T A B L E_T A L K Have you ever stayed in a grand hotel? Discuss the joys of sleeping in style in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y Bangkok's got a brand new bag By Karl Vetas Sex change capital of the world (09/10/98) Have dress, will travel By Lori Leibovich Test-driving Travelsmith's "Indispensable Black Travel Dress" (09/09/98) A legendary cafe-restaurant in Paris By David Downie Le Pied Rare is celebrated in novels -- and by its pork-loving patrons (09/08/98) Raving in Goa By Karl Taro Greenfeld Into the dark heart of India's newest scene (09/04/98) Confessions of a hoteloholic By Jan Morris Seduced and bedazzled by a grand hotel (09/03/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		FROM NUDISM TO BUDDHISM | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - I set off for Spain. On the train I run into a group of six young Americans. They're all about 18 years old, wearing loose cotton clothes and dangly earrings. Back in San Francisco I have friends in comparable positions, but here I feel like an impostor: a 30-year-old who looks like a 20-year-old; someone out of college almost 10 years who can afford to take two months off and travel but not to stay in hotels. The young travelers assume I'm their age, and I play along, talking about my major, where I go to school. Over the next month I travel madly through Spain, keeping off the beaten track, staying with Servas hosts in suburbs and villages. (Servas is an international friendship organization that hooks up hosts and travelers who have a mutual interest in peace and social justice.) I do, however, spend a night each in the more touristed spots of Granada and Cordoba, where I meet a very young Portuguese painter and make out with him on the floor of the Alhambra's elaborately carved chambers and amid the columns of the famous Cordoban mosque. Parting from him, I decide I'm definitely not dealing with my break-up in a healthy way, and I need solitude. Sometime during the bus journey out of Cordoba, I casually tell the woman sitting beside me that I'm looking for a remote village. "Get out right here! Right here!" she exclaims, and hails the driver to stop. "Here?" I look doubtfully at the olive trees and looming gray rocks. We're on a winding road through the mountains in Andalucia, about an hour from Ronda. "Walk two kilometers down that road and you will come to Benalauria, where my grandmother comes from. Ask at the Meson la Molienda. They have rooms. Tell the proprietor I sent you!" she calls as the bus pulls away. Only then do I realize I never asked her name. Sweating in the beating sun, coughing in the dust my feet stir up on the dirt road, I think, "Whose bright idea was this?" But when I see the tiny whitewashed houses nestled against the wooded hillside, my spirits lift. The proprietor of Meson la Molienda looks surprised to see me, but giggles shyly and shows me to a tiny room, with rough plaster walls painted a dusky rose and a handmade quilt on the bed. A small window shows wooded mountains and the red tile roof and whitewashed walls of the next house. The price, about $30 a night, is a splurge for my budget, but at this point there's no turning back. I venture forth into Benalauria, population 350, and doors close as I approach. Eyes peer from behind shutters. Children scurry around corners. Panicked, I hurry back to my room. This is what you wanted, I tell myself miserably. I lie on the bed and cry, loudly and indulgently, as the sun dips in the sky. No one knocks at my door. Eventually, several shuddering hours later, I fall asleep. The next morning a horde of children descends on me. "Cómo te llamas? De dónde vienes?" Apparently they had conferred and decided to approach the stranger en masse. I am carrying a notebook and a plastic bag filled with colored pens. They grab the notebook and fill it with doodles and messages in Spanish: "Please come and visit our town again, American friend. Con cariño, Paula." Later that afternoon as I sit on the steps of La Molienda with my watercolors, Juan, the maintenance man, beckons to me. "You are an artist," he says, indicating my notebook. "Just for fun," I say. "Come," he says. "I will show you my paintings." I follow Juan to his little house, where he introduces me to Maria, his wife. "Come," he says. We go upstairs into a little attic, which I'm amazed to find crammed with canvases. They are mostly domestic scenes: fruit on the table, a woman stirring soup, a man playing guitar. They are wonderfully vivid: Their broad strokes and bright pure colors remind me of Matisse. "Where did you study?" I ask. "Here," he says, pointing to his forehead. "Only here." Eating tortillas de patata with them that night, while a competition of child singers blares on the television set, I feel a deep contentment. They seem truly moved by the gift of a plastic San Francisco key chain with a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge on it that I present to them when I leave. "I'll keep it always," Juan says reverently, tucking it in a drawer. Concerned that all this camaraderie is distracting me from my grief, I decide to move on. Flipping through my address book, I come across a phone number my roommate gave me of a place called Plum Village, a Buddhist community near Bordeaux, run by the venerated Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. What better environment for seeking inner peace? Breathing in, breathing out Breathing in, breathing out I am blooming like a flower I am fresh as the dew I am solid as a mountain I am firm as the earth I am free. -- Thich Nhat Hanh I arrive at the Upper Hamlet tired and cranky from a long night on the train, looking forward to a shower. When I go in to register, I find there is no record of my coming, though I'd telephoned from Benalauria to set it up. "We'll see if we have something," says the placid nun at the desk. "See if you have something!" I am alarmed. They place me in the New Hamlet, a 35-minute van ride through the placid French countryside. About 90 monks and nuns are full-time residents here, but I've arrived during the summer retreat, which 500 people attend. There are four hamlets, grouped by languages. New Hamlet has a sprinkling of Americans, and large groups of Dutch, French and Vietnamese. I've missed the van to the New Hamlet, and I wait outside for four hours until the next one arrives. When I finally get there, I'm told there are no available beds. "Now look," I say to Sister Ving-yip, the sweet-faced Vietnamese nun signing me in. "I'm very tired. I was on the train all night, I sat in the Bordeaux station for five hours, and now I've been waiting all day for the van. I need a place to shower and lie down." Putting out aggression, I expect aggression back. But Sister Ving-yip smiles and takes my hand. "Yes, Sister," she says, holding my hand. "Yes." Completely disarmed, I watch my irritation slip away, like dirt washing off in a cool stream. Welcome to Plum Village. Bells bells bells, morning till night. The bell is the voice of the Buddha, reminding you to be present, and every time it rings you stop whatever you're doing and watch your breath until the last echo dies away. This is no small challenge with a clock chiming every 15 minutes. It goes for the phone, too: You breathe through the first three rings before mindfully picking it up. Imagine my surprise when I was registering and the phone rang to see the nun freeze with her pen in mid-air. I thought she was having some kind of attack! This was all the more bizarre when it happened about four times in quick succession. Once I figured out what was going on, a comic sketch popped into my mind where Inspector Clousseau is desperately trying to get some information from a slow-talking nun, and whenever she gets close to the crucial piece, the phone rings and she freezes. Then I thought of a scenario in which someone goes home, dials Plum Village, and sets her phone on automatic redial, immobilizing the place. Mealtimes are a system of torture designed especially for me. We stand silently in line to serve ourselves, then sit at the long wooden tables with our plates of food in front of us, breathing in their savory aromas while every single person in the hamlet serves him- or herself. When everyone is served, a prayer is spoken: "This food is a gift of the whole universe -- the sun, the rain and a lot of hard work ..." As the prayer nears its end, I begin to salivate, but no, it is repeated, first in Dutch, then in Vietnamese, sometimes in French or German for good measure. Then we have to wait for the bell to ring three times. Yesterday I swear they waited a solid minute and a half between the second and third ring. Another thing about the food -- there isn't enough. Whoever's at the end of the line misses out on the good stuff, and ends up with a plateful of lettuce and rice. So while we're supposed to be walking mindfully across the courtyard upon hearing the lunch or dinner bell, I find myself surreptitiously hurrying to get to the front of the line. You'd think with all us wannabe Buddhists cultivating compassion and generosity, we'd take moderate portions, but much to my surprise, all the people at the front of the line load up their plates. During the second week the line "let me not act with greed or gluttony" is added to the mealtime prayer. On my fourth day in Plum Village, after continuously finding fault, brainstorming comic torture scenarios and bonding with others through eye-rolling and sighing when the clock chimes, I go for a walk and give myself a stern talking to. "Look, Tanya," I say, "did you come here to learn about this stuff or to mock it? All the rest of your life you can go around in a big rush, never having to stop for bells, not chewing your food 30 times. You came here because something is missing in your life. The least you can do is commit while you're here." After that I find, much to my surprise, that if, when the bell rings, I truly stop what I'm doing and focus on my breath, rather than waiting impatiently to continue whatever trajectory I'm on, the moment of stillness becomes a kind of refreshment and regrounding, a reminder of the silence beneath the words. Which I suppose is the point. A week later, as I sit in the morning meditation, I begin to think of moving on. "Where should I go?" I muse. "It's almost September. If I could make it to Italy, I could pick olives in Tuscany for a while and make some money. And after that maybe grapes ... Then I'd have a chance to really process my break-up. I could find a place by myself, away from all these people ..." Just stop it, Tanya. You've done the naked city, the mad dash through Spain, the passionate affair, the remote village and now this. Just stop. Sit down. Right here. So I do. I sit. I sit for many weeks. And when I can't sit anymore, I get up and go home to my newly single life. SALON | Sept. 11, 1998 Tanya Shaffer is a writer and performance artist in San Francisco. Her new solo, show "Let My Enemy Live Long!" -- based on her travels in Africa -- will run at Venue 9 in San Francisco (415-626-2169) from Oct. 22-Nov. 21.