My friend Daneeta, the producer of Tokyo Cowboys, is leaving London for New Orleans.

I will miss her and I am looking forward to visiting her there.

I had a wonderful time in New Orleans last year, in spite of all the sadness in the aftermath of Katrina.

The city feels so surreal.

It might be the river with its strong presence.

The Mississippi feels like a father figure.

I sat down on a terrace overlooking the river to eat lunch one day and it was as if my grandfather, who passed away many years ago, had joined me. We were sitting there in silence eating our sushi in the Louisiana afternoon heat, lulled by the comfortable boredom felt only by those who are always there for each other, through the years and through the vagaries of history.

Daneeta has been working on the script for another movie about New Orleans and her family. I can’t wait to see it.

“I don’t have a village. I am a floating person”

I simply adore this line.

I went to listen to a talk by Lord Meghnad Desai last night at the Ismaili Centre about diasporas and migration.

Having been a “foreigner” for most of my life, I have a strong interest in phenomena that turn people into strangers.

Lord Desai was talking about migration being at the core of human history. “We all came from East Africa. We all descend from Lucy”.

It was really in the 20th century that people began to insist on national identities. “By thinking in terms of citizens and foreigners, we have created barriers for ourselves”.

According to Lord Desai, before the rise of national identities people used to think in terms of clusters of households. But in the 20th century, “our imagination stopped to see individuals and families and began to see only nations”.

While I was listening to this, my mind wandered back to Prague. I heard the voice of a Jewish friend of mine saying how much he hates nations. And he does have a strong point.

Prague’s cultural and social life was much richer before WWII when they had a Czech, a Jewish and a German community.

All this is gone for ever. Thanks to people chasing national identities and turning neighbours into strangers.

Lord Desai also spoke about the urge that people have to create “locals and foreigners”.

That puzzles me. It does exist. I have often been called a “foreigner” and I have always found it intriguing.

I don’t really know what a foreigner is. May be it is because I cannot really identify with a specific country or a particular place.
I have always thought that nations create distance between people. Or may be it is because of what I have seen in Easter Europe.

No, I don’t particularly like the word “foreigner”.

“It is like a journey through your subconscious”.

My friend Gina and I were trying to make our way home on the Underground after a dinner at a Chinese noodles place near the British Museum.

Midnight at Holborn station can feel like walking through the meanders of your mind (Have you ever watched Being John Malkovich?).

I love London with all my heart.

But sometimes I feel so confused. I move through the streets, rushing from meeting to meeting. A lingering dizziness starts to form in my heart, as if I was floating through a realm that doesn’t really exist.

I sometimes make strange encounters. I cherish them. The stranger the better. They help to soothe my dizziness…

I went into Boots yesterday. The lady at the counter looks at me: “Where are you from?”

You will probably know by now that I have a knee-jerk reaction to this question. I have been asked it a billion times over the years. I don’t even hear it any more. My ears switch automatically to a Buddhist mantra every time somebody in my vicinity formulates it.

But this time, it was different….

The woman had such a sweet face. So I told her I am Italian.

She looked at me with dreamy eyes and said, “Have you ever met the Pope?”

I told her that I had been to Rome on a school trip as a young girl to see the previous Pope.

The lady fell deeper into her dream, “He was such a nice man.”

“He was,” I said. And this time it was my mind to wonder off, back to Easter Europe and to dreams of better times that I hope will stretch into eternity.

Later on, I was chewing my noodles near the British Museum and looking at the peaceful face of our Chinese dinner companion.

“The restaurant smells like Asia”, said Gina.

Behind me a wall-to-wall flat screen was showing MTV-style videos from the 90s.

I leaned back and gave in to the energy of London. May be my dizziness is a sign that I am becoming part of it.

Photo: thanks to inmagine.com

My friend Daneeta’s feature documentary Tokyo Cowboys is about to premiere at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles.

I am so excited!

Tokyo Cowboys tells the stories of a group of westerners who gave up their jobs, homes and countries to pursue their dreams in the cut throat world of Tokyo. The film’s delicate and humorous portrait illuminates the price some pay for a taste of Tokyo’s success. It follows the trial and errors of its heroes’ quest for opportunity on this post-modern urban frontier.

The documentary reminds me so much of my years in Eastern Europe.

Some of its characters are like the confused expats I used to meet at parties in Prague and Bratislava.

It was all so surreal. History had just turned a major corner and we were not sure of the role we were going to play in it, if any.

Watching Tokyo Cowboys brought back to me that old feeling of being suspended in time.

So intriguing….so liberating.

The documentary will be shown at the Japan Film Festival in Los Angeles on April 14th. It is the only film in the festival directed by a non-Asian and the only documentary to deal with the subject of gaijin experience in Japan.

I wrote last week about the surreal feelings connected with having spent most of my life abroad.

Many thanks to Mike for writing on my Facebook that this post resonated with him.

It’s great to know I’m not the only one.

I am always on the lookout for comforting messages of this kind and a couple of days ago… I hit the jackpot

I was reading in the International Herald Tribute about the life of Barak Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann, and the influence she had on him. And I came across this quote by Obama’s sister, Maya:

“She [Stanley Ann] felt that, somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core”.

Obama’s mother lived in different parts of the US before moving to Hawaii, where she met Obama’s father. She then moved to Indonesia where she became a consultant to the USAID on setting up a village credit program. She also worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta specialising in women’s projects.

Ever since I read Maya’s quote, I have been thinking about that “something” that makes up my core.

I think I know what it is.

I was wandering through “uncharted territory” in Eastern Europe and I came across what became the essence of who I am today.

Now that I think of it, it is all quite clear, but you first need someone to explain to you how it works.

That’s why I love this quote.

All of the sudden, it all makes sense. To use the words of an old friend, it is as if someone came into your kitchen and started to make order. The cups with the cups….the plates with the plates….

This quote is exactly what you need to read to yourself when you feel confused. And living in different places can leave you confused. Your path is so different from that of many of the people who sorround you.

So every time you start doubting that path, just read this quote.

Picture: thanks to iht.com

‘Can you switch it off?’

‘What!?’ My puzzled look made it across the lush prawn salad I was eating.

‘Your accent!’

I was sitting in a restaurant in Napa in September having an interesting conversation with my friend Natasha’s daughter, Lana.

I seem to have this effect on kids. When my godson’s sister found out that I am not really Austrian, she almost cried.

As I wrote in a previous post, I have spent a large part of my life discussing accents. I have grown used to the topic and I am beginning to find it fascinating.

The years I spent in different countries have managed to make me sound different no matter what language I speak.

You should see the looks, when I meet my family’s acquaintances in Italy. Behind their perplexed silence, you can read in big letters:

‘Who is she?’ Is she really their daughter or did they get her from a Romanian orphanage. (I am taller than my parents, which doesn’t help.)

After several adventures of this kind, all concerning my different accents, I have come to view the whole thing in a relaxed way.

And I have started to pay attention to my friend’s voices. Their accents and the things they have said to me over the years are like the soundtrack of my life.

I am so grateful that I have some many friends from so many different places. Their accents are the essence of who they are.

Every time I miss one of them, I replay their voices in my mind and, by some magic, they become incredibly present.

There are people who seem to find comfort in the fact that those surrounding them sound exactly as they do.

I have not had this in years and it is extremely liberating.

I know people in Italy who use their neighborhood cafe as their “˜home away from home”. It’s the place where they go to meet their friends and boast about their latest love affair. It gives them a sense of belonging.

˜My home away from home” is my Greek greengrocer, down the street from where I live, in West London. It is a mixture of greengrocer and deli with great Middle Eastern food: halva, hummus, all kinds of olives, pita bread, great pickles. But it is much more than that. The owners, two Cypriot brothers, play Gregorian chants in the store and hold interesting conversations with their customers, about different things, the meaning of life or the best room in your house for writing a book.

“So where are you from in Italy?”

I told them I was from Verona, in the north of Italy, between Milan and Venice.

“We are from the South, from Cyprus.”

May be because I am not very fond of the usual north-south debate with all its stereotypes or may be out of Mediterranean solidarity, I told them that my great-grandfather came from Naples. That’s how we came to speak about Sicily. Sicily has wonderful food and very good looking people, I said picking up an apple and putting it into a paper bag. “Of course”, said the younger brother, they are all Greek! After this lesson in Mediterranean anthropology, I got another one one day I was shopping for fruit. I was inspecting my favorite type of grapes, when the younger brother came over with a bag full of dried plums.

I threw him a puzzled look. “This is what people in Italy eat when they have constipation. I am afraid it would make me spend the rest of the week in the loo!”

My Greek friend frowned. Don’t you know that the best works of mathematics, physics and religion have been written in bathrooms. No, I did not know that but it made sense to me, so why argue.

The Greek brothers employ a young French help of Moroccan descent with one of those beautiful Berber names that makes you dream of the Atlas Mountains and their oasis. We often talk about the house he built in Fez and the great food you can eat there. Across the street from my greengrocer is a beauty parlor with my Sicilian hairdresser (yes, he is good looking and ….no, he does not look Greek), my Armenian-Iranian beautician and her colleague from Ghana. I often speak with the two ladies about my grandmother, who will turn 100 this summer. The lady from Ghana told me a wonderful story about hers. According to the local tradition, she had some beads she was going to be buried with, but because she loved her granddaughter such much, she decided to give them to her. Now, that her grandma has passed away, she still has the beads. I could picture the beads in my mind and, in an instant, they turned into magical prayer beads to hold in your hand every time you wanted to tell your late grandmother how much you loved her.