Trip

2/7/2025

Eve

2/7/2025 06:53:02 pm

David
I found peace on a tiny alcove on a tiny island off the south-southwestern coast of Puerto Rico. Clear water, shallow water, and clean sand. Trees everywhere providing shade. I visited this same spot for years with friends, family, and my partner. The earthquakes in that part of Puerto Rico have raised the water levels and this tiny alcove on this tiny island is currently disappearing. It will "sink" deeper in the next few years.

Daniela
this last line...
let's hear more! :)

Daniela
"I love NY but I would never move there. I wouldn't be seen as a human," said by our casa particular host, a 30-something Afrocubano, in Vinales, Cuba (July 2016, at the same time Trump 'closes the door' to Cuba)

Tricia
Last year was the first time I slept on a plane where the I didn't have to ask a stranger next to me to wake me up because of ear pressure pain. But now, they're a stranger again.

Daniela
These encounters, daily, on the subway. Knowing smiles. No words.

Yes -- what do we do with that?

Rasha
But now they're a stranger again. <3

Yes. So many subway/transportation stories. A couple of favorite moments:
1. Singing Happy Birthday to a Yankees player after a game, on the 4 train.
2. When that woman stood up and walked HEAD FIRST into a pole and NOBODY LAUGHED! Until she got off, with many people guiding her around the poll. Doors closed and the whole car cried laughing.

John
After spending the night on the Zagreb train station floor, we lugged our backpacks to the currency window as soon as it opened to exchange our last 30 francs to get breakfast.

Michael
We were on a Middle School overnight trip in the country. Our challenge was to create a boat/raft out of barrels, rope, and plywood. I took off my life vest and jumped into the lake, not realizing how heavy wet jeans and soaked sneakers are...

Rasha
Oh no!

Kelly
"Are you KIDDING me?" my student sobbed, "The amount of money that I paid for this trip, and they can't even cook a GREEN BEAN right?"

Ileana
hiking in the mud and leaves and trees in New Zealand; will I ever travel again?

Sarah
I ask myself this too... in part--the pandemic...in part-the coming responsibility of motherhood...

Sarah
Visited the Justice Department with my 6th grade class. Immediately learned that justice is not for Black and brown kids.

Daniela
I'm so curious to see this 'scene' -- is this something the kids realized or you or both? What did they react to and how?

Rasha
I was a 6th grader on my senior trip. We were sightseeing and the sky turned green and walls of water started coming down. Our class, from East Harlem, and an all white class from somewhere, were ushered by our teachers into the closest building, the Justice Department. You can imagine what a bunch of soaking wet 6th graders running in from the rain sounded like. Within 2 minutes, 2 tall white security guard came over to tell our teacher we couldn't be there. Not a word to the white class, just as excited and just as noisy. Our teacher, Delia Susarret - tiny Puerto Rican woman - let those security guards know that that she wouldn't be taking us back out into the storm. They told her she had no choice. She told them they could arrest her if they chose to, but we wouldn't be leaving. We stayed until the rain died down.

Delia was a force to be reckoned with. And a big inspiration in my teaching.

Eve
Oh, my goodness. A story that needs to be out there and visible!

Daniela
a moment that has stuck with you. definitely worth putting out there. (walls of water -- lovely)

Eve
Stuck in a storm under a leaky bus shelter in rural Cuba with a pedicab driver and a mother and daughter. The pedicab driver put on a radio, the mother pulled out a bottle of rum, and I got my first salsa lesson.

Sarah
I want to talk about our Cuba stories!

Eve
Hahahaha... we could do a whole page called Cuba

Eve
Crossed the Rio Grande, barefoot. (In another lifetime, politically.)

Eve
Swam in the South China Sea, ate pineapples and soup and rice crackers sold to us by women (some were just girls) walking up and down the beach with their heavy loads in hundred-plus heat hoping to make a sale or two that day. The soup lady had one spoon, who knows who had used it already. We used it, too, stifling our concerns.

Rasha
Less likely that you'd use that spoon today.

Eve
*(See Idea Lab themed memories activity)
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Eve Becker

Lost on a hike in the dessert in Utah with rattlers and imminent flash flooding*
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Eve Becker

Chased by a bull on a hike in Andalucia*
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Eve Becker

Lost on a hike with a student for six hours. Sun began setting...*

Trip

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