names like coffee that i didn't drink at the time, so i began drinking coffee later on, names like caufildo and garfield, my favorite one, that made me wonder if the bureaucrats at the id office knew that i really love cats. without my garfield id, i left havana in 1981 and went to zurich, switzerland, thanks to james joyce. my dancing there became walking through the silence of the city. instead of people looking at me like my family did when i was a child, people began to ask me, where are you from? i felt disoriented, exiled. the changing perception of nature, religious views, philosophical and political opinions, botanical knowledge and idiomatic sounds, everything new. i asked myself many times for a specific reason why my irish family went to cuba and began searching for missing pieces of my irish history in irish, cuban, and catalan archives to discover before me that i had a fascinating history of displacement and transformations in various geographic setings. my book, ticket it ride, is a personal journey towards the past and the present. there is no one but many places i belong to