Lots to say.





30?31.7.04

Talking to myself.

Paris isn't quiet, even from the top of the Eiffel tower you can tell it's a throbbing, percussive city-- clean and white and stretching out to every horizon like some sort of industrial Arctic.

For no reason at all the whole tower starts to spark for about 10 minutes at 9pm, so it looks like the building is taking pictures of us for a change. I noticed as we were walking away at about a quarter till sunset, when I heard a group of tourists sigh a steady 'Ooh' and noticed that they let their cameras rest at their bellies to take it all in with their eyes.

But soon we all composed ourselves and turned around with cameras attached to our wide eyes, flashing right back a meaningless morse-code correspondence to be scrapbooked and smeared with fingerprints in a few months or weeks, when holidays make way for busy-ness.































Their science museum is massive.































3 more days.











Quote of my lifetime: 'I thought I was reading but maybe I was just thinking and got confused.'
-Jeff

12.7.04

CERN | swoon

but first, a list of things we've stolen:

(1) 3 spoons (2) 2 showers* (3) the hearts of millions

* needs explanation:
CERN beckoned, and that's not the sort of call you can ignore: the work of 2,000 physicists, twice as many engineers, the collaboration of at least 35 countries. So we went. Night train in, night train out. We had tried this once before, so we were passably familiar with Geneva, specifically 'City Hostel' where we stayed two weeks ago, a cute generic place only a short walk from the train station. We didn't even need blue prints of the air vents or anything, we walked right in, avoided the reception desk, swooped upstairs for two hot showers so that we could arrive to CERN refreshed, prepared for recruitment if it worked anything like a modelling agency. Which it doesn't. Yet. Did we leave the premesis when a member of the staff came into the bathroom to clean and obviously recognized us? Nope. We went down into the basement where washing your clothes costs 8 francs but the dryers are free, dried our towels, and played a rigorous game of chess. Man, we're silly.

So my mom asked, 'Was it worth it?' I guess she meant all of the night trains, and even if we weren't oddly treated like royalty for the first time since we got here, my answer would indubitably be HELL YES! Here's how it went: A professorial lecture from an engineer named Klauss, a hunched, smiling man, who gave a voice to the idealism I have appended to science for years. The first thing he said was that several countries had alligned for the goal of peace, and that the most constructive outlet for this ambition was curiosity. So they built up funds, and eventually you get this huge collaboration of science and culture: 35 countries (including the US and Urbana-Champaign in particular) creating the world wide web, creating the first antimatter particles. I'm out of time now but this is definitely to be continued...

9.7.04

edition2

I was wandering alone on Wednesday with a few hours, a few books, and a complete lack of intention.. until I wandered too close to where I used to live. (I did live here once, although that seems like a disjointed lifetime, written down and remembered mostly as those words.) I attempted to walk to a park I once knew but got all turned around and found myself on a street I had never seen. If you've ever been to Florence, you know that it's concrete from your feet well into the skies, without green, without reprieve, a city forged entirely in stone. And I happened upon one of those rare breaks in the monotony of that hard and dirty: it was a walled-in park with words all around; a small green space that was decorated all over with painted block letters that hung from the trees and crouched on the ground and slept on the low-lying shrubbery, declaring to the world 'flowers' or 'roses' or 'apples' or 'lemons'. In English. I sat down in the middle of this wordy park and read a book from cover to cover, looking up to laugh to myself at this place that I found, and the confused few who wandered through the unauspicious gate to find a rainbow world of words. Later in my lazy day, I found a small shop tucked neatly behind rainbow pinwheels and peace signs where I ducked in from a crazy vespa for a fruity milkshake and some chatter.

I lived here before, slept and woke and ate and learned here, wandered and wasted a summer here, and I had never found a place that fit me just so. Wednesday I found two perfect fits just in time for Thursday and goodbye.

I took Jeff to my milkshake shop for breakfast this morning, we had a cheese-and-honey plate, served with warm bread and warmer coffee, and we marvelled at their free trade Nicaraguan coffee, and left our names and a few ideas in a little book called Parole Pace-'Words of Peace,' and wandered on anonymously.

[...]

5.7.04

Last night was the fourth of July and we spent it in an internet cafe. My dad wrote me an email and reminded me that usually we fill our eyes with fireworks. I'm always dazzled by those night-lights. As a little girl it meant staying up late and being encouraged to make a racket. It meant the sky was picture-pink like it sometimes ought to be. Even still I love the show, the grey lines left behind when I blink. Usually we're with family in the midwest, and I watch my sleepy cousins open their eyes wide for the first time in hours, and wonder what they're thinking.

But it made more sense to see the light I did. A bluish glow of computers stacked impersonally in a well-lit room, the screen refreshing right in front of me even though I can't detect it. This is how we should celebrate our country, because this is what it has come to be. Impersonal, convenient, and before-your-eyes dubious. Man, I wish I could see Michael Moore's movie, and hear the thunder that lingers in the wake of that flash.

This capital city has peace signs and stickers everywhere.

I had more things I wanted to say. But this was where my mind was.

click

4.7.04

I'm pretty sure that everything I wrote before has been lost somewhere. Or at least lost to me, because I guess it exists still as a delicate sequence of magnetic shifts on a particularly troublesome harddrive in Gainesville. And so I'm starting this over on nothing but white, the potential is insurmountable: sharing my mind with the people who are on it.

I guess that's just misleading. It's never been an empty page...Jeff said it best when we were waiting for a train in Naples (we were so often waiting for trains in Naples). He looked off somewhere up and then full into my face with words I guess he caught from whatever he saw out there, 'My parents have probably sat right here. And I think my grandparents too.' There was no 'Isn't it weird (or wonderful) that--' no preface whatsoever, just the raw fact resting in the thickish summer air. We're following footsteps. Good footsteps to follow in, too. It took me a little bit longer to notice.

We're in Rome now. It's my fourth time in this city and the sussurus of familiarity makes it all the more charming. Maybe it's enormous, but there are rusty streets that never run straight which are just quaint enough to be small-town personable. And I really love it here.

The first time I came it was with my Mom, and she was all smiles and stories that lingered somehow in those corners we found, waiting to be remembered and relished on my every return. I loved the peace of mind she found here, squandering our aimless hours (dreamlike fun). And it just hit me that my grandma, my Bubbie, has walked these streets too. She loved to travel, or maybe she just loved to remember, as I now love to remember her.. Three generations of wanderlusty Liebermans (okay, two Liebermans and a Stein, but who's counting?)
After twenty two years of friction, pushing so hard to make my footsteps distinct, I never thought I'd cherish so thoroughly the opportunity to do this footstep chasing, but wow.

Catching up Quickly
(A collage-y collection of word I wrote while my website was down | edited and now intended for general consumption)

(Interlaken)

And now for the juiciest part of my trip...canyoning! Uncomfortable in our cold wet wetsuits, we climb up a short way through the Alps (learning intimately what breathtaking could mean with so many stolen gasps of 'wow'), and then we tread through the water, sit down and slide on some little waterfalls and eventually belay into Saxeten. It's you, a rope, and 30 feet of cliffside down, but you climb in and that's that. Waterfalls everywhere. And adventure. There was only one jump that shook me. I mean it: I was violently shaking. I stood facing down and had to step back in the face of my fear. Nobody thought I would make it after that. Falter is so often failure. But I did it! And there are parts when you are in caves behind waterfalls (where Jeff snuck me the sweetest kiss ::stillblushing-he's so romantic::) and then the guide reaches his hand into the water and pulls you out onto a rock that you have to climb to go jump or slide down something else. So wow. I bought the picture package- I think I'll need the proof :-).

(Munich)

We're in Munich and we're staying in a place called "The Tent". It's just what it sounds like- a big tent. There's room for about 100 kids here but there are only about 60 right now. Its 8 euros per night and for all of that you get:

1 child sized rainbow colored mat to sleep on
4 army type blankets (which, even in mid June, barely kept us warm in the bizarre chill of last night), and
1 fulfilling breakfast.

You also get a stockroom full of stockroom type kids. Nice enough types who listen to Dave Matthews and feel like they're making real connections with fellow travellers when they realize that the stranger to their right ALSO read and LOVED the Da Vinci code. It's not disappointing or beneath us, it's simple amusing, this influx of well meaning pop culture Americans. I want to get to someplace we haven't touched.

Everything has been slightly off here. We went to see the glockenspiel never expecting an atonal racket and some plaster puppets moving slowly in circles. Bear fell over laughing. We went to a beer garden where monks roll out the beer in wooden barrels, this beautiful little spot surrounded by so many trees and old men who seem to routinely gather around platefulls of sausage and liters of beer (a liter of beer is A LOT of beer by the way, my tummy hurts!) and it started to pour this icy rain that filled our mugs and stayed like crystal beads in our hair. So we came back to the tent and laid down on our rainbow mats and mountains of blankets, and we listened to one of the CDs we remembered to pack, in a row on the floor there. We have one jack and so Jeff and I were sharing headphones and sitting slightly closer and Bear was a bit further away, and we're all looking up at the rain gathering on our canvas roof and bouncing just a bit in place. We forgot about Jeffs cd player, I think, because we've gone a whole month without music, and it just felt so good, us three sitting parallel but asymmetrically watching the shadowdance rain.

Still sentimental, but refocused in Rome:

It's funny-the things you never know you'll miss. But when I saw a palm tree for the first time in months on that volcanic-sandy shore in Naples I almost jumped for excitement. I've been taking Florida in for 9 years now, after kicking and screaming to get there. And now I'm making the same fuss about leaving. I love my world to much to ever let any of it go.