passing by

Nostalgia for blue skies, on my visit to Beijing, Xian and Shanghai Lighting the beanstalk to boil the beans, and of this the beans thus wailed: “Born are we of the same root; should you now burn me with such disregard?”   Li Bai, poet laureate of the Tang Dynasty When I was 19 I wrote a bucket list. I revise it every so often to remind myself of my dreams at the time but also to edit it. Ten years later, many of those aspirations remain. One of the items on that list was to learn mandarin and live in China for at least two months. Mandarin I did try to learn, multiple times. First in high school with a teacher that was the daughter of the owner of my favorite vegetarian restaurant, one my dad used to take my sister and I for lunch during our high school years. Juan Jose, my classmate from French, and I, decided to get private lessons with her. Unfortunately, she was in college then and didn’t have the time; only one of nicknames remains from then – Me...

I woke up to the Tasman Sea below me. As soon as I landed I was asked for my yellow fever vaccine. I broke into a sweat knowing I hadn’t brought it with me, hadn’t even thought about it. They sent me into another line and looking through my phone I was lucky to find the picture of it from going to Tiputini. The officer told me they were very serious about the vaccines; they didn’t want yellow fever back in the continent. I only understood once I was finally out in the Australian sun taking the ferry to Manly and Q station, the quarantine island where hundreds lived and died to prevent epidemics from spreading in Australia til the 80s.  View of Sydney coming back from Manly Manly’s beach was beautiful yet I was mostly fascinated with the first cockatoo I saw by a street light. I stared at it for as long as I could in disbelief, taking endless terrible pictures; I had only seen cockatoos with wings cut and in cages. I also couldn’t believe more people weren’t as ama...