No pressure to document my thoughts

But yet here I am

It’s a strangely liberating experience to go on holiday and not post a single picture to social media. It puts a perspective on that holiday I may have forgotten since the last time I travelled with a Kodak camera with a film of only 24 shots. I tried to stay in the moment, I committed things to memory and I felt almost no pressure to document my thoughts. Very 1980’s and a strong recommend for future holidays.

But I can’t come back from Eastern Europe and not share a few thoughts that stayed with me and may even be worth remembering.

I am a Jewish woman, educated at a Jewish school in South Africa and schooled on the Holocaust since I was, frankly much too young. But there is something about seeing the homes where people were taken from, seeing the ghettos where Jews were forced to live, where they couldn’t work in most jobs, couldn’t go to university and were ultimately killed just because they were Jewish that hit me with a ferocity so hard it made everything I had learned in the text books seem like a story about unreal characters.

The shoes on The Danube

Witnessing the Shoes on the Danube and hearing the stories of how thousands of Jews were shot into the river, after being forced to remove their shoes which could be used as a commodity, has left a mark on me I cannot erase. I cried to my husband about how such cruelty could have taken place so recently and tried to pretend it could never happen again. And the very next morning I read about the brutal killing of thousands of villagers in Sudan. I have no words. Just a head full of shocking images and the frustration of not knowing how to think about it.

Huge big segue so that we can all breathe (and yes I do feel guilty about that so keeping the Sudanese and everyone else affected by violence firmly in mind.)

I loved the European dogs. I love that they go to restaurants and to work and on the train and to concerts and they just live busy little lives alongside their owners. This may not be on any Must-See list you have encountered, but if you ever want to dog watch you should spend some time in Vienna. There was even a dog who worked at our hotel. As you can see from the picture she’s not your typical ‘working dog’.

Penny, not your typical working dog

While we were in Vienna we went to the Natural History Museum and I discovered an untapped (in me) awe of nature. It was a humbling experience seeing the history of rocks . Stay with me I really am talking about stones (and minerals and crystals) . We think that AI is amazing and technology is mind-blowing but honestly nature is fucking miraculous and seeing literally thousands of rocks that come from the earth unaided by man, or a 3-D printer or some scientists in a laboratory made me have faith in the earth (if not the people) .

I am the luckiest human on earth to have seen so many cities on such a magnificent trip (Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, and Vienna) and, even though we ended the trip in the US, which is not my country of choice to travel to, going across the world to celebrate the wedding of a good friend’s daughter is the greatest luxury in the world.

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Obviously I read a bit on my holiday so straight into book chat.

Well This Is Awkward

I started reading this book on the first leg of a long plane trip and I am kind of glad that is all I had downloaded on my kindle to take with me. I absolutely loved the beginning and thought I had the whole feel of the book set up - young woman working in digital media, hectic life, dating, dealing with work colleagues etc.

And then the whole vibe of the book shifted when the main character Mairead, is put in charge of looking after her nine-year old niece. Everything about her former life shifts and so did the tone of the book, I thought that maybe I didn’t like this new direction, I hate to admit that if I wasn’t on a plane I might have put it down and picked up something else. But I am glad I didn’t.

Well This is Awkward tells the story of a woman who is suddenly put in charge of her niece after her militant activist sister has an accident and is not able to look after her daughter. The author never spells out whether the niece, Sunshine, has autism but she clearly has some atypical behaviours and the fact that this isn’t spelt out actually makes the book so much more charming ad thought provoking.

The book explores parenting, what it means to be a parent, how our parenting affects us and whether being a biological mother actually makes you a parent. I finished the book a while ago and I’m still thinking about Sunshine and the huge changes her aunt makes to give her a life of love.

Buckeye

I loved this book so much and it wasn’t even the story that got to me (although that happened as well) but it was the writing. Oh My God. Patrick can put together sentences in such a way that you’re just pulled into another world where the line between poetry and literature is almost imperceptible. I say this with caution as I am not a person who enjoys poetic literature but I am at a loss as to how else to describe how much this writing moved me. Put it this way, I FORCED my husband to read it and he didn’t even object.

Buckeye is a family saga in that it tells the story of two generations of two families in suburban America from the time of the second world war till the 1970’s. It is a deeply moving story about family and love, about honesty and loss, family secrets and the ravages of political turmoil. It is deeply rooted in the 1950’s but at the same time it is almost ‘comforting’ in how it reminds the reader that while we think the world is a terrible place right now, we have been through terrible times before. Horrendous, sad and unjust times - so what we are experiencing is not necessarily new but maybe our perspective is.

It’s a sad book, filled with secrets and loss but also full of love and empathy. It is one of those books that you will want to buy the hard copy of and keep it in a special place on your bookshelf.

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That’s it from me for now, the jet lag has won.

Until next time

Lana