Pimping the Historic Future

Photos!

Jumpers are coming back, and I don't mean the British word for sweater kind of jumpers. I mean a Jumpsuit - with tapered legs, a waist and a zipper up to the neck. Where one wears a gray sweatsuit jumpsuit is beyond me, but H&M has a vision. I hope all the fashionable school girls with their mini Catholic uniform plaid skirts and pointy toed heels know how to make it the perfect outfit. What did happen to the days of measuring a uniform skirt to the knee? But I digress.

Newcastle is not only about the retro, futuristic fashion being peddled in all the shops. It is "real" England; much more like our Midwest than London. It's a maze of new modern and old industrial buildings. It's regular people - not thin, fashionable or rich enough to incur visitor jealousy. This is a area of regular working people. There is a healthy dose of tattoos, punk rock slacker kids and people in tracksuits. The accent is strong and muddled like the Scottish accent. I strain to eavesdrop. I am currently at about a 5 to 1 ratio of words said to words understood - a slightly better ratio than in Spain. However, there is still the trace of British loveliness where curse words sound rhythmic and meaningful.

This city - actually it's Newcastle on the north of the Tyne river and Gateshead on the south - is undergoing an impressive revitalization. An old ship building and factory town, it is now being pimped as a vacation destination for shopping and art. For such a tiny city, there is an impressive amount of modern art museums and galleries. Today I went to the Baltic, a free modern art museum and the SAGE Center, a shiny silver bubble of performing art.

I hiked across town to The Biscuit Factory to covet buyable art that was well outside my price range even before the depressing conversion rate.

My travels around town mostly involved me walking to a street, pulling out the map, studying it for 5 minutes, squinting while looking for invisible road signs, heading up a street, stopping at the next intersection, and pulling out map. Walk. Stop. Look. Repeat.

I walked for hours today, mostly because my ability to buy an all day metro/bus pass was foiled by my inability to carry 5 quid in coins. The modern convenience of buying travel cards with ATM cards has not made it Newcastle. A water and coffee purchase later, I have an all day travel card.

The upside is I got to see a lot of town. There were the old historic buildings, the revitalized river area called the Quay, the Millennium Bridge that opens and closes like an eye, the street full of mattress shops, the pedestrian shopping street, the diner full of old people having the breakfast special, and the crooked narrow streets loaded with Indian restaurants and kebob stands.

Next up, a trip to Chinatown for dinner, and then perhaps in search of a pub. Tomorrow, I head out to Alnwick Castle, better known as Hogwarts! There is a gigantic 6,000 feet high tree house, the Labyrinth and Poison and Serpent Gardens. If I get back early enough, I might head back to the shops. While the jumpsuit isn't quite my thing, the rest of 1983 was calling me. Dark jackets with big buttons! A polka-dotted school girl dress with a big belt, and my favorite - those dressy shirts with the big poofy necktie things. It's all ridiculous, but I can't stay away. Good thing I've got time to settle into the inevitability of me wearing this stuff, since it'll be another year before we see it in Austin.

Life Wrangling

The mental to-do list has been nagging me. "Write blog post" is blinking red. It's beneath "clean nasty bathroom!!!" but above "back up computer". For months, this domain has been rolling around my thought space. This item on my list has ballooned into a much larger task than was hastily written down.

cocovelocity feels directionless. It sits stagnant for months. Its readership a phantom list of friends and family who likely have gotten used to the settled dust, and have stopped checking for polish.

The smell of foreign air, the sound of unfamiliar accents, languages and even bodily noises mark spikes in writing production. Adventures and events are an easy subject.

But what about those other times? Those times when I am living the life I do have, not the one I imagine myself having in the whirlwind of somewhere new. This space, after all, was meant to force me to write; to spend time crafting sentences worth a damn.

But life now is both challenging and rewarding. And private. There is no humorous detail in my dog dying, or of the complications of relationship. It is all, frankly, not the Interweb's business. Even if this address is like a secret present for those I know.

So what to do here? Travel blog exclusively? Continue with the infrequent posts that are two or three times removed from my heart? They lack grace, feeling and often a decent spell check.

I contemplated politics, but that is a crowded space, and I doubt I craft words better than others trying to hopelessly change the minds of others. Nor am I a preacher. I do not need to tell anyone what they already know.

I've thought of blog retirement. But pictures alone don't tell my stories. Perhaps, I will continue to plod along as is. New adventures are still piled in front of me like Christmases. Story-telling doesn't need a schedule, nor divine inspiration.

Life, after all, is about the journey, which try as I might, does not conform to my schedule, quality standards or even direction. Life is as much the hilarity of the curses my father & I will spew while we wrangle my kitchen walls down in November as it is my anticipated wonderment and fear as I navigate Singapore without a guide.

As I search my heart for who I am as I approach 30, perhaps I can let go of the need to define it publicly, and with great clarity.

Southern Corner

According to the map in front of me, I am over the corners of Alabama and Tennessee. The red arrow will achingly crawl its way across the Atlantic before it dumps a tired, achy girl in front of British immigration.

"I am here," I'll say to no one in particular. I will turn on my cell, compulsively looking for contact from home. There are only a few who would message me.

Traveling - with its black, empty vastness out this window and lack of solid time zones - brings quiet to my roaring mind. The contemplativeness of this temporary time travel is almost hypnotic. I will work on my short story. I will write a poem, perhaps. It is likely that tears will collect in the corners of my eyes, perhaps escaping to my cheeks, but not with such speed or in such numbers to detract my neighbor from his physics magazine.

Here, barreling over land and sea, my uncertainty and unsettledness is a comfortable sweater. Here lonely is a friend, not the silhouette in the corner that my eyes work to avoid.

Tainted Love

80s cover bands are an excellent choice for a wedding band. Tainted Love got an encore even.

The Jersey girls dug the Bon Jovi. The Billy Idol "White Wedding" choice seemed, perhaps, poor given that we were a gorgeous Napa Valley wedding.

Alana & Mike threw a great party. She's never seemed happier, and we stayed in this beautiful old Victorian house with a wrap around porch.

My fellow housemates/bridesmaids gave me a fabulous idea. Blogging about my upcoming kitchen remodel!

Wedding pics!