News outlets and media were quick to cover the devastation, highlighting the death toll and the number of missing people. Others were eager to attribute the disaster to climate change and the outsized share of emissions produced by the western world. But little has been written about the people and the life in that valley.

This is what we’ve lost.

Timure, Rasuwa District. Nepal

November, 2024.

The women dance down the mountain like ballerinas clad in sandals, leaping down the stone steps. They carry woven baskets and school bags, quickly disappearing from sight as I coaxed my legs to slowly follow in their footsteps. Power lines arc overhead, leading me down into the valley where a green-grey river slides beneath a metal bridge, carving its way through the earth.

The sun beats down on me as I trudge through the dry dirt of the road. Plumes of dust fill the air whenever cargo trucks or motorbikes rumble by on their way to the border. I try to hold my breath for as long as I could to avoid breathing in the exhaust and dust. The trucks are bedazzled and bejeweled with religious symbols and hand-painted slogans. I put out my arm, flagging one of them down — a TATA truck with a metal container loaded onto the bed of the trailer. The driver peers down through his window. “Timure?” I ask. He nods and opens the door to the cab, motioning for me to jump in. I’m grateful to be out of the sun.

The driver points to a checkpoint up ahead and tells me that there is a border inspection for drivers. He pulls over into the line of waiting cars, and I hop out and walk the rest of the way.

Timure is a small village that occupies a flat section of a low hill just off the highway. Past the concrete buildings and the signs, a trio of white stone stupas occupy the heart of the village, clad in prayer flags, with a line of prayer wheels encircling the perimeter. Chickens roam around the street while residents carry bundles of vegetables back home. A woman waits beside the walkway in a pink vest, holding a blue shopping bag in one hand. A young child breaks away from her to join a group of young schoolchildren by the stupa. They lean against the painted walls, reaching up to spin the prayer wheels. Power lines crisscross overhead in a spider-like tangle.

I walk past buildings with ornately carved wooden windows and doors inset to painted white bricks and sheltered by blue corrugated-metal roofs. Others are built with colorful concrete details — walls adorned with the imprints of flowers, and gardens lined with potted plants and painted rocks. The sound of cutlery and conversation echos from dimly lit restaurants, mingling with the lines of laundry drying in the sun. The lone guesthouse here has no availability, so I make my way back down to the highway and continue walking.

The line of trucks stretches even longer here. The drivers stand, sit, and smoke while waiting for approval to cross. Along the highway, a small marketplace has formed around them: makeshift restaurants constructed from tarps and wooden planks, selling snacks and small meals to the waiting drivers. A lone stupa stands off to the side, intricately ornamented with painted gold and religious motifs.

A man runs into the street and scoops up a goat that bleats in protest. “baaa.” The man bleats back, bouncing the goat like a small child.

Giyrong Border Crossing

Chickens roam around outside, pecking and ducking beneath the trucks that were parked on the side of the road. The proprietor leads me through a small garden of lettuce and flowers, to a series of rooms in the back. I dropped off my bags and continued toward the border crossing.

Along the way, I pass dirt lots filled with new cars — one for vans, trucks, and sedans — all covered in a layer of dust as they wait in purgatory for approval. An unfinished hotel sits on a small hillside. Goats roam around its concrete bones, from which bouquets of rebar sprout. The long waits at the border have given rise to a small economy of restaurants, pool halls, and roadside stalls, constructed from wooden beams and corrugated-metal. One restaurant had a fish-farming operation, selling the fish alongside packaged snacks and noodles. They take renminbi here.

At the border, dust gives way to concrete and China’s hulking administrative building stands in its sand-stone colored glory. On the Nepalese side, workers clad in sweatpants and sandals churn a vat of concrete. They are building their own administration building, though for now it was little more than a concrete mass covered in bamboo. I toe the line, inching my way up to the bridge that separates China from Nepal.

Trucks lay waiting, lining up one after the other, while Nepalese porters ferry cardboard packages filled with food or small goods across the bridge. I watch a group of young Chinese students pose for photos and videos. A border guard goes up to them, asking to see their papers.

On my way back, a border guard stops me and directs me to a back room. “Fu zhao” the officer asks me in Chinese. I showed him my passport and they search through my bag in another room. Afterward, the border officer tells me about a good bar in Timure and says to grab a drink with him later. On my way back to my lodging, I see a young Chinese man with a loaded bike waiting outside of the visa office. He had biked through China and Nepal, making his way here from Pokhara. He was carrying a bag of groceries in hand and was preparing to cook dinner, since the office was closed today. We set up his stove atop brick pavers in a small garden, next to where he had set up his tent. He quickly boiled water for ramen, mixing in vegetables and eggs from the market. We sneak some spices from a nearby planter.

Over dinner, we talk about our travels and life in other countries. He shows me a video of a snowball fight at his university, students dressed in black parkas dancing and shrieking with laughter in the snow. As the temperature drops, we move indoors, where the family that ran the hotel has gathered around electric heaters, sipping on steaming drinks. They moved to let us use one of the heaters, bringing us hot cups of tea. Certificates of tourism, small clippings from newspapers, and photos family members were framed along the wall.

Syabru besi.

A young man greets me at the entrance of the guest house. He was home from school for the holidays, helping his parents during the tourist season. Over dinner, I ask if he likes the town where he grew up. “There’s not much to do here”, he tells me. His friends were back in Kathmandu, where there were more interesting things to do and places to explore.

The next morning I stop by a small restaurant to pick up some food for the road, ordering some boiled eggs. A little puppy clambers over a set of wooden benches, warmed by the morning light. Larger dogs bark and scare the puppy, and a young girl rushes out from the kitchen and scoops up the puppy, bringing him into a back room. She later emerges to hand me a piece of a sel-roti, a doughnut-like snack made from rice and spices, still warm from the pan.

It could easily have been me, exploring the border crossing when the waters struck. It could easily have been you, born in one of those villages, back home to visit family.

Everything is gone now.

I slip out from the office, savoring the crispness of the evening breeze as golden spears of sunlight disappear down Market Street. There’s a glow to the air. A glow that beckons like a lighthouse to weary sailors, radiating warmth from windows that blossom against the darkening sky. It lays a soft blanket over the people on the streets below, guiding their way home.

Below-ground, a metal tube hurtles through the earth, pitching and screaming before depositing me into a neighborhood where more often than not, I’m greeted by the flashing of police car sirens and shadowed figures clustered around shuttered storefronts. I spend the next three hours tinkering, disassembling, and tuning bikes — rebuilding the latest victims of the city.

My route home takes me up a hill. The road drops off into the distance and the city comes into view. Cars, buildings, and skyline shimmering in the night. The same shimmer that I encounter while cutting through the park: the glint of broken glass, peering through the dirt like earth-born stars.

It’s beautiful here.

As I write this, a year ago I was sleeping next to the banks of the Ganges, entangled with a Hare Krishna group and thinking about the forces that bring people together. Having returned to the land that shaped me, I see those same forces driving this engine of a city — pulling in people who seek their fortunes in the pit of technology, capital, and perhaps the making of a better world. It feels like a lifetime ago now: the conversations about the birds and the trees, discovering life with strangers, and the taste of all the different ways to exist on this planet. Someday, I’m sure I’ll be back.

I actually don’t have many voicenotes for this piece so I’ve included a voiceover to compensate. Enjoy! It is very long. Also all names are fictional.

Astana, Kazakhstan

A small waterfall tumbles from the spout before me. It steams gently, splashing slightly as it touches down in a basin of smooth porcelain. She fills the cup to the brim, pours the contents back into the pot, then refills the cup again. Once. Twice. Flakes of mint tumble in small green eddies against the glass. Three times. She fills the cup halfway and passes it to me, cupping her hands as though sheltering a flame.

Her name was Anya, and we had met earlier that day on a press tour organized by the Kazakh government. Her parents were Russian, but she was born in Kazakhstan.

“In Kazakhstan, we have these traditions. We ‘marry’ the tea so that the flavor is mixed. You never pour too much — that means that you want your guest to finish quickly and leave. Instead we do half pours so that their tea remains hot, slowly refilling through the night.”

The fall of the Soviet Union sent a wave of crime and nationalism crashing through the Soviet Republics. Amid the chaos, her family relocated to Belgium and she grew up absorbing European language and culture. But on a family trip to Kazakhstan, she felt the land calling out to her. She moved back to Kazakhstan recently and started her own tour company, helping to develop the country’s nascent tourism industry. Business was going well. Most of her clients were from the Emirates, flying over for a weekend horseback ride through the steppe.

A waiter arrives with plates of baursak, salad, and beshbarmak.

“This is dish is called ‘five fingers’ — traditionally you eat it with your hands,” Anya says, picking up a fork. She sat beside a former classmate who was visiting from Almaty. Her name was Anita, I think. Narrow features framed by long, dark hair. She spoke slowly — English unfurling in careful phrases, interspersed with rapid exchanges in Russian. She asked about our gender politics and told me about her impressions of the U.S., pieced together from movies and media that were smuggled across the borders.

A evening snippet:

Anya pours me another cup of tea and continues: “When I grew up in Europe, it was American parks everywhere, it was American music everywhere, it was always American TV shows. Everything was very American. So there was a big, big influence. And same in the Ex-Soviet block. For people it was this imaginary ideal country where there was freedom and they idealized it. Now it’s changed a lot. In Europe I can feel that the people are rejecting American things, because of the problematic situations, and are getting interested in other cultures. So American shows are getting less popular. That’s why a lot of Korean dramas are coming to market. So for sure in Europe its changing. And here as well. You also have the Russian propaganda, where people are seeing Americans as the enemy. I think the things that gets America less popular these days. Is really this gender, this kind of stuff, because for people here — this is against religion, against tradition, against their way of living. And they really don’t accept it. And it makes them think worse of the United States, especially the older generation. And actually, the younger generation now is getting more and more religious. For them the values that are transmitted through the United States are opposite to their values. There’s a huge movement around Islam. Because religion was forbidden during the USSR, now people are getting back into it, especially in the past five years.”

When the last of the tea has been poured and our plates lay empty before us, the waiter brings over an ornate wooden box with the check tucked neatly inside. I reach for my wallet to pay but Anya places her hand over the bill.

“You are our guest, this is our hospitality.”

I took the long way home that night, tracing my footsteps along the string of fountains and gardens that framed the central axis of the city. Ahead, the Baiterek monument rose like a torch from the boulevard, cradling a golden globe in its nest of painted steel. The globe was said to hold the hand print of Kazakhstan’s first president, though I never had the patience to wait in line and see for myself.

A few years after declaring independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan moved its capital from the Soviet-era city of Almaty, pressed up against the foothills of the Tian-Shan mountains, to a settlement in the vast northern steppes: Akmola (White Tomb). The settlement was renamed to Astana, meaning Capital. A global competition was launched to select an architect capable of giving form to the modern aspirations of the newfound country. In 1998, the commission went to Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. Most famous for his (now-demolished) Nakagin Capsule Hotel, Kurokawa was one of the founders of Metabolism, a movement that imagined cities as living, modular systems adapting continuously to the needs of their residents.

On the south bank of the Ishim River, Kurokawa laid the city out on an orderly grid, weaving the central axis of Soviet master planning with a linear zoning system that he claimed would achieve symbiosis between people and nature. My footsteps traced the contours where his pen split sidewalk from asphalt; pavers from planters; city from steppe. Along the boulevard stood an assortment of coffee shops, malls, apartments, government buildings, restaurants, and banks. But from where I stood, it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. They were all hidden behind sheer strips of glass trapped within aluminum bodies, pasted into concrete blocks that weathered in a way that felt old instead of historic. There was a hollowness to this city, barren of all the details that make someone feel seen. I noticed that bike lanes transitioned from road to sidewalk without any curb cuts. If there were any cyclists, they would have to dismount and lift their bike onto the sidewalk to continue riding.

This city was the same age as me. It felt as though we were both experiencing growing pains: our futures lay suspended in a web of uncertainty, unable to distinguish which parts of ourselves were our own and what had been inherited from elsewhere. You could feel it when you walk. The city lacks its own rhythm. Your step does not skip. There is no urge to dance. But this was also a city shaped without its people, given form under the auspices of a man who sat thousands of miles away, who placed buildings like punctuation scattered across a passage written into the steppe. What Astana lacked most was not beauty, nor ambition, nor coherence. Astana lacked sediment: the gradual layering of memory that allows a city to become itself over time.

But the city is still young, after all.

Yesterday, I squeezed into a Yandex (Russian version of Uber) with some local volunteers that I had met at the games. They had planned a blind date for one of their friends and had invited me along. Crammed in the back seat of the car, they asked me who I was.

“Home alone Kevin? But you look so young! You know Game of Thrones? Sherlock? Where are you from?”

“America,” I respond.

“Ah American! Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez! Black Lives Matter and Trump! Are you a feminist? You guys have no days off. Can’t stop working. You buy so much. If you had ten days off, you not buy stuff.”

The young man next to me rapped his knuckles against his head. “Empty” he said, laughing. He pulled out his phone to show me a photo of him riding a goat in a village, asking if I wanted to go horse riding while pointing at the grassy expanse in the background. “It’s easier to fall from horse than goat” he tells me. “Horse can tell if you are scared. To not be able to ride horse is to not be a man.” He looked at me questioning, rubbing his ring finger and mimicking a ring.

The Yandex pulls into a parking lot and we spill out of the car, making our way to a glass building. Massive colored letters plastered above the entrance spell out “Qaganat.” Inside, tables were scattered throughout a lobby-like space and the group splits with a familiar ease. Lisa walked with me to the display counter where we filled a cafeteria tray with plates of samsa, curd, and some unknown sweets. She disappears off to the row of microwaves along the wall to warm the food. Another girl from our group comes over with a kettle filled with honey, spices, and mint, mixing the contents with hot water from a dispenser. The boys have settled at a nearby table, having brought over a set of cushioned chairs. We place the food on the table and wait for the newcomer. One of the girls places her phone against her water bottle and begins recording the meal.

The crowd here was young, mostly students it seemed, drifting in after school or work for cheap food and a place to charge their phones. The newcomer arrives, dressed in a loose flannel. She takes a seat, putting her hand on her waist and crossing one leg over the other, flashing a pair of red Jordans. Over the course of the evening, they introduce themselves to one another, joke about the different regions of Kazakhstan, and spoke about dating norms. I took some notes:

• They shared with me the meaning of their names: Cheerful. Respect. Protector of Soul. King Man.

• “I can’t speak for everyone…but north side better (referring to Kazakhstan).” Her mom doesn’t support dating guys from other regions.

• The women’s response to the men complaining that they have to shower women with flowers and gifts during courtship: “Of course, after we marry we are expected to do everything — so is that not the least you can do?”

• Wanting to visit the US to see if it is like the movies. Also go to Italy, England because they like football and want to see some famous players on the street.

• Instead of travel experiences, people here prefer to spend money on material things. The typical metrics of success are an apartment and a car. People care a lot about family—marriage, children, etc — sometimes to the degree that nepotism is an issue.

At the end of the night, they walk me back to my hostel. We wander through the empty streets and I watch them break out into a brief dance to the music playing out of a passing car’s window. One of them points out the statues along the sidewalk. “This is my grandfather — he was a firefighter. And this is a monument to the fallen soldiers, who fought during WWII.” They point out the Abu Dhabi hotel, the tallest building in Kazakhstan, and the glass tower where I was staying which was nicknamed the Northern Lights. We stopped for photos at the Baiterek, posing as if plucking the golden globe from the sky.

My hostel was a small apartment that had been converted into a dormitory, in a glass tower just off the central axis. Making my way past the dimly lit storefronts and patchy ceiling tiles, I take the elevator up to the 16th floor. A few people are clustered around the dining table, illuminated by a single lamp hanging from the ceiling. I slip off my shoes and join them.

Iggy regales us with stories of Mongolia. He had been hitchhiking through the country in search of an elusive “yak-festival” that led him to ford through rivers for several weeks. One day, he encountered a drunk horseman who took a liking to him. He sat Iggy atop one of his horses and paraded him through different villages as if to show off a newfound toy. Iggy towered over the locals and every time they passed through a forest, the horseman would laugh as the low hanging branches hit Iggy over and over. At each village, Iggy would stick two fingers up beside his head to mime horns, then place his hand over his brow and squint off into the distance — in an attempt to ask locals about the location of the yak festival. He told us that he had gone to bed one night in a village, only to wake up to find himself surrounded by yaks: the festival had come to him. He spent the next few days in the yurt of a shaman, joining in on their ceremonies. Afterward, he spent 6 months making his way across India.

I jot down some notes:

• Mathura - where the guy was born for holi.

• April 12th - Songkran Thai new year festival. Water festival.

• Alex Rothman youtube

Iggy told me that he sat with the British team at the Nomad Games after seeing the Union Jack during the Kokpar match. They had entered into the tug of war competition for a laugh, just two months ago.

Jamie, another brit, had come to the hostel just as the Nomad Games were ending. He was a footballer growing up and told me about traveling through India alone as a teenager, and his search to photograph elusive tigers in Nepal and polar bears in Svalbard. He was on a quest to visit every country in the world.

“This is Sophia, she’s another brit” introduces Jaime. We turn to the new arrival at the table and ask what brought her to Kazakhstan.

“Men,” she replies softly.

We did a double take. “Men?”

Sophia had flown alone to Kyrgyzstan and hitchhiked from village to village. She told us about a horseback tour around Song-kul lake and her fleeting romance with a guide who would sing old Kazakh songs from the saddle—the memory of them holding hands on a swing under starlight, and how he had pulled her horse over to steal a kiss. Sophie was writing a love letter to Kyrgyzstan—to the kindness of the people she met while hitchhiking, to the way people made wishes together after a meal, and to the fantasy of running away together with a local shepherd. She caught wind of the Nomad Games, and the image of big burly men riding on horseback convinced her to make her way over. Kazakhstan was different, she added. She liked how the monuments lined up along the central axis. After Kazakhstan she was planning to go to Xinjiang next, figuring things out along the way and traveling until the money ran out. Maybe get a work visa somewhere. She was only 20 years old and had put off university to work as a bartender and travel.

I loved feeling like the least interesting person in the room. We made plans to explore the city the following day.

The next morning I step into the elevator, catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored glass, and walk out into the dim lobby of the building. A small sign, taped to the side of an old column catches my eye. It reads “самса” (phonetically, samsa: cyrillic C is an S). I take a deep sniff. My nose is blocked and it sounds like someone gasping for air. But a hint of flour, water, and meat waft from in-between the columns. I follow my nose down a dark corridor, tapping into an ancient bloodhound instinct and sniffing violently with my nose up in the air. Missing ceiling tiles reveal a labyrinth of wires, like living roots of the building. Light spills out of an open door, softened by a tapestry hung across the frame. I peek inside.

The space is small, just a front room separated from a back kitchen by an embroidered curtain. A man sits at the kitchen table, filling pastry dough from a bowl of fillings. “Samsa, Samsa” he calls out. I linger in the corridor, hesitating.

“Salem Alaikom,” I call out, before entering the room.

“Alaikom a Salam”, he replies, rising from his seat. He points to a platter of triangular pastries on a side table, still gently steaming. He speaks in rapid Russian and I stare blankly at him in response. He must have realized the language barrier as he stops, gestures to the first platter, and turns to me.

“Bawkbawk” he cries out, tucking his hands toward his body and flapping his elbows. Pointing to the other platter, he gestures and makes a low bellow: “Moooo.” Incredible. We laugh and I order a set of each. He wraps them in a plastic bag and gestures for me to pour tea from a dispenser on the side, typing the cost by dialing numbers into his phone.

I step out into the autumn air, savoring my new bundle of warmth and meat. At a nearby bus stop, school kids wearing backpacks monogrammed with Oxford and Harvard logos mill around trees that are painted blue up to their trunks. I catch the ping of Duolingo — someone learning English — and glance over shoulders at phone screens wallpapered with New York skylines and Parisian streets. Lil Yachty leaks softly through a pair of headphones. Lisa’s question from the other day floats up in my memory: “You guys still use cash right?”

Iggy, Jaime, and Sophia join me at the entrance. We explore!

Lisa joins us for dinner that evening and we end up at a rooftop bar in Hotel Dubai, towering over Astana. She peppers the others about life in the UK and I see her shyly sip a little bit of a cocktail. The topic of the Ukraine war comes up, and she tells us that her father was sent to Ukraine by the Soviet Union years ago. He remembered it as a beautiful place and was devastated to hear about the invasion. Her mother’s brother had been sent to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War.

“Russia hides this in their movies,” she said, “but it was our people that were sent to the front lines. Our proximity and relationship to Russia is dangerous — no one will help us. Businesses that are worried about sanctions will pull out.” The city shimmers below us and I catch her looking out at the faint outlines of the buildings that we’d visited earlier that day.

“I started to be proud of our culture after the Nomad Games, to see how rich these traditions were. Before, I didn’t like them because of the weddings and the costs and all that.” She trails off.

“I’m jealous you have the ocean.”

Later, she invites us to dinner with her family.

Over the next couple days, I hop on random buses until they take me out of the city. On the north side of the Ishim River, the towers give way to older Soviet-era apartment blocks and sprawling shopping districts made from shipping containers. After crossing another bridge, we reach villages where the city quietly dissolves into steppe. As I explore the different segments of the city, I wonder if it is possible to measure a city not in economic terms, but by its youth: their activities and life. Here I see them whizzing by with packages in plastic bags strapped to scooters. I see them playing with their bikes and hanging out on swings. I see kids climbing up the tiled foundations of the bridge and sliding down in their socks. I see them recording TikTok videos in the IM cafe (basically McDonalds with different branding — a product of Russian sanctions). I follow a small walkway to a little pavilion by the edge of the Ishim River. People photograph each other lounging on benches, kids skate past parents with their children, teens take selfies on the overhang perches. Compared to the hollowness that I felt from the city before, here I look and I find life.

Lisa’s dinner is tonight. We call a Yandex to the address she sent, somewhere on the eastern side of the city. A thin haze thickens the air as we drive through a forest of white-washed buildings, plantation-like in their uniform spacing. A power outage plunges the district into an eerie darkness, turning the buildings into glowering chaperones watching the dust dance in the beams of our headlights. The car drops us off by a dark lot and we linger, trying to figure out which of these identical buildings was the correct address. A young boy pokes his head out from a side door and beckons us into a narrow, white-walled corridor.

“You made it!” Lisa exclaims, peeking her head from a doorway. An orange cat slips past her into the corridor, watching us from between the legs of a metal coat rack. We slip off our shoes and present her with a box of chocolates.

The walls of the apartment are light and textured. Bare, except for a small television mounted in the main room. There are no pictures on the walls. A heavy tablecloth sits atop a large dining table, covered with a plastic protector printed with silver patterns. Toys lay scattered around the wooden floor. Lisa seats us on a couch that stretches the length of the dining table, explaining that guests are seated opposite to the entryway as a place of honor. The power is back on now. She didn’t seem too bothered by the outage.

Lisa disappears into a side room and resurfaces with tea and baursak on a platter. She pours us each a cup, explaining that it is the duty of the youngest daughter to pour tea for guests. Her family comes out to greet us: mother, father, older sister, and two brothers. A friend from university, Kuzmova, was also visiting from Almaty. Lisa goes into the kitchen to help her parents prepare and we are left with her younger brother, who runs around and shoots rubber bands at us from underneath the table.

Dinner begins with a short prayer (bata). The family brings out bowls of fruits, salads, and bottles of juice and Coca-Cola. Then the main dish is brought out with a round of applause: different cuts of horse meat piled high on a massive platter of noodles and potatoes. The father pulls out a butcher board and a knife, deftly slicing the meat into smaller pieces and adding it to the noodles. The rest of the family piles the food onto our plates. This dish is beshbarmak (five fingers) and we are supposed to eat it with our hands. We pull up our sleeves, pressing our fingers into the greased folds of boiled dough and feel the heat on our fingers. I can never look at a horse the same way again. They are delicious. A soup of salted broth and crushed curd is brought to wash the palette, followed by kumys served in small bowls, then another salad with thin cuts of pumpkin. We sit back, patting our bellies and groaning with satisfaction.

Her father appears from a side room, supporting Lisa’s grandmother to a chair by the entryway. She is dressed in a traditional headscarf for elders: the ak zhaulyk, and a cerulean shapan. The room falls silent.

Lisa’s grandmother begins to sing, softly. Repeating a phrase that must have been a blessing, until her voice began to falter. We hold our breath as her voice breaks and silence seeps through the room, lingering in the space between us. Lisa’s mother picks up where her grandmother trails off, lending the strength of her own voice, adding a layer to the melody. Lisa joins in as well: three generations of women carrying on the prayer. Life here may no longer be tied to the steppe. Even the most enduring of traditions can be challenged. But the importance of family remains.

I couldn’t understand what they were saying. But the feeling of kindness, the glimpse into something that originated long before you, and will continue to live long after you, struck my soul. I felt overwhelmed with gratefulness that life had somehow led to this moment. To have been blessed with time and existence.

I was reminded of a horoscope that I had read in a magazine on my flight to Kazakhstan:

In September you’ll feel dizzy with the gifts being showered on you. It might encourage you to believe that you deserve more. However, you need to stay grateful for small favours or you could lose everything. In October you might meet like-minded people and form a coalition with them. Save your strength and don’t start implementing your plans before May

The dinner was far from over. Lisa surprises us with a shower of gifts: skullcaps (takiya) and we try them on while her family laugh at our excitement. The plates were cleared and new platters of dessert and chai were brought out. We rise to take photos of the spread, only for them to return with more and more plates — overwhelming us with a towering show of abundance: curd, dried apricots, almonds, baursak, cakes, and candies. The table is filled to the corners and we sit in stunned silence at the incredible display of generosity.

Kuzmova rises first to address the family, speaking in Kazakh to the family and conveying what must have been her thanks for the dinner. Jamie expresses how touched he was for the extraordinary meal, and praises Lisa’s parents for raising such a beautiful family and such an incredible daughter. Iggy and I share our own gratitude for this evening, for bringing us into their world, for sharing their traditions with us, and for showing us a new way to live. As we sat down, we knew that this night had forever changed us.

For the remainder of the evening, we speak about life in Astana over never-ending rounds of chai. As the night draws to a close, her parents bring out plastic bags and begin filling them with snacks for us to take on our journey. It’s now 2AM. Her father and brother give us a ride home to our hostel, weaving through the wide city streets. They crank their windows down and extend their hands out into the night, surfing over currents of air. The city moves past us, glittering and strange but warmer than before.

The next day I left for the train station, seeking out a train that would take me across the country.

His uniform matched the flag behind him. Light blue, bordering turquoise: a child of sun-faded blue and green, catching the light streaming in through the door. A bright backdrop against the black-gloved hand that he held up before me, gesturing toward a massive metal scanner. Flustered, I forget to pull out my rolls of film from the depths of my bag.

The train was the same color as his uniform. Sun-faded and weathered. A giant metal steed lying dormant at the station. I heft my bag further up over my shoulders and count the carriages until I reach number seven. A thin metal railing and narrow set of stairs lead up into the carriage. A samovar (water dispenser) hisses with steam by the entrance. I squeeze past, beginning my search for seat number five. But there are no seats. The carriage is segmented into berths by walls that extend into the aisle. Two long platforms fold from the walls, one above the other. A smaller shelf folds out from the wall of the carriage, doubling as a table. Two men sit on one of the lower platforms with containers of food laid out before them. In another berth, a woman has draped a shawl from the upper bunk to fashion a makeshift curtain. I catch her silhouette kneeling, bending her head toward Mecca.

Seat number five is a lower bunk near the entrance, except instead of a bunk I see a middle-aged woman sitting at a small table. Her wispy brown hair is cut short into a bob and a small stack of chicken wings is laid out on a napkin in front of her. I hold up the screenshot of my ticket and she gestures for me to sit, pouring more chicken wings onto the napkin and pushing it toward me. I lift my backpack up onto the storage rack and take a seat.

Kuzmova was heading back home to Almaty with her aunt and luckily was in the same carriage as me. She helps me get settled, explaining that the woman had back problems and was asking if I’d be willing to exchange places with her upper bunk. Other passengers come and sit by us, asking where I was from, how old was I, and whether I was married. We passed around our passports and I admired their cerulean and gold lettering. Flipping through the pages revealed a neat line of stamps: border crossings between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The others crowd around my navy blue passport. One man tucks it away into his shirt pocket with a cheeky grin.

The train lurches to a start, beginning our 25 hour journey across the country. Astana quickly fades into the distance, replaced by pockets of shrubs and small villages that dotted along the tracks. Cars drift on the horizon, atop a highway hidden from sight.

A slapping sound drifts over from the back of the carriage, where a group of men are clustered around an aisle table. One after another they threw down a set of cards, looking at one another expectantly. They made room for me and I sat with them trying to decipher the mechanism of the game.

• Low card, same number allows the diversification of suits, and you need to play one card higher.

• There is a bomb suit that beats anything.

• Card at start of stack is the bomb.

• Work in sets of 3 - triangle plays.

• Place one card. Match suit and higher value. Place low cards first.

• Valid is also same number from previous set. Have to attack the suits of each set.

• Pairs and triples valid.

They deal me in and I attempt to match their rhythm. Another man comes up behind me, slyly pointing out the cards that I should play. After a few rounds he peels away and returns with a steaming kettle, filled from the samovar by the entryway. He pulls out a container and begins to lay out the food on the table for his wife. Tomatoes, potatoes, bread, and horse meat. He waves me over, pouring me a cup of tea and pushing the container of meat toward me. I sit with him on this bench that was also a bed, wrapping my hands around the metal cup that he offered. Rich, salty, and warm. The other men continued their game, leaning across the aisle to slap their cards onto the table.

Eventually I join Kuzmova and return to my original seat. The man who pretended to pocket my passport is asleep now, lying across an upper bunk. The woman with the bob-cut hair waves me over, cutting pieces of bread and placing them on the table before me, adding chicken wings and sausage and a cup of tea. She opens up a metal tin of candies and presses it into my hands. I waved in protest, indicating that I was full. Kuzmova tells me not to worry — I didn’t have to finish the food; they’d take whatever was left back home to their families. After I ate, the woman carefully scooped the uneaten wings back into the bag, folding the napkin neatly.

It was only later that I understood the significance of this. In the early 1930s, Stalin had unleashed a wave of collectivization policies, seizing the herds of nomadic groups and killing off their livestock, effectively engineering a famine that killed an estimated 1.5 million people: at least a third of the Kazakh population. The survivors were reduced to a minority within their own country and were censored from speaking of the tragedies for decades under Soviet rule. Nearly a hundred years later the memory of the famine, called the Asharshylyk, is still embedded into the cultural psyche of the people. Now, in this time of relative abundance whatever they had, they cherished and they shared. This was so different from life in the states, where there is very little cultural memory of famine and it seems like food is wasted with no further thought.

Kuzmova and I traverse through the train carriages, peering through cracks in the dusty windows to watch the steppe stream past in shades of gold. Sunset hues cast over a flat expanse of low grasses, as far as the eye can see, swallow the earth whole. Vast and isolating and yet filled with possibility.

The night was silent, with only an occasional creak and groan from the train. The steppe was like an ocean without a reflection. Rolling hills like waves. Darkness and shapes.

In the morning, an orb of orange and yellow rose over the muted purple hues of the steppe, melting the backdrop of royal blue, disappearing and reappearing as we crested over low hills, gleaming off the train tracks. Small tufts of golden grass caught its glow, like small sails filled with light. As I depart, the woman that offered me wings breaks into a prayer, wishing me good health and safe travels.

• Salbongtz (goodbye)

• Salamatz ba (hello formal)

An excerpt from Part 3: Lands of Lost Borders (coming soon…ish)

Flowers hung from the fence at the border. Small planters with sprigs of roses and bursts of color against the grey metal. They cast short shadows in the afternoon light, greeting me as we crossed.

I expected it to feel different, coming home. The ease with which I’ve slotted back into my old life is perhaps the most foreign part of returning to the states. I meet with old friends and cycle through the same restaurants and tea shops, watching students cram calculus and strangers talk about where to play tennis and how New York is too dirty. It’s been almost a decade since I left. Not much has changed. Caught between the corners of a cloudless blue sky, a vibrant tech industry, and miles of asphalt to traverse—I understand now more than ever, how this could be utopia.

As of late, a feeling of dread has crept into my mind. A dread that leaves me wondering if somewhere, somehow—I’ve made a mistake in choosing to travel and learn more about the world. So as I send my job applications into the void and second-guess my return to society, this is a reminder to myself: to hold onto the memory of the vastness of the world, and the beauty of all the different ways to exist on this planet.1

I was in Astana, Kazakhstan just over a year ago now. The Kazakh government had accepted my foreign-photojournalist application and given me press credentials to cover the World Nomad Games. But beyond photographing horse wrestlers and eagle hunters, Kazakhstan gave me a glimpse into the challenges of rebuilding a national identity, the tension between enduring traditions and a rapidly modernizing society, and how despite the interests of foreign policy and governments—we are not so different.

I have to warn you, this is a long read. There are some audio clips in this essay that I’d like you to listen to. Imagine I’m sitting next to you at a cafe. I’ve just handed you my headphones. You oblige, closing your eyes for a moment. I reach over and steal a bit of your cookie.

Part 1: The Games

I appear to have missed all the major events today. Apparently it is possible to be both too early and too late to just about everything. I’m in the archery arena now, a boulder in the stream, splitting the trickle of spectators making their way back to the city. A young archer stands at the edge of the range. He pulls back the bowstring and locks a finger behind his chin, trembling slightly. It’s windier today. The golden targets spin like miniature pinatas, suspended by string from a wooden perch.

The closing anthem signals the end of day. Flags ripple and whip, their dancing shadows stretching over the steppe, where a trickle of discarded confetti slowly scatters in the wind. Riders on horseback bask in the evening light. They move swiftly across the ocean of yellow and green grasslands that stretch back toward the sun. The voice of a singer, strumming a dombra, lifts and carries us back into the past. This is where worlds collide: nomadic traditions, wrirring drones, and concrete blocks— all sprawled out over an ocean of yellow and green.

“Shit!” One of the Americans cried out, pulling hard on the reins as his horse veered off the pitch.

“Can you help me with this?”

I run over with another volunteer. The anthem thunders from the spectator stands. We each grab a pair of legs and hoist the rubber goat onto the American’s lap. He adjusts the fur cap above his brow, red jersey dyed burgundy with sweat, before wrapping the leather reins stiffly around his hand and returning to the pitch. I watch as the players settle back into a circle of jostling riders, clashing horses, and spray of sand. One of the Kazakh riders breaks away from the pack—he’s managed to pick up the goat, securing it underneath his leg while directing his horse to gallop at full speed toward the goal. He launches himself and the goat, mid gallop, into the rubber pit. The anthem blares from the stadium. The crowd erupts in cheers. Cerulean flags wave in the distance.

The Americans were playing the Kazakh in a game called Kok-boru. Imagine a game of polo, but instead of mallets and balls you have men on horseback jostling over a dead goat (roughly 40kg), picking it up from the ground, carrying it down the length of maybe a football field, and tossing it into giant bundt-cake shaped rubber goals. I learned that this game came about via tradition—after a hunt, villagers would often play and “steal” the goat from one another, dropping and tenderizing the meat in the process. But while this game may have humble origins, it was now being live-streamed to the world by drone, with a backdrop of glittering skyscrapers in the distance.

The next set of teams enter the warm-up zone, trotting circles in the sand. I catch sight of a flag. It’s such a simple thing. Blocks of color laid out on a polyester rectangle. Blue, red, and white. The stitches are fraying and creases are visible. But there’s just something about a flag.

“U.S. good luck!” shouts one of the Russians. They make a slow tour around the pit, tying the horses up to the plastic barricades. I notice that the team doesn’t look fully Russian. “They’re ethnically Kyrgyz” says the volunteer from earlier.

The opposing team—Uzbeks—ready their horses. A few players lounge on the sand, slapping each other with their short riding whips. The taped tails of their horses swing stiffly.

“Salam Alaikum.” One of the riders greets me.

“Salam Alaikum,” I respond, repeating his greeting. The rider laughs2.

“Hello, where are you from?”

The Russian coach comes up to me, reaching out his meaty hand to shake mine, before gesturing for me to photograph his team. The athletes stiffen and pose atop their horses. I snap a few photos before flashing a thumbs up to the coach. He hands his phone to me, gesturing for me to put in my contact information and send over the photographs. In my head, my mind is spinning. Don’t our countries hate one another? Aren’t we supposed to be enemies? A memory resurfaces of when I was trekking near the Russian border in Georgia with some friends—and their stories about Russian border patrols kidnapping Georgians for ransom. And what about the war in Ukraine!

The coach then opens up his Instagram. I catch a glimpse of some scantily covered women on his discover page. He quickly navigates to a saved Instagram reel of a Chinese man posing with snow-capped mountains in the distance. The coach puffs his chest out and strikes a pose, gesturing for me to recreate the video. Thankfully the other volunteer is more familiar with this task and offers to record. Satisfied with the results, the coach calls a teammate over to crack his back. I watch them laugh, lounge, and goof around. We’re so accustomed to assigning labels to make sense of the world—to categorizing people and places such that they align with our manufactured worldviews. But in the end we’re really all just people, despite the wishes of those who might make us believe otherwise.

I loved the freedom of the kok-boru field. It was the one place in the sports complex where I could wander around, free from security checks and fences. A small taste of freedom. I could only imagine how this might have looked on the steppe: a sibling playing the dombra, the song carried by the wind over the endless sea of grass to men on horseback circling, charging, and chasing one another.

The anthem rumbles from the stadium. The Kazakh team has scored another point. Cerulean flags wave in the distance.

The Americans and Kazakh have finished their match, with the Kazakh winning something like 16-0. As the riders head off the pitch, they gesture for me to toss bottles of water to them. Someone hands me the reins to his horse while he empties a bottle over his head.

I duck underneath the plastic barrier that delimits the raceway, making my way back to the Ethno-aul. The sandy track turns to pavement and I follow the crowd out of the stadium and into the street. Police blow whistles and shout, gesturing for us to use their newly painted crosswalk.

Crossing a gravel parking lot leads to a grid of white tarpaulin domes—yurts—seated on square platforms of astroturf. This is the Ethno-aul, the cultural exhibit of the Nomad Games. The different regions of Kazakhstan—such as Aktau, Mangystau, and Almaty—had exhibits set up within these yurts to showcase their cultural heritage. Kazakhstan is made up of 17 different regions, each with its own distinct culture and identity. In front of each yurt, performers in traditional attire sing and dance, playing an assortment of instruments. Locals and foreigners alike mill about the grid.

The Ethno-Aul was a far cry from the grassy plains and villages where one might typically find these settlements. The yurts felt out of place—seated atop their AstroTurf thrones on what was essentially a gravel parking lot. The glossy sheen of the plastic exteriors felt like cheap imitations of the felt coverings that traditionally kept their inhabitants warm. I spoke with a couple of photographers from Singapore who had photographed the last World Nomad Games that took place in Kyrgyzstan. They described a scattering of yurts nestled in a lush forested valley, with athletes and performers lounging between the trees. They said the experience felt more authentic—more aligned with how these traditions and lifestyles would have existed for generations prior. On the other hand, the games in Astana felt more like a photo-op for the Kazakh government to showcase their progress—with this backdrop of glittering Astana and yurts that featured new materials and digital experiences.

I was struck by the contrast.

With such rich traditions and pride—these were the people that had conquered half the continent—why was there not a movement toward these more nomadic, traditional lifestyles? What was it about the city, that enticed people with a legacy of free-roaming nomadism to settle? How did they come to relinquish those traditions?

I also felt incredibly out of place. Not in a manner of people singling me out and making me feel like a foreigner, but out of place in that I noticed all the other foreigners receiving so much attention. I watched a group of performers circle around a group of foreigners—bringing them gifts, singing and dancing as the foreigners recorded with their cameras. What was this privilege? I felt a little childish, sulking in envy at the attention. Whenever I entered a yurt, the attendant would greet me in Kazakh or Russian, and I’d reply with прйвет (hello, informal)—roughly 10% of my Russian vocab—before peeking at the displays. I didn’t want to be singled out—to be perceived as a tourist. And yet I also felt incredibly isolated here in this foreign country, navigating life and experiences on my own.

A table display catches my eye. I stop for a moment to admire the intricate jewelry: spherical earrings with teardrop-shaped orbs suspended by delicate silver chains. A young woman, dressed in a volunteer uniform, comes up to greet me.

“Hello, sorry I don’t understand” I reply sheepishly.

“Oh, English! Hello, where are you from?”

“I’m from the U.S.” (sometimes I would tell locals I was from Taiwan in case they had a bad impression of the U.S.)

“Oh wow, I thought you were Kazakh!”

The volunteer introduces herself as Lisa (name changed for privacy), a college student from Astana studying journalism. She picks up a chain of small medallions and holds it out to me. The pendants sway and glint in the sunlight. Lisa explains that the number of pendants are related to the number of family members, and typically traditional jewelry and clothes reflect one’s marital status and identity or role within a community. She calls out to two nearby performers, both dressed in traditional attire, greeting them and translating. The younger woman is wearing a taquiyah: a traditional skullcap decorated with tufts of feather attached at the tip, almost like a flag. She is dressed in a koylek (loose fitting dress) with a red shapan (coat). The elder beside her is dressed in a kimeshek (headdress of a married woman) with an additional shylauysh3 (turban) that denotes her status as an elder/grandmother. The larger the turban, the more esteemed their place in their community (and the less jewelry they wear).

It was beautiful to see these linkages of tradition and culture sewn quite literally into the folds of everyday life: small reminders of our respective roles in society and our ties to the earth.

The performers gesture for a photo. I felt incredibly under-dressed.

Lisa offers to show me around the Ethno-aul, and we enter the closest yurt.

“Priviet” I say, greeting the attendant.

“Why do you speak Russian? You should speak Kazakh!” exclaims Lisa. She teaches me some new words, repeating slowly as I type out the phonetics in my phone.

салем (salem) — hello.

ракмиеt (rakmiet) — thank you.

кешириниз (keshiriniz) — excuse me.

пака (paka) — goodbye (informal)

Мынаны бересиз бе (muhnaneh beresiz be) — Can you give me this one

киіз үй (Kiez ye) — yurt (translates to “felt house”)

The displays in the yurts feature paintings depicting sinuous riders on horseback, artifacts from daily traditional life on the steppe, and cases of jewelry. Lisa points out a set of heavy rings in a display case.

“This is kyz muryn. It is the bird’s beak ring. A woman after marriage will bring it with her to her new family. If her husband or husband’s family is treating her badly, she sends it back to her parents to ask for help.”4

As we continue our walk around the camp, we stop to watch and listen to the performances. Lisa explains that the stringed instruments are called “dombra” and that people will fight (or flirt) with song and instrument. Akin to our version of spoken poetry or rap battles. The performer’s fingers dash across a thin wooden neck of the dombra, while the other hand strums so quickly that fingers turn into a blur that revolves around his wrist.

“This song is one about a naughty child. The other one was about the beauty of the land.

These days, songs are mostly about love.”

The nearby kids are playing asyk atu, a game similar to marbles but with sheep bones instead of glass balls. Others pose for photos atop a camel or sit upon massive swings.

Next to the tea stall, I catch a glimpse of some performers coming off their shift. They’ve exchanged their long coats for black puffer jackets, slipping on white chunky boots with a rugged sole. I catch a glimpse of the familiar Nike swoosh and Adidas flower. Another is dressed in beige, wearing green-grey Reeboks with blue laces. The coat looks cashmere. Its stitching clean. The same traditional silver jewelry adorns her hat. She opens a pocket mirror to touch up her makeup and lashes. Lips even redder, eyelashes blacker. The other girl leans her head against her shoulder. Her thumb bears the residue of a press-on nail. The influence of western brands was undeniable, but while I lamented a little at the spread of American consumerism and brand identity, I could only imagine how stifling it must feel—being immersed in an environment where traditional gender roles are so visibly reinforced by one’s clothing. Those western clothes and the values and aspirations attached to them must mean a whole lot more.

As Lisa and I continue our walk, our conversation shifts into cultural comparisons—opening up a window into life in this new world and how things came to be. I’ve added excerpts from our conversation below:

“But if you notice, we have differences between our regions. Aktau is more traditional. The North feels like Russian. Shymkent is sneaky, but kind. Almaty is international and artsy. Here it is a little bit corporate. Sometimes we have words in Kazakh language here that other regions can’t understand. It’s like an accent, but it’s about words. And we have differences between foods, between our dances and traditions. So, we have a saying that every region is like a new country in Kazakhstan. Here we have differences between not even other nationalities, but between cousins. So my parents always say, you need to find a guy from this particular region. It’s really a problem because in real life people can say, oh my goodness in our region, you need to wake up at 5 am or 6 am and you need to cook for us.

“The people?”

“Yes, parents of the husbands. We have a tradition like that for a long term, that the last child needs to live with parents. So we have a joke that if you are a girl, you need to find someone old who isn’t the last child. Otherwise you will need to take care of your husband’s parents. It’s absolutely true that the parents always love the last child more than others because they know that the last one takes care of them. So the last child is always, you know, always more cheerful.”

“It sounds like they are spoiled”

“Yeah they are absolutely spoiled. But now we started to think like a European, so we started to live separately. Because we need to. It’s about the girls’ requirements right now. But our old people don’t want to understand that. It’s ridiculous. Before like 10 years ago, it was absolutely okay when the husbands parents can require you to wake up the, we call that ‘kil-ren.’ It means wife. So to require them to wake up at 5 or 6 am and to cook for everyone and to prepare husband’s clothes, and you need to have 5 or 6 children because people can judge you if you don’t have a child.

Or we had a tradition like 200 years ago. But people still use this—this tradition that they steal a girl. So like you steal the girl and you can just take her as a wife. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t, she doesn’t know you. But it’s a tradition so the man can say, oh sorry, you need to live with these rules. We started to change this tradition but I think only a little bit changed because like ten or fifteen years ago this was absolutely okay. Even if a girl doesn’t like the man, doesn’t like the rules, or doesn’t like his family. The man can just tell you this is the rule. So you know it was ridiculous. They can just steal the girl, like they drive and can just, just take a girl from the street.5

But this was a tradition created centuries ago. So it doesn’t fit to nowadays because girls have their own voices and can make their own choices. So it’s ridiculous. But we have men who still thing that it’s tradition and it’s absolutely okay to do because our dads or grandfathers did the same. But we also have a lot of good traditions.”

“What are some of your favorite traditions?”

“There’s a really good tradition in…North. No West. West side of Kazakhstan, called kul-uz sunoh. After winter people come out from their yurt and just hug each other and congratulate that they are alive — still alive after winter. It was always 14th of March. So after winter, they come out because you know, winter in our country is really big problem because you can just die from the temperature. It’s not like the apartments in nowadays. So it’s really cold and a lot of people and a lot of animals can just die too. Horses, they’re our everything. So it’s a really big problem if they die during winter.

Another one is, we have this tradition of before marriage, chasing the girl on horseback to kiss her. If the man kisses her, they get married. Otherwise the woman turns around and uses her whip to hit the man.6

I was ten days ago at a wedding. Someone will sing and the girl will just walk dressed in white. It’s really important that she wears white because it means that you will be lucky in your life. It’s really interesting because it means that this girl, will not be girl. She is going to be wife. It’s about their new life. And the girl is always crying and we are crying. Our regions and our yurts, they are located too far away. So it means when the girl leaves her home and becomes the wife, it means she will not visit her home for like ten or twenty years. That’s the reason why the girl cries. And like tradition you will walk and everyone will kiss you, everyone will hug you, your siblings will say something good, something supportive. It’s beautiful. But I always cry.

And it’s the same. The wife will go move in with the husband and take care of the husband and the kids. Unless it’s the youngest one which means you take care of their parents too then, and sometimes this means also the husband’s sisters, brothers, also. I think it’s not so easy to be wife, and to take care of the husbands family. So we always cry. If there is a wedding like that I will invite you because it’s really interesting. You need to see that.7

I think this is not so modern. Like to live with parents, to forget about your career and to take care about your parents, not your parents, about your husband’s parents.”

“What does it mean to be modern?”

“To be modern it means we have a little bit old traditions they don’t fit to nowadays.

You know, people still think that we live in yurts. We have just like a stereotype, that Kazakhs live in yurts or something like that. They think it’s not about progress, it’s not about being modern. And we’re like, oh my, we don’t think that we are old or something like that. We think, oh my goodness that’s so sad that we don’t live in yurts. Because, I don’t know, it’s really good. I want to live so badly in a yurt, like for summer. I think it’s really good and healthy for you. You can just live in the mountains or something like that. So it’s really interesting. So people are like, oh my goodness that’s so sad. You live in yurts. I don’t know why people think that we still live in yurts. There are so many stereotypes about Central Asia. By the way, a lot of people in the US absolutely don’t know about the Kazakhstan. Yeah, I was like, I’m from Kazakhstan and they are always — uh, Kazakhstan. Where is that? And I will always explain that under Russia, under Russia, between China and Mongolia. Between China and Mongolia.

We have so many arguments between Kyrgyz. Do you know the Kyrgyz? And between Kyrgyz and the Kazakh people, or Uzbek and the Russians, etc. And I was like, we don’t need to argue because people even don’t know about our countries! We always have, ‘oh we created the yurt.’ We, not the Kyrgyz. Or like Kyrgyz would say, oh we created Dombra. Like our instrument, not Kazakhstan. And I was like. We don’t need to discuss about that because people, we need to be popular!”

“I can see that Kazakhstan still has this connection to this nomadic life. So how did people come to live in the city? What made them choose this way of life?” As Lisa told me stories about Soviet colonization in the 1930s, I realized how ignorant I had been to the world.

“The Soviets wanted to control the people in Kazakhstan, but we were nomadic. So to make us easier to manage and control they engineered a famine, killing off our horses and livestock. And you know, our horses are like our family. At the top of the yurt there is a hole called the shan'araq. It is made from the rib structure of the yurt that meets at the top, and symbolizes our connection to the earth and sky. It is also for ventilation for the hearth. It was so bad that in the winters, families would wake up in the morning to see which yurts had smoke coming from the yurt, you know, to see who had survived. Sometimes families would block the hole during the night to give their families a death by suffocation while they sleep, instead of starving. The famine drove them to such desperation. And the survivors were herded into these cities built by the Soviets. And put to work in the gulag, the mines, to feed the Soviet machines. This was two generations ago. That is all it takes to erase a way of life. After the fall of the Soviet Union, some families returned to the nomadic ways. But for the rest, this is what they have—what they know. There is no going back.”

Lisa’s stories reminded me of the acts of love that my friends from Asian households may understand: the plates of cut fruit that parents will bring to your room, grand-parents piling heaps of food onto your plate—insisting that you eat your fill, or the admonishing tone of a parent telling you to clean off your plate. Not once do they mention the famines that swept through India at the hands of the British, or China during the “Great Leap Forward” or the numerous other postwar famines. But the echoes remain in these small interactions. Countries that have experienced famine have a particular relationship with food.

My questions turn to life in Astana, and how it compares to other countries abroad. Lisa had studied in Poland, traveled around Europe, and even did a work-travel gig for four months in the U.S.

“It’s a bit sad because a lot of people here never go abroad, or never see the ocean or go on a plane.”

The biggest influence of these western countries is that they are seen as role models, where to be modern means you have more freedom to choose. Lisa tells me that she is part of a movement of young feminists, fighting for more opportunity and freedom from traditional gender roles.

“It’s not about wanting to be men, but we want more rights for women. We want the freedom to choose.”

A couple girls come up to Lisa and ask to take photos with her. They wore simple cotton sweaters with “qazaq-born” and “qazaqnation, est. 1465” printed across the front. Their hair hung loose over their shoulders.8

I watch as they pose with Lisa. Behind them, the awards ceremony was starting. People stood to attention, saluting a fluttering cerulean flag atop a central flagpole. Kazakhstan’s anthem played over the speakers. I thought more broadly about the pride that the Kazakh people have in their country—on how Lisa corrected me when I spoke Russian and taught me to use Kazakh, on the sweaters and western attire as a sign of how the younger generation are claiming their own identity and reshaping their own futures: defining what traditions to keep and which are no longer aligned with their way of life. And how the games were in a way, a celebration and reclaiming of tradition and identity after decades of Soviet occupation: a country stepping out from under the shadow of the USSR. Lisa tells me that the Nomad Games have helped her realize the beauty of their traditions and to be proud of their heritage.

“So what do you think of Kazakhstan?” She asks me.

Lisa and I exchange contacts and part ways. She says she’ll show me around Astana sometime.

Our conversation lingered in my mind. A window into this other world had been opened, and a breeze was sweeping through—bringing along with it a new understanding of my own identity. I realized how much I had taken for granted in America: the liberties, and the appeal my country must hold to others as a place unburdened by tradition. Growing up I always lamented about the lack of culture—the strange sense of identity I had as someone born between two different worlds: neither from here nor there. I had developed a disdain for the world where I was from, a land where work was our culture, capitalism: our religion, and technology: our cure. We’ve lost our deeper relationships and ties to land that once gave us meaning.

I sought out places with deeper tradition—the implicit set of rules that help a society flourish within a particular region: these beautiful linkages across time. As a foreigner it’s easy to fetishize the culture of another region, and lament the loss of cultures as those places modernize. But culture is something that is not and should not be immutable. I realized that in a rapidly evolving world, tradition may not be a simple link across time; coupled together, those links can feel like a chain.

There is no singular trajectory for progress. We may yearn for nature or grow tired of the developed world. But to others, that is their future. With these young feminists at the helm, advocating for greater rights and better opportunities—for the ability to shape and chart their own course, unburdened by the expectations of tradition—perhaps here too there shall be change.

Outside one of the arenas, I strike up a conversation with two Americans. They are freelance journalists writing for various magazines. We lean against the railing, watching kids race by on horseback. One of them pulls out a film camera, snapping a photograph of the racers. He tells me about his experienes photographing here; people are kind, but wary. They seem to be on edge around him, posing the moment he lifts his camera. The other reporter tells me about her friend that had been chosen as the BBC news correspondent for the games, and how every moment of his time was pre-arranged by the game officials. It made sense after all. This was Kazakhstan’s moment in the limelight—the people here were representing their country to the world. They were under the spotlight at all times.

I make my way through the maze of barricades, sneaking behind the broadcast cars and row of guards, taking a seat on the AstroTurf blocks that double as flagpole stands. I liked seeing what was going on behind the scenes, how people went about life normally. Off in the distance, riders gallop across the open plains of the steppe.

There’s a sense of camaraderie between the performers, as they sit sprawled out atop one another.

“You and me we go to America,” someone says. They laugh.

A quiet song plays out from a performer seated on the ground, plucking and strumming the thin set of strings. I watch a young boy squat down next to him, smiling. He fixed a metal adornment that hooked onto his belt.

Older women with head coverings and reflective vests go about emptying the trash cans, using long grabbers to fill the bags that they held. They pass by a group of girls with hair loose around their shoulders, dressed in velvet petticoats and silver chains. The wind blew at their dresses, lifting the hem of the silk fabric to reveal their Adidas sneakers underneath. There is such meaning in what people choose to wear: in the values and aspirations that clothing embody. This reminds me of the story I heard from the Romanian traveler in Nepal, about how the Soviet Union was brought to its knees in part, by the desire to wear jeans.

One of the guys storing items and managing the horses poses for a photo, calling out after me in Kazakh.

“Salem” I reply.

He smiles and laughs with his friends.

“Do you like Kazakhstan?” they shout out to me.

People hustle by carrying flags, props and instruments. Young performers dressed in costume ready themselves under the eaves of the rumbling stage, rehearsing their choreography. A few photograph each other against the setting sun, their dresses fluttering in the wind. Men in suits lean against a wooden rail, gathering for a smoke. A group of volunteers sits nearby, picking at flatbreads wrapped within plastic bags.

A photographer, flaunting a red VIP badge, comes to photograph two seated performers. They’re a little flustered, arranging their dresses to cover their knees and legs before posing with their head on their hands.

The late-afternoon wind picks up again, whipping through the steppe where the sun casts its long golden shadows. Music thunders from the auditorium. The Nomad Games are over now. The closing ceremony to be broadcast on TV. Past few days have taken a toll, we can see it on our faces. But still I watch life unfold before me. Performers checking their makeup, catching a smoke break behind the yurts, goofing and laughing with one another off-stage. I take another seat next to them, snapping a few photos. No one takes any notice. There’s a beauty to being ignored. No one was putting on a show for me, and now I understood how special that was.

This has been an incredibly long read. Someday I’ll figure out how to express myself more succinctly. I have a couple more snippets and photographs included below. If you’ve made it this far, I owe you a cookie. Leave me a comment to claim.

On horseback archery:

To the side, athletes practiced shooting arrows at bales of hay and small circular targets suspended like piñatas. I flash my press pass to the line of guards, ducking under the railing and onto the field. I catch jerseys with that spelled out France, Poland, Oman, Vietnam, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyz Republic. A European girl wearing glasses, leather boots, and a quiver, softly stroked the mane of a blue-grey horse.

“Does this horse have a name?” I asked her.

“They didn’t tell me his name,” she replied. “Horseback archery was practiced in Poland a long time ago, but it disappeared” she said. “Now we are trying to revive the tradition. The Nomad Games are the biggest competition in the world for horseback archery.”

She had been training for two years so far. Her coach had attended a workshop in Krakow and met people from China and other places back in 2014 (or 2004), before starting his own training.

“Is it difficult to ride when you don’t know the horse?” I ask.

“Yes, different regions train their horses differently. When we get on, sometimes they respond differently. It is better to ride with your own horse.”

I watch as she mounts the horse, guiding it over to the starting line. She grips the reins with three fingers and nestles an arrow in her hand. The start buzzer sounds and she spurs her horse forward, striking its flank with the tail end of her arrow.

Two French reporters with microphones stand behind a massive news camera, speaking into their phones and playing a translation to the athlete before them. They asked questions like whether he had played in the games before, if they had nomadic families still here. After each translation, the athlete would respond back and the translation would begin again.

Besides them, a group of British photographers stood by with fancy cameras — Bolexes and Hasselblads. They were here with a fashion magazine I recalled—their green Margiela shoes stood out starkly against the trodden earth and horse poop in the arena. The woman slinks behind someone that was speaking to their group, snapping a photo of the jewelry in her hair. Something about this made me wonder if they were here to extract a semblance of culture to feed a dying society that was no longer capable of generating its own meaning.

A fight nearly breaks out between a French and Kazakh player. The French were unhappy with the way that the Kazakh treated their horses.

“It is a warrior way of riding the horse,” someone says. The local practice here is to forcefully tame a horse, beating the horse with whips to force obedience and “break” the horse. A practice that has lasted for generations.

“Europeans ride in a softer way. They try to understand, to know the horse, with a sense of respect. It looks more beautiful, more respectful. Educating the horse so that it can understand,” I overhear someone say.

“Here the only thing they know is you slap the horse.”

On eagles:

The women were dressed in the traditional pointed fur hats customary for unmarried women, with bell-like earrings that chimed softly as they walked. Perched on their arms, claws biting into thick leather gloves, were an eagle and falcon (don’t ask me how I know the difference.) A French Zendaya-looking photographer was sprawled on the ground before them. Both her and her compatriots were lined up in the first row with long telescoping lenses pointed at their faces. I stepped aside to let a father and young boy pass by, positioning myself behind them to catch the birds from a better angle. There was an ombre gradient to their feathers, with a jagged layered pattern of white over brown. A white leather hood with tufts of feathers sat over their heads, blocking off their vision. Talons sunk into the thick white leather gloves that the women wore, patina and stitches signaling their wear.

People pointed at them, asking for photographs as they walked by. I followed them for perhaps longer than I should have, trailing as they moved from the yurt area toward the concert. The women maneuvered to a nearby bench, transferring the birds to the wooden backrest before slipping off the gloves. Underneath, their hands were adorned with silver and red jewels that wrapped around each finger, connecting to a short silver leash around their wrists. They took out their phones and rested. Children came up beside them, reaching and petting the birds. Their touch was gentle, with fingers spread wide. The birds murmured and shifted slightly under their touch.

After a few minutes the pair stood back up, donning their gloves and pulling the birds back up onto their arms. They smiled and spoke to me in Kazakh.

“Sorry, I don’t understand.” I replied.

“Where are you from?”

“America. Do they have names?”

Akh Miet. I wasn’t sure if this was the name of the bird or their own names.

“Rakmiet” I said, placing my hand on the bench. They smiled and nodded, standing up and posing for two photographers. Americans, by the look of it. Their press passes waved in the air.

Up next:

Voice Notes from Kazakhstan, Part 2: Life in Platzkart

Two years ago, the warmth of these stone walls and of the people that resided within them taught me what it means to experience a place. My time there provoked this question of how to convey an “incalculable experience,” which inspired the start of my writings. You can read my first post here: Dante Was Wrong.

With my flight back to the U.S. in just a few days—I’m met again with this challenge of how to convey my experiences from this past year to friends and family back home. How do I even come close to capturing everything that I feel is now a part of who I am? Last week I sat with a friend in Seoul swiping through photographs and stories for over an hour. By the time she had to head out for an appointment, we’d only covered the first few months of the year. Again and again, I find myself repeating: “Summer in the Balkans, a month and a half in Central Asia, 3 months in Nepal, 4 in India, a month in Japan…”—as if somehow by emphasizing the time spent in each country, people might understand the depth of my impressions. But through the corner of my eye I can see that my audience’s attention has wandered1. There’s just something lost in translation. It’s easier almost to just write—to just be a boy with some thoughts and conversation—leaving gaps for you to fill and find meaning.

Let’s try that.

I first set out on this year of travel hoping to discover the moments that could only be experienced through unrestricted time. These are moments that cannot be planned in the typical sense of “being scheduled.” Rather—the planning comes from altering yourself such that when these moments cross your path—you recognize them for what they are.

Coming into this year I was a chronic over-planner. I once won a travel grant in undergrad, where in my application I had each day planned out to the hour (complete with gas stations and rest stops). But the detriment of this style of planning is that by essentially deciding what your experience of a place will be, before you even arrive, you close yourself off to the possibility of letting yourself be changed by a place and its people. I desperately needed to renegotiate my relationship with risk and uncertainty. So while staying with a friend in Bulgaria, I decided to embark on a 14-day solo trek, tracing a nascent hiking trail through the war-torn landscapes of former Yugoslavia. There were shepard villages and small towns scattered along the route, but I intentionally left half of the nights unplanned with no accommodation booked—forcing myself to figure out where to stay as a spur-of-the-moment sort of exercise. Just in case, I brought a makeshift tent fashioned out of a piece of tarpaulin, paracord, and trekking poles.

Besides redefining my relationship with uncertainty, I hoped that spending time in these regions could reveal insights as to how people have rebuilt in the post-war years and how their longstanding traditions contend with notions of progress and modernity.

The Balkans: June-July, 2024

Seagulls flew abreast to the ferry, soaring, diving, and dodging for morsels of bread that were held in the outstretched hands of children. Their hair ruffled and tossed in the wind, lifted alongside the laughter of their mothers filming from behind. The sun shone on the sea, turning water into diamonds. That night, dinner was met with a warm handshake and crinkled eyes that smiled with familiarity. In the bazaars, mountains of Hasbro gummy bears were piled high alongside basins of viagra tea and potato spice: modern and ancient worlds colliding. The next day, I sat in the stone courtyards of a mosque, sketching. The minarets always came last, with my pinky braced against the edge of the page.

Storm clouds gather above. A suited man riding past on a dilapidated bicycle turns to me and points to the clouds.

“Storm. Danger.”

I wave him off and continue making my way down the dusty road. Thunder rumbles overhead, punctuating the murmur of the summer stream. Seated under the overhang of the local information center, I watch the sidewalk darken with raindrops. The stray puppy in the corner scratches its ear, gnawing on a plastic bottle.

There’s something about the air. You feel it in your brain. A slight smell that reverberates through you, washing away the bitter taste of petrol. I flag down the bus —a modified sprinter van—and we take off racing into the canyon. The driver taps his horn before turning a sharp corner and I catch glimpses of raw tunnels of blasted rock through the curtained window. Another passenger reaches behind him to pull at the curtains, opening up a better view of the sheer mountain cliffs. I am deposited on the side of the road 30 minutes later, next to a pile of gravel and concrete telephone poles that are nestled in a bed of thistles. A young boy herding goats crosses the road.

“2 kilometers,” he says, pointing up the hill. As I begin my walk via the newly built road, I let my thoughts drift to my arrival in Peja that morning. It’s Balkan Time, I write in my notes, thinking of the train conductors that leaned against the thin metal railing by the train tracks, sipping from small cups of coffee.

The path takes me through evergreen forests with glimpses of mountains in the distance. We reach a lake, nestled in a small valley and surrounded by lush grasses. I crouch to watch the salamanders swim: they wriggle their tails to propel themselves through the water, tucking their little feet tight against their bodies. When they come up for air, a portal opens. With each ripple, the sky turns into a Monet. Stones and half-submerged logs become a bridge between worlds.

A light mist collects on the water’s surface. I continue onward, plucking some wild dill and kneading it between my fingers, savoring the flavors of earth and sun. A small shelter, sign post, and chirping of birds marks the entry into Montenegro. The land continues. Rolling, dappled green hills specked with yellow freckles and purple bruises of flowers.

After a dinner of burek and potatoes, I ask the waiter if I could camp behind the restaurant. Two half-hitches and a few tugs later, I’m satisfied that my contraption will hold. I settle off to bed, but sleep is hard to come by—the dogs barking through the night make me wonder if there was danger lurking.

The trail leads me down a dirt path that winds through a stand of woody pines. Down the hill, a large dog chained to a wooden post leaps up, barking and snarling at me. I quickly pass, following a wood fence to a clearing. A small sign—marker on wood—is nailed to the fence. A menu.

“Would you like a drink?” Asks a woman, appearing from behind the fence. A young boy peeks out from behind her faded pink sweater.

“Do you have beer?”

They nod and I follow, guided by a fluffy white dog caked in dirt, to a covered table overlooking the farm and valley. The woman sets a beer on the table and takes a seat.

“What is your name?” I ask.

“Anissa, Hamza” she says, pointing to herself and then her son. Cows, sheep, and goats roam the pens around us.

As Anissa and I exchange comments, I watch Hamza (7yo) play — bouncing between herding cows into a barn, attempting to fix the chain on a small pink bike that was missing a seat, and watching television in a back room. Anissa shoves some logs into the wood-fire stove. This was their summer farm, where they’ve been coming for the past 17 years—ever since she married her husband. They live here for 6 months of the year, and each winter they walk their flock for five hours back to Plav (the nearest city). She learned English in her school days and from conversations with tourists. The shepard I saw earlier walking the hills was her older son (16yo). Cell service is only available up in the mountains, so he goes up there to watch TikTok and play games on his phone while herding sheep. I ask what they do with the sheep. They are kept for milk and meat, she says. For some reason, wool doesn’t sell anymore.

Anissa brings out a plate of cheese, tomatoes, and freshly baked bread, explaining that the bread was made with local wheat, salt, water, and baking powder.

“Falimenderit?” I say, after finishing the assorted foods and drink.

“Here it is Hvala. Hello is Zdravo.” Hamza tilts a coke can near vertical so that the final drops spill into his open mouth. He then looks down the opening of the can, bringing his eye closer to make sure that he had gotten every last drop.

Anissa brings out a small treat: a thin crepe with jam, before returning to her seat across from me. She cradles her head in her hands and leans against the back rest of the bench, turning her gaze toward the valley—where the sound of hammering rings into the afternoon.

I hold back the urge to ask about the war.

Central Asia: September-October, 2024

Hello again. I’m caught in a snowstorm in the south of Kyrgyzstan, trying to stay warm in a yurt camp. A soft crinkle of snow on tarpaulin and the rhythmic drip and hiss of the coal burner keep me company.

It’s now a few days later; my companions are ill so we are taking a rest day in a small village. From my window, I see the rusted remains of a car and diesel tank surrounded by golden fields. The snow-coated mountains of the Pamirs rise up in the distance.

A few days later again, I’m in the village of Arslanbob — home to the largest walnut forest in the world. Flies buzz against the glass of the corridor windows. A birch tree grows just outside, its yellowing leaves trembling with the weight of small sparrows jumping around its branches. Their white feathers blend against the paleness of the gnarled trunk. Up the hill, a metal roof sits rusting atop a frame of white brick and falling stucco. Hopefully I can finish writing today.

These past two weeks have taught me a lot about letting your plans change. There’s something special about the sense of freedom that comes with not knowing where you’ll be. My unplanned encounters taught me so much about how to travel, live, and be. And I think that this is who I am. I crave freedom and the wind. The warmth of light on my skin. I am not so complicated.

India: Jan-April 2025

Candles flicker on a silver tray, tracing slow circles in the air. Wisps of smoke linger like a winter’s breath, caught by a fluorescent sun.

“Hare krishna. Hare hare krishna.”

I kneel and lower my head toward the earth, holding my breath as the cold touch of beads trace a circle around my neck. The chanting stops. The guru murmurs a name. I feel the press of a coarse finger on my forehead, cold against my skin.

I rise slowly, my leather boots bouncing in the sack against my back.

What is hare krishna?

Just a day ago I was seated behind a stranger on his motorcycle, savoring the rush of wind through my hair and the feeling of adventure in my heart. My train to Varanasi had been canceled earlier that day, and the replacement bus I booked had no pick up point listed. I took a rickshaw to the main overpass and started asking people on the street for help. But with each conflicting answer, and my phone calls to the bus operator met with a string of Hindi and silence, the pressure in my chest was beginning to build.

I poke my head into a small shop filled with old electronics, hoping that someone might be able to point me in the right direction. The shopkeeper looks up and I gesture to my phone, asking if he knew the location of the bus stop.

“There is no bus stop here,” he says, zooming in on the ticket on the screen.

“I know, do you know where I can find the bus?”

The shopkeeper pulls out his phone and dials the number of the bus operator. They speak in Hindi for a few minutes, and he writes out a script on a slip of paper.

“15 minutes, that way” he says, handing me the slip and pointing in the opposite direction that I had been walking. I stare back blankly, thinking about the conflicting directions that I had been given earlier.

“I can take you if you want?”

“Are you sure? That would be really helpful.”

He gets up from his desk and walks to a blue motorbike parked by the road. I clamber on, bracing myself and my backpack on the seat behind him.

The bike rumbles to a start and we take off—cutting through the main road and speeding down a side alley into the unknown.

I had no idea where we were heading, and whether I would get to where I needed to go. But the wind felt good against my face and the sun was setting silently from behind the maze of buildings, casting long shadows that reached for us from across the fields.

A few kilometers later, we find the bus parked in a dirt lot. A worker lathers water onto the windshield from a soapy bucket. Another ties packages onto the rooftop rack. I reach into my bag, hoping that a handful of bills might be able to convey even a little of my gratitude. He refuses my money, shakes my hand, and departs without a word. And I realize just how powerful kindness can be.

The next morning, I was on a train to Prayagraj, the host city for the Kumbh Mela: a 1-in-12 year Hindu pilgrimage festival that also doubles as the largest gathering of people in the world. Accommodation sold out months ago, but I figured this was what I had been working toward: building enough tolerance to uncertainty that I could crash the biggest gathering on earth with no idea where I’d sleep.

From the station, I join the streams of pilgrims dressed in lehengas, jeans, and t-shirts alike. Their feet pound the asphalt, clad in sandals, sneakers, or nothing at all. As we near the banks of the Ganges, the asphalt road is replaced by sheets of metal laid out over the sandy river bed. Concrete buildings are replaced by encampments crafted from corrugated metal, wood, and tarpaulin. In the distance, pontoon bridges made from gigantic metal vessels stretch across the tributaries. The scale of the Ganges is so massive that it takes nearly two hours to walk from bank to bank.

Music and voices ring out from up ahead. I spot a group of foreigners and locals gathered beneath a small shelter made of tarp and straw, forming a drum circle. They gesture for me to join them. I take off my boots and scoot under the shade, grateful to be out of the sun. Someone hands me a small cup of masala chai.

The foreigners are part of a congregation led by Swami-ji, a wandering ascetic from Kerala. After some conversation, I ask if they might have a space for me to stay. When the singing subsides, one of the foreigners approaches and kneels beside the swami, whispering something in his ear. Swami-ji closes his eyes and murmurs, swaying back and forth. A few minutes later, the foreigner returns.

“Ok, he says you can come with us.”

After another round of singing and drumming, the group prepares to leave and I get up to join them. I bow my head to Swami-ji, expressing my thanks and introducing myself. The swami looks at me with wide, piercing eyes.

“I had a feeling someone would join us today.”

I fetch my boots and quickly put them on.

“What are you doing! This is leather. You cannot wear this! You sell to me. I will buy for 10 times the price. One lakh! I will give you one lakh for them.”

I freeze. Ugh, stupid! I knew that Hindus worship cows but didn’t realize that it extended beyond not eating beef. I apologize and quickly take off my boots and socks. The swami calms down a little. He grabs an old vegetable sack from behind a tent and gestures for me to put them inside.

“Good ventilation” he says.

The group moves quickly and I pick up my pace—not wanting to jeopardize my chance at having a place to stay. Beneath my bare feet I can feel the coarseness of the sand and metal, still radiating the heat from the sun. It’s an eclectic group. Just a few foreigners from the Americas and Europe. They carry small bags filled with strands of rope, rolled up vinyl posters, and small tasseled rugs.

The rest of the day is a blur:

• A man screams “Long live Trump, long live Modi. India and USA forever” and proceeds to rant about Angela Merkel ruining Europe by turning it into an Arab country. He moves around the table and takes selfies with each of us.

• We enter the Parmarth Niketan enclave and join the audience that has gathered under a massive tent. Religious gurus give speeches and people raise their hands to manifest a new BMW. AI-generated videos of muscular Hindu gods and thunderous music play out over giant screens. People come up to Swami-ji, touching his feet and taking photos with him.

• Swami-ji leads us to a small temple within the enclave where a priest invites us to sit with him. We meditate next to a shiva lingam stone as the priest recites prayers. Every so often Swami-ji would strike his hands with a wooden flute for each mispronunciation. Apparently this stone was particularly holy.

Later that night, Swami-ji insists that I stay with him in his room. As he prepares cups of herbal tea, he tells me about the temples that his followers are building and that he could use the help of someone like me. I smile and nod my head.

“Do you know Krishna?”

While the other devotees lounge around the camp, waiting for Swami-ji to return from his meetings, I decide to walk to the Ganges. A gentle wind tugs at my shirt, its song drowned out by the honking, loudspeakers, and civilization around me. Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, Swami-ji told me about vibrations from the universe and how the crises of faith/environment/humanity that characterize our modern era, are a result of humans losing their ability to feel and connect with those vibrations. I reach the waters and look around at the expanse of trash and muck that flow in from the tributaries and sewage pipes; at the smoke billowing out from piles of trash burning by the road; and at the dust and fumes from vehicles rushing past.

I look around and think none of this is holy.

How can this be holy, when we treat our waters this way? The streams and canals in Bodh Gaya, Kathmandu, and Mumbai—so clogged with bottles and bags of trash. So badly that the rivers stink. Do they not meet and flow into the same ocean? Are the waters not all the same? How can something be holy, when this is how we treat it? I think back to the servants that Swami-ji ordered and traded around, to the rickshaw driver that he berated and made wait for hours. What is holy, when there is a separation, a hierarchy, a caste? When we still treat people this way?

But listening to my friends sing about life. Speak on behalf of land and community. Is that not spiritual? Are they not priests of their own world?

Later that night, food poisoning strikes. I spend the next day recovering in the tent, chatting with a devotee from Iceland. He had read about the Kumbh Mela back home in Columbia, and more recently quit his engineering PhD in Germany to work with ecovillages in Iceland. Our conversation drifts between spirituality, culture, and society.

• God is not in a temple, speaking from a sacred fire. It is within him. Leading him.

• Those people with skeletal arms that are frozen above their heads, or seated naked around a fire with coatings of ash around their bodies. They are practicing ancient forms of yoga. The term yoga comes from “Yog”—to bind. To connect with the divine. This is done through suffering and overcoming the fear of suffering, as taught by the Buddha. It is an ancient Sanskrit practice.

• India is a land of spectacle and contrast. In these collective societies, religious leaders serve to “siphon” off the pressure within these communities. This would never work in America or Europe he says—people are too worried about their own lives. A guru here would basically be like a homeless person there.

We take a walk down to the river.

• This is nice. A glowing red sun. Not much haze. The lights in the city turning on at 5:30. People out laughing and splashing and chanting softly. I can get used to this. People selling chai. People putting clothes back on. The peddler asking to see my photo. Shadows of people moving. Beautiful. This is beautiful.

• What a place. We wander and walk, joining queues for prasad and eating plates of roti, rice, and other sweets. We wander down to Triveni Sangam. I point out an anchored boat and we wade into the sand and water and climb aboard.

• River, bubbles, and ripples flow past us. The chanting, honking, and din of the city are off in the distance now. Their melody lifts and sways, weaving between the sound of car horns and the sound of construction. The city, this sea of gridded lights, stretches all around us. Reflected in the waters. I lie down. The light breeze feels cool against the dampness of the air. I feel the wet sand between my toes. Jupiter smiles at us from above. The city is singing.

• A figure in the distance wades across the water and sits beside us at the helm of the boat. I watch out of the corner of my eye as he downloads google translate onto his phone. He taps me on my shoulder and holds up the phone. “Why are you in India?” I point to the waters and settle back to my nap. He presses no further.

• On the way back, we hop into the back of a truck and watch the world move past us. People on bikes and tractors laugh and wave. I think I get it now.

Early the next morning, I join the pilgrims for their morning bath. The air is cold, the water colder. But I take the plunge. Dip three times, then raise the waters above you.

I typically try to bundle my writing under a common theme—but the events I last wrote about were over two months ago now. Too much has happened since. So as I try to settle my thoughts and stay off my phone, here’s a quick snapshot of what I’ve been up to.

I’ve spent the past few weeks in Meghalaya—one of the “Seven Sisters” of Northeast India and one of the wettest places on earth. This was a bit of a pilgrimage for me, as one of the reasons I became interested in architecture was Julia Watson’s book: Lo-TEK. There’s a chapter there on the living root bridges built by the local Khasi communities. The villagers will “train” the roots of local rubber trees (fica elastica) over the course of years to centuries, forming bridges that build upon themselves and strengthen, such that these crossing can withstand centuries of monsoon deluges. While these bridges are such an incredible show of synergy between people, architecture, and the environment from which they derive—I found it interesting that the villages immediately adjacent to these structures relied so heavily on concrete and rebar for their own developments: very few buildings left had woven palm roofs or walls. But that’s progress, I suppose. If these buildings suit the needs of locals, who am I to judge?

Before Meghalaya, I spent a couple weeks hiking and hitch-hiking through Sikkim, reaffirming the kindness of strangers in each brief gesture for me to hop in. Here’s a thank you to the family that went trail racing in Darap, the young man from Gangtok on his way to visit friends from university, and the man that sat in silence with me and waved away the money I tried to offer. A friend from Kazakhstan had similar experiences—locals would stop and wait (often in shifts) to help her find a ride, and people went out of their way to take her to where she needed to be. What is it about this place that makes people kind and willing to help a stranger? Why does it seem like back home, we’ve lost this quality. All of the people that have offered me a lift, have apologized about the condition of the roads. Maybe the key to overcoming polarization is more potholes.

It was in Sikkim that I also found the beauty of knowing a place, through the experiences of another person. The landscape changes when they point out the vegetable market where they started learning photography, the building where they had their music lessons, and the momo shop that they’ve been frequenting since childhood. These stories of how they grew up and how a place shaped them, made me realize that each of us have the power to infuse meaning into a place, by our mere presence. Intertwined with the people we care about are the places that shaped them. It brings me some small comfort, knowing that even though I may not have fully appreciated all of the places that I’ve been this year, these places might matter to the people that know me—because of how I matter to them. So when I see you next, ask me about the monastery where I discovered that Mongolian throat singing is eerily similar to Tibetan prayers; ask me about the alleyway I walked down, holding a bouquet of flowers; ask me about the steps I sat on, watching laundry drip and dry in the sun.

It was also in Sikkim, that I did my first 10-day Vipassana: a silent meditation retreat that follows the direct teachings of the Buddha, which are hailed as a technique to end all suffering. It was during those 10 days that I realized the strange sort of intimacy that comes with watching laundry dry. A lot of thoughts arose during this time, including imagery of my mentor sitting in a car seat, next to a pink target tricycle with streamers off the handles. The technique works. Maybe a little too well. I’ll explain later.

I also rode some very cool trains these past few months.

A little hop and skip over to Chandigarh; I wonder if I would have had a different experience in architecture school, if they had taught me about Pierre Jeanneret. The name should sound familiar, as one of the most famous architects of the modernist movement was once named Edouard Jeanneret: Le Corbusier. While Corbusier and his stature as a larger-than-life starchitect continue to make its rounds in the education of new architects, it’s quite telling that his lesser-known cousin was omitted from our syllabus. I first realized that Pierre Jeanneret was a different person from Corbusier after a conversation with two architecture professors from Chandigarh, where they said that, “for us Indians, Jeanneret was the peoples’ architect.” And this was despite the fact that I had booked a room in Pierre Jeanneret’s house! They told me about how Jeanneret stayed for years in Chandigarh, making sure the projects got built—even through the hot summers—while Corbusier would just fly in twice a year during the winters to check on progress. Chandigarh and Pierre both shaped each other so much that Pierre instructed that his ashes be scattered in the Sukhna lake, just a few minutes from where he lived in Chandigarh. In architecture school I struggled greatly with how aesthetics seemed to supersede any attempt to foster depth and connection to a proposed site. Buildings were more a reflection of the architect, than the people that would inhabit them. But Pierre’s story tells me something different—that there can be more to building than just building. Maybe there’s still hope for me. More to come.

Another crowded train takes me to a different side of New Delhi, where the parks, buildings, and people feel like they’ve been snatched out of a hip Berlin neighborhood. I feast and climb and discuss the future and fate of cities with a French PhD student, leaving them my copy of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities.

For any budding writers out there, I highly recommend you check out the book, The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth. It is a compendium of literary wordplay and techniques that help build your arsenal of nice sounding phrases that can spice up your next post. Clearly, I could use another read through. There was one chapter, about two-thirds through, on synesthesia. It begins with a passage by Raymond Chandler: She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight. Broader politics aside, it’s simply an incredibly enchanting sentence. And I went to the Taj Mahal to investigate, timing my visit with the full moon—the only time when “moonlight viewings” of the Taj become available. I have no photos to show you. None that would do it justice. Frankly the more I write, the less I am able to convey the feeling. So here are the notes I made in the moment:

Like it’s trying to tell you something. Uncertainty, shyness. Just waiting for the right moment. Softness. Shyness. Indescribable. The more I try to break it down, to analyze and identify. The more I lose the feeling. Simply being in your presence. Mountainous.

I crave time alone. Standing among these other visitors that prattle and chatter; I wish it were just you and me. You seem under-appreciated, overlooked, underwhelmed. No one bothers to take the time, to see the beauty and the glow—to take the time to know you.

And a last note, to Lucknow. A city with a too-quiet metro, abundance of good food, and new friends that showed me how—worlds apart, we are not so different.

Only a month and a half before I return back to the states now: New York, New Haven, LA, and the Bay Area. For my friends stateside—I’m excited to see you soon. Maybe you’ll be able to see more clearly, just how much I’ve changed.

The other day a stranger asked me if I liked India. I remembered the tears streaming down the face of a young traveler in Varanasi, after being trapped and jostled by the hordes of people gathered for evening aarti along the Ganges. I remembered falling asleep underneath the shade of the bodhi tree, to the sound of prayers and leaves making their final dance to earth. The same tree where Buddha is said to have found enlightenment, and the same tree where I waved away an especially persistent tour guide—unsure of how to tell him that I wasn’t looking for knowledge: just peace. I remembered the bodily rumble and rush of motors, movement, and the earth: riding past abandoned mines and forts while filming a music video—listening to a friend point out bends in the road where Maoist insurgents would carjack passersby. I remembered the sunset filtering between the columns of unfinished buildings, the texture of wind and soot in my face, and the touch of kindness that came with hopping on the back of a stranger’s bike to chase down a bus to the next city. I remembered the softness of sand between my toes and how my leather boots—stuffed within an old vegetable sack—bounced against my back as I ran to catch up to a wandering swami at the Maha Kumbh Mela: the largest gathering of people on the planet. I took a nap the next day at the confluence of the Ganges, amid a sea of gridded lights; the hum of machinery and religious chants rising and weaving strange harmonies around me. The same spot where days later a crowd crush would claim the lives of dozens of pilgrims. And I remembered wandering through the slums of Mumbai, taking in all the different textures and feeling oddly envious of the kids playing soccer and flying kites, with no expectations from the world.

There is no good or bad, I told him. It’s just different. Here, the only truth I have is in experiencing.

When I was first deciding what to do with this gap year, a friend from grad school introduced me to Jan Chipchase and his studio—Radio Durans. Jan leads an annual expedition to Afghanistan to support socio-economic development through adventure tourism—namely through efforts to map nascent trekking routes in the Afghan Pamir. I spent a late-night call with the preliminary team and came very close to committing, but the cost of the expedition would have been equivalent to several months of my own pursuits. Although I opted to travel independently, I grew interested in Jan’s writings on how young designers might engage (truly) with the world:

“If you want to understand how our planet will turn out this century, spend time in China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Brazil.”— Jan Chipchase’s 61 Glimpses of the Future

I came to India to figure out what Jan meant by this. Somini Sengupta, author of The End of Karma, describes present-day India as one caught between past and present: when India gained independence from Britain on the midnight of August 15th, 1947—independence came with the promise of new liberties and new possibilities: of equality and fundamental rights written into the very constitution of New India. How would this be adopted by a country where, “for centuries, an Indian’s destiny has been scripted in the womb?” India is caught between the ingrained belief of a cosmic dharma that defines one’s destiny—and the call of the modern day: for people to shape their own future and break free from the past. A follower of the Hare Krishna cult that I was recently entangled with described India succinctly as a “land of contrast.” Half the population is yearning for the skies: the birthright of the world stage. Pledging their allegiance to the spectre of a better life. While the other half seems to be holding them back: rooted in traditional ways of living. Accepting of destiny. I toe the line, wandering around holy cities and spending time with young designers and singer/songwriters—in hopes of catching a glimpse of both worlds and understanding what people mean by “a better life.”

Part 1: A Day in Mumbai

I love this street.

Goats roam beside barefooted kids playing in the streets. Yellow leaves lay swept up in small piles. Curtains of tarpaulin, suspended by metal poles, shade people drinking chai by the roadside. People come up to me, asking to take selfies, asking if I’d like to play cricket, asking how I was and where I was from. Kites sail on currents returning to an unseen ocean. They hand me the string, tugging at a yellow kite that comes spiraling down like an oak seed.

Following the main road brings me to where the slums meet the water. Painted concrete and corrugated metal, less colorful than the clothes suspended from rooftop lines, sit behind blue barrels, boats, and bikes. I pass schoolgirls in uniform and children climbing on beached boats along the causeway. A group of young boys are setting up soccer goals on a small strip of turf, anchoring the metal frames with discarded pieces of debris. They turn and ask “playing?” to me. People greet me with soft smiles and a hand to their chest, and I think that there is more peace to be found here, than in other parts of the city. In a small slit between whitewashed apartment blocks and the slums, the ocean caresses the mouth of an open landfill that is masquerading as a beach. Small wooden boats bob on the tide, joined by styrofoam blocks and plastic pastiche. Looking out over the waters were two kids, standing atop the rusted shell of an old boat, pulling at a string. They had made a kite out of newspaper: a diamond form with two tails fluttering in the ocean breeze.

I stop for lunch at a local eatery, savoring the taste of the unknown from the tips of my fingers, before making my way back to the central district. Shops and stalls line the main thoroughfare. There was a strange peace about it: a peace of being. I write this as I watch people sit on the curbside, beside wooden crates with wares locked within. They converse with one another, sharing a laugh, and simply being. I wonder if this is something we in the West, have lost: the ability to simply be. This street is beautiful. Trees and arched corridors line its length, backlit by a hazy afternoon sun that catches the colors of saris and starched collared shirts as it filters through leaves and colonnades alike. The rush of cabs and cars and buses form a blurry backdrop; a curtain of colors and sound. Backstage performers are seated on benches. Three at a time, watching a fourth pose with a pair of sunglasses. Next to a young man, laying with back to the flat concrete, foot propped at an angle, taking a nap. Another man sits and watches.

I am jealous. Jealous of the women at the street stall, holding babies while sipping juice and ice from underneath a dark veil. Jealous that even with this weather I am limited to the confines of restaurants with metal plates and spinning fans, and stalls that serve hot chai. One day, I will join them.

I watch a young boy lean out the open train doors. White cotton tee caught in the sun against his dark skin. Fluttering in the wind. The doors rock gently in their cradle. The ground turning into a blur.

The bazaar consists of stalls fashioned from bamboo and tarp: ceilings made with sandwiched carpets and cardboard, from which plastic-wrapped metal plates, cutlery, plastic containers, and other assortments dangle earthward. I position myself in an eddy amid the river of people, photographing the stalls against a backdrop of concrete and fading paint. A shopkeeper sitting on a stool nearby waves me over. He mimes a photograph and points. I cut through the flow of people and he points again, to the man beside him: asleep, head resting on crossed arms, seated by a grindstone. He smiles and motions for me to take a photo. I oblige, stepping back to catch the entire scene. Both victim and perpetrator.

“Saal padri, saal padri.” A voice cuts softly through the din of oncoming traffic. Colored shawls draped on one arm, he stands. Clad in dusted sandals. Blue bag placed to his left. Grey streaks in his hair and beard. Chanting his anthem day in and day out. His head dips down at times, eyes blinking away the fatigue as cars and people in various dress and stature pass by. The heat of the day is over. The smell of the seafood market is slowly washed away by an evening breeze, ebbing from behind new high rises and rippling billboards that say “book your sea view home.” The man pauses, before chanting again.

The sun is setting beneath a smoggy sky, washing away the din of traffic and detritus accumulated on the road. The clash of colors, sounds, cultures, and textures of the city are all made equal—all made beautiful—under the glow of a red sun. Sitting by the elevated walkway of Marine Drive, I watch the waters of the Arabian sea before me. They beckon from beyond the steep drop and stretch of concrete riprap that lay between us, and I realize that those kids from earlier—playing in beaches filled more with refuse than with sand—are closer to the waters than we are.

Back at the hostel, a local strikes up a conversation in the dorms. He has been traveling through India for years on motorbike, telling both me and another traveler about how travel opens your mind. I tell him about my interactions with the kids playing on that street that I loved, and he says, “this area is shady man, sketchy people here.” I hate how his words have colored my perspective. How when I walked through that street again, his words make me focus more on the trash on the ground and not the kids playing cricket on the corner. And I think again on how travel can change you.

It’s the New Year. But for some reason I feel more tired than ever. I feel stagnant. I feel like I have already seen what the city has to offer, even though I’ve been here mere days. Even though yesterday, was such a good day. I feel the loneliness that comes with being a stranger in the city, despite how the workers at that restaurant smiled when they saw me again.

I’ve been trying to walk on the same earth as the rest of the world—breathing the same fumes, dodging the same traffic, and eating the same food. But at the same time, it feels like I’m just cosplaying; we both know that I’m just passing through. The beauty of those moments comes through the lens of someone who gets to leave—but does that make them any less beautiful? Does it make my interactions any less meaningful? What does it means to belong to a place? The waiter slips me the menu again; a not-so-subtle reminder that here, my presence is only as good as my money.

This question of belonging surfaces time and time again. It wears me down and makes me wonder, turning exploration and experiencing into a tired routine. But there are moments. Moments over morning coffee while local dogs eye you for a treat, sharing thoughts about the value of an education and what we’ve taken for granted; a makeshift meal of eggs and ramen at the border, talking about new horizons and the makings of a life; sharing an upper berth on a train headed nowhere, discussing cultural differences and being at peace with the world; huddled by a wood stove on top of a mountain, musing over progress, uncertainty, and everything in-between. And oddly enough, in listening to an Italian man who was lost on a mountain overnight—talk about the salty, buttery taste of his own urine that he drank to stay warm.

There are also unspoken moments: a shared meal of beshbarmak at a family home, testing out the taste of fokso at a local eatery, passing out terracotta cups of chai, jotting down swear words in Hindi, a shared taxi ride across a country, rooftop conversations warmed by a bottle of rum, motorcycle rides at dusk through the countryside, and squeezing into a tent next to rivers running from the roof of the world. Amid the transience, I’ve found that home is other people: these shared moments and conversations with former strangers who opened their worlds to me, and of course the messages, voice memos, and group calls from old friends and mentors. I’m incredibly lucky to have had this period of my life shaped by so many.

I often ask myself what it means to have experienced these moments. Ultimately, I feel that they’ve changed my understandings of an existence.

Part 2: The Age of Arrogance

Back during my trek in the Balkans, one of my Hungarian parents recommended the film, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. There was a scene where the villagers explained to a city-born teacher the importance of stacking stone cairns on the mountains: they are prayers toward one’s existence, to make it home safely. For much of humanity’s time on earth, we lived in environments where this relationship with nature was intimately tied to our own existence. In Entry 03, I described this by writing:

Because as someone who may not fully appreciate the difficulty that comes with those lifestyles, I see in them a beautiful connection between people and land, and a richness and beauty that we no longer have.

The film’s explanation made me realize that to be modern is to challenge precarity: to lay claim to one’s own existence. And when we control our own existence, it becomes precious. Our time becomes valuable and life—a matter of efficiency: a problem to be solved.1 I grew up in this environment, where culture and education focused heavily on “solving” life. Getting into college was a matter of following a checklist. High school students sought remedies to the pressure of courses and all nighters through “productivity” hacks—Pomodoro techniques, Pareto principles, popping pills, and everything in-between. Companies were built around developing applications to “revolutionize” systems and address “pain points” to bring greater convenience and efficiency to people. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that life is not an optimization problem. I don’t mean to denigrate the innovations that have improved the quality of life for many of us, but I feel that we’ve grown arrogant. Our obsession over controlling fate and time is to the point that we are enslaved by our own power: where we seek to maximize and extract value from our own being, chastising and hating the world when something does not go to plan—when it dares to go against our vision of life and the world. Would things be better if we simply let go? Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but while I slid around on that smooth metro seat, I found myself missing the chaos of traveling in Kyrgyzstan and Nepal: the people crammed in the aisle, next to bags of produce, propane tanks, goats, and chickens, the babies thrust into peoples’ arms, and the peddlers that squeezed on board at each rest stop—waving their snacks and bottled water. They stood out so starkly against the homogenous backdrop of efficiency that I was accustomed to.

There are certainly aspects that could and should be improved upon, but I’m also reminded of the uniformed agent in Kosovo that passed out tickets on the bus and ushered me to my stop; the elderly woman who pointed me toward my hostel, and the grumpy clerk in Macedonia who sold me my bus tickets. These were the people that were replaced by the Omni tap-to-pay system, Google Maps, and online booking platforms in the name of streamlining an experience. When we allow our lives to be so mediated by technology, are we not also giving up the interactions that might make our lives all the more vibrant?

Part 3: Changing Baselines

I embarked on this year of travel wondering what we left behind in our pursuit of progress. What I’ve found in these past few months, is that I’ve been utterly overwhelmed by the very life that I was in search of. It’s placed me in an interesting position where my baselines on normalcy have shifted drastically—forcing me to reconsider my position on what progress really means. Expressing this tension has proven trickier than expected, so apologies in advance if I am not entirely coherent.

I met a man on a boat in Varanasi who had just visited Houston, Texas (he builds oil refineries for the engineering firm Jacobs). His first thought was, “where are all the people?” What is special about India is the undeniable presence of life; it’s in the eaves, the shadows, outcroppings, alleyways, gulleys—spilling out onto the street. Quite frankly, India is bursting at the seams. I hopped on a random bus shortly after arriving in Mumbai, enamored by the sight of hazy streetlights illuminating the people drinking chai, fixing bikes, and eating dinner by the roadside. More and more people piled into the bus—to the point that when I realized the bus was heading in the wrong direction, I nearly broke someone’s arm trying to squeeze my way out. I found myself in a similar tight squeeze in the trains, metros, and markets of Delhi and in the streets of Varanasi. The flow of people is overwhelming and electric—pulling you in and under. The day before I took the train from Delhi to Chandigarh, several people died in a crowd crush at that very station. And don’t even get me started on the honking. Life here is so intense, so in your face, that progress seems to be akin to an escape. It means seeking out enclaves to take refuge in, away from the chaos, where you can bathe in cool conditioned air or when you have the means to ride on newly built roads in the private bubble of a personal car. It means living in gated communities with signs forbidding street vendors and sweepers that maintain the aesthetic of a “clean” street. Life here is so abundant that progress seems to be a process of compartmentalization, erasure, and escape. And—I get it. I understand why people would want something different: why they would want things to change. It’s so clear, so palpable—what it means to live a better life.

I used to criticize the piles of plastic goods placed out on the street: the stuffed animals in plastic bags and stacks of buckets and chairs and toys. Consumption! I railed out. But now I think about the barefoot girl dressed in a ragged shawl, gnawing at bones from a small camp on the street overpass—and how she clutched at a small plastic doll with blonde hair. I’m thinking about the kids at the Maha Kumbh, filling plastic bottles with sand and their laughter as they ran and tugged them along with pieces of string. Now, when I come across a stall with stuffed plush unicorns, pandas, Peppa pigs, and Pikachus laid out in the shade of a faded beach umbrella—I think about the reprieve that a parent might feel, giving a toy to a child, when they have nothing else to give. I understand now that those bags of plastic products, in all their colors and brands and styles, are a lifeline for people: toys for them to keep their kids busy while they are on the streets, household items, and outfits to wear for a first family outing. I’ve found that consumption is not as simple a condition as I once believed. It serves as a lifeline to not just comfort—but also greater access to spaces and social liberties.

In the book, Why Loiter? by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade, the authors discuss gendered access to public space and the politics of risk for women in Mumbai. It is through this book that I first learned about the scrutiny women in India face from societal/familial expectations and the current state of women’s rights and access to public space. I previously lamented about the homogenization of global cultures as they trend toward consumerism—but what if what I took to be cultural erosion was actually a means of expression and an escape from a more restrictive culture? The branded clothes signal membership to the modern world, women are now coveted in their role as a consumer, and through this newfound power are able to gain access to spaces that traditionally were reserved for men. While this access hinges on assuming the identity of a provider/consumer—and thus is not “true” right to public space—it is still a taste of freedom for people that have faced far greater cultural and social repression than I have. The past few months of travel have shown me starkly, the luxuries and privileges that I’ve taken for granted.

I’m reminded of my conversation with students from Kazakhstan—young feminists fighting for rights in a society where it was once (and in some places still is) customary to kidnap brides for marriage. And I think about the conversation I had in Almaty with a local friend who wanted to replace the old USSR-era buildings (that I found beautiful) with new glass and metal malls. These glitzy malls for them are a sign of progress—new spaces that they can access. Capitalism and consumerism here are liberating forces. Building these spaces to them is exciting—essential even—for a better life. When I was in Kathmandu I would often wander the streets at night, illuminated by the still-open storefronts. And I would wonder:

I wonder what you gave up, to be standing with your hands in your pockets outside these stores. To be hunched behind a table, back bent over your phone. What did you give up, for a dream?

And yet, they know where they want to be. They know where they are heading. Do we?

Part 4: Are we really prepared for progress?

There’s something I felt about Nepal and India. Within the smog and traffic—I could feel something in the air: a yearning, burgeoning growth. The sense of excitement, possibility, and certainty—to how they might realize a better life. Why is it that back home, I feel that the atmosphere is one of complacency? For the people in the so-called developed world—why do we still rely on consumption as a marker for a better life? It feels like we’ve hopped on the bandwagon of technology and just accept whatever is new and exciting as signs of progress. These innovations take us round and round, providing solutions to problems that we manufacture ourselves, spiraling toward some unknown future with such confidence. Do we like, or even know where we are heading? What future do we envision for ourselves? And are we really ready for further progress, when we can scarcely hold on to the liberties and rights that we once took for granted?

I’m not sure where to go from here. Frankly, I don’t think we are ready for something more. Our lifestyles and functioning of our very society is contingent on the exploitation and stratification of people. And this is nothing new. Since the dawn of civilization there has been some form of cheap, controllable labor. When the point comes where enough of the world becomes so educated that they no longer need to work as farmers and laborers—will the world really be ready for that?

Out of all the questions floating around my head, the one that resurfaces the most is: what do I owe the world?

Part 5: Between Peace and Progress

I’m impressed you’ve stuck with me for this long. That last section was a little rough—I am not so well read on post-capital/degrowth moments that I could give it the depth that it deserves. But what I am, is caught making peace with, and wanting to change the world.

In a conversation with a venture capitalist, I spoke of this undue responsibility that Americans typically feel toward “doing good” in the world. Even now as I advise students on college applications, I tell them to emphasize their understanding of broader global issues and how they might leverage their education to address them. There is some sort of martyr complex/noblesse oblige about this mindset that I’m not sure how to untangle. I suppose I feel this obligation to make the world a better place, given the privileges that I’ve amassed through my upbringing, education, and America’s imperialism.

A little under a year ago, I drove with a friend to Florida to help him document an underwater jetpack that he had designed and built for himself. On that drive down I was reading A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power—the former ambassador to the UN under President Obama and until recently, the head of USAID. The book focuses on the history of genocide given her experiences as a foreign correspondent in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. I was drawn to her depictions of Raphael Lemkin—the man who coined the term, genocide—which were that of a rabid, obsessed man chasing after people in the corridors of the UN to convince them to ratify the terms of crimes against humanity. I was moved by the torture this man must have felt, having lost his entire family, to dedicate himself so much to something that it destroyed him entirely. Is this what it takes to change the world?

From my window I can see piles of trash that sit below unfinished concrete buildings. But people are playing soccer, flying kites, sitting and playing amid all the debris. What does it matter? It’s still a life. It’s still beautiful in its own way. As I am now, everywhere I go there is something beautiful about the world. I’m reminded of the shoemaker sitting underneath his tarp, with such a dignity to his eyes that I felt compelled to look away; of the street vendors and pure symphony of their craft—punching holes in pani puri or making the fastest buttered sandwich of your life; of the kids playing in the dirt, happiness in their soles; and a life without expectations. It seems they’ve made living itself an art, with a quiet, ineffable dignity. And I wonder if I need to give up being able to see this beauty—if I need to be more unhappy or discontent—in order to change the world. Perhaps I am conflating humanity’s ability to find dignity and joy, with acceptance. Perhaps I need to remind myself that just because I see children laughing and playing—doesn’t mean that their lives can’t be better. But at the same time—is that something for me to decide? Why is it that, the more I understand the world, the less I want to change it?

I feel caught between this martyr complex—some strange responsibility to try and do good in the world—and the peace I feel with the world. What do I owe the world?

I’m quite tired. Tired of the routine of wandering and falling in love with new places, and of being able to leave so easily. I’m tired of experiencing so much, and I’m tired of how beautiful the world is.

And so as I let my thoughts settle again on the meaning of progress, I’ve written a short piece — not all that profound, that reflects some thoughts on this new world of our making, its textures, and what it means to be of the earth.

I’m thinking about, how we are molded by where our feet touch the ground.

Cushioned by smooth asphalt sandals. Trodding upon the unholy remnants of disfigured relics. Metal pull-tabs and plastic pastiche make a mosaic to the traces of ancestry. Mountainous wastelands of our own making, where the higher you stand the more evolved you are. Six inches make a mile.

By the winged grace of Nike we are lifted into a world where our children yearn for the kiss of rubber, to erase the stain of dirt from their soles. With her blessing, we embark on a crusade toward concrete castles, pledging our allegiance to the spectre of a better life. And when the kind embrace of pine needles and fallen leaves no longer feel soft to our skin — we turn to the comfort of knowing, what we wear is what we’re worth.

Or perhaps, are we shaped by where we sit?

Atop worn concrete blocks, tea thermos set aside. Savoring the taste of home from the depths of a plastic bag. The same taste that you’ve found, seated in a white plastic chair, at a restaurant that has begun to expect you.

Perched on a bench, metal rungs pressed against your body. A cold embrace warning against the sin of rest. You sink to grassy shores, making a sandwich with the earth. Filling it with whatever is on hand: a jacket, a plastic bag, a piece of cardboard, or a blanket dutifully packed by a more responsible friend.

Now back to the safety of a wooden seat. High-top, with a footrest that is both too high and too low. Amid the aroma of coffee and chatter, you plug into another world. Your body left safe behind impenetrable panes of glass and class.

What about, how we breathe?

Crisp forest air, the flavor of morning mist. The permeating lightness of rain.

Warm diesel winds, mixed with dust from the dry riverbed. A gift from a passing truck. Your eyes close and face earthward, sheltered within a triangle tent of fabric. Seeking solace in each captured breath of skin and sweat.

The cellular breath of respiration, made equal to the mechanical musings of an electronic god. Held to life by lungs that are not our own.

It must be, how our lips meet the earth.

Water from a stream. Fresh and fragrant. You plunge your head in. Hands and feet braced against water-lapped stones. A prayer, with lips puckered for the kiss of a nymph. This must be ambrosia.

The thin smoothness of a paper cup, coarse against your scalded tongue. Fresh brew mixed with extracts from the plastic lid that you’ve so carefully pressed into place. The flavor of soil, sweat, and bitterness.

A warm coat of liquor. Embers running down your throat. Liquid fire bottled in clear plastic — the shape of Coca Cola. Distilled from apples, they tell you. You’ve heard rumors of how it can make you blind.

The cinnamon sweetness of volcanos. Thick caramel dredges trailing down a crystal bowl. You sip, swirl. Nodding slowly, despite bitter tannins. A shy glance to see if others agree.

Clay gathered from an unknown riverbed. Fired in factories oceans away. Filled with the sound of lemongrass washed under a trickling spigot. The gentle spillage of a bobbing teabag, brought over by a friend you used to know.

The other day, I took a bus that wound for hours down the mountainside, crossing dotted villages, terraced plains, free-roaming chickens, and families that waved as we passed. The blare of honking horns and stench of petrol marked my return to Kathmandu and the end to ~5 weeks of trekking in the Himalayas. When I first set out on this year of travel, I specifically allocated three months to Nepal, with which I planned to be utterly untethered and trekking continuously; wandering from villages and tea houses while contemplating life, identity, and my role in the world. Things did not quite go as planned. And while I think my time in the mountains did what I needed it to do, I came face to face with the realities of a country that relies heavily on tourism for their economy.

To prepare for Nepal, this summer I spent two weeks in the Balkans, trekking alone and getting comfortable with hitchhiking and traveling without knowing where I would eat or sleep. I brought along a tarp as a backup, which combined with some rope and trekking poles — allowed me to camp anywhere. After a while I began to resent the limitations posed by the few reservations that I did make — enjoying much more the flexibility that comes with uncertainty.

Development was booming in the Balkans. The sounds of construction echoed through the valleys and roadside eateries, guesthouses, and asphalt were popping up in every little village. On the trail, I met children that would question me about where I was staying, leading me through the woods to where their parents were building new accommodations. But while these developments marked the aspirations of locals, sometimes it came at a cost.

While researching the trek, even local guides recommended that people skip the Kosovo section of the circuit due to less-impressive scenery as well as significant portions of “road-walking.” My trek however began in Kosovo, where I took an old train — complete with windows cracked with what looked like bullet holes — to Peja. After starting the trek later that day, I sat and spoke with the proprietor of one of the original guest houses on the circuit, located in the village of Rekë e Allagës. They shared stories of the people that came through their guesthouse and of the seasonal migrations that they undertook with their animals. I wrote down the pronunciation of useful phrases — falimenderit, pershenditye, shombokul. They spoke Albanian in that region, hinting at the complexities of ethnicity, identity, and conflict that lingered after the fall of Yugoslavia. And while I never explicitly asked them what they thought of the road and how it had affected their lives — this question stuck with me. As I walked through Kosovo, large billboards on the new roads all advertised large resorts and hotels with various excursions and rentals. And after more than a week of trekking, I arrived in Valbonë, Albania, where along the road I saw an angular hotel — the color of perceived modernity — that jutted out from a field of cows and bunkers.

Locals spoke proudly of that new hotel. Yet many of us trekkers were drawn to smaller, more intimate homestays. There seemed to be such a mismatch between what locals took pride in — perhaps what they saw as progress — and what foreign travelers like me were seeking. It is here that I would like to introduce a complicated dynamic — something that will certainly come up again in my future writings. Formerly disconnected regions of the world [whether geographically, financially, or politically] are experiencing an influx of information and cultural exchange made accessible by cheap electronics, increased connectivity, and prevalence of social media. As I am writing this months after my time in the Balkans — this statement also reflects my time spent in Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, and Nepal. On one hand, these tools can be used to amplify and uplift individual cultures and ways of life — showcasing the beauty of their traditions and increasing opportunities for self determination, social mobility, and more. One example of this is with a family-run silk textile production facility in Margilan — the silk production center of Uzbekistan that dates back to the Silk Road.

On the other hand, increased access to social media and the internet also exposes people in these regions to the full socio-cultural machinations of globalization, well-honed by consumerism and soft power geopolitics. Which — alongside the dream of self determination — can so easily sow the seeds of discontent by manufacturing desire and the perceptions of inadequacy, resulting in the tragedies of lifestyle inflation, cultural erosion, overconsumption, and the opening of these regions as potential markets to be tapped and targeted. Exploited.

For regions without previous exposure and education to digital platforms and the algorithms designed to target and exploit human nature — I believe the latter statement is more likely to occur. Even the generations in the West that have grown up immersed in social media and digital cultures — and this is coming from someone who grew up in the Silicon Valley — are not immune to the allure and power of social media and advertising. The tradeoff for our digital access and entertainment is marked by declining mental health, political polarization, and sale of personal information — making us more susceptible to targeted advertisements and corporate interests. Now imagine this being deployed in countries that have never been exposed to these forces before. Perhaps you don’t need to imagine — we’ve seen what happened when our parent’s generation entered onto Facebook — and the wave of polarization and disinformation that has perpetuated ever since. A contemporary analogue would be the reach of food corporations — PepsiCo, Nestlé, and others — that target remote communities with foodstuff that has been engineered to be addicting. [Here are two articles (NYT, CorporationWatch) about the health impacts of Nestlé in Brazil]. For more information — Michael Moss’s Hooked and Catherine Shanahan’s Dark Calories and Deep Nutrition can introduce the perils and ubiquity of processed foods.

I am wary of what self-determination and free will mean in a world where our subconscious desires can be so heavily shaped by the media we consume. A world where social media is owned by those who benefit when people buy into the global culture of more. My entry into the sun-speckled hillsides of Albania was marked by a flock of sheep, herded by a young man in a hooded rain jacket. He carried an umbrella as a walking stick, and his attention was fixed on his phone. I later stopped for tea at a small hut, where I sat and spoke with a woman that turned out to be that shepard’s mother. She told me that the hillsides were where her son could get cell service to watch TikTok and play games on his phone. Besides us, the shepard’s younger bother tipped a Coca Cola bottle near-vertically into his open mouth, before looking through it as if it were a telescope to make sure he had secured the last drop. Is this what arises from the intermixing of traditional cultures and the modern world? I’m reminded of Turkey, where stalls in the grand bazaar of Istanbul sold small mountains of Haribo gummy bears alongside traditional spices.

At the same time, I should be wary of my thoughts — which may very well be the voyeuristic fetishization of the traveler — here to ogle the seemingly peculiar in a foreign place. And this begs the question of what, in the end, is right? As someone who comes from a monetarily wealthy nation and reaps the benefits of development and predatory foreign policy, does my (following phrases interchangeable) cherry-picked rejection of consumerist values/presumed understanding/first-hand account of the limitations of this system grant me permission to want to deny those opportunities to people in another country — for the sake of preserving what appear to be charming and rustic lifestyles? Because as someone who may not fully appreciate the difficulty that comes with those lifestyles, I see in them a beautiful connection between people and land, and a richness and beauty that we no longer have.

Perhaps these changes will not be as drastic as I imagine. Perhaps people will be able to preserve their sense of culture and tradition — the very tools that have enabled them to persist in their lands for generations. These observations have made me cherish even more the moments that I’ve felt were “authentic.” And I will elaborate on that meaning in the future. For some additional context, my thoughts are greatly shaped by — Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death, John Bodley’s Victims of Progress, and Ivan Illich’s To Hell with Good Intentions.

I’ve digressed quite a bit. Let’s get back to the road. While trekking in the Balkans, I was adopted by a group from Hungary. Over dinner one night I brought up my observations on Kosovo and questions on development — my uncertainty with what was actually “good” in the world. One of them had been traveling around the world for over two years, and he mentioned that during his time in Nepal he saw similar issues appear along their more developed trekking regions. He mentioned that residents along the earlier villages of the Annapurna circuit also suffered a similar predicament. They approved the road as it would make easier the transport of Coca Cola crates, building materials, and other supplies to support their burgeoning guesthouses, as jeeps could transport goods from the city more efficiently than porters and packhorses. But the aftermath — those very tourists that they sought to attract ended up speeding past their villages by jeep instead. And while there are still some trekkers that seek out the experiences that comes with completing the circuit in its entirety, the commercialization of the trek has also turned it into an experience that draws people who view it more as a checklist item to be allocated into a set period of time, rather than something to be savored.

And so this brings me to mid-October: the beginning of my time in Nepal. I was curious what progress meant for people here. What technologies they incorporated into their lives. And for a country so often ravaged by monsoon flooding and earthquakes — what it meant to rebuild. I held these questions in my mind. Not so much looking for an answer, but letting it settle and simmer while I waited to see what sort of conclusions might appear with time in the mountains.

The writing I have during this time is fragmented. I’m not going to attempt to string them together. I won’t bother you with a day by day rundown of what I did and where I ate and what I saw. What I realized while trekking was that while your feet are pounding gravel and your mind is questioning why you even agreed to do this in the first place — your subconscious is released. My thoughts at the time were often incoherent, jotted down quickly in notes while they flitted through my head. So when I wasn’t second guessing my decision, complaining to myself about the stone steps, or passing judgement [perhaps envy] at the groups who had hired porters and themselves wore nothing but a day pack — these were my thoughts.

Part 1: A New Beginning.

200 rupees for a haircut. It took longer than I expected. Hair fell quickly under the quiet buzz of the clipper, the realization only taking hold once the hair that covered my forehead began to fall over my eyes. Watching the grey stubble on my scalp that marked my hairline, I thought that the process was over. But the barber took out a razor, sprayed some oil on my head, and began shaving down to the scalp. Grey turned into white, revealing skin that had never before seen the light of day. He worked slowly, brushing clumps of stubble off onto the back of his hand, stretching my skin beneath his fingers. After the last pass, he ran what looked like a crystal beneath the faucet and rubbed it over my bare head, pressing my head between his hands. And here we are. My head does not feel much lighter. It feels no cooler. Myself, I am no different. I never realized how warm my hand is. The warmth of my own touch.

Part 2. Annapurna.

The hum of the jungle surrounds me as I make my way past terraced rice fields and rivers. The path winds up the low mountains, taking me through villages — multicolored with metal roofing and thatch; brick, concrete and stone. I catch glimpses of the river and valley below. It is in these mountains that I discover the gift of unknowing. The water I carry. The places I stay. There are no plans, but I have done my best to prepare — just enough.

Namaste greetings in multiple forms: excited, reciprocal, and nonexistent. I see kids on a giant swing, the guarded walls of a hydroelectric plant built by China, and am scolded by an old Nepalese woman with two yaks on the way I said namaste. My hands were not properly clasped together I realized, as she pulled her hands apart, waving them in the air, and shaking her head. Before firmly pressing them together.

Something about a mountain road. Winding around hillsides. Roots and rocks. Trickles of water flowing past, pooling in tire tracks. Eroded banks above a waterfall or a river of rocks. The precarity of it all. But most importantly, how the air smells. How birds swoop, dance, and prance, and hop. And how leaves tumble from the sky to embrace the earth for one final time.

I discover the wonder and joy of baby goats. Plucking vegetation off the side of the trail with one of the villagers. Watching them nibble at the tablecloth during breakfast. At some point in life I will raise goats, releasing them onto the world like little lawnmowers. Baby goats are better than dogs.

“What a world. It’s all we have.” A last exchange with a man named Iwan. Romanian, but lives in Canada. Our conversation over dinner extended into hours as we spoke of the rise and fall of communism and the USSR (which he said he never could have imagined), the role of jeans and cultural soft power, broader musings on global society and geopolitics, and what to make with a life.

Something about the peace of the morning. Just the sound of birds and the river, the village awakens. The movement of smoke from metal chimneys drifting into the valley, caught by the first rays of morning sun. Flags flutter gently in the light breeze. Above the mountain stands watch.

I share a tea with two detectives from Berlin. One had just lugged a giant bag of toys up for a local school. The last time they were here (2014), they had to turn back just before Throng La Pass due to a snowstorm that they later found had claimed dozens of lives. And they lamented a little — they were glad to see someone like me, traveling alone and open to the world. There were more the last time. Later that night, the proprietor tries to teach me some Nepali phrases:

Molai (aja) daal bat tzaiyo (I am eating daal bat)

Molai man poleu (I like)

Mo boli Ice Lake janchu (I am to ice lake going)

Dreaming of dal bhat. It is not the first course. Prim and proper, mint sprig places on a gentle bosom of rice. The potato curry and small piles of greenery. Nor is it the cup of steaming green lentil soup that begs to be savored. No, it is the second helping. The third. The shower of rice that falls from the serving plate of the chef, a deluge that covers the plate. Drenched in ladle-fills of dal and mixed with spoon or finger to utmost perfection. I dream of the falling of rice, the steam, the flavor. Later on the trek, a waitress asks for a selfie after I clean off my third refill of dal bhat.

It was at Tilcho Lake. The highest lake in the world. That I caught myself slipping. I spent a rest day at the base camp, basking in the sun and utterly stuck in my head. Earlier that morning I watched local tourists celebrate and pose with flags of Nepal. They seemed so proud. And I felt so empty. I was nearing the crux of the Annapurna Circuit, surely something worth celebrating, but what does success mean for someone who simply does? For whom there is no alternative — for whom failure is not even an afterthought. I had no doubt in my mind that I would complete this trek. So when success is the norm — I wonder, what even is success? Is it a state of being? Something internalized? And the inverse — what then, is failure? I feel like I have never known success nor failure. Failure depends on your expectations, as does success. So where does my bar lie? My brother came up with some new ways that I could further push myself — perhaps I could befriend someone I found annoying or learn how to make people feel a certain way — to try and push and find new dimensions of myself by casting aside my values and judgements. While these prompts were intriguing, I felt a sense of resistance from within. “Is this…me?” In that moment I came face to face with the person that I had become. Perhaps this will change in the future, but for the moment I’m happy with my being.

The night before Throng La Pass. Dreaming at high elevation. Where every breath feels like you’re drowning. Swimming in this ocean as you breathe. Wallowing.

Sunrise. The slow pacing of my feet: notes between the sound of static in my ears and the river coursing below. A loneliness, watching color return to the earth, to the prayer flags blowing silently in a morning breeze. The dim flow of headlamps below gradually extinguish. And the sliver of the moon is engulfed in faded pink, orange, and blue hues. I can hardly feel my toes. The sky turns to white, reducing the snow-capped peaks to the dull grey hues of a leftover watercolor rinse cup. I’ve never seen a white sky before. As I’ve made my way down. The orange glow of the sun kisses the white ridges of the annapurna’s. A beacon, and swarms of blackbirds take off into the valley.

Ate a frozen toblerone at the pass. Chocolate is not as good at high elevation.

Time passed by differently after the pass. Most of the trekkers caught a jeep back to Pokhara. But I wanted to continue the circuit. I was wandering alone now, in a region that had far fewer people. Bearing the brutality of the afternoon wind and dry riverbed. I forged ahead to a small village, and was met with locked doors below the signs for accommodation. Eventually I found a place to stay, and was later joined by a group from Israel. We played cards (BS). The concept of bluffing was foreign to our host. They had just finished their stint in the IDF and were trekking around the mountains free form. The girl had spent months hitchhiking and trekking through India, telling me about the hand signals they used and the kindness she found.

I stayed for a night at a Tibetan refugee camp. There I learned another truth in life: never haggle with grandmas. You lose even if you think you’ve won.

The rest of the trek faded into obscurity. I had no particular thoughts. My questions still remained. But I noticed that I felt on-edge — something felt off about the trek. Most people were here with their guides and porters. Few I felt were here to let a country change them. I missed the sense of new experience and discovery that I felt while traveling through Central Asia. And I felt drawn back into the pack, making my way from one place to the next — a pressure to conform. And it began to wear on me that my interactions with locals all centered on this expectation of a potential transaction. Perhaps this would be different elsewhere. After all, this is perhaps the most touristic trek in Nepal. What was I expecting?

[to be continued]

I’ve been thinking about…just what the hell I’m doing here. There. Anywhere. What does wandering around markets, cramming myself into buses and trains, and wandering around remote villages do for me exactly? Well, the past few months have shown me why it’s so much easier for government officials, academia, and policymakers to be disconnected from reality and how people live (an observation also shared in the book, The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power). So today, I’ve decided that this year will simply be the beginning of trying to understand and engage with the messiness of life. Luckily I have a superpower — my face. ;) A journalist from America that I met in Kazakhstan shared that the moment he raised his camera — people would stop what they were doing and pose. I often saw western tourists and photographers surrounded by locals that would ask them questions and give them gifts. At first I felt left out — people would speak to me in Kazakh and I was too awkward to correct them so I would just nod my head and leave. But I realized that looking like a local lent me special access to their lives. I could just sit next to people — coaches, athletes, performers — as they took their cigarette breaks or as they shouted at their teammates and draw no extra attention.

Unfortunately the camera I used to capture those moments broke a few weeks ago while in Kyrgyzstan. I wish I could say that I dropped it while scaling a mountain or that a horse had stolen it from me, but unfortunately it just puttered out while I was trying to cross a small footbridge. Pretty solid run for something made in 2011 though. The files are in such an old format that I’m actually unable to edit them with my current equipment…so neither of us will be seeing those photos anytime soon.

Since our parting, I’ve been in a mini crisis. I’ve held my identity as a photographer for over a decade now. It’s to the point that I see the world as the composition of subjects. Places, people, and life as a whole — is experienced in retrospect through the dim glow of a screen and bootleg copy of Lightroom. While trekking in the Balkans, I was adopted by a group of lovely Hungarians. One of them had once traveled the world for three consecutive years. He told me that he only took photos when he was bored. “Shit photos” he said. When engaged with life — perhaps experiencing something worth photographing — he would be so engrossed that taking out the camera would be an afterthought. I’ve had a few of those moments so far. An American Kok-Boru player (think polo with dead goats on horseback…the rider, not the goat) asking me to help him lift the fake stuffed goat. The sunset glow while briefly lost in a walnut forest in Kyrgystan. Diving head-first into a sprawling old soviet bazaar in Uzbekistan — trying to figure out what the real price of a coin was. And more recently, navigating the bustling and raucous streets of New Delhi. So from here, I wonder how I will experience things. Without my camera, how will I know and remember the world?

I have a hard time figuring out what matters these days. What’s worth my writing about? What do people care to know? What should they know? I’ve had a reoccurring thought these past few months — while I was trekking in the Balkans, strolling the far-too-wide avenues of Astana, and while I was looking out the bus in Bishkek — that these places are not so different from home. And so far in just two short days in Delhi, I’ve been thrown into the mix of urban conditions and the lengths people go to live. In comparison, the whole of Central Asia is a picnic. I never thought that one day I’d find myself seeking solace in a shopping mall. I’m beginning to understand the desire to act and be associated with being “modern.”

I thought a little bit about romance today. What is romance in a time where we are overly connected? Where imagination once had to fill in the gaps on what people were doing and thinking — is reality all that much better? And what of the expectations that come with it? I feel like people once had to make words matter more, because communication was so infrequent. How does this affect how deeply we love?

I’m thankful for the friends I’ve made over the past few months, and for the friends from home that have made me who I am today. And so I have a parting question for you. I’m not sure who I’ll be after these upcoming months — so how will you remember me?

[Some older photos from this summer]

I hope to write more about my current travels shortly, but first—this post is dedicated to the place I called home over the past three years: New Haven. A little more than three months ago, I wrote the following note to myself:

I’ve just made it onto the train and for the first time today am able to find a moment to breathe. I snapped a photo of my bed just an hour ago, the imprint of my blanketless body held for a moment by the mattress. There’s a restaurant nearby that I think is a lawsuit waiting to happen—slick wall tiles repurposed for the exterior entry, and each Spring their planters encroach onto the sidewalk to make room for spindly outdoor chairs and tables. In bright neon just by the entrance reads a sign: “if you didn’t (check in), were you really here?”

I’m leaving the place I’ve called home for the past phase of my life. Risking missing my flight, I called an Uber to the library to take a final look at the exhibit that I helped arrange. Visitors had started writing notes and leaving them on the exhibit shelves, and I pinned them up on strings hoping that more would follow suit. I snuck a few photos of the students’ work, wondering if these pieces of paper and plastic — that nowhere says my name — would be proof enough that I was here? As I arrived at Union station, I remembered what Charlie [a local resident that had grown up as the renewal-era highways were constructed in New Haven] had shared about the art on the walls that no one seemed to notice. And how he used to shine shoes downstairs before heading off to anywhere. Earlier that day at breakfast, Charlie left me a parting word of advice: “Slow me down, lord — it’s a prayer and a poem for your liking, for when the world is speeding by and you don’t know if you’re coming or going.”

While this restaurant’s question reduces one’s presence down to a single indicator—to me, it also prompts some consideration for the following: A) what actions or events need to occur for you to register your own presence in a place, and B) how does your presence register with the people that already reside in that particular place? If they take no notice of you—were you really there?

New Haven has certainly left its mark on me. As I travel, when people ask me where I’m from in the United States, I find myself hesitating; I grew up in California, but my values and identity were realized most consciously by my undergraduate and graduate educations on the East Coast. Jokingly, I tell them—if you put it all together I’m actually from somewhere in the Midwest. There’s something about smaller cities that are at such a scale that you feel like you can make a difference. Even as a student I was able to email and grab coffee with New Haven’s former mayor, go on walks with local community leaders, and even share a beer with the head of New Haven’s parking/transportation department—learning their insights on the characteristics and meanings of the city. When I was deciding between graduate schools, I had read somewhere that Yale and New Haven’s “town-gown” relationship that was not unlike the disparities present in the United States. I figured that even if I found that architecture was not for me, I could still learn something about how these stark divisions of wealth, class, and privilege manifest in urban space. I’m still saving my full critiques on my formal education for another day, but for now I’m thankful for that earlier—wiser version of myself. Burned out from the indifference demonstrated by both the faculty and administration—I turned to the city to learn about how people live.

[Sidenote: I recently came across a copy of Jane Jacobs’ magnum opus: The Death and Life of Great American Cities—with the opening chapter plainly stating: “The practitioners and teachers of this discipline (if such it can be called) have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities — from anything but cities themselves.” It appears that in the decades since its publication — little has changed.]

As with a lot of things in my life, I owe my explorations, chance encounters, and friendships to my stomach. At the start of my second year, I went with a friend to an alumni talk hosted next to the architecture building. Enticed by the prospect of free refreshments, we agreed to quickly stop by before heading back to studio. Unfortunately for us, we had two factors that derailed our plan: 1. The room was laid out in an intimate circle of comfortable chairs, and 2. The speaker of the talk was Caroline: an alumni, social entrepreneur, advocate, and today — someone that I’m incredibly honored to be able to call my friend. Once we sat in those chairs with our plates of crackers, cheese, and fruit, Caroline was so personable and charismatic that we ended up staying for the full hour. Later I brought Caroline into the architecture school and spoke with her about the studio project that I was working on — designing a library driven by notions of how people were already using the space, inspired by found objects and tactical urbanism. Caroline could sense the interest that I had in New Haven, and later sent me a flyer for an event she was hosting: “Community Pitch Night” for Start in New Haven.

I was woefully unprepared, but that night I threw together some slides on tactical urbanism and submitted my application. To my horror, I was selected to present. With my schedule already filled by classes and studio, it took me some time to convince myself to commit to the event. In the end I figured — what the hell, worst case I can maybe solicit some ideas about current work in New Haven to help with my studio project. After all, the residents know far more than I do about the happenings of the city. After my presentation I surprisingly found myself swarmed by people, all of whom had something to share or ask about the idea of implementing tactical urbanism projects in New Haven. I collected their names and contacts in a little black notebook and spent the next day reaching out to everyone individually to chat over coffee. Either from those conversations, or the conversations that followed through referrals and chance encounters, I began to get to know the city. I want to highlight the following encounters, each of which deserves a full forthcoming chapter.

[photo by Caroline Tanbee Smith]

Stephen, a director with Neighborhood Housing Services, picked me up in his 19-somethings Crown Victoria. We made our way past the maze of asphalt-cracked parking lots and mini marts toward Newhallville: a formerly redlined neighborhood that was built to house workers for the Winchester Rifle Company during New Haven’s industrial age. We stopped outside a garden, still bare from winter, enclosed with a chain-link fence. Across the street, a sculpture of a turtle lay alongside the paved path of the Farmington Canal Trail. Shortly after, I was introduced to Doreen. Doreen is a local community leader in Newhallville that had transformed the “mud pit” — an open-air dumping and drug trafficking space — into a park space and “learning corridor.” I spent a summer volunteering with Doreen, building pavilions with her cadre of local teenagers at the adjacent garden: the Urbanscapes Plant Nursery. Over the summer, whether through coffee walks in the neighborhood with Doreen or humid mornings spent searching for screws and trading drills with the teens, I realized how the impacts of historic injustice — redlining and urban renewal — still bled through the neighborhoods. But instead of being passive entities affected by these policies, these neighborhoods had something that I had never before seen in my life: a strong and vibrant community network. Doreen introduced to me the notion of radical trust and social capital: how an initial seed of suspended disbelief can catalyze the formation of communities and the work required to maintain and strengthen its ties. These words really don’t do justice to Doreen’s work — and I hope to expand on this in a future chapter.

https://doreenabubakar.wixsite.com/cpen2

I heard about Mark during a call with Peter Crumlish — the director of Dwight Hall: Yale’s center for public service and social justice. Mark runs the Amistad Catholic Worker [now called Rosette Village] in The Hill neighborhood of New Haven. Operating under the premise of a “human rights zone” drawn from the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Mark opened up his backyard to economic refugees — what we might call homeless or unhoused people. My morning visit to Amistad quickly elapsed into the afternoon as I sat with residents under the shade of a beach umbrella, engrossed in the stories they shared. One resident told me that it’s not difficult to stop using [drugs], the hard part is finding something worth stopping for. In addition to being such a clear example of radical trust, Amistad showed me how the natural formation of communities and social relationships laid the groundwork for recovery. The residents had all experienced a fracturing of relationships — whether self-imposed or otherwise — at some point in their lives that precipitated their acquired condition of homelessness. My visit was in the wake of a recent camp clearing ordered by New Haven’s mayor, and the residents detailed how these camps formed naturally to provide safety, community, and social connection: the bedrock for rebuilding oneself. The camp clearing and scattering of belongings, people, and the isolation that followed, resulted in a state of precarity and insecurity that was far more dangerous as it increased the likelihood of overdoses. I learned more about government solutions to the homelessness crisis — from Section 8 Housing to homeless shelters — and how they failed to address what people needed most: stable relationships and groundedness. In Mark’s words, the government solutions were more appropriate for conditioning people for prison. I will write more about Mark’s work and our conversations later on. But for now, Mark and the residents of Amistad taught me about what people — in their most vulnerable state — need to live.

https://www.facebook.com/Amistadcwh/

[photo by Chris Randall]

There are more people that have transformed my time in New Haven, who I have not included in this writing. I hope to share more of their stories later.

A week before graduation, in the back corner of the New Haven Free Public Library, I knelt next to a girl with black frizzy hair tied up in an orange bandana. She had finished sifting through the pile of photographs on her table and was beginning to tape them into booklets made from folded strips of paper. I (short for the incredible people who helped stay up to cut pieces of chipboard and strips of paper), had prepared templates to help the students arrange their photographs and was demonstrating how to use the templates to center the photographs. She waited patiently for me to finish before saying, “No thanks, I don’t need that.”

I took a step back and smiled. In the last week before my graduation, after three years of higher education, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it felt to still be learning. Turning to look around at the other tables, I saw students making use of the materials around them in different ways — transforming them into statements of their own identity, voice, and aspirations. These teenagers were teaching me so much more about life than my classes ever could.

[photo by Chris Randall]

The students were making booklets for an exhibit that had been in the making for several months. With the help of some grants and local businesses, they had taken photographs of places where they felt welcome or unwelcome [as commentary on youth experiences in a city shaped by urban renewal]. The library space was now filled with orange-painted ikea shelves with photographs clipped onto wires, rearranged into L-shapes that gently drew people through.

On the day of the exhibit opening I was nervous, sleep deprived, and really not quite sure what I had gotten myself into. But as familiar faces began to trickle in — I found myself drawn into a sea of hugs and handshakes. I said hello to the students that came, many of whom had brought their families with them. I pulled them to the side and handed them another yellow disposable camera and gave them one last mission: to be photographers for one more night — documenting the opening of the exhibit and how people were responding to their work.

[student photographs]

At a certain point, the room started to feel restless but I wasn’t sure what to do as people were still trickling in. Finally, as the tension became unbearable — I grabbed a chair, dragged it over to the center of the room, stood up, and began to speak.

“Thank you all, so, so much for coming…I’m going to speak for as little as possible because tonight is not about us. Tonight is about the students — their experiences and voices, they they’ve put up on display. So I want to share some of their words: ‘That in places that are bland to the eye of someone seeing something for the first time, are places of creativity. Being in a school located around downtown, the places you see and venture start to become places of comfort, adventure, reflection…Places no longer become sights — but instead artistic views of the youth - D’ I’ve spoken enough — thank you all for coming. Refreshments and food are in the back.”

The rest of the night was a blur of chatting with the attendees, introducing people with one another, and listening to stories. But what I remembered most, was how during those few hours, I knew that the exhibit was no longer my own. Ownership flowed to the students — their families, siblings, that sat at the table making more books and drawings to add to those orange shelves. It’s funny that, despite my hours spent in studio and classes, none of my invited professors nor administrators showed up to the opening. But it also felt right that those who needed it most would be there.

At the end of the day, my co-curator had gone off to a classmate’s party to celebrate, but I was in no celebratory mood. I felt like I should have done more — said more — while I had the chance and attention. I went off somewhere to vent and reflect on what I learned from that night, hoping that even if I were to walk away from school with so little to show for it, I was still able to make a difference in the city. I wrote this note:

What does success mean to you? When teenagers are the last ones to leave. When all of the food has been eaten (except for maybe the pita), when you have friends that stay behind to help clean without your asking, when the security guards — instead of berating you for staying after hours — peruse the exhibit, saying they don’t mind staying longer — and as you leave, promise to watch over the work. “Don’t worry, we won’t let nobody mess with it. We’ll take good care of it.” When you have people come to help set up, telling you only that you should have told them sooner. When families are brought along, and when they pick and pull their work for all to see — holding it proudly on display. When the handshakes are firm, smiles are real, and excitement palpable. When new connections are made, making it both easier and harder for me to leave.

I’m still grappling with what my time in architecture school amounts to, but for now at least my voice and experiences are still my own. And the exhibit lives on! It currently stands at the New Haven City Hall, and was adopted by the librarian of those students’ to put in the school library. At Yale I often saw pieces of their exhibits — the posters, shelves, and walls — filling up the back alley dumpster after the end of an exhibit. Pieces of astroturf from the last one still remain in the sub-basement corridor. As much as I harp on Yale — there are people that I’ve met there who have changed my life. If you’re reading this, you know who you are. As for the faculty/administration — to them I leave behind a little too many paint marks on the Frank Gehry patio furniture on the 4th floor terrace, the story of the boy who emptied out an entire dumpster to rescue a load of books, and accidentally let loose some worms in studio while using them to make sculptures out of plastic.

More photos and coverage of the workshop, here

Local news article written over the summer, to my delight and surprise, here

Additional student quotes, that I wish I had said while I had the chance:

“I feel like my photos with friends are the best because ‘’…just being with people I trust makes me feel welcome anywhere” — CL

“Most of my photos are of things and places I see and pass by often. The church I took a picture of I see a lot because I walk past it downtown almost every time I stayed downtown. It’s a moment I see often.” - MG

“I wanted to capture everyday life and the things you would see like walking around after just getting out of school” - B

“I want the world to know to enjoy life. Enjoy every little things. Take time to appreciate the details, hear the sounds, and take everything in. I want people to see my photos and see the daily beauty of every day life imagery” - J

“I want to use my photos to show people the beauties of the world and to let people know to be mindful of the millions of things happening around you” - D

“That in places that are bland to the eye of someone seeing something for the first time, are places of creativity. Being in a school located around downtown, the places you see/venture start to become places of comfort, adventure, reflection, etc. Places no longer become sights — but instead artistic views of the youth” - D

“every day is a new day, anything can happen, the same things you see everyday can change” “even though the weather looks cold, this photo makes me feel warm” “Makes you think about life and what time does” - K

“This picture looks peaceful — somewhere I would feel safe” “a moment in everyday life. People just being people” - J

“All the memories came in from when I was younger feeling nostaltic to me knowing that I could go back to those places. I want the world to know that is perfect in its own ways.” - EP

“Through these photos I feel like I really got to see New haven. Not the New Haven when you search on google but New Haven from the perspective of someone who really knows the beauty and ugly of the city. Somehow nearly all of these images sort of had this dreamlike effect that showed the impact of the city. The people, the murals, the nooks and crannies, it is nice to see the familiar and unfamiliar places in the city. Looking for beauty where I probably didn’t look before.” - DM

“The world should know the beauty of New Haven, even if it is the little things like art or just a simple view. So many things happen in downtown that what we see should be showcased. Like in the green I’ve had just a simple picnic with friends but that holds memories. New Haven is seen as a bad city but it has its beautiful moments and it’s hard. But New Haven is a community and it is shown in different ways throughout these pictures.” - IC

“I want the world to know that photos can show who you are” - C

Just a ways off the trail, I saw a figure lounging by a fallen tree. He looked up from under the brim of his wide grey-blue hat and called me over.

“Hold out your hand.”

I made my way ungracefully down the rocky path to where he was sitting. Into my outstretched hand, he [a professor from a world-renowned institution] then poured a small mound of iridescent capsules.

We made our way down the mountain, our scramble over rocks and roots spurred on by beams of sunlight filtering through the dense foliage and glimpses of the ice field extending before us. I listened to him speak on memory, meditation, and philosophy — before sharing my own nascent thoughts for the future: pursuing a year of personal exploration. He paused for a moment. Instead of telling me that I was undermining my future career, or bringing up a litany of other valid concerns, he asked me for my age and then responded:

“You are nearing the end of the developmental period of your pre-frontal cortex. Now is perhaps the best time to engage in this type of experience while it still has the capacity to shape you.”

Months later, at the birthday party of a college classmate, I shared my aspirations with one of the other party guests. He had recently quit his job and now lived out of a car, climbing and trekking around the world.

“Do it, there’s no better time than now.”

He later sent me a message and a small sum of money on the condition that I follow through with my plans, and send him a print of a mountain.

And how have I responded? Well, one month in, I’ve mostly been lounging around in my underwear, my feet sweating in a pair of old leather sandals, going for days on end without leaving the apartment. All part of the process, I hope.

So how did we get here?

Four years ago, I graduated from my undergrad feeling that I was a better person coming into college, than I was leaving it. [My initial reflections on college, here]. I felt that my impact as an engineer was limited by its own faculties: engineering is at its most successful when it goes unnoticed by people. Relying on technology alone, I realized, would be insufficient for addressing the climate crisis. And so I set out, applying to graduate architecture programs to learn more about design and its capacity to interface with people and the environment and change the way we fundamentally interact with the world. A lofty aspiration, but I was satisfied with just the prospect of learning more about design.

My graduate school education however, was not what I expected. I will save these critiques for later, but broadly architecture is a profession that is irrevocably tied to the daily rhythms of the built environment. However, instead of spending time walking the streets, speaking with residents, and learning more about how people interact with the spaces around them, my program ensured that I [and my ideas] virtually never left the confines of the architecture studio. How does this institution expect its graduates to go out and shape the world, when they have not learned how to interact with, learn from, and design alongside the people they serve?

First year architecture students are required to design and build a house in New Haven, and my year had partnered with a local nonprofit to build an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) to help address chronic homelessness. We constructed a single-family unit in the backyard of an existing residence, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods of New Haven. Despite the small scope of the project, not only was there little interest by the faculty in performing a carbon assessment [LCA] on the construction process, but also despite our presence in someone’s back yard — not once did we consult with the people already living there. It was as if we were airdropping buildings into New Haven, with a note saying “take it, we know what’s good for you.”

I recall distinctly during my second year studio, that my research on the history and still-present impacts of urban renewal were to be condensed into a single sentence, as if my proposed project could somehow be held in equal weight to the lives that were uprooted. The legacy of urban renewal worldwide, stemmed from top-down processes and highly educated designers and planners “knowing better” on how to shape a city [i.e, racism]. Clearly, architectural education has learned little in these past decades, as they continue to propagate the supremacy of aesthetics, representation, and theory in their mission to superimpose buildings and forms onto the masses.

When I brought these concerns up to the leadership of the school, they were dismissive: “Do you think you know anything about architecture? You guys are nowhere near ready to be talking to clients.” It troubled me that the architecture program was so incredibly disconnected from how people live. Through my later personal explorations I saw how despite its history, New Haven is not a city that “needs to be saved.” Its residents are already in action — and what we really need to do is listen and learn.

The people I met at school were dreamers. Incredibly gifted in the production of drawings, models, and other forms of representation to create various experiences and worlds. In a conversation with one of my studio partners, I shared my difficulty in producing drawings due to all of the decisions that had to be made. She said that her approach was to imagine and create moments of joy and wonder, and I realized then that my inherent disposition was not to build, but rather to break things. In my undergraduate exams and evaluations, my instructors would stress-test our projects by pointing out any possible mode of failure. This led to me applying the same rigor of consideration for all of my design decisions — subjecting me to great mental pressures and feeling lost when I had no “reason” to justify a design development. Rather than learning to claim agency over these decisions, I chose to relinquish the last bastion of power for an architect — deferring these decisions instead to the lived experiences of people.

I’ll save my experience with this for another post, but these two articles: here [on a part of my work in New Haven] and here [featuring my studio model] capture some of what I was hoping to achieve.

I have no regrets about my education. It has granted me a unique skillset and sensibility to how people live. However, architecture school has left me with just enough exposure to the problems of the world, but not enough knowledge to do something about them. My hope is that over the course of this next year I can reconcile these dual identities of engineer and architect to forge my own path forward in the world.

So where to from here?

I plan on using my remaining eleven months to begin answering two questions:

1. What does it mean to build?

2. How can we balance the preservation of cultures with globalization and modernity?

Along the way, I hope to learn a little more about reconciling my own sense of individualism, relationship with institutions, and what I want out of life.

I’ve been affected greatly by a set of books/essays recently: Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks, Ivan Illich’s To Hell with Good Intentions, Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death, and John Bodley’s The Price of Progress.…and inspired by Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between and Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist.

I leave tomorrow for a two-week solo trek through the Balkans, testing to see how I fare with uncertain accommodation and talking to strangers. If anyone has readings on former Yugoslavia I’m all ears.

Dante was wrong. There is another circle of hell. Lesser known, but all-the-more unbearable: this special state of anguish is reserved for the bright-eyed hopefuls of the world. Here, the damned are given a taste of paradise: a moment of escape from the oppression of the western day and momentary membership to a greater legacy. 

We were robbed of a normal life, upon return; consumed by a sense of strangeness and uncertainty of how to use the hours of our lives. Day by night, by unwavering day, we sit in muted torture — wracking our minds on how to represent an experience so perfect that words truly and simply cannot hope to do it justice. 

I’d rather it were all a dream. And so instead, what I have to share is not a carefully crafted, expressive, and cohesive piece that represents the magic of Civita. Rather, I have the fragmented beginnings and never-endings of what I had tried to write. All together, they might just capture a fraction of what we had:

• As the Tuscan sun set over the shadowed valley of the Calanchi, the blue glow of twilight softened the hues of the purple and yellow and green until they disappeared into dusk. The warmth of the day radiated softly from rough stone walls, penetrating deep into the earth that surrounded us, and upon which we stood. 

• The smell of lavender – sweet and wanting – floated by open windows on that same evening breeze, ushering out the last tourists of the day. We watched their soles tread through the cobbled streets and down the spindly bridge, and the crumbling heart of the city took yet another beat.

• The hand-pulled noodles that were so carefully brought from a weekend trip in Florence, paired elegantly with off-the-cuff wines that somehow never seemed to disappoint. With our lessons from Maurizio in mind, we cut through foil, twisted corkscrews deftly, and presented the labeled face of bottles with a practiced sort of ease. Glasses full, we swirled, sniffed, and savored the new flavors of the earth. 

• Aperol bottles were repurposed as rolling pins, turning flour and water into a focaccia bed where garden-borne leeks come to rest. The scent fills the house. Tartufo the house cat lounges on our doorstep. 

• Standing in the garden, I wavered between artichoke heads that trembled with the evening air and the wild herbs that bobbed in and out of the setting sun. People waved and said their greetings, but I could only stand idly and wave, as my mouth was stuffed with newfound wonders from the charcoal grill. 

• We sat at the dining table in Tony and Astra’s Sala Grande, flipping through handwritten recipe books and menus from didactic dinners dating back to 1991. Photos fell through the pages of the life that had filled the room – radiating a warmth far greater than the renaissance era fireplace that had attracted Astra a lifetime ago.

• There were moments when we called it home. 

Papate al Tony (Tony’s Potatoes) 

1,5 k Potatoes. (Whole), peeled and waiting in pot of cold water

  — Olive Oil

  — Butter

1. Bring pot w/potatoes to a boil and cook ‘till potatoes are al dente

2. Heat oil and butter in skillet. Add potatoes and cook ‘till brown and crispy on the outside (turn as necessary)

3. Serve w/lamb

• Isabelle discovered a new litter of kittens in the barn. Clumsy paws and bundles of fur, they clambered over one another and skirted around us. We brought morsels of meat as offerings, and they responded in kind by taunting us with another impossible future. 

• Despite my scattered per favores, piaceres, mi chiamos, and non parlo italianos, I still found a feeling of connection. Dancing in the square, in line with the nonnas that put us to shame – there was more than one way to speak a language. 

• It’s 9am. Drat – late yet again. I shower and change, stepping out over the doorstep and gingerly avoiding the furry sprawl of Tartufo (the illicit house cat). Tartufo joins us for a few paces on our lengthy hundred-meter walk to class in Palazzo Contino, the old merchant palace of the city.

• The smell of mint cut through the heat just as the ruins appeared in the distance. Stone churches, barns, occupied in centuries past stood in waiting. Cows and donkeys grazed around us, feeding on thistles and wild sprigs of mint. In the distance, we imagined the tolling bell from the city square, heralding the end-of-day. 

• This was our moment to start a new tradition for the new students that would return to this site. As we raced up the bridge, this thought was quickly replaced with a regret of the wine and bread that had treated us far too well. Perhaps we should have been more forgetful.

• Cherries rained down on us like little hailstones, and we gathered them up in our shirts under the cover of night. 

• The green chairs in Tony’s garden stood out against the backdrop of weathered stone. They were designed by Gae Aulenti I later learned, but all I saw was the legacy of Astra basking in the morning sun. The thin wisp of smoke emerging from a slender cigarette, clasped knowingly by a gentle hand. In her eyes was a glimpse to the vastness of life that filled up the space that we occupied, and of the future we were now beholden to. 

• The clouds sat low over the clay valley, rising and falling like ocean lulls that untethered us from the land and from civilization. For a brief moment, nothing else mattered. 

I write in praise of imponderabilia, and of madness in meaning and rediscovery of the old ways of life. But the experience of Civita extends far beyond this. The photos, the text, and the drawings in this publication are abstractions of an incalculable experience. If what you’ve seen has left you wanting, then come and see for yourself. 

This is Lost | Found.

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