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Published: July 22nd 2008
Well I didn't get around to talking about the meaning of the title of the last entry, and this one.
When I left San Francisco I flew to Philadelphia to hang out with the crew of fake Aussies in West Philly that we'd met at Ida. Zemmo picked me up from the airport and we got lost for a while before heading to Bezza's house - the Powerhouse. All the communal houses in Philly seem to have names, it's a great idea. So we hung out at the Powerhouse while Beth made cherry pie and we drank tea in the heat. The East coast is a lot more humid and hot than the west, it's true. After a bit we headed back to Get Busy (Zem's house) and crashed out.
West Philly was an adventure ofcooking, rooftops, guitars and visits to the Wooden Shoe (local anarchist bookstore & zine shop). On Independence Day Beth and Michelle and Jackie took me to see the Liberty Bell: one of the greatest symbols of the American Revolutionary War. According to Wikipedia, it's most famous ringing occurred on July 8th 1776, to call the citizens of Piladelphia to hear the Declaration of Independence. The bell
was also adopted as a symbol of the abolitionist movement by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837. The bell has a big crack through it, and was re-forged several times but rang for the final time to celebrate George Washington's birthday in 1846. if you want to read more (it's pretty interesting actually) just go look it up in Wikipedia.
After joining the hordes of tourists and managing to smuggle my knife into the Bell without having it confiscated we escaped and headed to Michelle's for smoothies. Eventually we headed back to West Philly and Beth and I headed out to an Iraq Veterans Against the War gathering. The gathering was upstairs above an ethiopian restaurant and starred Ryan of Riot Folk who sang a bunch of stirring and beautiful songs about war and action. The crowd were mostly returned servicemen all wearing IVAW tshirts. At the end of the night another guy got up to sing and lo and behold it was Eric Peterson, of the fabulous Mischief Brew. Beth and I hung out for a little while and then headed over to The Mitten for rooftop fireworks spectating only to find out they'd already happened and you
couldn't see them anyway. Not feeling like participating in drunken late night Boggle we headed back to the IVAW show to have arguments about evolution.
I left Philly on the dreaded Chinatown bus but actually quite enjoyed it. It was a little like the frenzy of Chinese bus stations: people shouting at you with tickets, grabbing your luggage before you're really ready to let go of it, and of course speaking chinese. I rolled in to New York completely bewildered and spent a few hours getting lost on the subway before making it to Williamsburg to hang out with Sian.
Sian met me at the station and we headed back to the Glennwood Hostel. The truth about the Glennwood is that it's not really a hostel, it's more of a halfwayhouse, with a lot of permanent residents crammed into plywood cubicles and woefully inadequate shared bathrooms. The outside of the building is painted a cheerful purple, and the insides walls are plastered with signs for anything from football teams to famous musicians to Granny's Kitchen. i got my own little cubicle and wandered around awestruck at Brooklyn.
Sian and I spent hours updating each other on our adventures.
She's been mostly in India and Nepal, Turkey and then the US and has just gone to Bolivia. We watched some of her footage from Nepal, heartbreaking.
Sian and I pretty much spent the week together getting chores done in preparation for her time in Bolivias, drinking beer and looking for photobooths, and sitting on the fire escape of our hostel trying to escape the stuffy cubicles. We visited BLue Stockings, the info-shop and radical bookstore in Manhattan. We tried to take the Staten Island Ferry but were crowded out. We drank a cosmopolitan in the East Village. We listened to a funk band play in an infoshop in southern Brooklyn. We went to a freak show in Coney Island. But, all in all NY was too much for me and as soon as my paid week at the Glennwood was over I bailed it back to the safety of West Philly.
The Chinatown bus leaves from CHinatown, oddly enough. It's true China style, people hawking bus tickets on street corners and the bus driving endlessly around the block until it was full enough to depart. The ticket collector climbed on the bus and checked the tickets as
we were moving already and then jumped off a few blocks later, just like China. The space under the Manhattan Bridge was filled with veggie stalls and densely crowded.
West Philly was hotter and more chilled. I landed back at Beth's house and we commenced to drink tea and potter around the kitchen fermenting things. We attempted to make tempeh and it kind of worked. Beth's current pastime is fermenting almost anything you can think of. Kombucha, coconut milk biri, tempeh... We baked and fried things and ate a lot at weird times of the night. And this is where the title of the entry comes in: at Beth's place I finally had some time to myself in an otherwise empty house, phew. You wouldn't believe how much of a luxury it is! I read 2 whole books...
My last night in Philly for the second time around was spent playing a highly competitive and ridiculous game of scrabble at The Mitten. It was originally scored and sensible and then degenerated to random scoring and even more random spelling. THen I had to say goodbye...
I took the greyhound again the next day, winding up through Pennsylvania
and New Jersey back to New York, then back through New Jersey and upstate to Syracuse, pulling in at around 10pm. Cindy and Claire came to greet me, which was amazing. We headed back to CIndy's place for tea and gossip. The next day Claire and I wandered around the university district of Syracuse with a big black dog named Samson who likes to chase squirrels/groundhogs/skunks/woodchucks/seagulls/crows... just about anything. We wandered through a little patch of woods and then went to the coop for the most expensive tomatos I've ever seen. they were good though... in the afternoon we headed in to the Syracuse Cultural Workers, (www.syracuseculturalworkers.com) which has been making and selling "tools for cultural change": peace and justice publisher since 1982. They're looking for a distributer in Australia, by the way...
The next day we all headed out to Lake Ontario. When we arrived we took a short hike to a heron rookery, an amazing gap in the woods: tall tree skeletons in a marshy lakey base, with the spiky raggedy herons nests right up high. The babies were still in the nests, making a kind of clacking cry while the bullfrogs roared. The stillness and magic
of the place was amazing. We wandered along the swamp side to see the evidence of the beavers which created the lake, huge trees ringbarked at the waterline, a dam of sticks and logs and mud, and a lodge out in the middle of the water. We continued around the marsh and back to the Lake: more of a freshwater inland sea - you can't even see Canada on the other side. The shore consisted of smooth round rocks, the woods came within 3m of the water and it was beautiful. Hard to imagine the 3 nuclear power plants all drawing water from this lake, and the proposed (defeated) nuclear plant which was supposed to have been built right next to the heron rookery. We lazed in the water until it was time to race back to Syracuse to meet Rebecca Sue who was driving up from Ithaca with her 3 1/2 month old son Cyrus.
Having a small scale Seeds reunion was great. We had a short check-in with each other out the back of Cindy's place in the shade, we cooked and ate together, and filled each other in on what's been happening in the last 3
years... I didn't want to leave, but my flight was booked and so Rick and I drove away bellies full of breakfast birthday pancakes towards Albany and yet another greyhound experience... goodbye Syracuse...
a car ride, a greyhound ride, a subway ride, an airtrain, a delayed and claustrophobic but not too uncomfortable plane ride with a small boy who kept climbing over me to open and close the window shutter, and an Underground ride and suddenly I was in another continent, another city, waiting for Pippa Lane on a street corner in Covent Gardens. Whew! Sleep deprivation and a couple of free whiskeys on the plane had left me feeling dehydrated and weird, and suddenly Pip was there and leading me through the streets to the bus which would deliver me to her place. A whirlwind... London flew by like Monopoly, familiar names and places actually real and written in cement and bricks. I crashed out on the floor for a few hours until they came home... Pip and Jules showed me their "farm" - a few pots of tomatos kale snowpeas and beetroot out the back of their basement apartment in Hackney. We talked trash and revolution until
it was time to head out for dinner: Eritrean food which turned out to be a huge fermented pancake with servings of 3 or 4 different foods on top of it. Yum! And headed back to Pip's again to crash out some more...
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