Pittsburgh (Initial Impressions)

Pittsburgh is going well. Already, I’ve found so many things that I’m happy about–many of which I never found in Phoenix and/or Denver:

  • A great radio station that I love (WYEP)
  • An awesome coffee roaster who roasts a great selection of quality, fair trade, organic coffees from around the world (Zeke’s)
  • A great network of running and mountainbiking trails (I’m minutes from both Frick and Schenley Parks)
  • a really solid local brewery (Yards)
  • an arts movie theater
  • A nice chinchilla park where I can take Kanye for exercise and to meet other chinchillas*

What’s more, there’s a ton here that I’m eager to see and explore. There’s a dozen museums which are all high quality to be explored, and hundreds of restaurants and cafes

Things I’m still looking for:

  • a good grocery store (Giant Eagle is awful)
  • climbing / adventure buddies
  • A go-to coffee shop
  • A (really good) bagel bakery

I’m stoked on my living situation, and excited for my program. (I’ll be mostly taking un-exciting core courses this fall, but that’ll leave a lot of flexibility for the spring.)

* – okay, not really. Still working on figuring out how to keep Kanye active and fit

Apache Relay

Just saw Meru. The movie is rad. Pittsburgh’s arts theater is conveniently located a five minute walk from my doorway, and has discounted student tickets and $2.50 PBRs. Win.

I cried an unusual amount during Meru. I’m given to cry in movies, in general. Any movie about climbing necessarily has heartbreak around its fringes. But what, unexpectedly, caught my breath away and sent tears streaming were the images of Bozeman in the wintertime. Oh, Bozeman. I was moved by the images of the Flatirons and Boulder, as well, but it’s not the same intense pang straight through the heart.

I’ve realized in the last two months how incredibly important place is to me. Place has absolute primacy in my aspirations in life. At present, my life trajectory is to move to New York City (which, I hear, is a place)–and then eventually to return to the Rocky Mountain West (Montana, Idaho, or Utah). My career goals are merely means of accomplishing my location and place goals.

I obsess over place and landscape. Place is far more important to me than career, romance, status, etc. I just need to be in the place I want to be, and on trajectory to where I want to be next.

When I ask new acquaintances where they’re from, it’s not idle “getting to know you” chitchat. It’s important to me. I feel place is one of the most important and defining aspects of identity–in myself and those who I meet.

Went to a free concert in Schenley Plaza (a lovely park just down the street from CMU) last night and saw The Apache Relay perform. Really, really enjoyed their performance. First truly good band I’ve seen perform in a very long time.

Survived the first week of orientation. The least productive week I’ve had in many, many months.

I had these grand visions for myself, for the person I would be at Carnegie Mellon. I really saw myself as becoming this extrovert, some sort of social butterfly, striking up new friendships and acquaintances at every turn. Well, fanciful as that image of myself seems… okay, yup, mostly fantasy. In fact, I find that I’m very much my usual self. I’ve met many wonderful people during orientation, but not nearly as many as I had anticipated for myself. In typical extrovert fashion, I found myself quickly fatigued of making new acquaintances, and needing time to recharge between bouts of social interaction.

I guess I’ll never be Bill Clinton.

I feel like I’m losing my enthusiasm for becoming Pittsburgh Mark. I feel the weight and inertia of Rocky-Mountain-Mark with me. I feel myself running out of give-a-shit for things like trying to learn and adopt the style of dress out here (it’s not hard–just take your credit card to The Gap, and get yourself some stupid boat shoes). Carhartts and Chacos are starting to sound pretty good to me right now. There’s a Carhartt outlet right next to The Gap.

I’m also really quickly running out of steam for online dating. I’m just frankly not that eager to be in a relationship. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d put finding a relationship at about a 3 in terms of importance. Is it just fear driving some sort of impotence? Or, is it sincere disinterest? I’m thinking the latter. Mostly, I’m realizing that dating is godawful lot of work.

Also, what’s the reasonable amount of time to spend on setting up a comfortable living environment? If you’re going to live someplace for one year, how much time do you spend acquiring furniture, painting, installing shelves, etc? I’m not sure what the ratio is… but I do think I’ve spent ENTIRELY too much time hauling furniture all over Pittsburgh. Ug!

Adaptation

In the Phoenix summers we adapted to the heat (like other desert creatures). Every adventure was a pre-dawn start. On the route by sunhit, we’d be hiking out by the time of the first shimmers of heat rising from the valley.

We’d zip home over wide, smooth pavement, amid scant and sleepy traffic–home to the cool, air-conditioned house, stocked for a boozy breakfast.

Breakfast is the marginalized meal–too often routine and too often rushed. Stressful and boring. So there’s luxury in a long, lingered-over breakfast. And a boozy breakfast, doubly so. A boozy breakfast subordinates the rest of the day to the demands of indulgence. The day’s adventure over, there’s nothing better.

With full bellies and buzzing heads, we’d retire to bed to nap away the day’s heat. We’d wake once the sun’s blasting rays were oblique, attenuated. Rousing ourselves, we’d prepare for the evening–the second inhabitable part of the Sonoran summer day.

Sunset signaled for music, open backyard windows and doors, and for friends to gather. Cold beer and grilled burgers were the order of the evening. 95F darkness is the perfect swimming pool weather–a joy to enter the pool, and not the least bit unpleasant to get out. We kept cool with ice-mounted cocktails and roof-launched cannonballs. We’d become nocturnal and amphibious, like other desert creatures.

Reading Out of Africa

Ask an American of colonial East Africa, and doubtless images from Out of Africa will come to mind. And, appropriately so. Set aside unhelpful-if-not-unfair “liberal” objections to the “romanticization” of colonialism, and you can gain some appreciation for an enterprise that was, in fact, quite picturesque, adventurous, and romantic in many regards.

I read Out of Africa while travelling through Kenya (and, in fact, visited the house where Karen Blixen lived and where many of the scenes of the movie were actually shot) and found I quite enjoyed it. Blixen (under the pen name of Isak Dinesen) writes beautifully and evocatively. What her novel lacks in coherent narrative and structure it makes up for with its poetic lyricism and prescient insights.

here are a few of my favorite excerpts from the book:

Describing the view from the Ngong Hills:

Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequaled nobility.

On being out in the wilds:

The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence form the wild before they are accepted by it.

On belonging:

I know a song of Africa,–I thought,–of the Giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a color that I had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the driver that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me?

On the Masai:

One, on the farm, I had three young bulls transmuted into peaceful bullocks for my ploughs and wagons, and afterwards shut up in the factory yard. There in the night the Hyenas smelled the blood and came up and killed them. This, I thought, was the fate of the Masai.

…

A Masai warrior is a fine sight. … Their style is not an assumed manner, nor an imitation of a foreign perfection; it has grown from the inside, and is an expression of the race and its history, and their weapons and finery are as much part of their being as are a stag’s antlers.

On visitors, when living in a lonely place:

In Pioneer countries hospitality is a necessity. … A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places.

On belief in ourselves:

Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it.

On death rites:

The Kikuyus, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the Hyenas and vultures to deal with. … It would be a pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars, and to be so promptly, neatly, and openly picked and cleansed; to be made one with nature and become a common component of the landscape.

I quite enjoyed Out of Africa. It was evocative of Kenya–both of a time past, and very much of modern Kenya as well. Blixen herself is fascination–kind, curious, knowing when and how to fight, and when to surrender to her fate. She had an incredible and rich adventure of eighteen years–and did so with pluck, charm, and humanity.

Empty Hotels, Empty Restaurants

Speaking of tourists … where are the tourists? Everywhere I’ve been so far has seemed a ghost town. Egypt, understandably so, in light of its recent revolution. (Still, it was quite surprising to visit the pyramids at Giza and not find crowds.) I also get the sense that Egypt may have overbuilt its tourist capacity, even for the best of times (visitation was growing at ~10% per year leading up to their revolution in 2011). So, I get that.

But in Kenya, too, the guest houses are empty. It used to be that safaris needed to be booked months in advanced. When I arrived, operators were beating the streets to find people to join their tours. And, while on safari, we were always the only group in facilities that could easily have accommodated a dozen.

In Uganda, it’s much the same, at least where I’ve been in Jinja and its nearby village of Bujagali. Here, much of the adventure tourism, which was thriving up until 2007, has disappeared under the backwaters of the Bujagali Hydroelectric Power Station. Completed in 2007 (constructed with money on loan from the World Bank), the dam completely drowned over half of the incredible rapids and waterfalls that made Jinja a world-class kayaking and rafting destination. (The White Nile below the dam is still quite incredible, but the White Nile is half of what it once was, in terms of international kayaking and rafting appeal.) Adding insult to the matter, the dam’s electricity doesn’t even illuminate Ugandan homes, being primarily sold overland to neighboring Kenya.

I wish I could have captured the image of walking along the dirt road in Bujagali at night, past a group of small shops (seemingly made of scrap lumber), each burning a candle for illumination, having no electricity, and looking quite small under the massive high voltage power transmission tower behind them.

As an aside: there’s another image I’ll never forget, and wish I could have captured with a camera to share. After our day of kayaking on the White Nile, we took out below Itanda Falls. Me, my guide, and our two kayaks and gear were to be ferried back to Bujagali base camp by the two 100cc motorbikes who brought us to the put in. Byron (my guide) and I are riding three-to-a-bike on the first one with its driver. The kayaks, bulky and brightly colored plastic things that they are, are stacked on the back of the second motorbike, perpendicular to it and a little lop-sided–looking very much unwieldy. We’re taking a muddy and rutted dirt road through a rural village. We come upon a herd of cattle being driven in the street, filling it and spilling out onto the very porches of the small huts on either side of the road. There’s no getting around, so we must go through. Imagine the scene of the motorbike with the bright, bulky, plastic kayaks strapped to it, and its driver, in flip-flops, a big red trucker’s hat and a shit-eating grin, weaving through the cows, sliding and slopping in the mud, dodging cows, calves, horns, and barely keeping upright!

My impression is that tourism is down throughout East Africa at the moment due to some of the isolated violence and unrest in the greater region. I believe that Americans (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) tend to see Africa as a monolithic whole (like Australia), rather than the vast continent made up of fifty-five distinct nations (like Europe) that it is. This, when we read of violence in South Sudan or Al Shabaab terrorist violence, we think that the whole of East Africa is dangerous, violent, spoiled by unrest. Being here, I can tell you that it’s not the case. Nevertheless, I think that violence in any part of Africa (or greater East Africa) likely harms tourism throughout the entire region.