Liz Beatty // Host
Native Traveler Blog
Native Traveler Blog

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me resolvi

me resolvi

I open my eyes to a dim room and feel the all-too-familiar sting in my throat. I can’t swallow. My muscles tense as I shift in bed and I close my eyes, hoping I might be able to fall back asleep and will it away. I can’t.

Across the room, my window opens to the courtyard of this building in Old Havana, and I hear the neighborhood waking up.

I went out dancing last night, but it’s not a hangover that’s debilitated me. It’s probably tonsillitis. I ask my friend to tell the lady downstairs that I’m unwell and ask which hospital I should go to.

Turns out, the lady downstairs has a different idea, and it appears I am in her hands. Cubans have their own way of "resolving" problems and getting things done in a country so short on resources for so long. These are the surprises of everyday life post-Fidel-Castro that go on behind the vibrant Instagram shots. And I’ve come to know firsthand these unexpected ways from the moment I arrived just over two weeks ago.

Walk This Way

Walk This Way

I wake early to birds and make my way to the kitchen where my friend is heading out the door to drive her teen daughter to school.

Drive? I raise my eyebrows. The weather is gorgeous. We’re in California, for heaven’s sake.

“Nobody walks in LA,” my friend laughs. It’s my first visit to her place, this home they rent in Hermosa Beach, with views of the Pacific if you look out the second floor window.

Nobody walks?

I lace up my shoes, the screen door slapping shut behind me.

I Lost My Job, My Marriage, and My Home, So I Climbed Kilimanjaro

I Lost My Job, My Marriage, and My Home, So I Climbed Kilimanjaro

Picture this:

It’s 2am and I’m in a tent pitched on snow. I haven’t felt my fingers or toes in a few days. My head hurts. I’m coming down with bronchitis. I’m clutching a hot water bottle inside my sleeping bag but still shivering too hard to sleep. At least I’m excited to be getting this journey over with tomorrow.

Finding the Hygge

Finding the Hygge

Ah, those inscrutable Danes—bold yet reserved, stylish yet unaffected, pragmatic yet mysterious in a steely Nordic way. Even their most cherished of holiday regions feels infused with bits of contradiction. The Jutland Peninsula is in many ways Danish cottage country, but it’s also a window to the sort of oblique Danish sensibility. Our road trip exploring this ethereal North Atlantic strand began in Billund—the hometown of LEGO. It was a few years ago now, but here’s the story of that journey.

Hidden Treasure

Hidden Treasure

As we come down out of the clouds and the islands of the Bahamas stretch out beneath us, window shades go up and our necks strain to look out the windows of our airplane. Cara and I are flying over Grand Bahama, then New Providence, the big island of Andros to our right, and then the Cays of Exuma are stretched out in a line ahead of us. It looks like a painter's palette down there, strokes of cream-coloured sand bars and crystal blue water punctuated with the dark, lush green of the inner islands. I know I’m not alone in the excitement I’m feeling. My clothes feel too heavy. My head, lighter. My life from four hours ago in cold, wet Toronto begins to feel like an archaic mainland memory, sluggish and grey. Our wide eyes take it in from above, and I can’t wait to walk out onto the tarmac and feel Exuma all around me.

This Strange Soil

This Strange Soil

Other places may make the claim, but Seoul is truly the city that never sleeps. Everywhere people are walking, running, talking, laughing, eating. LCD billboards flash with fluid colour like digital oil slicks. Punchy Korean pop ballads blare from open shop doors. Old women shout to one another over sidewalk fruit stalls. Metro trains thunder overhead and rumble underfoot. Cars and buses whip past at breakneck speed, scooters threading their way recklessly between the bigger vehicles and stirring up a flurry of horns in their wake. Every sight and sound adds to the hum of energy and urgency that seems to permeate this city.

Fresh off the plane and entirely alone, I am overwhelmed. No amount of research could have prepared me for the reality of the situation now facing me—an entire year living and working in this heaving, flashing beast of a metropolis.

Ulster Roots

Ulster Roots

My 85-year-old mother’s slumbering inhalations sound like a slow, breathy metronome. In the next seat, my son Mack looks on in genuine, 11-year-old wonder about ten inches from her open mouth. Despite the crush and chatter of passengers settling in for this flight to Dublin, Mom has fallen deeply, blissfully asleep just minutes since our boarding.

My husband Tim exhales with exasperation, standing with bag in hand and peering into the already packed overhead bin. I know the feeling, but not about carry-on.

There is no sugar coating this. Transporting five people with birthdates spanning seven decades across the Atlantic, then squeezing them into a mid-sized Renault hatchback to drive 650 kilometres of remote northern Irish coastline on some ancestry scavenger hunt—well, it’s one big, messy ordeal. Still, if there’s such a thing as shared genetic memory, the idea of our three generations summoning it together just seemed important. And with every sip of my un-chilled airline chardonnay, I’m feeling more hopeful it is.

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