Balance and visit from another life

“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.” 

As summer is proceeding, I am trying (and succeeding) in making my time here feel as much as possible as a summer holiday. I'm a little surprised at this myself, as I thought I would go all-in for my internship, but I am really getting the benefits from a more balanced life. I guess I didn't expect very much at all from DH, but its really showing off its best side, prominently on the people side as I'm constantly surrounded by  funny, clever and warmhearted people. I am really grateful to all of them for sharing as much as they do. In a long-term perspective, I also believe that going to Vienna in October will be much better if I'm filled up with summer and energy (and beer...).

Regarding the internship, I am happy with it, albeit the feeling that I haven't really gotten in to it yet. A lot of my time is spent doing market research, which is time consuming and a bit boring, and the outcome doesn't really show yet. But instead of getting frustrated, I hope for more interesting tasks in the future and enjoy the fact that I'm the least stressed person in the office. The benefit of being an intern is that after all (at least in my case), you have no responsibility.

Last week, I was very happy to recieve my first visitor, Andres from Argentina!! Who would have thought? We met in Ecuador in 2011, and now he had decided to "cruzar el charcho" (cross the puddle) and come to Europe, and he was in the Netherlands for a little while. A lifetime ago, yet it is very near in some senses. It was really great to catch up and interesting to see what happened to us after our roads diverged - we lived basically the same life for a month when we traveled together, then I went home and back to my studies in Sweden whereas he continued to Mexico and the Caribbean where he has been working in bars and random places, even as a musician (although he said he was not very good at it). It is fascinating to imagine that I could have done that too, in a different life, but I chose this route and I am definitely happy where I am.

Snapshots

From my first weekend in DH (Den Haag) - my fabulous flatmates Charlotte (left in stripes) and Kelvin (guy on my right) took me to a festival arranged by a neighborhood. Dance dance dance to lovely mexican/peruvian/spanish band Chupacabras! 

Dancing made me happy. Friends made me happy. Good vibes.

And, Kelvin is the person to thank for the capturing of this moment!

Starting a new chapter

“How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail, and pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!” 

Monday evening at 10 pm I disembarked the bus, after having spent 14 hours on the road. The journey started in Copenhagen and ended in The Hague, my new home for the next 3 months. I managed to orient myself, and after a short walk I found the house where I was welcomed as the new flatmate. More to come about that!

The following morning I got dressed and went to the office where I will spend most of my time for these next few months. Since I am transferring universities this year (just finished the first year of my master in Copenhagen, the next one will start in Vienna in October), I ended up with a long summer holiday. Nice and all, but since I really want to find a satisfactory job when I'm done with my degree (next June, hopefully), I figured it would be great if I could get some experience from the field I want to work in. Therefore, I managed to find a place willing to have me for a while - kind of outside the system, most announced internships are 6 months with a minimum salary, but mine is categorised as volunteering, so no salary and no rules, basically. Anyways, I'm at a place called IWA, the international water association, which aims to create a platform for different stakeholders in the water sector to network and exchange knowledge. Honestly, I couldn't have found a better place. This impression was enhanced when I came into the office and met the people working in my department (communications and engagement) - everyone is so nice! Humble, witty and clever people who immediately made me feel very welcome.

The week in the office has been extremely intense. I managed to arrive in the beginning of their "international staff week", which means that people from all offices (London, Nairobi, Beijing, Bucharest, Singapore and Bangkok) have been here. It was actually a great introduction, I now know a lot about the work they are doing and had a great chance to get to know the staff better at the social activity, the dinner and karaoke night! Quite crazy, I must say. I've also had the time to get to know the army of interns there, about 10 in our office, who are really sweet and as it turns out, there is another Swedish girl that I have friends in common with from before! All of this has of course been great, but also quite overwhelming. Yet, it has exceeded my expectations and I'm looking forward to a very interesting summer.

As for my house and the flatmates, it seriously couldn't be better. I live with Joost, a local, Anik, originally from India, Kelvin from Sierra Leone/Canada and Charlotte from France/Germany. And they are all really great people! We have already spent a lot of time together, endless conversations over beers or tea, and gone out for adventures together, watching football games in bars, dancing both in clubs and concerts and laughed all the time. I am so happy and grateful to be in this house, with a great community spirit. Here I know I will never be alone or bored!

There is so much more to be said, but I think it is better to stop here and continue with the reflections (an pictures!) at a later point. This chapter of my life will indeed be quite different from the Bolivia one (the last episode I blogged about), but I think I've found a different (rainier) kind of Wonderland here.

From Rurrenabaque with love

“You would have to be half mad to dream me up.”

It is the morning of our last full day in Rurre, tomorrow we’re taking a flight back to La Paz again. Our stay is much overdue but I’m not at all ready to leave. Met so many amazing friends, saw so many beautiful things, dreamt so much, got drunk, danced, cried, laughed.

I will write a separate entry for the two excursions we did, one was to the pampas as I already mentioned and the other one was to the jungle. Mesmerising.

In Rurre, we have as I’ve written earlier spent a lot of time writing on our thesis. So much that all out friends and acquaintances are commenting on it – but you are working so hard! You cannot work all the time! We have spent much time at the hostel, but also at a restaurant called Casa del Campo, where the owner has become like a second mum to us. Delicious food, but slow cooking!

We have of course also spent time with Miguel, the couchsurfer, almost everyday (Rurre is so small you are bound to run into each other at least once per day). We were also excited guests at his sister’s birthday party, when she turned eleven last week! A lovely experience, and interesting to see the differences from a Swedish celebration. First of all, all guests arrived (as expected) two hours late… and the TV was on all the time, since there are no games, just dance. And the dance is performed to the latest hits, which are in Latin America quite often performed by a man surrounded by women in bikini. Interesting, as in Bolivia the women will wear clothes even to go swimming, and we are often stared at for wearing a swim suit. On the contrary, any mother will breastfeed her child in public at any time! Confusing…

The last two days we have spent with Elin and Pontus! Pontus is a friend of mine from Sweden that I see maybe once every year together with his cousin Marcus, who is one of my closer friends. And now they are on the road, apssing by Rurre! We’ve had a really good time here although the weather turned from 30 degrees and sticky sweat to icy rain… We’ve been eating out a lot, and laughing a lot as we share the same cultural sense of humour. And Elin and Pontus are really funny – they are a perfect match! We wish you all the best for the rest of your trip, and we hope to get invited to your wedding so we can give you a chocolate fondue machine!

More friends who had a big impact on us were Sami, a French guy living with energetic Edwin. Both had such a lovely energy, cannot help but smile when around them! And our jungle guide, Leoncito, a really special person. As well as Cheo, the young artisan that is so passionate about life and nature.

This is such a special place. I think the strongest reason for that is the intense presence of the wild nature – the Pachamama, as mother earth is called in Latin America. You have to be senseless not to feel anything here, which is why I’m secretly planning my return to get a longer stay in the jungle. Maybe next year…

Thesis writing is serious business!

“Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!” 

So, we decided to stay in Rurrenabaque (RBQ) and write the main body of our thesis here. Yesterday we could finally start writing, and it feels fantastic. Our first time here was dedicated to other things – we did an amazing trip to Las Pampas for three days, and two days of field trips for a contract job that Tess is doing for the environmental consultancy U&We. These were fabulous experiences and it was relieving to stop thinking about the thesis for a while – even the best of brains need a rest at some point.

So this week, we have started to revise the interviews. It is a hard job indeed, reading the transcriptions in Spanish, I select the important parts and then I translate them for Tess. The texts are hard to deal with since spoken vs written language is so different, and they can be very confusing… a funny thing is that in Spanish, ‘no’ can sometimes mean ‘yes’, it depends on the intonation, which we of course cannot see in the transcriptions! Cochabamba feels like such a long time ago, and even though we mentally started processing the material already when we did the interviews, there are many things we don’t remember. Especially for Tess, who never fully understood the material when we did the interviews.

When we did our data collection, I got to practice my skills as an interviewer since Tess does not manage the Spanish that well yet. This learning process has become very obvious to me now, as I see the varying quality of the interviews. And although my Spanish is good, it is still my third language and therefore I can be thrown of my feet if the informant is using a confusing rhetoric. And I swear, Spanish-speakers can be so confusing!

Now, we try to write as much as we possibly can. I miss our kitchen table in our old apartment in Malmö very much – RBQ is great in many ways, but writing here is difficult. It is very warm, which makes our mid-day writing sessions very sweaty. We still don’t have a proper table where we live, which makes writing not ergonomic at all, and this is a noisy place (although the hotel we are at now is pretty good in that sense). Still, I would not want to be anywhere else.

To go for a swim in the river whenever we get too hot, walk barefoot, some of the new friends we met here, the hills, the pace of this place… I was lying in the garden a while ago, looking at the sky and the bush with orange/pink flowers next to me. The colours are so vivid! That is something I really miss in Sweden – everything is a bit …duller. It of course has its own charm, but this lively colours, especially the green of the plants in contrast to the sky, it fills me with energy.

Las Pampas ... will tell more about that another time!

L'chaim

A very, very sensitive topic indeed. I don't know yet if I will publish this entry, well, time will tell.

Israeli travelers are abundant in South America. From what I have been told, everyone has to do military service - men do three years, women get away with only two. Thereafter, the "trend" is to work an let's call them unqualified jobs, as a waiter, and then go travelling the world.

Israeli travelers are not popular in South America. They are infamous for traveling in large groups, often 5-8 people, only speaking Hebrew, being very loud, doing lots of drugs, bargaining on everything and always going for the cheapest option. Were I lived in Colombia, there were two Israeli hostels which led me to the conclusion that they really like rave music, at all times of the day, and that their parties are rather exclusive. They are not known for their great social skills. Various hostels and guides simply refuse to deal with Israelis. However, everyone who has met a single Israeli (myself included) always has to add that it seems to be the group behaviour which is so irritating, not the individual.

Arriving in Rurre, we realised that this is an Israeli hotspot. We were told that it is so because an Israeli was kidnapped here a long time ago, wrote a book about it and therefore all Israeli want to go here now (I consider that logic dubious, but I guess also logic can be relative and cultural). And honesly, we got quite fed up with the masses. Waking up to an overdosing Israeli vomiting violently outside our hut in the wetlands was not fun. Worse was to have a group of ten sitting outside our door at the hostel, smoking weed, listening to horrible music and shouting in hebrew. We ended up having to go to another hostel to get some peace.

And why? Why are they so loud? Why do they almost always travel in large groups? Why are they not behaving like normal people?

Tess and I guessed that the loudness comes from the military training. Running around in large groups preparing yourself for war, I can see how shouting becomes a normal way of communicating. Well, it's a theory.

Then two days ago as we were walking home from the river, we stop outside a restaurant where I'm looking for a friend. Then three guys shout at us - come and have coffee with us! - why not, we thought and joined them. I got a beer instead of a coffee and then we were soon engaged in conversations with these Israeli kids. I can't remember everything we talked of, but I remember the strange feeling of enjoying the company, yet feeling very distant from the guys. And of course, we touched the topic of politics. Ouch. But it taught me something very important. One of these young men, when he started talking about how Arabs attack Israel, there was such a brutal frustration and anger within him, and I thought to myself - this is what keeps wars going, this deep hatred. Then I understood something even more important.

I will never understand this man.

I will never understand why he is feeling such hatred. I will never understand what it feels like to come from a country that has been disrupted by conflicts for thousands of years, under constant attack and criticized by every other country. I cannot possibly imagine what is like to belong to a group that has been persecuted for generations, dispersed over the continent. There is no way I can grasp the horrors of the holocaust and what effects it had, the aftermath that has shaped and divided the world. It is not even in my collective memory, because swedes don't know what war is. We haven't had a war of our own in almost 200 years.

I will never understand where this man comes from. So who am I to judge him? The only thing I feel I can do right now is thank him, for opening my eyes, and try to be somewhat more humble to other's reality.

Arriving in Rurre

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Oh, Bolivia.

A week ago we left La Paz in a little propeller plane, which was by far the most beautiful flight of my life (and I’ve done quite a few…). Since the plane was so small, we flew between the snow-covered mountains and then down towards the lowlands, the green hills, the rivers.

When we arrived at the airport of Rurrenabaque, which was basically just a house next to a field, we were greeted with the phrase “wellcom to paradais!” (imagine a Spanish intonation here), and he was so right. This is so incredibly beautiful, it’s like living and breathing a documentary from national geographic. The landscapes I barely dared to dream of are now surrounding me.

So we got into town and called our couchsurfer. In this remote (yet touristic) village, there is only one couchsurfer, who of course gets heaps of requests. However, after 3 years in the CS community and this being my 40th time surfing, I have some practice in writing requests by now and know how to make people understand that I'm genuinely interested in meeting them and not just want to stay for free at someone's house. Miguel, or Lechu as he is nicknamed, picked us up and then drove us to his grandparents place, where he picked a coconut from the garden and served me. In the afternoon Tess was feeling a bit ill, so Lechu and I did a little excursion to a remote beach to go swimming in the river. Lechu and I get along so well, he is fun to hang out with and we have a special kind of humor largely based on teasing each other. He is not at all the typical Bolivian, since he lived in Venezuela for five years and has travelled a lot. At some point, I think travellers merge into a people who have more in common with each other that their countrymen – we are in a certain way a different species, with our own variety of course. And yet, after a while, you can pick out distinct types of travellers so easily... will return to this topic later!

Couchsurfers and a shared piece of beach art!