Carmen: in HD

I got an overdue dose of culture this weekend. I went to the opera at the Met. It was my first -- a new production of Carmen directed by Richard Eyre that's been all over the New York Times arts section of late. But I'm still in West Virginia, you're thinking. How did I manage to see a New York opera?

Well, although it was a live performance, I wasn't actually at the Lincoln Center but in a cinema in the little town of Barboursville that broadcast an HD version.

I've always wanted to go to an opera. I like the old glamour of the idea and even tried to see one in the Teatro Colón when I lived in Buenos Aires. But the opera house, which has some of the world's best acoustics, was closed for renovations that year. (Actually I just looked it up, and it's still closed -- it will reopen after a four-year hiatus later this year.)

This movie-theater opera had its appeal. Yes, it lacked the world class people watching and cultured atmosphere I'd expect at the actual venue, and I missed out on an excuse to wear a (faux) fur coat over a luxe outfit. (This full house theater was of the gray-haired, sweats-wearing variety.) But the views were better than a front-row seat at the opera, with the camera crew artfully panning and zooming for maximum dramatic affect and focusing in on the key singers when appropriate.

So for $22 I saw the brass buttons on the soldiers' military coats, the star mezzo soprano's false lashes, and set details like the handwritten postcards on a military camp wall. We probably saw much more than those in the front row Center Parterre who paid up to $370 for their seats, no opera glasses required. When the camera focused on the orchestra pit we could even see the sweat drops on young conductor's forehead.

And in the theater we could eat snacks (smuggled Starbucks in my case) while watching the three-hour performance. During the 30-minute intermission we got to see interviews with the leads, the Sicilian tenor Roberto Alagna who played Don Jose and the curly-haired Elina Garanca, who on stage was pure feist and sex but backstage wore a huge grin and rattled away into the microphone in Latvian.

Both of them were well into their 40s, unlike most big Hollywood productions. I suppose it takes years to rise to the level of international opera star. I felt aware of my own superficiality when I couldn't get over how Barbara Frittoli looked about 50 but was playing the young, goody-two shoes Micaëla. I noticed her matronly chest rather than simply appreciating her world class voice and expressive face.

Ultimately, Carmen is intended to shock. The story is rife with sexual tension that culminates in violent tragedy. And this edition was indeed intense -- all cleavage and passion. Bizet's French opera (accompanied by English subtitles) is set in Seville, Spain. (That immediately sold me because last year I spent some time in that Andalusian city, which is a sunny place full of Spanish stereotypes like bullrings, voluptuous dark haired women, and flamenco dancing.) The gypsy Carmen, a fiery and volatile heart breaker, seduces Don Jose, a lowly soldier betrothed to his childhood sweetheart Micaëla. She convinces him to desert and join the gypies for a smuggling operation in the mountains, then ends up leaving him for a celebrity bullfighter. This particular production was dance heavy for an opera, with fierce numbers by an athletic ballerina couple opening each act.

I came across a newspaper article reporting that 240,000 people in 37 countries saw the live telecast. And now you know that record-setting number included a few art-hungry West Virginians.

Photo Credit: Metropolitan Opera/ Dusan Reljin 

Leaving it all behind: Packing and materialism

My cushy stay back at home -- even life as I know it in the U.S -- is about to end. Thank God. I'm itching for some independence and a return to an urban lifestyle, ready to discover a whole new country.

But it's bittersweet. After a few extended stints abroad I know I'm in for some sacrifice. I'm leaving my family (along with a certain cuddly cat). And I'll be doing without some shallow comforts as well.

That leads to a confession: I'll never be a hardcore, Swiss-army knife-carrying backpacker. Yes, I'll skip a few showers and sleep in a tent, but please, I beg you, don't deride me because I powdered my face and brushed on mascara before I started trekking through the Peruvian Andes. Don't roll your eyes because I won't skip conditioner or give up my moisturizer. I'm already savoring my last days with a few luxuries that won't be taking up space in my luggage: a fluffy bathrobe, a pair of cozy house slippers, a designer flat iron, and a light-up makeup mirror.

Because while I don't know anyone in Chile or where exactly I'll live, I do know that for the rest of the year I'll be living out of two 50-pound suitcases.

I remind myself that it's a good exercise to cut back to a more simple lifestyle. Since I moved back to the States in May I've already started accumulating more stuff. I'm buying into a materialistic culture fueled by millions of advertising dollars that convinces us that consuming more things will make us happier.

Some of my recent purchases were good investments, like a Mac notebook, an iPod (my first -- a refurbished Nano), and a DSLR camera. But at the same time I've realized that the more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to worry about, and the more complicated life is. Having less can be freeing.

Until the day you must settle into your own apartment and realize you don't have anything to put in it. I'll save that predicament for next year.

(Exploring Incan ruins, with a bit of lip gloss.)

Winter in West Virginia

Valley Park, Hurricane, WV

On moving down south. Waaay down south.

Twenty-four days from today, this blog will get a lot more interesting. Because in just a little over three weeks I'm moving to Chile. So this will once again become a real travel blog instead of Rachel's online diary recounting her exile in West Virginia.

About a year and a half ago, with my college graduation approaching, I spent hours writing and polishing nearly 15 pages of essays. Then I spent a week locked in my room translating those essays into Spanish (with some help from South American friends via instant Messenger). I met with the director of my university's Hispanic Studies Department to get the scoop on South American universities, then I pored over his recommendations and their course offerings. I met with local high-society community leaders. The vice president of our college even took me out to lunch. (I wore flip flops. Her initial glance at my feet told me BIG MISTAKE. But they were classy flip flops!) Finally, I drove two hours to the state capital for impromptu written essays and interviews, in which I sat at the end of a long board room table and a dozen professional-types interrogated me.

And it was all worth it. (Somehow) I got the scholarship. I'm going to study for a year at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Valparaíso, Chile (that long, skinny country on the west coast of South America. Yes, some people ask me where it is.). And Rotary International is paying for everything. I'll come back with a certificate in Latin American Studies from a respectable university on the rocky Chilean coast.

Now why would Rotary give me $24,000 to live and study abroad for a year, you ask. Well, their goal through this Ambassadorial Scholarship Program is to promote international peace and understanding by sending young people from all over the world to live and study outside their home country. The idea is that the students who receive these scholarships will be positive ambassadors for their own nations and develop friendly relationships in their host countries, and then they'll come home and share their enlightening cultural experiences, and that ultimately these "scholars will be tomorrow's community and world leaders," according the the Rotary International website.

So in addition to taking classes in Latin American literature, culture, and politics, I'll also be giving presentations on the U.S. to local Rotary clubs and co-heading a service project. I'm a teensy bit nervous about the (Spanish, of course) speaking engagements, but I've heard from other scholars that they're not all that bad -- low key with a sympathetic audience. And I'm really excited about the volunteer project. I won't know exactly what it will be until I get down there and see the needs, but right now it looks like it could involve a big sister-big brother type program with foster kids in an underprivileged mountain village.
When I'm not studying or volunteering I hope to be traveling. I'm dying to get down to Patagonia and maybe up to Brazil or back to Buenos Aires. I'll be flying into Santiago, the capital, where I'll spend a month reviewing Spanish at a language institute and living with a host family. Then I'll have to find my own apartment (eek!) in Valparaíso.

Valparaíso has been called the Little San Francisco of South America, as it's a colorful and shabby seaport city built on hillsides overlooking the Pacific. Antique elevators serve as transportation in some spots, and the historic quarter is a labyrinth of cobblestone streets and allies. The so-called Jewel of the Pacific has become a cultural mecca of late too. I read an Allende novel set in Valparaiso, La Hija de la Fortuna (turned out to be one of my all-time favorite reads) that painted the bohemian city as seedy and full of haughty European ex-pats. (But that was in the 1800s. Surely things have changed by now, right?) Today the university campus is divided between Valparaíso and its sister city, Viña del Mar, which is more polished and modern and popular for its beach resorts.

I've been waiting for this adventure for nearly TWO years. "Are you in Chile yet?" has become a sort of cruel joke. Since I returned from Barcelona in May I've felt like my life has been in limbo. But when very important people conclude that you're worthy of a very generous gift that allows you to see the world, educate yourself, and help others, you don't turn it down. Even if it involves a whole lot of waiting.

Now the waiting is about over, and I'm wondering ... am I ready?

Rewrite: My Hometown in 500 Words

Way down a sloping gravel driveway a big woman with white hair stands by a barn with her hands on her hips, her muumuu billowing in the breeze. I jog up and down the hills of Cow Creek Road contemplating the trailers in muddy ditches with ‘80s-era swing sets, rusty tricycles, and shells of old cars piled in the front yards. Across the road are gated brick mansions with landscaped lawns, pools, and Hummers in the driveways.

My grade school classmates who lived in the big houses would only stay for a year or two until their dads were transferred again. Now all my other old friends have moved away too. As kids we'd dig crawdads out of muddy creeks in the summer and pile in sleds to fly down snowy hillsides in the winter. Now they’re married and working as nurses, pastors, or accountants. I avoid visiting their Facebook profiles because links such as “Al Gore Invented Global Warming” upset me.

“How did I end up back in West Virginia?” I say to my mom when she picks me up from my run by Mid-Valley Mart. I’d vowed I’d leave for college and never come back. I wanted to move somewhere where I heard foreign languages and everyone didn’t have the same skin color and vote for the same presidential candidates. A place offering urban vitality.

“It’s only for a few months,” my mom laughs. She grew up in an impoverished mining town in the mountains and is content with an upgrade to suburban Teays Valley.

I grew up to a soundtrack of roaring interstate with interludes of bellowing train whistles. This place I consider home doesn’t even qualify as a small town. It’s more of a highway stop-off with gas stations, a couple of truck stops and motels, and a representative of about every fast food establishment in the Southeast. Fifty years ago it was rolling farmland. Today Teays Valley is a district of 13,000 people who live in subdivisions crammed with look-alike houses.

My mom’s phone rings as we pull in the garage of our brick home in New London Commons.

“Hi Janet,” she says to her friend from church.

Janet drove a school bus for 30 years and can’t go anywhere without seeing someone she knows and stopping to chat. She collects fairy lights and nurses wild animals back to health. I can hear her voice on the other end.

“They say it’s gonna be hotter than a hen on a hot rock this weekend,” she says. “Are you and Michael still planning on going out hiking?"

That evening Michael, my dad, comes home from work to pick up my mom for Wednesday night church service. He’s a physician at a rural public clinic nearly an hour away. Although he grew up with a Harvard-educated professor father in a college town, he sometimes speaks in the Appalachian-hollow dialect of his patients. My parents bought a house in Teays Valley because it was a couple of miles from their church and the adjacent Christian school, where they sent my brother and me.

While my parents are at church a storm hits. “Do you hear water running?” my dad asks hours later.

“It’s still raining,” my mom says.

But he goes outside and sees water flooding from our house. He calls Frank, Janet’s husband. He’s a trim, white-haired Korean War veteran who can fix anything.

“Sounds like you got a loose pipe that needs fixing,” Frank says. “I’ll be right over.” It’s 11 p.m.

Frank drives over in his truck. He goes out in the downpour to shut off the main water line in our front lawn. The next morning Janet calls. “I thought y’all might be interested in some hot showers,” she said. “Come on over ‘cause we got some hash brown potatoes, scrambled eggs, and biscuits too.”

This morning, Teays Valley is okay with me.

Bluestone: Winter escape to the mountains

I holed up in a secluded little cabin with my family in the snowy mountains of Bluestone State Park the first three days of 2010. Outside the wilderness temperatures plunged below 10 degrees, leaving us with a new dusting of snow each morning. We kept a fire burning in the brick fireplace at all times, fueling it with logs from the stack in the backyard. My weekend uniform consisted of ski pants, a puffy down coat, and snow boots. We cooked oatmeal for breakfast and hot soup for dinner and sipped hot cocoa in between. It was three days of snow angels, wind gusts, and snowy footprints.

One morning we walked down the long road from our cabin, winding around rugged hillsides to a trail behind a tiny red cabin that led into the forest. That afternoon we took a drive to Pipestem Resort State Park where we spotted dozens of deer. They were extra shaggy, giving them a prehistoric look. The furry young ones with blunt faces looked as sweet as puppies. I snapped lots of pictures of them, and the forested hills framing Bluestone Lake, and anything else that caught my eye, from pine cones and icicles to frozen waterfalls.

I’d had fears about spending a weekend isolated in the wilderness in a two bedroom cabin (I’d get the cot) with my family, as my tolerance for a certain young couple’s use of the terms “hubby” and “honey” and “sweetie” was already waning. But in the woods I forgot my frustrations, if only for a few brief moments such as an especially competitive round of Uno or Sequence by the fire. 

My brother brought along his laptop with its stand (for ergonomic purposes, he reasoned), state-of-the-art headphones (with a splitter for his wife), and a wireless mouse and keyboard (again, ergonomics). He planned to work on his forthcoming philosophy book. I’m serious. I was content curled up on the not-so-comfy couch with cup after cup of green tea reading La Casa de los Espiritus. I’d brought along the Isabel Allende novel rather than Soren Kierkegaard’s A Fragment of Life -- a 640-page philosophical discourse on the ethical versus the aesthetic that my brother and sister-in-law gave me for Christmas. (Maybe he's trying to send me a message? I got him a pair of slim-fit J. Crew jeans.)

On the way home we stopped at Concord University in Athens, WV where my parents met in 1977. On campus they subjected us to the details of their meeting and courtship. They pointed out the student union where a mutual friend introduced them, the pine grove where they'd stroll, and the window of the TV lounge on the bottom floor of their tower dormitories where they'd spent their evenings.       

I'm happy that this on-campus love affair led (one two-month engagement and seven years later) to me, but I count myself lucky that I didn't inherit the genetic inclination for collegiate matrimony. (Click here for more photos of our snowy weekend in the mountains.)

Arrivederci, 2009

The night of December 31, 2008, I traipsed around Rome with a group of new friends. This grouping started with a struggling actress from New York City and her curly-haired, college student sister who were sharing my hostel dorm by the Vatican. They invited me to join them to meet up with their middle sister who was studying in Rome through Loyola University for the year. 

That sister’s friends, a tipsy American girl and a blonde Austrian girl who both worked as au pairs in the city, met us on our way to the Coliseum. Finally, a petite American guy who was also studying abroad with the aforementioned middle sister joined us. I don’t remember his name, but I recall his combed hair, fitted leather jacket, and purple scarf. He raved to me about the gourmet dining opportunities in Barcelona, where I was working. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that none of my young foreign friends would spend the money to join me for a sit-down restaurant experience in the economic crisis-stricken city, although they somehow had the cash for club entrance fees and alcohol. 

That night I wore a gold T-shirt dress, black tights, and heeled boots. But it didn’t matter, because as with the rest of the 22 days I spent in Italy, I never took off my long brown parka. We carried champagne bottles as we slowly shoved through the masses to near the Centro Historico. We hung onto each other like old friends so not to get lost in the chaos. We'd missed the rock concerts and found no sign of the colorful showers of fireworks we'd expected.

At the stroke of midnight no giant crystal ball dropped, but champagne spewed and ornery spectators shouted and set off renegade firecrackers. The champagne sprayed in my eyes and soaked my hair. The firecrackers shot off like dangerously erratic bullets. Then within minutes the plaza emptied, with gold lights glistening on the wet, litter-strewn streets. I walked home sticky and half deaf and limping after two straight weeks of exploring urban landscapes and steep Tuscan villages on foot. 

The two exchange students led us on a circuitous route back to the hostel. After traversing back and forth the city for a week I grumbled that I knew my way around better than these students who lived there. I wasn’t surprised because in my experience studying abroad with an American program tends to foster a routine of afternoons piled in dorm bunks watching DVDs, evenings drinking at the same bar down the street, and weekends jet setting to another European city via RyanAir.

So my New Year’s Eve in Italy wasn’t the night of a lifetime, but I’d still rather be spending the evening stumbling around Rome in the cold instead of sleeping in Hurricane, West Virginia like I did this year. But even if 2009 didn’t go out with a bang, I came up with some highlights worth listing:

1. Exploring sunny Andalusia during my last weeks in Spain, particularly Granada where I wandered through silent Sacromonte, a gypsy cave quarter, and ate Lebanese tapas in Little Morocco with two lovely friends. I won’t forget feeling like a lost outsider during Seville’s world famous Semana Santa, a week-long, raucous street party in celebration of Easter, either. Or hiking down into a 400-foot deep gorge and photographing the sort of countryside that makes you question your urban intentions in the Spanish mountain town of Ronda.

2. Running a 15-mile race (with a significant uphill component to boot!) in a respectable time. My thighs still burn when I think about the overzealous hill training I did the week before.  

3. Discovering New Mexico with my parents. We fell for the Southwestern state with its roasted chiles, turquoise jewelry, and adobe chapels. We still rave about the glorious golden views on the Aspen Vista Trail and our hike through the otherworldy Kasha Katuwe Tent Rock Canyon.  

4. Getting over myself and baring the braces. In four short weeks I’ll be flashing a broad, well aligned smile for a lifetime.

5. A few milder 2009 highlights – owning my first iPod and Mac, becoming a redhead (part of me doesn’t want trade the fiery shade back for my natural brunette), acquiring new cooking skills, getting reacquainted with my inner yogi, meeting a bunch of travel nuts (like me but brainer) at a scholarship orientation in Philadelphia, and rafting the Gauley River with my dad.