deartraveller

My dearest Sara,

BEST CHRISTMAS EVER!!! I had so much fun! The four of us together have no match! Everything was absolutely delightful! My handmade decorations, the Christmas tree you and Gabriel brought, Robert’s delicious cooking (thank God he knew how to cook so well or we would have starved to death! I mean: not trying to diminish our cooking skills… Remember that week we spent, just the two of us, in Porto? Well we found out that our hamburgers and pasta are delicious, but not for seven days in a row!).

Anyway, can you guess where I am? Back in the Old Continent, all cured from our New Year’s Eve party, once again with my bag pack, my sunglasses and a map of…. (drum roll please) Austria! You know how much I love these countries, filled with history on their streets, where you smell culture everywhere; so you must imagine how much fun I’m having!

We’ve been here for a week now and have spent most of our time in Vienna and Salzburg. The landscape is so beautiful, green meadows in the bottom and at the top mountains filled with snow! Can you imagine waking up everyday and see this trough the window? That’s the dream!

The museums are incredible but the thing I had most fun visiting were the salt mines in Salzburg and the lakes that, despite freezing cold, are amazing!

On our fourth night here, Robert encountered one of his friends from high school who went to Madrid to study fashion and design. He was in Austria to work as one of the hosts of a Chanel fashion show and after a couple of beers in one of the city’s beer gardens, he offered us two invitations. The show took place in one of the most ancient castles of the city. The decoration was just perfect: classy with just the right amount of boldness. There were candles and an orchestra playing as the models went on the runway.

Awesome right? But I haven’t even told you about the best part of the night! Later, at the after show party, you won’t believe who I met! Remember that book I read last summer about the life of a woman from Somalia who became a model? “Desert Flower”? I met her! I met Waris Dirie! I was so excited, I couldn’t hide it! She was there as a special guest, since she used to model for Chanel and she has Austrian citizenship since 2005.

She is so kind! I asked her a billion questions and she answered every single one with a smile. She has a really touching life story. She was born in Somalia in 1965 into a nomadic family but at the age of thirteen she fled to Mogadishu to escape an arranged marriage to a much older man. A few years later, she moved to London where she worked for an uncle who had been appointed Somali ambassador and then at a local McDonald’s. That was when she began evening classes to learn English. “I was so lucky. By chance, I was discovered by Terence Donovan, a photographer who helped me get my first job as a model” - she told me – “From that point on, my career took off. I started being hired by top designers like Levi’s, Chanel, Revlon and L’Óreal and went to London, Milan, Paris, New York! I was on Elle, Glamour, Vogue!” Did you know she also appeared in some movies like James Bond? In 1997, at the height of her modeling career, she was interviewed for Marie Claire’s magazine and spoke, for the first time, about the female genital mutilation that she had undergone as a child. “What I said spread so quickly all over the world Érica, I was amazed. That was when I realized my voice could be heard in every corner of the world, and by every little girl in Somalia or anywhere else: they could hear me saying they don’t have to suffer no more because I’ll do my best to change things for them!” I admit tears came to my eyes as she said this. That same year she became a UN ambassador for the abolition of FGM. In 2009, along with François Henri Pinault and his wife, Waris founded the PPR Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights’. A year later, she was appointed Peace Ambassador for the Year of Peace and Security by the African Union. The Desert Dawn Foundation was also founded by her: it raises money for schools and clinics in Somalia.

Her achievements as a human rights activist earned her several prizes: the Woman of the Year Award in 2000 by Glamour Magazine, Women's World Award (2004) from former President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (2007) from the former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, among others.

Her work is truly an inspiration! I wish you had been here to meet her too. I told her all about you though, and of this journey of ours. She wished us both the best for the future. Well, I’ll write you next time something great happens! Don’t worry, you know me… That won’t take long.

Miss you a lot already,

Érica.

P.S.: Dear Sara,

Please start writing shorter (and more boring) letters to Érica. She gets so excited when she finds she has mail that she spends half the day reading and re-reading your letters (and writing and re-writing her answer). Meanwhile, I’m walking with a ghost all over Europe that only pretends to hear what I say. The days she gets your letters I’m like “Want some coffee?” and she answers “That shirt doesn’t look good with those shoes”! Just kidding (but keep this suggestion in mind!).

Love,

Robert.

Dear Erica,

One more Christmas and one more New Year's Eve has passed and with such joy I must say! Everything went so well, despite the freezing cold, that I think we must also celebrate the Chinese New Year!

The title of my post might remember you of a very well known song but it's actually what happened to me yesterday and you won't believe how idiotic my face looked when I noticed that it was replaying while I was awake. Funny how travel can happen only within our mind (although I never expected it would happen out of it!).

Everything started in L.A. (California hurray! Gabriel came visit his grandparents), the temperature was bearable and I decided to go for a run in the City of Angels while the californian boy was having lunch with the grandsons of the immigrants from Asia that have formed a number of significant Buddhist congregations (making the city home to the greatest variety of Buddhists in the world), his grandma and grandpa.

 The sleepy one is Gabriel's great great grandfather .

As I was running, or, to be accurate, jogging around the 9 million houses at Hancock Park I bumped against THE Angelina Jolie. Yes, the holder of the titles of: Most Beautiful Woman In The World, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, Special Envoy of High Comissioner António Guterres, Invited Speaker at the World Economic Forum, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and recipient of the Inaugural Humanitarian Award, the Global Humanitarian Award, the Freedom Award, the Citizen of the World Award. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres presented Jolie with a gold pin reserved for the most long-serving staff, in recognition of her decade as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and even King Norodom Sihamoni awarded Jolie Cambodian citizenship for her conservation work in the country! 

On her way to meet with some members of the Congress, this Super Woman is involved in a collision with a girl with headphones in her ears and a UNICEF's t-shirt. This is the moment when my idiotic face comes in. I got so confused that when she asked me if everything was alright, one could actually hear my brain matching the name with the face of the person that was talking to me. My idiotic face stayed on for one whole minute and it was one of the longest of my life. When I finnaly got to answer she had already looked at my t-shirt and smiled.

As Special Envoy, she represents the UNHCR and High Commissioner António Guterres at the diplomatic level and works to facilitate long-term solutions for people displaced by large-scale crises, so imagine what I was stepping ... you are correct, the papers to aks for founds to help Afghanistan and Somalia. Typical me, right?

Well, I knew that Angelina had established several charitable organizations and that she uses her public profile to promote humanitarian causes through the mass media, things like this can easily be found on Wikipedia, what I didn't knew was that the wife of Brad Pitt had the most amazing sense of humor, especially towards t-shirts! Either because of the awareness of worldwide humanitarian causes that she gained in Cambodia while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider or due to field visits to refugee camps around the world, that most certainly shocked her, she found that a t-shirt like mine would be a very good way to start a conversation with a fast girl that ruined, momently, Somalia's funds. So we entered her house, yeeees I'm serious, and after a shower and some new and expensive clothes that unfortunately I'll have to return we sat down to talk.

Through more than 30 countries like Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Pakistan, and paying for all her expenses, she met with countless internally displaced persons and refugees.

When I asked her what she had accomplished or hoped to accomplish with so much travelling anf fighting for third world countries she answered "Awareness of the plight of these people. I think they should be commended for what they have survived, not looked down upon. Angelina, and now mee, aims to visit what she terms "forgotten emergencies" - crises that media attention has shifted away from- for she added that "it appears to me that the second media stop allerting the world for the strugling of a few, all of us forget their basic rights and needs"

She is noted for not shying away from traveling to areas that are at war. I don't think that I could visit Darfur region of Sudan during the Darfur conflict or Chad during its civil war and Iraq during the Second Gulf War. And Afghanistan during the ongoing war and Libya during the Libyan revolution were absolutely out of question!

But now comes the funny part, on my dream she told me that her early field visits were chronicled in her book Notes from My Travels and that this travel through all that she has done so far should also be included! That is way my e-mail today sounds like a History class and you are so bored

by now dear Erica I'm the one who will right that part, but don't worry for my sanity, I'm going to a  party tonight with Gabriel on one arm and Angelina Jolie 2 metres close to the other!

I must get ready before Gabriel arrives or he will start with the monologue 'Why do women take so much time to dress a one piece dress?', one of these days I'll send you an excerpt, I'm sure you will find it quite amusing.

And I think I'll choose that green dress we bought in New York .

Missing you already,

Sara.

P.S.: Angelina has also regularly released public service announcements promoting World Refugee Day, that she regularly attends to in Washington, D.C. due to her deeper envolvement in promoting humanitarian causes on a political level, so guess where I will be tomorrow?

At an ice ring, she didn't invited me for this, but honestly that part of the dream was to good to be true!

California by night.