Routes Magazine Volume 2, Issue 2

T H E T I N Y B O O K O F T R AV E L S TO R I E S Routes Travel & Exploration Magazine

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T H E T I N Y B O O K O F T R AV E L S TO R I E S

Routes Travel & Exploration Magazine

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PHOTO TEAM: Bridget Braley ’18 Joyce Lee ’20 WRITERS: Kate Brouns ’17 Olivia Box ’17 Kahini Muttsudi ’20 Olivia Paradice ’18 Grecia Santos ’20 Alex Witonsky ’17 COPY-EDITORS: Estella Brenneman ’20 Julie Flanagan ’17

Victoria Bullivant ’18

PETALS: RACHEL ALATALO ’18..................................................................... 6

Alexis Stroemer ’18

NEW YORK CITY: KAHINI MUTSUDDI ’20................................................. 8

Hannah McLean ’19

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND: TIM HARTEL ’18................................................... 10

Jacqui Young ’17

REDISCOVERING YOUR HOMETOWN: OLIVIA PARADICE ’18............ 12

Ali Zildjian ’19

NINGBO, CHINA: DAN TU ’20........................................................................ 14

MEDIA COORDINATORS: Shelby Castillo ’19 Lilly Yangchen ’20 LAYOUT TEAM Julia Gorlovetskaya ’19 Helen Sternberg ’20 Nicole Yoshimura ’20 4

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

MOROCCO: ALEX BRANTL ’20..................................................................... 16 UPON THE BRINK: ALETA NICOLE BROWN ’17....................................... 18 FROM DUCKFAT: H. REECE THOMPSON ’18............................................. 20 THE MELTING POINT: SOPHIE GAULKIN ’17........................................... 22 PHOTO CONTEST FINALISTS........................................................................ 24 WIEHNACHTSMÄRKTE AM BODENSEE: ALEXIS STROEMER ’18........ 30 5

Petals Rachel Alatalo ’18

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The sun was just starting to set, pulling a lavender gauze across the late July sky when I walked through the gate into the botanical garden. The sounds of my feet brushing through the dense, plush grass and a distant chorus of birdsong mingled with water vapor in the humid air. After a few moments of solitary wandering, I came across an apple tree. Most of its leaves were green, except

for one branch, broken off and leaning at an angle against its former notch in the trunk.

The branch, left waiting to be swept away by the industrious grounds crew in the early hours of the morning, was still covered in clusters of delicate white flowers. They looked almost foamy at this distance.

They must have frothed like whitecaps in the breeze when they were still suspended from the tree.

They were probably locked in bloom because the branch broke off before the petals could fall and be replaced in rank by leaves. But as I stared at that wispy collection of stalled blossoms, I couldn’t shake the thought that the branch, spangled with pure white flowers among green neighbors, had fallen under the impossible weight of its own beauty.

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New York City Kahini Mutsuddi ’20

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In New York, we woke up to the smell of freshly-roasted coffee and the soft patter of rain on cobblestones. We slipped into a tucked-away bakery, and watched as the world passed under stormy skies. The city could only be described in vibrant colours and redolent scents. The blurs of mustard that fly past the window as taxis rush through narrow streets. The deep red of lipstick stains left on milky coffee cups. The waft of stale smoke that accompanies the glowing, burnt orange end of a cigarette.

The emerald vines of ivy that creep along the burgundy brick of expensive townhouses, striking against gray gloomy skies. The inevitable smell of urine that made us scrunch up our noses as we tiptoed by. New York isn’t my first love—London, my dearest, I shall return—nor am I its, but simply thinking of our whirlwind romance leaves shivers down my spine.

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Brighton, England l ’18

Tim

te Har

sometimes i forget i’m so far away. i see the ground, the asphalt Still dried old skin, the cars still with their chrome and white, the people still with their suits and their coats and their hijabs and their bleached blond hair. here, my comfort pentagram, doesn’t feel foreign; its contours aren’t augmented or misshaped, twisted-tied-turned. but then I Look up And see something. In the trees, something off. The shape is too pointed or maybe the trunks are too thin or too plentiful, conifers that seem too far abstracted from a Christmas tree, cousins removed many times over. at those moments i see the tree through a new language e(xo)rotic. it feel like i’m on safari in some terrifically new yet impossibly ancient graveyard, a place stuck somewhere between the nineties and ten years from now, where “Friends” and future mix, the no mans land of not quite now. but how could london ever be now? it loves it’s past too much, the buildings are far too short, it’s queen too old, food so nude, the street’s so narrow, the people too too not me. Look Look Up/look down/comfortable/ neurotic never anxious/seething/still/gaps/ full with bone in Brighton there are so many bath houses, it’s like a 70’s gay porno

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Rediscovering Your Hometown

Oliv

ia P

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arad

ice ’

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I come from a small town and if there’s one thing that’s the same about all small towns, it’s that the residents know the area inside out. No nook or cranny goes unexplored, and no rock unturned. Before long, the town becomes like an old jacket —not exactly the latest fashion, but well worn, comfortable, and above all familiar.

I’ve lived in the same town since I was 2 years old, and I know it like the back of my hand, better even. Or at least, I thought I did.

On the drive up to New Hampshire for fall break, my friend—LA born and raised, a city girl through and through —commented, “I’ve never seen this many trees before!”

Huh, I though. Yeah, I guess there are a lot of trees.

At another point, she asked, “Why are there so many antique stores?”

Well, I’m not sure. They’ve long since faded into the background for me, but now that I’m looking, there are quite a few.

And on and on this went, throughout our 4 day trip. She would point something

out, something obvious, and I would realize that I hadn’t really noticed it for years. Big things, like the striking color of the leaves and the mountains towering above us, and little things, like the ‘moose crossing’ signs and above all, the quaint and rustic nature of it all. All things that I have long since taken for granted.

My relationship with my hometown is complex.

I’m one of those small town people who claims that they’re ‘getting out of this place and never looking back’, and that hasn’t changed. But what has changed is how I view it — not anymore as just a trap, a place I have to escape from, but a place with its own beauty and merits, things that I will be losing when I leave it behind. All it took was seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

And yes, as I have finally realized, there are a lot of trees.

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Ningbo, China Dan Tu ’20

FA R L E F T: T h e s h oppi n g c e nt e r s i n Ni n g b o t y pi c a l l y h av e m ore t h a n t h re e f l o or s , t h e re fore on e c a n e a s i l y f i n d spectacles looking d ow n f rom t h e t op s t or y.

L E F T: A bu s a rou n d 8 pm , i n t h e m i d d l e of a t r a f f i c j a m .

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Morocco Alex Brantl ’18

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One look at my transcript and one notices that I took a lot of language classes during my first four semesters at Hamilton.

Among French, Arabic, and Latin, I spent a fair amount of time in college declining nouns, conjugating verbs, and muddling through vocabulary lists. Using those languages, however, was always reserved for the classroom.

Then I decided to spend the fall semester of my junior year in Morocco, where I have found myself living in multiple languages. Morocco is a fascinating and frustrating country for a variety of reasons, including language.

Wikipedia tells you there are two official languages in Morocco – Arabic and Berber, but that information fails to account for the French, Spanish, Darija Arabic, Fusha Arabic, and English languages that weave through daily life in Morocco.

While living in Morocco provided me with an unparalleled opportunity to try multiple dialects of Arabic as well as French, I came to realize with my Moroccan homestay family that the most important communication that we exchange doesn’t come from language.

It comes from the eye rolls my homestay sister gives me when her mom won’t stop

lecturing her, from seeing my homestay dad walk around the house in the Hamilton t-shirt that I gave him when I first moved in, and from the kisses on my cheek that my homestay mom gives me when I come back from weekend trips. In a country where a single conversation can take place in multiple languages, I have learned that sometimes the most important communications are not spoken.

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Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

Upon the Brink Days of stagnant living lying idle day and night.

Twenty-four hours and time repeats itself.

A déjà vu of seconds refusing to fly by.

With limping eyes and rough hands I look at fate;

Frictionless as space

Inevitable as death The new unknowns are leading me away; changing the definitions of night and day, I follow the path in time.

I end up in a home astray.

Aleta Nicole Brown ’17 18

Alexis Stroemer ’18

Then the clock unlocks, and all in one day, thousands of miles away, it starts to tick and tock, slowly pulling curiosity through dusty eyelids, where each moment is a new morning and a fresh dew covers my face.

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from duckfat

storm ship devour light eat the savory oyster sky fully satisfy appetite lunch like going out of a fast satisfy through morning that bitter sordid symphony Kittery, ME

h. reece thompson ’18 20

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The Melting Point (Glaciers Aren’t That Cool) Sophie Gaulkin ’17

In Iceland, you can be on the top of a volcano and inside of a glacier in the same day. But, that doesn’t mean you should.

The glacier tourism industry in Iceland has the potential to warn people about global warming and move them to action. Hundreds of feet below the Earth, inside a glacier, the guides will tell you about the melting rate of the ice. Not that they have to—on certain paths, the dripping water from the human-made ice ceiling will be educational enough.

They will tell you about this tragedy, all while leading you past a glacial chapel in which people come to get married, past flashing rainbow lights they dug under the ice, and past several heated fixtures. After all, they dug out this glacier for us to be there. It’s difficult to take them seriously with this hypocrisy.

According to them, the glaciers are so large that this destination is really just a drop in the bucket. But we could say that any collective action to combat global warming—recycling, limiting water use, turning down the heat, walking instead of driving, to name a few—is just another drop in the bucket, too.

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shouldn’t

be

cool

to

go

inside

of

glaciers,

and

soon,

it

won’t

be.

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T H E L A K E D I S T R I C T, E N G L A N D

MERZOUGA, MOROCCO

T I M H A R T E L ’ 1 8 : A n e pi c t r a g e d y, r av a g e d by it s ow n b e aut y a n d a g r i c u lt u re , t h e l a n d s c ap e i s a c at h e d r a l of l i v i n g s t on e .”

A L E X B R A N T L ’ 1 8 : The Sahara Desert is a playground for the boy in this photo. And for one day out of my four months in Morocco, as we slid down the dunes and did cartwheels in the sand, the Sahara Desert was my playground too.

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M T. C O O K , N E W Z E A L A N D J I L L I A N D O N Z E ’ 1 8 : Ne w Z e a l a n d , y ou a re pi c tu re p e r f e c t . T h a n k s f or t h e i n c re d i b l e s c e n e r y, t h e a m a z i n g h i k e s , t h e l e g e n d a r y ro a d - t r ip s , t h e a d re n a l i n e f i l l e d a d v e ntu re s , t h e i n c omp a r a b l e b e aut y, a n d of c o u r s e t h e p e op l e . Fo u r m ont h s w e nt by t o o f a s t , but I’ l l b e b a c k . Unt i l t h e n , Cheers!

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C A S A D E L S O L , S E G O V I A , S PA I N AU D R E Y N A D L E R ’ 1 8 : My d ay t r ip t o S e g ov i a , Sp a i n w a s t h e p e r fe c t bre a k f rom t h e hu s t l e a n d bu s t l e of t h e Ma d r i d c apit a l .

I s p e nt t h e d ay e x p l or i n g c at h e d r a l s , c a s t l e s , a n d a qu e du c t s , s a mp l i n g l o c a l d i s h e s ( i n c lu d i n g a t r a d it i on a l s u c k l i n g pi g , c o c h i n i l l o – t h i s m i g ht h av e b e e n t h e m o s t a d v e ntu rou s p a r t of my d ay ) , a n d w a n d e r i n g a b out t h e c o b b l e s t on e s t re e t s .

For s u c h a s h or t d ay i n s u c h a s m a l l c it y, I l e a r n e d t on s a b out S e g ov i a’s r i c h h i s t or y a n d c u ltu re .

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Wiehnachtsmärkte am Bodensee Konstanz, Deutschland

Alexis Stroemer ’18

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ROUTES volume ii

issue i

TRAVEL

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