Questing

Questing

Questing (full episode)

From Stanford University and KZSU, this is the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I've been following cookie crumbs through the woods of these things that I had sort of associated with like an interesting and fulfilling life, you know, like travel, like meeting new people, like having new experiences.

And I felt like I'd finally found the vein of gold.

Eight years ago, a feeling changed my life.

It happened on my first trip out of the country.

My high school English class went to the United Kingdom to do a bus tour of dead authors' homes, Rabi Burns, the Scottish poet, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Shakespeare.

In between stops, we sat on long bus rides where we tried to sleep, listened to lectures, and stewed in enough sexual tension to power a sonnet cycle.

Then we visited Hadrian's Wall.

Hadrian's Wall is named after the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who built it almost 2,000 years ago to protect his empire from the Scottish barbarians.

Today, it's a crumbling ruin that runs on and off for about 80 miles in Northern England.

The part we visited was on top of a huge hill with a cliff on the other side.

I was slow and stiff during the climb up, fresh from three hours on the bus.

Once we got to the top, there was a freezing, wet wind.

My classmates immediately started pretending to push each other off the edge of the cliff and I flopped down away from them.

And there, sitting on the cold stone, I looked over the other side of the wall.

And I'll never forget that moment.

For the first time on our trip, I could see for miles over this new country that I was visiting.

Everything was green from the rain, three times greener than I've ever seen grass be.

Sheep were huddling together in stone paddocks that had existed for hundreds of years, and there were tiny cottages dotted around the landscape.

And as I sat there and took it in, I forgot what my classmates were doing, how cold my butt was, and if I would ever make out with what's-his-face.

And I felt this incredible feeling begin washing over me.

Rather, I was so caught up in the beauty of the landscape that I didn't feel anything, because I didn't really exist anymore.

For a moment, looking at the sheep and the clouds in the land, I was spread out into the rain like vapor.

I became the world around me, and the world felt full of beauty and sound and longing and peace.

After I came down from the cliff, I remember thinking, oh, this is what travel is for.

To be filled with such beauty and newness that you lose yourself and become part of the world.

I thought that the next time that I got the opportunity to travel, I would experience the feeling again.

But I didn't know how precious it was then, or how difficult it would be to find again.

I didn't know then that if I ever wanted to feel what I had felt on Hadrian's Wall, I would have to go on a quest.

This is KZSU Stanford 90.1 FM.

I'm Rachel Hamburg.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Each week on our show, we pick a common human experience, like listening or haunting, and we bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Today, we're bringing you stories about questing.

We all go on quests.

We leave the comforts and routines of ordinary life in search of that shimmering light in the distance.

In the old days, it was a better trade route, a new world, the Holy Grail.

The things that people are questing for in this episode are not that different.

A film editor named Giuseppe goes on a quest for a better way to serve people.

An academic all-star named Bobby goes on a quest for community to call home.

And of course, I go searching for my Holy Grail, the feeling.

Previously on Rachel's Quest, I experienced a feeling on top of a wall in England.

I didn't know what the feeling meant or what it would mean for me later, but I knew that it was amazing.

It felt like I was dissolving into the world around me and I knew it had something to do with travel.

The next major opportunity that I had to travel was four years later when I visited Barcelona with my mother and her best friend.

Instead of reading novels to prepare for the journey, we read the Lonely Planet Guidebook.

We went to a restaurant where Picasso had showcased his first paintings.

We went to La Sagrada Familia, a huge unfinished cathedral covered in Cubist statues.

And at that point, the feeling was only an unarticulated impulse at the back of my mind, a longing to experience something vaguely like what had happened on Hadrian's Wall, to lose myself in the place.

But instead, I felt like I was doing the opposite of losing myself.

I felt more self-conscious than ever.

Every time my mom took pictures, every time we hailed a taxi or asked for directions in poor Spanish, I got more and more self-conscious about how badly we fit in, how clearly we were tourists.

It was weird.

I remember sitting in a sunlit plaza with my mom, drinking sangria and eating fresh goat cheese with honey.

And even though I was grateful that I was experiencing this great meal that she was giving this incredible gift to me, I felt just totally insane.

I was dizzy and shaking.

I just wanted to go home.

Two years later, I was in New York City to visit some friends sleeping on their floors.

I was also doing a project about New York City cooperatives.

And so a lot of my days were spent searching out various co-ops and artist collectives and interviewing their residents.

Having this little mission relieved my anxiety about my relationship with the city.

And since in New York, pretty much everybody's on a mission, I felt like I kind of blended in.

And then it happened.

I was in the subway and people of every kind of beauty, businessmen, old women with shopping bags, little kids, hobos, people my age with more sex appeal than anyone I had ever encountered on television or in magazines, were all rushing past me to their mysterious destinations with no interest or care for who I was.

And I lost sense of my body.

I was floating through the crowd.

I was part of it.

I felt the same beauty and longing and peace that I had felt on Hadrian's Wall.

After that trip, I had a better sense of when this feeling, this feeling that I loved about travel appeared and when it didn't.

Having a quest helped, living like a local helped.

I resolved that the next time I traveled, I would do it that way.

Fast forward to my last year at Stanford.

That's when my friend Bobby began talking about going to Buenos Aires.

Bobby made no mention of the monuments of Buenos Aires.

The pink house, the graveyard at Recoleta, the ferias.

He wasn't interested.

He was on a quest too.

Bobby's quest is about to get all up in my quest, so let's cover some background.

Bobby and I go all the way back to freshman year of college.

Back then, Bobby was very different.

Every night in the dorm lounge, Bobby sat with our friend Yakov and drank a new expensive beer.

Bobby usually wore high-collared black activewear, and he was really, really good at school.

I worked really hard.

But then Bobby started changing.

He changed so much that Yakov started naming different versions of him, the way you name software that's rapidly going out of date.

Bobby 2.0, Bobby 2.1, Bobby 3.0.

The change began the winter of sophomore year when Bobby sat down to take the ultimate quarter.

Four classes, three of which were, like, really hard and work-intensive.

I took EE102A, which is, like, a math class, EE108A, which was, like, a laboratory class that's just known for taking a ton of time when you, like, build some chip, and then CS244A, which is, like, the graduate computer networks class.

And I did very well that quarter, and then I ended up getting straight A-pluses in all of my classes.

That was sort of this turning point where I was like, well, that was cool, but it wasn't really very satisfying.

What do you do when your limit isn't even on the map you've been relying on?

When you get four A-pluses in the hardest classes at Stanford?

In Silicon Valley, if you want to stay part of the game, you go work in Mountain View at one of the big tech companies.

That's what Bobby did for that summer.

I was staying at these sort of, like, extended stay apartments, you know, where, like, all the interns were staying.

And we had a pool, and we had a tennis court, and we had a hot tub.

In some senses, this was, like, the American dream, right?

Of, like, you're doing a job that you like, and it rewards you financially, and you have luxury.

But I found it, like, particularly unpalatable.

You know, it was, like, so nice.

Some quests begin with a goal or a challenge.

Sometimes they begin when you reject the path you've always assumed you should be on.

And sometimes they begin when you reach your goal too early to appreciate it.

Bobby's quest began that way.

Maybe he would have been happy if he'd felt like he'd earned the hot tubs in the tennis courts, if they were the end of a long career.

Maybe they still wouldn't have made him happy.

But either way, Bobby 2.0 was restless.

He needed to embark on a new adventure.

And if there's one thing money does buy you, it's a plane ticket.

Bobby took his to Buenos Aires.

It just felt like such a break from what I had been doing before, of like, I'm in some other country, I'm hanging out with people who are from other countries, and that sort of shifted my direction of what I was looking for.

Bobby followed up on Buenos Aires by going to Paris to study abroad.

But instead of studying like a good Bobby, he spent most of his time on a bridge.

Every night or like most nights, I would go to this bridge over the sun called Pont des Arts.

It sort of goes through waves of police crackdowns, but generally it's sort of the public drinking spot in Paris.

And I found this to be an incredible place to meet people, because I would literally just like go and insert myself into some social circle.

It was pretty cheesy, but I would just like walk up with a bottle of wine and like say, does anybody want some wine?

And so I would just like go and insert myself and people thought it was weird, but mostly people were just like, yeah, sure.

And then I'd sit down and yeah, we'd start talking.

And Bobby thought at that point that maybe he'd found it, the algorithm for his happiness.

I felt that I was meeting people.

When my life sort of started getting more exciting, it was like directly proportional to the number of new people and I was meeting and the number of new experiences that I was having.

My brain latched on to this as like, this is what I want to do.

This bridge was just like a great way to like just like chug through people.

Meeting people on the bridges was cool, but if you decide that you're on a quest to meet as many people as possible, there's a better way.

It's called couchsurfing.com.

Couchsurfing is like Facebook for travelers.

You put up a profile and you can search people in a city and crash on their couches for free.

When Bobby continued his travels that summer, he decided that couchsurfing was the way to go.

And he found a guy named Julian who kind of intrigued him.

Julian was a little weird.

You know, most people's profiles are pretty standard.

They say, like, oh, here's me, here's the music I like.

Like, here's some of my personal philosophy.

And this guy's profile, it was, like, designed to be outrageous.

If you like the way society is right now, then you and I are probably not going to get along pretending to be, you know, a crazy nuclear scientist of, and I have just enriched, you know, five tons of uranium.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

And so I wrote him and I said, hey, you know, I'm going to Amsterdam tomorrow, but I don't really have anywhere to go.

And he links me to this website, which is casarobino.org, and he gives me the email address of somebody named Robin.

He said, this is his little utopia.

This is my friend in Amsterdam and this is his little utopia.

So I go and check it out, and this website is describing what is called a nomad base.

And the main idea of Casa Robino was that every guest is a host, there's no such thing as a guest.

You walk in the door, you are instantly a host, and you have all of the rights and responsibilities as such.

You don't have to ask somebody every time you want to take a shower, and you can't ask, like, is there anything I can do to help?

Because instead, you should look around and see what needs doing.

And so it's sort of this, you know, a little anarchist post-couch surfing utopia.

I wrote Robin, and I told him that I was coming to Amsterdam and I had no plans, and I would like to at least come over and see the place.

So I follow the directions, and I walk to the street that I was given, and then I find the number, and I was told to ring the top bell, so I ring it.

Somebody picks up the phone.

I say, hello, is this Casa Robino?

And this sort of female Italian voice says, sometimes, and then I say, is Robino there?

And she says, sometimes, and then I say, may I come up?

And she says, sometimes, and then she says, do you have a password?

And I said, no, I'm so sorry, I don't have one.

Maybe I can go find internet somewhere and talk to somebody on the IRC channel, and maybe I can, and she's like, no, no, no, no, you just make up a password.

It's like, I make up a password.

She's like, yeah, anything, anything.

Anything.

Okay, well, how about helicopter?

I guess you can come up.

And then bzzz and the door opens.

And I find myself at an open door with lots of shoes outside, and I take off my shoes.

I come in the door, and there's people bustling around everywhere.

And I just kind of stand in the entryway for a moment.

And this short little Italian girl who I recognize from the voice on the intercom comes by, and she smiles at me, and she says, she waves, and she says, hello, helicopter.

And then she walks away.

Then I tell myself, get yourself together.

This isn't couchsurfing, this is post-couchsurfing.

This is a Nomad base.

Of course, nobody's going to greet you here.

So I take off my pack, and I go asking around, and does anyone know if Robino is here?

And the guy says, yeah, yeah, he's outside.

So then I go out to the balcony, because this is the third floor, and there's these two guys sort of smoking home-rolled cigarettes, and ask, excuse me, sorry, are there of you two Robino?

And they're like, yeah.

I'm like, you're Robino.

He's like, no, you're Robino.

No, no, no, we're both Robino.

Sometimes, I'm Rob, he's Bino.

Yeah, we change, you know, and this whole set of thing.

And I'm like, well, okay.

I don't know if I could stay here.

I mean, I would really like to stay here.

He's like, you don't want to stay here.

No, no, no, no, no, you misunderstand.

I want to stay here, but I wonder if it's okay that I stay here.

He's like, you don't want to stay here.

But I do, no, you don't want to stay here.

And this sort of goes back and forth.

And he's telling me, you know, sort of kind of meanly that I don't want to stay here.

But he's not actually telling me that I can't stay there.

And so finally, I decide that this is a test.

And then I stopped talking to him and I turn around.

And then I realized that I don't know where anything is.

And so I turned back around.

I said, do you know if there's a store nearby?

And he's like, yeah, you can go get a joint at the coffee shop down on the corner.

I was like, no, I don't want to smoke a joint.

I want to buy food.

And he says, well, okay.

So he gives me these instructions.

I go and I find this little Turkish shop.

And I buy some avocados and some bread and lots of vegetables and some beer.

And I come back and without talking to anybody, I just start making pico de gallo.

And everybody walks in to this common living room area where there's no table, but there's this big circular legless table rolled up against the wall.

And then somebody takes this little stool and puts it in the center.

And then everybody rolls the big table and puts it on the stool.

And we have just created a table out of nothing or out of pieces.

And then my food is ready at the same time as this other guy's food and we put it on the table and then everybody eats.

And then I stay.

Despite the riddles of its residents, Bobby began to realize that Casa Robino was incredible, that he was being hazed because if he was the right person for Casa Robino, he would succeed.

And he was.

He was emphatically the right person.

But if life was a game that Bobby was too good at playing, these hitchhikers and dumpster divers were like a whole new secret endless level.

They were living without money by using resources that most people don't think of.

They were constantly moving around, meeting new people and inventing new challenges and enacting new ideas.

And they were creating something out of mere pieces, a community.

Most of them didn't necessarily have jobs, but they were perfectly fine living without money.

And they sort of found ways to make it work.

You know, they hitchhiked to travel, they dumpster dived for their food, but these weren't dingy homeless people.

These were like young, energetic, super interesting, super diverse people with lots of big ideas.

And I just sort of had this sense that there was this, that there was this world out there that I had finally found.

You know, I'd been following cookie crumbs, you know, through the woods of, you know, these things that I had sort of associated with like an interesting and fulfilling life, you know, like travel, like meeting new people, like having new experiences.

And I felt like that I finally was doing that.

Like I had finally found the vein of gold of, you know, this incredible world of interest and excitement and hope and things that seemed worth spending one's life on.

After Casa Robino, Bobby went home.

He had to finish school.

He lived for a year in a co-op with me and a bunch of other certifiable dumpster diving tie-dye sporting hippies.

In that house together, we had the most fun we've ever had.

But.

You know, basically every problem that we would have in this 20-person co-op, I would have a reason why this wouldn't happen in a nomad base.

Every social problem, every difficulty in dynamics, like every issue we would have with who's doing the dishes, like I would say, ah, you know, you fools.

You know, if only this were a nomad base, this wouldn't happen.

Bobby couldn't get the nomad base out of his mind.

And not just going back to Casa Rubino.

You know, if you're a good bike mechanic and you go to a nomad base, then you fix all the bikes.

Through my chosen lifestyle, I happen to have an income, so sure, I'll pay the rent on one of these places, right?

And while I'm doing that, hell, I'll just start a new one.

And he wasn't gonna do it in Europe, where they were already becoming popular.

He was going to explore a new continent.

He was going to start a nomad base in Buenos Aires.

And so I started talking about it a lot, and I think I infected a lot of other people with this excitement for, you know, like, let's just get everybody in, let's go to South America and start a new life in Buenos Aires, and we'll make a nomad base, and we'll have this project, and it'll be great.

And so by the end of it, there were like one, I decided, you know, there was me, and then there were two other people, three, four, five, I don't know.

There was like seven people going down to Buenos Aires at one point or another to like, be tangentially involved in this project.

Including me.

Including Rachel.

I was fascinated with the nomads that Bobby described.

I knew they weren't the kinds of nomads whose cultures had existed for thousands of years in deserts and on plains.

These were in most cases people who came from more or less the same society that I came from, but who had rejected it in favor of something that they thought was better.

These were people who loved something about travel so much that they had devoted their lives to it.

And if it wasn't tourism that they loved, I thought maybe it was transcendence.

Maybe these people were veterans of the kind of spiritual ecstasy that my best moments of travel had inspired.

I decided I would go.

I would make it my quest to find out as much as possible about them.

I didn't realize then that what I was really after was something different.

It was a search for the same feeling that I thought maybe they were living on, breathing in every day, the feeling from Hadrian's Wall.

In retrospect, it was all just sort of like the snowballing momentum of a very fickle thought.

My boyfriend and I arrived in the city a week after Bobby.

Bobby spent that week trying to find a cheap apartment with a big open common room, a fairly large kitchen and easy access from the ground.

He'd found one that fit that description in a working class pocket of a middle class neighborhood called Cabashito and he took us there one night.

It was on a one way street next to the train tracks and the whole block smelled like sewage, but Bobby liked the grittiness.

He said we could make friends with the locals who were staring at us from their windows.

There was a squat next door.

We'll have potlucks with them, he said.

The new apartment frightened me a little bit.

I noticed Dan walking closer to me protectively, so I knew I wasn't the only one.

As we walked back to the subway, I asked Bobby why he was pushing for something so difficult.

I think a lot of what makes life meaningful is just the difficulty of whatever you're doing.

Extreme example is like primitive survival.

Like survival is just great.

If you come from a really bad family, your dad beat you, your mom was on meth all the time.

Graduating from community college and getting a stable job is a huge accomplishment.

Like a spouse and a dog, right?

You've done it, man.

But I at least come from a whole lot of privilege where that wouldn't be an accomplishment at all.

And so I need to somehow challenge myself in some different way to feel fulfilled, right?

Like to feel that I'm...

So I essentially need to invent quests for myself.

Like, I'm gonna go...

No, I'm not gonna work out of an office in Mountain Dew.

I'm gonna go to Buenos Aires.

Quests, you know, adventure is a type of quest.

But the reason that adventure is necessary for some and not for others has something to do with personality, but also just depends largely on, like, the situation that you're coming from.

Whether life of it in itself is enough of a adventure that you don't need to make it any harder.

When you rent an apartment in Buenos Aires, you need to find a garantía, a landed relative or a close friend to back up your commitment to pay rent.

Bobby looked and looked, but he couldn't find anyone willing to act as garantía for the apartment he liked.

When he called the real estate agent, she said that he should stop looking in that area anyway because it was too dangerous for somebody like him.

Bobby began walking with his hands in his pockets, pulling up his jacket hood and scowling in the streets.

But he was still hopeful that he could find a garantía or a cheap apartment.

He was still on the quest.

Bobby 3.0.

Even though I was still excited to be part of Bobby's project, I didn't feel like I was on my way to the feeling.

I'd gotten to know the basics of Buenos Aires in a non-touristy way, which I thought I had wanted.

I knew the prices of real estate in each neighborhood, where the local couchsurfing chapter met, and how to use public transportation.

But instead of feeling that sense of connection that I was craving, I mostly felt sort of underwhelmed with the romance of apartment hunting in the most romantic city in the world.

So I decided to search out some romance by myself.

La Poesia is one of the older cafes in Buenos Aires, and the city's most famous writers, Borges Cortazar, would sit there and talk shop.

I took my laptop and set off, humming to myself, happy to be alone for a little while.

I remember feeling a sense of relief at not having to interact with anyone or meet anyone, even if they were a life-changingly cool nomad.

With no one to appreciate or impress, I could disappear into the street.

I could finally begin to absorb it.

Two blocks away from my apartment, I was stopped by a pair of men who appeared suddenly out of a doorway.

They said something that I didn't understand, and one of them took out a gun.

He pointed it at my stomach.

Give me your computer, he said.

Money, camera.

I silently handed over my things.

Once my bag was empty, I just stood there, staring straight ahead.

Goodbye, the man said.

I started walking again.

I didn't even feel anything until I was ringing the bell of the apartment that I'd just left over and over again, waiting for somebody to come down.

After that, I was paranoid all the time.

Every time people talked to me in the street, I jumped.

I crossed the street constantly to avoid pairs of men.

I started scowling.

Around that time, Bobby found another apartment in a much nicer area of town.

It wasn't gritty, but it had a big common room and a courtyard and it was beautiful.

It was also safe.

We thought maybe we had found something that would work.

Bobby got his friend Pablo to agree to be gaurantia and we thought that we had made it.

But just before signing the lease, Bobby got worried that the landlord would freak out if she knew what would really be happening at her apartment, if she knew that her old home was about to be turned into an anarchist-friendly community for hitchhikers and other alternative travelers.

So instead of waiting for her to notice and accuse him of running a hostel out of her property, he decided to write her a letter.

He included pictures of Ithaca, our old home in Palo Alto.

He told her that we would bake bread and keep the place clean, that we would invite her over.

We all hoped that Bobby's honesty would bridge the gap between our two cultures, that we would somehow make it work.

But she backed out.

She decided that she would give her apartment to somebody a little bit safer.

And it was a good thing, actually, because that evening, Bobby received an email from his work saying that they were no longer able to support him on salary in Buenos Aires, though they were happy to move him to France.

That night, we all piled into the big bed in the apartment that Bobby was staying in and talked about the trip.

Bobby was full of doubts.

So many of my previous assumptions are just like so silly when you translate them here.

Like my assumption that like, yeah, you know, in order to do some sort of like legit, like co-op housing project, you got to kind of like live in a slum, right?

You know, which is, yeah, you're like a working class neighborhood.

My initial like reaction when I found out that there was a squat that was, you know, like a couple of houses down from the place we were thinking about living.

And I was like, oh, like that's awesome.

Like, I can't wait to like meet those people, you know?

And then like, you know, Pablo was like, dude, like a casa tomada is not, it's not like a European squat.

Like it's not run by liberal punks who are going to be excited when you come over and give them, give a workshop on hacking wifi.

It is slumlords who move in, take over an apartment and rent with dirty cash from really helpless people.

It's not something you want to be involved in.

You know, and then just like as time goes on and I spend more time here, you can literally watch on the map, you know, as the region of neighborhoods that I'm looking at apartments for, it just moves like steadily north.

Parque Patricios, then like San Cristobal, and then like moving up to Cabachito, and then moving up to Vise Crespo, and then like moving up to the borders of Belgrano.

You know, in my sensibilities, I have become like an upper middle class porteño in this span of like two and a half weeks, which is like kind of like telling.

That night, Bobby started questioning the idea of starting a new nomad base at all.

He thought maybe he would give up the quest for a while, see if he could cure himself of the need for questing even.

He thought maybe he would try going to Europe again.

Maybe he would see if being in the place where he'd originally been inspired would make him happy.

I feel like that's one of the places where it's probably like most brain dead simple to be like pretty happy.

But if I go to that, if I go there and I just decide that this place has nothing for me, I want something more, then I should probably look more inward than outward.

There are places that will expand you in much bigger ways.

There's South America, there's Asia, there's India.

But those places, as you know, have discovered here in the training wheel grounds of the most European city of South America.

There are also parts of it that are really hard.

For Bobby's birthday, we rented a basement in a local cafe, which was covered in painted penises and had been used to film pornos in the 1990s.

We made a fake apartment for Bobby there out of fabric and Christmas lights.

Bobby left a couple of days later.

After Bobby left, Daniela and I moved around a bunch, sometimes together, sometimes separately.

We stayed with different couchsurfing hosts.

Despite an increasing sense of comfort, Buenos Aires still felt tainted by our failure to build Bobby's dream there.

I thought maybe, though, I would find the feeling in a place of more solitude, a place out of the bounds of the city.

Dan and I decided to visit San Juan, an agricultural province in the center of Argentina.

We had heard about it from our friend Gab.

She had stayed at a house there, where they gave her a big meal and a tour of the farm and took her hiking in the mountains.

She said that they drank mate at the summit and looked out in an incredible view, and that the father cried when she left.

That sounded like a recipe for the feeling to me.

The family had built their own house out of adobe.

They had a farm and a raggedy horse and piglets and pigs.

When we arrived, the father showed us the big plastic barrels where they kept the grapes, and we had a feast of fresh sausages and grapes, cured olives and wine and white bread.

I told them that I was breaking vegetarianism to eat their sausages.

The father kept nudging me throughout the meal, making vegetarian jokes in Spanish.

After dark, Melina, the daughter, took us around the farm.

We hunt rabbits out here, she said, once we were out of the glow of the house.

We shine a flashlight, and when we see pairs of glowing eyes, we shoot.

Melina worked for the local tourism board.

When we got back to the house, I told her and her mother, Carmen, that I was a photographer, and I could take pictures of the farm to help her out.

The next day, we decided to work.

Carmen took us out into the fields.

Their three dogs followed us.

Two of them had long white dreads, and Carmen called them both hippie.

Carmen handed us bags of strips of paper.

We were supposed to be tying vines to wire struts, which would help support them as they got heavy from the grapes.

As we were tying, we noticed small ducks on the paper we were using, and we realized that it wasn't paper, but cut up dirty diapers.

I remember feeling disgust with myself.

Was this my noble quest?

To impose on other people's lives for a chance to feel something genuine?

At lunchtime, the vegetarian jokes continued.

The family had a flat screen TV, which played a reality TV show about pole dancing.

Carmen said that she was going to kill a piglet that night.

You should watch, she said.

You should take some pictures.

They had brought out the whole family to watch, including their baby.

The two hippies, the pit bull, and the farm cats all waited nearby, while the father cut the piglet's throat, and as it died, drained its blood into the bucket below.

The dogs and the cat all drank from the bucket afterwards.

Sacá una foto, Carmen said.

Take a picture.

They left the piglet hanging in the barn for the night, and we had another big meal with sausages, which I didn't eat.

That night in my childish Spanish, I asked Carmen what she thought death was.

I wanted to understand just a little bit of how she thought about her life.

She said that death was it for you.

You were just gone.

Are you religious?

I asked, and she said, we're Catholic, but we don't ever go to church.

Death is it for you.

That night at around 3 a.m., I heard a phone ring.

Then there was screaming and hysterics.

I went to Carmen's room, and she was sobbing on the edge of the bed.

What happened?

I asked.

Her sister was dead, had died moments ago.

She had had an aneurysm.

I'll make some tea, I said.

Whatever, the father said.

I started boiling some water, but after a minute I turned it off and totally embarrassed, I went back to bed.

In the morning, I left to go back and work in the field so that I could give the family some space.

The pit bull followed me out.

An hour later, I tried to go back to the house and it began growling.

It got between me and the house and it crouched low, maybe seven feet away.

I was a hundred yards away from the house and there was literally nothing around us except vines and sky.

Shh, I said, but it crouched lower and it barked louder.

Eventually, I screamed.

In a few moments, someone walked slowly out of the house and called off the dog.

The end.

You are always welcome to come back, querida, Carmen said, and we hugged for a few moments.

Then we piled back into the pickup truck and drove to the bus station.

Then we got on a bus and went back to Buenos Aires.

Dan flew back to America, but my flight wasn't until two weeks later.

I was not looking forward to it.

Every effort I had made to find wonder, to find connection, to have real conversations with people had ended terribly.

One of the people that I talked to the most was Daniela.

Daniela had been my first couch surfing host in Buenos Aires.

She was a tango dancer, which was convenient because it meant that she could take me to tango clubs without me feeling guilty for doing something touristy.

As a consequence, the most fun that I had in Buenos Aires had been with Daniela, going to her favorite tango bar, La Catedral, with the giant hanging metal heart and the beautiful instructors and the vegetarian food and the guitar players out back full of longing.

The last week that I was in Buenos Aires, I met Daniela for drinks.

I told her the story about San Juan, about asking about death, and we began talking about her religion.

She was a Muslim.

I asked how she felt being a woman and being a Muslim.

Americans are pretty trained to believe that it sucks, I said.

We had known each other for a couple of months at that point.

We had built up a degree of trust.

So she invited me to come to the temple where she worshiped.

Thank The temple was a house in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.

Inside the storm door, somebody handed me a green veil.

Daniela told everyone that I was a guest.

Normally, that would have made me feel self-conscious, but here it felt natural and good.

And as the service began, Daniela sat next to me, whispering the translations into my ear.

The sheikh took the armchair at the front of the room.

Last week, he said, our brother in the discussion section told you all how badly his life was going.

He had been fired from his job, yes, and his wife and he were having trouble.

He was feeling hateful towards himself.

You, like good friends, reminded him of the good things that he had done.

You're not doing that badly, you said to him.

Think of this thing here that you did, and this, and this.

But this was the wrong advice.

What you were supposed to do was tell him that he is not important.

By being disappointed with his life, he is on the right path.

Here's how Daniela put it.

Life as it is cannot offer us complete fulfillment.

Once you are disappointed, completely disappointed at life, then you can start looking for something else.

But there's something beyond, beyond life in this world.

I asked the sheikh what life would be like after one found God.

Life takes on a quality of infinite mercy, the sheikh said.

You can be walking down the street and see a dead dog.

You think to yourself, what beautiful teeth that dog has.

After the service, a man got silently to his feet and began to sing prayers.

He had the clearest voice I have ever heard, and he leaned into the song, the way that at the prow of a boat, you might lean into the wind.

After the disappointment comes a moment when you actually see things for the way they are, and things are actually beautiful.

But not for the reason you think they're beautiful, but because they're beautiful.

I mean, things are not beautiful because they give you pleasure.

I think the world is beautiful the way it is, because of the way God meant it to be.

And when you're able to see the beauty of it all, everything becomes beautiful.

Even, as in the example, like a dog rotting on the street, it will have something beautiful too.

And I think that's the way you feel when you travel, like everything becomes wonderful, everything is.

Because it's not really that the other country is more beautiful than yours.

It's just that you are different, because you're more attentive.

You're more open to receiving these things.

Later on, I discovered a Sufi poem called Conference of the Birds.

In that poem, a group of birds go on a quest to find a phoenix, a symbol for God.

They travel a long way.

They get in all kinds of scrapes.

They lose their feathers.

They basically get destroyed.

Some of them drop off.

At the end of the journey, when they're supposed to see God, all they see is a lake.

They look in the lake, and they see their own reflections.

They see all the remaining birds together, having made the journey.

And I think the point is not that the divine is them, although that's a part of it, but rather that the tattered selves that went on the quest for divinity are divine.

If you're on a search for the feeling, then the quest, in other words, is the answer to the quest.

The longing and the finding are the same thing.

I've been back from Buenos Aires for a year now.

I'm still on a quest for the feeling, but I don't feel like I need to travel across the world to find it.

Instead, when I'm particularly restless, I go on a walk near my house, and often the feeling returns.

The other week, I was walking with two friends.

It was drizzling, just getting dark.

We were on Embarcadero, the busiest street in my neighborhood, and at some point, we stopped in front of a lamp that was lighting an American flag up above it.

I stood briefly above the lamp, full of this crazy longing.

And as I was looking up at the night, I noticed that the lamp had lit up the rain.

It had become golden streaks that fell down onto my head, blowing gently around me with all of the unpredictable, subtle forces of the night air.

My friends and I stood there for five minutes on Embarcadero, staring up at the golden heavens, five blocks from my house.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This show is called Questing.

We've just talked about my quest for the feeling and Bobby's quest to create community by building a nomad base.

This last story is about Giusepi.

Giusepi is a film editor on a quest to build not a nomad base, but a nomadic base.

He's not looking for just another way to live.

He's creating a mobile venue for connection, open to anyone passing through.

Sophia Paliza tells this story.

Late last year, a tan Volkswagen bus rolled up on a residential street in downtown Palo Alto.

The owner parked and got out.

He was a young, relatively clean-cut looking guy wearing a newsboy cap and a pair of quaint overalls.

He hung a handmade sign on the front driver door.

T, the sign said, zero cents.

Then, the young man opened the passenger door to the bus and waited.

Slowly but surely, residents of the house across the street made their way over to the bus.

They read the sign on the door and then one by one, they climbed inside.

Do you want a cup of tea?

Yeah, I would love a cup of tea.

What would you like?

What kind do you have?

We can pick some out of here.

I've got other things.

My name is Giusepi.

We're on the tea bus.

It's a mobile free tea house.

It's kind of like a living room that can roll, living room slash kitchen, that can roll up to any sidewalk in any town, and instantly there's a tea house there, a free tea house.

This is the second time Giusepi's visited Emerson Street.

He knows this street and its residents.

It's a sojourn for him, a rest stop in a quest that began four years ago on the city streets of Hollywood.

I always tell people the roots of the tea bus lie in loneliness.

Back before the tea bus was even an image in his mind, Giusepi lived out of his truck in LA while trying to make it as a video editor.

He worked on his friend's documentary as an intern.

I just sat on his couch all day long in front of a computer.

I wasn't even at a desk.

And I was five months for five months.

The first three months was 70 hours a week, like 60 to 70 hours a week.

And I wasn't getting paid.

I got paid barely anything for the whole five months.

And he got restless.

He wanted to meet people, but he didn't know anyone in LA and didn't have any money to go make friends in a bar.

So he came up with a pretty out-there idea.

Well, so I just would go down to Hollywood Boulevard and open my tailgate and cook my dinner and cook more food than I needed.

And anyone who was hungry for food or conversation, people would just sit with me.

Even if they weren't like need, didn't need food, they would sit with me.

And to keep those interactions going, I would just make tea for hours.

All sorts of different people started coming to just hang out with him.

A music student would sit down with me.

And then a gutter punk street kid would sit down with me.

And then a shopkeeper would sit down.

And all three of those people would be sitting there.

I was like, oh, this is interesting.

And then a gangster dude with his street name is tattooed on his face.

And he became someone to these strangers.

They gave him an identity.

On Hollywood Boulevard, everyone started knowing, asking when I was going to be serving tea, or, you know, oh, they started calling me the Tea Guy.

And I was like, oh, I don't know about that.

I just, like, what have they got with you, you know?

It was too late.

Even if he didn't see himself that way, he had become the Tea Guy.

This new identity was thrust upon him.

And with it, a quest began to crystallize.

Giuseppe had spent four and a half years trying and failing to start a nonprofit video production company.

It was in serving tea that for the first time, he actually saw change in the people he encountered.

So his new identity became more than just part of his personality.

It became a full-fledged occupation.

And he started to develop ideas on how to be a full-time tea giver, ideas that required a bus.

This bus served in the Anaheim School District from 1989 until probably the late 90s.

And I have always had a thing for school buses.

And I looked at a lot of different vehicles.

But the character that the school bus brings along with it is part of it.

It's got the rounded ceilings.

It's kind of like a gypsy wagon.

He named it Edna.

She was big but not massive, old but fixable.

She was perfect.

With bus in tow, Giuseppe had his quest.

Finish the bus, then go travel America.

Give America tea.

It is kind of complex.

There's the electrical system.

There's solar panels.

There's the, I'm doing, I almost completed with my straight vegetable oil conversion, which is using recycled vegetable oil.

He told himself he had two years to finish all of this, and then he would go traveling around the country.

It's taken him longer because the lure of his newfound vocation was too strong.

Giuseppe started traveling all over California to bring people tea and he had to work on the bus on the side.

He got tea donations from companies and individuals and supported himself by living simply and picking up odd jobs, video editing, or offering the bus as part of a ride share program.

So I always say my spiritual practice is turning wrenches.

That's like my meditation is turning wrenches or cutting wood or building something and pouring tea obviously.

But basically every day of my life is vacation and every day of my life is work.

Giuseppe's quest is about pursuing the creation of community between strangers.

But strangers often have qualms about him, misconceptions about the man in a bus who is offering something free.

I can understand.

Okay, there's this random guy in a school bus with a sign that says free tea.

That's weird.

That is weird for our social standards.

And I've heard many people walk by and say, they read my sign, they say free tea, and they go, sketchy.

But enough people get over it.

They see one person go in, and then they follow.

They look into his eyes and see he isn't going to poison or drug them, that he isn't looking to exchange his tea to tell them about how Jesus can save their souls.

But the world doesn't always see giving and taking like he does.

The world isn't always nice.

It isn't always safe.

Giuseppe lets in the whole world, and sometimes those bits of the world bite.

One night, soon after Edna came into his life, he sat down with a homeless man in Hollywood.

There was a Scientology clinic giving free stress tests down the block, and the man asked Giuseppe, Do they believe in Jesus?

And I said, you know, I'm not exactly sure, but I have, I don't think they do.

And he said, oh, I'm not drinking tea then.

So the guy walks away, and a little while later, these hitchhiking street kids sit down to drink tea with him.

They're having a good time and getting buddy buddy with Giusepi.

Giusepi, man, just so you know, if anyone ever messes with you, we have, we've got your back.

And I was like, oh, come on.

No one ever messes with me.

Like, don't be silly.

In a couple of minutes, the old guy comes back and he looks Giusepi in the face and starts just screaming at him.

You don't believe in Jesus.

You're the devil.

And he starts scream at me.

At this point, this man is getting everyone's attention all along the street.

Giuseppi's apologizing, trying to defuse the situation, but it's not working.

The street kids get involved.

And all, and this, all these street gutter punk kids just start standing up being like, what, mother?

You know, just started swearing at this guy and be like, tell them they're gonna kick his ass.

And I'm like, no, no, no, guys, like chill out.

And there's this whole confrontation starting to like bubble up.

And I'm like, no, this is not what I do.

I want to promote peace, not aggression.

The conflict didn't escalate this time, but not many people would brush off a situation like that easily.

Many people would question the very foundation of their quest, that the world is ready and open to receive strangers and their tea.

Later in his quest, Giusepi made it up to Seattle.

He and some friends had made cinnamon rolls and were sitting around when a homeless man came up to the bus asking for money.

People in his position, if they can scrounge up five bucks, then they can get a room and a shower.

And he, but he was, you know, doesn't want to be asking for money.

His eyes are down, et cetera.

I offered him some tea, and my friend Allie offered him some cinnamon rolls.

And we asked him what his name was, and he came in here and he sat with us.

And he went from being completely shut down and not communicative with eyes and stuff like that to, us, everyone, treating him like a genuine human being.

They gave him money, but Giusepi said that wasn't what mattered most to this man.

He said, you guys have given me more than anything I could have asked for.

I don't want to take your money.

Those are the kind of interactions that, I mean, those are the deep ones that are awesome.

You know, if just one of those circumstances happened in four years, I'd be happy, you know.

For Giusepi, these moments of sudden and total connection of the service that tea and cinnamon rolls and a warm bus offer, these have made everything worth it.

And of course, he loves the freedom.

But in order for Giusepi to have the freedom to journey so far in search of connection, to offer himself so wholeheartedly to so many people, he has to sacrifice something.

He has to be alone in other ways.

Despite the tea bus emerging as a quest that is an answer to loneliness, loneliness is part of being on a quest.

And that's hard.

I've never been on this bus and traveled with anyone on this bus that I can function with like her.

She's the only woman I've ever felt like I wanted to have a family with or have a garden with.

This next couple years is the defining time for her band.

The harder she works and the more she plays and that's going to define her career for the rest of her life.

So I never want to take her away from that.

And I know that she doesn't want to take me away from this.

She's a successful musician and I'm a successful tea giver, I guess.

I'm still in love.

And Giuseppe is a successful tea giver.

And not just because of the number of people he has served tea to or the number of places he has been.

In the world of nature, everyone knows the story of the upstream swimming salmon that struggle against the current in order to spawn and continue their cycle of life.

But out of those massive swimming salmon, there are always a few that don't follow.

When they go swimming off from the other salmon in new and unexplored directions, the others probably look around and wonder at their strange brothers, but they keep swimming.

And it's these strange salmon that enable the survival of the mass by finding new places to spawn and creating biological diversity.

And that's what Giuseppe does.

He swam through his life, living in his truck, working long hours every week until he couldn't do it anymore.

And then he took off in a big rickety school bus and gave tea to people.

Most of us just fantasize about that breakout, about quitting our jobs, about running off into the sunset, and some of us even find a way to do it.

But for those of us who can't or won't, Giuseppe can do it for us.

And we, as receivers of his tea, give him just enough encouragement to keep going, just enough to counterbalance the risks and the dangers he faces in mission.

Because we know, as upstream swimmers, we know that we need him to swim sideways for us.

Today's program was produced by myself, Rachel Hamburg, Sophia Paliza, and Jonah Willengans.

Special thanks to Bobby Holley, Daniela Bize, Daniel Green, and Giuseppe the Tea Guy.

Thanks also to Charlie Mintz, Natasha Ruck, Kristi Hartman, Sandra Clark, Victoria Hurst, and Joshua Hoyt.

Music you heard on this program includes Yair Yonah, Stefan Basho Jungens, Stephen R.

Smith, Cam Deas, Black Twig Pickers and Steve Gunn, Fred van Eps, Victor Herbert Orchestra, James Blackshaw, Lauren McCasin-Connors, The Oo-Ray, Broke for Free and Phil Rivas.

Original music for the Buenos Aires piece was recorded by Manolis Swayga.

The Buenos Aires piece also featured the music of Jake Wachtel, who traveled around the world for a year and then recorded an album called Wanderlove, which features 80 instruments that he collected on his journeys.

Check out our website and iTunes beginning on Friday, January 30th for an amazing story from Bobby Holley about a life or death situation while hitchhiking.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes.

You can also download them and find out more about the Storytelling Project's live events, grants and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, I'm Rachel Hamburg.

Have a lovely evening.

If you're planning on questing tonight, make sure to pack a warm jacket, clean socks and plenty of water.