Category: Travel

VIDEO: We, dada, wewe… (You, sister, you…)

We dada, wewe… (You sister, you…)

THE SINGING. Still brings me tears.

Video from Tanzania in 2006 – I was sixteen, it was my first time traveling on my own, and my first time in Tanzania. I spent three months – volunteered in an orphanage, taught English, went on a safari, saw some chimps in the mountains. Sometime later that year, I threw a bunch of the video clips together and backed it with some of the kids singing, from the background of other clips…

I don’t have the original video files anymore (a fact which also makes me want to cry), but… the singing! Really wished I’d recorded more of it…

Continue reading

The town on top of the hill. (In the flattest party of the country…)

The snow has finally melted.

I hated the snow. I was complaining about it constantly for the last two weeks, moaning and making every possible excuse to stay indoors. But now that it’s melted, I already miss it.

I should have gotten a photograph. It was beautiful. The streets, covered in nearly a foot of snow. The open courtyard behind my building was filled with snow. The river and the pond in front were covered, and the roof of the cottage perfectly peaked in white. The tree branches were tipped with it. The fences were perfectly frosted. The field across the way was utterly white (the field that’s lined with trees, but in the summer had man-sized bales of hay tied… Continue reading

Back in Brizzle…

(And I’d promised myself I’d never call the city that…  )

So… I was on holiday/vacation for the last month. And for the first time traveling, ever, I didn’t write so much as a word.

On top of that, I pretty much “forgot” to take any pictures. Woops.

I got to spend time with my family (which, when you only see them once a year and live on a different continent, is a glorious thing indeed!). After running around Nice and Paris and briefly dropping by Cambridge (long enough to find me a place to live next year)…. Continue reading

En France, avec ma famille… et je l’adore!

I’m in Paris, in a charmingly curious little hotel near Notre Dame and l’Ile de St Louis.

We flew in this morning, from Nice, where I met my parents – whom I hadn’t seen since December – and my brother and a lovely family who put us up for five days. (Five days which went entirely too quickly.) They have a beautiful, rambling 17th century farm house – all corridors and white plaster – with an incredible garden, twenty minutes walk from the beach.

They fed us more foie gras and cheese than we could eat, wine more amazing than I know how to appreciate, and ran around in circles with us. We tagged with the family – a gallery opening (a Sosnos exhibition, and met the man himself) to which the… Continue reading

I’m on Salon!

Salon:  When I almost died and didn’t find God

My story (That time I almost died from typhoid fever in Tanzania…) is now featured in the Life section.

It’s been edited severely – now focusing on my, ah, religious “confusion” (see tagline: “In an East African hospital, I battled a mysterious illness, but all anyone could ask was: Did I believe?”) and hospitalization in Nairobi – rather than how I got ill and managed not to realize for months Continue reading

That time I almost died from typhoid fever in Tanzania…

“Do you believe in God?” She was earnest. She wielded a clipboard.

A grin skipped up beside. “Ca va?” He sounded young. A green mask covered half his face but I remember him grinning. From my back, on a bed, in a hallway, I replied automatically. “Comme ci, comme ca.”

The doors opened. “It is time, Miss Tankard.”

Lights, white tile, stainless steel. I remember the windows. It hurt, so they found another vein. An older voice told me to picture a happy place – to imagine my family – and they counted, backwards.

The grin on the left waggled a vial. “Maziwa…”

I swam upwards to translate. “Milk?” Split second having managed it, before she came in from the right, put her face to my ear, and whispered through her mask.

“Believe, Miss Tankard, believe. He is real.”

And then I was out. Continue reading

Mon frère habitera à Paris. Or, Expatriating with grace.

notredame2010

My brother has a “phobia” of looking like a foreigner. (He told me so himself.)

Now, I can almost understand. I hate looking like a tourist. I get self-conscious with my accent echoing in my own ears and all the wrong currencies falling out of my pockets.  I feel single-handedly responsible for over-turning all the stereotypes about loud Americans. I refuse to patronise international chains and I’ve been known to duck into a doorway to surreptitiously peer at the directions that I’ve discretely scrawled on my hand. I don’t carry a guide-book in public. (Actually, I don’t carry one at all.) I pride myself on not standing out too painfully: I can, and enjoy, eating Continue reading