the simplest things....

...are not always so simple.  internet access has been, well, let's say, a bit of a challenge.  i'm good.  i'm in bosnia.  i'm just not all hooked up in the whole hey-look-at-me,-i'm-in-touch-with-the-whole-world kinda way....  i'm sitting in a cafe/bar at the moment, blissed out by the fact that 1) one of the employees here could not only speak english but 2) also knew about computer/router/internet stuff and so, 3) i was actually able to get an internet connection after only 45 minutes of rebooting the establishment's equipment and dicking around with my nic settings (and spending as much on beer for the "free" internet connection that i would have spent for an entire month of unlimited internet access at home), and 4) after all of that, convincing the employees to let me plug in my laptop (only plug in the place is behind the bar) since my battery can barely hold a charge anymore....

now, completely soused and satisfied with my tiny victory, i say "screw the spellcheck, i'm just gonna post!"  i'll try and get some photos and other stuff up within the next week...

cheers!

bye bye budva, bye bye

i'm not ready to leave, but somehow the time has come.

october in budva

day tripping in bar, montenegro

bar, your basic centuries-old walled, fortressed city in the mountains
(i'm tired. it looks like it's going to rain.  do you think it's going to rain?  do we really have to climb around up there today?  i'm hungry.  i have to pee.  hey, are you taking a picture of me?..)


montenegro has had some pretty big earthquakes...


did i mention the mountains?

is that a vanillice in your pocket?

sweets from my sweet this mornng.  i wake up to a crackling noise.  z's just come back from his morning walk and he's pulling a small bag out of the pocket of his jacket. "hey what this? how get here? someone must put in when i walking by pekara*."

* that would be the the local bakery that makes amazing treats the likes of which i've never tasted in the states...

the winding down

sigh. it's winding down. the angle of the sun, the ever so slight cooling of the water. and the grapes. look at them. they were once so full and fat and vibrant. now they're, well... winding down. sigh.

brunch before beach in budva

fuel for frogging around in the adriatic all day

you're never too old to rock the adriatic!

photo by nico and/or chris

i am exhausted

i mean, really, bobbing around in the adriatic all day, every day is simply exhausting. it's all i can do to drag my butt back home and eat whatever fabulous meal zeljko has prepared for me.

the last 4

why host just 1 or 2 couchsurfers at a time when you can host 4 at a time?

seriously though, it really is much more fun to have a houseful. well, at least for me. maybe not so much for the surfers who have to sleep on the floor...

anyway, joining agata - and then swapping out agata for lucia - to make the end of our hosting season in budva especially crunchy and mellow:

nicolas, from the french speaking part of belgium,
and who is not a fascist

chris, also from the french speaking part of belgium,
also clearly not a fascist

and lucia from uruguay (although most recently dublin, ireland),
a hitchhiking, spanish-teaching, dog-loving vegan (who added a few dishes to zeljko's repertoire),
and who, although we did not specifically discuss it,
i'm pretty sure is also not a fascist.

agata of the couchsurfing, sailboat surfing variety

agata, immigrated from poland to the u.s. when she was 4, now back in poland on a fulbright scholarship.

agata, come and gone so quickly.  ok, maybe i pushed her out, but it was so she could take advantage of a free, yes free, croatian island hopping opportunity that had just dropped in her lap.

andy and mau: our unintentional surfers

we met andy and mau (maureen) from england at the prince, our favorite pub/internet cafe in budva. they were vacationing north of budva and had bused here for the day to check out stari grad and enjoy the beach. we immediately hit it off, so we plied them with beer, they plied us with beer, and after much mutual plying - we lured them back to our place with promises of the best balcony in budva, pasta bolognese, and more beer. many, many hours later, after the last bus back to their place was long gone, we had our next batch of couchsurfers. i think that there's nothing better than couchsurfing, except maybe for spontaneous couchsurfing...

romancing the worm. ringworm, that is.

texas tea. black gold.  ok, never mind.  guess you had to be there. 

look, it climbed up on my lap, made biscuits, then promptly fell asleep.  what was i gonna do?  well, what i didn't do was touch it, despite my overwhelming desire to do so, lest this happen to me again.

unstable angina

that's what it turned into.  i'm pretty sure.  i think z's previous episodes were of the stable variety, but last night's had all the earmarks of the unstable variety. and that woke up all kinds o' fear in me.  he wouldn't let me call a doctor (there's no emergency room option here) but once it passed, he finally agreed to go to a cardiologist when we head to banja luka bosnia next month.  next month.

but the really good thing about last night was that it reminded me - again - that we're all just passing through and we touch each other's lives for such a short time. last year i made a conscious choice to actively love and serve (yes, i said serve) and bring happiness every day to this soul whose path has converged with mine, and there's no excuse to fall down on the job for even a moment because every moment could be the last.


eddie vedder's rise from the into the wild soundtrack

stari grad (old town) in kotor monenegro

i could live on this street


or this street


or here


or here (even though it's not actually in stari grad...)

the migration patterns of the happily disallusioned

so i had a little issue come up the other day. i had to get out of montenegro since the 90 days i could legally be here on just a passport were about up.

the great thing about montenegro - since it's not a member of the infamous schengen gang - is that once you exit, you can just re-enter and the 90 day clock starts over. not true with those schengen thugs whose 25 (damn you switzerland for joining them in 2008!) member countries who, unless you manage to wrangle a temporary residence permit out of them, only allow you to stay a total of 90 days within any 180 day period. that's not 90 days in each country. that's 90 days cumulative across all the member countries.

so anyway, the point is that i had to get out of montenegro for a bit. and you know what that meant? roadtrip!!!!

after 3 months, yes 3 (hello!) friggin' months in one place, i was finally on the road again! ok, indulge me. it was only for a couple days, but it... was.... the.... road!!!!!

hitchhiking from montenegro to croatia was glorious! and when i say glorious, i don't say it, i sing it - glorrrrr-iiiiiii-usssssssss!

and i finally got to hitch a taxi!!!!

ok, it's hard to explain it, but i was glowing when z and i had to walk the 1.2 kilometers (uphill, mind you) of no-man's land between the montenegrin border crossing exit and the croatian border crossing entry. glowing! i know it seems a bit silly, but for some reason, there’s just something fun about walking a border crossing, about “pulling up” to the border crossing guard booth on foot.

now, if you're wondering why hitchhikers end up walking across border crossings, well, sometimes drivers go out of their way to take you all the way to the border crossing even though they're not crossing the border themselves. and sometimes drivers who would normally love to give you a ride decide they don’t want to have to explain to a border guard why they have an international criminal in the back of their car, if indeed you turn out to be an international criminal... in this particular case, our lovely just-gone-off-duty montenegrin taxi driver couldn't take his employer-owned taxi over the border.

so anyway, i wasn't glowing just because i walked another border crossing. i was glowing because i was on the road and there were very few cars on that road, and it was getting dark, and dubrovnik was still a long way away. who would be our next ride and when would they come? (ok, so it turns out our next ride picked us up just steps after the croatian border crossing guards allowed us entry, but it could have taken longer…)

but the point is that z and i were on the road together on our first long distance hitch. he was in thongs. cheap little rubber thongs and he was walking the border crossing with me - at dusk!. and it as okay with him! z was okay with it all!

i was ecstatic in the moment. i thought about alex and bruno from aix-en-provence now on foot in southeast asia. i thought about vincent and marie from paris - the "delighted caravan" heading to india. i thought about the last group of couchsurfers we had just hosted, all of them solo hitchhikers who happened to converge on our place at the same time, all of them from different parts of the world and all of them heading to different parts of the world.

i thought about all of us, all of us disillusioned with the trappings of conventional life and, all of us following our own migration patterns across the globe and happily - ecstatically - finding meaning in the places and people and moments along the way.

30 couchsurfers in 60 days

i tried to write about it - specifically the last 10 days of non-stop hosting - but i'm still too tired.  it'll just have to wait until i've had enough "me" time and feel like sorting through my thoughts and photos and stuff and junk.  until then, this'll have to do:

david, our australian marine biologist

florian, the german didjeri dude
and environmental conservation student

james, our international relations student
and danielle, our molecular biologist

uh, how many people am i cooking for?

the delighted caravan lands on our doorstep

our most recent couchsurfers, marie and vincent, collectively
"the delighted caravan", landed on our doorstep last night. both are engineers in paris, and in late june they climbed into a camper van and left their jobs and home behind in france to travel for one year. they should hit greece by september and then they'll leave the van behind and head out on foot to india. yep, that means trekking through turkey, iran and pakistan on foot.

so we talked through most of the night about work, life, travel, language, couchsurfing, politics and all that stuff. and they taught us a great line - "j'en ai ras le cul les couchsurfers" - to use with our next french couchsurfers. well it's great assuming they have a sense of humor and don't get offended easily... oh, you can try the free online translators on this one, but they don't quite reveal the poetry of it.

yuma salsero is in the house!

so there's this guy named yuma who is french salsa dancer and instructor and he's travelling around southeast europe and the balkans for 5 months organizing salsa workshops and public demonstrations - and making a documentary about the whole thing for french television.

he and the gang are taking a breather and staying with us here in budva before they head off to their next events in croatia.

sylvestre, the camera guy, is not a salsa dancer. he likes techno...

bring it on!

let's see, what's happening in the couchsurfing world tonight? well, in the photo you've got mirko from serbia, me from the states, marcella from italy, zeljko from bosnia, and elodie and christian from france. and arriving later, fran the spanish guy and david from chile. that's 8. another late night. another dance party on the balcony...

involuntary compassion

sigh. i annoy myself sometimes. it's crept up on me and i can't make it go away. involuntary compassion. compassion for the person who stole from me in such a prolonged, cruel and ugly way. sigh.

gautier, gautier!

i'm particularly fond of hosting hitchhikers.

although the couchsurfing community is a pretty open, many people don't have the flexibility in their schedules to host someone who might arrive today, or maybe the next day, or... and when your hitching, that's just kinda the way it is.

so since i am ultimately flexible at the moment, i especially want to help out hitchhikers.

enter gautier, a reggae musician from amiens france travelling solo through the balkans for the summer. he's an eco-minded guy and after spending a little time with us, he's headed to my favorite place in the world, zelenkovac.

the dance party continues

me and ivica down by the schoolyard. ok, actually, me and ivica up on the balcony, but whatever.

the budding artist downstairs

our downstairs neighbors for the past couple of weeks, vanja, ivica and their son joban, are from podgorica, the capital of montenegro. joban did a portrait of zeljko the other night while we were hanging around on the balcony. not bad!

and then came stacey and dave

out with the old, in with the new. after gloria and daniele vespa’d off into the sunset, in came stacey and dave.

stacey’s from connecticut, speaks mandarin chinese, has been couchsurfing since 2007, just finished school and is on her way to china to teach english for a year. dave’s from london, has hosted a gazillion couchsurfers there (been in since 2006), does volunteer work with the homeless, and pretty much wants to find an abandoned hollow volcano evil supervillian base to live in. hmmm.....

then, after an evening or two of local beer and fun conversation, they were off on the rest of their summer balkans tour.

gloria, daniele and the vespa tour

when i heard that gloria and daniele, 2 couchsurfers from bergamo italy, were travelling through eastern europe on a vespa scooter - well a knockoff made in india - i knew i had to host them.

ok, so they may be a bit crazy what with the whole travelling around on a little teeny motorscooter with two people and a bunch of luggage thing, but they're also pretty resourceful cooks and they managed to put together a yummy italian dinner for us despite our woeful lack ingredients...

the end of naked july and the beginning of fun-with-vestibular-neuritis august

vestibular neuritis. gotta love it. this bout was a doozy. kept me in bed for a week.

how can you go wrongwith with tuna, peas and rice?

weird, just weird

look what i stumbled upon tonight.

it's kinda weird to see conan o'brien in budva, just squeezed in there amongst the montenegrin, serbian, croatian and german television shows...

naked july

so when i proclaimed this past month "naked july" i had no idea that it really was naked july... in chicago.

july started out hot and muggy and just kept getting hotter and muggier. you never really dried off after getting out of the shower, and a couple of quick showers a day was a necessity. so why bother getting dressed at all? thus begun naked july.

amaretto cookies and balsamic vinegar!

we bid a fond farewell to our couchsurfers davide, margherita and cristina from bergamo, italy today. and although we'll miss them, we have the amaretto cookies and balsamic vinegar to remember them by. yummmm!

payette is a valley, city and county in idaho and a kayaking couchsurfer from petaluma

...which is only about 10 miles from where i stay when i'm in northern california.

and she came to visit us in budva.

and after leaving us she made her way to kolašin, montenegro where rumor has it she had quite the lovely time.... and then to my favorite place in bosnia where rumor has it (oh, i have my sources...) that she was a huge hit with the local guys.

that makes the 2nd 40-ish solo woman from my old neighborhood passing through here in less than a week! what's happening in california?

like a raft, mf'r

i cling to you like a raft. 
you've seen so much damage yet you're still afloat.

like i've been foundering in an ocean for years,
i pull myself up onto you and sink in, finally able to breathe.

sveti stefan redux

blue water...


dribbly rock formations...


and a mythic tree root

sometimes a gal just needs a break

a short vacation at montenegro's sveti stefan.

and then there were 8

ok, let me start by saying that our flat is small and a big chunk of it is occupied by a little kitchen area, a double bed, and a corner converted into an art studio. having said that, z and i still managed to jam in 6 couchsurfers who synchronistically all converged on the place at the same time.

bartek, michal and kuba, 3 university students from poland, arrived first - one week earlier than originally planned. they had travelled to belgrade, serbia only to have their couchsurfing host cancel at the last minute. suddenly without accommodation, they spent the night in the train station and then headed towards montenegro sooner than expected. can we come early? no problem!

and then sami and mikko arrived just hours later. i'd been in touch with sami, a 30-something long time, long distance bicyclist from finland, since we met at zelenkovac in bosnia in july of 2008. (sami is in the last photo of this post from that time.) i knew that he and his friend mikko, one of his 2 usual travelling companions, would be cycling through our area in late july/early august. it turned out that today would be the day.

next came max. when you first log into couchsurfing, it displays a list of couchsurfers travelling in the area. a week or so earlier, i saw max's profile, and eager to meet another solo female traveller, particularly a 40 year old solo female traveller from san francisco, i emailed her an invitation to surf with us should she be passing through budva anytime. turns out she was. today... max is an artist, semi-reluctant performer, does set, mask and lighting design (and teaches lighting design too) and has travelled all over the world doing just that. so while the boys were checking out stari grad, its beaches and it's 12 foot tall skinny-as-a-rail women, max and i lost track of time talking - for 2 days straight.

despite the fact that i had managed to kill our refrigerator the night before everyone arrived, z managed to keep everyone fed - and watered, or i should say beered - and it turned out perfectly.

sami's posted a bit more of the story here on his blog - including giving a shoutout to the "springrolls" that tasted more like burritos than the burrito i got at a mexican food place in bosnia...

and then they were all gone and suddenly our flat seemed oddly large and empty.

budva living: view from my window

budva living: the washing

who needs the latest techonology in washers and dryers when you've got...


a bathtub


and a stairwell

budva living: the water

well, the drinking water in budva may look like this and taste kinda like, ummm, chalk, but when it's 90+ degrees fahrenheit all day every day for a couple of months, it'll do just fine.

oh, i forgot to mention that you can't actually always count on having water in the summer. sometimes you just don't.

the weight of your world

i'm falling in love with the weight of your world. all of it.

i'm making love to the world, the world inside you, the world you bring with you. the summers in your grandmother’s stone house, running away from the crowd that gathered after you were hit by a car, the music, the art, the fame, the failures, the innocence of that new year’s eve party and the shock of your world turning upside-down overnight, the war, the loss of your friends, home, your city, your country, the deadness in your soul forced by year after year of ugliness, the brokenness and the refusal to be broken, the anger and the acceptance, the forgetting and the remembering, the laughing, the dancing, the quiet strength, the waking up and the acceptance of it all.

you’ve been softened by acceptance and i can feel it in your body. your body is soft, yielding to the whole of life, yielding to me, letting me in, inviting me in to share all of it, all of you.

i’m making love to the whole of your world.


ok, everybody now...

crash into me

stopping

i feel like i could just stop. i breathe out and i feel no impulse to breath in again. nothing in my body, nothing in my mind, nothing that compels me to breathe in. i breathe out and when that breath is gone, it’s just all so calm, so quiet, so restful and i just stop. the constant in and out and in and out and in and out takes so much energy and seems so noisy, so busy. and stopping is just so still.

this morning i woke up and this is what i felt. so quiet. z was talking to me, smiling his beautiful “good morning” smile, and i had no words. i heard a faint answer in my head, but the act of moving those words outside of my body seemed so unnecessary, so busy, even violent. i wasn’t resisting speaking. i didn’t think “gee, i really just don’t feel like talking at the moment.” i was just so wonderfully still, nearly stopped.

not that i'm counting or anything, but it's been...

20 months. 20 months. that's nearly 2 years. it’s been nearly 2 years since my former "life-partner" kicked me out of the house ever-so-conveniently-for-him just after i finished investing over 2 years of my heart, soul, time, and my entire life's savings - into designing and building it for us. kicked out and told that he would be retaining the house and that he would not "allow" me to buy him out of the house although i contributed the majority of the funding.

260 days since he informed me, via email, that he intended to breech our verbal agreement to return my money now that the time had come to actually honor that agreement. an agreement that had been in place for nearly 1 year. an agreement that i entered into with the intention of giving him ample time to repay me to make it easier on him since it was a large amount of money.

50 days since he breeched our subsequently painfully "negotiated" (read: nearly 7 months of stalling culminating in a "take this or nothing" jab), written, signed, notarized legally binding contract in which he is required to return but a painfully small fraction of my money which he has withheld from me since refusing to honor our previous verbal agreement.

20 months is a long time and it seems that a whole lifetime has passed. i’ve been lucky enough to find a new and better life since then and, most days, i’m happier than i’ve ever been before. but today just isn’t one of those days.

it annoys me that this date actually stuck out in my head today and i know that the date would be meaningless to me now if it weren’t still impacting me in a very, very real way because here it is 20 months later and he’s still withholding my money from me and i’m trying to come up with a “plan c” since dumpster diving isn’t working all that well in Montenegro and i can’t get a job as a foreigner and now that i am no longer sleep-walking, i’d rather shoot myself in the head then go back to the slow suffocation that was my life before this. whew, take a breath.

so sue me, but when i’m scrounging for food, it’s hard not to think that “hey, had I not been stupid enough to be ripped off by this guy, i wouldn’t have to be scrounging for food right now.” yeah, i know that it is what it is, but every now and then i have just a little bit of difficulty coming to terms with it. but then tomorrow’s a new day.

:: disclaimer
blah blah blah. it’s all just my personal opinion. blah blah blah.

time to

breathe (2am)

plan b: dumpster diving in budva montenegro

my plan b needs some revisions.

dumpster diving for food. you help stop food from going to waste and you reduce the amount of waste going to landfills, all with the added benefit of being able to eat for free.

but there’s a little hiccup in my plan. montenegro is not the usa. and while you may be able to eat plentifully and healthily in the states by diving behind natural food stores, that's not quite the case in montenegro since:

• the quality of fruits and veggies in the stores here is often equivalent to the quality of fruits and veggies found in the dumpsters of america,
• expiration dates are meaningless here and foods well past their expiration dates remain on the shelves until sold instead of being tossed in the dumpster,
• food rots incredibly quickly here given that it’s not kept refrigerated while in the markets, that most of it is organic, and that it’s freaking hot here,
  
• any food leftover from outdoor markets that is still edible is taken home by the vendors themselves.

so by the time something ends up in the dumpster, it is well past the edible state. the exception; however, is bread. old, dry bread (keep in mind you'll only find baked baguettes with no preservatives here; no loaves of sliced preserved stuff) is often left in a plastic bag tied to the edge of the dumpster. if you can manage to get within 4 feet of the dumpster without puking from the stench of rot, then grab the bag and run, and if you can wrangle up some eggs, you can have a lovely meal of french toast.

my first couchsurfers in budva

rich and gill, a couple from the uk in their early 20's, just took off after spending a couple of nights here.

my first couchsurfers here in budva!

rich is a pro chef who has worked as a private chef in chalets in the french alps and gill is currently studying tourism. and somehow in between all of that, they've also travelled around thailand, australia, new zealand and south africa and done skydiving, bungy jumping, cage diving with great white sharks, swimming with dolphins, safari, scuba diving, paragliding over the alps, snowboarding in fresh powder...

I hope lazing on our beaches was exciting enough for them!

curiosity, kitten, doesn't have to mean you're on your own

and i'm not.

i walk along these hillsides in the summer 'neath the sunshine.
i am feathered by the moonlight falling down on me.

- counting crows "a murder of one"

a bit o' siberia in budva

zifa, an english teacher, and my new siberian penpal!

mere gurudev

krishna das' "mere gurudev" is playing as i'm doing savasana after my yoga session. my eyes are closed and i see/feel myself spinning like a dervish, face up to the sky. everything is golden yellow orange and i am basking in the bliss of all creation.

i see the the people from my past. i see their faces as i let them go; they are dissolving as i spin. i thank them for their lessons and i let them go. i no longer need the lesson of love given and love withheld. i no longer need the lesson of abandonment. i'm free of it.

finally. finally, i can allow myself to have more in my life. more authentic love, more truth, more. finally i can say that i deserve happiness.

mere gurudev

pried open

i wrote this back in april while i was in santa rosa.

i've learned some pretty harsh lessons over the last couple of years, the most recent – and the most cruel – having been learned over the last 6 months from some of those who claimed to love me the most.

these aren't things i'd hoped to have to learn in my life. these are things - embarrassing things, humiliating things - that gullible people in the newspapers and on oprah and dr. phil learned. not me.

but i know the fact is that these things exist, that there is incredible human cruelty. and i know that it's often that those you are closest to are the ones that willingly and ruthlessly choose to harm you the most.

this is just a truth in the totality of the human experience.

because i want to know the totality of the human experience, i have to embrace this lesson. and I have. this lesson has allowed me to embrace, rather than hide, the parts of me that feel duped and betrayed and abandoned and ...

this culture teaches us that it's "proper” to suppress emotion – to suppress our humanness - out of shame and out of fear of appearing weak, while some cultures celebrate human emotion out of the joy and appreciation of the full range and depth of the human soul.

after 47 years, i have finally begun to relinquish my shame over being a human with human emotions. i can laugh more authentically and cry more freely, all without apologies to those who are uncomfortable when faced with such openness.

pried open by the experience of such cruelty, i now have room in my life for more experiences of openness, of authenticity.

with that new room, there have already come new people, and they have brought much more sensitive lessons. lessons of love, truth and safety.

sing it alanis...

that i would be good

what goes up must come down

so i was doing a little yoga the other day and couldn't focus. couldn't just be in the moment. couldn't do the ending savasana. and i realized that it's been quite awhile now since i could just enjoy the moment for more than, well... a moment. and what's up with that, especially since i'm living in a fairytale right now?

so what is up with that? a bunch of crap has been swirling around and around in my head for weeks and i just need to get it out. but i've been unable to get it out of my head for fear of the repercussions.

wait a minute. did i just say i haven't been doing something out of fear? did i hear myself right? would you look at that. look at the control i'm allowing to be exerted over me from across the miles.

if you're a good girl and you don't tell, if you just walk away quietly with your tail between your legs, and certainly if you don't dare to use the law to recover what it rightfully yours... well then maybe someday you might get a little bit of your money back. but only if you don't tell. shhh, be quiet. don't tell. just walk away.

fuck fear.

shut up. shut up. shut up! don't talk. stop whining. don't tell. buck up. move on.

so what if someone stole everything from you and then bullied you - and those around him - into submission. just shut up. talk about something nice. something fun.

isn't the water just be-yooo-teeee-ful in budva?

From Judith Herman's The World’s People:

"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.

...In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim.

If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he martials an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization.

After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on.

The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering."


so here's my remembering.

and for the record, i don't consider myself a victim at all. don't care for the word. i'm simply the target of what appears to me to be some really disturbed behavior.

:: legal disclaimer ::
anything i've said here is only my opinion based on my personal experience, and may or may not be a statement of absolute reality - if there is such a thing as absolute reality. or even based on reality at all. i mean, philosophers have argued the nature of reality for ages and still can't agree.

the old double hitch-a-roo hitchy hitch hitch

hitched with z from jaz to budva today. ok, it wasn't all that far, but it was our first hitch together - and z's first hitch ever.

as a female who has always hitched alone or with another female, i wondered how travelling with a male partner - a really tall, shaven-headed, kind of scary looking male partner - might impact the amount of time it would take to get a ride.

apparently not at all. it took us less than 2 minutes to be picked up by a guy in a mercedes.

so there's that.