The Wind Up There

Lining Up for Flight

Cleared for Take-off

Run!!!

The majority of my flights were on the first 3 days, right before the previous blog entry. After that, the weather was less permissive. I got 2 more flights in -- and while #6 was more frustrating than exhilerating, #7 was a great one and even had some mild thermal activity that kept me up a couple minutes longer than usual. After #7 Peter was ready to let me play in more active air, but I'll have to wait for next time.
The weather blocked our flights, but we were still lucky. The weather was beautiful and though the wind was too strong at the take-off, things were sunny and breezy on the ground. I got to take it easy amidst beautiful countryside and no responsibilities, and had the opportunity to...

do some reading:


Go for a hike:


Sit around the barbeque:



Soak up some glider theory:



And of course, enjoy the local sights:




At the last minute, fighting phone troubles, weak wireless signals, and a carillonneur who only spoke French, I even managed to get in a carillon field trip that became one of the highlights of this vacation.

The drive to Chambery was spectacular. We took a rough mountainside road, barely wide enough to let 2 cars pass, overlooking a huge lake with mountains on the other side. My camera was in the trunk so you're just going to have to imagine it.


The Chambery carillon was equally spectacular. I knew it was 70 bells (a lot) but I hadn't realized that that it would be 70 brand new Paccard bells (my favorite) going down to a low G in concert pitch, or that it would use ultralight carbon-fiber transmission rods giving incredibly precise control, with a hefty, smooth action... or that it would be set amidst beautiful scenery with a glass-paneled chamber allowing views of the bells and the mountains, or that we would have an incredibly kind and generous host who took a great deal of pride in his operation and was more than happy to bring up a dozen hanggliders for a visit, even at the last minute.




Playing this carillon was a total joy. Each bell was richly colored and happily did whatever I told it to. I serenaded my glider buddies and got to experience the privilege of a carillon field-trip through their eyes, as though it were my first time too.

When we went to the roof, our instructor Peter said he was going to stay inside for fear of the heights. "Aren't you the guy who's teaching me to run off of mountains?" I asked. "You've never actually seen me fly," he responded.


Chambery passed, as did the final flight, and when the clouds were moving a bit too fast on Sunday morning, we packed up and drove home. The first part of the ride was sunny, and it might only be chance, but I swear that the first flakes hit right as we crossed the Luxembourg border. Pretty soon we were driving at 10mph in icy conditions, at first because of traffic, then simply because there wasn't enough traction to do more than that. It didn't last forever, but the message was clear enough: Welcome Back North.


It wasn't the easiest shift. From mountainside living in the sun to a flat, aging Belgian city; from vacation mode, with less to do and more going on, to home mode, with less going on and much more to do; from campfires to the school lunch table; from wishing I could understand more of the Dutch fireside conversation about energy policy, to wishing I didn't understand the school's lunchtime Dutch conversation, which seemed only to amount to a chuckling disdain and self-contentment of being better than all those other political, national, and linguistic entities out there. From speaking to shopkeepers in my ever-growing comfort with the French language, to stumbling over words with my rusty commerce-Flemish, knowing with every accidental utterance in French, I was outing myself as 'one of them'.
I've had two comforts in my couple days of being back. The first, was the arrival of my Amazon package from the US, containing, amongst other books, "The Art of Practicing" by Madeline Bluser. It seems to be the book that I've been waiting for, a book whose content I've been grasping at, trying to construct from bits and pieces here and there; a book about the discipline of music as understood through frameworks of meditation, body-work, movement, and spirituality, a book explaining how to bring these tools to bear on a daily basis leading to performance. Or so I hope.
The second comfort was frites and assorted frituur, which seem to have made up for the lack of quality cheese and baked goods.

But of course, things pick up and get back into the swing. I've got some projects to work on in performance and in design, and between that and submitting concert programs for this summer, things have, at least for today, seemed filled with good and exciting work.

I've gotten some more pictures in from the flying, so here's a slideshow I made out of a rapid-fire set of photos of my final take-off. Sorry for all the bouncing, I don't quite know how to control that in Picasa:

And here is an overly romanticized (in the best way, of course) movie starring one of the more advanced guys I flew with. Definitely worth checking out. Given the choice between flying again and watching this movie again, I'd choose flying, but it would be a bittersweet choice. Maybe I could get some headphones with the soundtrack for my next flight?

The Air Up There

I got the message right after playing the Wednesday afternoon concert: We leave tomorrow morning, 9:30 sharp.

The ride to Savoie took about 12 hours with the hanggliders on the roof. We left in the morning and arrived after dark. After last week's weather, I was prepared for 10 days of sitting around in the cabin. But the weather forecast was flyable so we set our alarms and planned to be at the landing field for pre-flight briefing at 8.

6.30AM: Peter and I wake up frozen in our un-insulated cabin. There was frost on the ground outside our window and condensate on our breath. Peter threw on all 4 stove burners and started fanning the heat into the room. Slowly over the next hour we brought ourselves back to comfort.

8AM: We rendez-vous with the rest of our party at the landing field. One instructor, one assistant-instructor, one very experienced student, 2 mid-level students, one 2nd timer, and one fool who was doing this for the first time. We got our flight plan, learned the terminology that Peter would use over the radio, the names of the different corners of the landing field, the protocol for shedding altitude over the landing field, etc. We got back in our cars and started the drive up the mountain. I had both the eagerness to make sure I got to fly, and the nervousness of my first mountain flight. Was I actually going to be soaring a couple thousand feet above ground in a few hours? I had proved myself on the training hill, but it had been 10 days since I had touched a glider and I wasn’t going to get a practice run.

Peter had explained during the drive down why we chose this site: "Its the safest place I know. The takeoff is a gradual slope. First grass. Then bushes. Then trees. Plenty of time to turn back. Plenty of barriers that you can only clear if you have enough lift to fly over them.” So while I was nervous, I felt good about the circumstances.
The drive up the mountain was 20 minutes long, through winding narrow roads, first passing through the picturesque hillside village of Chindrieux, old stone walls and houses with flowers growing out of them, then up through forest and rising snow levels.

We got to the take-off site, which was entirely covered in snow.

He kicked at the icy snow by the start of the runway and stood there for a minute or two, deep in thought. Finally he looked at me. "There is another place you can take off from, but its impressive. We will go and you will tell me if you want to take off from there." Peter's English has a few idiosyncrasies that I've gotten to know over the course of my training. When he says impressive, he means scary as all hell.

The trompe-plein is a wooden platform, about 30 feet long. The first 15 feet are flat. The rest of it slopes down at a 40 degree angle and ends abruptly over the rustic countryside half a mile below us. Its as though someone had tried to build a wide wooden slide down a 2000ft mountain, but had given up after the first few segments.

“I want to do it,” said Ilsa, one of the intermediate students. I held my tongue, hoping that the next half hour of building-up the gliders would give me the chance to build-up some courage as well.

I built-up my glider in a haze of fear, adrenaline, and stupidity, and made Stephan, the assistant instructor, inspect it with all his might. Peter’s words echoed in my head “Its an incredibly safe takeoff, but its impressive”. Impressive is the understatement of the year. I said a shema.

The glider is a flying machine. It wants to fly. You run off a something like the trompeplein with a glider and a headwind and it should fly. All my theory told me this. And all my animal instincts told me that to run off a ramp into nothingness was sheer madness. I would only have once chance to do this right. I was betting that I could hold 80 pounds of wind-catching metal and fabric steady and run full-speed, without tripping or tipping, off the scariest ledge I’d ever seen. No practice runs, no do-overs. One straight run with full stakes.

I thought that watching Ilsa’s take off would reassure me, but it just did the opposite. One moment she was standing there, another moment hurtling into steepness, and within seconds she was a football field away from us, hanging free with emptiness on every side. I said another shema.

My turn came. I stood with my toes at the end of the flat segment. Before I could run I’d have to lean forward and start to fall, giving the glider some momentum so that it would stay with me. Once I did that there was no turning back and anything I did to fight gravity would only endanger me. Speed is safety. Speed is safety. Speed is safety. The wind stabilized. Stephan gave me the go-ahead. “When you feel ready, you can start running.” And friends, I ran.

I don’t remember anything between the start of my run and the moment, a few seconds later, when my glider stabilized in the air. But on that day, when I took my run into nothingness, the somethingness I found afterwards was completely different from what I expected. After all that adrenaline and all that buildup, I was just hanging peacefully. The air was so calm and stable that I felt as though I were simply attached to a giant crane that was slowly lowering me to my destination. Was I really flying? My glider tends to nose-up and stall, and because the ground was falling away from me rapidly I had the feeling that I was in a never-ending stall. Up and down are not entirely clear at first. I pulled in and tried to keep the nose down, and keep a steady course for all I was worth. My hands nearly froze onto the metal bars of the glider frame, but I wasn’t about to let go. Peter stayed with me on radio contact the whole time, even if just to say, “well, there’s not really much to say, you’re doing fine”. I landed alive and surprised at how ordinary I felt, having just run off of a cliff.

The most surreal part of the day was yet to come. We packed up our gliders. We left the landing field. And we drove to the supermarket. In less than an hour I went from hanging free 2000 feet above ground to standing in an aisle of canned goods choosing between brands of tuna. Life goes on?

For the past few days its been a dependable routine: we wake up, get warm, eat, hit the landing field, and then drive up to the take-off. If the wind looks good (and it always has), we haul the gliders from the cars, assemble them (I’ve gotten down to 25 minutes for assembly, 35-40 to be ready for take-off), suit up, and take-off. There are pre-flight inspections, and if you’ve made any mistakes, you owe the instructor a bottle of wine. I’d gladly buy my life for the price of a bottle, but so far, no problems. At the landing field, we disassemble, load the cars, go back to the campground, and eat lunch, which always seems to involve fresh bread, cheeses, and wine. I seem to have taken the attitude of “eat well today because who knows about tomorrow.” In the afternoon we repeat the flying process, and then at night we repeat the eating process.

Its been 2 days and 5 flights since that first run into nothingness. Renzo, the 2^nd-timer who wasn’t up to the trompe-plein spent some time salting and shoveling the original takeoff while we were at the supermarket. So the rest of my takeoffs have been a bit less dramatic than that first day (the second and third take-offs were still pretty adrenalized).

I’ve been improving loads over the past few days. On my first flight, I basically just survived. On my second flight, I leveled-off my 180-turns at the landing field, which had been too extreme. On my third flight I learned to use the foot-bar (a small rod that hangs down from your harness -- you can rest the soles of your feet on it so that you can lie horizontally instead of hanging with your legs dangling in the air – it involves some extra maneuvers to get into it mid-air, and to get out of it before landing, not to mention the psychological factor of doing a running take-off with it banging against your heels). On the fourth flight I worked on my steering sensitivity, reacting quicker and using less force. Peter let me have control for most of it. On my fifth flight, I had some turbulence from thermals (rising pockets of air) and was able to steer into them and gain a bit of altitude on my way to the landing field. Thermals are invisible, but you know they’re there because all of a sudden one wingtip rises throws you into a turn. Thermals push you away, but if you fight the turn early and get the glider level, you can slip into them and get an upward boost (at least this is what I’ve found). Feels almost like a game. In more advanced stages you actually learn to do circles inside of them and ride them high into the sky.

I think flight #4 was my favorite. It was yesterday evening, a bit before sunset. By the time we had our gliders built, the wind had shifted to a gentle tailwind.

Wind follows the contours of the slope. If the wind comes from behind you on a downward slope, it flows down at the angle of the hill. Because the glider flies at a 15 degree downward angle relative to the air, its physically impossible to do a running take-off in a tailwind. You’d have to be able to run at an angle 15 degrees steeper than the ground you’re standing on.

Stephan was betting that with the setting sun the tailwind would only grow stronger. I expected we would be disassembling and driving downhill, but Peter radioed up that because I was underweight for my glider, I could try to take-off if we got a moment of feeble headwind. I took my position on the runway and waited some more, watching the 4 wind-flags scattered throughout the take-off area, all of which were doing different things. Finally they harmonized for a minute, all pointing with the laziest little inkling uphill. Stephan said go, I ran, and all of a sudden I was in the air. Once you’re in the air, it doesn’t matter whether there’s a head or tailwind. You’re flying either way, and in the warmth of the setting sun, I felt as though I had just escaped from the glum disappointment on the take-off hill into complete and utter freedom. No adrenalized buildup. No fear. Just a hopeful wait, a moment’s run, and the air rushing by me. Peter radioed up that I was on my own until the landing field. “You can do smart things, stupid things, I won’t say anything.” I took a few extra turns to get a nice view of the lake and mountains in the evening light. The air was calm enough that I could look down and really feel the bird’s-eye view over the land below. The more you can do that, the more you feel like you’re really flying.

Well, I think I’m hooked. It took a bit of time to get over the fact that you don’t quite feel like superman, zooming around in any direction you choose. But once you’re past that, the little joys of flight seem to grow steadily.

Tonight is the first evening without flying. The wind has picked up and the weather seems to be changing. Peter’s guess is no flying tomorrow. His hope is for flights the day after. But after 5 back-to-back flights, I’m almost happy to have a little break to relax, soak it all in, and condense my experiences here. Hopefully the weather will have me back in the air before long.

Sorry voor dit gejojo

An excerpt from the text of the latest e-mail from my hanggliding school director: "Sorry voor dit gejojo". Which as far as I can figure, means "sorry for all this yoyo-ing." I'm not too annoyed at the 'gejojo' (cheyoyo), after all, weather is a finicky thing. But its certainly set the tone for a yoyo-ish past few days:

The hanggliding news feed:
5 days ago: We'll be driving up this weekend (I find a ride leaving Sunday night)

4 days ago: NE winds and low temperatures. No flying until Wednesday at least. (I volunteer to play the Sunday afternoon concert in Mechelen).

3 days ago: Anticyclone activity over the gulf of Biskaye. Conditions will be cold but flyable. We start Monday.

2 days ago: We are still going, but you will need snow tires to get to the campsite, and our water may be cut for up to three days. Monday and Wednesday look flyable. (My ride cancels. Peter my director offers a ride for Sunday morning, before the concert that I'm supposed to be playing. I wonder if no water means no heat either.)

1 day ago: The road is inaccessible, even with snow chains. Postponed until Thursday.

Last night, 7pm: Someone down there says the road is actually accessible. Peter leaves 10am, but I still have a concert at 3pm. I send out an e-mail looking for later rides.

Last night, 2am: I check e-mail. No ride offers. I set my alarm for 7:30am, planning to double check for rides, find out if anyone can replace me for carillon, and if necessary, pack, arrange a replacement, and be ready to leave at 10am

This morning, 7:30am. I get a list of people to call as replacements. Do I really want to call these people early on Easter Sunday and ask for a day-of favor? I look into alternate ways to get to the site. I get a phone number of someone who's driving down. I weigh options.

This morning, 9:00am, 1 hour before my ride leaves: Actually the road is inaccessible. The guy who said it was open was mistaken. Trip postponed until Friday at least.


Well, here I am, underslept but too awake to go back to bed. I've got another 6 days in Mechelen. In some sense that's a good thing, I was really feeling like a 2 week break was a bit too long given where my studies are at. But in another sense, it means fewer shots at good flying days. I really do hope I get to fly this time around.



In other news:
Monday I went with Geert to Middelburg, Netherlands, where he has a student, and where he is working to start up a master's program in carillon. We both got a lesson on Lange Jan, the city tower, then hit a bar for a couple bottles of wine, and loads of fried food. This was a really wonderful trip. I like the format of 2-person lessons. Watching someone else receive instruction, and seeing the process without being distracted by trying to implement corrections, etc... can be just as educational as having the lesson yourself. And playing with others is just much more inspiring. BTW she plays better, in my opinion, than anyone else who's here with me at Mechelen, and she's been studying for only 3 years. Convinced me that I should be working harder / smarter. And 2 bottles of wine plus convo with two talented and driven folks in the same discipline as me (rare) makes for a spectacular evening.

I'm moving past my initial struggles from the fall where I would worry about whether I want to focus more on learning from Eddy or Geert. At first, they seemed to be radically different. But I think they're complimentary. Different styles, but there's enough common ground in their concepts of musicality that I don't feel torn by studying with both. One difference between Geert and Eddy is that Geert teaches conductor style and Eddy teaches corrector style. With Eddy, I play something, we talk about it, and I try it again, repeating until we get to a performance that we both agree is good. This means I learn how to find my way to the right place. Geert does a lot of conducting and coaching while you're playing, which means I get the immediate experience of hurtling through the piece as a master would. It leaves a slight disorienting aftertaste, the feeling of "how did I do that again?" and "Can I remember enough to get back on my own?" but its also great to have direct access to the feeling of a stellar performance, and its my hope that over time, these experiences sink in, they integrate such that you can find your way back.


In other other news:
I got a surprise visit from Mike Lee, a high school friend, who got posted to London for a month for work. Way to go Mike! Last night we were up until 2, playing Settlers of Catan with Ren from downstairs, drinking Grimbergen (high quality Belgian brown beer), and eating 'frituur', fries and assorted other fried goods, in order to introduce Mike the real Belgian culinary tradition (2 nights ago we did the classier culinary tour -- chocolate, mussels, beer, restaurant-style fries, and waffles). Today we're hitting Rombouts, and if I can stay awake, I'll give a good concert and we'll check out the view from up top. Remember, this can be yours too...



And because I try for the multimedia blog experience:
Here's a clip from a Romanian Jazz concert in Brussels that I went to with BAEF fellows. The band-leader played cimbala, something like an eastern-european-sounding hammered dulcimer. But the star of the night was definitely the guest drummer who joined them for the last few numbers, apparently a rock legend in Romania. Think skills of a seasoned veteran with the enthusiasm of an three-year-old who just discovered the neighbor's drum set. Anybody else reminded of Animal from the Muppets?

Going to Chiendrieux

After a long period of uncertainty going down to the wire, I logged the necessary training and been approved by my hanggliding instructor for mountain flights. We leave in 8 days, and will be taking over some cabins in France by the mountains (Chiendrieux) and running off cliffs and stuff. Should be fun. I have some video and pics of me flying, but its a wingtip camera aimed at me, so you don't really see the view or the drop -- just me hanging there. Anyways, you can check it out to get a feel for what take off and landing looks like at least.



Its been a busy week or so -- I've been distracted from practice by two projects -- one was making sure I qualified for mountain flights -- which means yesterday and today were a double header of 'the triathaon': biking to the training hill, (45min - 1hr), flying down it and then hauling 80lbs of metal back up the hill a bunch of times, then climbing up a carillon tower or two (today was the school trip to the carillons of Leuven,
which I joined midway after a morning on the hill) -- several hours of sustained activity with intense sprint-like bursts scattered throughout. I'm just about ready to collapse into a deep slumber. The other project was making a 5-minute purim-related film for a contest that only had one other entry and offers a nice cash prize (a friend who works for the sponsoring org tipped me off). A 5 minute film turns out to be over 100 takes and 15-20 hours of work, at least for a newbie like me. Its not particularly high quality, but it just has to be better than the other guy's.
Carillon design has been faltering a bit, I'm starting to realize that sound production will be tricky and I haven't yet mastered how to build acoustic resonators to best amplify the sound of the tone bars. I started this project figuring I'd do some clever stuff with the mechanics of play and then add on some tone bars to make it sound, but if I actually want a reasonable instrument to support my musical development, the sound-production system looks to be the hardest part right now. Hopefully I'll have a breakthrough sometime soon, because I'll probably need a good 2 months to build it once the designs are in place.
I think thats about it for now... having finished the film and the qualifying for mountain flights, I have a whole week ahead of me to make some progress on practice, carillon building, and getting my summer organized. With two trips into Brussels mixed in, one for a fellowship get-together, one for a megillah reading, it should be an active, but hopefully manageable week.

Foundries and other Business

For your sake and mine, I'm gonna keep it short.
Things are rocking out here. This past week has seen me
-playing carillon twice in St. Rombouts tower (nearly 1000 stairs in a 3-day period),
-in a wood-shop trying to learn how to make a practice carillon sound good,
-in a practice room dissecting a well-made practice carillon for some insights (turns out I missed a decimal point in my calculations and the required air spaces that I need to fit into my design are an order of magnitude smaller than expected -- very good news),
-in an industrial bell-foundry taking in the sites and seeing if I can get any additional insights,
-in a classroom drinking great wine as part of an apparent nascent tradition of toasting birthdays,
and my favorite,
-50 feet in the air strapped to a hang-glider (and subsequently 0 feet covered in mud).

I've been engaging in musical practice, physical activity, textual and hands-on research, physics and engineering, and good food and drink. I think that having my thesis stuff in the mix is rounding out the experience nicely -- pulling my math-physics brain back into the mix, and giving me a really interesting puzzle to work ong so I don't have to invent problems to get my fix. Dark is coming later, the city is waking up, and things are looking up. I've even maybe got some travel on the distant horizon!

Some pics from the foundry:

Experimenting with glass bells

Fully tuned and polished

Coating the outside of a sand bell to make the outer mold for the casting process

Cores (inner molds) waiting in the pit. Notice the chute on the far wall -- it carries 1100C molten bronze. The casting is done in a pit so that in case of an accident you don't get liquid bronze pouring across the floor. Then the pit is filled with sand to let the bells cool slowly over a period of several days.

Strickelboards giving the inner and outer profiles of the bell. Used for shaping molds on a turning table. The invention of the strickelboard (500-600 years) ago totally changed the process of bellmaking. These used to be passed down from father to son, keeping alive successful bell profiles through the generations.

Heat-protective suit for working with molten bronze

A beautiful design for a radiating and concave pedal-board (seen from the back)

I've been framed! Adventures in carillon-engineering land

When I went to Luc this morning, he asked if I had any detailed designs for the frame of my instrument (meaning every part of the system that isn't copied over 49 times, ie excluding keys, springs, tonebars, etc). I wasn't planning to design that until I understood what I wanted the repeated systems to look like and how they would fit into the frame. But Luc suggested the other approach, build a frame and then use it to speed up the other experimentation. He also suggested outsourcing it to his frame-builder guy. He added that he was going to visit the frame-builder-guy that afternoon.
So my brief meeting with Luc turned into a quick turnaround assignment: make a bunch of decisions upfront and then design a frame that would still be relatively adaptable to the designs that I'm considering, so that it can be used to test all of them, and so that once I do make my decisions there's a chance I can use it in the final product. Since its almost March, I welcomed the time pressure and spent a while in the carillon museum, measuring the various practice instruments from throughout the ages, toying with design ideas, and specifying through text and drawing, down to the millimeter in some cases, what I wanted in a frame.

Here are drawings of a couple of the more innocuous parts (since I don't want to reveal all my secrets to the web). Not bad for someone who thinks he can't draw, eh? Now don't go stealing my vague ideas and marketing them around the highly lucrative practice carillon industry. Copyright: me.


I delivered the specifications to Luc, 6 hours after our initial meeting, with the instructions to go ahead with it if the guy quotes below my threshold price and to call me for any prices higher. I haven't heard from him yet so I'm hoping it'll be a cheap job.




In other engineering related news, the clapper on the lowest A-bell of the carillon of St. Rombouts snapped mid-strike, hurling its 100-some pound clapper ball across the bell-chamber and marking the temporary uselessness of that bell with a resounding clang and thud. I had the honor of having given the clapper its final strike, though the bell had been acting strangely for the past week or so, and I don't think I can claim the kind of muscle it takes to snap a healthy iron rod in half.

A year ago at the International Carillon Festival in Bok Tower Gardens, I wished Boudewijn Zwart good luck on his recital by telling him to break a pedal. After delivering the final concert of the festival, he returned to the ground to show me a splintered fragment of a pedal in hand -- apparently these wear-and-tear events happen. Unfortunately clappers need to be cast in a foundry, making it unlikely that the rather important A-pedal will be in use any time in the next week. Hopefully I'll still find a way to keep the practice up.

Back Across the Pond

I spent the last 2.5 weeks in the US, and am happy to report that I have nothing to report, other than that it was really great to be back and see you all.
And in spite of all my moaning about being all alone in Belgium, its actually been great to be back. Besides being fun, going home for a few weeks has been helpful for getting some perspective on my time here. All of a sudden the sounds and sights of Belgium are special again -- my apartment is amazing again, the opportunity to practice carillon and lead a leisurely life (presuming I can keep my busy side in check) is once again a privilege.

Two nights ago I went to visit Beth Hillel in Brussels for Friday night service - a congregation that's reformish enough to put a large portion of their services in the lingua franca, and Brusselsish enough for that lingua to be French.
Its still the standard liturgy that I'm used to hearing in the hebrew and following half in the hebrew, half in the Enlgish. Only now they're speaking the same words in a totally different language, one that I'm not used to encountering in the Jewish context, one that really only seems fit for catholicism or existentialism. You hear French phrases, translate them in your head, say, hmm, that idea sounds vaguely familiar, oh its Psalm 96. Trippy. Maybe I can find one in Dutch before I leave?


A sample day (biased sample selection):
Having staying up 'till 5am with e-mail and IM and whatnot, I wake up around 10 and head to handbells class. Afterwards, I meet Cyril and Chelsea, friends from Bxls, take them up the tower, and hang out and play (well) for an hour or so. Then beer and lunch with them on the terrace of a cafe in the Grote Markt / Grand Place, outdoors in the sun (still with warm sweater, but nonetheless). Class at 3:30 in which Koen explains ancient and medieval systems of timekeeping and conceptions of time, the mechanics of tower clockworks, and the art of programming music into 17th century automatic-play mechanisms. He gives me a 5 pound tome on the Art of the Carillon in the Low Countries to start reading through, something that actually strikes me as exciting (its got good pictures, which helps).
Ren comes upstairs to do laundry and we end up lying on the floor in my apartment listening to Idan Raichel. Turns out we're both underslept. Then, on my way to bed I accidentally get drawn in to the conclusion of the novel I was reading and lie in the hammock in my living room for a couple hours seeing how it ends. 1am and I head to bed, sleeping up for my early morning meeting with Luc Michiels to pick up again on the engineering stuff.


The sun sets after 6pm. I have over 3 extra hours of daylight. Its been warm enough to have throngs of people sitting outdoors at the cafes. There was a carnivale parade in Mechelen on Sunday. I've been to Brussels twice already in the week since I've returned. I learned a new piece in about 4 days. I'm reading an interesting book. It even seems like I'm more able to find people around when I want them. I been in the tower twice and am very happy with my playing. I've caught myself trying to do too much twice already, but the rest of the time I seem to be doing well. And without 7 extra hours of night-classes in Dutch, I think things feel a bit roomier time-wise.

As for now, I sign off from perhaps the shortest and easiest post-trip blog entry I've ever written.

Israel

It happened around mid-November. I wasn't feeling ready to go back to the US as planned, during winter break. I wanted generally to tour Europe but was in a bit of a rut and didn't have the ideas or energy to put something together for December. And I got a call from my friend Sarah Beller: "I'm going to Israel. Wanna come?"
We talked it over and eventually I got on board.


The trip had 3 components.
1) Arrival, shabbat, and general hanging out with friends who were in Jerusalem for the year;
2) Visits to Palestine / the West Bank;
3) a visit to an enviro-kibbutz in the south.

I added on some scuba diving for myself during the last part of the trip, and on December 28th Sarah and I met in the Tel Aviv airport and made our way via sherut (shared taxi) to J'lem.
In the sherut we met someone who knew a friend of ours and had been involved in our e-mail conversation about travelling to the West Bank. It was going to be the first of one of many random "small world" run ins that happened, more or less on a daily basis, in the small world that is anglo-Jerusalem.



Stage 1: Jerusalem.
Mood: Joyful and Festive.
Rating: Awesome.


Looking back on the trip, I think one of the really amazing parts was getting to reconnect with friends and friendships in various degrees of development, ranging from people who I already had a strong relationship with, to people that I had shared community with but hadn't really gotten to really spend time one-on-one with, to friends-of-friends that I hadn't yet met, and all the stages in-between. This Jewish, justicey, post-denominational post-geographical overly-educated add-your-own-adjective seemingly-ever-outward-stretching community that I have found myself a part of over the last few years seems to consistently succeed in popping out great new people. Outside of it I find it rare to quickly connect to people -- inside, it seems to happen all the time. It felt great to be surrounded by people at once interested in making the world a better place, and also in living spiritually and emotionally rich lives enjoying what good the world and its inhabitants have to offer. It became evident to me that as much as I needed to cocoon for a bit in Belgium, having this community and these people in my life is important to me.
So, there was the usual bounty of Shabbes meals and walks, great food and song, and generally doing J'lem from the living room, ordinary street, and park perspective, rather than the tourist track.

Post-shabbes I hit the tourist track and took a walk to the old city. I visited "the wall", meaning the western wall, the holiest site for Jews, and found it to be disturbingly a) touristy, b) dominated by one particular and self-proclaimed-authentic form of Judaism, c) why are we holding a site or a physical object as holy? Isn't that a little bit against the whole Judeo-radical-monotheism revolution? d) meaningful in spite of, or perhaps because of all these conflicting issues condensed into a single physical experience of who-I-am / what-I-am-a-part-of. Its strange, but encountering that sort of fragmentation and conflict within something that is supposedly me, my culture, my people, in my name, etc. can be just as powerful an experience as encountering abundant perfection in the same realm; just to encounter that realm of selfness-in-world in any state is a step towards the more intense, especially when I'm so used to playing the stranger-in-a-strange-land.
There was a lot of tension between what the site suggested my identity to be and who I felt like; what this site suggested the world should be like and how I felt it should be. A custodial worker passed before me sweeping notes, people's handwritten prayers for their deepest hopes, into his waste-bin en masse to be incinerated or dropped in a landfill somewhere far away. The holy collides with the mundane and the profane. In Israel there's not enough space to keep them separate anymore.

Afterwards I met a Berkeley grad who was working consulting in Bahrain and we took a walk together through the shuk in the Muslim quarter that eventually placed us on a walk atop the wall that surrounded the old city, overlooking the beauty and chaos below. Once atop the wall I admitted that I had been a bit nervous walking around below, and he admitted that he felt the same -- he could just see the headlines: "American tourists shot by Israeli soldiers". I found this enlightening -- we were of two minds here. Of course it makes sense to be afraid of the 18 year olds with the machine guns. But to me, they weren't personally threatening. Aesthetically unpleasing, even politically problematic, but certainly not threatening. Heck, sometimes when I felt like I might be wandering into the wrong part of town, seeing the IDF uniform was a relief. They probably went to school with one of my friends' cousins. I could speak Hebrew with them. I could use the right code words. I could pass for "one-of-us" in their eyes. There's safety in that identity. But that same identity that made me feel relatively ok with the soldiers while my companion felt threatened, created the opposite effect for both of us on the streets of the Muslim shuk. I didn't know the callsigns there, and though my identity wasn't visually apparent, if revealed it might cast me in a poor light, regardless of my own personal political views. He was a Christian tourist -- relatively innocuous in that setting.
Israel is a place where identity and all of the hooplah surrounding it suddenly take on a whole new importance. Your religion, your nationality, your culture, and your politics all have big impacts on who you can relate to, where you can go, what you can do, how safe you feel, how people treat you, etc. And the degree to which you can pass or present ambiguously very much affect your experience in day to day life. I felt that over the course of the trip, whether for safety's sake or just for comfort / pleasantness' sake, I had to stay very mindful of how I presented and what I revealed about myself. The times when I could pass for having a good / acceptable identity, my privilege became very present and real for me. The times when I couldn't were hard, frustrating, and sometimes even frightening. More on this in stage 2.




One highlight of the Jerusalem component of the trip was playing carillon at the YMCA building right outside the old city. I took two cohorts of about 5-6 friends up, one on Monday, one on Tuesday. We did about half an hour of playing on the small and somewhat dilapidated, but still pretty-sounding instrument there, then a climb up to the top of the tower to catch the end of the sunset and sing some nigunnim to the old city.
Others highlights: Ringing in the secular new year a la renewal Judaism, seeing cats walking the streets, being surrounded by Jerusalem stone and plants living and growing all around, clear sunny skies, temperate weather conditions, taking in the sights of the various shuks (marketplaces), and of course, eating real falafel and hommous.
Most small-world experience: Besides the daily run-ins on the street, there was one contra dance where my friend Ilana showed up by surprise, and then one of my dance partners ended up also being the host of a New Year's party that I later attended.


Stage 2: Palestine.
Mood: Sometimes heavy, sometimes joyful, always stretching and growing.
Rating: Awesome.


I am standing out on a dark and empty street. The air is filled with the sound of the adhan, the day's final call prayer. It pours forth loudly, overwhelmingly from each and every tower of the many surrounding mosques, each at a different tempo and pitch, overlapping, mingling and clashing like turbulent waves from adjoining seas. It is my first time ever hearing this sound in person. I find it simultaneously alien, terrifying, and beautiful. And, to my amusement, familiar in the most surprising of ways. Every day I listen to the bells of Mechelen compete with each other and fill the soundscape in this very same fashion. I breathe in this sound and take pride in my achievement of coming out here, of braving the unknown, while at the same time making sure I stay within a 5-second dash to the protective front door of my host's house.
OK. I admit it. I was nervous. Who wouldn't be? I knew so little of what I might find on the other side of "the wall" (now meaning the "security barrier" that Israel has erected between itself and the Palestinian population, both groups loosely defined), and the little I did know suggested grave danger. My only clue that this impression might be incorrect was that many of my friends regularly went across. A couple even ran an organization called Encounter Tours that took Jews with no experience in the area into the West Bank.
The plan was to go over with Encounter Tours for the day -- then Sarah and I would stayed the night with a local host, Abed (a colleague of Sarah's boyfriend who runs an arts program in the Aida refugee camp) while the rest of our group headed back to Israel proper.

Some words about safety, so that I can leave it behind. My friends made sure I was well-informed and well-prepared. I never had to be away from a professional or local who had taken on the obligation to keep me safe. I had a lot of input from people living in Israel. I had cash and emergency phone numbers under the insole of my shoe, a practice donated from a friend and one I intend to keep. What's safety in these situations? 20,000 Christian tourists pass right through Bethlehem without a hitch.

Our group of 9 set off early from Jerusalem. We took cabs to the checkpoint. Our driver asked us to have our money ready so he could drive off as quickly as possible and not risk having his car stoned. I'm pretty sure nobody throws stones right outside the checkpoint, but we found this to be telling about the attitudes on the ground. We crossed the checkpoint by foot and got into our tour van on the other side, and our day began.

We met with the deputy mayor of Bethlehem and principal of a Christian-Palestinian school. We saw the landscape, the various segments of the wall, the Jewish settlements atop the hills, and the protected roads and tunnels that cut across the countryside to connect them to Jerusalem. We saw the countryside too, full of beautiful terraced hills and olive trees. We met with the director of a non-violent resistance program over a lunch of delicious Palestinian foods, most of which we had encountered as delicious Israeli foods earlier in the week. We saw the churches and all the important sites of Christianity. We visited the Aida refugee camp and met with Abed.

And then Sarah and I waved goodbye to our the rest of the Encounter tour, goodbye to the sense of security that came with having an experienced friend in charge, goodbye to the safe and easy way to a bed in the midst of Jerusalem. We took a brief walking tour of the camp with Abed. We met a lot of children along the way, and got to see the general layout. As night fell, we hopped into his car and drove to his house in Beit-Sahour, about 10 minutes away.

Sarah took a nap before dinner and I managed to convince Abed to let me help with the cooking. The dinner was delicious. Abed had worked as a chef in Paris while he was getting his degree over there.
We talked a lot over the cooking, and afterwards too, over the dinner. And even after dinner, we lingered at the table for a while, listening to Abed and drinking sage tea made with sage from his former village in Israel; and eating Belgian chocolates that I had brought over as an attempt to somehow thank him for the kindness and hospitality he'd shown us.
The next day we toured the refugee camp again, toured the facilities of Al-Rowad, the arts camp, and had a good long talk with Husam Jubran, who had started the non-violent activism program that we encountered the day before. We looked, talked, and explored, then left in the early afternoon so that we could make it to the checkpoint before sundown, and make it through before the evening rush. The plan had been to have Abed put us in a taxi, but by this point Sarah and I both decided that we wanted to make our way to the checkpoint by foot. This was probably the scariest part of the whole experience. It was our first time being alone, without a guide, without a local host who was a respected member of the community to protect us. I was walking with two dual and very different impressions in my mind -- mindful both of my recent experiences of hospitality and kindness, and also the sorts of dangers that I'd been taught to expect over there. I clung to 'Marhaba', the basic arabic greeting. Its funny how the little things make all the difference, but the fact that its normal to greet strangers on the street in Palestine made things feel so much safer. It let me set a friendly tone with every passerby -- it let me hear their voice and see their eyes, and in some sense, know who I was dealing with. We did the 10-15 minute walk to the checkpoint together. We walked along the wall, the security barrier and studied the impressive array of art and graffiti that covered its surface. I don't know how much of it is locally done -- I understand that a lot of international artists have used the wall to provide visual statements of solidarity. Very little of it was violent, but a lot spoke of pain and outrage, and also faith that better days were to come. Most of it was very beautiful. We arrived at the checkpoint, made our way through the various tunnels and fences, barriers, gates, and metal detectors, and emerged into Israel proper.
Since the exit is also the entrance, the final act of our crossing was to make our way through a thick and long line of Palestinian workers waiting to get through and go back home. They squeezed against the fences on either side of the path to make a narrow corridor for us. It felt pretty horrible, getting waved through as soon as the blue of our passports showed, walking through as casual tourists while these people waited and waited, having what should be a 15 minute commute transformed into a long daily ordeal. I felt so unjustly privileged , so apologetic, but what do you do, what do you say? We walked through in silence.

This story has been a hollow shell consisting of only the most basic chronology. I've said nothing about the content of my conversations; the sights, the moods, the feel of life on the other side; my impressions; my reflections; my conclusions, if any. And I've needed to avoid all of that to keep myself out of the mire of personal political content that I'm still working on putting into words. Hopefully this can be a separate blog post in the future.
What I can say is that this trip was a very powerful experience for me. It was a poignant crossing of that metaphysical boundary between self and other, made very physical by the elaborate checkpoint and imposing concrete walls stretching forth as far as the eye can see. To meet with people over there and understand their lives, to eat with them, cook with them, wrestle with them (metaphorically), and most of all, listen to them, was at times challenging and trying, but also in some strange way easier than I might imagine, filled with a certain calmness, even spiritual uplift of finding self-in-other; I was entering and facing incredible conflict and contradiction, struggle, guilt, responsibility, and confusion, but that reality was still easier than fearing that reality from a place of avoidance. Because of this feeling, Sarah and I both found this experience, which was admittedly difficult and saddening at times, to be liberating and even joyful.

I will also say this. Having stood on the East side of the wall, my personal relationship to the situation has been transformed. I don't think you can really understand it before you've stood there. Regardless of your politics, regardless of your conclusions: I don't know how much you can understand if you haven't seen what Palestinians see on a daily basis; if you haven't heard their voices, their narratives, their experiences. Even if you choose not to validate these narratives and opinions, they are a part of the situation. If you don't understand them, you can't understand the views, choices, and actions that go along with them. I'm not being naive about this. I know that there are other members of the Palestinian population who have very different outlooks and agendas than the ones I spoke with. I know that I didn't get a full sample of what's over there. But I can get a basic sense of what the more extreme groups are like from afar. You don't see the ordinary lives and what they entail until you're there.

The sad part is that standing on the East side of the wall, and the transformative perspective that it provides, is something that is legally off-limits for every person that has a say in who governs Israel and, by extension, what life will look like in the West Bank. If you are an Israeli citizen, you are not permitted to go to the places we went to that day. Officially this is for the safety of the Israeli populace, and my sense is that's not wholly inaccurate; Israelis citizens would not get a warm welcome over there. Whether or not that's the entire story, the consequence is that the people who have the most influence over the state of things in the West Bank don't even know what life looks like over there.
Returning to Israel proper, seeing all the buses and ads and hustle and bustle of modern urban life, made me feel that daily life in the West Bank probably doesn't even enter too many people's consciousness, so long as there are no bombings, rockets, kidnappings, or attacks. The wall has helped to reduce those a lot, but its also added another layer onto the hardships of ordinary life for the sorts of Palestinians that I met with. When I was there, it had been several days after the birth of Husam's son and he still couldn't get to his wife's house to see him. You can say all you want about security and protective measures. When you're a decent guy with your newborn son on the other side an uncrossable wall, its harder to see it that way.


The next day we woke up early again and made our way to Hebron with the group Shovrim Shtika, Breaking the Silence. It was created by Israeli soliders who served in Hebron to share their stories about the situation there, and their roles and experiences while serving. My guide was one such soldier. Here's a video of him talking about his first mission -- to fire a grenades via machine-gun at an abandoned building in the midst of a busy downtown area, as a response to shots fired at the Jewish settlement. Sounds nice in theory -- a non-lethal but noticeable response. Let's hear what he has to say:


Eventually the response firings weren't enough. The military switched to pre-emptive firings. When that wasn't enough, they switched to shock and awe -- armoured vehicles driving down the streets, blowing up cars. All of this still got the same headline back home "Israeli troops return fire to the source of fire".
The part of Hebron that was the most shocking to me though wasn't the day-to-day military aspects. It was the settlers, the brutality with which they behaved. All I can say is that Hebron flips on its head any stereotypes or ideas I used to have about 'us', 'them', 'good guys', 'bad guys', guilt or innocence. Its hard to watch footage of settlers throwing rocks at Palestinian schoolchildren or raiding a clinic and destroying medical equipment, always with soldiers standing by to protect the settlers. Its hard to look at Jewish symbols, symbols that are supposed to represent me, spray-painted on closed and abandoned Palestinian shops as tools of intimidation and hatred. Did somebody recast the play while I wasn't looking? The settlers seem dedicated to using fear and destruction to make life as hellish as possible for the local Palestinians, and with an army wrapped around their finger, its not that hard for them. Nobody stops them. No matter how outrageous their actions, the army has no mandate and the police have long been threatened and intimidated to the point silence and acquiescence. We can go on about Israel and its moral codes, its democratic institutions, the rule of law, etc. as long as we want. Its hollow so long as Hebron continues like this.


I guess at some point you need to put that away. Not for good. Not entirely. Just to set it down for a moment -- even outrage cannot be sustained for ever. And so we gathered once again for Shabbes in Jerusalem, to decompress, to process, and to remember the good in life as well.
It was really hard to watch things happen that morally disgust you... and not have any response. Not have any action to run to, no heroic act to save the day. Change is slower than that, and travel is much, much faster than that. So I move ahead. For now.





Stage 3: Eilat and Kibbutz Ketura; Southern Israel
Mood: Vacation-like, with adventure, relaxation, and recharging
Rating: Awesome.


I caught an 8am bus South and arrived in Eilat just in time to catch the last refresher dive of the day at Manta Dive center. We had 3 days, 2 nights in the South and I needed to make the most of my time there. The deal was as follows: if I do well on the refresher dive, I could go ahead with normal diving. If I fail, I'd have to take a refresher course and spend the majority of my time there in a swimming pool.
Since I was the only refresh person, I ended up getting a private dive in the process. My instructor ran me through the basics of gear set up and underwater safety procedures and protocols. I had done some review beforehand and I remembered a whole bunch of it... but not all of it. Thank goodness for refresher requirements! We went under and did some basic emergency simulations, then explored the dive site for a bit. I passed with flying colors and signed up for the morning and afternoon dives the next day.

Meanwhile, Sarah had taken a later bus south and had set herself up with a friend at Kibbutz Keturah, home of the Arava Institute, a center for environmental studies which (amongst other things) brings together Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian students to learn about and work on the environmental issues (and associated resource management conflicts) of the region.
Yossi, one of her hosts, was in Eilat for the evening and could drive me to Ketura for the night, then take me back in for my morning dive. Sweet! I met up with Yossi (+ 5 kids, ages 4-12), helped entertain the kids for a bit and then slept the whole ride home. It had been a long day!
Arriving at Ketura, I felt a bit jealous of Sarah. Tired from several days of early wake-ups, still carrying unprocessed burdens from Hebron, I wanted also to have the space to sleep in and take it slow. I decided that I would dive the next day but skip day 3 of diving and just relax on the Kibbutz.
That night I found out that the plans had changed. Yossi's Dr's appointment got canceled and I lost my ride to Eilat. Lots of scrambling over the course of a few hours got me in a hitched ride to Eilat, just in time to MISS my 9am morning dive at Manta. But, Manta, I learned, wasn't the only game in town. It was one of those brilliant moments where things fall apart and rebuild themselves into something much, much better. I booked myself onto 10am morning dive at Dolphin Reef.

They don't call it dolphin reef for nothing.



My guide and I knelt on the sea floor 6 meters below sea level and watched the dolphins playing around us. One swam right across my my field of view, about 5 feet away. She was definitely looking at me. Probably because I had a weird mask on my face and a big piece of rubber in my mouth.
Once again I lucked out and was the only diver there for the day. I have a private guided dive for the price of a public one. My guide was great. We both were all about taking it slow and enjoying the sights, and we established that before going down in the water. That made it much easier to stay on the same page underwater with minimal sign-language communication. He also did this really cool thing where he took out his regulator and got a little fish to swim into his mouth and pick at his teeth for food. These fish generally form a symbiotic relationship with bigger fish. The bigger fish promise not to eat them, and in return the little guys eat all the food particles in the big guys' teeth. Occasionally a big fish will get hungry and eat his dentist. Then the rest of the little ones go on strike and the big fish's mouth rots away from bacterial infection. Well anyway, apparently they're branching out into humans dental services too now. I wonder if its covered by my insurance?
I got to spend a couple of hours on the premises of dolphin reef (which is a full fledged attraction for non-diving tourists as well) before the afternoon dive at Manta. I sat on the beach. I ordered lunch (they bring it right to your beach-chair) and got a hot pot of chai to ensure that I could stay out in beach clothes. It was borderline, but this was as close as I'd get to summer and I meant to make the most of it.
The afternoon dive (once again at Manta) had some great sights, in some sense cooler than the dolphins (amazingly dense schools of fish, intense and beautiful coral formations up close), but was also a bit less fun in terms of pacing; "OK, we're going to try to cover the first leg really quickly so that we can get to the interesting stuff, so just stay close and keep up, and oh, and we'll want a lot of bottom time to really see it all, so try not to breathe too much." Very beautiful sights, but a bit less relaxed than the morning dive.

I caught a bus to Ketura and was done with the shlepping, with the logistics, with the connections and schedules and everything. I could wake up as late as I wanted, spend the day wandering the kibbutz, and then walk out the front gate and take a sunset bus to Jerusalem.
And that's basically what I did. I also got to talk to some Arava students at lunch; hike up a little desert mountain with some steep drop-offs on either side (wasn't quite prepared for that); and run into Zvi Bellin, a friend from DC who also happened to randomly be at Kibbutz Ketura the same day I was. Apparently I was still in the small-world zone.



Epilogue:


The bus ride to Jerusalem was stuffy, overcrowded (ie sitting on the floor in the aisle), and long. We made it back and had some final meetings and goodbyes in Jerusalem; I spent a good few hours shopping and bargaining in the Muslim shuk in the old city, and paid a final visit to the western wall (Anna made the point that in spite of all the crazy surrounding the wall, its a place thats witnessed generations of people coming and pouring out their hearts, in the same exact location... and that regardless of its relationship to history, theres some meaning in that on its own. So I wanted to take another look). The Chabad dude moved towards me as I entered, asking if I was Jewish. "Nope", I said. I was in no mood to deal with him. I think that's the first time that I've ever actively denied my Judaism, and it just so happened to be at the holiest of all Jewish sites. I felt pretty OK about it.


The airport was a mess of lines and unending security checks. In a final hat-tip to the identity politics I was leaving behind, I was asked a lengthy series of questions on my religious identity, observances, and practices by the security agent. How do you explain trans-denominational post-halakhic havurah-style Judaism to the security agent who's asking you what synagogue you belong to in the US?


Sarah and I took our pictures with the frightfully serious looking busts of David Ben-Gurion, whose parents loved the airport so much they named their son after it. And then we were in the air.



Situation and Self:

Israel showed me other-within-self. Palestine, self-within other. Israel showed me the level of fragmentation within "my people". Palestine, long touted as alien and dangerous, showed me the way things change when you alter your notion of who is self and who is other -- who is the diverse assortment of individuals acting with varied interests and goals... and who is the monolith.



Its a land of invisible lines and boundaries that define who you are, and so many of them pass right by my doorstep. Now that I've stepped out my door to meet the people on either side, those lines have cracked apart. The divisions don't make sense when the important things fall on both sides of the line.
For all the lines in Israel, there doesn't seem to be one for the people that I agree with, respect, or enjoy. There doesn't seem to be a line out there that follows moral contours. There doesn't seem to be a line between those who honour the divine in others and those who trample it. All these 'us's and 'them's have become alien to me. They're not my choice, they don't work, and I just don't see the sense anymore. I think that's what I meant when I told the Chabad guy I wasn't Jewish. Not under your lines, not on your terms.
What's sad is that this is all happening in a place that's supposed to be holy. Mundane and profane are spread in the name of holiness. Who can pull them apart? I watch as the old stone wall releases its prayers, watch them swept away with a broom and a dustbin. One line stands firm: I am a part of this. I can't cordon myself off from this one.

See the rest of the photos: http://www.flickr.com/gp/59706944@N00/16p344