russia, something to do with World War II.

Lake Baikal

Even though it is the end of May, winter is only just beginning to ease its grip on the land here; lake Baikal was a cobweb of floating ice. There are field fires everywhere, blackening the white trunks of the birch trees. The kind German/South African man in the berth next to me, who lives half of each year in rural Siberia, told me that the Russians light these fires to clear the dead leaves and grasses, since the seasonal shift between Summer and Winter is too short to allow proper decomposition. Sometimes at night the glow of the brush fires can be spectacular, and also disturbing, like how I imagine land might look during War Time.

My bunkmate is a kind-faced Chinese man. He doesn’t speak English and I hardly know any Chinese, so we can’t really talk, but we share our bags of nuts and dried fruit and can manage some basic friendly communication via gesticulations and context. I wonder what it will be like when I get back to the United States and can understand everything that is being said around me – snippits of conversations in the park or on the street. I wonder if it will be overwhelming. Not long now. I’ll be back July 30th.

Here’s a summary of the last month in installments of 140 characters or less:

April 12, 2010

catching the overnight train from Hong Kong. Gonna miss those cappuccinos at Café Corridor.

scenes from the train window: a lone telephone pole askew in a lake. rows of plastic bottles demarking a net. scarlet brick factory kiln.

scenes from the train: a fussing wife wiping sleep-sand from her husband’s eyes with a blue-striped washcloth. the hock and spit over a washroom sink.

April 13, 2010

ah, Squat Toilet – how could I forget your keyhole charms in the oasis of Hong Kong luxury? moving train adds extra element of thrill & skill.

To the pushy lady at Shanghai station: I know you’re old & tiny, but I swear to god, if you shove your luggage cart into the back of my knees one more time, I’ll eat you.

Well, hello...

April 14, 2010

Had to buy copies of this wonderfully homoerotic poster celebrating “10,000 years of Sino-Asian Friendship & Brotherhood” at the Shanghai Propaganda Museum today.

And how could I pass up an original vinyl of the classic “Our Great Motherland is Abloom with Flowers”?

April 15, 2010

Loved the fishmonger who was serenading his fish with a flute at the market this morning. Is it crazy to say they seemed to thrash less? How do fish hear?

Was slightly alarmed at woman cleaning her earwax with tip of large, sharp knife. More alarmed by notion that she cuts enormous tofu blocks beside her with same blade.

April 16, 2010

Got to stand behind the DJ booth & watch all the knob fiddling at LoGo. Felt my cool factor exploding by association. Is this how rock stars feel everyday?

April 17, 2010

Little Punk

Tonight at Yuyintang: Stegosaurus? EP release with Boys Climbing Ropes, Rainbow Danger Club, and Dragon Pizza.

Boys Climbing Ropes – not sure I’d listen to a CD of this, but frontwoman Little Punk is a tiny ball of intensity. Worth catching them live just to see her crazy eyes.

Dennis Ming Nichols & Jesse Munson of Rainbow Danger Club

Rainbow Danger Club: all expats, but solid, mostly instrumental experimental rock. Rhythmic structures hint at members’ jazz-backgrounds. Dug the bowed bass & drumstick guitar rattling.

Dragon Pizza: These boys made it through all of 2 songs before going shirtless. Japanese bass-player goes cross-eyed during intense shreds. Pretty lighthearted bunch for a metal band.

Dragon Pizza

April 18, 2010

Stopped 4x for photos w/ Chinese tourists while walking on The Bund today. Got used to this in India & Indonesia, but surprised to have the experience in cosmopolitan Shanghai.

April 19, 2010

field research for songwriting: tried bone marrow at a hot pot restaurant – at once surprisingly creamy & stringy. Check out quasi-related lyrics

there are many things you can cook in a hot pot

April 20, 2010

Dammit, Rilke! Now I’m really, truly, actually going to have to learn German.

April 21, 2010

Found: decent bagels in Shanghai! Gotta say though, this is one thing North America just does better. Also dirty martinis.

April 22, 2010

Spent the afternoon with awesome Ada, a certified Chinese tea ceremony master (5 year program!), who taught me how to serve green tea in her studio. Days like this are why we travel.

April 23, 2010

Wuji EP Release Concert at Yuyintang shut down by police w/o explanation save “Expo.” Went to hastily organized house concert, but worrisome

Wuji regroups at a friend's house

April 24, 2010

Tried frogs’ legs twice this week. More like shellfish than chicken in texture. Devilishly tricky to grab with chopsticks. Reminded of Triplets of Bellville.

Yuyintang open as bar, but still closed for music. Pinkberry concert cancelled. Police confiscated computer & sound equipment. Check out article by Shanghai blogger, Jake Newby

April 25, 2010

Shanghai & Mumbai have approx. the same population, but Shanghai has ~7000 people/km2 & Mumbai has over 22,000. The feeling is v. diffirent.

model of Shanghai at the Urban Planning Museum

April 26, 2010

Got to hitch a ride with press to soft opening of Obama nightclub. Gawdy, gold, & ginormous. Apparently nothing to do with Obama save publicity stunt. Cheers to the go-go dancer on stilts.

April 27, 2010

Great chat with Sean Leow this morning. Check out Neocha.com, & edge.neocha.com – online network of China’s creative communities (art, music, film, etc…)

April 28, 2010

Playing a show at OZNZ tonight. Check out urbanatomy.com listing by the lovely Leslie Jones – 1st harp joke in print I’ve laughed at in a long time.

April 29, 2010

My Shanghai hosts set the bar ridiculously high. How am I ever going to leave them? Good thing I accidentally missed the train to Beijing & had to stay on an extra night.

Heading over to The Revitalization of Shanghai Rock show. It’s Emo Pop Punk night like whoa, but happy to celebrate the fact that Yuyintang is open for live music again.

Yuyintang

May 1, 2010

Welcome to Beijing, where breathing the air is like smoking 70 cigarettes a day. Hang on Siberia, imma commin soon.

Taxi was too big for the roads, so arrived in forbidden city with self, harp, & bags in rickshaw – velvet & fringe on top. Like the surrey in Oklahoma!

May 2, 2010

camping out at Midi

Midi Modern Music Festival Day 2 highlights: The Swamp, Xiao He, Voodoo Kungfu, Asaf Avidan & the Mojos.

Made it to the right bus stop, then followed likely-looking T-shirts to festival entrance at Haidian Park.

Voodoo Kungfu: um, Mongolians + bodypaint + deathmetal? Yes, please! Love a band that includes “backing-growls” & horsehead cello in their line-up.

Asaf Avidan says he’s from Israel, but he must have just touched down from Mercury. That voice cannot have come from this planet.

May 3, 2010

Epic feat of foreign public transport mastery achieved in finding my way to Strawberry Festival at Tongzhou Canal Park. 3 Metro changes, 1 bus, & nearly 3 hours ONE WAY.

Modern Sky Strawberry Festival Day 3 highlights: Fruit VC (highly danceable + onstage foam shower?) Wang Yue & Hang on the Box (All-girl band, sounds a little like The Ting Tings)

Gotta hand it to the Chinese rockers – even the bands with mediocre music put on one hell of a live performance. So much energy!

getting myself a custom-made shirt

May 4, 2010

Overheard: heated fight between drunk couple. Chopsticks were thrown, but no injuries except eardrums.

May 5, 2010

Still haven’t gotten used to seeing open slit-back trousers on the wee ones here. Torn between adorable factor of baby butts & gross-out spectacular of free expulsion.

May 6, 2010

Found myself playing harp in hostel bar w/ 2 handsome Russian ballet dancers, sweet Irish couple, Thomas from Beijing, & my gregarious Canadian bunkmates last night.

tent at Haidian Park

If you’d like to receive updates like this once I cross the border to Russia, follow me at www.twitter.com/gilliangrassie

the break

This is the part of the harp that rests against my shoulder when I play, and it’s important structurally for sound quality. But – if I can talk about this without becoming overly sentimental – this part of the harp is also significant emotionally, since it is the point of contact between the instrument and my body; when I play, the sound vibrations travel through this section of wood to my shoulder and resonate physically in my body.

When I fly, I pack the harp in a soft, padded case that fits inside a second, rigid foam and fiberglass flight case, like a set of Russian dolls. Over the years, I’ve flown internationally using this set-up about a dozen times without any problems, so it must have gotten dropped very hard for this to have happened. It’s hard to imagine what exactly the baggage handlers might be doing to cause such serious damage to otherwise well-protected musical instruments, but David Carroll’s YouTube video offers some pretty funny ideas. I suppose it’s a bit of a miracle that nothing like this happened before, especially given the number of unlikely and inhospitable places I’ve taken my harp.

there's always one smart-ass at the airport who makes a crack about a dead ex-boyfriend. They always think they came up with it too.

Having had my fill of major Southeast Asian metropolises, and feeling not a little heartbroken, I hopped on the first train I could book to Yogyakarta, a much smaller and slower-paced city in central Java, and the island’s semi-official cultural heart. I was hoping that somewhere in this hub of universities, music schools, and gamelan orchestras, I might be able to find someone who could try and stabilize the crack until I could get the instrument to a harp maker and look at my repair options.

Sure enough, literally around the corner from my guesthouse, there was a luthier. I spent a couple hours watching him build acoustic guitars with a reassuring, grandfatherly countenance and a craftsman’s leathered hands. I brought my harp over for him to take a look at, and we discussed (with the help of a friendly local’s translation) how he might try and stabilize the instrument. At first, things seemed optimistic, but, after a few days of head scratching, he ultimately decided he wasn’t confident working on the harp.

I guess if you’re going to find yourself halfway around the world with a rare, broken instrument, Yogyakarta isn’t the worst place to evaluate the situation and regroup.

First of all, there is excellent coffee.

I’m still getting used to the grit of drinking it unstrained – which is how it is served here – but there is absolutely no question that Java’s coffee plantations are producing delicious joe. Secondly, and much more importantly, the people in my Sosrowijayan neighborhood are wonderful.

tony let me hold his pet bird

The Sosrowijayan neighborhood is pretty easy to fall in love with. As soon as you turn off the main drag onto Jl Sosrowijayan, things get dramatically quieter. There are more smiles and fewer hawkers. Upon turning onto one of the alleyways that lead into the residential part of the neighborhood, the sound decibel decreases another few notches and suddenly you feel as though you aren’t in a city at all, but a small village, with lots of adorable young children running around, friendly faces asking how your day was, and the old folks smoking clove cigarettes and looking on.

making music on the batik shop steps

It helps that I started off on the right foot by bypassing the restaurants and eating at the neighborhood food stand, which serves amazing rice, tempe, tofu, gado gado, and ginger tea, along with a plate full of fried chicken necks complete with heads that I try not to think of as staring at me while I eat my veggies. The flora and fauna in my G.I. tract provided by three months in India have made me braver than the average tourist, so I’m not too distracted by traveler’s belly to appreciate the dirt-cheap, delicious food. Lunch typically sets me back about 80 cents. The food stand is also great because it’s next to an open space where kids play pick-up football games (the kind the rest of the world plays, not the U.S. version) across from the mosque, and is generally an all-ages neighborhood hang-out. It also helps that I’m American, since Obama has a nation-wide fan club in Indonesia for having spent part of his childhood in the courty – there’s even a statue of a 10 year-old “Barry” catching butterflies in Jakarta.

mucking about with a siter

Within my first 48 hours I’d talked to a group of high school boys about their favorite bands (Guns and Roses, Metallica, Oasis, and a bunch of Indonesian emo-pop bands), received an invitation to a nearby village for a traditional music event celebrating the rice-harvest that’s particular to this region, been advised on the fair purchase price for snake fruit (4000 rupiah per kilo), and planned a couple of bicycle day trips to nearby mountains (read, volcanoes) and beaches. Taking pity on the harpless harpist, some locals also invited me to an evening jam session on the front steps of a batik shop. They played guitar and offered me a siter (not to be confused with India’s sitar) to mess around with. The siter is a stringed instrument typically played in Gamelan orchestras and the closest thing to a harp I’ve seen in Indonesia.

Togor

A couple of nights later, when (much to my horror and embarrassment) I found myself in tears over the situation with my harp, I was immediately offered a hot cup of tea and invited to sit down and talk with some new friends. We didn’t come up with a solution that night, but I was deeply touched by the sincerity of their concern and empathy, and I went to bed feeling a lot better after singing a couple English songs Togor knew how to play on the guitar (amusingly, these were “Summertime” and “Jingle Bells”), and learning a Bahasa lullaby.

It’s true that I can get another harp (and hopefully my insurance will ensure that I do) and that there may still be hope that my harp can be repaired properly, but even with a new back, her voice will probably be different, and I can’t shake the feeling that something has been lost here that is not replaceable. This feeling is especially poignant since I learned that Jack Faulkner, the man who designed and built my harp, passed during the fall.

sound check at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival, 2001

This particular instrument has been my partner since I was twelve years old. She has shared the stage with me at every major competition and performance of my life. I remember feeling nervous backstage at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival when I was fourteen, and how much comfort I felt as soon as I sat down and pulled her back to my shoulder. When I was fifteen and found myself living in Switzerland, alone for the first time in a foreign country, it was on this harp that I wrote my first song. She has helped me make music in the mountains of British Columbia, and in a whole string of grimy, smoky clubs in the United States. More recently, she decimated cultural and language barriers in Mumbai, when a young girl’s curiosity lead to an impromptu concert in a Western Rail suburban train car.

my best impression of a pack mule

When people see me lugging the flight crate through customs or walking through cities saddled like a pack mule with the harp on my back, they often raise their eyebrows at the idea of girl bothering to travel with such an unwieldy thing. What they don’t realize is that it’s not me who’s dragging the harp along for the journey, but rather the other way around. It’s true that I’ve turned down family vacations before because I couldn’t bring my harp with me, but it’s also true that the vast majority of opportunities for travel I’ve had have been provided by the harp. I wouldn’t have seen Scotland or most of the southern United States without the financial support she’s given me through touring and scholarships, and I certainly wouldn’t be here now, writing a blog update from Indonesia, without her help. She makes me braver than I am, and often takes me places I wouldn’t be bold enough to go alone.

camping in British Columbia

Despite the sense of loss, I’ve been trying to look at this as a moment of opportunity. Perhaps this is a good chance to pick up another instrument, something that could offer fresh ideas for the way I approach the harp and might even liberate me from some of the frustrating limitations and creative ruts I’ve found myself preoccupied with over the past several months in my songwriting. Maybe I’ll start immersing myself in electronic music and composing on my laptop. I might finally pick up the guitar, or the piano, or some weird little instrument I come across in my travels in China next month. I’ve always had a soft spot for the accordion, although I’d have to consider the repercussions of inviting that many more bad jokes. Whatever happens, I’ll keep you updated on my adventures.

daybreak at Borobudur

Pippi!

We stayed with some old friends of Doro in this awesome student complex with a big mural of Pippi Longstocking on the front wall and an elaborate squatter camp next door, complete with organized art events, political demonstrations, and its own wash-your-dishes-and-it’s-free “Café,” where I had one of the best cups of Chai in my life (ask me again after India). Across the street was a very modern office building powered entirely by solar panels, which, fittingly, housed a group of dedicated environmental organizations. To say that this university town near the French border is preoccupied with saving the planet is an understatement; Freiburg has become one of the de facto capitals of the international Green movement. Environmental issues dominate the daily news in both print and radio, and the city elected Green Party member Dieter Salomon as their mayor. Bikes rule the streets and a short trip outside the city will lead you into the heart of the Black Forest (think Brothers Grimm).

the patio/balcony. a sign hangs above that reads 'Occupied' in German, and a large banner with a quote from Brecht hangs on the fence

I got to see a bit of the Black Forest in all its winter glory on a drive to a town an hour outside Freiburg where we rehearsed with Doro’s guitarist. As the road climbed up into the mountains we suddenly found ourselves pulling out of the thick clouds into a world of white, snow dusting the conifers and fallow fields and trapezoidal barn roofs. I had the best meal of the trip so far that evening, though it’s hard to say if it was the delicious food or the three bottles of wine or the new friends or the fact that whenever I looked outside I felt like I was living in a fairytale gingerbread land. Before we headed back to Freiburg to lay down some tracks, we took a drive out to see an old castle and stood along the banks of the Rhine River, looking across into the Swiss Alps (don’t worry, Watson, I didn’t cross the border!). The water had that gorgeous glacial glow, a sort of blue-green that seems somehow milky, like frosted sea-glass.

Schwein!

Growing up on a farm, animals –lots of them – have basically surrounded me all my life, and one of the few downers of this year of travel so far has been the critter-withdrawal I’ve been going through. So I was elated when Doro got a phone call from another old friend and asked me if I’d be interested in visiting a little farm nearby that afternoon. I think I was probably even more enthusiastic than the two year-old we were with about seeing the piglets, and the goats, and getting kisses from bulls (seriously, these were the sweetest, gentlest bulls I’ve ever met, a whole pen of affectionate Ferdinands).

the Koes in Normandy weren't into Knufflen, but the bulls in Freiburg were all about the kisses

If anyone can identify exactly what kind of pig this poor, unfortunate-looking dear is, I’d be very curious to know. We found two of these guys in a pen, with curled tusks, a big, bristled back, and kind of squashed, pug-like faces with a serious brow-bone.

poor dear, what are you?

Later that night, we went out to a performance by Lindsey Blount, a jazz singer who came over to Freiburg from the U.S. through the Berklee exchange. If you have a chance to see her perform in the U.S. (Philadelphia, I’m talking to you), you really must. She is a total treat.

doro laying down some piano in the studio

The trip to Freiburg finished with an inspiring day in the studio, tracking accordion, piano, and harp for Doro’s songs. I feel really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Doro, who writes beautiful, interesting, strong songs with both German and English lyrics. As soon as she finishes mixing down a few of the tracks and posts them online, I’ll put up a link here and you can listen for yourself. It was exhilarating to have the good fortune to meet such a cool artist and be able to take her up on such a wonderfully spontaneous offer – all within the span of a week! Serendipity has been on my side lately, and I hope it sticks around, because one of the most incredible things about the Watson Fellowship is that it has freed me to accept fantastic, last-minute opportunities like this one, and granted me a spirit of flexibility that I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed before.

setting up mics for the harp

Berlin has been extraordinary, in part, because, despite a long history, it’s still a very young city in many ways (November 9th will mark only the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall). There is an energy here of constant change and reinvention and opportunity; it’s a very creative atmosphere, and this combined with the fact that it’s still an affordable city to live in lends Berlin a gravitational pull for artists of all sorts. The general consensus is that the arts and music scene in Berlin now is comparable to that of New York City in the 1980s. But there is also a sense here that the moment is fleeting – how long will it be before Berlin’s housing market becomes gentrified and beyond the reach of low-income artists? Do we have five years? Ten? Once a city’s rent climbs past a certain point, the creative arts scene invariably changes; artists become less experimental and collaborative and more competitive, accepting the types of commissions and bookings (and day jobs) that pay the bills. The low-rent factor that helps permit Philadelphia’s music scene to be more community-oriented is one of the reasons I prefer it to New York’s.

But this acknowledgment that Berlin’s creative heyday is probably not indefinite lends its own sense of urgency and earnestness. Doro, and I, and the other artists I’ve met so far agree: it’s exciting to be here, now, at this age, in this moment.

in the poetry nook at Shakespeare & Co. I left a a poem tacked to the wall - If ever you're in Paris, look for it!

The thing about fresh bread that you don’t realize in America, when all you have at your disposal are pre-sliced bags of “seven grain wholesomeness” preserved to within an inch of its perpetually spongy life, is that fresh bread goes stale – quickly. Overnight, in fact. That’s okay though, because one of my favorite breakfasts in France involves dipping crusty chunks of leftover baguette, smothered in demi-sel butter and jam, into a steaming bowl of chocolate milk. The staleness of the bread becomes important here, because it softens as it sops up the hot milk and chocolate and becomes the most delicious, slightly chewy, juicy bite to start the day.

If I were more mature or had an earlier wake-up call or an actual desk job to get to, I might mix the milk with Ricoré, the chicory-blended instant coffee they sell right next to the powdered chocolate. As it happens, I’m on my own schedule and generally don’t wake up until around 9 AM, when the construction workers start banging holes into dry-wall and jack-hammering cement mercilessly. They seem to be converting several rooms between the sixth and seventh floors into a single, enormous apartment that will no doubt be magnificent when they’re finished. At the moment it’s mostly just dusty, and the stairwell and hallways fill with chalky clouds from the plaster demolition.

I made friends with some of the workers, to be polite, and also because I know approximately 3.5 people in Paris, and those not very well, so it’s nice to have the human interaction. One of the men is from Portugal originally and when he asks me out on dates I pretend that I can’t understand his heavily accented French, which is partially true. Still, I gave him one of my CDs and sort of sweet-talked him into fixing the lights in the hallway. Now, when I come home from concerts at 2 AM, I don’t have to rally quite so much courage to round the corners of the narrow, Tim Burton corridors with my shaky, LED flashlight and pocket-knife. The pocket-knife part of the all-in-one Handy Tool used to lend me that extra bit of confidence I needed to brave late-night bathroom excursions, when I would walk with measured steps, every nerve on edge, calming myself by imagining exactly which jiu-jitsu moves I would explode into when faced by the serial killer or vampire who was surely lurking in the shadows just ahead. I consider the Portuguese’ copy of Serpentine one of the best-placed CDs I’ve ever given away.

The garret I’m living in is strange, because it would be a lot like living in a student dormitory, if only there were anyone else here. There’s a collage covering the North wall of one of the bathrooms – torn off pieces of newspaper and magazine advertisements, heads of Obama and Sarkozy and Michael Jackson and kittens. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it was a collective, unspoken effort; when you’d wander to the bathroom at night you’d bring some tape and the latest quirky find from your favorite periodical. I wonder who did make it, and where they are now. I can imagine the little numbered doors clanging open and shut all night, Sorbonne kids sitting cross-legged in the hallways with flashlights, studying before exams, music from crappy stereo speakers spilling through the thin walls, cigarette smoke curling out open windows, someone knocking on a neighbor’s door for a condom. We’d laugh about the stairs, and the broken lights, and the Tim Burton aesthetic. Maybe we’d plan a group outing to see Number 9. But there’s no one. At first, I thought there might be someone else – a noisy someone else – until I realized that if I didn’t shut the bathroom door properly, it would blow open and bang shut with the wind all night.

chambre de bonne

Of course, the seventh floor could never be a student dormitory, for the simple reason that in this neighborhood, it’s illegal to rent out the chambres de bonne, since the good, upstanding residents of the Septième wouldn’t want rooms in their building sublet to untrustworthy, low-income, young, noisy strangers (quelle horreur!). As the name implies, these rooms were originally reserved for live-in servants, and the back staircase with separate entrance passes by the external laundry closets on each landing, and the backdoors of the main apartments, which open directly into the kitchen. My impression is that the rooms on the seventh floor are mostly used for storage now, since it’s a ghost town up here, but theoretically it’s still acceptable for each main apartment in the building to house, say, a nanny, in their chambre de bonne, or use it as a guest bedroom. This latter scenario is the case with the dear family friends who have been kind enough to let me stay here while I’m in Paris. It bears noting that they are a decidedly hip couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter and share none of the stuffiness that seems to afflict their neighbors.

The long staircase and grim hallways are more than made-up for by how cheerful my little room is once you’re inside.* It’s tiny in a sweet, charming way, with a comfortable bed, a kitchenette, a miniature shower, and a truly fantastic little wooden writing desk by big bay windows that let in an unbelievable amount of light from the courtyard. There is a fabulous set of enormous, old-school iron keys for the door. I especially like being here during rainstorms, when I can hear an entire symphony of water spilling off the rooftop into the gutters, and the diffused light extends the feeling of early-morning into mid-afternoon.

fabulous, enormous, old-school iron keys

It’s days like these that I do most of my writing (musical and otherwise) and reading. When I’m not doing research for my Watson project, I’ve tried to pair my pleasure-reading list with the places I’m visiting.** For Paris, that list has ranged from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, to Leila Sebbar’s Métros Instantanés, to Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity(totally different from the movie, by the way, and largely set in Paris circa 1980), to Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast (which I picked up at the same Shakespeare and Co. mentioned repeatedly in the book).

I’ve especially enjoyed Hemmingway’s memoir, not least of all because he also spent most of his time in Paris living in tiny garret apartments (granted, in vastly worst conditions than mine, in much less posh neighborhoods, without plumbing, oh, and with a wife and young child). His descriptions of this time in his life, as a young writer discovering his craft and living humbly but happily abroad, really strike a chord with my own experience right now. Even though I daresay Paris has lost much of the charm it had in Hemmingway’s time – a charm that has been converted into a sort of nostalgic kitsch rather conspicuously clung to in some of the brasseries and certainly in the postcards stands that clutter every corner – I think there’s something special about being 23 and living in a funky apartment in any big, strange new city, where you don’t know anyone, and everything is new and foreign and exciting. It’s doubly special when you have some kind of creative outlet to channel all that into.

Métros Instantanés

There are several songs in the fire now, including one little tune that I wrote while in a terrible bout of homesickness, thinking of my sister. Mind you, it’s a very crappy little recording, done on my iPhone as I was writing it, and a long way from any final arrangement. It is also an instrumental, partially instigated by a recently rekindled love affair with the traditional world of harp at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient (blog about THAT forthcoming). I’m pretty sure “I Miss My Sister” is not going to be its working title. But still, I’m posting it here so that I can share with all of you a very genuine moment in this grand adventure I’ve embarked upon. Past experience tells me that the worst of the homesickness will pass over in a few more days. Then I should be good for about five months. After five months, I’m not sure what happens, but I’ll be sure to let you know.

I Miss My Sister

Bryn Mawr College came back to life for the fall semester this week and I can’t help thinking of all my dear, dear friends settling into those gorgeous gothic buildings that don’t look so unlike some of the older bâtiments here. I’ve been imagining the students gathering underneath the trees between Taylor’s bell tower and Thomas Great Hall for the first step-sing of the year, raising their colored lanterns each time the refrain, “hearts starve as well as bodies / give us bread but give us roses,” comes around. I remember sitting on a velvet, Queen Anne armchair in the blue room of the Wyndham Alumni house for my Watson interview, being asked what challenges I thought I might face during the year. I said that while I worried about many things – staying on budget, the logistics of traveling with a harp, language barriers and the limitations they might place on my interview subjects – I thought isolation might be one of the biggest hurtles to cross.

Loneliness is an inevitable part of any long-term traveling experience, and it’s not necessarily a bad part of it. Discovering the pleasure of my own company, learning how to forge new social networks, finding the courage and confidence to go out there and make a fool of myself in new languages – that’s all part of the Watson experience, and it’s important. But I’m finding the project aspect of the fellowship increasingly critical, since it lends a structure and purpose to days that would otherwise feel like an overwhelming, aimless void. There’s only so much wandering around city streets – even streets as pretty as those in Paris – you can do before you start to feel a hunger all the pain au chocolat in the world couldn’t fill. And it is at the edges of this place where I am most grateful for my work and for my music.

Footnotes:

*I wouldn’t moan and groan about the staircase so much, except that you have to remember that I’m traveling with a harp, which I carry generally on my back, and in the French system the first floor is the American second floor, so actually I’m on the eighth floor, and if you count the descent into the basement of the building upon the initial entry, then it’s a total of nine spiraling staircases I have to climb, with my harp. The good news is that my legs haven’t been in this great shape since I ran with the cross-country team in high school, and all that huffing and puffing definitely offsets the pain au chocolat and pâté I’ve fallen in love with.

the view down into the abyss that is my stairwell

**I also tried this approach with an iTunes movie rental one night, which resulted in the somewhat disastrous selection of “Taken.” In retrospect, I can see how insane that choice was, but at the time my train of thought wasn’t so much young-American-girls-in-peril as Liam Neeson kicking ass in Paris? Yum…