A Post: About Thanksgiving (Nominally)

It will take me a while to land the plane that is this post, but I promise I will get there.

My solitude used to come in bite-sized pieces.

If Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club has single-serving friends on flights, then I certainly had single-serving moments of introspection. Six years of six a.m. flights. Of bad plane coffee. Of sprinting through CLT trying to make a hopeless connection. Of inconsistent WiFi and spotty access to charging. Of hour-long cab rides into the city, doing my makeup just as we hit the Midtown Tunnel, while turning the back seat into a mobile workstation. Of renting what was tantamount to an overpriced closet where I occasionally slept and more often did laundry. Of sustaining friendships with unexpected drop-ins.

Of measuring my life in miles.

2020 was – if it had continued as it began – going to be a banner year for business travel. I flew over 60,000 miles across 56 flights this year, 52 of which happened before March 15th. That old tale of the shark who dies if it stops swimming… that is the life of the business traveler. If you actually stopped to reflect on what you were doing, there would be just no way to make it work.

When all things came to a screeching halt with me “stranded” in California, I was forced to take that step back that I never wanted to take. I could have just as easily kept kicking the travel can down the road and telling myself sweet little lies like, “you’ll slow the pace of travel after this fiscal year” (said, of course, every fiscal year) or the even more insidious, “buck up, you’re tough enough to handle this.”

It’s not toughness, friends. It’s not fortitude. It’s stubbornness, pure and simple. And a healthy dash of fear of the unknown.

Could I be happy in one place? I can’t say I’ve ever really tried.

The truth is that I’ve lived a casually and ridiculously privileged bicoastal life, being neither here nor there, but just where I needed to be in the exact moment in time I needed to be there. The concept of a fixed “here” felt (and if I’m being honest, there are moments where it still feels) oppressive, and I would have surely cracked from Shelter-in-Place had I been cooped up alone in my Atlanta apartment.

I can’t say I believe in fate, but it was a stroke of pure luck that things stopped when I just happened to be in the Bay Area. They say you can’t go home again, but in many ways I think I have. The city is deeply different and yet my neighborhood feels exactly the same, with just a tiny bit of apocalyptic flair.

Having passed the 8 month mark from California SIP orders, my quarantimes look like this: 3.5 months each at my parents’ house and at my old/new building in the Mission, bisected by the most surreal month in Atlanta to pack my things. And though I was hardly isolated for 7 of those 8 months, it was impossible not to feel unmoored, adrift, listless, unenthused. Purposeless. Emotion I normally would ignore or kick down or push through. Or – when I was really in my feelings – go volunteer about. Those outlets I had nearly all are gone.

A quick digression: suffering is not an Olympic event. I’ve been incredibly incredibly lucky this pandemic and for that I’m so grateful, but it doesn’t mean that I haven’t had my frustrations. We all do, and we’re all allowed to feel them, and acknowledge them, and process them as we need to. Guilt is not a particularly utile emotion in times like these. Ours is a zeitgeist of ennui, to be sure. Universal as it comes.

Eventually, I turned to ritual in hopes of reclaiming some kind of anchor. And all of my rituals, my holidays, my family ties, all of it: they all seem to start or stop in the kitchen.

Cooking and baking tend not to be skills in which one acquires any true proficiency when one spends an average of ten nights (that is to say, twenty days) a month in hotels, on the road. In a way I’ve spent a lifetime of sponging up what I could, where I could: there was the after school cooking for kids program that my best friend’s mom ran from the teacher’s lounge at my elementary school—I still remember the lesson on folding batter. Or “baking” with my dad as a toddler, sometimes getting to stir but always getting to be the taste tester. Or at the elbows of my grandmothers, both excellent cooks with the mysterious kitchen idiosyncrasies that only old home cooks really can have. Or in that one soup kitchen in Manhattan that has access to a restaurant kitchen, but you have to be in Midtown by 5:30 on what is inevitably a frigid fall morning, worrying the whole way if the 5 will have issues, but the reward is getting to use an industrial mandolin and – hopefully – keep all your fingers. Or working in the phenomenal industrial kitchen in Atlanta where spaghetti is made in 40 gallon tilt skillets and stirred with what could only be described as an erstwhile rowboat oar.

Food justice and food equity are so important to me because it’s so primal, both in terms of human need and also in the satisfaction one gets from feeding others. I’m Italian: we cook to say we love you as much as we actually say the words.

I dabbled early in the year with what I ended up terming “Mik’s Quarantine Cucina,” basically Instagram stories of what I was cooking, how I was trying to make sense of our rapidly changing lifestyles, of the weird hoarding and ingredient shortages happening early on. It was nice to have something glib and fun and relatable and ended up being an easy way to stay connected to my East Coast friends and colleagues. You can get out of those awful “how are you?” conversations that everyone either lies about for politeness’s sake or gets too real and then you’re all in that rona pit together. We had something tangible to talk about that wasn’t more of the same, more of the quotidian exhaustion. It’s the same reason people got puppies and Pelotons, something to shake things up.

And so I threw myself into Thanksgiving cooking this year. That wasn’t particularly new; with no grandmas at the helm for the last 4 holiday seasons, I’ve certainly pitched in on dishes here and there. All the time, knowing I was missing the vital ingredient: old hands (as my zia says). I feel my grandmas’ absence most acutely at this time of year, as I think is common for most (whether with your family you’re born into or with the family you make).

This week was an orgiastic flurry of stirring and chopping and folding and sautéing and kneading and fraisage. A little bit French (pâtes, brisée & sucrée, one of each), a little bit Italian (ravioli in the style of my nonna’s mom, Nonnie B), a little bit American (3 recipes I took from the NYT foods section before I canceled my subscription in a fit over their publication of the Cotton op-ed), and even a little bit Somali (I would be remiss if I didn’t throw in a little plug for Hawa Hassan’s brilliant In Bibi’s Kitchen, which has energized my cooking over this month). There was even a little bit Chinese though it wasn’t done by me – maman made her mom’s (my popo’s) traditional day-after-Thanksgiving turkey jook (粥). I took pictures here and there, thinking to do some sort of post around technique that I always find frustratingly lacking in recipe blogs.

Dinner came together in fit of chaos, as it always does. Even with all the forethought in the world, we still run through the marathon of all the things having to get heated or cooked in the final hour. And though my parents’ kitchen is bigger and better equipped than either of my grandmas’ kitchens, the three of us were constantly on top of one another, vying for burners or ovens or even the microwave and trying to help each other stay moving. There were two last minute mishaps (exploding ravioli and these fussy potatoes where I just couldn’t get the butter to emulsify), and at one point I was caught muttering, “happy fucking Thanksgiving,” which thankfully sent us all into hysterics.

As I realized, sitting at the table by myself after the meal, I was cooking as much as anything to wrap myself in ritual and thumb my nose at the all loss all around me. It wasn’t a conscious decision to be incredibly extra about the holiday, but it was clearly all the angst of this oddest of years coming to the surface. I didn’t need to make two kinds of stuffing. I didn’t need to make two desserts with two different doughs. There were so many ways to simplify and streamline this process, and yet.

Most of us are not taught to grieve in any real way and there are some truths about grief that can’t be anticipated, only learned through experience. And when you take a year of such deep collective loss where there is no space given for commensurate public grief, it’s no wonder so many of us are struggling to cope in our own ways. Moving forward without going through the grieving process is not, in fact, moving forward – you’re just burying the problem, only to have it pop back up later, often times inconveniently and messily. We need time; we need patience with one another. We need patience with ourselves. And try though I might, you can’t just cheer it away, and relentless positivity is equally toxic to negativity.

I wish I had arrived at some sort of profound conclusion at the end of all this, but it, not unlike everything else, seems to be a work in progress. And that will do for now.

Three Hours in Tirana

The traffic ringing Tiranë was just about what you’d expect: back ups, confusing street signs, shouting drivers, horns, diesel fumes. My cabbie decided that he’d had enough – and I can’t blame him: what with a drive back across the border to Macedonia and all, it had turned into a 5-6 hour adventure. He found a relatively safe street and dropped me off, luggage and all, and told me to be very careful and to take an “Albania taxi,” but being who I am I chose to walk into town instead.

Not the best plan I ever had. 

In truth, I felt very safe the entire time. My sketch-o-meter is highly highly attuned from my years in the Mission District, and nothing about Tiranë set it off. However, my arms were about ready to fall off after 20 minutes (the joys of lugging camera gear around?), and I stopped at Parku Rinia for a quick snack and some light sunbathing. It felt amazing in the sunshine after some chilly time in Macedonia. After a quick respite, I gritted my teeth and made for a luggage storage facility I had found with some quick googling at the hotel.

Luggage storage nearly always seems to be a trial, even in a good-sized city like Tiranë. I’ve had so many ridiculous run-ins over the years (dragging a rollaboard across the sand in Viareggio is a standout) that I suppose it’s no surprise I moved to backpack-exclusive travel for the vast majority of my adventuring.

Given this illustrious track record, I was surprised and pleased to find an excellent solution in the simply named Luggage Storage Tirana. It was having a soft opening of sorts (lucky me!), and I was able to leave my bags for a nominal fee. I got doubly lucky in that the proprietor, who first apologized for his command of English, saw my surname and asked, “ma non parli italiano per caso? - you don’t happen to speak Italian, do you?”

What I learned later that day is this was not a particularly unique occurrence – Italian is still the most widely spoken foreign language in Albania, a remnant of fascist invasion and communist-era pirated Italian television – but this was still a remarkably welcomed turn of events. And should you ever have need to find luggage storage in Tiranë, I would highly recommend you do the same. Bags safely deposited, I made my way to the center square.

I was greeted by a busy fun fair and Christmas market in Sheshi Skënderbej – the aforementioned center square, named for the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg. It seemed slightly smaller than it actually is with all the goings on of the day, but was massive nonetheless.

The square is gorgeous: pure pedestrian paradise, ringed with key civic and cultural buildings including the brilliant old Et’hem Bey mosque which was unfortunately (for me) undergoing renovation. The majority of the architecture is no doubt a relic of the Hoxha regime… decidedly socialist, but somehow lighter or less imposing than some of the heavy-handed brutalist relics one might encounter in, say, Podgorica or Zagreb (which, incidentally, I adore, but the beauty of Tiranë’s buildings felt more universally accessible).

I was absolutely enthralled with that contrast of harsh architecture and the palpable warmth radiating off the people I encountered. The square rang with laughs and shouts as it sparkled and gleamed in the surprisingly bright sunshine. There was something to be said for the incongruity of a massive and hideous conical Christmas “tree” with – I kid you not – “Feliz Navidad” emanating from one of the many food stalls in a majority-Muslim country. (Proving, as always, that we can all just get along, should we so choose.)

The building I was most looking forward to seeing in my quick tour was the Piramida, a UFO-looking thing from the end of the communist era, originally built in memory of Hoxha, now abandoned and decaying.

If decrepit communist ruins and discussion of photography aren’t your thing, you can probably skip to the end of the post. In fact, I probably could make this its own post, but what’s the fun of that?

There have been plans to rebuild the thing for years, but here it sits, all broken windows and garbage and graffiti.

While the sunshine had at first been a welcome antidote to all the cold, it did lead to some photographic challenges. What’s the fun of an endless blue sky and harsh midday shadows? I’m not sure how I would have liked to have shot the pyramid, but what I got certainly didn’t capture much of what I was hoping for. At the time I remember being frustrated I had nothing wider than the Q’s 28mm, though I’m wondering if that would really have given me what I wanted.

Black and white didn’t seem to absolve the images of their sins either, and it’s all a bit frustrating in reflection. All the same, it was exactly as impressive in person as I’d hoped – something I should probably try to keep in mind.

The most delightful part was just how accessible it was: 10 minutes south of the square on foot, just across the river. Something like this in the states would be fenced in, boarded up, inaccessible (I mean, relatively inaccessible), but here people climbed freely up the sloping concrete sides for the view over the city.

I wanted terribly to join in, but my footwear was suspect and tumbling off a building to crack a tooth or worse hours before an international flight seemed like a bad plan, even for me.

It may finally be time to give up the ghost and admit that I’m an adult.

All too soon, my time was up, and I cut a quick path back to the luggage storage to grab my bags. Across the street was a cab stand, and after some quick haggling in Italian (The best kind of haggling, if I do say so myself. That language was made for furiously fast negotiation.) I was on my way to the airport.

My quick Albanian tour felt almost like a gift with all the hassle it took to get there. I’m glad I toughed out the trip in, and am thoroughly looking forward to return visit some time in the future. Faleminderit, Shqipnia – thanks, Albania!

The Great Balkan Taxi Adventure

One piece of advice I give for travel but rarely follow myself is not to box yourself into a schedule corner. Even with domestic travel, airlines have maintenance, weather happens, things go wrong. My itineraries almost always include back up schedules, particularly when trains and buses are involved as Plans B are easier to come by.

Naturally, I took not one second of my own advice when planning how to get from Ohrid to Reykjavík, where I was meeting a friend for New Year’s Eve. And somehow, I miscalculated times and booked myself on a 15.50 flight leaving Tiranë for London. (Unsurprisingly, there are no TIA-KEF directs.)

The night before, I was packing and mentally preparing for the travel day when it dawned on me that I wouldn’t have too much time in Albania. Google Maps said that the journey between Struga and Tiranë was usually around 2.5 hours, which would put me into town at noon. I realized quickly I had neglected to factor in border time (assumed an hour based on how those things go) which meant 13.00 arrival... and then my paranoid brain hopped on actual Google to find stories of 5+ hour trips on the bus route.

I PANICKED. Full on looking up new flights, trying to figure out if the 4am bus still runs or if that was seasonal, and otherwise stressing myself out. 

Eventually I settled on the world’s most privileged solution to any problem: throw money at it, this time in the form of a taxi. From a few posts, I gleaned I could get a ride for about 120€. I proceeded to sleep fitfully with a plan to take a taxi to Albania or – if no one would take me – at least to Struga where I’d roll my dice with the international bus.

My fears were confirmed the next morning when the hotel owner shot me a look like I was insane when I asked her to call the cab company and see if a ride to Tiranë was possible. She laughed and shrugged and said, “we’ll ask...” Anxiety went to relief not two minutes later when her skeptical look turned to a smirk on the phone call (all I could discern from the rapid-fire Macedonian was that she’d repeated Албанија when asked – I assume – to clarify) and she announced that the driver wanted 100€ and could pick me up in 10 minutes. The driver arrived, I asked for a quick bancomat run (through the hotel owner), and we were off.

The drive itself was pretty straightforward: back up around the lake, passing Struga, into the hills, over the border, through the snow, back down, through a few towns, and into city center. My driver’s English was a bit better than my Macedonian, but communication was still difficult… which of course meant I had to occupy myself by taking photos.

Albania was always a bit of a question mark in my mind. Many Italian friends and family have opinions on the country which I always took with a grain of salt; after visiting, I understood some degree of their views. My Macedonian taxi driver was even more firm in his opinions, cracking jokes like, “look, Albania car wash!” when we encountered a wildly flailing garden hose, left on and walked away from by the side of the road. (I could have sworn I had a photo of this, but no such luck! I saw no fewer than five such “car washes.”)

They say that every country has a country that they shit on, and all signs pointed to Albania being the much abused, younger sibling type. 

I’ve certainly never been one to eschew a location on the basis of loosely controlled chaos – quite to the contrary, I love the boisterous, frenetic energy of the Napolis of the world. On that level alone, it was the right destination for me, and I’m sure it deserves a longer visit at some point in the future.

The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour

A silly habit that began nearly 10 years ago is naming all of my trips. Weirdly enough – since I’m someone who hates logistics and gets anxiety around work travel – I find the structure and consistency helpful. Then again, I also still make paper itineraries and plan capsule wardrobes... which I’ll admit I’ve gotten very very good at throwing together the hour before I’m supposed to leave for the airport.

The name of this trip was a throwback of sorts to one I took back in 2010 called Tumblin’ Tumbleweed Hobo Thanksgiving Roadtrip Adventure, which I think was the first named trip. Other highlights over the past decade or so have been: Miknattsolensland (Norwegian-ish for “The Land of the Miknight Sun” – always with the puns), Nostalgie al gusto di curaçao (French + Italian “Curaçao-flavored nostalgia,” a lift and modification of a Paolo Conte lyric), La Folle aventure (French, “The Crazy Adventure” – crazy in as much as I went to Sénégal three or so days after booking my flight), and of course the classic Mikstanbul.

And thus, The Great Balkan Hobo Christmas Bustour. (I throw hobo into trip names when I am lodging-deficient on holidays.) Riding buses in the Balkans is not something new for me. The rail infrastructure rarely lends itself to border hopping, either due to Cold War power plays or because of the wars after the collapse of Yugoslavia. I’ve taken buses from Bosnia to Croatia, Croatia to Croatia, Montenegro to Croatia... you get the theme here!

(As far as Croatia goes, this was my first trip to the Balkans that did not involve a visit there. It’s a beautiful country, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Love.) 

So here was the plan that ended up on my itinerary: 

• 18.12.26, 09.30 – матпу bus: Sofia 🇧🇬 to Skopje 🇲🇰

• 18.12.26, 16.30 – галеб bus: Skopje 🇲🇰 to Ohrid 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 08.00 – local public bus: Ohrid 🇲🇰 to Struga 🇲🇰

• 18.12.28, 09.30 – дурмо турс bus: Struga 🇲🇰 to Tiranë 🇦🇱

One thing worth noting if you’ve never been to the Balkans... while cell phones are as ubiquitous there as anywhere, putting logistics information online isn’t nearly as common. There are some aggregator websites written in English or at least the Roman alphabet that often times have dated timetables  (or, as I discovered in Skopje, said that a particular bus line had a route which they in fact do not at all) which will do you more harm than good. The only reliable method (though Trip Advisor can sometimes help... as long as the date of the original post is within close range) is to show up at the bus station and look at the posted times on the bus company’s window.

Матпу (Matpu), the bus company I took over the border from Bulgaria to Macedonia, was very well organized. Their website (though only in Bulgarian and hence Cyrillic) listed accurate routes and times; the bus itself showed up to the parking lot exactly when it was supposed to. I think I paid 30 лв for the ticket, which is about $17.50. We arrived in Skopje at 13.30, right on time. 4 hour ride including about 50 minutes to clear the border, not bad at all. The best part by far was the constant late 80’s early 90’s playlist that feels so perfectly Eurotrashy in the most amazing way possible.

After the quiet Christmas calm in Sofia, Skopje’s bus station was a veritable riot – people coming in and out, small “casinos” (slot parlors, really) leaking stale cigarette smoke, a million little offices and ticket windows. I made the decision to get on an earlier bus in hopes of making it to Ohrid in time for dinner and put my trust in an erstwhile aggregator site, which told me that there was an earlier bus through a company called Hisar Turizam. I went to their office, asked if they sold tickets to Ohrid, was given a strange look and told that they offer international buses, and directed to one of the central ticket windows. (All I can assume is that one of their buses to Albania can pick up/drop off in Ohrid, but it’s not the best way to get there.)

​At this point, I figured it couldn’t hurt to take a quick glance at the departure board and lo and behold, there was an “OHRID - 14.00 - 8” listed. 520 MKD or $10 later, I had a window seat on a bus that was run by none other than Галеб Охрид  (Galeb Ohrid), the original bus company I had planned on. Should you ever have a reason to take a bus leaving from Skopje, the station has an excellent website with the essentials, i.e. departure time and cost, which I naturally discovered after this whole adventure. (Again, without English, but that’s what Google Translate is for, no?)

Ohrid is in the bottom corner of Macedonia, right by the Albanian border. We took a winding journey through snowy mountain roads before descending to the lake itself. I nearly drained my phone battery taking blurry photos of the winter wonderland in the hills and arrived in Ohrid as desired, well before dinner.

La Parthenopea

If reincarnation were really, surely at least one of my past lives would have been lived out under the blistering Neapolitan sun. Naples has been one of my happy places since my first visit at 20. It is frenetic and filthy and often dangerous and I love every part of it. I'm not certain what it says about me that I thrive in chaos.

At least, I think I thrive in chaos.

In that spirit, I kicked off my trip not in the reasonable starting cities of Milan or Rome, but instead my beloved Napoli. It meant an extra layover (hence, Madrid!), and a whole layer of complication to meet up with my parents in Umbria. I arrived at 23:00 and was scheduled for the 13:00 train for Roma Termini; in my mind, this was clearly a sufficient amount of time to wander my favorite streets and stop for a meal at the oh-so-touristy but equally delicious Antica Pizzeria da Michele.

So I thought.

I woke up late with a headache to boot and didn't get out the door until 10. Naturally, the street I thought I wanted to take (and found without map nor problem) wasn't the street I actually needed to take, which lead to me furiously power-walking down Spaccannapoli muttering "shcusate" in my best imitation of dialetto and arriving at the restaurant (where a line was already assembled) at five to 11. 

My saving grace? Solo travel! The place is always so crowded that you get a ticket on arrival and wait until your number is called. It can be hours if you time things badly. The man giving out the tickets was asking how many were in each group and I hollered out, "una!" when he came to me. "Are you alone?" he asked. "Si, sono da sola - I am alone!" I responded back in Italian, hoping that would help my case. Lo and behold, I was not only seated, but got the first pizza coming out of the oven. I left twenty minutes later, full as an egg and inordinately pleased with myself.

The other complication of the morning was the fact that while I had brought along the DSR and an extra lens and planned my shooting around the direction of the sun, I had forgotten to replace the memory card. There's nothing like lugging a heavy bag of effectively useless camera gear to pay penance for your stupidity. And so, instead of rim-lit portraits of Napolitani going about their mornings, iPhone shots. So it goes.