Feeling Ungrateful (22)

We find Rita in the kitchen when we get back. She is sitting at the table with her bare feet up on a chair reading something on her cell phone as always, a cup of instant coffee in front of her. She raises her eyes from the phone as soon as she hears us and asks, “Where were you?”

“We went for a walk,” Vera answers before I have a chance to say anything. “Are you ready to leave?”

“Did you hear the news? There was a rocket attack from Gaza,” Rita ignores Vera’s question and immediately answers her own. 

“Yes, I already talked to everyone,” Vera responds in a tone that signals she is not particularly interested in pursuing the topic. For my part, I assume that “everyone” refers to the immediate family back in Israel. 

“Sigal is mad. She’s stuck at home with the kids,” Rita tries to up the drama, but Vera is not taking the bait. “I know, I talked to her,” she says. “Now put some shoes on and let’s go.”

At this moment, Anna enters the kitchen. “Something happened?” she asks, sensing that the conversation is revolving around something more interesting than breakfast. The cloud that surrounded her yesterday seems to have lifted a bit. Maybe the situation with her daughter was resolved somehow.

“Hamas shot 200 Kassams this morning and some fell not far from my parents’ apartment,” Rita reports and turns to her mom. “Dad said it sounded really close.” 

“Is he OK?” Anna asks. After living in Israel for nearly thirty years, she knows how to react to these events. Nothing is a big deal, until it is.

“Yes, he’s OK, everyone’s OK,” Vera intervenes, a bit impatient. “Now put your shoes on and let’s go.”

“I’m going to get my stuff,” Rita gives up and rises from the chair. “You all packed?” she asks me. 

“Yes, she is,” Vera answers for me. “We already took everything downstairs. Give me the key so we can load the car,” she adds before I have a chance to say anything, again, which is perfectly fine with me. I don’t want to sound pushy or disinterested or anything in between. I am just tagging along, staying out of trouble. 

Rita hands her mother the car key, which hangs on a large ring. In addition to the other keys she brought from home, there are all kinds of tchotchkes hanging from this key chain, making it one of Rita’s most recognizable possessions. Just like her bejeweled cell phone, huge silver rings, long earrings, and several necklaces that always, always adorn her person.

“I want to find a place to have real coffee,” Rita calls after us as we descend the stairs.

“OK, OK,” Vera says, more to herself than to her daughter.

Anna, who stayed behind to collect her food from the fridge, joins us at the bottom of the stairs and helps Vera load her stuff into the car. When Rita finally arrives with her bags, Vera mentions the little bakery we passed on our walk.

“We can go there and see if they have coffee,” she suggests after Rita locks the house, puts her carry-on in the trunk, and arranges all the other luggage around it.

“Let’s go check it out,” Rita decides, and we all march alongside her to the bakery. 

There are no tables and chairs inside the bakery, which means that we are going to have to look for a different place. Rita decides to buy some pastries anyway. Maybe she can eat them later in the car or wherever else she chooses. 

I go outside to wait for them on the sidewalk and realize that I am having a WTF moment. I want to be positive and grateful that I am healthy, that I can afford a trip to Europe without having to worry about how I will pay rent afterward or keep my job, that I don’t have to figure out how to get to places by myself or book a hotel room, but too many questions cloud my attempt to stay positive. How did I get myself into this? What am I doing here? Where am I, anyway? Why am I such a blob? In short, WTF?

After three days in Portugal, I feel like I’ve had enough of being a tourist and traveling with some women I barely know and don’t enjoy being around. I have seen castles and churches, statues of privileged men, azulejos and sardine cans; I tasted cholesterol-laden pastries and traveled in a tuk-tuk operated by a Portuguese prick who called himself a tour guide because he memorized a few facts about the history of Lisbon and knew where he could park without getting a ticket. But all these experiences do not make me feel any different. Except for receiving the confirmation that yes, there is a world out there that looks and behaves and speaks differently from where I come from. But my person has not been affected by the experience of witnessing this obvious fact.

I know I sound like an ungrateful bitch. But after a few days of traveling in a country I don’t know at all with a woman who calls herself a tour guide and works as one, I am more opposed than ever to this activity called tourism. Yes, it provides employment and income to many people, but what is tourism really? What does it do for the soul? Nothing. Tourists don’t go to a country to really learn about it. They don’t mix with the population, they don’t learn the language, they don’t participate in any activity that is meaningful to locals or even to themselves, like studying the history of the place, or its geography or geology or literature. It’s just another facet of modern consumerism. Consuming views and food and souvenirs, and getting little in return. Especially those tourists who get herded from one place to another in those large air-conditioned tour buses and then taken to hotels that most of the local population never set foot in. 

After all, what is the difference between remodeling a kitchen and being a tourist in a foreign country? In my opinion, there is none. It’s all about spending money on hotels, rental cars, restaurants, and admission to whatever the tourism ministry (or UNESCO in some cases) decided to turn into a coveted tourist site. It’s exploitative, voyeuristic, and patronizing to the local people. And it’s probably bad for the environment too, since tourists hog the limited resources of the places they visit.

I mean, why do tourists from all over the world crowd in front of the Mona Lisa, for example? There’s so much good art everywhere, but people pay thousands to stand in front of this painting so later they can tell themselves and others that they saw it in person. So what? What effect does it really have on them? Am I a better person because I saw the Mona Lisa in person (I didn’t) and not on YouTube? I don’t think so. It might even be better to see it in one of those fancy coffee table books than to travel all the way to France and be subjected to all kinds of scams and pickpockets and long lines and scabies-infested blankets and bedbugs and overly-priced restaurants, all for the privilege of pushing your way into a museum and taking a selfie with La Gioconda in the background.

Thinking about museums, last time I was in Rio I took the metro to the Museum of Tomorrow, which Cariocas (Rio natives) are so proud of because it’s so, well, futuristic. It was one of the few touristy things I agreed to do because my friend kept asking me every day what I was planning to do, and I didn’t want to appear lazy or incurious. One day I said I’d go to the museum, hoping to make her happy and me look like a good person and maybe even profound. It was on a weekend so I assumed that the line would be a little longer than on a regular day, but not demoralizing. When I got out of the metro, I noticed three women climbing the stairs behind me and I knew, instinctively, that they would ask me how to get to the museum, because in Rio, the moment I stepped out to the street someone always asked me how to get somewhere. 

As soon as we all reached street level, they asked me in Spanish where the museum was. I showed them the direction to the museum and we started talking. They found out that I was originally from Israel, and I found out that they were two sisters with their eighty-year-old mother on a trip to Brazil for her birthday. I also found out that they were Jewish, from Argentina, and that one of the sisters worked at the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires and taught Israeli folk dances among other things. Without thinking twice, I started to sing (in Hebrew) and dance a simple folk tune that I still remembered: “Od nashuva el nigun atik…” clap, clap, clap, right, clap, left “ve’hazemer yif ve-ye’e-rav.” One of the sisters joined me and we had a fabulous time dancing and singing and talking about things common to us, four Jewish women meeting on the street in Rio. They practically adopted me. They even insisted that I go with them to a clean bathroom they had found, where there was no line. Needless to say, I did not visit the museum that day and neither did they. The line to the museum was beyond catastrophic and we decided that there were better things to do in life than standing in line for hours to see something. Especially when you were eighty.

Strangely enough, this is one of my fondest memories from Rio. Connecting with people. Laughing. Doing something unexpected and feeling almost stupid because of it. The museums can wait, and so can the churches, the palaces, and all the other places tourists flock to because this is what they are supposed to do.