Twenty-five years ago, I wrote about my adventures in Egypt in a group email after one of my first days in Cairo. I was electrified by a visit to these twin mosques in the city that were bigger than any house of worship I had ever imagined. I bribed a watchman to let me climb the pitch-black, bat guano-covered stone steps of a turret up to the top of a minaret that stood perhaps 100 meters above the street below. The wind up there wasn’t strong, but it was steadier than my feet underneath me, and the consequences of wobbling too much weren’t abstract. There was no railing on top of that dollop of marble. My heart raced. I was short of breath. And then, looming in the far distance were the hulking pyramids. Giza was maybe 5 miles away? Maybe 10? They were almost mirages, so far away, so big, so fuzzy— the sandy grit that hung in the air offered a haze that only a wonder of the world could cut through. I went from breathing heavily from distress to outright breathless in amazement at their sight. The adrenaline kicking through me had a new name in that instant: Adventure. 

That moment pressed itself into me. I think about it now as I try to describe what it’s like living in Shanghai. I’ve been here for 4 months. I’m middle aged now. I moved here not for adventure but for employment. My wife and I seek to create routines for our daughter and ourselves to make this new place feel like our home. 

This week, I finally wrote a description of my impressions here — topics include the weather, the electric motor scooters riding on the sidewalks, trees, apartment buildings, the scale of this city, what you can get delivered to your door. 

There have been no minaret adventures. 

Part of this shift in what constitutes an adventure is perhaps predictable based on stage of life, although a little over a year ago I did not know we were going to be living in China. Unpredictability at this stage in life is not the same as it was decades ago – part of what made that day in Cairo so potent was it was my first time traveling outside of the U.S. on my own, and being launched into the world like that was exhilarating in a way that might be hard to duplicate in similar circumstances. 

In another way, though, I think that adventure might be increasingly harder to have because of the devices upon which we are now so dependent. In Shanghai, my phone is my ticket to everything, literally. I haven’t made one cash transaction since I arrived. I order food, groceries, Halloween costumes on apps on my phone (not my computer). I translate spoken words and printed writing with two different apps. I use the maps and compasses to navigate. My bus tickets and metro fares are paid via an app.

(Another memory from Cairo: getting on a bus and not having the fare, which I think amounted to 3 cents and was printed on a piastre note so small I thought it was a bookmark when I saw it. The man next to me paid my fare and said, “When you’re in Cairo, you don’t have to worry.”)

Historically, getting lost is pretty common for me. Following verbal directions has never been a strength— I routinely lose my way driving in my hometown. So in new locations, especially cities with long histories where roads aren’t straight or marked or where there are cab drivers who play the game “get as close as you can to the foreigner crossing the street” I need a lot of directional support. There was a driving trip in Costa Rica once where I was on a road trying to get back to San Jose. The road went over hills with lots of turns and junctions. I stopped constantly for directions. My Spanish was so limited that I had to set up every question so the answers were either “yes” or “no” (San Jose está allá — si or no?”). 

In Shanghai, I haven’t had to ask a single person for directions. I don’t know what I would say if I had to — I haven’t acquired any language proficiency yet. 

Moving is a struggle. You uproot everyone in your life. And then you try to get back into balance, routine, homeostasis. It’s different from the struggle to communicate how to find the bus, train, taxi combo to get to that village you heard about from the one person who spoke English at the tea stand yesterday. The distance and time between hugging the dome on top of that minaret in Cairo and ordering a gluten free frozen pizza to be delivered to my door in Shanghai feel further apart than 25 years and the leaps in technological capacities. Adventure once was an experience related to how out of place I felt in a new surrounding; now, Adventure is measured in how easily I can feel a part of a new place. 

I like it here. I know how to navigate the city. In most things, I feel I can mostly find my way. The adherence to a routine that offers me the energy to self-direct here is what counts as an adventure. I will not seek to find the top of the tallest buildings in town, but I will seek the little cozy corners where I feel like I’ve had an experience that’s mine. 

And then I’ll lay my head down at my regular bedtime and get into my routine for the next day. 

I haven’t watched a Super Bowl in 10 years. It’s been even longer since I saw a Super Bowl halftime show. And yet, after hearing and reading about the profundity of Rihanna’s halftime concert last month, I found myself watching it on YouTube. And again. And again. 

No one would call me a Rihanna fan — I just don’t know her music. About half the songs of her setlist evoked this reaction from me: “oh, this is one of her songs?” Prior to this performance, I had never looked up one of her songs or pressed play on something in her catalog on Spotify.

So now I’m humming some of the hooks from her hits throughout the day. I even woke up last night with one bouncing in my head. Her Super Bowl show performance was incredible — the interwebs go on and on about that: iconic, fiercely low-key, exuding self-possessed confidence … she’s getting that kind of acclaim. And I keep going back to it. It’s a great show. 

And, there’s one moment that stands out to me above all the rest. She’s surrounded by dancers the entire time. Hundreds of them. Then there’s a shift to a piece where a band is waiting for her on one of the platforms on the forever-long stage. She’s just a few seconds into the transition of the new song; there’s a steady but building intro. She walks up to a very tall man holding a base-guitar, and she gives him a fist-bump – the only greeting she offers someone else in her performance. For just a moment, the camera follows her with the base player in the background. It’s clear from the soft fist-bump that these two know each other. It’s a warm moment that flashes by, and then, in background, this giant man, a rockstar in his own right, dressed in tailored clothes for a Super Bowl performance – so in other words, is in this moment of time, one of the coolest cats on the planet – nerdily sings along (sans microphone) with Rihanna. 

I’ve watched this video half a dozen times just to catch this moment. I love it. 13 minutes of ultra-precision and choreography, and a momentous moment of human connection. 

I’m thinking about Holden Caulfield these days, and how on his last night at Pency Prep, he went alone after dark to a hill on campus that overlooked where the rest of the student body was watching a football game. He tells us he’s looking for a nice “goodbye feeling” — we come to learn in the pages that follow that the poor guy has suffered one loss after another without ever getting a chance to mourn, celebrate, appreciate.

Fortunately for me I have a few more skills than old Holden so I see him as a non example rather than a model. Still, saying goodbye brings up a range of memories and connections. The idea though of wanting a nice goodbye feeling is relatable, though, probably to anyone who moves from one place to the next even if the rest of Holden’s circumstances don’t relate.

For us, the coronavirus didn’t exist when we decided to come here; by the time we arrived six months later the world was a different place. And this place, this city, felt empty. I remember the first people in my neighborhood that I recognized seeing frequently were the homeless men occupying the nearby city park and the two middle schoolers who slowly walked the same loop each day, side-by-side, clearly crushing on each other and relieved to be out of the sight of their parents.

All the opportunities we hoped for getting to know this place the way we knew and loved our last place evaporated in the pandemic. As I prepare to depart, I wish I knew more about Bucharest and Romania. At the same time, this place offered our family exactly what we wanted and needed. Our daughter couldn’t yet crawl when we arrived; she learned to walk here. Now she runs, jumps, climbs. She walked all over and through the groves of trees in the three giant city parks within walking distance of our home, looking for sticks and rocks to pick up and carry. She stomped through puddles that pooled around clogged storm drains, and took great glee in going from playground to playground, asking to be pushed as high as possible on each set of swings she could find. On her last week of preschool here, her teacher reported that she was speaking in sentences in Romanian. The sentence? “Push me higher, more!”

The enduring benefit of this international teacher life is the opportunity to meet and befriend such great people who share our unusual and self-induced chaotic expat life. My slice of Bucharest has offered me a fulfilling combination of soulful connection with new and old friends. Saying farewell to these folks, and taking our squishy little kiddo out of the place where she began to really become a person are the hardest parts of this ending.

So I sympathize with Holden — leaving, then starting over, is always hard. And, I’m grateful for the gifts afforded us during these two years that could have been much, much harder. I’m down to less than two days remaining here. Instead of waiting for that nice goodbye feeling, I’m savoring the unique and the mundane moments which cobbled together made such a strange and wonderful experience here.

My earliest memories of answering “What do you want to be when you grow up?” involved moving vehicles. Train Conductors were always getting off train cars just before they stopped or just after they started moving again, which I thought was so cool. The Garbage Man had such a great job: he hung off the back of the truck with one hand, then got to smash all that stuff into little bits by pulling on that little lever. I imagined Firefighters, especially those who held onto the back of the engine, were always having the greatest time on their rides.

Memories of these dream jobs came back to me last week as I stood in the open doorway of a local bus in route 1 outside of Chiang Rai, Thailand. This green machine, perhaps 40 years old and at eight-fifths capacity, had no other sitting or standing room for passengers. I held onto the back of the seat in front of me with my right hand, the handle on the outside of the bus door with my left hand, and hugged the retracted according glass door, lashed open with bungee cords. I peeked my head out of doorway as we motored down the highway, taking in the unique and the ordinary along the side of the road. It was thrilling.

My grandparents had an RV camping trailer that they used on their road trips (I love, by the way, that my grandparents, who were both born before 1920, crushed the #camplife meme two generations before Instagram made it hip). They parked the 30 foot trailer in their driveway, and I spent hours playing on the step outside one of the doors. There was a retractable metal step, which when extended into the locked step position, felt a lot like the moveable stairs that the Amtrak conductors unfurled when coming to a station. My grandfather also owned a conductors metal step stool, which was legendary by itself (his father had been an actual Union Pacific Conductor in Wyoming and Utah in the early 1900s). I had my routine for approaching the imaginary station set: I opened the door to the trailer, pulled the steel step out, and, holding onto the handle on the outside of the door frame, leaned away from my train car and towards the platform in that iconic conductor pose. I practiced grabbing the step stool from inside and smoothly putting it into position below the step on the ground. After my imaginary passengers boarded, I gave an “all aboard” call and reversed the process.

These memories were visceral — a few minutes standing in the open doorway of an old bus and I was right back in that driveway.

Niaux Grotte Bison, c. 14,000 y.a. http://prehistoart.canalblog.com/

Last week, I saw cave drawings that are 14,000 years old. This is the Tarascon Basin in southern France, not so far from the border with Spain. Bison, ibex, horses, and cave lion images on the gallery walls in the Niaux Caves offer an alternate experience to the typical French gallery visit one might expect in a country with so many art displays.

Seeing these cave paintings was nothing short of thrilling. These are the oldest forms of human art or writing I’ve ever laid my eyes on, and the place where they occur is spectacular — these figures appear more than 800 meters from the entrance to a cave network that’s more that 2 kilometers in length; the darkness in the deep subterranean caverns is darker than pitch black. These ancient and anonymous artists did not live in these caves; they walked, with torches as their light source, all the way into this particular place to create, to pay homage to these animals.

I’m pumped about the backstory here: the bison, the ibex, and the horse were all common animals in Europe 14,000 years ago, but not in the caves, mountains or valleys in this part of what’s called France today. The animals resided in the plains, which are relatively far from this narrow valley. These folks would have been semi-nomadic, which means that they were likely in contact with these species in flat-lands at some part of the year, then they retreated to this area for a different time of year. While they resided in huts or tents that were easily constructed, they plunged deep into this cave network to create this art. Of course, this means they had to find this cave network, explore it, then decide that this chamber was the place for their masterpieces. I love imagining what they must have been thinking when they decided that this was the place.

“Wispy” bison, Niaux Grotto. http://www.grottes-en-france.com

The drawings are made from charcoal, which means the organic matter can be carbon tested — that’s how experts know that most of the drawings are 14,000 years old (there’s another set of drawings that were created 1,000 years later). The images are literal, not abstract, but show a sophisticated range of stylistic techniques. For example, natural contours of the rock were used to give some of the bison two-dimensional features, and in other places the horns of some of the animals are stylized in a wispy sort of way; additionally, some of the bison images are layered on top of each other. There is no abstraction and little change in the portrayal of the bison from 14,000 years ago and the bison drawn 13,000 years ago. Thinking of the art that we bring home to our parents to put on the refrigerator when we’re kids, I wonder what these artists’ mothers thought of this display. They must have been proud.

I used to teach ancient history to 9th graders. My class content included examining some of the reasons for the Neolithic Revolution, the time when humans transitioned from nomadic lifestyles to living in settled communities. The catalyst for this event — perhaps the biggest shift in human history — was development of technology that enabled humans to control the environment and create permanent living spaces. There are a couple of theories for what caused humans to settle down where they did. The most common theory is that humans settled in places where they could consistently create agricultural harvests. Examples abound: settlements in the Nile River Valley, the Yangtze River, Mesopotamia. There’s another theory that has fewer advocates, but is intriguing; humans settled in places where it was easiest to have access to the materials needed to express their beliefs of the afterlife. In other words, they lived in places that made it easier to worship. I first read about this theory in this Smithsonian article about the village in Catalhoyuk, modern-day Turkey.

In the mountainous part of southern France, villages, hamlets, towns, and small cities spread through the valleys, and are perched on top of craggy hillsides. The Pyrenees Mountains begin in earnest very close to here, and these population centers have long histories as basecamps for people who were preparing to cross the mountains. Human settlements in this area might be small in size, but they too have a long history, and perhaps it should not be a surprise that the earliest denizens of this region left behind artistic expressions of their lives. Clearly, the bison and ibex (the most common subjects) were important to these people. The images they look just like the animals they represent. I take this to mean that the observers knew their subjects well. Think about this: the ideas and the technique to depict them were so strong that the artists held them in their minds all the way from the plains to this mountain region, and all the way into the deep darkness of this cave network. Maybe it should not be a surprise, yet I stood there in amazement — at the articulation of the figures, by the location, by the age of the drawings.

In the week that has passed, I’ve been into six medieval churches (and stood outside five others), all of which commanded devotion and inspired belief with the size and grandeur of the building. The architects intended on impressing those who walked in the doors of these enormous piles of stone, brick, mortar, wood, and glass. To the casual tourist and even the non-believer of today, walking into the holy sanctuaries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries provokes a deep breath at least, and often something closer to awe. The architects of the medieval churches designed structures to honor what they believed was the most important element in their lives. Their ancient ancestors knew something similar: that the animals of the plains were so critical to their existence that they were the only thing drawn on these dark walls, so deep in the ground, so far from the lands where the animals roamed. I saw this with my eyes, and I still have a hard time imagining their thinking.